by Jan Reid
Like the race to catch up with Sputnik, and the invention of the missiles and satellites that eventually put American astronauts on the moon, the Super Collider intrigued the Reagan and Bush administrations in part because of its possible military applications and its potential to create unearthly amounts of energy. And they did not want the Soviets to do it first. But in 1992 there was no Soviet Union. And in addition to the sudden end of the Cold War, by 1993 the projected cost of completing the Super Collider had ballooned to $8.25 billion. Congress was having a severe case of buyer’s remorse with the Super Collider, and the Clinton administration’s passion for it was tepid, at best.
As the grand experiment’s fate became more apparent, Shelton Smith’s mission in Washington evolved into reclaiming the initial $150 million that Texas had invested. (According to the Houston Chronicle, Texas’s bond expenditures on the project totaled $400 million.) Clinton and his Energy Department bureaucrats weren’t too hot on refunding the money. The disagreement escalated to the point where Shelton found himself seated in the White House with Ann and the president. As the bargaining grew more intense, Shelton got increasingly nervous. “She said to President Clinton, ‘I want you to understand something, pal. You owe me a lot of money, and if you don’t pay it back, I’m gonna sue you.’ Then she turned and pointed at me and said, ‘And this is the guy who’s gonna do it.’”
Shelton continued to describe the moment: “Clinton’s a big guy. He had turned beet red. He sat there glaring at me, both hands on his thighs, and said, ‘How much are you gonna sue me for?’”
“I said, ‘I don’t know for certain, Mr. President, but it’s probably gonna be four or five billion.’
“‘Do you think you can win it?’
“‘Yes, sir, I do.’
“He turned and stared at Ann a while longer, then he got a huge grin on his face, and he said, ‘Well, Governor, I guess we’d better get you your money.’”
Another series of meetings ensued with officials at the Department of Energy. Taking charge of the transaction was an undersecretary named Bill White, later a popular Democratic mayor of Houston and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. In the final meeting, Shelton said, “They handed me an envelope with three checks totaling one hundred fifty million dollars. I thought it was going to be a wire transfer! So I’m going out of there with these checks in my briefcase. I called Ann and said, ‘What am I gonna do?’
“She said, ‘Well, you idiot, get on a plane back down here and let’s put it in the bank!’
“So I jumped on the first flight, and after I was back in Austin and the checks were deposited we went to the Four Seasons Hotel lounge. She saw I was acting kind of twitchy, and she said, ‘Oh, go ahead, have a drink. I don’t care.’”
In April 1993, another crisis arose for Ann involving the federal government. A federal judge in West Texas and officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service indicated that several aquatic species that lived only in the San Marcos Springs of the Edwards Aquifer qualified for protection under the Endangered Species Act. One species imperiled with extinction was a blind salamander. San Antonio and smaller towns relied entirely on the aquifer for their drinking water, and large-scale irrigated agriculture in Central and West Texas pumped from the aquifer to meet its needs. A rebellious uproar ensued over the court’s power and that blind lizard-like amphibian. The Endangered Species Act, which had been signed into law by Richard Nixon, was cast as the ominous villain.
Gib Lewis, the House Speaker from Fort Worth, had run afoul of the Travis County district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit by accepting and failing to report several gifts. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, resigned as Speaker, and did not seek reelection in 1993. The Democrats, who still had a healthy majority in the House, chose a well-liked Panhandle farmer, Pete Laney, as the new Speaker. Trying to head off a political firestorm, Susan Rieff, John Hall, and Bob Armstrong, whom Clinton had made an assistant secretary of the interior, composed a letter to Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona, with copies to Bullock and Laney. It explained how the state had devised a plan that would keep the San Marcos Springs flowing even during a drought, thereby protecting the species. And they asked Babbitt for a very specific letter outlining the consequences if the state just ignored the Endangered Species Act. On her copy of the memo, Ann bracketed the latter part with a star of emphasis and the notation “Important to get done.”
Babbitt obliged with a somber explanation that the state’s failure could cause federal funds for highways, military bases, and crop subsidies to be withdrawn. Texas then got lucky, because rains broke the drought and increased the springs’ flow, reducing the danger that the fragile species would become extinct.
In the 1993 legislative session, Gary Bradley, Ann’s old friend and onetime major contributor, got the legislature to pass a bill that proposed to overturn and countermand any City of Austin attempt to enforce the strictures on developers laid out by the activist group Save Our Springs. Out-of-town legislators had a history of indulging in the capital’s pleasures while spiting the city however they could. Without hesitation, Ann vetoed her old friend’s anti-SOS bill. She thought that should signal reasonable environmentalists of her goodwill. And for some, it did. But in the other camp, a number of legislators’ animosity toward Ann’s environmental team and their policies festered to the point that a senator who had been adding an amendment to a bill looked up at the gallery and shot Susan Rieff the finger.
Then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released yet another study, this one designating thirty-three Texas counties as critical habitat of endangered black-capped vireos and golden-cheeked warblers. It raised the possibility of listing jaguars as an endangered species, even though not one of the big spotted cats had been seen in Texas in many years; the last one killed was in Mills County in 1903. Organizations calling themselves Farmers and Ranchers for Property Rights and Take Back Texas rose up. The leader of the latter organization was a man named Marshall Kuykendall, whose former wife, Karen, was Ann’s friend, and their son had worked for Ann during the 1990 campaign.
Ross Ramsey, then with the Houston Chronicle, wrote, “Richards initially supported efforts to win federal ‘outstanding national water resource’ protection for four areas of the state. She later backed off, saying the state should find someone other than ‘ham-handed’ federal regulators to act as steward.” The state Republican Party, for this purpose calling itself Associated Republicans of Texas, issued a press release accusing Ann of more flip-flopping.
Ann had increasingly less time to spend with Bud, but they managed to work things out. Even when they couldn’t align their schedules, the correspondence never stopped. In the summer of 1992, he still had some hooks in the water in Hollywood, and then he planned to join her on vacation in Switzerland.
Dear Guv:
My plane tickets to Gstaad arrived today. I suppose I am really going to climb down out of my tree and go over there.
By the time you get this note I’ll be in L.A. playing Hollywood—don’t cry for me, Limo-zina—but I want you to know I’m thinking about you. If that sounds too sinister, you’re in my heart.
Love always, Bud
He accompanied her on a trip to Los Angeles in which she courted CEOs, raised money from celebrities, and lobbied for more movies shot in Texas. He elected to go home early.
Dear Guv:
Sorry I couldn’t hang around L.A. for a few extra days, but I had to hurry home to my blind dog and my grouchy cat.
Call me when you get a breather.
It’s only 74 months until the next century. I guess I’ve got to hurry to get things tidy in time for the end of the world.
Love, Bud
Another time he sent her a great photo taken when he was a younger man with a broad smile, holding a long fly rod and a very big salmon.
Dear Guv:
I’m sure you never doubted my story about catching a 35-pound salmon on a two-handed fly rod
in the Alta River in Norway, thus earning membership in the X Kilo Club—but we know how people are about fish stories.
I still have the boots and slicker in my hall closet. I gave all my fishing tackle (except for one light spinning rod) to my oldest grandson.
We had the fish canned and ate it.
The fly I used was called “Thunder and Lightning.”
I wasn’t kidding about the swarms of stinging flies, either.
Love, Bud
But for every one of those welcome messages, it seemed now there were three broadsides from the Republican Party and Karen Hughes. The former television journalist was like a machine gun of press releases, in which she often quoted herself.
Republicans Stand Up for Taxpayers, School Children;
Governor Ann Richards Acting Like a Playground Bully
Austin—“Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives today stood up for taxpayers and school children in Texas in rejecting a $4 billion tax increase and redistribute-the-wealth plan which Governor Ann Richards stubbornly tried to shove down the throats of reluctant legislators,” Texas GOP executive director Karen Hughes said today.
“Despite Governor Richards’ playground bully tactics, the House Republicans did what they were elected to do and stood up for the best interests of the taxpayers and the school children of Texas . . .
“Governor Richards has acted irresponsibly in attempting to threaten and intimidate Republicans into accepting an unacceptable plan. We are proud of our Republican elected officials, of their integrity, and of their willingness to do the right thing in the face of irresponsible threats and criticism from the governor.”
Ann’s Policy Council aides and Bill Cryer were able to refute most of the Republicans’ charges, or at least tell their side of the story, but it was a constant, time-consuming task. Cryer was pleased to issue a release when an Austin district judge ruled that the Governor’s Office had complied with Open Records Act requests by releasing more than 35,000 pages of records to the Republican Party. A staffer named Don Temples spent almost all his time faxing documents demanded by the GOP’s requests. It was harassment and logjamming, plain and simple, and the strategy was working: Ann and her team were constantly on the defensive.
In September 1991, a man named George Hennard rammed his pickup into a Luby’s Cafeteria in the Central Texas army town of Killeen, and then used two handguns to murder twenty-seven trapped people and wound twenty more before killing himself. At the time, it was the worst mass murder in American history. A chiropractor named Suzanna Gratia Hupp watched her father and mother executed by Hennard—her dad had tried to tackle the man. Hupp was haunted by her belief that if she hadn’t left her .38 revolver in the car, she could have shot the maniac and saved them. She later ran for the legislature on that single issue and won, becoming a heroine for a growing number of Texans. Ann was troubled by the slaughter in Killeen and by a grieving daughter’s proposal that every man and woman should be free to go armed and take the law into their own hands. But the tragedy in Killeen sent Ann down a road to a stand of principle she would not back away from, and it put her in direct opposition to the forces personified by Representative Hupp.
The wrangles related to crime-fighting policies were not wholly devoid of humor. Ann took a strong hand in ordering the Texas Rangers to remove obstacles that kept women from qualifying for the elite law enforcement group. The storied Ranger Joaquin Jackson got fed up and retired, partly over that episode and her bossy manner. She was, of course, the boss. Joaquin and a novelist, David Marion Wilkinson, wrote One Ranger, an excellent book about his hair-raising and sometimes hilarious experiences. Third- or fourth-hand versions of what happened next sounded like material for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I asked Joaquin to elaborate on his rumored feud with the governor. He wrote back:
Reference Miss Ann, Shelton Smith is a good friend of mine, and he was a lead attorney for the governor. Well, David Wilkinson and I were at Shelton’s place on the Blanco right after we had finished the manuscript of One Ranger. Shelton told me that I needed a woman to write a blurb for the book. I asked him who he had in mind, and he said Ann Richards. I said, “Shit, Shelton, she’s one of the reasons I left the Rangers.”
But he sent her the manuscript. He said she called him and did not say, “This is Ann” or “This is the governor.” She just said, “Shelton, you tell that old bastard that I will write him a blurb for his book, but I will tell you I know he rode his horse from Amarillo to Austin to turn in his Ranger badge, and I damn sure don’t appreciate it.”
Shelton replied, “No, Ann, I know what he did was to ride his horse from Alpine to Austin.”
Of course I did not ride a horse from Alpine to Austin, but I drove the sorriest vehicle I ever drove for the State, a Jeep Cherokee. Now you know the rest of the story.
Episodes like that only added to her lore as a colorful leader, and Ann was hardly indifferent to the issue of violent crime. Following the horrifying spree of the serial murderer Kenneth McDuff, in March 1993 she announced the formation of the “Fugitive Squad,” an apprehension program targeted at capturing the most violent parole violators. “I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that any Kenneth McDuff, or any potential Kenneth McDuff, is brought in before he can hurt innocent people,” she said. “The Fugitive Squad consists of five law enforcement officers from the Department of Public Safety, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the head of Texas Crime Stoppers. They will work closely with local law enforcement agencies, the Pardons and Paroles Division, and Texas Crime Stoppers. Their job will be to go through the files of Pardons and Paroles searching for parolees who fit the profile of a repeat violent offender. The team will then establish a Ten Most Wanted list of violent parolees. We are going to turn the heat up on these guys.” The squad included a Texas Ranger, Stan Oldham, and at the end of the first year, Ann was able to announce the apprehension and arrest of the first fifteen ex-cons who wound up on that list. But the success was underreported because of what happened on the rolling hills a few miles east of her hometown, just before she announced the formation of her Fugitive Squad.
On February 28, 1993, Ann was traveling in Brenham when she received a call from staffers informing her that a surreal and savage drama had erupted inside a compound called Mount Carmel, where a religious cult called the Branch Davidians had been drawing increasing scrutiny and suspicion by law enforcement for some time. The Davidians were a rebellious offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists. In 1988, the cult’s leader, a sometime rock guitarist who changed his name to “David Koresh,” was involved in a gunfight with a cult rival named George Roden. Koresh was acquitted at trial, while Roden went to prison. In late 1991, activities inside the compound had begun to alarm caseworkers at the state’s Child Protective Services agency, and reports of automatic weapons and explosives being stockpiled at the compound got the attention of local law enforcement officials and agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).
John Fainter, the governor’s chief of staff, compiled a riveting diary of the unfolding tragedy at Mount Carmel. In early December 1992, ATF agents approached the Richards administration with requests to borrow state aerial-reconnaissance equipment. The governor is titular commander of the Texas Air National Guard; the ATF could also have gotten what it wanted through military channels, which it did. In January and February 1993, aerial photos and infrared videos allegedly conveyed a “hot spot” image that the agents interpreted as an illegal weapons cache.
Ann and her chief legal counsel, David Talbot, contended that the National Guard could participate in arrest missions only if illegal drugs were involved. The ATF responded with accusations, never proved, that the Branch Davidians were manufacturing methamphetamines inside their compound. The morning of February 28, though the agents knew that the cult members had been tipped off and that the element of surprise was lost, heavily armed ATF officers tried to serve warrants at the compound for firearm
s violations, with support from eight National Guard helicopters and crews. In a vicious gunfight, four ATF agents and at least six residents of the compound were killed. One of the slain was the two-year-old daughter of David Koresh.
The next morning at the Capitol, Ann had planned to wax nostalgic about her high school and college years in concert with “Waco Day,” but the bloodshed and standoff changed the subject. Ann told a crowd of reporters, “The sad part about a situation like this is that you’re trying to make sense out of a senseless event. I’m worried about those children in the compound. I want them to get those kids out. If the adults make a choice that they want to be there, then they have to live with the consequences. But kids don’t have a choice.”
Answering a reporter’s question, Ann said that she would take “a serious look” at legislation to ban assault weapons in Texas.
The standoff grew more tense and more bizarre every day. The FBI listened for hours as Koresh ranted about his interpretation of Scripture. Under cover of darkness, the Branch Davidians hung a huge banner on the roof that read: “God Help Us, We Want Press.” Bumper stickers appeared in the area that read: “Nothing Happened in Waco!” Ann learned that the foray by the National Guard had resulted in three shot-up helicopters and state expenditures of $300,000. “The thing that frightens me,” she said as the siege wore on, “is that everyone wearies of it. I think eventually we can reach a peaceful solution, but I’m going to respect the decisions that are made by the FBI. I think they’re all sort of tired of listening to the evangelizing on the telephone, and I can’t say I blame them.”
Koresh’s mother contacted the Houston defense attorney Dick DeGuerin, and he gained admission to the compound. He later said that when he walked up to the front door, the crunching and crackling under his boots was not gravel, but rather an amazing number of spent cartridges. He told me that Koresh had been wounded in the gunfight and smelled strongly of raw garlic, which he believed was a natural antibiotic. DeGuerin believed he could negotiate a deal for the Davidians’ surrender, but Ann watched in anguish as Koresh backed out, saying that God was giving him this chance to reveal the mystery of the seven seals in the Book of Revelation. He demanded and got a live broadcast on a Christian radio station.