by Jan Reid
Mary Beth Rogers had been at a distance for a while, writing and teaching at the LBJ School, but she again came back to manage Ann’s campaign. Kirk Adams, Ann’s trusted son-in-law, had also come back. “Kirk and Cathy Bonner were trying to hold things together,” Mary Beth said. “It was a different experience, a totally different experience.”
“How so?” I asked her.
“Just the atmosphere. There were way too many people on the staff, and they were too set in their ways. Ann had kept a political office open the whole time, and there were eight or nine people on staff. There was just a different feel to it. Ann was not the same candidate. We were less clear about message, about focus, about what Ann wanted to do. We knew from the polling data that people were sick of negative stuff.”
Yet plenty of negative stuff was flying their way. Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn, who had been a friend when she was Austin’s mayor and Ann was a county commissioner, had recast her lot with the Republicans. Ann wasn’t too surprised when Strayhorn called her “an honorary lesbian.” Among the gay women close to Ann, Jane Hickie was the one her political enemies disliked the most. Hickie’s attachment to Ann was clearly profound. They had been friends since 1972, and you don’t subject yourself to the emotional and psychological torment of initiating an intervention for addiction with someone you care little about. The attack dogs’ innuendo about Ann’s alleged involvement in a bisexual affair almost always posited Jane as the other lover. And Hickie’s personality often just rubbed people the wrong way—including people who were politically on the same side. In January 1989, when Ann was basking in the glow of celebrity that followed the keynote, the Dallas Morning News had run a short piece about the contributors included in a campaign finance statement.
Ms. Richards’ latest report, filed last week, is replete with famous names—actor James Garner, feminist poet Maya Angelou, and the eminent sage of the New York public library system, Vartan Gregorian. “And we got several thousand dollars from this guy whose name is Don Henley,” said fund-raiser Jane Hickie. “He said, ‘You won’t know who I am, but ask your children.’”
Henley was a lead singer for the superstar rock band the Eagles, and a native of northeast Texas’s Piney Woods; he generously contributed to environmental causes, especially the protection of Caddo Lake. The Dallas news item reached him, and he fired off a letter to Hickie.
I do not appreciate being referred to as “this guy whose name is Don Henley.” While I am well aware that campaign donations are a matter of public record, I also don’t appreciate the reference to “several thousand dollars.” No amount was mentioned in connection with the other famous names. In fact, I think your entire statement is extremely tacky and unprofessional. I have contributed to Ann Richards because I believe in her and what she stands for, not because I wanted some amateurish publicity blurb in the Dallas Morning News. “This guy” thinks Hickie is quite an appropriate name for you.
That dustup of course came to the attention of Ann, and Hickie had to write him a prompt letter of contrition.
Dear Mr. Henley—
I certainly understand your anger at the quote attributed to me in the Dallas paper. I did not however talk with any member of the press about any of our contributors, and cannot, at this point, figure out where they got their story.
I have laughed about the fact that you thought Ann would not know who you were and that you suggested that she ask her children—but have never been derogatory of you, your reputation, or your generosity to Ann.
I hope you will accept my apology for whatever I did to contribute to the writer’s attribution to me of something I have no memory of having said and giving it a tone that is not one I have ever felt.
Mr. Henley, I wouldn’t have insulted you for any reason. I thought your letter was genuine and funny—reflecting the fact that we have a candidate who reaches across generations—even to a generation whose icons she doesn’t (or didn’t previously) know.
Then had come her angry and impulsive bolt from the 1990 campaign when Ann hired Glenn Smith as campaign manager and did not make him subordinate to her. Then the months when she and Ann were not on speaking terms. When the campaign was in disarray over the drug issue, she marched back to the rescue, and she pushed for the television ad that may have salvaged the race and certainly infuriated Mark White. Young campaign staffers said that without a word of explanation, she started barking orders; some, who were recent hires or volunteers, didn’t know who she was.
She had served Ann faithfully and well in the race against Clayton Williams and in the early months of the term, recommending and vetting her appointments. Then she and Chula Reynolds, her partner of some years, broke up. She was ready for a change, and she easily won approval from the Senate when Ann appointed her director of the Office of Federal-State Relations. In addition to lobbying the White House and Congress for Texas on the future of NASA and the Super Collider, she directed a staff of thirty-seven people. Her salary, $82,500, was in line with that of peers employed by New York and California. But the contention about her was sufficient that a file in Ann’s political archive was headed “The Jane Hickie Problem.”
In a confusing report, a legislative audit found that she obeyed the law in billing the state for additional “per diem travel expenses on days she never left town . . . in addition to hundreds of dollars in per diem payments on days she didn’t work at all.” Taking exception to the audit’s conclusions, the Houston Post’s Lynn Ashby blistered Hickie and her boss in a long run of editorials that he wrote and cartoons that he published on the editorial page.
Hickie’s Hokum: Washington Lobbyist Should Quit—or Be Fired
What will it take for Gov. Ann Richards to see that the case against Jane Hickie is not about politics?
When will she realize that the high-spending ways and arrogance of the state’s chief lobbyist in Washington do not sit well with most Texans?
When will she summon the courage to dismiss Hickie? Better yet, when will Hickie have the decency to repay the money she has pocketed without earning it and go quietly away into the political night? . . .
All this comes on top of earlier revelations that Hickie had racked up a $10,000 airline tab for traveling in the state—when her job is in Washington, not Texas—and that her office had destroyed its records after the Post began investigating.
Richards insults our intelligence by insisting questions about Hickie amount to nothing more than “a political game.” Indeed, Richards’ Republican opponent, George W. Bush, was too mild in his assessment of Hickie’s actions as “ethical lapses.” They were much more than that.
The governor should abandon her silly claim that Hickie has brought some $5 billion to Texas from Washington. That old dog not only won’t hunt, it won’t even bark.
Ann was catching grief from Bush and his team, from the Republican Party, and from the press, and in subtle ways she was being lobbied by friends who pulled out all the stops in calling on her loyalty. Molly Ivins now received nearly as much daily mail as the governor. One time a fan in Kansas sent her just a photocopy of a short news item in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon that read: “Man Arrested for Sodomy with a Duck.” And then there were the hate letters, such as one from a frequent reader of her columns. They clearly got him all revved up.
Molly Ivins,
You pea-brained, idiotic, stupid liberal, stop writing about senators being weasels. The Clintons and the Jesse Jacksons, your partners in ludicrous and hypocritical thinking, are the enemies of this country. Clinton, weak character that he is, and his masculine wife are tearing this country to pieces. You—not partisan?—I hate your columns. You are the scum of the earth. Grow up will you?
Try God—be good.
You are mean spirited. Satan!!
Well, she would plead guilty to one of those charges. She was an unapologetically partisan Democrat. And as her own fame and the controversy surrounding her grew, she was more charitable to her old friend the governor.
In January 1994, she wrote Ann a letter of thanks for an invitation to a party. It was nostalgic, sentimental, but it also contained an inspired bit of lobbying. She invoked Ann’s father, Cecil; Maury Maverick, Jr.; Congressman Henry B. González; and Tony Korioth, whom she had pilloried for his sexism, in what she thought was a sweet-spirited way, at the roast of the governor in Port Arthur.
Dear Ann,
A thousand times thanks to you for a wonderful evening. That was awfully close to magic. [A guest of the party named Janet] is perhaps the most perfect example I’ve ever met of how much easier it is in the world to just be your own self, or how you should.
T. Korioth’s contribution will not be forgotten.
I had intended to tell you that among my favorite memories is the sight of you dancing with your daddy. At Cecile’s wedding and on three or four other occasions that I recall. My, he was such a stylish dancer, and you two looked so good dancing together. I wish I could give you a video of those dances so you could have those memories too. I guess you do, but yours are from close up.
Love, Molly Ivins
P.S. I also forgot to tell you that Maury Maverick called the other day, and allowed as how he understands how there’s yet another big push to repeal the Texas Homestead Act and that if Ann was to support such a thing he, Maury, would pretty much have to go out in his backyard and put a bullet through his brain. Which he might actually do, on account of he keeps grumblin’ about bein’ 73 and not feelin’ all that well.
If I were you, I would not appreciate a friend layin’ that kind of pressure on me. On the other hand, if I had a bunch of real sharp lawyers in real nice suits with three-color charts comin’ in [I would] explain to ’em that while I understood and agreed with their every point, such a move would cause Maury to kill hisself and Henry B. to have a heart attack, and that I was not, just at this present moment, prepared to accept responsibility for that much bloodshed; and that they will just have to wait until both of those gentlemen die natural. By which time, with any luck, it will be someone else’s problem.
Another one of their old friends, Bob Bullock, no longer had any use for Ann, but was he trying to undercut her in the race against Bush? Some Democrats thought that was the case. Facing only a feeble GOP opponent that year, he had plenty of time for mischief. The subsequent emergence of Mark McKinnon and Matthew Dowd as top members of Bush’s political team framed liberal suspicions in this way: they had worked for Jack Martin, who directed them to an affiliation with Bullock, and the next stop on the climb up the opportunistic ladder was George W. Bush. Did even Martin turn on Ann? When did the defections begin? Were they all covert operatives for Bush in the 1994 campaign?
“I don’t believe any of that,” said Chuck Bailey, the attorney and chief of staff who had been with Bullock since his early days as comptroller. Bailey added that he had accompanied the lieutenant governor to a meeting with Mary Beth Rogers and John Fainter in early 1994: “He pressed them on how serious she was about running, and after that he said to me, ‘All right, she’s in. She’ll be up to it.’ He sounded satisfied to me. And Ann’s team had all the polling information that Bullock’s had. I don’t know what he could have actively done to damage her.”
But Bullock had a way of playing perverse mind games with people. For example, Ann wanted to appoint Max Sherman, the former Panhandle senator and dean of the LBJ School, as her chair of the board of the Department of Health and Human Services. Sherman said he would be pleased to serve, but he doubted his nomination could ever get past Bullock, who bore a grudge more than twenty years old. Ann told Bailey that she wanted to make the appointment and that Sherman would be calling the lieutenant governor. Sherman described the conversation to Dave McNeely:
I picked up the phone, and here are the first words from Bullock: “Senator, the worst thing that can happen to a man is not to be confirmed by the Texas Senate.” I then held the phone a couple of inches from my ear for several minutes as he leaned in on me. He said, “I want you to know that I remember you were one of the senators who voted to bust my appointment to the insurance board in ’72, and I want you to know that that was one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life—to be busted by the Senate of Texas. I went home and cried like a baby. No man should have to go through what I went through. And because of that, I will support your nomination.”
Bullock held the same grudge against Barbara Jordan. As a state senator, she too had opposed his appointment in that two-decade-old vote. Sherman was spooked by the conversation with the lieutenant governor, but he took the job on an interim basis for several months as a favor to Ann. A cancer diagnosis gave him a reason to pull out before Bullock got to lead the Senate in officially taking up his nomination and watch him twist in the wind.
And then there was Bullock’s complete turnabout on the subject of a personal income tax. Texas was one of only nine states that did not have one. Ann had let him twist in the wind over his brash insistence that an income tax was fair and inevitable. Then she created a task force that ended up agreeing with Bullock. Yet in 1993, Bullock declared that Texas would get an income tax when a Russian submarine sailed up the Houston Ship Channel. He engineered a constitutional amendment that barred the legislature from imposing an income tax unless voters approved it in a referendum. Some critics said he made enactment of an income tax impossible. Defenders said he left the door open, since only a simple majority of both houses was required to call a referendum. Whatever his intention, he got the income tax monkey off his back. Almost 70 percent of the voters approved his amendment. Ann’s pollster meanwhile told her that 43 percent of the voters believed she wanted an income tax.
In the governor’s race, there was a persistent story, perhaps apocryphal, that a charm offensive began as soon as the former president’s son went to meet Bullock. In that tale, Bush said in his friendly way, “You know, Governor, you and me, we’re both just a couple of old drunks.”
George Shipley, “Dr. Dirt,” was Bullock’s neighbor and good friend. He blamed Ann for the failure to heal the animus with her old drinking partner: “Ann was awfully well liked in this state. When it started out, she had a twenty-point advantage on Bush. But too much of her attention was on being a national celebrity. Bullock had been taking care of business in the ’93 session. He was an old-school guy. All Ann had to have done was go to him and say, ‘Bob, you’re a man, and you know so much about this business, you’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and I really need your help.’ He would have just melted.”
George gave his desk a resounding slap with the flat of his hand. “Just like that—Mary Beth Rogers beat her hand on her desk and said, ‘No! We’re not going to reward bad behavior!’”
He stared out his office window at the Capitol and went on: “Ann had a lot of promise, but she had this coterie of women around her—Jane Hickie, Mary Beth, Cathy Bonner, Susan Rieff, Marlene Saritzky. Jane Hickie had the worst political judgment of any of them. She got it in her mind once that Ann was going to bring in Roy Spence and get rid of Jack Martin. She said, ‘You’re not a leader, Jack.’ Roy was going to be the guy.”
Cooler heads prevailed on that idea. But George offered more recollections of how Ann’s 1994 race shaped up: “She raised a lot of money, but most of it was going to salaries of campaign staff. When the time came that she really needed it, she didn’t have the money to compete with Bush on TV. I really disagreed with their insistence that they couldn’t go negative against George. There was plenty to go with. And we were all naïve. We forgot to remember who we were up against. Hell, those guys who were doing ‘security’ for George worked for the old man when he was running the CIA.”
Election night, governor’s race, 1994: George W. Bush celebrates his victory over Ann Richards with Karl Rove. One of Bush’s nicknames for the GOP strategist was “Boy Genius.”
CHAPTER 30
Queen Bee
Ann was worn out physically, and she looked it. In addition to waging a hard-fought
campaign, she was determined to do her job as governor—she continued to take those bulging files of work home with her at night. Looking young and fresh, always in good shape, George W. Bush did not have that problem. Still, Ann was the popular governor with the aura of gravitas and glamour. In June 1993 John Connally died, and the political elite came to his funeral in Austin’s First Methodist Church. People in the gallery gasped when Richard Nixon walked in and took a seat beside Ann. Their heads tilted and they spoke briefly. The former president told her, “You’re very good on television.”
Veteran members of the press liked her even as they illuminated her faults and failures. Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News related how she was once in Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association. He knew he wasn’t going to get much of a story because the important events were closed. Ann told Slater to come to the Democratic governors’ closed meeting, pretending to be a member of her staff. He couldn’t take notes, just observe. He readily agreed. When they were inside and she was talking to her peers, she said, “Wayne, would you go get me a cup of coffee?” He asked if she wanted cream and sugar, got her the coffee, and carried it back to her. She looked at him, then dismissed him with an imperial flip of her wrist.
But for all the laughs, the open-records requests cascaded into the Governor’s Office from the press, not just from state Republican headquarters. The Houston Chronicle’s R. G. Ratcliffe, who was as unrelenting in filing those requests as any reporter, offered a sober note in a story he filed in mid-June:
Twenty-eight death threats against Gov. Ann Richards and 181 “security risks” to her safety are currently under investigation, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety revealed today.