by Jan Reid
Col. James Wilson cited those figures in explaining to a state district court why he opposes an Open Records request by the Texas Republican Party for Richards’ past detailed daily schedules.
The strain and growing doubt were showing in the Governor’s Office, not just over at the campaign. Joe Holley, who had written the State of the State speech with Suzanne Coleman’s help at the start of Ann’s term, told me about the unease he felt: “I ended up writing more speeches, never as many as Suzanne, but I worked on position papers, press releases—I was observing more, really, than participating. And it was a time when our people were in power. That was the first thing I realized when I started working for Ann. I walked into the governor’s meeting room, with all of her people sitting in chairs. And what interested me over the next months and years was that all of us who had been writing, pushing, lobbying for things to happen in the state of Texas, finally we had the opportunity to make those things happen.
“We were trying to avoid the same mistakes that we had criticized the opposition for making. And I’m not sure that we did. I was at this one meeting where Mary Beth Rogers was in charge. People like Susan Rieff and Pat Cole and Deece Eckstein all had their areas, and everybody was pushing to make sure that Ann was aware of the vital work that they were doing. And of course she thought it was vital, too. But as I listened to it, I began to realize that Ann had to communicate better with the people of Texas, who were suspicious of her anyway. What she really ought to do was figure out three or four ideas that she would focus on. I got the feeling that it had gotten too complicated, with too much stuff swirling about. The other thing I found interesting is that we were all liberals, high-minded, we had the people’s interests at heart, but we were susceptible to the same kind of personality quirks and shortcomings as those people that we’d been criticizing.
“I would watch it sort of like a beehive, with a queen, and everybody maneuvering. The third thing I noticed when the race really began: there was a real strange sense that she almost didn’t want to win. The prospect of another term wasn’t something she really pushed for. Her defeat was almost a self-fulfilling wish.” Karl Rove was then all but unknown in national politics. He had prospered and shown he had talent grooming Texas candidates to win victories in down-ballot races. But in George W. Bush he saw a thoroughbred, a Seabiscuit that he could ride all the way to the top, and that was just what he did.
“Bush stumbled in the beginning,” Mary Beth Rogers told me. “They took him off the road for about two weeks. They had him going to small towns in East Texas, and when he came back he was a different candidate. And in the meantime the stealth campaign was going on: all the antigay stuff; Ann’s gonna take your guns away; Ann’s gonna take your land away. Karen Hughes was very good. They besieged us with Open Records requests, wore poor Don Temples down at the copy machine. They were effective. Joe Allbaugh was very skillful running that ship. Karl Rove kept George on message. We had a democracy, they had a dictatorship. We had way too many people making decisions.”
When Bush came back, he was more disciplined than Ann, and under Rove’s direction, the only issues he talked about were education, juvenile crime, and tort reform (code words for putting plaintiffs’ lawyers who bankrolled Democrats out of business). Over and over and over.
Any criticism about Ann’s record on crime and prison policy got her riled. In February, she addressed the National Conference on Drugs and Crime in Dallas. In an indirect but barbed way, she addressed Bush’s perceived slights of her reliance on Alcoholics Anonymous; he boasted that he had quit his drinking simply through his faith and strength of character.
Sam Houston was president of the Texas Republic and he later served as senator and governor. One of his staunchest opponents was Mirabeau B. Lamar. And one of the most popular sayings of their day held that “Sam Houston drunk in a ditch is worth ten Mirabeau B. Lamars.”
She then launched into spirited defense of the crime-fighting policies she had pushed through to heal the damage of the shell games played by Bill Clements.
We doubled the time that violent offenders must stay in prison, and required that the most violent—those convicted of capital offenses—serve no fewer than 40 years.
We cut the parole rate by two-thirds.
And we undertook the most ambitious prison-building program in the history of Texas.
We have authorized the construction of 75,300 new spaces—enough to double the capacity of the system Texas had when I took office.
When I finish we will have a prison system that will probably be one of the largest in the world—with space for 140,000 inmates.
This year, we will have 39,000 spaces coming on line.
Generally, I agree with the idea that we can never build our way out of the crime problem. But in Texas, we were playing catch-up, and we had little choice. . . . Here in Dallas last year, crime was down almost 15 percent and violent crime decreased by more than 16 percent.
Who would have ever dreamed that Ann Richards would end up framing her legacy not as one of social justice and women’s rights, but of a vastly expensive prison-building spree that doubled the number of people in Texas prisons?
No program initiated by Ann was more important to her than the one administered by my wife, Dorothy. As prison construction raced to keep up with the number of convicts sentenced by the courts, and as longer sentences were imposed and paroles denied, the program struggled to keep the drug and alcohol treatment programs growing apace. The expert at projections on the sheer numbers was Dorothy’s friend Tony Fabelo. Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, he was a very funny man—when he got going, he sounded like Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. Tony was the executive director of his own agency, the Criminal Justice Policy Council. One day in mid-1994, he remarked in public that the prison system was not going to need all the 14,000 new beds that had been projected for the drug and alcohol abuse programs.
“It was the only time I ever got the treatment from Ann,” Dorothy said. “She called me up and yelled, ‘Darthy! Do you want me to lose this election?’ She kept on yelling. ‘Did you know Tony Fabelo was going to do this? You get him on the phone, and you two get over here, right now.’ And when Tony and I got to her office, she just went on and on like that. We were in a room with all these white guys and her. I kept thinking, it doesn’t do any good to say, ‘Ann, it’s the truth.’”
On the issue of capital punishment, this governor was never going to strut past photographs of executed men as Mark White had done in the 1990 campaign. But nineteen prisoners had been executed during White’s four years as governor. Under Ann, the number reached forty-eight. The liberal reforming governor James Allred, a former district attorney, had instituted the pardon system in the 1930s in response to bribes-for-freedom allegations under Pa and Ma Ferguson. On capital-offense convictions, the governor’s options were limited to pardoning the offender, commuting the sentence to life imprisonment, or granting a thirty-day reprieve. The real decisions were placed in the hands of a Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members no longer even met to talk about the cases; by Ann’s time, they voted by fax. Aides swore she agonized over every one of the executions. But her only acts of clemency were in granting two thirty-day stays. One in 1992 went to Johnny Frank Garrett, who was seventeen at the time of the murder he was convicted of committing, and was, according to Amnesty International, “extremely mentally impaired, chronically psychotic, and brain-damaged as the result of several severe head injuries he sustained as a child.” He had been defended by my friend Selden Hale, and was especially loathed in Amarillo as “the nun killer.” In Cuba, Leoncio Perez Rueda said he was the one who had raped and killed the seventy-six-year-old woman. (Perez Rueda was later convicted of raping and killing another elderly Amarillo woman four months before Garrett was alleged to have killed the nun.) But the execution went ahead. Garrett’s last words were: “I’d like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me. And the rest of the world can kiss my ever-
loving ass, because I’m innocent.”
In 1993, Ann allowed the executions of two foreign nationals to go forward in two days. She refused to meet with the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the United States and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who together pleaded for the life of Carlos Santana, who admitted taking part in a robbery in Houston, but another man involved in the holdup did the killing. Then Ramón Montoya became the first Mexican citizen executed in the United States in fifty-one years, despite pleas from Mexico’s president and the Vatican. Three thousand people gathered to receive his body on the Rio Grande bridge at Reynosa. These were matters of conscience and policy, but also of politics. At one campaign meeting on criminal justice, George Shipley said, “Dorothy, I don’t want to hear one more word about capital punishment!”
In her book Ten Minutes from Normal, Karen Hughes claimed that Bush later told her that he decided to run for governor when he attended Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s victory rally in June 1993. On the ballot that day was the constitutional amendment to enable a school-finance law that Ann supported, and it failed. He told Hughes that on television he saw Richards “wringing her hands” and saying she was out of ideas. He said he thought, “I know what to do,” and made up his mind to take her on.
Bush’s ideas on curriculum would lead, on the national stage, to the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, with its overriding emphasis on reading and math, standardized testing, and holding schools accountable for results through funding; the law left teachers saying they were required to spend all their time “teaching the test.” On how to pay for his proposed reforms, he campaigned for governor on a platform of increasing the state’s share of public school funding in order to limit increases in local property taxes. The outcome was a shell game: he was able to claim $1.4 billion in tax cuts, but at the expense of depleting a $1 billion budget surplus, and nearly two-thirds of the cuts went to businesses and their affluent shareholders, the rest to homeowners. And property taxes in the state still rose.
It may be true that Bush decided to run on the basis of his commitment to public education and how to fund it, but the day before he attended Senator Hutchison’s victory rally, Governor Richards carried out her promise to veto the concealed-weapons bill. The state was in an uproar over gang violence and drive-by shootings. Especially in Houston, people feared thugs, most of them young blacks, who, in the murderous fashion of the moment, were jerking drivers out of BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes and, not content with the carjackings, were popping rounds into old white guys’ heads before dumping them on the asphalt and racing off. And the National Rifle Association was mindful of Ann’s stated interest in a ban of assault rifles. Bush didn’t have to make guns one of his stated issues. He just quietly let it be known that he would sign a concealed-weapons bill. Ann had her heels dug in, and she was doing nothing to defuse the emotions that aroused.
In April 1994, she spoke to a crowd of supportive police chiefs about her battle with the legislature. She began by thanking Plano’s chief, Bruce Glasscock.
His advice was helpful to me when I was considering the conceal-to-carry bill.
But I have got to tell you that when you all asked me to veto that bill, it was not a hard decision to make.
It is a mystery to me how anyone can think we make Texas safe by encouraging every Tom, Dick, and Henrietta to arm themselves to the teeth.
No one is more secure when every driver stuck in rush hour traffic and every customer at McDonald’s is legally packing heat.
So I was proud to veto that bill and I am ready to do it again.
Political reporters were not lying down for Ann, any more than they had in 1990. As the 1994 race warmed up, R. G. Ratcliffe summarized her term in the Houston Chronicle.
She is, according to polls, the most popular Texas governor in 30 years. . . . But the record also shows that Richards signed a $2.7 billion tax increase during her first year in office, after making a campaign promise that it wouldn’t be necessary to raise taxes, and has overseen a 30 percent increase in the state budget. Her tenure has occasionally been marked by tentativeness and failure: She briefly favored a statewide property tax for schools, but quickly withdrew her support in the face of opposition from school superintendents and school boards, and she backed a constitutional amendment for school finance that was soundly rejected by voters. And she failed to follow through on a promise to bring teachers’ pay to the national average. During her 1990 campaign, Richards pledged to regulate health insurance and lower other insurance rates. But health insurance remains largely unregulated in Texas and homeowner and auto insurance rates have risen.
With reporters, she continued to give as good as she got. One time, as part of a “Smart Jobs” economic development initiative, she led the Capitol press corps to an East Texas factory where laid-off workers were being retrained as welders. A stifling day was made hotter by the welding torches. At the press event that followed, a television reporter named James Moore, who seldom let up on any politician, cracked, “If welding is a smart job, what’s a dumb one?” She let him go on sweating under his boom mike for a moment, and then smiled. “You know, Jim, it don’t look to me like it takes a whole lot of smart to be a microphone holder.” Yet on receiving a letter from Moore’s young daughter, Ann carried on a warm correspondence with the girl that lasted through her college years.
George Shipley was disgusted by the results of her courting all those CEOs she had enlisted as economic advisers. In June 1994, she found herself assailed over her support for Garry Mauro’s compressed-natural-gas initiatives by executives of Southern Union Gas, Texaco, and Shell, and a lobbying firm representing refiners in Houston, El Paso, and the Golden Triangle. They wanted a product called reformulated gasoline to be certified as a clean fuel under Texas law. The worst backstab came in a letter from a man who had praised her warmly as a friend of the business community.
Dear Gov. Richards:
The Greater Houston Partnership is the primary advocate for the Houston business community and has more than two thousand members with over 500,000 employees who are affected by Texas environmental regulation. As Chairman of the Board of Directors for the partnership, I am writing at the Board’s direction to express their concern over the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission’s proposed rules regarding the Texas Alternative Fuel Fleet (TAFF) Program because, as now proposed, the rule will exclude fuels [such as reformulated gasoline] that do not meet the federal Clean Air Act standards . . .
As the heart of the nation’s energy production, Texas should be especially sensitive to providing an equitable competitive climate for both innovation and prosperity for that important sector of our economy. The TAFF, as proposed, will seriously undermine the Houston region’s innovation, competition, and cost-effective air quality improvement. We ask that you encourage the commission to make the TAFF fuel-neutral.
That tacit declaration of war by the energy industry was delivered by her good friend Ken Lay, the later convicted chairman of Enron. (Still, ever loyal, when that house of cards crashed down, she somehow defended Lay, saying he had always treated her right.)
Ann cautioned aides and volunteers not to take Bush lightly. In fact, they all thought he was a hothead who would blow up under pressure. But Ann was the one with overheated rhetoric. In April 1994 at the Democratic State Convention in Fort Worth, a video of highlights of her term preceded her speech. One of the images that raised roars from the crowd was the march down Congress Avenue before her inauguration.
Looking at that video, seeing that march again, it seems impossible that it has been almost three and a half years since we met on the bridge down by the IBEW hall, gathered ourselves up, and set off on this great adventure.
It was an incredible, emotional day.
I remember looking up at the buildings and seeing people leaning out of the windows—smiling and waving—a lot of them with little American and Texas flags.
If we did not know it before that da
y, I think we all realized at that moment that we had done something truly remarkable, truly extraordinary. We took back this state for the people of Texas . . .
But here’s the part I like the best. What simply mystifies me is why we suddenly hear from people at election time who have actually filed to run for statewide office when we have never heard an idea about government from them before.
People who never seemed to have the slightest interest in what the people care about—who were never there when there was a piece of legislation discussed or debated, who were never there for a public hearing, who never wrote a letter asking for a position on any vote on anything that we have done in government—and suddenly pop out of a P.R. back room claiming to have a better way of doing everything.
It’s just like your brother-in-law who was supposed to help with the moving, and then shows up after it’s all done and tells you the furniture isn’t in the right place.
All we have to say is: Where were you when we were doing the heavy lifting?
These Johnny-come-latelies . . . let me tell you, serving in public office is not some sort of beauty contest. You have to go through a lot of living. You have got to have some experience with people. You have got to serve at the local level to understand the impact of what is happening with state policy and state laws when they are passed down to the local level.
You have to have someone who understands the impact of the power of what transpires in state government. You can’t wake up one morning and stand there shaving, looking in the mirror, and say, “Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm, I think you’re so cute you ought to run for governor.”
It was a partisan event, and it was her job to get the juices flowing. But it wasn’t funny, and lacking in her rhetoric down the stretch was Lily and the Baptist pallet—the passion for what she might yet accomplish, not just the bristling defense of what she was proud to have done.