by Jan Reid
In 2010, Wayne Slater devoted one of his newspaper columns to Karl Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. In it, he retold Rove’s account of a poignant moment from election night in 1994: “The same night that Bush won as governor, brother Jeb lost his race for governor of Florida. Jeb was the brother seen as most likely to rise politically, not George. And so when his parents called, they were so anguished they barely acknowledged Bush’s extraordinary upset of Richards. ‘Bush listened to his father’s distress over his brother’s defeat; when the conversation finished, he shrugged his shoulders and went back into a room awash in joy and excitement.’”
Was there an element of getting even in the Texas race? You bet there was. In December 2004, the elder George Bush would say to the Washington Post’s Hugh Sidey, who was writing an article for Time: “Remember when Ann Richards said George Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth. And then when George beat her in his first run for governor, I must say I felt a certain sense of joy that he finally had kind of taken her down. I could go around saying, ‘We showed her what she could do with that silver foot, where she could stick that now!’”
The day after the election, a woman in the GOP stronghold of Midland wrote Ann a letter on school notebook paper. She said she wanted to tell her before she left office how appreciated she was for the work she had done for some Texas families. Three years earlier, her oldest son had gone to prison at the Eastham Unit. Deep in the East Texas woods, Eastham was state’s first maximum-security prison. Clyde Barrow had helped engineer one of the few successful jailbreaks out of there, in 1934, and a guard was killed. It was known as one of the most brutal prisons in the country, and in 1972 one of its inmates had been the writ writer David Ruiz. The Eastham Unit personified the conditions that compelled a federal court to rule in 1979 that imprisonment in Texas amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The woman’s letter continued:
It was a very sad day for our family. We thought all the doors were shut forever. He came from a good family. We were a farming family, we work hard, raised five boys. Raised our boys to believe in God, Country, and family. We didn’t have much money. But we had lots of love, place to live, food to eat, clothes—I thought we had it made.
We came to Midland from Plainview. We left farming and went into the oilfield. Our oldest son was in the Army. He came here in ’82 and started to get in trouble. I asked many questions as to why—no answers. No one knew what to do and if I had lots of money I could have found help . . .
I thought are the minor drinking and drugs my son was doing that minor? When he was sent to prison this time my world fell apart. I had just buried my 23 year old son and now my oldest son was gone. After he was at Eastham Unit time was coming around for his release. He called and said he was being sent to Kyle [the model unit for Ann’s drug and alcohol treatment programs]. I could not understand why the State was doing this to us. I knew nothing about Kyle, no one knew. Little did I know it was the first step in my son getting his life back.
It is one year later, and now we have our son back. If it had not been for Kyle and your program I might have lost him forever.
This last Thanksgiving was the best. We have so much to be thankful for. You will be remembered in our prayers. There are no words I can say—what do you say for a child’s life? You have touched our family life and made it better.
As the transition proceeded, a forlorn news story circulated that the Richards campaign was auctioning off mementos to help retire her $50,000 campaign debt. “She didn’t have a job, she didn’t have a car, she didn’t have a place to live,” Bud Shrake told me. “She didn’t know what the future held for her at all. Then one day this guy called her up for Frito-Lay and said they had an idea for her and Mario Cuomo to make a commercial for Doritos chips that would run during the Super Bowl. With nothing else to do, she and Cuomo were going to sit around with doleful expressions, poking Doritos in some dip and watching the game. She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. It sounds all right. Does Mario want to do that?’ The man said Mario was game. Then there was this pause, and he said, ‘And . . . we’ll pay you a million dollars.’”
“That thing was a real production,” Marlene Saritzky told me. “They flew her out to LA, and I was with her the last three days she was governor. It was like a full-blown movie set. She had a nice trailer, and she kept rewriting lines of the script. It happened that they were winding up the day Bush was inaugurated. He took the oath at noon, just like she had. It was ten o’clock in the morning in California. The state trooper who was out there with her, Mike Escalante, came to me and said he was going to go tell her good-bye. I was pretty worried about her. We had made plans to go to a movie later that day. Ann said, ‘Please don’t take this personally, but I’d like to be alone for a while.’ She came back after an hour or so, and that was that. She was off into another life, and we went to the movie.”
Ann with some of her grandchildren: from left, David Adams, Lily Adams, Hannah Adams, and Jennifer Richards.
EPILOGUE
Passages
The year that Ann turned seventy, she sat for an interview one day with a young political scientist at the University of Texas named Jim Henson. She was in a relaxed and reflective mood. “I got involved in politics as a very young woman,” she told him. “I was nineteen years old when I married a man who was interested in politics. We did it like other couples, you know, go bowling, joined dance clubs, we joined the Young Democrats at the University of Texas, and we participated in political campaigns, we rabble-roused, carried picket signs, and we had a ball at it—what you call the grass roots. If there was a protest, we were participants. And these were the days of the Civil Rights marches, the protests against a government that repressed African-Americans in this country, and it was a great time to be a part of politics.”
But she also spoke of the growing disaffection she came to feel with the role she inherited as a wife and mother—as a woman. “No one ever told me when I was in college or in graduate school that I might be preparing myself for life. My whole goal was to be married, have fun, be with the man I love, get away from my folks, but still have them support me for a while, and I was going to do all the things that the slick magazines said I ought to do. You know, I was going to have a family. I was going to have this lovely house. I wasn’t going to have to worry about anything, and I was going to have a bunch of kids named Dick and Jane and we’d have Puff and Spot. And pretty much, that’s what I did. And it just bored the living hell out of me. I was so bored, cooking and sewing and—you know, there were days when I spent the entire day ironing shirts.”
Henson asked her whether she was satisfied with the progress made by American women in her time. “Oh, I am hardly satisfied,” she replied. “I am outraged most of the time at how progress seems to stall—how difficult it is for young people to realize that their very freedoms are in jeopardy if they are not willing to fight for them. But you also have to look back and accept and be pleased that things have changed. My grandmother, during a period of her life, didn’t have the right to vote. The law in Texas was that idiots, imbeciles, the insane, and women could not vote. And, less than one generation later, I was the governor of Texas. Now that’ll tell you that we have progressed.”
Ann lived in a series of nice condominiums in Austin, and it seems now that we saw her fairly often. Sometimes it was just at the grocery store, or she would be shooting up and over the hills of Fifteenth Street in her tidy Chrysler. But we were aware, too, that she was gone, living someplace else. First, for three years, it was Washington.
A few days before Christmas 1997, in her New York Times column, Maureen Dowd blistered Ann and some of her big-name colleagues for the depths to which they had sunk. “While cashing in has become a national calling,” she wrote, “their Faustian bargain with Big Tobacco has left many here speechless.” A firm formed by Harry McPherson (a former aide to Lyndon Johnson), Ann, George Mitchell (the distinguished former senator from Maine), and Howard Baker (the
former Tennessee senator and a voice of conscience during the Watergate hearings) had billed its tobacco clients for $5 million in the past year, Dowd claimed. She said of her targets:
Cigarettes are a particular scourge of women, minorities, and the poor. Yet here is Ann Richards, a heroine of women, minorities, and the poor, twisting arms to help a murderous industry that preys on the downtrodden she once championed. Hawking Doritos with Mario Cuomo was just tacky. Hawking tobacco—especially given the fact that the former Texas Governor speaks movingly about being a recovering alcoholic who understands the iron trap of addiction—is reprehensible.
How can George Mitchell be both a statesman working against death in Northern Ireland and a shill for death in America?
We proudly remember Howard Baker for asking, at a pivotal moment during Watergate, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Well, shouldn’t he be asking the same question of his new clients? It was grim to watch the former Senate majority leader, whose first wife died of lung cancer, relinquish his spot as chairman of the board of trustees of the Mayo Clinic because his tobacco work nauseated his doctor friends.
Had Ann, her good friends, and those former Senate majority leaders sold out? Newspaper editors schedule columns more often than the columnists do, but Dowd’s Christmas gift to Ann, Mitchell, and Baker in the New York Times made no attempt to underscore the complexity of the tobacco settlement story, much less to explore whether there might be another side to it. The only point of view that counted was hers, and she loaded up her presentation with remarkably harsh rhetoric: “scourge of women . . . reprehensible . . . shill for death . . . nauseated his doctor friends.”
None of the people under Dowd’s attack had the resumés of thieves and scoundrels. They had served in government ably and well for decades. But even in the best of lights, Ann hadn’t waited long to slip through the revolving door she had decried during her 1990 campaign and her term as governor—this particular door just happened to go around in Washington, not Austin. In fact, she had made up her mind to do it while technically still governor.
The man who offered Ann an as-counsel position with the law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand was a man whose friendship went back to the days when he and David Richards were enrolled in the University of Texas Law School and Ann was getting a teaching certificate. Harry McPherson and his wife, Clay, were their closest friends when they went to Washington in 1962 in hopes the New Frontier was real, and then they welcomed them back with the fond dinner party that made Senator Ralph Yarborough throw a paranoid fit and send them limping back to Dallas after David’s employment of just one day. As a senior adviser to Lyndon Johnson, McPherson tried to talk the president out of escalating the war in Vietnam, and he helped design and build the War on Poverty. He has been credited with persuading LBJ to call out the National Guard to protect the civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Former Senate heavyweights and failed presidential candidates Lloyd Bentsen and Bob Dole also had positions at Verner, Liipfert, though they were not registered as active lobbyists. George Mitchell brought more stature and knowledge to the lineup of the Democratic-leaning establishment firm, as did McPherson’s longtime friend Ann Richards. McPherson said of their association with the country’s major tobacco corporations: “This is a chance to work on an issue that if it is completed successfully would make a very large contribution to the public health of the country.”
Verner, Liipfert and its star politicians were not alone in that noble or ignoble quest. Howard Baker committed his law and lobbying firm to representing the interests of tobacco company clients, as did Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican Party and a future governor of Mississippi. According to Public Citizen, a nonprofit organization of integrity-in-government advocates, Big Tobacco besieged the Capitol and the Clinton administration with 208 lobbyists in 1997, dishing out $35.5 million to them in that year alone. The top four of Big Tobacco were Philip Morris USA, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp., and Lorillard Tobacco Company. Ann’s new employer represented all those corporations plus a smokeless tobacco producer, UST, Inc., to the tune of $10.3 million in its 1997 billings. Haley Barbour’s firm registered a distant second with $1.7 million.
As far back as 1950, the British Medical Journal had published an article linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. According to USA Today, the Justice Department claimed to have evidence that in a private meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1953, executives of Big Tobacco spawned a scheme to lie about the dangers of smoking, load tobacco with higher-than-natural nicotine levels to increase addiction, and target the youth market. Hundreds of private suits by ailing and dying smokers against the tobacco companies were filed in state courts, but only two plaintiffs prevailed, and those decisions were reversed on appeal. By the nineties, state governments were in an uproar over the smoking-related costs being paid by Medicaid and other public health programs, but Big Tobacco moved to ward off any sort of coordinated assault, petitioning Congress for a “global resolution.” The tobacco industry’s power and leverage in Washington ensured that Congress was never going to act.
Seeing no progress at the federal level, forty state attorneys general—including Texas’s Dan Morales—sued the four biggest tobacco corporations, which became legally known as the “Original Participating Manufacturers.” In 1997, the parties reached a “Master Settlement Agreement,” in which the four companies agreed to pay $368.5 billion to settle smoke-related lawsuits filed by the states and finance antismoking campaigns—Texas was to receive $17.3 billion. In addition, the companies would restrict the marketing of cigarettes, permit the federal regulation of tobacco, and pay fines if tobacco use by minors did not recede. That sounded good, but there was a big catch: in the words of Public Citizen, the proposed settlement would “almost completely immunize the tobacco industry from past and future legal responsibility for the harm caused by their deadly products,” and it would cap jury awards and eliminate punitive damages.
But to enforce this, Congress had to approve the settlement, which led to the scramble and swarm of lobbyists in 1997. Charles Lewis, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, told the New York Times: “This is probably the most expensive and formidable array of talent ever hired by a single industry. What’s troubling is to see so many politicians aligning themselves to lobby for an industry that has been responsible for so much death.”
Those politicians included Ann Richards, George Mitchell, Howard Baker, and Haley Barbour.
Trial lawyers, not the attorneys general and their staffs, performed most of the litigating and negotiating, and their individual shares of the settlement proceeds totaled hundreds of millions of dollars—fees for the team of lawyers in Texas came to $3.3 billion altogether. Dan Morales abruptly dropped out of a race for reelection as attorney general in 1998 and later, after pleading guilty in 2003 to charges of mail fraud and tax evasion, went to prison. The charges stemmed from his efforts to help Mark Murr, a Houston attorney, obtain more than $200 million in fees for working on the tobacco negotiations; other attorneys who worked on the case claimed Murr had contributed little or nothing to the effort. And complaints were soon raised that Big Tobacco was passing off the billions of dollars in liabilities to smokers by hiking the price of cigarettes.
What was in it for Ann? According to “Shattered Icon,” an Austin Chronicle article by the author and journalist Robert Bryce, she was billing clients roughly $385 an hour while employed by Verner, Liipfert. Those clients, he reported, were not just Big Tobacco; they included the City of Austin, Motorola, the Texas Association for Homecare, NBC, the often-fined military contractors Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas, and a developer of vast shopping malls called the Mills Corporation. One of its proposed projects targeted 206 acres of wetlands along the Hackensack River near East Rutherford, New Jersey. Mills offered to refurbish 380 acres of nearby wetlands in exchange for a permi
t to dump enough material to fill a domed football stadium on the Hackensack’s acres of fragile marshes. One of the opponents of the development was the ubiquitous environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. Still, a taxicab dispatcher and self-proclaimed Hackensack River keeper seethed, “Our regulators, the paid stewards for our resources, are going to be cowed into granting permits that are not in the public interest because a high-powered ex-politician from Texas has gotten involved in something she knows nothing about.”
Bryce wrote that he cornered Ann when she returned to Austin to make a speech at the University of Texas in August 1997. “Richards refused to say whether or not the project was good for the environment. However, Richards did confirm that she has met with [Bill Clinton’s] Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner. ‘I have talked to Carol Browner, not about the specific project, but about whether or not they are going to get their SAMP [Special Area Management Plan],’ said Richards. ‘Frankly, I don’t know when that’s going to happen. All of that is under the aegis of the Corps of Engineers. So what the Mills Corporation wants—and what they frankly deserve—is for the governmental entities to decide what they are going to do with the property. And if the property is going to be commercially developed, they want the opportunity to do that.’”
As a sidebar to his article, Bryce noted that Ann’s “environmental agenda for the new Texas” in 1990 criticized the revolving door at the Texas Water Commission: “Questions have been raised about the influence of lawyers and lobbyists over the environmental protection role of the Commission.” One of the illustrations was a page from that twenty-four-page document. It read:
Richards’ Environmental SWAT Team
Target High Priority Cases
• Protect Water Supplies