Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Although Molly mainly hung out at the river’s edge while others went on hikes, she also helped out in the kitchen, chopping ingredients and telling stories about her early years as a reporter. True to Molly form, she organized a sing-along and talent show. As sick as she was, she still had the energy to invigorate others.

  For all that, getting her in and out of the raft was a major undertaking, but, typically, she insisted on doing everything on her own. As Dave Richards put it, “We for damn sure weren’t going to let anything happen to her, not on our watch. For the most part it was pretty quiet water except for a few places like Rattlesnake Rapids. Molly, being Molly, insisted on sitting up front, where you take the brunt of the shocks when you hit the rapids. You really have to hold on. Well, Molly lost her grip and went airborne. Somehow she came down partially straddling the boat. I got hold of her and we’re still in the middle of the goddamn rapids. Brady held on to one leg and I held on to her until we got to calm water. I think that chastened her for the time being, but it sure as hell scared the shit out of me.” . . .

  “Molly seemed to get stronger as we went along,” [Sandy] said. “In the end it was the right thing to do and she was a wonderful companion. Much of the trip was hiking trails, so either Dave or I stayed with her while the others went on the walks. We talked, and of course we sang. We were ten days on the river, and at the end Molly insisted on taking everyone to dinner. I was so glad she had made the trip and enjoyed it so much. I don’t remember anything anybody ate. I just remember there were some people on the trip that we didn’t know and by the time we parted company Molly had them all singing along.”

  All these friendships, all this loss. In remembrance of Ann, Lily Tomlin related a very funny tale about how she and a group of friends had hatched plans to take over a Manhattan building and, without regard either for leases that had held firm for generations or for the city’s daunting policies of rent control, they would just buy the building and make it a guarded salon of artistes and intellectuals—their playground. Ann listened to the plan and, in that voice of absolute knowing, said, “Bad idea, Lily.”

  The most eloquent words of loss were written and delivered by Bud Shrake.

  For the last seventeen years Ann has been the anchor of my life.

  We don’t know what life really is, or where life comes from, or where life goes, or what to do with it while we have got it.

  But we know life is far grander than just chemistry. We are beings of spirit.

  And even across the divide of death, Ann’s spirit remains an echo in our hearts this morning.

  Father Taliaferro says hell is being in heaven and not liking it.

  I think that is Ann’s message to us.

  Put a smile on your face, and a good thought in your heart, and try to do the right thing—and you will find Ann standing beside you with a fresh bag of popcorn.

  Thank you, Ann. I love you.

  Ah-men. And Ah-women. And Ah-Ann.

  Bob Bullock did some inexplicable things at the end of his life, one of them pointless and cruel. Garry Mauro couldn’t stand to watch the Democrats just stand aside, offering no opponent, as George W. Bush ran for the 1998 reelection that was the first lap of his presidential campaign. Garry threw a bunch of well-made ads at Governor Bush early in the summer. The polls didn’t budge, and after that, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Near the end, Bullock decided to endorse Bush over his protégé. They had been through intimidation by the FBI together. Bullock was the godfather of two of Garry’s children. His announcement left Garry’s friends speechless. When Bullock was dying, he made amends with Garry and other people he had hurt in his turbulent life. He predicted on his deathbed that Bush would be president and the Texas House would keep going Republican—“there wasn’t any saving it.” As soon as he was gone, his beloved Senate went Republican, too.

  The Texas State Cemetery was Bob Bullock’s abiding wish for a thing of beauty, and when it is not crowded with mourners and sorrow for someone you know who is being buried, you see what a fruition of his dream it is. On a hot June day, I wandered through it, pausing a moment before the monument of one, Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas, who went out into a dangerous frontier, willing to make his way as a colonist and an immigrant to Mexico. John Connally’s celebration of self is much overdone, bearing a life-size sculpture of some bearded wise man holding an open book in one hand and a board in the other. A board?

  Tom Landry’s stone sports an engraving of the iconic fedora that symbolized his coaching tenure with the Dallas Cowboys. Tom Lea’s gravestone is as exquisite as his paintings and prose. The writers Walter Prescott Webb and Fred Gipson lie side by side; I wonder whether they were friends. I stop for a moment on seeing the chiseled name of Charlie Wilson, that great East Texas rascal—some say scoundrel—who took it upon himself to arm the mujahideen against the Soviet might in Afghanistan.

  I am not sure how to find what I am looking for. I do come across the grave of Bill Kugle, who shocked his friend Ann once by inquiring whether she would be pleased to go to bed with him. Kugle’s service in the legislature was short, but the epigraph on his tombstone is a classic: “He never voted for Republicans and had little to do with them.” I see some teenage kids who have also been looking about with interest and have retreated to park benches in the shade of a blooming crepe myrtle. I stop and ask them whether they have seen the grave of Ann Richards. Most look away from whatever this old man with a cane presents to them. A couple of them ask me to say the name again. They look at each other and dismiss me with a sort of giggle. My God, I realize, they have never heard of her.

  But over in the southwest part of the city there is an innovative middle school that bears her name and has won acclaim as a leadership school. During her time in New York, Ann came across such a school in a tough part of the city. A wealthy old man in Dallas told Ann that she ought to take the lead in bringing those schools to every city in the state. All the students at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders are girls. Getting in is very competitive, and for reasons I don’t quite fathom, the concept seems to work educationally. Ellen Richards has given its board the organizational talent her mother described, and Jeanne Goka, a friend, neighbor, veteran principal, and wife of my colleague Lou Dubose, has brought it from concept to thriving classrooms. Many of the students come from disadvantaged backgrounds; about 60 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price meals. A Japanese American, Jeanne knows a great deal about overcoming hardship in this country; her parents were sent to internment camps in California during World War II. She says, “I tell the teachers we are going to get this girl into college, she’s going to come back and take her siblings through, and they’re going to lift this whole family out of poverty.”

  Dan and Clark Richards are practicing law in downtown Austin with their father, which has been a treat for all three of them. Dan is a lifelong hot-rodder, and he goes zooming off with Sam, the older of his two half siblings. Sam’s sister, Hallie, is a former star softball pitcher and a college student, as tall, confident, and pretty as her mother, Sandy. Clark has a passion for playing some kind of big drum in a troupe, and he and his brother are collaborating on a mystery novel featuring two brothers practicing law and fishing on South Padre Island. And how proud Ann would be of Cecile, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, carrying on one of the fights for hearts and minds that was so important to her mother.

  The subtext of birth control is abortion, and no one can think that the most wrenching political disagreement in American life is going away. But on Good Morning America on May 10, 2010, Cecile said, “The invention of the birth control pill revolutionized life for women in America. It’s completely changed women’s options.” It was the fiftieth anniversary of the pill’s invention. Cecile and Kirk live in New York now. Not long before I took my walk through the State Cemetery, Time proclaimed Cecile one of the twenty most influential people in the world. Dorothy and I looked at each othe
r and said, “The world?”

  Our friend Bud Shrake made it through life only a couple of years longer than Ann did. He died in May 2009. He went out with a blaze of creativity, finishing a novel and a play before lung cancer brought him to an end. After being told what ailed him, he remarked with annoyance that he hadn’t smoked in twenty years. In an e-mail interview Bud granted not long before he died, Brant Bingamon asked whether he thought people with drinking in their past are more prone to cancer. Bud wrote, “I have no idea if drinking and cancer are linked in any way. However there’s not as many old drunks as it seems there used to be.”

  The admirer continued, “What’s it like to not have a wife in your old age? Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Bud replied that he loved both his wives, Joyce and Doatsy. “I’ve been divorced since 1980 but always had a girlfriend and for seventeen years until she died my girlfriend was Guv Ann Richards. Ann and I planned to get married eventually, talked about it a lot but never got around to it. I don’t know if I miss having a wife or not. I certainly do miss Ann.”

  Some mutual friends were driving in the hills west of Austin not long after he died. They laughed so hard they had to pull over on the shoulder of the road after seeing the pink granite tombstone jouncing in the bed of a pickup. “Edwin ‘Bud’ Shrake, Jr.,” the tombstone read, and below that the carefree motto that sustained him, “So Far So Bueno.”

  I find them finally. Anyone who believes theirs wasn’t a genuine love affair needs to see them side by side. They arranged it that way—he was as deserving a writer as others buried here, but former governors do have pull. Bob Bullock and his wife are buried three rows back. Bullock chose a plot that he said was sixteen paces from Stephen F. Austin. The chiseling on the back of Bullock’s gravestone reads, “Only death will end my love affair with Texas.” I grin on seeing that to his front and to his rear there is no more than a horseshoe toss to the graves of two women who irked him to no end, Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan. I like to think that late at night, you can almost hear them scaring up an argument.

  Some people don’t care for Ann’s abstract marker of white marble. The lines of it flow all right for me. A couple of political buttons have been left on a small shelf of the marble. I lean close enough to read them. One says, “Pass the E.R.A.”; the other, “Hillary 2012.” Engraved on the other side of Ann’s tombstone is a graceful line that I couldn’t hear when the helicopter was circling the Capitol that day of her inauguration, all those years ago: “Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color—a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let people in.”

  Ann belongs here beside Bud in the shade of an old and majestic live oak tree. But what a wonder she became for the whole country. I see her in New York, strapping her purse over her shoulder—having no harried male aides to lug it around, as she did when she was governor—and barging up those sidewalks grinning, proud of her good heart and thrilled by the journey.

  Notes

  My path to writing this biography began with a November 2006 Texas Monthly essay on her passing, “Ann: An Appreciation.” That led to another essay, “The Case for Ann Richards,” in the anthology A Legacy of Leadership: Governors in American History, edited by Clayton McClure Brooks (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

  Much as I admired Ann and was indebted to her in my personal and professional life, I would never have attempted to write this book if I had not, in researching the second essay, discovered the wealth of materials and knowledge in the Ann W. Richards Papers in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin (hereafter cited as Richards Papers). The index alone runs to 700 single-spaced pages. Early on, I saw that important sections bore a proviso that authorization by the governor would be required. Since she had passed away two years earlier, I asked the lead archivist, Evan Hocker, what that now meant. A day or two later, he reported happily that only capital punishment and personnel files remained confidential and closed. She had stipulated that a year and a half after her death, she wanted scholars and interested citizens to have access to whatever they might find and learn. That transparency is very rare among politicians today. My job was to be thorough and fair.

  David Richards and his children, Cecile, Dan, Clark, and Ellen, contributed to this undertaking from the outset. We had no formal agreement that it would be an “authorized biography”; they just trusted me to do my best to tell Ann’s story right. Bud Shrake’s sons, Ben and Alan Shrake; the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos; and the archivist Joel Minor contributed correspondence and an insightful interview of Bud by Brant Bingamon. Bud fell ill before we had the long conversations about the book that we planned, and I did not want to intrude on the medical difficulty that he fended off with bravery and creativity in his last months. But in the course of our friendship, he had already told me a great deal.

  My wife, Dorothy Browne, was a friend of Ann and David Richards before she became a senior aide of Ann for almost a decade. She was also my knowing critic here. Her administrative assistant in the Governor’s Office, Shawn Morris, in turn was my helpful research assistant. So I knew many of Ann’s associates before I began. Still, I was startled by the response of professional colleagues who made generous time for interviews. The same was true of her political advisers. In addition to the archival work, I conducted over one hundred interviews over a three-year period.

  Some important figures, such as Jane Hickie, politely declined to be interviewed. Ann’s speechwriter Suzanne Coleman did not respond to my calls and e-mails about the book. She had been our good friend since Dorothy went to work at the Treasury, and I knew that in addition to her work and whatever she felt in retrospect about her long creative partnership with Ann, she had a loved one to care for, and I did not want to intrude on their privacy. For one reason or another, there were a few others whom I did not get to interview, but their roles and words were abundantly documented in the archives.

  Ann Richards’s memoir Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places, written with Peter Knobler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), and David Richards’s Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2002) are secondary sources, but read together, I found they became something more than that, for they offer different perspectives, sometimes disagreements, on many experiences that were richly shared.

  Other books I consulted were Land of the Permanent Wave: An Edwin “Bud” Shrake Reader, edited by Steven L. Davis (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2008), and Davis’s Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers in the Sixties and Beyond (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2004); Gary Cartwright’s HeartWiseGuy: How to Live the Good Life after a Heart Attack (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) and Turn Out the Lights: Chronicles of Texas during the 80s and 90s (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2000); and Molly Ivins’s Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (New York: Random House, 1991) and Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known (New York: Random House, 2004).

  On politics and government, I learned much from Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas, by Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2008); Brian McCall’s The Power of the Texas Governor: Connally to Bush (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2009); From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi, by Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2009); George W. Bush’s Decision Points (New York: Broadway, 2011); Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Free Press, 2008); Mike Cochran’s Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2007); Karen Hughes’s Ten Minutes from Normal (New York: Viking, 2004); Wayne Slater and James Moore’s Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (New York: Wiley, 2003); and Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010).

  To refresh my memory and double-chec
k sources, I also revisited Beaches, Bureaucrats, and Big Oil by Garry Mauro (Austin: Look Away, 1997), a book that I helped edit, and Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), on which I collaborated with Lou Dubose, Carl M. Cannon, and, in an important unsigned chapter, John Ratliff.

  Prologue: Glimpses. I first described the “gonzo bridge” party in Austin where I met Ann Richards in the previously mentioned Texas Monthly essay “Ann.” For the intervention, see Straight from The Heart, 202–212. I conducted interviews with David Richards and Dan Richards, and Michael and Sue Sharlot, who took part in the intervention.

  For Ann’s work for Sarah Weddington, see Straight from the Heart, 137–145, and for the keynote address, the same book, 11–32. In interviews, Mary Beth Rogers and Bill Cryer described the pressured speechwriting sessions in Atlanta. Dan Richards told me about watching his mother deliver the speech from the stage wings. The Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater recalled her remark to him on finishing the speech in a KLRU-TV interview by Paul Stekler. The faxed letter of congratulation from Bud Shrake is in the Richards Papers. Copies of the exchanged notes between Ann and President George H. W. Bush are there as well. The summary of her accomplishments and shortcomings is mine alone.

  Chapter 1: Waco. Ann Richards’s Waco High School yearbooks, mementos, and photographs are in her personal effects in the Richards Papers. David Richards spoke of her father, mother, and uncle in conversations with the author. For the effect on Texas of the Civil War and Reconstruction, see T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 393–432. The postwar constitutions are described thoroughly and well in The Handbook of Texas Online, published in multiple editions by the Texas State Historical Association, Austin. The Handbook also relates the story of William Cowper Brann, “the Iconoclast.” The colorful tale of the invention of the soft drink Dr Pepper is related in papers and articles at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, as well as on the museum’s website.