by Molly Ivins
In this, the era of ideologues, that is a most unfashionable position. There are seventy-three Republican freshmen and one Speaker in the House who consider compromise treachery. And Phil Gramm considered compromise treachery before compromise-as-treachery was cool. I suppose we should give him credit for being ahead of his time; Texans always have liked a hard-ass.
Now that politician is a dirty word (not that it was ever reminiscent of roses), it seems awfully dated to bring up names like Sam Rayburn, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, and Barbara Jordan. But they were politicians. They fought hard and they compromised because they thought it was for something quaintly called the greater good. Or maybe they just wanted to move the ball. In any case, in the phrase of the kindergarten report card, they worked and played well with others. And no one ever considered them sissies because of it.
Phil Gramm does not work or play well with others. Never has. And I don’t think that works well for Texas. “Go along to get along” is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash ’em in for your home state? No, I’d say we could ask for more than that from our senators. But I’ve never seen Phil Gramm collect or cash a chit for anyone except Phil Gramm. And that is one in the ribs to a man who’s down. God forgive me.
February 1996
Morris Udall
TUCSON, ARIZ. — damn, life’s a funny ol’ female-dog, idn’t she? Here I am, back in Tucson, one of my favorite places in the U.S. of A. and also the place of one of my most bitter professional regrets.
I did a man wrong here one time. I didn’t mean to, and it didn’t make much difference, but there it is. The man’s name is Morris Udall, representative from Tucson, and the year was 1976.
Six, I think it was, Democrats were scrapping for the presidential nomination that year. Ol’ Jerry Ford looked beatable. Among the less likely contenders were Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia with the charisma of a day-old pizza, and Mo Udall, an ace guy with the misfortune to be from Arizona (three electoral votes).
The New York Times Sunday Magazine was fixing to run profiles on each of these six candidates, and they called me to profile Udall—I think because I, in Texas, was the farthest-West journalist they’d ever heard of. Texas, Arizona—it all looks the same from New York.
In those days, I was what is known in our trade as “hungry,” which is supposed to mean “fiesty, ambitious, willin’ to go after a story like a starvin’ dog.” Actually, I was plain hungry: Six years at The Texas Observer left me below the poverty line, and I jumped at that assignment.
So I came over to Arizona and investigated Mo Udall’s life, times, finances, family life, psychological health, and public record back to Year Aught. I’ll tell you now what I should have told you then: Morris Udall is a man of exceptional decency, integrity, courage, honesty, and intelligence. On top of that, he’s funny. If you could have forced Congress to take a vote at that time just on the question of who was the finest human being then serving—secret ballot, no consequences, just vote your conscience—I swear to you that Udall would have won hands down.
And did I report this? Hell, no. I was looking for warts; I wanted dirt. Besides, I was afraid of being conned, of looking like a naïve hick. I dug through his campaign contributions. (I found union money! Do you know how brave you have to be to support unions in Arizona?) I dug through his psychohistory. (The Udalls are a famous Mormon family. Mo split from the church and became a Jack Mormon after commanding an all-black troop in the army). I wrote about his being one-eyed. (At one point, he was a one-eyed professional basketball player—some handicap.)
Faced with the disgusting reality of a truly decent politician, I did my dead-level best to be nasty. I didn’t cut him an inch of slack; I thought that was my job, the way they did it in the big leagues.
My grudging report that I hadn’t been able to find anything actually wrong with Udall duly appeared in print. Imagine my surprise when The New York Times’ famed political correspondent R. W. Apple followed my reserved appraisal of Udall with a puff piece about Jimmy Carter. (Johnny Apple, you know perfectly well that was a puff piece.) Every venial sin of Udall’s that I had held up to the merciless light of day, Apple glossed over gaily in the case of Carter. The profiles appeared from one Sunday to the next, but the politicians described in them were not judged by a single standard. To put it mildly.
Well, Jimmy Carter turned out to be a man of character and decency, too—he just wasn’t much of a politician, and Mo Udall was a good one.
My continuing regret is that what I wrote was accurate, but it wasn’t true. I was trying so hard to prove I could be a major-league, hard-hitting journalist that I let the real story go hang itself.
The real story is the sheer decency of Morris Udall. When I am asked if there are any heroes left in politics, I always think of Udall. He’s retired now, victim of a sad, slow, wasting disease. I suppose you could say that Udall is to Arizona liberals what Barry Goldwater is to Arizona conservatives: an incurably honest man of principle. Or you could say that Morris Udall is to Arizona liberals what Ev Mecham is to Arizona kooks. I think he’d like to have it end with a joke.
Speaking of remarkable figures from the past, those of us in the small but select circle that follows South Dakota politics were delighted to see Bill Janklow with the nomination for governor again. Last time Janklow was governor, he contributed greatly to the public entertainment. Among the more colorful charges leveled against him were that he wore a rabbit suit and carried a machine gun in his car trunk. (I can’t remember if any of that is true or not, I just recall the offbeat charm of it all.) The thing to remember about Dakota politics is that the Dakotas only look normal—underneath is a wide streak of Dakota weirdness. For normal, you have to go to Nebraska.
June 1994
Richard Nixon
QUEL TRIOMPH for the old Trickster. One last time we got a new Nixon. The Dead Nixon was, according to all those glowing tributes on television, a man of vision, courage, and leadership. For those of you thinking you must have lost your marbles lately to have forgotten what a great American Richard Nixon was, here’s a little pop quiz to refresh your memories.
How did Bob Haldeman, who was Nixon’s closest aide in the White House, describe Nixon in writing from prison?
“Dirty, mean, coldly calculating, devious, craftily manipulative, the weirdest man ever to live in the White House.”
What did Nixon think of the Supreme Court?
He nominated two men, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, to the Court, both of whom were found unfit to serve there by the United States Senate. According to Haldeman, if Nixon had gotten a single vote on the Court, he would have defied its order to turn over the Watergate tapes. “When the Court ruled 8-to-0 against Nixon, it unknowingly averted what might have been a supremely critical confrontation between the executive and judiciary powers.”
How did Nixon see the executive branch?
According to John Ehrlichman, shortly before the 1972 election Nixon called a “landmark meeting” at Camp David to plan the “capture” of the executive branch. “It was Nixon’s intent to repopulate the bureaucracy with our people. We would seek new laws to permit the dead and disloyal wood to be cast out.” Nixon admired John Dean because “he had the kind of steel and really mean instinct we needed to clean house after the election in various departments and to put the IRS and Justice Department on the kind of basis it should be on.” The IRS was to be used to get those on the enemies list.
In his diary Nixon wrote, “There simply has to be a line drawn at times with those who are against us, and then we have to take action to deal with them effectively.” Of a bureaucrat who had failed to knuckle under to the White House, Nixon said, “We’re going to get him . . . there are many unpleasant places a bureaucrat can be sent.” At other times, Nixon ranted about the “Jewish cabal” in the bureaucracy he was convinced was
trying to make him look bad, and ordered a head count of Jews in certain sections of the government.
“The Democrats have the Jews and the Negroes, and let them have them. In fact, tie them around their necks,” Nixon said. He hated the “Jewish press” (i.e., the major newspapers) and warned an aide to “stay away from the arts—the arts are full of Jews.” He used the word nigger and believed blacks were genetically inferior.
What did Nixon think of reformers?
Hated them. Those who harped on honesty in government were “hypocrites, little bastards, sanctimonious frauds, people who couldn’t butter a piece of bread.”
And what did Nixon think of the American people?
He told Theodore White about campaigning, “All the while you’re smiling, you want to kick them in the shins.”
How many Americans died in Vietnam after Richard Nixon ran on a platform of having a “secret plan” to end the war and promised to get us out within six months of his inauguration?
Twenty-one thousand.
What was the Huston Plan and who felt it threatened civil liberties?
The Huston Plan was intended to control Nixon’s enemies by wiretapping their phones, opening their mail, burglarizing their homes and offices. J. Edgar Hoover was horrified by it. It was the official policy of the administration and suspended the Fourth Amendment.
How did historian Barbara Tuchman describe Nixon’s legacy?
“An accumulated tale of cover-up, blackmail, suborned testimony, hush money, espionage, sabotage, use of federal powers for the harassment of ‘enemies,’ and a program by some fifty hired operators to pervert and subvert the campaigns of Democratic candidates by ‘dirty tricks,’ or what in the choice language of the White House crew was referred to as ‘ratfucking.’ The final list of indictable crimes would include burglary, bribery, forgery, perjury, theft, conspiracy, and obstructing justice.”
How did Charles Colson describe George McGovern’s 1972 campaign?
“Just about the dirtiest, meanest presidential campaign in this nation’s history.”
Richard Nixon has been described by his biographer as “a humorless man”; did he ever say anything funny?
Yes. Upon being shown the Great Wall of China, Nixon said, “This is, indeed, a great wall.”
June 1994
Barbara Jordan
THE PUBLIC BARBARA JORDAN from the directory of distinguished Americans is easy. She was always a First and an Only.
First woman, only black; in the Texas Senate, in the Texas congressional delegation, from the entire South. She served on the judiciary committee during the decision on Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Her great bass voice rolled forth, “My faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion is whole, it is com-plete, it is to-tal.” She sounded like the Lord God Almighty and her implacable legal logic caught the attention of the entire nation.
The degree of prejudice she had to overcome by intelligence and sheer force of personality is impossible to overestimate. She wasn’t just black and female: she was homely, she was heavy, and she was dark black. When she first came to the Texas Senate, some of her colleagues referred to her as “that nigger-mammy washerwoman.” It was considered a great joke in those years to bring one’s racist friends into the Senate gallery when B.J. was due to speak: they would no sooner spot her and gasp, “Who is that nigger?” than she would open her mouth and out would roll language Lincoln would have envied. Her personal dignity was so massive, even those who admired her hesitated to approach her. No one will ever know how lonely she was at the beginning.
Her friend Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton justly reminds us that Barbara Jordan was not effective solely because she sounded like God. Among educated Southern blacks—Jordan’s Baptist preacher daddy was one—speaking with perfect enunciation was one way of fighting the everlasting stereotype. Jordan was born and raised in the Fifth Ward of Houston, the biggest black ghetto in the biggest state in the Lower Forty-eight. She went to Texas Southern University and Boston University law school. It was neither her exceptional voice nor her extraordinary diction that got her ahead in life, but the force of her intellect.
One of those quaint Texas sayings is: “If you don’t know the difference, it don’t make any difference.” Barbara Jordan knew the difference: which is to say she was so smart it almost hurt. Lord, she was a good legislator; but never wasted a minute on a hopeless cause, no matter how righteous. Don’t ask any of the Senate liberals of that era about Jordan; ask those cornered-cottonmouth, mean-as-hell-with-the-hide-off conservatives what they thought of Jordan. Fought her on the floor in head-up debate, fought her in the back room over article 53, subsection C, part II: Jordan always knew what she was talking about, and almost always won. She traded some public suck-up with the Texas Democratic Establishment of that day—Lyndon Johnson, Ben Barnes—and got the first black congressional district ever drawn in Texas. Smart trade.
As it happened, the night B.J. spoke in favor of the impeachment of Richard Nixon, it was also sine die (the last night) of the Texas legislative session. Dozens of bills were still in the balance, every member was bargaining, finagling, and sweating through the final hours: came B.J.’s turn to speak on national television and the entire Texas capital came to a halt. Legislators, aides, janitors, maids, everyone gathered around scattered television sets to hear this black woman speak about the meaning of the Con-sti-tu-tion. And they cheered for her as though they were watching the University of Texas pound hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.
She cut her own congressional career short. She said later she didn’t have the patience to deal with the legislative process anymore. But it seems likely she already knew she had this weird variant of multiple sclerosis and that it would kill her before long (took almost fifteen years as it turned out). Of course she wanted a seat on the Supreme Court and Jimmy Carter could have given it to her. If there is one thing I would ask you to accept on faith, it is that Barbara Jordan had Judicial Temperament. Her faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion was whole, it was complete, it was total. I consulted her about appointments from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, and never found her less than fair. George Bush the Elder will tell you the same.
In the last years of her life, B.J. was a magnificent teacher, at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. For many more students she was quite simply the stonewall inspiration for a life in public service. No perks, no frills, no self-righteousness, no money, no glory: just a solid commitment to using government to help achieve liberty and justice for all—within the realm of the practical: She was always practical.
Her role as a role model may well have been her most important. One little black girl who grew up in the Fifth Ward used to walk by Jordan’s house every day on her way to Wheatley High School and think, “Barbara Jordan lived right here in my neighborhood. Barbara Jordan grew up right here, too.” Today Ruth Simmons is the president of Smith College.
Jordan was a helluva poker player, used to play regularly with a group of women friends. And before the disease twisted her poor hands so badly, she loved to play guitar. Sing, my God, with a voice like that do you doubt she could sing? It was like God singing the blues. “St. James Infirmary”—Let her go, let her go, Looord, let her go.
But let’s not let her go without remembering that the Woman Who Sounded Like God had a very dry, very wry sense of humor.
Former Senator Don Kennard of Fort Worth once took the ghetto-bred Jordan deer-hunting in South Texas. As dawn broke, the two of them were talking quietly in a clearing, leaning comfortably against an old, tumped-over table. Suddenly Kennard glanced over the table and there stood a beautiful buck. “There’s your buck, Barbara, take the shot,” he urged. But she got buck fever and just couldn’t do it. So Kennard took the shot and that buck dropped straight down like a rock. The two of them strolled over to inspect their prize, whereupon the buck shot straight up again and took off like a bat out of hell, without a scratch on it. Jordan said, “Good thing you’re a better senator than you are a deer sl
ayer.”
One time, Barbara Jordan invited Ann Richards, who later became governor of Texas, but was then a mere county commissioner, out to Jordan’s house in the country for dinner. Jordan lived down a dirt road and had a troublesome, indeed totally batty neighbor. This neighbor had taken it into her head that she owned all the land along the dirt road, and consequently kept locking the gates on it. Jordan, never one to miss an opportunity to Make Government Work, asked Commissioner Richards to do something about the locked gates. Richards dutifully made some phone calls, but was never able to get the dingbat to see reason.
Time went by and Professor Jordan invited Governor Richards to another dinner at her house. As they meandered down the dirt road, Ann inquired idly, “Barbara, whatever happened to that dreadful neighbor of yours? Did she ever quit lockin’ the gates on you?”