Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  The staff at our doctor’s office had done a commendable job of counseling us through the initial days of the tragic decision with which we were faced and the resulting loss. It was through the literature that they provided us, stories recounted by other couples who had endured a similar experience, that we decided we wanted to see Tate after her delivery. I am so grateful for those stories, for the willingness of other couples to share how they handled their loss and grief. It was because of them that we have the precious memories of seeing Tate, of holding her, of baptizing her, of photographing her. And I am so very thankful for those memories, as bittersweet as they are. In a wooden memory box given to me by Patti, with Tate’s name carved on its top, mementos of her are stored: the photographs, the program from a private memorial service we held for her at our home surrounded by a small group of our closest family and friends, cards sent by people who reached out to us to provide comfort, and that little crocheted bunny. Each year, on the anniversary of that terrible spring day, I take them out and open myself to the grief and the comfort they bring.

  It was a time of great sorrow for our family, and in the weeks that followed, we went through group grief counseling with other couples who had experienced similar losses. Our girls, Amber and Dru, grieved along with us, and we did our best to soothe them. Patti flew in from Boston while I was still in the hospital and stayed for almost two weeks, cooking for us, taking the girls to and from school, shopping for loose, post-pregnancy clothes for me to wear, but mostly caring for and helping to hold me together during the darkest initial stages of my grief.

  The following fall we participated as a family in a “Walk to Remember,” writing Tate’s name and the date of her birth and death on a small card that we attached to a tree in Trinity Park. It was important to all of us to memorialize her, to recognize that she was. That she was loved, and is still loved, and always will be loved by us.

  FIFTEEN

  All politics is local.

  —TIP O’NEILL

  EARLY IN 1996, before my heartbreaking pregnancy with Tate, my entry into politics began. Fort Worth’s mayor, Kay Granger, decided she would run for Congress, creating a cascading effect that set me up for my first run for public office. The councilman for the district I lived in, Ken Barr, announced immediately that he would run for mayor, leaving our district’s seat open. I jumped into the void and filed my candidacy in the special election that would be held to replace him.

  I wish I could say that I had been planning a run for public office for some time, but honestly, I had not. I even took Jeff by surprise when I told him that I wanted to run. But I was at a place in my life and in my career where I felt like I needed something more. I needed to feel that I was making an impact, and my law practice wasn’t providing me that kind of fulfillment.

  I suppose it wasn’t entirely unexpected. After all, I had literally “grown up” from my very early twenties with an admiration for Jeff’s service, for his ideals, and for his interest in local politics. Viewing it through his world-lens, I believed it would be something I would enjoy. And that I would be good at. My experiences at the Legal Services Center during law school and clerking for Judge Buchmeyer had taught me the value of working for others above self. And, given my own life experiences, I knew I could relate to and connect with the people in my diverse district who faced many challenges similar to my own. I had the blessing of having moved from a place of struggle to a place of opportunity. And I had the benefit of the analytic training that law school had provided me. Both, I believed, would serve me well as someone who wanted to and could make a difference.

  District 9 was a place I’d called home ever since I had enrolled at TCU in 1986. I felt I understood the needs of the district—from building upon the work to improve its declining commercial corridors, to protecting its historic neighborhoods from unnecessary encroachment, to improving its declining neighborhood parks and working to add additional community centers. And I was committed to improving the quality of life of all who lived in the district—whether in its affluent or economically distressed neighborhoods. District 9 also included all of downtown Fort Worth, which was experiencing a rebirth, thanks to the efforts and resources that the Bass family had committed to it. Partnering on these efforts was intriguing and exciting to me. I believed strongly in the work they were doing and I wanted to help. I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to work on something that I could stand back with pride and say, “I helped do that. I helped do something tangible, something that matters.” The job paid $75 a week, so anyone asking to be elected certainly needed to be committed to the work, rather than having a desire, or the need, to be financially compensated.

  Trouble is, I hadn’t exactly laid the groundwork for establishing myself in the community. To most folks in the district, particularly those activists who had been working long and hard in the trenches to make positive changes, I was an unknown and an unproven quantity.

  Except for getting involved in my neighborhood association to fight the expansion of a zoo parking lot behind my home—the one and only time I’d ever seen the inside of the Fort Worth City Council chambers—I wasn’t someone who was very well known in town. That issue had grabbed me, not just because I was concerned about its impact to my own quality of life and the value of my home, but because I was deeply concerned about the loss of park space that had continued to occur with the zoo’s expansion. What had once been an area with baseball diamonds, soccer fields, an archery range, and a small amusement park that my family and families from all over the city, particularly from the minority community, had enjoyed, was now being gobbled up bit by bit by the zoo’s expansion.

  But in spite of my limited experience inside the walls of city hall, I believed I could prove myself worthy, and I worked hard to quickly get up to speed on budget and long-term planning issues. With Jeff’s guidance I began meeting with smart, thoughtful city staffers who helped me see the landscape of both the opportunities and the challenges that the district faced. Jeff also helped me strategize about what the campaign would look like, and soon we hired a firm owned by one of our neighbors to help us. It was through that firm that I met and first worked with J. D. Angle, who is now a partner in a political consulting and call center firm that he and two friends created. J.D. has gone on to work in presidential races, helping to model likely voter targets and design strategic outreach. But back then, his experiences had been limited to working for the local Democratic Party, staffing a state senator, and now, working as an employee for the Tyson Group, whom I hired. Like me, he had been raised in difficult circumstances, the youngest of eight, raised by a single mother after his parents divorced, and had taken on a high level of responsibility of helping to care for his family at a very young age. We were both young and hungry to grow our impact on the world, to make a difference in the lives of people who had struggled as we both had. From those early days of fighting for that city council seat together, J.D. and I built a friendship that lasts, strong and deep, to this day, and J.D. continues to be a valuable and vital resource in my campaigns.

  Cathy Hirt, a very capable lawyer who lived in a neighborhood not far from mine, had also decided to run. Two other people got into the race as well—a Hispanic man, Lee Saldivar, and another Anglo woman, Judy Phillipson—bringing the count to three Anglo women and one Hispanic man. Lee and Judy had much stronger résumés when it came to community work, but what Cathy and I both lacked in that regard we made up for in other ways. We each had the benefit of a law-school education and an ability to absorb and strategize effective policy positions. And we could also raise money and put together sophisticated and effective campaigns. All four of us worked hard and brought passion to the table in that election, but Cathy and I ran very aggressive campaigns from the start and were quickly considered the front-runners.

  Jeff had always told me that he’d won his city council race at age twenty-seven by sneaking up on his opponent, a longtime incumben
t who believed that this upstart kid had no chance of beating him. But Jeff did it by knocking on doors and talking to voters for hours every single day. Before his opponent knew what was happening, Jeff had gained a significant following in the district, and by the time his opponent tried to mount an offense of his own, it was too late. So I set about trying to do the same thing in my campaign. I would knock on doors for several hours a day—as soon as I got home from work, I’d go out for a couple of hours, and on Saturdays and Sundays I would knock for four or five hours each day, sometimes with Jeff and the girls alongside me, sometimes alone.

  As I talked to people at their door, I’d ask about issues that were important to them and I would do my best to convince them that I was the best person for the job. I also tried to distinguish myself from Cathy on the basis of having lived in the district for ten years while Cathy had lived in Fort Worth for only about two years. To her credit, though, she had quickly emerged as a neighborhood leader in her own neighborhood and had forged alliances with some of the strongest community leaders in the south side of Fort Worth, who pulled together an active volunteer organization to help her. And Cathy was much better at selling herself than I was. In fact, I found that aspect of campaigning the hardest. I’d always been very modest by nature, and shy. Whether at someone’s door or standing before a group of people, I was extremely uncomfortable—I wanted to talk issues and debate differing perspectives, not talk about myself. That necessary quality for an effective politician to possess was one I had to learn over time—it didn’t, and still doesn’t, come naturally to me.

  It was a tough race, and the debates, which took place at several different arenas with all four of us, were nerve-racking. It was all totally new to me, and despite my legal experience and being thoroughly prepared for the events, again, I was still at my core a very shy person, and being in the spotlight wasn’t something I was comfortable with. The degree of scrutiny, even in entry-level local politics, is intense, as is the near-constant feeling of rejection. It’s hard not to take everything personally when you’re in the middle of a campaign and struggling to convince people that you’re the right one to do the job. But I truly felt I was the right person for the job and I was deeply committed to playing a role in shaping and improving my community. Challenging that discomfort and anxiety gave me a newfound respect for people willing to put their name on the line and endure judgment, scorn, and criticism. Now, whenever I meet someone who has mustered the courage to put his or her name on a ballot and run for office, whether for constable, school board, or Congress, I tell them that I admire their willingness. It’s hard to describe the exposure you leave yourself open to unless you’ve run for office. It is not for the faint of heart. And in that first city council race, I often wondered whether I really had the mettle to get through it. Nervous anxiety left me with little appetite and I lost quite a bit of weight, something I could hardly afford at the time. By the end, my mouth had broken out in blisters from the stress. Looking back on that, as hard as it was, I’m grateful for it. I see the blessing I was given through it. Because it toughened me for the journey I had ahead. A journey I could never have predicted at the time.

  After several months of a grueling campaign, election day arrived. I waited nervously with family and supporters in my headquarters. When the final votes were counted, there was no winner. No candidate had received more than 50 percent of the vote. Cathy Hirt and I would meet again in a runoff. The two of us would be left to debate our positions on a variety of issues—from the planned construction of a major toll road, to improving the quality of life for the people in our district. Cathy went into the runoff just slightly ahead of me in terms of the number of votes received. So now we were really scrambling. And she continued to prove her capacity as a worthy adversary. Until that point I’d run a very positive campaign—we both had. But Jeff had a different, more aggressive campaigning style, and during that runoff period he convinced me to be much more aggressive than I probably would have been if left to my own devices—particularly back then when I was such a novice. But the buck stopped with me, to paraphrase the old saying. And I must own the actions taken in each and every one of the campaigns I have run. It was my call on whether to send out a negative mail piece on my opponent—one that pointed out her failure to initially pass her state’s bar and to work as an attorney prior to becoming licensed. In other words, it called her qualifications into question. To this day I regret it. The mailer was mean-spirited and it hit below the belt. It wasn’t in keeping with the tone that either Cathy or I had set in our campaigns. And she certainly had proven her credentials to be a worthy representative of the district. At the end of the day, I believe that sending it out did me much more harm than good. I am absolutely certain it cost me support. Most certainly, it cost me self-respect and a feeling of pride about how I had run my campaign.

  What hurt me even more than that, though, was an extremely negative editorial that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram ran about me on the day of the election. Their normal policy, and the policy of most newspapers, is not to run an editorial about a candidate on election day, because it leaves no possibility for the candidate to respond before voters go to the polls. But on the day of our runoff election, almost the entire left-hand column of the newspaper’s editorial page was taken up with a very strong and very ugly editorial about me, making what I believed to be purposely false—and therefore libelous—statements about my position regarding the Fort Worth Zoo expansion that I’d opposed as a concerned citizen and the circumstances of my departure from Kelly Hart, a law firm I’d worked for. I believed that editorial, and the fact that I didn’t have a chance to respond to it, contributed to my loss of the election.

  By ninety votes.

  The publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time, Richard L. Connor, was very close to the major financial patrons of the zoo, Lee and Ramona Bass, people who had done a great community benefit by investing in dramatic improvements to that institution. But my neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhood had been very heavily affected by the loss of park space and by the threatened expansion of a parking lot into some of the park space that remained. As I said earlier, this was an issue I had previously gotten involved in. I had spoken out about it at a city council meeting. But the issue had long since been decided, and it was one we had accepted and from which we had moved on. Though it had not been an issue in the race, the newspaper worked to resurrect it, I believed to sully my name. I was repeatedly asked about it by a reporter from the newspaper during the course of the campaign, though neither I nor anyone else in the district was raising it as an issue, and it was never discussed as an issue in any of the debates. I tried to provide responses to the reporter’s questions, indicating that the issue was behind us and that I looked forward to working with the zoo’s benefactors if elected. Both Jeff and I were concerned, though. We saw a strategy at work and believed that the resurrection of the issue was purposeful and that the publisher was directing its coverage on the news side so that the paper could use it as a jumping-off point from which to editorialize against me—which is exactly what happened on the day of the election:

  “Given the plethora of vital issues that cry out for the immediate attention of the next council member from District 9, it is surprising and disappointing that some of the candidates have chosen to try to open an old, healed wound. Making the zoo a political football in this race can serve no useful purpose. But it could provoke another round of detrimental community divisiveness . . . Any candidate who seeks to stir up unwarranted hysteria about the zoo instead of concentrating on existing issues does a disservice to the community and deserves rejection by the voters of District 9.”

  Of course, I will never fully know how much impact the articles and the editorial had. Nor will I ever know how much impact my own actions in sending out a negative mail piece had on the outcome of the election. But I had lost. And I was devastated.

  Not long after the electio
n, a top female editor at the Star-Telegram left the paper in a highly publicized resignation or firing, depending on whose version you believed. She left on terms that were not good, and eventually she filed suit against the newspaper, agreeing to a settlement with a confidentiality provision in it, but eventually, through other sources, information came to us that shed some light on what had gone on at the paper during the election, including her overruled objections about running the editorial about me, which we outlined in the suit we filed:

  “An example of the malicious conduct is as follows: Before being interviewed for the story that ran on May 1, 1996, concerning the resurgence of the zoo as an issue in the race for the District 9 seat, Davis questioned the reporter’s reasons for wanting to write a story on this issue since it had been a non-issue for over a year. The reporter, Kristin N. Sullivan, indicated that she had ‘been told’ to cover the issue. Careful not to make the zoo an issue in her campaign, Davis offered several positive viewpoints regarding the zoo. Despite her efforts, however, Davis was later told by Ms. Sullivan that she would not be happy with the way the story was going to run the next day. Sullivan informed Davis that the story she had originally written, which reflected the positive nature of the interview, was edited in a manner that would cause Davis to be unhappy with the story. Ms. Sullivan apologized and said she was powerless to do anything about the article as ‘things are very political around here [at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram].’ . . .

  “The Star-Telegram intentionally wrote and published this news article so as to purposefully avoid the truth . . . To Plaintiff’s knowledge, only former Star-Telegram executive editor Ms. Debbie Price attempted to prevent the publication of such malicious stories and editorials.