Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir
Page 18
“On the morning after the May 1, 1996, story ran, Davis, at the suggestion of Ms. Sullivan, contacted Ms. Price to express her displeasure with the paper’s stories on her candidacy. Davis indicated to Price that she felt that certain stories had been purposefully edited to create a false impression in the minds of the readers. Price indicated that she had not been involved in the editing process and that if the paper were to cover the zoo issue again, it would include Davis’ positive statements. Subsequent to this conversation, the Star-Telegram ran three defamatory editorials about Davis, one of them specifically addressing the maliciously fabricated zoo issue. Within a few days after the publication of the May 25th editorial and run-off election, Price was terminated. A Wall Street Journal article covering the disappearance of Price stated that she was fired for refusing to go along with ‘unethical editorial policies.’”
And that’s why we decided to file a libel suit against the paper and its parent companies: in order to find out, through the power of legal discovery, what had really happened. In order to determine that, we’d have to legally pierce the terminated editorialist’s confidentiality agreement, and the only way we could do that was by filing our own suit in the hopes of being given the opportunity for discovery. We’d been told that we had a good chance at a compensable claim, but that truly was the least of my concerns and my interest. All I really wanted was a chance to get to the bottom of things.
At almost the exact same time that we were going through our decision-making process about whether to file the libel suit against the Star-Telegram, the law firm I worked for, Haynes and Boone, had hired a partner from another firm. The Star-Telegram was one of his clients, which meant that the Star-Telegram had now become a client of my firm, and what that meant was that if I attempted to file suit, it would be a conflict of interest and I would have to leave the firm. We waited right up until the one-year statute of limitations to file the suit had almost run out before making the decision on whether to file. It was 1997. And my firm tried hard to encourage me not to file—telling me that I had an incredibly bright future there; that I’d not only be a partner but was considered one of their rising stars. They wanted me to stay, but I decided to file the suit, which would come to be my second regret from that first campaign. Though I sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened in the editorial decision-making process to determine whether something untoward had occurred, there was little to really gain from it other than looking through the rearview mirror. Leaving the firm, though, in spite of the possibility of a very bright future there, turned out to be a move in the right direction in my life’s journey. My heart was not in it. My heart had already set its sights on public service and the kind of personal fulfillment that I believed it would bring.
Ultimately, Jeff and I filed the suit on April 18, 1997. Neither of us liked the idea of being litigious, but we felt wronged, and we wanted to know why. It wasn’t something I did lightly. I wanted the truth, though. Libel cases are notoriously difficult for public figures to win. In order to succeed, a public figure (and all candidates are considered public figures in the eyes of the law) must prove not only that a published statement was false but that the speaker knew it to be false at the time. In the end, our case was dismissed without any discovery being granted, because we couldn’t sufficiently clear that hurdle. And my quest to find out what had gone on in that editorial office went nowhere.
Looking back on it now, after years of experience in the political arena, I’ve learned that having a newspaper say ugly things about you when you’re running for office is just part of the deal, even if you feel it’s gotten the story entirely wrong. And in today’s social media environment, the terrain for that sort of vitriol has grown exponentially. It comes with the territory. And as a candidate, you accept that that’s just how things are when you decide to run. I’ve trained myself to tune it out, put my head down and move forward. It’s noise. Only noise.
I know that much can be said about living life looking in the rearview mirror and second-guessing our actions, but I can say with all candor that I regret some of my actions—both in filing that suit and choosing to tarnish my opponent—during that first race. Did I learn from them and become a better person as a consequence? I would like to think so. Would I go back and do things differently if given the chance? Yes. But life brings no do-overs. Only opportunities to learn and grow from and act accordingly when the next bend in the road comes.
I am pleased to say that after all the drama, my nemeses during that time period later proved to be friends. It says far more about their capacities for forgiveness and grace than about my own. Cathy Hirt, as a city councilwoman, eventually gave me an appointment to a citizens’ committee on a highway expansion that would affect my neighborhood and proved herself a person who took the high road. I will forever be indebted to her for that. It was my role on that committee that helped establish my credibility in a way that set me up for a successful city council run three years later when Cathy decided not to stand for reelection. The zoo patrons I had tangled with became people I worked closely with as a councilperson, and they supported me in many races after that first one. Even my very first opponents, Lee and Judy, came to be two of the people I would rely on to partner with me on projects to benefit the district during my years on the city council. And the newspaper publisher? He and I found our way to a peaceful accord when I dated his nephew, some time after Jeff and I divorced. Making peace, I have found, even with once-sworn enemies, is powerful and can help soothe those recesses in our lives, those voids created when living with regret.
—
That first city council election was the first thing I’d ever put my whole heart and energy into that I hadn’t succeeded at—and in the days and weeks following, I had a hard time dealing with the loss. It felt like an enormous personal rejection, and that, coupled with the unease I still felt about the negative mailer we’d sent out and how unjustly I felt the Star-Telegram had behaved, made the whole situation difficult to get past. I’d gone into the process understanding that I might lose, but accepting the reality of it was a much more painful and complex process than I ever could have anticipated.
After a lot of soul-searching, I unpacked my disappointment and my crushed ego from the reasons that the voters had not chosen me. I reexamined some of the decisions I had made. And I resolved to learn from the experience—especially that a run for office must reflect more closely the values you hold dear. For me, that means standing strong for the things I believe in to my core—no matter what. I’ve learned that I’m at my best when I’m fighting for people, for the cause of equality and justness. In pursuit of that, I’ve also learned that sometimes, punching my opponent—above the belt—is necessary to ensure that people are informed about who will best serve their interests.
I also learned that losing doesn’t actually kill you. That may sound trite, but I’m a deeply competitive person, made that way in large part thanks to my father, and that was a concept I’d never truly understood. He had always taught me, through his own example, to work as hard as you could at winning but that, win or lose, you should do so gracefully. I didn’t bring the right measure of grace to my city council loss, and I learned and grew from that. It gave me a new perspective on how I would process the torments of a future campaign and how I would respond to them.
Integrity is in the record of work a public servant leaves behind. A record of work made up of everyday deeds, of acts of compassion, and of simple human connection with those whose trust you hold. After I lost that first race, I began to lay the foundation of my record. And the first brick of that foundation was proving myself to the community whose support I hoped to ask for again one day.
What I realized in time was that, in that first race, I hadn’t done the community building necessary for me to deserve to be elected. In my first campaign, people would say to me, “Well, what have you done? We don’t know you. We haven’t seen yo
u working on this issue or that issue.” Most people who get elected to local offices do so by proving themselves, creating reputations as community leaders. I had not done that. I’d just rushed into it and tried to get people to see how much I wanted to do the work to make Fort Worth a better place. But it’s not that simple. You have to give people a reason to trust that you’re going to fight for them, and my lack of experience in the community had not achieved that. It drove me to get more involved in my neighborhood in a substantive way.
First, I became president of the Mistletoe Heights neighborhood association and joined a group devoted to the revitalization of a commercial corridor in our community, the Berry Street Initiative. Together with a group of local residents, volunteers, and private investors, we worked hard to transform an area in decline near TCU into an appealing pedestrian environment for students and residents. Then came the appointment by Cathy Hirt that I mentioned; my work on that committee helped me to be seen as someone who could work constructively, even on controversial issues. I will always be grateful to Cathy for giving me the chance to be involved at that level.
Never a quitter, and emerging from the many months of darkness that followed the loss of Tate, I decided to try again for a city council seat in 1999. This time there were three people in the race: Dan Roberts, a public-affairs consultant, and David Minor, a successful businessman who had started mowing lawns as a teenager and built an incredibly successful landscaping operation. David was young and good-looking, charming and smart, with a very compelling personal story of bootstrapping his way up in the world. While he’d been handpicked by the business community as their candidate of choice, he didn’t have the connection to the grassroots community that I now had after the several years of relationship building I’d done.
I knew it would be tough to get a pure majority of the vote with three of us in the race. Dan ran a positive campaign, but David and I ran better-financed strategic campaigns. I braced myself for a runoff but worked really hard to avoid one—aggressively knocking on doors again—until I ended up winning the election with just over 50 percent. It was a narrow win, one I felt grateful for and proud of. I’d been bound and determined to stay absolutely positive, and to his credit, David Minor did, too. I know that we both came out of the race feeling proud of the campaigns we had run. No regrets. I had resolved that no matter how things turned out, this time I would have no regrets.
The evening of the election, my supporters and I had gathered at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants on the city’s south side—Benito’s. While everyone else congregated in the main area of the restaurant, I was off in the back hall with Jeff and J.D., on the phone with someone that we had placed at the election administrator’s office so that we could hear the results of each precinct’s box as soon as it had come in. Because the vote margins were so tight, it literally came down to the last one—a box I felt sure would be good for me because I was strongly supported in that neighborhood. When it came in, I’d avoided a runoff. I had won.
I was so proud and so happy. I had run a race I felt good about, and the people of the district had placed their trust in me. I was bound and determined to hold that trust, to show them that they’d been right. And, a few weeks later, joined by my family and friends, as I raised my hand at my first city council meeting to be sworn into office, I made a silent promise to myself—that I would always vote my conscience, no matter how hard. And that I would always choose what was right for the people I represented, even if that meant choosing the harder route.
—
When I first started serving on the Fort Worth City Council, I was certainly well outside my comfort zone. I was still that painfully shy little girl, so doing a launch at a groundbreaking or taking my turn to speak at the council table always made me feel a bit nervous. But I actually think that’s a good thing; it’s a sign that you respect the people who are your audience, that you want to make a good impression on them, that it matters to you what they think.
Working on the city council quickly took me far beyond where I expected it would in terms of my personal growth. I was now coming to understand the true meaning of being a public “servant.” I felt, to my core, the tremendous privilege of service above self and the incomparable satisfaction that comes from helping to make your community better for the people who live there. Real people were relying on me for things big and small, and I saw, close-up, that small things are big things when it comes to improving the quality of life for hardworking families. Tremendous sacrifices are required of people who answer the calling of being a servant—the biggest and most painful of which is the fact that attending to the needs of the people you represent can often trump the needs of people who are personally dear and who need you as well: family and friends. Public service is nothing less than a family affair, and there’s no question that my daughters have had to make sacrifices of their own because of my years of service.
When people have a day-to-day connection with the person who represents them, they feel they can be heard. They believe they can come to meetings and be part of the process and part of the solution regardless of the issue being addressed, and it’s that connection that’s at the very heart of what it means to be an elected official. You’re making a promise to people. Every day. And when you look people in the eye, people you represent, people who have voted for you and trusted you with what they treasure most—their family and their future—and you promise you’re going to do your best to help them with something they need—it’s real. And it’s sacred. Maybe it’s helping to install a pocket park in a neighborhood that has no open space, or getting lights for a Little League field, or putting sidewalks in a neighborhood so that kids can walk to school safely instead of having to walk in the middle of the street. Every single thing my constituents needed and asked my help with touched upon their daily quality of life and their greatest investment and what they valued most: their homes and their children’s well-being.
There was hardly an evening when I wasn’t attending a neighborhood meeting or a small gathering of community leaders to work on projects important to them. Things like code enforcement issues, which sound small in the grand scheme of things, were actually very important. As the “broken windows” theory goes, code violations within a community can begin to degrade it bit by bit, contributing to an environment of disinvestment and crime. Cleaning up declining commercial corridors and encouraging reinvestment was a key collective goal. So was improving parks and funding and building community centers where they were needed—especially in some of the economically distressed neighborhoods that I represented. To anyone who asked me for help, I always made the very same promise:
I’m going to help you with that.
I’m going to do my very best.
And I did. I was tenacious. Joined by the help of extraordinary council aides, first Vonciel Buchanan and then Kristi Wiseman, I developed strong and respectful relationships with city staff people in the parks department and the public-works department, so that if someone in my community needed something, I knew how to go about getting it done and whom to ask to help me get it done. Those positive working relationships made all the difference.
The district I was elected to serve also included all of downtown and was therefore considered one of the most influential seats. In the morning I might find myself in a meeting with downtown power brokers, working to make continued improvements to the investment and job creation there, while in the afternoon I might find myself at a kitchen table in one of the Latino neighborhoods in my district, helping to plan a way to get more streetlights to make the community safer. I represented some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the city and some of the least affluent. And I loved them all. Every bit of what I had the privilege of working on, I enjoyed and took tremendous pride in. But I found the most satisfaction in working with my constituents living in impoverished neighborhoods. Sometimes fulfilling the simplest of needs brought the greates
t rewards.
One of my favorite things to do was to meet in someone’s kitchen and talk over something that was very important to them. Many of those kitchen conversations helped me actively partner with them and fight to receive federal Community Development Block Grants for streetlights, street improvements, and other crucial basics that lifted up their neighborhoods.
One of the kitchen conversations I remember vividly was with the Florez family; they lived in one of the most economically challenged multigenerational Hispanic areas in my district. They’d lived there long enough to see things go downhill, especially when the commercial corridors that abutted their neighborhood had become crime-ridden, full of seedy bars and hourly motels. They were watching other parts of the city grow and thrive, and they wanted that for their neighborhood, too.
When I met with them, we focused on how we could redevelop that area—the Hemphill Corridor Task Force was formed by Fernando Florez, who served as its chair for many years. He helped me to see that one of the things that built integrity in neighborhoods was assuring compliance with city codes—mowed yards, porches free of debris, lighting in good repair. One ramshackle, unattended house can bring down the next house and the next, until a whole street is suffering. Likewise, improving a neighborhood one house at a time, one street at a time, can make a tremendous positive impact. Neighborhood leaders like Fernando and so many others were people who loved their communities and were willing to do the hard work to turn them around. And I came to love these people as though they were my own family.
Fernando’s wife, Roberta, was equally committed—her passion was helping kids whose parents worked and couldn’t afford adequate daytime care for their children during summer vacation months. Through her commitment to the children of her community, she had started the Mobile Recreation Summer Day Camp, a program that moved around and wasn’t housed in a permanent facility—therefore the “Mobile” part of its title. Instead she’d arranged with the parks department to let kids gather at a local park in the morning for constructive recreational outdoor time and then, in the afternoon when it got really hot, to go to a church-annex building nearby and use their gymnasium. That first summer Mobile Summer Rec started with around seventy kids.