by Jan Reid
One night, Ann and David were invited to the birthday party of a woman named Mary Margaret Wiley, who worked on the vice president’s staff. A friend from their Austin days, she invited a few Texans over to celebrate. “We were sitting around drinking and telling stories when Vice President Johnson himself arrived,” Ann wrote. “We were all dumbfounded. Mary Margaret worked with the vice president all day, but the rest of us had no access to him at all.” The young adults fell silent, and David tried to offer some reasonably informed conversation. He mentioned an article in the Texas Observer that he thought had been complimentary to Johnson. LBJ knew that the Observer’s editor, Ronnie Dugger, despised him, and David had forgotten another article in that issue in which their San Antonio friend Maury Maverick, Jr., questioned LBJ’s backbone for how he responded to the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. LBJ launched into a tirade about the disrespect shown him by the Observer and pipsqueaks like Maury Maverick, Jr. Why, he alone among Texans had the courage to stand on the Senate floor and condemn McCarthy!
“On it went for what seemed an eternity,” David recalled. “None of my comrades stepped up to defend me; they left me as the sole target of this withering assault.”
That encounter was one of the few times Ann ever admitted to being cowed. “Johnson was a large man with a powerful voice. He spoke with authority and cut a large wake. Standing in Mary Margaret’s living room he was like an ocean liner in a small harbor. He was not a man you wanted to have an argument with about anything.”
During David and Ann’s sojourn in Washington, they conceived their third child, Clark. David grew disenchanted with writing legal opinions that were edited into mush and bore no resemblance to the arguments and passages he had crafted. Ann described her own unhappiness at that time in her book:
The entire time I was there the only thing asked of me was to bake cookies for the Capitol Hill house tour. The politics of Washington is the work of Washington. It’s not an avocation. We had looked forward to meeting and being involved with the best and the brightest, and we would go to some social events, but after the first six months we began to tire of the eternal speculation about which senator was sleeping with which other woman. We pretty quickly came to the conclusion that when we had moved to Washington we had left the New Frontier. In February 1962, a year after we had arrived, we went back to Dallas.
Ann parodies John Connally in her last appearance in the “Political Paranoia” follies of the North Dallas Democratic Women, 1968.
CHAPTER 3
Lovers Lane
The law firm welcomed David back, and the Richardses bought a home on the corner of Athens Avenue and Lovers Lane. By and large, David enjoyed his work with union workers and organizers, whom he described in his memoir as “a wonderfully irreverent, bawdy, and hard-boozing bunch who truly believed that working people deserved a better shot.” In his spare time, he ran for chairman of their Democratic Party precinct, and largely thanks to SMU faculty members and students who lived in the neighborhood, he won. Liberals prevailed in several Dallas precincts in 1962, but it got them nowhere. The county chairman refused to convene them unless a statute required him to do so.
The Richardses continued to battle the entrenched powers from their base in Dallas, but the fight was no longer just against conservative Democrats and the Johnson machine—the Lyndon Law had backfired. In Wichita Falls, John Tower, a government professor at Midwestern University (now Midwestern State University), had offered himself as a Republican sacrificial lamb in the 1960 election for U.S. senator, yet he ran surprisingly well against Johnson—perhaps because of the perceived ham-handed arrogance of the latter’s role in passing the bill nicknamed for him—in any case pulling 41 percent and nearly a million votes. Governor Price Daniel appointed a conservative from Dallas, William Blakley, to fill Johnson’s seat until the special election scheduled for May 1961. The Fort Worth congressman Jim Wright ran for the Senate seat, as did the Richardses’ friend Maury Maverick, Jr., and San Antonio’s Henry González—seventy-one candidates in all. When the dust cleared in the runoff, by a little more than ten thousand votes, Tower had eased past Blakley. It was the first time a Republican had been elected to statewide office in Texas since 1870.
But the biggest story in Texas politics in those months was the emergence of John Connally, who had managed five of LBJ’s major campaigns (including the U.S. Senate primary in 1948, when the infamous box 13 in Jim Wells County gave him a victory margin of eighty-seven votes) and his presidential race against Kennedy. After a one-year resumé scrub as Kennedy’s secretary of the navy, Connally had come home to run for governor. David distrusted the man’s background as an oil baron’s lawyer, but had to admire his deftness at bringing blacks and Hispanics into his organization. In that gubernatorial campaign, Connally positioned himself as a consummate centrist. He had battled the right-wingers of Allan Shivers but also had gotten into a nasty feud with the liberal senator Ralph Yarborough. Connally campaigned well, saying that he would emphasize education, improved race relations, and poverty reduction. He won a squeaker over the liberal Don Yarborough (who was not related to the senator) in the Democratic primary and then had to hustle to defeat Jack Cox, a Shivers-crowd Democrat turned Republican, by 131,901 votes. The improved race relations and poverty fighting evaporated from his agenda when he took office, but he delivered on public and higher education during his three two-year terms. He was a study in polish, finesse, and knowing how to get what he wanted from the legislature. By serving long enough to appoint all the leaders of powerful state agencies, he made the office of Texas governor, which the 1876 state constitution designed as a weak figurehead, into about as strong a power base as anyone ever had.
During her pregnancy and after the birth of Clark in May 1962, Ann joined with other politically dedicated women in a new organization called the North Dallas Democratic Women. Among these political-activist friends were Virginia Whitten; Claire Korioth, who later became a lawyer and one of Ann’s most thoughtful and careful advisers; and a writer named Ruthe Winegarten, who, as a University of Texas student radical, had joined the Texas Communist Party and the Dallas Labor Zionist Party—since then her views had evolved into an earnest liberalism. Their outfit raised a little money and some hell by writing and performing an annual satirical skit called Political Paranoia. Ann was a star of the vaudeville-like revues. “The North Dallas Democratic Women was basically formed to allow us to have something substantive to do,” she said. “The regular Democratic Party and its organizations were run by men who looked on women as little more than machine parts. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the men I worked with on campaigns; I did. It was just that we women did all the dumb work, were never allowed to make any decisions; basically didn’t use our brains. No woman ever moved up in that organization.”
During the same period, David and Ann took part in what they believed was a quiet and thoughtful group of activists called the Dallas Committee for Peaceful Integration. They were stunned one day to read in the newspapers that one of their fellow members was an undercover FBI agent. There was nothing to do but shrug—it was just Dallas. They gained another set of close friends in Mike and Betty McKool. Mike was an attorney specializing in condemnation law. Betty, like Ann, was a housewife, mother, and politically oriented ham. Ann and Betty sent out slickly produced, humorous Christmas cards, a tradition that they carried on for nine years for an ever-growing mailing list. In one of the cards, costumed as the magi, they are gawking at the manger and crying in the caption: “It’s a girl!”
Betty McKool, left, and Ann pose for one of their popular Christmas cards from the 1960s and 1970s.
But while Ann was getting some pleasure out of all this, she couldn’t kid herself that the environment she inhabited was any less hostile than it had ever been. Consider the prominence in Dallas of the Texas-born army general Edwin Walker. In April 1961, with Kennedy newly in office and trying to overcome the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a paper called the Overseas Weekly quoted
Walker, the commanding general of an infantry division, as saying that Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson were “definitely pink,” and reports came back to the Pentagon that Walker had hectored his troops to vote for archconservative Republicans. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, relieved him of his command and reassigned him. Walker instead resigned from the army. In September he organized protests against the enrollment of African American student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, and the demonstrations there turned violent. Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general, issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion.
Walker wound up jailed for five days, claiming that he was a “political prisoner” of the Kennedy administration. He moved to the posh Turtle Creek area of Dallas, and though he had the support of Barry Goldwater, he ran sixth and last as a gubernatorial candidate in the 1962 Democratic primary. He sang the praises of the John Birch Society and white Rhodesia and flew his American flag upside down, a signal of extreme distress. The Dallas press treated him as a serious figure, not a kook.
It was a schizophrenic time. One month after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the preppy Kingston Trio hit the record stores and airwaves with the enormously popular folk LP New Frontier and its patriotic title track.
The following April, Lee Harvey Oswald told his Russian wife, Marina, that he was going to a typing class at Crozier Tech High School; instead, he carried a newly purchased rifle to the church parking lot next to Walker’s house. One implausible but widespread account claimed he rode all the way across the city by bus, with no one noticing him or the rifle. But two teenagers indicated to the Dallas police and the FBI that they had noticed a man in a black and white Chevrolet parked beside Walker’s property. In addition, one boy, who heard a rifle shot, said he saw a man jump in a black and white Chevrolet and speed away, and added that he saw a second man jump in a Ford and hurry off. Subsequent investigations indicated that a would-be CIA agent and anti-Castro insurgent in Florida may have been with Oswald and may even have fired the shot from Oswald’s rifle. That man was never charged. Whether Oswald had an accomplice or not, the shooter narrowly missed killing the general, who was seated at his desk when the bullet ricocheted off a nearby window frame. Fragments of the shell’s jacket were found in his shirtsleeve, and he was still removing slivers of shattered glass when reporters arrived. At that time police had no idea who the shooter might have been.
In June, Kennedy electrified 150,000 West Germans with his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech beside the Berlin Wall. But back home, the president eyed polls that had him trailing Barry Goldwater in several states, including Texas. In Dallas, the animus against Kennedy reached fever pitch. One night in September 1963, David and Ann went to a municipal hall to hear a speech by Adlai Stevenson, now Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations. The man had run two thoughtful and respectful campaigns for president against Eisenhower, and at the UN he delivered an exposé of Soviet behavior in Cuba; he deserved to be received with civility anywhere in America. David described the scene in his memoir.
First, well-dressed young matrons began to jangle their arm bracelets, drowning out the speaker. As Stevenson appeared, the noise became overwhelming. The objectors had seated themselves in the center of the auditorium, and they began to rise and leave in unison, forcing those who wished to stay to stand to let them pass. In the midst of this bedlam, a long banner was unfurled behind Stevenson which proclaimed, “Get the U.S. Out of the U.N.” . . . At this point, a man leaped up on the second row and began to shout through a battery-operated speaker about Yugoslavian pilots and communist conspiracies. Almost immediately, an old friend of mine, Pancho Medrano, a burly UAW staffer, got up and began to climb across the rows to grab the heckler. The last thing I remember is leaping up and screaming, ‘Get him, Pancho!’ When Ann and I finally got out of the hall, we faced a group of men dressed as Nazi storm troopers marching in the lobby. By this time my grip on my sanity was faltering, and I went head-to-head with one of the Nazis.
David said that in the mania that gripped the city as subsequent events unfolded, he convinced himself for a while that the storm trooper in the lobby had been Lee Harvey Oswald.
After that, Adlai Stevenson and the master Dallas retailer Stanley Marcus, the city’s most influential Democrat, urged Johnson to talk the president out of coming to Texas that fall. Despite the polls, Kennedy hoped that in a year he would be running against Goldwater, not the moderate Nelson Rockefeller. But Kennedy was disgusted that LBJ could not put out the fire of animosity between Connally and Ralph Yarborough. It had been hard enough to carry Texas when the Democrats were united. So Kennedy scheduled a swing through the state just two months after the zealots spat on Stevenson and chased him to cover.
A ticket to the luncheon came Ann’s way, and she got a babysitter and dressed up for the speech that the president was going to deliver on his arrival in Dallas. The John Birch Society took out a full-page ad in the Morning News with the mocking headline “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas.” Bordered in black, it accused him of a dozen conspiracies with communists and fellow travelers. People downtown handed out leaflets accusing him of treason.
David rode the elevator down from his law office and strolled out at the lunch hour of what had become a bright fall day after rain that morning. From a sidewalk near his office building, he watched the Lincoln convertible glide past, bearing President Kennedy, Governor Connally, and their wives. “There appeared to be no security,” David said. “I thought, my God, you could just reach out and touch them.”
Meanwhile, at the Dallas Trade Mart, Ann poked at her food and listened to an announcement that the motorcade was delayed. A buzz of murmurs rose within the hall, and then the Dallas mayor came to the podium and told the crowd that the president had been shot. “I remember being terribly afraid,” Ann said. “The only thing I could think of was that I had to get home. The escalator down was overwhelmed. More people were crowding on than could get off at the other end, and panic set in. People started raising their voices; there was a crush at your back and nowhere to go. The fear in the building was physical.”
Both parents were desperate to reach the babysitter caring for their two small sons and get Cecile home from the University Park school where, they later learned with horror, older children had applauded on hearing the principal’s announcement that Kennedy was dead. “In our office,” David recalled, “immediate thoughts were of some right-wing putsch. Worrying about the welfare of my children, I fled home as quickly as I could to the sound of sirens wailing across the city. Cecile made it home from the first grade, and Ann eventually got through the crowds and back to the house. I was totally frantic until we were all safely together.”
Then the news came that a suspect in the assassination had killed a police officer and had been arrested in a movie theater in the Oak Cliff section of town. Though a chilling Arctic norther blew through Dallas just after the assassination, Ann and David did what they often did to escape Dallas—they bundled up the kids, and with the family of their friends Sam and Virginia Whitten, they went on a freezing outing to the shore of Lewisville Lake, north of Dallas. “I had campaigned for John F. Kennedy,” recalled Lynn Whitten. “I was seven years old—my mother made me go with her.” In the middle of the chaos, the American Civil Liberties Union asked David’s law firm colleague Otto Mullinax to get a message to Lee Harvey Oswald, offering legal representation; the answer flew back that Oswald wanted nothing to do with the ACLU. Meanwhile, David and Ann and the children made it back from their frigid outing. “Then, of course,” David said, “before we could begin to reclaim our sanity, Oswald was shot on TV before our very eyes. . . . It felt like the whole place was just engulfed in madness.”
In 1963, as Lyndon Johnson was preparing to put Barry Goldwater to rout, Ann had a complicated pregnancy and delivery of their fourth child, Ellen. Her blood pressure soared, and the delivery required a cesarean se
ction. Days later, she started hemorrhaging, and for the first time in her life, she wondered how much she feared dying. She healed from that, but one day that spring, she and Virginia loaded up the kids and took them for a picnic. On the way home, Ann blacked out while driving—and stayed unconscious long enough that her head lolled. Virginia was able to grab the wheel, get a foot on the brake, and get them safely off the road. Ann had a second seizure a couple of months later when her mother was visiting them. That one put her in the hospital, and eventually her doctors told her she was having grand mal seizures. She started taking Dilantin, the powerful drug then widely prescribed for epilepsy.
A few months after that, she and David were staining a door in their house when she got a headache of such intensity that once more she wound up in the hospital. A doctor informed her that there was an encephalitis epidemic in Dallas and that that was what she had—a terrifying but ultimately incorrect diagnosis. “So there I was sitting in my hospital bed,” she recalled, “in a fancy black nightgown that David had bought for me, David and I were playing cards, and this government man from the health department comes by to try to nail down the source of my disease. He was very respectful, making his rounds, and he asked me whether my house was on stilts and if we kept chickens under it. I guess the government health department had developed a standard set of encephalitis epidemic questions, and stilts and chickens were both on it, but the idea of having a house on stilts with chickens under it in University Park in Dallas struck me as pretty ridiculous, and I told him so.”
Those episodes scared David and the children badly, but Ann carried on bravely. She described in Straight from the Heart their first adventure in challenging whitewater rapids. Tony and Claire Korioth invited them to join a group that was going to run the Rio Grande through Boquillas Canyon in Big Bend National Park. The flotilla included the liberal legislators or ex-legislators Neil Caldwell, Joe Christie, Malcolm McGregor, and Bill Kugle; Willie Morris, on his way to becoming the editor of Harper’s; and their Austin friend Henry Holman, the vice horse at the Scholz Garten. Ann had never gone canoeing, and she claimed that David’s experience was then limited to his boyhood, at best. She also claimed that David was born with an unusual trait—nearsightedness in one eye, farsightedness in the other—and that he was too vain to wear glasses. She was not a strong swimmer, so her father-in-law, Papa Dick, had given her a pair of water wings that would inflate when she yanked straps on her wrists.
