by Jan Reid
The campaign spots showed Ann walking beside purportedly state-of-the-art data-processing equipment that was really just word processors, computers. “Ann hammered away on that theme out on the road,” Hickie said, “and we did it in the television spots and every other way we could think of. ‘We’ve got to move that office out of the quill-pen, green-eyeshade era into what Texas is today.’”
Dan Richards had gotten a call from his mother during the two-day fire drill. She told him she wanted to come over to his apartment, and when she got there, she asked whether he was willing to give her the next nine months of his life. He agreed to it without hesitation, and the next day she filed her candidacy. “Mom and Dad had definitely split up by then,” Dan said, “and they wanted somebody close”—a family member—“to travel with her. And I wasn’t really doing anything.”
Ann reminisced in her book about that time with her son: “He was very good at what he did. He was a very adept advance man; he kept up with the people that we went to see, he would stay right at my elbow in crowds; he would whisper in my ear, ‘Miss Jones is coming up on your right,’ and, ‘Here’s Mr. Smith, who we missed seeing last time,’ and ‘You remember that old drunk man that was here before, well, he’s on his way over again.’”
“It was just you and your mother on those drives?” I asked Dan.
“Yeah, most of the time,” he said. “Kaye Northcott, who had moved on from the Texas Observer, was handling press for Mom. I’d get my marching orders from Kaye, because basically that’s what you’re doing, trying to get somebody to write about the campaign. We traveled about six days a week. And that was a good deal for me. I was grown by then, although not in maturity. Usually by that time in your life you don’t get to hang around much with your mom. That was nice, it really was. There would be four or five stops a day. And I understood what my job was—get her to the next place. It didn’t matter if we’d had any sleep; she could get up and do her deal, make her speech. She’d go in there and make the same speech, time and again. And after watching a lot of other folks do the same thing, I started realizing, man, she is really good at this.”
Despite the heavy-hitter candidates and the millions of dollars spent in the races for the U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s office, the campaigns that captured the imaginations of Democrats and the press were further down the ballot. In the race for attorney general, an East Texas U.S. attorney named John Hannah had been one of the “Dirty Thirty” band in the legislature who turned Texas politics upside down over the Sharpstown scandal. A respected former state senator from the Panhandle, Max Sherman, was also in the race. Ann would have liked to see Hannah win, but after three terms in Congress, Jim Mattox had seen his Dallas district’s lines gerrymandered in a way that guaranteed he could not win reelection. Mattox jumped in the race for attorney general, and he was a ferocious campaigner.
In the General Land Office race, Garry Mauro was a curly-haired, former Texas Aggie yell leader who had greatly dismayed his parents by postponing his last year of law school to drive the car and carry the bags of Ralph Yarborough in the liberal warhorse’s last race in 1972. (After his defeat by Bentsen in 1970, Yarborough attempted a comeback in the 1972 race against Tower, but he lost in the primary to a freckle-faced Dallas judge and LBJ protégé with the wonderful name Barefoot Sanders, who went on to lose to John Tower.) With time on his hands, Mauro pitched in on the presidential campaign of George McGovern. Another member of that team was Roy Spence. Two years later, in 1974, Mauro and Spence guided the Shakespeare scholar and New Braunfels native Bob Krueger to a surprising win in a congressional district that stretched from northwest San Antonio to Big Bend. It was the first of two years of backlash against Watergate.
Mauro later spent some years as Bob Bullock’s protégé in the state comptroller’s office. Along the way, Garry asked Bob Armstrong to let him know if he ever decided to move on from the land office. Armstrong favored him with that call when he decided to run for governor. Mauro was the underdog in his race against Pete Snelson, a state senator from Midland, but he campaigned well by talking about offshore oil leases and the state’s public education endowment. Snelson was no match for his ideas and energy, or his ambition.
Jim Hightower, from the Red River town of Denison, had worked for Yarborough as a legislative aide in the Senate. He cofounded the Agribusiness Accountability Project during his years in the Senate, and he was the national coordinator of the short-lived 1976 presidential campaign of former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris. Wearing a cowboy hat and a closely trimmed mustache and driving a sputtering white sports car, Hightower had arrived in Austin to succeed Molly Ivins and Kaye Northcott as editor of the Texas Observer. Hightower’s Observer favored dry stories about agribusiness and bank holding companies and delivered almost none of the humor that Molly had brought to the muckraking journal, but the bone-thin populist was a laugh-a-minute demon with a microphone, becoming known for lines such as “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” Hightower had run for a vacant Texas Railroad Commission seat in 1980 and lost, but he was back in the hunt against a Democratic agriculture commissioner named Reagan Brown.
Dolph Briscoe had appointed Brown, a real rancher, to the office Hightower sought. A conservative Democrat, Brown had made a name for himself with citrus farmers by requiring that all produce grown in California be fumigated before entering Texas in order to prevent an invasion of Mediterranean fruit flies. As the 1982 race warmed up, Brown emphasized the necessity of an all-out fight against fire ants, a species from South America that probably came into this country aboard banana boats docked at ports on the Gulf Coast. Anyone who had gotten stung by them or seen pastures overrun by their mounds knew they were a menace that could not just be doused out of existence with the poisons on the market. But Hightower got under Brown’s skin by suggesting that he had invented a fire-ant crisis in order to get reelected. Out with a television crew one day, Brown took it on himself to demonstrate that the tiny insects were merely ants. He jammed his fist and forearm in one of their mounds, and was soon viewed grimacing and slapping, trying to put out the blaze of their stings. The Hightower and Richards road shows happened to wind up in the same town that night. They had a great time whooping and hollering over a race that Hightower had just won.
Ann stressed to her supporters that they were in this to win, not just to make symbolic gains for women, and they had to show they could play a game that could get rough. The campaign was barely a month old when it did. The incumbent, Warren Harding, was not Ann’s only Democratic opponent. Also in the race was a state legislator, Lane Denton, whom Ann considered a friendly colleague, even if not a close friend. She certainly did not expect to get blindsided by him. She and Dan were in Tyler when a call came that Denton had just held a press conference at the Capitol. He told reporters that Ann was an alcoholic, that she had been treated for it, and that in the past she had sought counseling for mental problems. A former Travis County commissioner named David Samuelson stepped up and said that Ann was getting drunk during the workday, that her performance on the court had been erratic and poor, and that something appeared to be wrong with her. She was unstable—not someone to be trusted with taxpayers’ money.
Also, Denton had obtained a copy of Ann’s travel itinerary, and for the next week he would go into a town right before she did. When she arrived, what she heard about was not the Treasury but those stories about her alcoholism and psychological condition. Dan and Cecile, who took a leave from her job in New Orleans to help with the campaign, were outraged; they remembered Denton at friendly Austin political events. “Lane would go hit these places right in front of us,” Dan said, “and he would cut and paste whatever he wanted under, say, the letterhead of the firefighters association. ‘We support Lane Denton,’ signed by somebody, and it was like this came from the entire organization.”
Ann answered the questions about her character and mental health with nonchalant calm: yes, s
he was a recovering alcoholic, she had gone to Minnesota for a month of treatment, she was now a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and as for the other allegations, she had no idea what those guys were talking about.
Denton’s tactic backfired; the press jeered him as a cad. The American-Statesman’s cartoonist, Ben Sargent, caricatured him as a slug, leaving a trail of slime. The career that Denton sabotaged was his own.
The television ads and Ann’s on-camera presence were effective, but they had not yet disposed of the incumbent with name recognition. “I think it is undeniably true,” Hickie complained in a note to their Austin pollster, “that people in Texas do not know that Warren Harding has been indicted—just think what they will know by the time the Republicans get through with him by October of this year. What can we do to make the point?”
They didn’t have to do anything different. A Travis County grand jury had indeed indicted Harding on two felony counts of official misconduct. The charges alleged that the treasurer had two employees working on political tasks while drawing a state salary. That is not a crime in many states—and certainly not in the White House—but the law is clearly written on the books in Texas. News of Harding’s indictment broke at the end of March, just before the primary. Ann led him in the primary, and then, five weeks after his indictment, Ronnie Earle and his Public Integrity Unit offered a plea bargain that effectively handed the election to Ann. Harding pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. “I remember being at the campaign office,” said Dan, “and somebody called and said, ‘He’s getting out.’ He’s what? ‘He’s getting out!’ We didn’t have to raise money for the runoff.”
Governor Clements reportedly persuaded the Republican who had won their primary that the GOP would be better served if he withdrew in favor of a candidate who had a better chance against Richards in the fall. The substitute candidate was Allen Clark. He had been a banker, and he had some definite ideas on how the treasurer’s office ought to be run. But he was also a former Green Beret who had lost both his legs in combat in Vietnam. He laid a lot of wreaths on the graves of veterans that fall, and his wife followed him, carrying a tape recorder that blared “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Ann just worked harder. Her crowds were getting larger, and now she was being offered use of airplanes, which enabled her to cover more ground, to make personal contact with more people in more communities.
A major disappointment for Ann and other liberals in the primary was that Bob Armstrong ran a distant third in the Democratic primary for governor. Buddy Temple, the timber baron’s son, made the runoff but looked at his totals and decided he was too far behind to catch Mark White, so he conceded and withdrew. Jim Mattox won his runoff and joined Ann, White, Bentsen, Hobby, Bullock, Mauro, and Hightower on the nonjudicial part of the ballot. Ann was one of the first friends who went to see Bullock after he returned from drunk school. But he directed little of his energy, organization, and money to the coordinated campaign. He had liked Bill Clements early in his term, but then had broken with him. On the other hand, he couldn’t stand Mark White; he dispatched his press aide, Tony Proffitt, to help with Clements’s campaign.
As Election Day neared, a Republican group prepared a print ad that showed Jim Mattox being handcuffed by Dallas police at a storied antiwar demonstration in Lee Park in 1969. The city’s police chief had later apologized to Mattox for that detention. But the ad and the photo appeared in fifteen small-town newspapers and the Dallas Morning News. For Mattox, it was a point of pride and a show of his power that Republicans feared and disliked him enough to resort to that. It was also a hint that things were not going well in the GOP camps.
A former newspaper reporter named Bill Cryer worked for the Clements campaign the last three months of the race. It was an odd time in his life, because he would spend the next twelve years as Ann Richards’s press secretary. In the campaign’s swank Austin headquarters, he got to know Karl Rove fairly well. Cryer later told me about their experience the day of the election.
The exit polls started looking shaky, and it was raining hard over in East Texas. We got a call that blacks and refinery workers were standing in line outside the polls in a downpour. Something was happening out there, and it did not bode well for Governor Clements. Karl and the others were blindsided; they didn’t see it coming. They felt terrible for the old man, wondered how they’d let him down and all that, but they were pros. Karl had this gallows humor about it all. . . . He could be a very charming fellow. What’s the word for him in those days? Puckish. He had a puckish sense of humor.
The most stunning thing about the 1982 election was the extent of the GOP disaster. Republicans thought they had the future of Texas politics firmly in hand; then they were routed from top to bottom. White ousted Clements 54 to 46 percent, and the down-ballot Democrats ran better—Hightower with 69.2 percent, Ann with 61.4 percent, Mauro with 60.9 percent. The established troika of Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Hobby, and Bob Bullock certainly helped the lesser-known candidates, for their money and organization encouraged straight-party votes. And two popular congressmen, Mickey Leland and Henry B. González, boosted African American and Hispanic turnout in populous Houston and San Antonio. But Ronnie Dugger, the publisher of the Texas Observer, saw it as the triumph of a reborn liberal wing of the Democratic Party: “The claim of a Bentsen aide that Bentsen and Hobby practically picked White up and carried him across the finish line is less plausible than the likelihood that Richards and Hightower stimulated feminist and progressive voters to turn out, who then made the difference for White.”
David Richards gives Ann a congratulatory kiss after her election as state treasurer in 1982. Though they were separated during that campaign, he provided generous financial support that enabled her to make the race. They divorced in 1983.
Identified in some accounts as “Yarborough Democrats,” the down-ballot stars of the Democrats’ class of 1982 take a celebratory stroll around the Capitol: from left, Ann, Jim Hightower, and Garry Mauro. Mauro and Hightower had worked for the populist liberal U.S. senator Ralph Yarborough, and Ann was close to him in her political career, despite an unpleasant experience when her then-husband David tried to go to work for him in Washington.
Taken during an impromptu nighttime stroll around the Capitol after the Democrats won, a widely distributed photograph ignored the populist Jim Mattox, but its “Gang of Three” captions and hype seemed to frame Texas Democrats’ future: Mauro a shade too handsome, his hair a crown of long dark curls; Hightower ducking his head with a sly smile, wearing his mustache, cowboy boots, and a vested suit; and Ann with her hand flung high, grinning at someone she recognized in the crowd, just two years removed from the lowest point in her life, forty-nine years old and looking sleek and fine in a pair of high-heeled shoes.
Wearing a name tag for the benefit of her new employees, Treasurer Ann Richards conducts one of her first staff meetings at the small state agency.
CHAPTER 11
Raise Money and Wait
Soon after Ann won the election, she received a letter from Nadine Eckhardt, who was living in Washington. Eckhardt proposed that she would get started at once organizing “the Austin-D.C. Axis” and Houston with an eye on grander campaigns to come.
Dear Ann,
Congratulations—again—on winning your race for treasurer. I’m writing you some thoughts before things get too hectic on the first of the year. First of all, the national press already loves you and I think you can be the first woman president (although you might have to be vp first) for the following reasons:
1. I haven’t seen any other female politician in D.C. who has it together as well as you and you actually like it and have fun with it.
2. You’re from Waco and went to Baylor and therefore can hang out with far-out folks and no one can criticize.
3. You’re a “class” person and I perceive you as having the character it takes to make decisions which go against the party doctrine when it sucks. I can be an “Ann Richards” Democrat right now but I’m
pissed at the national Dems and they’ll have to woo me back somehow with new candidates and new ideas. You and Jim Hightower are the only ones who have turned me on and a lot of people who think with their heads instead of their gonads have told me they have the same position. You cut across party lines.
Nadine
Dear Nadine,
I’ve just completed the first agency department head meeting, addressed all employees in two separate meetings, and now I’m off to a luncheon with other elected officials. Oh! Glory! How much fun!
I loved your letter and appreciated the sentiment and the thoughtfulness in working out my ascendancy to the presidency. . . . Problem is, I’m not all that sure I want to be President or anything but treasurer. I suppose that I ought to be foresighted and plan all sorts of future activity but I’ve never been good at that . . .
Ann
But she was still good at having a good time. That winter she went pheasant hunting in the Panhandle as a guest of Billy Clayton, a conservative Democrat and former Speaker of the Texas House who was now a lobbyist. She wrote him with the tone of an emerging good old girl. “Dear Billy Wayne, I cannot remember a hanging where I had more fun. You were a great sport. My office now proudly sports a stuffed pheasant. It is a beautiful reminder of one of the best times of my life. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me to be included in the hunt. Come see me!”
No doubt the lobbyist did just that. One night as Ann settled into the quiet time of her new routine, she read one of Jap Cartwright’s hair-raising crime stories in Texas Monthly. She wrote him a fan letter at the magazine, addressing him carefully as “Gary.” “Maybe age is upon us, but I think back on some truly insane adventures with real fondness. We may have slowed down a bit or redirected energies but you can’t keep a mad dog down.”
