Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  That fall, the Houston Chronicle sent a reporter named Barbara Karkabi to Austin to write about the new state treasurer. The angle of her story was not so much about how Ann got elected, or how she was transforming the Treasury, but why a prominent historian like Ruthe Winegarten was willing to immerse herself in recording Ann’s first year in the new office. Karkabi asked Ann: “What do you think the general public will think about this? You know, this is a time of recession with all these cutbacks, but then there’s a foundation giving a grant to do a study of the first year in office of the first woman elected in a long time in statewide office. Do you feel like there will be any negative feedback?”

  “I have no idea,” Ann said, but Karkabi pressed her. Ann replied evenly, “I don’t answer what if, what if, what if because I don’t know.” Karkabi and Winegarten stepped out of Ann’s office for a few moments, and when they returned, the interview ranged into Ann’s perceptions of her new job as treasurer. She reeled off some pat answers about what a fantastic job the voters had given her. Then she blurted: “I grabbed a cigarette while you were gone.”

  Winegarten cried out in dismay. “What happened to your hypnotist and your stapling and your . . .” Ann had been trying everything, including the remedial fad of having her ear stapled. Karkabi said she had read about Ann’s attempt to quit smoking.

  Winegarten put in sympathetically, “I know, Ann.”

  “That’s a miserable personal failure,” Ann berated herself. “I was skunking again this week. . . . I hate it—it’s obnoxious.” As the women sympathized, Ann went on that she had been trying to quit in hopes of influencing her daughter to do the same. “Well, it was really funny. I was interested in myself. I took my youngest girl, Ellen, to school, then drove straight back from that college to the airport and bought a pack of cigarettes. Hadn’t smoked in two or three days.”

  Interested in herself: she sure got that right. Ann was egocentric, principled, driven, caustic, and more than a bit cynical—qualities shared by many politicians. But she was a stickler about refusing to conduct politics on state time. Because they needed to talk about politics for the Treasury interviews, one weekend Winegarten came to her house in West Lake Hills. It was a poignant time for

  Treasurer Ann Richards lights up as Karen Hughes observes, Austin, early 1980s. Hughes was then a television news reporter in Dallas. As executive director of the Texas Republican Party, she was a thorn in the side of Governor Richards and became a powerful figure in the gubernatorial administration and presidency of George W. Bush.

  Ann—she was selling the house that contained so much of her personal imprint and history. Winegarten had been looking through boxes of mementos that an assistant had put in chronological order, for possible use in the documentary project. “Ann,” the writer said, “I have a lot of original photographs that she found in there that I’m afraid I have to give back to you. You know, like pictures of you driving a bulldozer and taking a raft trip down [the] White River in Idaho, and—”

  “Keep it, don’t give it to me,” Ann cut her off. “I don’t want it.”

  “Do you have copies of all those things?”

  “No, what would I do with them?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Winegarten said.

  “No, I don’t want any of that stuff,” Ann said.

  “But there’s a picture of you with Cecile as a baby . . . and I guess your wedding picture with a candle, and . . .”

  “Well,” Ann hedged. “I can’t imagine that anybody would be interested in that stuff. I am fixin’ to move out of the house.” But she relented and gave Winegarten permission to search through the bags and boxes that were about to be thrown out. “I had some things that it just seemed like I shouldn’t throw away,” Ann said. “Like I own all of the Dallas newspapers from the week Kennedy was assassinated, up to the time Oswald was shot. Scraps, God, there’s a million scraps. All my old high school yearbooks still have these rotted corsages in them.”

  Ann had just come back from a San Antonio convention of the National Women’s Political Caucus, where Bella Abzug had taken the lead in grilling potential Democratic candidates to oppose President Ronald Reagan the next year. Senators John Glenn, Gary Hart, Alan Cranston, and Ernest Hollings were there, along with Jimmy Carter’s vice president and the eventual 1984 nominee, Walter Mondale. And as the race shaped up, Time had floated Ann as a possible vice presidential nominee for the Democrats.

  “Well,” Winegarten asked, “how did you feel about the discussion of yourself as a vice presidential nominee? I’m thinking about the fact that all the presidential candidates could really use a Southerner on the ticket—it appears that would make sense.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Ann said. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “For a Southerner to be on the ticket?”

  “No, that I would be a vice presidential nominee or be suggested. It’s hype; it’s fodder for newspaper stories. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I’m capable. I think I’m perfectly capable of being vice president. But as a practical matter it’s just not feasible. You don’t begin with a base like I have and make a national base out of it.”

  As the conversation wore on, Ann talked about what neutral observers of that convention might infer about the ethnic makeup of the women’s movement. “You know, you look around that hall, it is just a white bunch . . . We are slowly being able to get some Mexican-American women involved, but by and large, they are very angry. They are not only angry at men, they are angry about the Hispanic societal structure that’s been more repressive toward them than what Anglo women have experienced. And the ones who aren’t angry are, you know, still doing forty Hail Marys every morning and baking cookies for the church social in some little South Texas town.” Ann was nothing if not blunt.

  She elaborated on how dull, stiff, and inept the Democratic presidential candidates had been in trying to connect with women. “I went back around behind the stage, where there was a lady with a walkie-talkie. I said, ‘Give me your walkie-talkie, and I want to talk to Fritz Mondale backstage,’ because I knew he was the next one up. I called back there and I said, ‘Fritz, I do not know what you’re going to say, but you are going to have to personalize yourself to these people. Show some sense of humor. This is boring, what is taking place here.’”

  After Ann’s speech in San Antonio, a number of women had come up to her and invited her to address their state caucuses, and just to talk. Winegarten asked Ann what she told those women. “I encourage women in their workplace to talk with each other not only about their professional problems but their personal problems,” she answered. “And I’ll have women come up and say afterwards, ‘You know, you’re right, I was sort of locked into thinking that I had to compete with that other woman at the desk next to me.’ They talk about problems with their kids, and they talk about feeling guilty, because they want to do something other than what they are doing, and they fear they’d be denying someone else if they did. And one of the ingredients I’ve been talking about for years is: Don’t believe that stuff they tell you about the Superwoman. . . . You’ll kill yourself trying to be the greatest professional combined with being a great nurse, lover, mother, and entertainer—whatever. I mean, all of that old garbage that we live by—or certainly I listened to and read in my generation. If we buy into that, we’re just cheap help. Cheap help.”

  She went on: “The sustenance that comes with being needed is enormous. I’m the A Number One Worst. When my kids come home, I have to steel myself not to go in there and wash all those clothes. Last night my daughter who is just home for a little while came in the kitchen and said, ‘Mama, I want you to relax while I’m here so that I can enjoy it.’ And I was in there shucking corn and getting after those green beans.”

  Winegarten wanted to know what the most politically engaged women—potential candidates—said in San Antonio. “The same old questions,” Ann replied, “about what role do you play in your family, or how can your relationship change when
you are running for office. I said, ‘Well, actually, when you are running for office everything is great. It’s when you serve that’s tough. . . . It becomes your life, and that’s when things begin to fall apart. And no matter how enthusiastic your husband or your children might be about seeing you become an elected official, when it becomes a daily routine . . . you need to be prepared to give it all up and no longer have a family.’”

  When Winegarten commented on how that must have shocked some of the audience, Ann stood her ground: “I say it all the time. . . . Some woman asked me, what did I mean? I told her, ‘I mean exactly what I said. The back seat of my car is piled with clothes that I don’t even have time to take to the cleaner.’”

  She was amused by the way some Texans had begun to react to her: “Invariably I get compared to aging actresses like Doris Day—personally I think she’s young—and Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck. About the only one I haven’t hit is Bette Davis. The other day on a plane a stewardess kept staring at me, and she came over and said, ‘How do you like your coffee?’ I said, ‘Oh, I like it fine, and I drink a lot of coffee.’ And then she giggled and went to the back. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. Later she came over and said something else, and it turned out she thought I was Lauren Bacall, who sells some kind of coffee on TV.”

  Winegarten asked Ann how she handled the press. “You just spend a lot of time on it.”

  “You don’t refuse them?”

  “Oh, goodness no,” said Ann. “You don’t dare refuse them. Lord, no. That spells disaster.”

  But she added that as the only female in statewide office in Texas, she received the kind of press coverage that other officeholders were constantly trying to generate. “Even when I was on the commissioners’ court, I tried my best to get less press,” she chuckled. “You stick out like a sore thumb anyway, for being the only woman there, and I think the public tires of you quickly.”

  Winegarten asked, “You think you can get too much press?”

  “Oh, sure. You bet you can.”

  “What would the reaction of the public be? ‘I don’t want to read about her anymore. . . .’”

  “Yeah. ‘There she is again.’”

  “Or they think you’re out soliciting, trying to be a prima donna?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that I don’t have to go get it. It comes anyway.” She laughed again.

  Ann’s longtime appointments secretary, Nancy Cannon, was at Ann’s house that day, and she walked in the room grimacing and trying to roll her head. “Nancy’s having a ‘neck thing,’” Winegarten explained.

  “What’s the matter with your neck?” said Ann.

  “Beat around on me,” Nancy jokingly invited.

  “Is it stiff?” said Ann.

  “Yes, it’s like—”

  “She can’t move it,” the writer interjected.

  “—like I’ve been in a car wreck,” Nancy said.

  “Well,” Ann said, “why don’t you have something done about it? Is it more fun not to?”

  “Well, no,” the younger woman replied. “It just happened this morning. I guess I could put a sign on the walk for a masseuse, in-house.”

  “You probably slept wrong,” Ann said, and then made an abrupt change of subject—as often happened, the more desirable topic of conversation was what she was thinking about and experiencing. “I had the weirdest dream this morning,” she told them. “And it was so bizarre. A man banging on the door wanted to ask about mowing my lawn, since it hadn’t been mowed in two months. And I said, ‘I have to tell you this dream, I’m afraid I’ll forget it.’ He looked so startled.”

  “Inside the dream?” Winegarten asked.

  “No! I went to the door with the man banging on it, in my nightgown and my bathrobe, and I said, ‘Come on in, would you like to have some coffee? I have to tell you about my dream because I’m afraid I’ll forget it if I don’t tell you.’”

  Winegarten asked, “Did he come in?”

  “Yes. He was this kid, about nineteen or twenty years old. He looked so startled. In the dream I was at a funeral, and there was a young boy who was dead—I don’t know who it was—in a coffin there, an open coffin. I don’t know who all was there; maybe Ellen was with me. And the boy woke up and sat up in the coffin. And I said to this guy, the preacher or the funeral director or somebody, I said, ‘This guy isn’t dead, this kid is alive.’ And he said to me, ‘Oh, no—no, no, no—that’s just the kind of dead he is. He’s been getting up like that.’ And I thought, ‘Well, these fools are gonna bury this kid and he’s obviously alive.’ Oh, it was so bizarre.”

  Following the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention that made Ann a national celebrity and gubernatorial contender, in August 1988 she accompanied Michael and Kitty Dukakis and Texas Democratic officeholders to a rally in Johnson City. She climbed on this longhorn as a lark, then laughed and yelled as the photographer came running, “Don’t you dare take my picture, Scott; damn it, don’t you dare!”

  PART THREE

  Only in Texas

  Treasurer Ann Richards and Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby don kitchen aprons and cut up with knives before a dinner party in Austin, mid-1980s. Hobby became Ann’s mentor and close friend, though she did not support him when he first ran for his office in 1972.

  CHAPTER 13

  Poker Faces

  In the 1986 election, almost all Texas news coverage focused on the rematch between Mark White and Bill Clements in the governor’s race. Clements was not supposed to have been in the race. The former governor, who was sixty-eight and had sold his oil company for $1.2 billion, made the surprise announcement while standing in front of a urinal beside a Dallas Morning News Capitol beat reporter, Sam Attlesey. Lubbock’s Kent Hance, who had become a political journeyman for both parties after handily beating George W. Bush in a 1978 West Texas congressional race, had hired Karl Rove and charted a GOP run for governor. Embarrassed and loyal to Clements, Rove recused himself from the Hance campaign and returned to help the former governor. With lavish money and a champion’s standing with the party base, Clements brushed aside Hance without a runoff. He seemed motivated largely by desire to get even with Mark White.

  White’s term had been crippled by the oil boom gone bust, the banking and savings-and-loan fiascos, joblessness, tax increases, and the nature of the help he received from Ross Perot. White’s abrupt, chatty education czar had authored a set of reforms that took dead aim on a hallowed Texas institution, high school football. The “no pass, no play” rule applied to all extracurricular activities in the schools, but if star tailbacks or quarterbacks didn’t pass all their classes and thereby became ineligible for six weeks during a fall semester, that could sink whole seasons in win-hungry Texas towns. Bumper stickers appeared all over the state that read “Will Rogers Never Met Ross Perot.”

  Early in his term, White had been flattered by media chat that he would make an attractive vice presidential candidate in 1988. He may have found it hard to believe the early polls that had him thirty points down against Clements. But critics in the media were all over him. He later told Brian McCall, in an interview for his dissertation, published as The Power of the Texas Governor, “The Fort Worth Star-Telegram said there’ll be no need for any new taxes in my term, but they didn’t read my statement before that. I’d said that if everything stays as it is now, there will be no need for any new taxes. So they just cut out that phrase and said look at all the taxes I’d raised. Hell, I’d raised everything. I raised taxes on everything across the board!”

  Clements spent $13 million—a million more than White—and reversed the score by 300,000 votes. But Clements had barely been sworn in to his new term when Texas football again raised its peculiar head. In the early to mid 1980s, with teams that featured the future NFL star runners Eric Dickerson and Craig James, Southern Methodist University had reclaimed the gridiron renown it had not known since the days of Doak Walker and Kyle Rote. Rich alumni
had engineered this turn-around by paying top high school recruits and their families. It set off a covert bidding war and recruiting scandal that ensnared all the state’s major college programs except the University of Texas’s, and it led to the NCAA’s imposition of the game’s first “death penalty”—banishment of SMU football for an entire season. The shamed and scaled-down football program has never really recovered.

  The scandal was germane to Texas politics because Clements also chaired the SMU Board of Governors. On discovering that twenty-six scholarship players were on the take, Clements ordered SMU subordinates to cover it up and turn off the spigot gradually, lest the athletes or their family members get upset and start talking loudly. When the Austin American-Statesman’s Dave McNeely asked Clements whether he had told “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about the SMU payoffs, the old-timer replied, “Well, you know, we weren’t operating like inaugural day, with a Bible, Dave, and there wasn’t ever a Bible present.”

  At best, the champion of Texas Republicans came off as a liar and cheat. On top of that, the devastated economy and lost state revenues that had doomed Mark White in turn obliged Clements to sign a $5.7 billion tax bill, the largest in the state’s history. Democratic heads swung quickly to the governor’s race in 1990.

  The Republicans made it easy for Ann to stay where she was in 1986, for they put up no credible opponents. A few days after her reelection, Ann, Mary Beth Rogers, Nancy Kohler, Sarah Meacham, and Mary Beth’s son Billy Rogers, a young politico who had directed the campaigns of Garry Mauro, met after work in the office of the developer Gary Bradley. The purpose of the meeting was to organize for a race for an undesignated higher office and work out a plan to raise money. It was certainly not too early for that. In the meantime, Ann still had an agency to run.

  That fall, Mary Beth Rogers had told my wife, Dorothy, that they wanted her to represent the Treasury’s interests by guiding bills that benefited the agency through the 1987 legislative session. Dorothy pondered that and finally told Mary Beth that she just had no confidence she could do that effectively. Instead, they named her the Treasury’s legislative director—the issues person—and hired Joy Anderson, a tall, confident preacher’s daughter who had worked in advertising and public relations in New York, where her husband, Jim, was an advertising writer and art designer; she had also worked for a year in the office of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s accomplished senator.