Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Following the exits of Biden and Hart, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis emerged and won the nomination, fending off Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Tennessee senator Al Gore. For a while during that summer of 1988, Dukakis’s star shone brightly. He had an accomplished actress cousin, Olympia Dukakis, who that same year had won an Academy Award for her role in Moonstruck, the kind of credit that doesn’t have anything to do with politics or government, but doesn’t hurt. He spoke a great deal about presiding over a “Massachusetts Miracle” of economic policy and achievement. Ann was impressed when Dukakis chose for his running mate Lloyd Bentsen, whose credits included defeating George Bush in a race for the U.S. Senate in 1970. She had urged Walter Mondale to put Bentsen on the ticket in 1984, even though Geraldine Ferraro got the nod.

  Three weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta that summer, Ann was headed to make a speech about Treasury business in Houston when she called in from a pay phone at the Austin airport to get her messages. Her life would never be the same.

  Bill Cryer was in Louisiana visiting his parents when the boss telephoned him. “She said, ‘Bill, I’m going to tell you something you would never believe.’ I said, ‘What’s that, Ann?’ She said, ‘I’ve been asked to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.’ I laughed and said, ‘Well, you’re right. I never would have believed that.’ She was laughing, too. ‘I don’t believe it either, but I’m not going to turn them down! I need you to get back over here.’”

  A Massachusetts attorney named Paul Kirk chaired the Democratic National Committee. He had been impressed by Ann’s delivery and style in a speech nominating Ferraro for the vice presidency four years earlier. Other fans of Ann were Dukakis’s campaign manager, the feminist attorney Susan Estrich, and her then-husband Marty Kaplan, a movie and television producer who had been one of Mondale’s speechwriters. Kaplan later reflected on the selection process: “We talked about what the themes should be. No one should try to out-ring the eloquent oratory of Mario Cuomo four years ago. This should be a speech for the working person. It should spell out the simple needs and hopes of someone like Ann. It should be funny. It should also be common sense. That’s Ann.”

  Ann said that she was so naïve about politics at that level that she thought she could keep an appointment at a board meeting and field press inquiries by telephone. But by the end of the first day, the small press operation at the Treasury had been swamped with calls from reporters pressing for an interview with this minor official who was little known outside Texas and feminist circles. Jim Mattox tried to badger Kirk into withdrawing the invitation. Spokesmen for the national party responded that the 1990 governor’s race in Texas was a long way off, that the party would stay out of that race, and that Ann’s selection for the keynote was locked in.

  The Houston Post interviewed Mattox’s chief fund-raiser, Tom Green, who said, “I just don’t think it’ll have much impact on the Texas Democratic primary in 1990. . . . I couldn’t tell you one thing Mario Cuomo said four years ago, and everyone thought that was the greatest speech since sliced bread.” Mattox bristled: “It never ceases to amaze me that someone will get out there, get two or three blurbs on TV and in the papers, and all of a sudden they’re considered great candidates.” As Mattox’s displeasure raced outward through his political network and staff at the attorney general’s office, no one was more startled and uneasy than his chief of litigation, David Richards.

  Mattox wasn’t the only Texas Democrat jolted by the news. That afternoon, Dorothy and I were shopping for groceries when we ran into Jim Hightower and his longtime companion, Susan DeMarco. Dorothy asked them with a burst of excitement: “Did you hear about Ann?” Jim responded to the news with a quick, sharp frown and a glance at Susan that puzzled me. He was the former Texas Observer editor who had fought for liberal causes in David’s office building, whose election as agriculture commissioner had been the entertaining highlight of the 1982 races. How could he begrudge this break going to Ann? It turned out that Michael Dukakis had been trying to ward off a rebellion at the convention by Jesse Jackson. The camps had been dickering back and forth, mostly about who would make what speech at what hour. In the trade-offs designed to make Jackson happy, Jim and some of his political allies hoped that he might get to deliver the convention keynote.

  Ann’s political office had just sent out 39,500 letters to supporters asking for donations to the Ann Richards Capital Council—a euphemism for her political operation. “Of course it was a coincidence,” Jane Hickie said. “We’d been trying to get that out for months.” A gushy profile rushed to print in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times noted that Ann kept a motto on her refrigerator door that read: “Women should be obscene and not heard.” The writer told a story about how Ann had once startled a crowd of Wall Street bankers by pulling on her pig-snout mask and snorting her way through a Harry Porco routine; when the reporter asked whether she wanted to run for governor, she quipped, “It’s about time we put somebody in the Governor’s Mansion that knows how to clean it.”

  For a week after the keynote announcement, she had little time to do anything but respond to the press. By the end of that week, alarm had begun to overtake euphoria. Suzanne Coleman, Mary Beth Rogers, and Jane Hickie were all accomplished writers at her command in Austin, but at first she acted as though she had no faith in her team. Ann saw the looming date on the calendar and decided she had two good talking points and little more. “I think I know how to open and close it,” she told Hickie, “which are the two tough parts. But we need a wordsmith.”

  Ann called Bob Strauss, a Texan who had been chairman of the national party, and he recommended John Sherman, a veteran Washington speechwriter. Sherman was already juggling several other speeches for the convention, but he flew down to Austin.

  Suzanne Coleman was gay, wonderfully gifted, and dedicated to Ann, though the wear and tear brought on by that dedication was already considerable. She was also working full-time at the Treasury, and the boss was being very careful not to get dinged in the press over state employees working for her in national politics while they were on the state payroll. At the meeting with Sherman, Suzanne gave him some old speeches and a first draft for the keynote she had written. He gathered them into his briefcase, flew back to his home in the Virginia suburbs, and went to work. Ann was trying to keep up with Treasury business, all the while fretting about the speech. Of reading Sherman’s draft, she said, “There were pieces in it I liked, pieces in it I didn’t care for, so I did an edit on that and faxed it back to him. The political office fax machine never stopped.”

  The morning after Ann’s selection was announced, New York’s polished governor, Mario Cuomo, had called her with much encouragement but also told her, with a note of warning, that she had no idea how profound the change in her life was going to be. Her anxiety about the speech steadily mounted. She called former LBJ speechwriters George Christian and Harry McPherson—the latter had been a close friend of Ann and David during law school and their days in Washington—and she asked her pollster, Harrison Hickman, to draft a profile of a young middle-class family that was having a hard time making ends meet. That was the audience she hoped to connect with.

  She called Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter, whom she didn’t know at all. She called Barbara Jordan, who sounded in her speeches as if she had invented the English language. Jane Hickie hired a former television newsman, Neal Spelce, whose mission was to teach Ann how to read and deliver text working off a teleprompter. She also hired an East Texas lawyer and convention veteran, Gordon Wynne, to manage the logistics of her entourage. An entourage! Ann now had a makeup artist from Washington. Women friends all over Texas were yanking fancy clothes off racks and sending them to her. She was a nervous wreck.

  A new message from Bud came inside a card bearing a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson.

  Dear Ann: I just want you to know that if you get stuck for a big opening�
��or closing, for that matter—the Flying Punzars, feeble though we have become, stand ready to rush from the wings and do our famous double-pyramid flip that broke a table and three chairs at the University Club.

  In case your early jokes about rabbis, nuns, Greeks, and watermelons don’t go over, all you got to do is pucker up and whistle and the Punzars will be there. I am very proud of you.

  Love, Bud

  He was always good for a laugh and an encouraging word, but the lift was fleeting. Jane Hickie, Mary Beth Rogers, Suzanne Coleman, and Cathy Bonner were helping her edit Sherman’s drafts. The political office didn’t have enough room or furniture to accommodate them, so they moved to Bonner’s office. They were cutting and pasting as Ann complained that it didn’t have the flow she wanted, or the right tone. It was nice to know that Bullock had commented to a reporter, “There’s fixing to be a real stem-winder. Mark it down.” But Ann was aware that members of her team were starting to get pretty disgusted with her.

  One of those days, she sent Bud a Far Side card and added a handwritten note.

  Bud—

  Book a flight for the Punzars. Crafting this speech is arduous and so far the only opening I like is “Here I am from deep in the heart of Texas whose history is principally the saga of what men do outdoors.” The censors have doubts.

  Any practice for the triple should be done on the capitol steps since the set in Atlanta looks like a Buzby Berkley [i.e., Busby Berkeley] extravaganza with a Mayan pyramid floor.

  I’m pretty scared. The best thing in all this is getting two notes from you.

  Ann

  The line about the great Texas outdoors, on loan from the author Celia Morris, did not make it into many drafts of the speech, and Berkeley’s name had faded from public awareness, except for moviegoers in the age group of Ann and Bud. Berkeley was a Depression-era choreographer of film and Broadway musicals, which included 42nd Street and its classic “Lullaby of Broadway.” He was also a rampaging martini drinker who disgraced himself by smashing into another car and killing two people. There but for the grace of God—as the saying goes.

  “John Sherman was due to fax us more or less his final draft,” Ann reminisced about the keynote writing, “when he called to say that his computer had eaten the speech. He couldn’t get it out. The guy from the computer company was over there that moment and they were working on it, but he was afraid that the speech—and all of our work since the moment I had been chosen to deliver it—was gone forever. It was funny. I mean, I just thought, ‘Whatever can happen will happen. And it’s happening.’”

  In the Atlanta airport, Ann was startled by all the shoving and the glaring lights of the media throng: “You feel like they’ve made a mistake. That they really don’t understand that you’re not that important. It was my first true moment in the eye of the media storm, and it took some getting used to. At first just the newness of it was a little distracting. But hour by hour, as it wasn’t going away, I settled into it. I began to think of the attention as just part of my job: this is what I do and this crush is going to be part of it.”

  The Democrats had booked her party a number of rooms at the Omni Hotel—one suite became the keynote factory. “I was working the phones in the room adjoining,” Bill Cryer told me. “I’d hear an ongoing chatter from all these women, then there’d be a whoop of laughter, and then more chatter. I wasn’t on any terms at all with the Capitol press corps in Washington, and they were saying, ‘Who is this woman? Why did she get to do this? What is she going to say?’ The party people recognized the situation and sent me over some help.”

  From the outset, the speech had two constant components. In one, Ann would describe a scene in which she was pushing a ball back and forth across “a Baptist pallet” with her grandchild Lily. This would be her metaphor for how the good ideas, works, and vision of government were passed on from generation to generation. The other key element was to be drawn from a letter Ann had received at the Treasury just days before her keynote selection was announced. Earlier in the summer, Donna Alexander had heard her speak to a professional trade group in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburb of Arlington. Alexander lived in Lorena, a town south of Waco that had 1,100 residents. She wrote that she and her husband had college degrees, she worked for a Medicaid-funded program, he worked for a public utilities company, and they had jobs with annual salaries that totaled about $50,000. She was the mother of three children, two of them teenagers. Alexander wrote of her concerns: “I’ve written my representatives and have received polite letters back. We vote in hopes of electing people who understand and do something—and I’m not sure to do what. Listen maybe.”

  Ann had made a notation—“Needs a good response”—in the margin of the letter, and then passed it on to her Treasury staff. Then, suddenly, a thoughtful and moving letter from a constituent morphed into the linchpin of a prime-time television event. Cryer called Alexander to secure her permission for Ann to use portions of the letter in her speech. He assured the stunned and flattered woman that her identity would remain confidential.

  Draft after draft appeared, in different typefaces from different computers and printers, with handwriting in the margins. One would begin with the woman’s letter from Lorena, then that piece would slide downward in the next, and it would start with the ball patted back and forth between Lily and her grandmother. (Lily Adams, who was then sixteen months old, flew out from her home in Los Angeles with her parents, Cecile Richards and Kirk Adams.) Ann’s large, forceful hand could be seen bearing down in the editing. With exasperation, she slashed the line “We’ve always believed what Ralph Waldo Emerson told us years ago, that this time, like all times, is a very good time if we but know what to do with it.” Emerson wrote that? Who could even say that without getting tongue-tied?

  Just in time, the team of Ann and Suzanne began to match eloquence with grit and imagery that distinctly came from their Texas roots. One line of attack on Reagan and Bush went: “Let’s take the policy they’re proudest of—their defense policy. We Democrats are committed to an America that is strong militarily. And quite frankly, when our leaders tell us we need a new weapons system, our inclination is to say, well, they must be right. But when we pay billions for planes that won’t fly, billions for weapons that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work, we have our doubts.” Ann realized that last clause defused the ones preceding. She sharpened the paragraph into a rousing battle cry: “Billions for tanks that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work—that old dog won’t hunt.”

  They wound up using three paragraphs from Donna Alexander’s letter. They debated back and forth about whether Ann should raise the pages as she read them.

  Our worries go from payday to payday, just like millions of others. And we have two fairly decent incomes, but I worry how I’m going to pay for the rising car insurance and food.

  I pray my kids don’t have a growth spurt from August to December so I don’t have to buy new jeans. We buy clothes at the budget stores and we have them fray and fade and stretch in the first wash. We ponder and try to figure out how we’re going to pay for college, and braces, and tennis shoes. We don’t take vacations and we don’t go out to eat.

  Please don’t think me ungrateful. We have jobs, and a nice place to live, and we’re healthy. We’re people you see every day in our grocery stores. We obey the laws, we pay our taxes. We fly our flags on holidays. And we plod along trying to make it better for ourselves and our children and our parents. We aren’t vocal anymore. I think maybe we’re too tired. I believe that people like us are forgotten in America.

  At which point Ann would bellow, “Well, of course you believe you’re forgotten, because you have been!”

  In addition to Dukakis and Bentsen, she had to work in praise of Jesse Jackson at some length. Following a three-hour summit between their teams of politicos, Jackson and Dukakis revealed at the last minute that they would henceforth be united—to the disappointment of pundits and com
mentators, who had been savoring a donnybrook.

  No matter how late Ann and her team worked on the speech, during the day she had to bear up under public demands—a profile in the Washington Post’s “Style” section, a taped interview with Charlie Rose, a Village Voice profile, a stern command from USA Today: “Must report to boss—very urgent. Q: major themes she might stress.”

  She jockeyed for rehearsal and studio time with Ted Kennedy and the young Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton—enough bullshit gas in that studio to air a blimp. She saw the Texas-born columnist Linda Ellerbee at one rehearsal session and asked whether she wanted attribution for the line about Ginger Rogers matching Fred Astaire step for step in their movies while dancing backward in high heels. The writer told Ann it didn’t originate with her, she may have overheard it on an airplane—she was welcome to it. (The line was eventually credited to Jill Ruckelshaus, who was prominent in Republican politics, but it likely originated in the Bob Thornton comic strip Frank and Ernest.)

  Lily Tomlin’s partner, Jane Wagner, weighed in with gusto. She offered the line that would make Ann Richards a household name. Ann’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, argued that she ought to ditch that, it was an old gag—everyone already knew it. “Well, I don’t know it,” Ann replied. “And if I don’t know it, Mama in Waco doesn’t know it either.” Ann’s son-in-law, Kirk Adams, bolstered her trust in her instincts. “Don’t let them talk you into taking that line out. It’s too good.”

  A quiet, handsome man, the union organizer steadied his mother-in-law with a critique handwritten on pages of a yellow legal pad. He told her that the speech demanded three different styles and tones—wit, warmth, and charm. “I’ve never heard you put real anger in a speech but I think the feelings and issues of the woman from Lorena should be expressed that way; I think if you get that tone out right, it will really get the crowd going. But it is a very tricky tone to get across in the right way, especially on TV.”