by Jan Reid
Wearing a T-shirt blazoned “Another Man For Ann,” Willie Nelson greets and encourages the candidate during her topsy-turvy first race for governor. Austin, 1990.
CHAPTER 16
Backyard Brawl
In late 1987, Glenn Smith was the Capitol bureau chief of the Houston Post. Caught in a continuing decline of circulation and revenue in its competition with the Houston Chronicle, the paper had been sold by Bill Hobby and his family to a group in Toronto, and now the paper had been sold again. Glenn had gone to the “Walk of the Stars” affair in Austin honoring Bud Shrake and his fellow writers. Glenn had not yet met the new editor, though they had spoken by telephone. “So we’re all standing there, and this guy, the editor, is introduced to me, and he withdraws his hand, won’t shake mine. Bud looked at me and said, ‘What’s up with that?’” Word of the insult got around Austin’s political and media community in a hurry; one week later, Bill Hobby sent over his chief of staff, Saralee Tiede, to offer the furious reporter a job in the lieutenant governor’s office.
A few months later, Michael Dukakis won the 1988 Democratic nomination and made Lloyd Bentsen his running mate. “Hobby was going to run for the Senate to fill the seat of Bentsen, if the Democrats won,” Glenn told me. “So he jobbed me out to split time between Hobby’s staff and Bentsen’s vice presidential campaign. That’s how I met Jack Martin. By Labor Day, it was obvious the Dukakis campaign was not going to have a happy ending. So I was going back to work the ’89 session for Hobby, which was going to be his last one. A group of guys got together one weekend, and we went fishing down on the coast. On the way back, I was riding in the front seat with Jack. He said, ‘How would you like to manage Ann Richards’s campaign?’ I said, ‘Great,’ because I didn’t know what I was going to do after the session was over.
“Your ego tells you what your ego tells you,” he went on. “I thought I must have really impressed Bentsen, that they wanted me to do this. At the time I was really flattered. But looking back I think they wanted her campaign manager to be a man, apart from whatever savvy I might bring to it. My role was to be the front man. Jack and Jane Hickie would be the ones really making the decisions.”
Yet even that reading on his part proved murky. A few days passed, then Martin arranged a breakfast and formally offered him the job. According to Smith: “When Ann was treasurer and I was writing for the Post, I had gotten on very well with her. Her staff, especially Paul Williams, helped me break some difficult stories. She knew I’d worked for Hobby and Bentsen, and she thought I was funny and trustworthy, and the move made sense to her. But right after that breakfast she marched in Hobby’s office and announced, ‘I want Glenn Smith today.’ Hobby said, ‘Like hell. I’ve got to have him because he’s filling a role for me in the session.’ It was kind of a tip-off to a certain impetuousness on Ann’s part that I should have been paying attention to.”
A barrage of unsettling things continued to come the rookie politico’s way. “Jack had told me to negotiate my salary with Ann directly. That just sounded like commonsense advice to me. But then someone brings all of Jane’s files over, dumps them on my desk, and I’m told she won’t be around anymore. I’ve never known what that was about. Ann never said a word about it. I didn’t really know Jane then. Like I’d gone around her or something? I can’t believe that was over my salary.”
In a wide-ranging profile, “Ann Richards: How Perfection Led to Failure,” in the October 1990 Texas Monthly, Mimi Swartz quoted the candidate: “Everybody wanted to let Ann be Ann. And they all had different Anns.” Swartz wrote that the blowup with Hickie was not a minor tiff. Hiring Glenn at all had been the first problem; the second was that he demanded to deal directly with Ann on all matters. “When Smith took control,” Swartz continued, “Hickie was clearly wounded. She and Richards stopped speaking for a time, and as the professionals gained more and more control, a schism formed between Richards’s female loyalists and the male political consultants. . . . Like so many of the women there, Hickie could be rhapsodic on the subject of Richards, but she seemed barely aware of the male staffers. Perhaps the men were defensive, and perhaps Hickie was harried; either way, neither side worked well together, each claiming every small victory and laying blame for every small defeat. To the boys, the girls were amateurs obsessed with flow charts and schedules who wanted to manage the campaign like the treasury. To the girls, the boys were overzealous guerrilla fighters, dragging them into a needlessly dirty campaign.”
But who was doing the dragging? “The thing between Ann and Mattox was extraordinarily pressurized,” said Glenn, “even during those months in ’89 while I was still working for Hobby. Mattox called me out at Scholz’s one night. He said, ‘I’m going to ruin you,’ and was jabbing his finger at my chest. It was such a visible thing that a circle of people formed, like it was a fight. I did not antagonize him. But somebody took a photograph of that, and it wound up in the Washington Post. He accused me of setting him up. Later he did it again, right outside Hobby’s office in the Capitol. ‘I’m going to ruin you, you’ll never work again in Texas.’ We had some lapel pins made up: ‘Mattox Threatened Me Too.’ I was thinking, ‘What the hell have I gotten into?’
“Another notable thing came in May of ’89, when Ann took me out to lunch right before the end of the session. As intense as those months had been, I never took any of that drug stuff from Mattox seriously. I hadn’t been in Austin during the party years. Just didn’t know. She looked at me at this lunch and said, ‘Okay, here’s the deal. How are you going to get me around this?’
“I said, ‘What?’ She was not explicit. She just said, ‘There’s some stuff out there, Mattox is going to know about it, and he’s going to attack me for it. And I want to know how you’re going to get me out of it.’
“I was noncommittal—said I’m sure we can get through it. But I was very surprised by how concerned she was. She was really, really worried, in a personal way. It’s always been my impression that two things were going on with Ann about that. One, she was being told by Bob Squier [her famous media adviser from Washington] and Jack Martin that any contact with cocaine, however incidental, would beat her, period. But I’ve always thought she was more worried about her parents. She would talk to me more about that when I was alone with her than about any of the political ramifications. It really twisted her up—‘I don’t want my parents to be hearing about this.’ She was quite emotional, and it affected her judgment. This was a problem I really didn’t expect to have to deal with in my first time as a campaign manager. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’
“But all that did lead to an event that still makes me smile. In December of ’89, Anne Marie Kilday, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, called me and said she was going to ask the drug question in an interview. We set up the call to come at three o’clock one afternoon when Ann was on a campaign stop in Lubbock. I flew out there from Austin, and Squier flew down from Washington.”
At the time, the Today host and commentator Jane Pauley felt she was being squeezed out by NBC, and she was threatening to walk away from a multimillion-dollar contract. Squier, a friend of the network star, was incensed at how he believed NBC executives were treating her. “So I sat there for an hour and a half,” Glenn said, “thinking we’re going to construct the answer to the drug question. They talked about nothing but Jane Pauley. I’d interrupt them every fifteen minutes or so. ‘Okay, we gotta deal with this. She’s gonna call us at three.’ And they’d start to deal with it, then they’d back up and it was poor Jane Pauley this, poor Jane Pauley that. We never did deal with it. Anne Marie called at the appointed time, and she never asked the question. She asked about drinking, but not the drugs. She backed off, for whatever reason, which was a damn good thing for us. But you know, Ann and Squier were part of that celebrity world, and that was what they wanted to talk about.”
Since Glenn was committed to working for Hobby until the end of the legislative session, Ann hired Mark McKinnon, a young favorite of Ja
ck Martin, as director of communications. Mark’s resumé sparkled as much as his smile. After chucking college to go to Nashville, he had caught on, briefly, with Kris Kristofferson’s songwriting team. After that, he returned to the University of Texas and won a student election to edit the Daily Texan. He dreamed of writing for a living, but in 1984 he volunteered for Lloyd Doggett, a state senator who was waging a doomed campaign against Phil Gramm for the U.S. Senate. Future campaign heavyweights Paul Begala and James Carville were working for the liberal Doggett. They mostly succeeded in taking out the favored Bob Krueger in his second run for the Senate, as well as the Democratic boll weevil Kent Hance, before serving Gramm with easy pickings in the general election. But in the process, Begala noticed McKinnon’s talent and hired him for Doggett’s press office. After that, Mark worked as a press aide for Governor Mark White when he was losing his rematch with Bill Clements. The next year, Mark caught on with Buddy Roemer, who was elected the “New Democrat” Louisiana governor. (That label was beginning to be tossed around, boosted by politicos like Begala and Carville.) After the Louisiana race, Mark went to New York to work in public relations for a while, but he had been looking around for a way to get back to Austin. He formed a partnership with Dean Rindy, a longtime liberal media consultant in Austin, and eagerly took on the task of managing Ann’s media relations. Mark was charming, cool, and easy to like.
Particularly after the abrupt departure of Jane Hickie, another force on the campaign team was Lena Guerrero. She had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley town of Mission and emerged as an up-and-coming star in politics when she was in her early twenties. While attending the University of Texas, she was elected president of the Texas Young Democrats, and in 1984, at age twenty-six, she won an Austin seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Only the second Hispanic woman elected to the legislature, she distinguished herself with work in behalf of migrant farmworkers and the prevention of teen pregnancy. After the 1989 session, Texas Monthly put her on its prestigious list of the ten best legislators. She had unquestioned talent, and she was a favorite understudy of Ann, but I recoiled the first time I saw her in action. In the little office a few blocks from the Capitol, she was screaming at someone on the telephone. I wondered who in the world on the other end of that line would be putting up with that.
I happened to witness the outburst because I was one of the unpaid volunteers. Others who were still on the Treasury staff took pains to contribute only in their off-hours and on weekends. They included Suzanne Coleman, Bill Cryer, Paul Williams, Joy Anderson, and Dorothy Browne. Two of the essential players in the campaign were Cecile Richards and her husband, Kirk Adams, who lived in California but came over to try to help Ann blunt the attorney general’s advantage with labor unions. At twenty-one, Ann’s younger daughter, Ellen, was answering campaign correspondence, such as a letter that came from a gentleman in Beaumont. He wrote that Ann appeared to be only the women’s candidate, and while he wished her well, he wanted to cancel his draft authorization of $22.03 a month as a contributor. Another campaign aide might have concluded that there was little to say in response, but after six impassioned paragraphs, Ellen concluded, “I am glad you shared your thoughts with me and I hope you will accept my response in the good spirit with which it was sent. I hope you will soon rejoin our efforts to elect Ann Richards the Governor of Texas.”
Amazed at how this looming demolition derby had come about, David Richards told Jim Mattox he couldn’t support him in a race against his former wife of twenty-nine years, and then beat a quiet retreat to his private practice and his new marriage to Sandy Hauser. David had managed the litigation that helped Mattox build his impressive record as attorney general, but Mattox never had much use for him after that.
The attorney general wasn’t the only Democrat that Ann had to overcome. Just before the filing date in December 1989, Mark White muddied the water by jumping into the race. At the start of the campaign, Ann had only $30,000 in her political account, yet the first major poll showed her with 35 percent, White with 23 percent, and Mattox with a forlorn 8 percent. Mattox was outraged, furious.
Because she was so short on cash, Ann was the last of the seven major gubernatorial candidates to start airing television commercials. And when her ads appeared, their fuzzy, swinging-on-the-front-porch style made her look like a vacuous grandmother, not a governor. By the end of February, White had edged slightly ahead, with him and Ann each favored by about a third of respondents polled, and Mattox was rebounding with 17 percent. While the polls and the responses to the campaign ads pointed to a hard-fought and expensive primary race, in April Ann got a note from Bud that spoke to the improvement in their personal lives. “I have never received anything even close to a mash note from such a classy person before. . . . Thank you.”
I had joined Ann’s campaign team because I admired her, she liked me, and she knew I had been writing speeches on environmental issues for Garry Mauro, particularly those affecting the Texas coast and the Gulf of Mexico. And then was when she thought she had need of me. The die was cast, and on a sweltering day in June 1990, she officially kicked off her race for governor with a speech on the grounds of the Capitol. She had been weighing whether to go with Bud to watch Dennis Hopper shoot a movie that he was directing. “Bud,” she wrote, “I spend next week on a coastal hegira—Corpus Christi to Port Arthur. After that I want to take you up on the offer to go see Dennis make his movie.” Then she headed for the Rio Grande Valley and a controversial “boat trip” up the coast of Texas.
Glenn Smith later told me, “I think my contribution to Ann was basically that I was so damn naïve. I made judgments and did things that I wouldn’t have done if I had been more seasoned in politics. But the fact that I did them helped her. Like the boat trip.” McKinnon also deserved credit for the idea of the coastal cruise. The barnstorming would begin with a weeklong “fact-finding tour” of the state’s 367-mile Gulf Coast. Ann reeled off the claims: it would take her past four million people, fifty million barrels of oil, and more than a hundred fifty school districts; and as some observers quickly noted, it would penetrate seven media markets. The premise wasn’t entirely feasible. The coast between the Valley and Corpus Christi is a 165-mile stretch of sand dunes, long shallow lagoons, and flat, unhandsome, almost unpopulated chaparral. A boat journey up that part of the Intracoastal Waterway would have left her afloat far from any news cycle. So Ann spent a day touching base with the leaders of Brownsville and other Valley towns and the agricultural community. In a coincidental prescheduled event, she joined Mattox, Bill Hobby, and Jim Hightower in a show of support for a local bond referendum to bring safe drinking water and sewage disposal to some colonias—unincorporated subdivisions that had sprouted along the Rio Grande. Then she flew to Corpus Christi.
Dorothy had taken a week’s vacation from the Treasury to be the candidate’s chief aide on the trip. Also along for the duration was Monte Williams, a tall, large, garrulous press aide. I signed on for the part of the float between Corpus Christi and Galveston. Our task was to do all we could to ensure the candidate did not get trapped in unpleasant corners in which her only means of escape would be to jump overboard.
And what a boat we were on! A woman at the Treasury named Janet AllenShapiro had, in an earlier period of her life, obtained a license to pilot an oceangoing vessel, and she sure delivered in chartering this one. Dorothy and I were amazed to find ourselves watching gulls, pelicans, and the sunset while sipping drinks on a fifty-foot yacht. There was a great deal of jollity among the aides. Most would be driving from port to port and making arrangements for her arrivals and schedules at night. Smith and McKinnon were close by their mobile phones in Austin. But watching that splendid sunset, Monte, Dorothy, and I had the rare luck to be making a private hotel of this yacht with decks made of teak.
We pulled out of Corpus with the city’s mayor, other officials, and a throng of television reporters and camera crews on board. Ann wore jeans, sneakers, one of her new campaign
T-shirts, and a bandana knotted at her throat. For the benefit of the camera crews, she took the pilot’s wheel for a few minutes. “Piece of cake,” she announced. As we crossed the bay toward the fishing town of Rockport, bright morning sunlight glistened off the water, and as if they had been called up by central casting, several dolphins joined the show, cavorting in the wake cut by the prow.
In the large air-conditioned cabin, Ann listened to briefings by an executive at the Formosa Plastics plant and, as we passed the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, by a birder who told us the plumage of roseate spoonbills gets its pink from a healthy diet of shrimp. That night in remote Port O’Connor, we wound up in a fish and beer joint. It didn’t bother Ann that the rest of us were drinking. She and Monte and the reporters, who included Wayne Slater, R. G. Ratcliffe, Ken Herman, and Ross Ramsey, traded one joke after another, and they were hilarious. At one point Ann stuck out her tongue and, scratching it lightly with her fingernail, informed us how salt affects the taste buds. The little darlings are trim and erect, she claimed, but salt flattens out the tops like heads of mushrooms. Dorothy squirmed, not too eager to see that in print, but we went to bed in our comfortable berth, laughing at how well it was going.
The next day was a short one on the water. We put up in Port Lavaca, a small town near the midpoint of an industrial complex that extends 400 miles along the coast. After dinner that second night, a local host and campaign volunteer took us on a drive past plants that included Dow Chemical, Union Carbide, DuPont, Alcoa, BP Chemical, and Texas Liquid Fertilizer. This was country rich in organized labor votes for Democratic politicians, or at least it long had been. At night the plants put up a dazzling light show—I had never seen anything like it.
