by Jan Reid
The FBI blasted the besieged cultists at night with deafening recordings of chanting Tibetan monks, the whine of a dentist’s drill, shrieks of rabbits being slaughtered. An FBI tank destroyed Koresh’s prized Camaro. Then at five thirty on the morning of the fifty-first day of the standoff, the National Guard informed Ann’s office that the FBI was going in, using tear gas. The outcome stamped on the nation’s consciousness a uniquely Texas image of explosions and inferno. Ann was snookered and used by federal agents who wanted to go in like a platoon of military commandos. The ATF got their wish, they got the hell shot out of them, and it led to that horrifying image of the compound ablaze with women and children inside. And to an extent, the tragedy had Ann Richards’s name on it.
Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, had recently come down to tour with Ann and some staff members, who included my wife, the drug-treatment prison in Kyle, south of Austin. Among the paranoid and conspiracy-minded element of Americans who perceived black helicopters roaming the country at night—a group that included the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh—word spread that the purpose of Reno’s tour of Kyle was a masquerade so that she and Ann could plot the attack on the Branch Davidians.
That fateful April, as the ashes and bones of Mount Carmel were still being collected and sifted by forensic experts, the legislature signaled that it would send a bill to allow private citizens to carry concealed handguns. Its Senate champion was a Houston-area Republican legislator, Jerry Patterson, who would later win multiple terms as land commissioner. Ann promised she would veto it, proclaiming: “The people of this state do not need to be reminded that weapons of violence produce death to innocent children and adults. I am an avid hunter and believe strongly in the rights of individuals to own guns. That is not the question here. This legislation will only increase the level of violence on our streets. I have not talked to one law enforcement officer who supports this bill, and I cannot in good conscience ask them to patrol the streets of this state and face additional hazards that this bill will encourage. Frankly, the only outcome of the passage of this bill will be more people killed by gunfire.”
Reporters mobbed her in the Capitol over the issue, and one of them asked what Bullock thought of this bill and her veto threat. My friend John P. Moore, a senior aide of Bullock since his days as comptroller, told me what happened next: “Ann said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s go ask him.’ And here they came barging into his office, the governor and a crowd of reporters, TV cameras and lights and all. I think that’s when the relationship of Ann and Bullock was ripped for good.”
In response to her standoff with the legislature, she heightened her rhetoric: “The move by sponsors to report out a stripped-down version of the concealed gun bill is nothing more than game-playing by a few legislators who appear intent on embarrassing this great state as a place where gun-toting vigilantes roam the streets.”
At a press conference to announce her veto of a bill allowing private citizens to carry concealed handguns, Governor Ann Richards is joined, from left, by State Representative Elliott Naishtat, Senator Royce West, State Representative Sherri Greenberg, and two uniformed policemen confined to wheelchairs by gunfire.
The legislature passed the bill, and she vetoed it as promised. In a speech she turned to police chiefs, county sheriffs, and constables who supported her veto; her voice rang with withering contempt for her adversaries: “I especially want to thank you for choosing to stand by me on this day when we say no to the amateur gunslingers who think they will be braver and smarter with gun in hand.”
With her reelection in mind, she had started appearing at town-hall-like meetings around the state. People in the audiences kept raising the question. On remarks by the bill’s sponsors that women wanted to be able to carry guns in their purses, she quipped that she didn’t know a woman who could find a gun in her purse in an emergency. She must have gotten tired of hearing about pistol-packing Texans, and one night on the trail she lost her patience—some would say her discipline—in characteristic fashion. She wouldn’t mind so much, she said, if these trained shooters were required to hook their pistols to chains around their necks. That way, others could say, “Look out, that one’s got a gun!” She wasn’t just parting company with the people who disagreed with her. She ridiculed them.
CHAPTER 29
Collision Course
With its glamour and tragedy and the mythos of Camelot, the Kennedy clan usually gets first mention as America’s modern political dynasty. In one generation, three of its men accounted for a president and three U.S. senators. But over a span of three successive generations, four Bushes accounted for two presidents, a vice president, a senator, and two governors. Ann Richards was too good a politician to take an electoral challenge from that family lightly.
The patriarch, Prescott Bush, was a World War I army officer in artillery and intelligence and then a Wall Street banker who directed a firm tied to a German coal and steel corporation that helped finance the rise of Hitler and utilized slave labor from Auschwitz. Overcoming poor publicity and a lawsuit by Auschwitz survivors, Prescott Bush was elected to the Senate from Connecticut in 1952 and served until 1963, a key moderate ally of President Eisenhower.
During World War II, Prescott’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush, was not quite nineteen when he was commissioned an ensign in the navy, where he trained first as a photographic officer keeping a record of the destruction wrought by bombs falling from the bays of B-24s and B-29s. Then he retrained as a pilot of a light bomber called a TBM Avenger. He joined an aircraft-carrier-based squadron as U.S. forces closed in on Japan. In the intense air battle over the Mariana Islands, he sank a cargo ship but also had to ditch a plane. Everyone in his crew survived that splash in July 1944.
Three months later, twenty-year-old Lieutenant (junior grade) Bush and a radioman and gunner flew off a carrier toward one of the Bonin Islands, 600 miles from Japan, that was called Chichi Jima. The small mountainous island bristled with antiaircraft gun placements. The target was a long-range radio station that had been intercepting American transmissions and warning the Japanese mainland of impending air strikes. From an approach at 8,000 feet, Bush aimed the nose down in the steep-glide bombing pattern, the third of four planes going in over the sides of the mountains. Black puffs of smoke and flak blew up all around them, and Bush felt the plane jump when one of those explosions ripped shrapnel into the engine in the Avenger’s nose.
Ann enjoys a rousing welcome from students of Tyler Junior College who have come over to Athens for a campaign rally in 1994.
He wrestled the plane onward and dropped four 500-pound bombs on the enemy station’s buildings and its antenna, then veered off to sea. The cockpit filled with smoke, and he could see flames in the crooks of the wings. He got the plane high enough and far enough over the water that he bailed out, and his parachute opened. One of his crew, he never knew which one, tried to parachute as well, but the tail’s stabilizer blasted into him and he was killed. The other crewman went down with the plane and died in the crash. One of the victims released the life raft, which inflated, and after a desperate swim, Bush clambered in, puking and crying like the boy he was. Downed fliers in the Pacific were often torn to shreds by sharks. The beasts idly rubbed their backs against the bottoms of the lifeboats, like a horse scratching an itch on a gatepost, and then suddenly one would lunge and leap out of the water, trying to snatch and pull a man out of the raft. Great white sharks looked like an onrushing train with a gaping maw and teeth the size of bayonets. Bush didn’t mention that dread in his reports, but all the fliers in his squadron had heard horrid rumors about Americans who had been captured and held on Chichi Jima—beheadings and even cannibalization by one Japanese who thought he could destroy a man’s eternal spirit by eating his liver. Bush saw a Japanese craft headed his way, but protective fighter pilots chased it away. A submarine called the Finback eventually surfaced and rescued George Bush. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for that combat
mission, one of the fifty-eight he flew.
After the war, George Bush married Barbara Pierce and attended Yale, where he became a father for the first of six times and played first base for the Bulldogs in the first two College World Series. He got to shake the hand of Babe Ruth. He raised family eyebrows by taking his young family to the desert oil town of Midland, Texas, where he had extraordinary luck drilling for and finding oil in the Permian Basin, as he later did in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1958, he moved the oil-company headquarters and his family to Houston, where he started his political career by winning two terms in Congress. This was the man that Newsweek put on a 1987 cover with an unflattering photograph and the caption “Fighting the Wimp Factor.”
On his father’s political team, George W. Bush screened all reporters requesting an interview with his dad. “Give me one good reason why I should let you talk to George Bush,” he would say. He shrugged off journalists’ complaints: “Just doing my job, protecting the old man.” Some reporters disliked him, and the feeling was mutual. He had vetted the Newsweek reporter, Margaret Warner, and he let her know what he thought of the “wimp” story. “I was red-hot,” he wrote in his book Decision Points. “She muttered something about the editors being responsible for the cover. I did not mutter. I railed about her editors and hung up. From then on, I was suspicious about political journalists and their unseen editors.”
Then a year later that woman from Austin was on national television claiming his dad was born with a silver foot in his mouth. And for years she insulted him again and again. It is true that Ann’s disdain was ongoing. When I was drafting her environmental position papers during the 1990 campaign, I knew that President Bush had taken actions to protect wetlands and was a staunch defender of the Clean Air Act. I wrote something to the effect that as governor she would look forward to working with the president on those and other issues. She wrote in the margin: “I don’t think so.”
Born in 1947, George W. Bush went to grade school and junior high in Midland. He spent enough of his adolescence in Houston’s posh River Oaks enclave that he and Molly Ivins, a future nemesis who gave him the nickname “Shrub,” ran in somewhat the same private-school crowd. But like his dad (and David Richards), he went on to attend the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. His grades at the prep school were good, and the legacy of his grandfather and father guaranteed him admission to Yale and its famous secret society, Skull and Bones. He was a child of the sixties, but like his contemporary Karl Rove, he recoiled from what was becoming youthful fashion. His dad had been a Phi Beta Kappa. George W. chased tail with the guys and just got by with his grades. During a visit home after graduation, George W. veered drunkenly into his parents’ driveway, overran the garbage cans, then offered his disgusted father a fistfight, “mano a mano.” Great numbers of American families have experienced something like that.
His hell-raising years coincided with the height of the war in Vietnam. Without question, some political calls were made for him, one to the Democrat Ben Barnes, then the lieutenant governor. Those calls scooted George W. to the head of the waiting list to join the Texas Air National Guard, which enabled him to avoid the draft. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and learned to fly F-102 fighter jets. George W. Bush obtained an MBA from Harvard, and then, like his dad, he drove out to Midland to make it as a wildcatter. He raised $2 million for his company, Bush Exploration, and lost it drilling dry holes. After two years out there, he ran for Congress because Jimmy Carter was trying to regulate natural gas and, he said, had the nation “headed toward European-style socialism.” The Democratic state senator from Lubbock, Kent Hance, whipped him handily in 1978, casting him as a beer-drinking party boy who needed to grow up.
On the good side of the ledger, George W. had met and married a public school librarian, Laura Welch, who had moved back to her hometown after enjoying her own fun-loving years in Austin. He woke up with a crushing hangover after his fortieth-birthday celebration in Colorado Springs and abruptly quit drinking. Another defining thing that happened for him in those years was that he became a fervent born-again Christian. He attributed it to a long conversation with Billy Graham at his parents’ retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, and in men’s Bible-study classes he attended in Midland. Still, in apparent fear of what George might blurt, his mother had him seated at the far end of the table during a formal dinner for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Barbara fondly remarked to the queen that he was the black sheep of the family.
A succession of fortunate mergers gave him the chance to run a Cincinnati-based company, Spectrum 7, and for three years, he was president of a company with dozens of producing wells. Then the eighties oil bust almost took Spectrum under. A merger with a company called Harken Energy staved off that calamity, and because of his dad’s power and stature, George W.’s role drew scrutiny when Harken outbid much bigger Amoco for exclusive rights to drill offshore in the Persian Gulf for Bahrain.
Having failed to replicate his dad’s success as a West Texas oilman, he moved his family to Dallas. In 1998, a month before the old man, that alleged wimp, demolished Michael Dukakis, George W. learned that a Bush family friend wanted to sell the Texas Rangers baseball team. He helped arrange a syndicate that bought the then-mediocre team for $89 million. George W. borrowed $500,000 to obtain a small stake in the franchise and the title of managing general partner. One highlight of his role was when the Rangers were able to sign Nolan Ryan away from the Houston Astros, and it turned out the old fireballing pitcher still had plenty of gas in his tank.
In the run-up to the 1990 elections, before the emergence of Clayton Williams, there was a bit of talk about George W. as a gubernatorial candidate. But the family’s hopes for another star politician were reportedly focused more then on his younger brother Jeb in Florida. And the launch of a political career was feasible for neither of them as long as the old man was president. George W.’s principal job was, once again, to put his good name to use, this time by lobbying for a new, publicly funded, $191 million stadium for the Rangers. The referendum passed by a 2–1 margin. Local legislators crafted and pushed a bill to create the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority; they needed the quasi-governmental body in order to use the power of eminent domain. In one of the choice ironies in both their lives, Governor Ann Richards had signed that bill into law in 1991.
The authority condemned thirteen acres of private property—two owners sued, unsuccessfully trying to stop construction of The Ballpark in Arlington. Bush then owned 1.8 percent of the franchise, plus a 10 percent bonus if it was sold again and the original owners recovered their investment, plus interest. That occurred in 1998. Bush had invested $606,302 of his own money in the team; his profits from the Rangers’ sale earned him $14.3 million. Ann Richards helped make him a very rich man.
George W. had a friend in Dallas named Bob Beaudine. In his habit of awarding his friends and acquaintances nicknames, he called him Bobby Boy. Beaudine was a corporate headhunter and later a motivational speaker and author who developed a profitable sideline in matching college coaches with schools that were making a change; that bloomed into relationships with the PGA Tour and the front offices of the National Basketball Association, the Arena Football League, and Major League Baseball. Sports Illustrated lauded him as “the most influential man in sports you never heard of.” In 1992, an owner of the Atlanta Braves made him head of a search committee for the next baseball commissioner, who would succeed Fay Vincent. “George asked me to come over to his office one day,” Beaudine told me. “We talked baseball for a while, then some politics. He got serious and said, ‘Bobby Boy, you might as well get me the commissioner’s job because these people have got me running for governor, and I don’t think I can beat Ann Richards.’”
If he felt that way, why was he being pulled toward a race that might offer nothing more than a respectable loss and the chance to run again and win against a lesser Democratic opponent in 1998? And who besides Karl Rove w
ere “they”? Bush told several people that he was motivated by scorn for what he perceived as her ineptitude, especially on issues of public education. Robert Draper, the author of the incisive Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, told me flatly that while the family-vengeance motive might provide a neat narrative arc, he believed that the silver-spoon line and other insults were most likely about number thirty on George W. Bush’s list of reasons why he entered the race in 1994. But Bush’s rationale and behavior must be viewed in part through the prism of his subsequent history. When questioned during his presidency about his decision to take the country into war in Iraq, he pointed out that Saddam Hussein had tried to have his dad assassinated after the war over Kuwait. Certainly, that would be a matter of personal honor for any decent and loving son. But it does underscore that “looking out for the old man”—as the younger George Bush described his role in turning away most interview requests and being the one who told John Sununu he was fired as chief of staff during his father’s presidency—was a prominent aspect of his psychological makeup.
Ann officially announced her campaign for reelection on her sixtieth birthday, September 1, 1993. A large crowd of supporters packed into a midsize Austin convention hall. Dorothy and I were there. As he had at the kickoff for her first governor’s race, the singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore performed in a voice and style that was part Jimmie Rodgers, part Buddy Holly, and Ann followed with a fiery, fist-pumping speech. She followed with birthday parties and kickoffs in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas—to a roaring crowd in the last city, the comedian Robin Williams performed in her behalf. But that first event felt odd to me. It didn’t have a pulse.
