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  Let the People In

  THE PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK WAS SUPPORTED BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE IN HONOR OF MARY MARGARET FARABEE, FOR HER INESTIMABLE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AND TEXAS LETTERS.

  Becky Beaver and John Duncan

  Susan Block

  Stephen L. Clark

  Eleanor and Jim Cochran

  Carolyn Curtis

  Gabrielle de Kuyper Bekink

  Jess Hay

  Jane Hilfer

  Joanna Hitchcock

  Luci Baines Johnson

  Cynthia Keever

  Jeanne and Michael Klein

  The Lebermann Foundation

  Teresa Lozano Long

  Alice Ann Lynch

  Maline G. McCalla

  The MFI Foundation

  Brad and Michele Moore

  Dr. Nona Niland

  Rosalba Ojeda

  Ellen and Ed Randall

  Jean and Dan Rather

  Edward Z. Safady

  Jane Schweppe

  Sander and Lottie Shapiro

  Suzanne and Marc Winkelman

  Mary and Howard Yancy

  ALSO BY JAN REID

  Comanche Sundown (a novel)

  Texas Tornado: Doug Sahm, with Shawn Sahm

  Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

  The Hammer: Tom DeLay, with Lou Dubose

  Rio Grande

  Boy Genius: Karl Rove, with Lou Dubose and Carl Cannon

  The Bullet Meant for Me

  Close Calls

  Vain Glory

  Deerinwater (a novel)

  The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

  Let the People In

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANN RICHARDS

  Jan Reid

  RESEARCH ASSISTANCE BY SHAWN MORRIS

  UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2012 by Jan Reid

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2012

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

  Permissions

  University of Texas Press

  P.O. Box 7819

  Austin, TX 78713-7819

  www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Reid, Jan.

  Let the people in :the life and times of Ann Richards / by Jan Reid ;

  research assistance by Shawn Morris. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-292-71964-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-292-74452-3 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-74579-7 (individual e-book)

  1. Richards, Ann, 1933–2006. 2. Governors—Texas—Biography. 3. Politicians—United States—Biography. 4. Democratic Party (U.S.)—Biography. 5. Texas—Politics and government—1951– I. Title.

  F391.4.R53R45 2012

  976.4'063092—dc23

  [B]

  2012016118

  For Dorothy, Lila, and Isabelle

  The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried eggs on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I’ve had to deal with in politics.

  ANN RICHARDS

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE: Glimpses

  PART ONE: GARDENS OF LIGHT

  CHAPTER 1: Waco

  CHAPTER 2: New Frontiers

  CHAPTER 3: Lovers Lane

  CHAPTER 4: Mad Dogs and First Fridays

  CHAPTER 5: The Hanukkah Chicken

  PART TWO: SUPERWOMAN’S CHAIR

  CHAPTER 6: Problem Lady

  CHAPTER 7: Landslides

  CHAPTER 8: Raw Deals

  CHAPTER 9: Capsized

  CHAPTER 10: The Class of ’82

  CHAPTER 11: Raise Money and Wait

  CHAPTER 12: Cheap Help

  PART THREE: ONLY IN TEXAS

  CHAPTER 13: Poker Faces

  CHAPTER 14: The Speech

  CHAPTER 15: Dispatches

  CHAPTER 16: Backyard Brawl

  CHAPTER 17: Answer the Question

  CHAPTER 18: Bustin’ Rocks

  CHAPTER 19: The Rodeo

  PART FOUR: THE PARABOLA

  CHAPTER 20: The New Texas

  CHAPTER 21: Fast Start

  CHAPTER 22: Ethicists

  CHAPTER 23: Odd Couples

  CHAPTER 24: Favorables

  CHAPTER 25: White Hot

  CHAPTER 26: Heartaches by the Number

  CHAPTER 27: Troubles by the Score

  CHAPTER 28: Sass

  CHAPTER 29: Collision Course

  CHAPTER 30: Queen Bee

  EPILOGUE: Passages

  NOTES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  INDEX

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a biography that contains a thread of memoir. I must thank Don Carleton, Evan Hocker, and their fellow archivists and librarians at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History of the University of Texas in Austin; they have done a masterly job of sorting, arranging, and preserving a massive archive detailing Ann Richards’s life and career. Joel Minor of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos found and shared gems of the correspondence between Ann and Bud Shrake.

  I am grateful to my wife, Dorothy Browne, who has been my best and most demanding source and reader, and Shawn Morris, my research assistant. The project drew thoughtful and enthusiastic input from the Richards family: David, Cecile, Dan, Clark, and Ellen. I am grateful to the late Bud Shrake and to Gary Cartwright for gentle and humorous pointers along the way.

  I treasure memories of Ann, Bud, Phyllis Cartwright, Molly Ivins, Fletcher and Libby Boone, Lopez Smitham, Pat Cole, Bill Ramsey, Nancy Kohler, Wayne Oakes, Henry and Mary Holman, Marge Hershey, and Sam and Virginia Whitten.

  Extremely helpful were professional associates of Ann, who include Mary Beth Rogers, Glenn Smith, Bill Cryer, George Shipley, Joe Holley, Joy Anderson, Marlene Saritzky, Rebecca Lightsey, Barbara Chapman, Richard Moya, Shelton Smith, Selden Hale, and Chris Hughes.

  I am indebted to Suzanne Coleman, Monte Williams, Annette LoVoi, Margaret Justus, Ellen Halbert, John P. Moore, Chuck Bailey, Andy Sansom, Bob Beaudine, Jim Henson, Doug Zabel, Ronnie Earle, Carlton Carl, Harold Cook, Joaquin Jackson, Dick DeGuerin, John Massey, John Keel, Nadine Eckhardt, Kaye Northcott, Jeanne Goka, Bill Head, Mark Strama, Gary and Tam Cartwright, Michael and Sue Sharlot, Doatsy Shrake, Ben Shrake, Alan Shrake, Jody Gent, Eddie Wilson, Bill and Sally Wittliff, Mark McKinnon, Jerry Jeff and Susan Walker, Ave Bonar, Wayne Slater, and Tad Hershorn. Some may not know how they helped, but they did. I learned much from the work of my fellow journalists and researchers Jan Jarboe Russell, Lou Dubose, Dave McNeely, Paul Burka, Mimi Swartz, R. G. Ratcliffe, Robert Draper, Skip Hollandsworth, and Brant Bingamon.

  I thank Garry Mauro, John Hall, Richard Raymond, Bob Krueger, Peggy Garner, Judith Zaffirini, Bob Rosenbaum, Jim Phillips, Elliott Naishtat, Kirk Watson, David Braun, Christopher Cook, and Bill Young for the friendships and the achievements shared in Texas politics and government over the past forty years; Bill Broyles, Greg Curtis, Evan Smith, and Jake Silverstein, my editors at Texas Monthly; Clayton McClure Brooks, the anthology editor who planted one of the essential seeds; my friend and agent David McCormick; and Dave Hamrick, Allison Faust, Lynne Chapman, Lindsay Starr, Theresa May, Joanna Hitchcock, William Bishel, Casey Kittrell, and other friends and colleagues at the University of Texas Press, as well as freelance editor Kip Keller and fact checker Kate Hull.

  PROLOGUE

&nb
sp; Glimpses

  The first time I saw Ann Richards, she was playing gonzo bridge, as her Austin pals called their game, in the home of Fletcher and Libby Boone. The party was on a Sunday night in the late fall of 1980 or early winter of 1981. With children whooping in the bedrooms, foursomes of cardplayers going at each other across tables that filled up the living room, and much strong drink poured in the kitchen, I was parked on a sofa with no interest in learning to play bridge. I was there because I had begun to court Dorothy Browne, a friend of Ann who worked for the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. (She later served as a senior aide on Ann’s staff at the state treasury and in the governor’s office. I was an adviser on environmental policy during Ann’s 1990 race for governor, and during her administration, I wrote speeches and research papers for John Hall, her chief appointee in that realm. Full disclosure, or at least half the glass.)

  I had been living out in the country fifty miles from Austin during the years when Ann emerged in Austin politics and government. I must have heard of her, but little more than that. The crowd in the Boones’ house that night was full of characters who were hard to overshadow, but Ann filled up the room. She was forty-seven then. Despite premature lines in her face and throat, and a hairstyle that harked back to a time when “permanent” was used as a noun—some friends jokingly called the coiffure Hi Yo Silver—she was sexy as all get-out. Believe it; she sure did. Ann liked men, and when she turned on the charm, she was all blue eyes and dimples. As I watched her that night, she cocked an eyebrow at the dubious prospects of a hand she had been dealt, leaned back in her chair, and drawled loudly, “I’ve just got to tell you all about Club. We have such a good time at Club. We just talk and talk. And when we get to the end, we vote on what’ll be our next meeting’s topic of discussion. I think I’m going to propose vaginal itch.”

  Ann looks over the crowd on the day of her inauguration as Texas governor, January 1991.

  It was a while before I fully understood that joke. The bawdy and rowdy feminist was one of the familiar sides of Ann, but something else underlay her wisecrack about the stuffiness and pretensions of Texas social clubs. In a crowd that was well juiced and thought nothing of it, she was talking about the newness and rawness of her commitment to the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. A few Sundays earlier, her husband, David, her two oldest children, and nine of her closest friends had with great pain of their own reduced her to sobs in the ordeal of intervention. The ambush occurred in the home of her friends and neighbors Mike and Sue Sharlot. Mike was a law school professor, and Sue was then an administrative nurse who later got her own law degree. Sue called and made up some story about a parent who had fallen ill, and Ann rushed over to their house. Her two younger kids were away in school, and on seeing everyone, she responded with the instinctive fright of a mother: “Are the children all right?”

  Hours later, she was on a plane to the St. Mary’s Chemical Dependency Services facility at the Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis. She said later that she had tried to fight off their pleas and their harsh testimony of what she was doing to herself, and to them. “I was terrified,” she recalled in her subsequent memoir, Straight from the Heart. “I was a public person, there was no way I could survive it.”

  She feared that when she came home, she would have nothing in common with her friends. She feared that if she quit drinking, she would lose her gift for being funny.

  That fall she was reelected without opposition to the Travis County commissioner’s court in Austin, and her monthlong absence from work never came up in the press. But her twenty-eight-year marriage to David had been strained for some time, and two months after she came back from Minnesota, he moved out. They made two attempts to reconcile, but by 1983 the parting of their ways was permanent. Ann said that accepting the divorce was the most difficult thing she had ever done. Dorothy Browne and I were married on Fletcher and Libby Boone’s lawn in West Lake Hills on the Fourth of July 1982. We invited Ann, who was then waging a campaign for state treasurer, to join us that beautiful night. She sent us a nice gift, and I remember her note saying that she was having trouble with weddings right then. Dorothy recalled it as saying that “it would be like touching a warm burn.”

  Ann was wounded in spirit those first months I came to know her. By standards she held dear—as a wife, as a mother, as an elected official, as a responsible person—she had reason to feel like crawling under a rock. But that was not her way of doing things. With her wisecracks at that bridge party, she had been making a statement that she was not going to give up friendships and rituals that enriched her life. And those months at the start of the 1980s were the very time when she negotiated a leap upward in politics that would make her grin, drawl, and grit known and celebrated throughout the world.

  Ann was one of those characters who seem to pop up everywhere all the time. When Ann lived in Dallas, she and her family were far too close for comfort to the John F. Kennedy assassination. A decade later, after moving to Austin, Ann and David became central figures in the most uproarious and bohemian years in the capital’s history—anti–Vietnam War protests, a madcap bunch called Mad Dog, Inc., the coming of Willie Nelson, and the famous concert hall, Armadillo World Headquarters. In 1972, Ann managed the first state legislative race of Sarah Weddington, the young attorney who was preparing to deliver the winning Supreme Court arguments in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that became the political and philosophical mainstay of American feminism. In her political coming-of-age, Ann experienced unpleasant face-to-face encounters with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter in the days of their overweening power. In 1982, taking advantage of a corruption scandal, she was elected state treasurer and became the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in fifty years. Then came the opportunity that made her a sensation.

  Most of the 1988 presidential race between Michael Dukakis and George Herbert Walker Bush has faded into obscurity. That race proved to be the most triumphant time in the elder George Bush’s life. He emerged from the long shadow of Ronald Reagan, who had routed him in his first race for the presidency and then had largely ignored him during his eight years as vice president. Bush’s landslide victory over the Massachusetts governor was a stinging rebuke of the Democrats. But at the start of the race, Dukakis led in many polls, and a telephone call initiated by his campaign changed Ann Richards’s life. Paul Kirk, the chairman of the Democratic Party, tracked her down in the Austin airport one day and asked her to make the keynote speech at that summer’s national convention in Atlanta. “I was standing there on the linoleum at a pay phone in the airport, and I was floored,” she recalled in her book. “‘You’re kidding.’”

  One of Ann’s erstwhile allies in Texas Democratic politics, Attorney General Jim Mattox, responded with a huffy call to Kirk and bellowed that this wrongheaded scheme would be a grievous insult to his 1990 race for governor. But Ann was fifty-four when her call to the big time came; she was no unseasoned rookie. She ignored Mattox and sought advice from Mario Cuomo; Barbara Jordan; Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary; and Ted Sorensen, JFK’s famous speechwriter. Cuomo told her, “You have no idea how much your life is about to change.”

  Bob Strauss, a native of Texas, an associate of Lyndon Johnson, and a former chairman of the Democratic Party, recommended a veteran speechwriter in Washington, D.C. The writer faxed drafts to her tiny political office in Austin. Ann felt the speech was turning into a mishmash that sounded nothing like her. At the last moment, a computer crash destroyed the Washington speech-writer’s files and morale. Ann and her party left for the convention in Atlanta with no speech. In her hotel suite, she went to work with a group of women who included the speechwriter she trusted to anticipate her thoughts and capture her voice. Suzanne Coleman was an affable former lecturer in political science at the University of Texas; for nearly twenty years, she had to be the most overworked speechwriter in the country, and though she was not widely known because Ann did not achieve n
ational office, she was one of her generation’s best.

  The day of the speech, Walter Cronkite left a message at the hotel and asked Ann to come by and see him in the convention hall if she had time. The veteran CBS newsman had attended Houston public schools and the University of Texas; Ann had known him for years. She looked him up that afternoon and told him, “Walter, I want you to be prepared for what kind of speech you’re going to hear from me tonight.” Cronkite gave her a quizzical look. “I’m going to talk Texas,” she announced.

  With a snort of laughter he replied, “Oh. Well, that’s great.”

  That night Ann wore a stunning blue dress—the color that is television’s favorite—with her silver hair swept up and back. She began by criticizing her party. “Twelve years ago Barbara Jordan, another Texas woman, made the keynote address to this convention, and two women in a hundred sixty years is about par for the course. But if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backward and in high heels!”

  Ann and her team had anticipated that about fifteen lines in the speech would draw applause or laughter. She was interrupted more than forty times. Once during the applause she reached for her glass of water and realized her hand was shaking so badly that she very carefully set it back down. “She looked so small out there,” recalled her son Dan, who sat with the family in the wings.

  But viewers perceived none of Ann’s anxiety. Her timing was exquisite, the material drawn from a populist upbringing that put her out in the world as a junior high schoolteacher when she was barely out of her teens. She was not impressed by class distinctions born of Connecticut wealth and privilege. “Poor George,” she said, throwing her arms wide with a delighted grin, “he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Though the New York Times and others quickly noted that the taunt was not original, Ann’s delivery of that line made her famous.

  Toward the end, she softened the tone and reflected on the promise and the challenges of this nation, which had come to mind while she was playing a game of ball on “a Baptist pallet” with her “nearly perfect grandchild, Lily.” (She had one grandchild at the time, the daughter of Cecile.) “I spread that Baptist pallet out on the floor,” she described the moment, “and Lily and I roll a ball back and forth.” It was her metaphor of a politics that spanned generations and lived up to its obligation to make lives better.