CHAPTER SEVEN

Running the Houston Post

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson congratulates Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby upon winning the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s third-highest honor. Courtesy Culver Pictures Inc.

I think I’ll like Houston if they ever get it finished.

OVETA CULP HOBBY

Returning to Houston and her job as executive vice president of the Houston Post after retiring from being the director of the Women’s Army Corps, Oveta walked into a changed city. She and the governor enjoyed a privileged position of power. Running one of the two major newspapers in Houston gave them entrée into the backrooms of city and state politics, where the real “work” and deals of the city were made.

Oveta wasted no time in picking up where she left off, rejoining her activities as a patron of the arts. She was on the board of directors of both the Houston Symphony and the Museum of Fine Arts at different times and supported both organizations throughout her life. She began collecting artwork for her own personal collection and soon filled her house and office with masterpieces bought on her behalf by Pierre Matisse, the son of the famous impressionist artist. Pierre, living in New York City, would send Oveta letters and pictures of pieces he thought she would enjoy, and buy them on her behalf, shipping the pieces she chose to her home in Houston.

One thing Oveta had become masterful at during her Army career was delegating and getting help with her projects. She learned that one person can’t do everything and was quick to enlist competent people to help her.

Just how did Oveta get all her work done? The St. Louis Dispatch gave a glimpse into her management style:

Two secretaries at her Post office and a domestic staff of four at home help Mrs. Hobby with career and household duties. Day begins at 6 a.m. in the 22-room house bought and remodeled under her supervision in 1946. Household problems come first and by 8:15 a.m. Mrs. Hobby calls her office to have important mail read to her and give suggestions for the day.

By 10:30 a.m. she is in her office [at the newspaper] ready for more mail and comments on the day’s issue of the paper. Generally, the morning is spent with department heads. After lunch at home, she’s back in her office at 2:30 p.m. for conferences with editorial department heads and for other meetings her civic responsibilities require. By 6:15 p.m. she is ready to leave her desk.

“One thing about her experience in the Army,” a secretary said, “she leaves her desk every night as clean as if a vacuum cleaner had been over it.”

And how does she get it all done?

“I do one thing at a time, trying to put first things first,” was her simple answer.1

With the end of World War II and the threat of Nazism under control, a new threat appeared on the horizon, the threat of communism.

Soon, accusations echoed over the radio waves and newspapers about the “Reds” taking over the country. Reds was the term used in reference to communists. The communists were lumped into the same category as liberals, progressives, Democrats, and left-wingers. Once a person was labeled as a communist, his or her job and livelihood were threatened. No reasonable person at the time considered people who were Democrats or liberals to be communists, but once a person was labeled as a communist, things could go wrong for him or her very quickly.

A group of powerful conservative women in Houston, known as the Minute Women, took as their mission the identification of communists. They used their considerable power to discredit those people they identified, rightly or wrongly, as communist.

During the same time, in the early 1950s, a Wisconsin senator by the name of Joe McCarthy climbed on the bandwagon and began a national campaign to eradicate communists from the United States. Hollywood celebrities were targeted and many lost their jobs, including the actor/comedian Charlie Chaplin, who was forced to emigrate to England to escape persecution.

It did not matter if a person actually was a communist, just the implication that they might be a communist was enough to damage their reputation, often forever.

This issue put Oveta in a tough position, both personally and in her capacity as head of the Houston Post with her husband. Governor Hobby, by this time in his mid-seventies, was more provincial and conservative than his wife, who was a dedicated Eisenhower Republican and internationalist. These differences in their political bents were played out on the pages of their newspaper. The governor’s views were written in the paper’s editorial columns by an old friend of his, Ed Kilman; Oveta’s more liberal viewpoint was articulated by staff writers such as Marguerite Johnston and George Fuermann in the newspaper’s articles.2

Speaking before the Alabama Press Association in February 1950, Oveta said, “When sensational charges are made . . . by vacant-minded or hysterical people . . . the charges are broadcast from coast to coast; and the public instinct is to accept charges as proof.” She asked her journalist colleagues to emphatically ask, “What is your proof?” when these allegations arose.3

Oveta found herself somewhat between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, she was against the anti-communist rhetoric being flung by her very own newspaper in Ed Kilman’s editorial columns. On the other hand, Kilman was representing her husband’s viewpoints.

Oveta tried to get Kilman moved to another job in the newspaper, but the governor refused to let her do so, protecting his right-wing colleague. When one of the more liberal reporters complained to Oveta about Kilman, Oveta showed her frustration by shrugging her shoulders, saying, “There comes a time in every marriage when a wife knows she has said all she can say about a particular matter.”⁴

During this time, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, or “Ike,” as he was affectionately known, won the Republican nomination for president of the United States. Oveta and Ike had a mutual admiration for each other. She had worked with the general both in Africa and England during World War II, and she got to know him well. During his presidential campaign, she became one of his biggest supporters and “used her newspaper resources for great effect” to help bolster his nomination.⁵ She joined the group Democrats for Eisenhower and even went so far as to work in New York City as a leader of the national Citizens for Eisenhower organization during his presidential campaign. Her husband stayed in Houston to run the Post and support Eisenhower in that way.

Oveta spent most of her life in government and politics, in one way or another. “I think there’s always a great respect between people when each is sure that the other is dedicated to the public welfare,” she said. “If people are really interested in research and legislation, I didn’t find that it made any difference whether they were Republicans or Democrats . . . Among men and women who are really dedicated to the best interests of this country, you’ve seen it many times, the crossing over of party lines.”6

Oveta described Eisenhower as having amazing organizing skill “in welding together all the generals of the different commands and the different armies. It was a skill [she] never saw equaled.”⁷

So when Eisenhower won the presidential election in 1952, he appointed Oveta the head of the Federal Security Administration, or the FSA, which implemented the Social Security Act, among other things. He appointed her with the understanding that the FSA would soon be promoted to a cabinet-level government department, and she would become part of his cabinet.⁸

.   .   .

Eisenhower chose Oveta Hobby to run the new department partly because Oveta was a Texan and he owed an election debt to Texas, and partly because she was a woman and he had promised to install women in positions of responsibility. But he chose her principally because she possessed a rare talent for tactful administration.

The Senate agreed with the president. Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan himself, took Oveta under his wing and introduced her around Capitol Hill.

During her Senate confirmation hearing, Johnson said, “Texans are not always in agreement on everything. But there’s one thing there’s no disagreement on—that’s Oveta. She’s the type of woman you’d like to have for a daughter or a sister, a wife or a mother, or the trustee of your estate.”⁹

Oveta took with her to the Senate Finance Committee hearing a seating chart that she had asked her son, Bill Hobby, Jr., to prepare. She wanted to be able to address each committee member by name.10 When her name came up for the vote, the senators confirmed her in seven minutes. And just like that, she found herself head of an agency overseeing 36,800 employees and disbursing $4 billion a year. She was in charge of the Social Security Administration, the Public Health Service, the Offices of Education and Vocational Rehabilitation, and the Food and Drug Administration. In April 1953, all those departments were rolled into one big agency known as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). Oveta’s title as Secretary of HEW made her the second woman in the U.S. to hold a cabinet-level position of power in American government.

When Oveta was sworn in, her husband, the governor, was asked if he thought his wife was the smartest person in Eisenhower’s cabinet. Governor Hobby said, “’Course she is. And if she weren’t, she’d have them thinking she was.”¹¹

An article in the magazine Business Week said of Oveta: “Observers can make two mistakes about Mrs. Hobby, either of them fatal. They can figure that, as a woman, she doesn’t really know much about business. Or they can get the idea, for the same reason, that she can be pushed around.”¹²

Said a 1953 Time magazine article called “Lady in Command,”

She looked small and feminine behind her broad mahogany desk, but she moved with the poise and confidence of a successful business executive, as she checked “yes” and “no” on a long list of requests for appointments and telephone priorities. Now and then she paused reflectively and puffed on a Parliament [cigarette], then turned back to work. Outside, down through the mazes, corridors and channels of Health, Education and Welfare, the news was spreading that Oveta Hobby was a lady in complete command.

Oveta’s life moved with the precision of a metronome. At home in Houston, she issues household instructions to her domestic staff at weekly meetings. A fitful sleeper, she keeps a notebook on her bedside table, makes frequent midnight notes on her “planned life.” Her office appointments are lined up on a conveyor-belt schedule. Her double-handled calfskin bag, which she carries everywhere, is a special efficiency container which she designed for her business papers, her purse, and a Book of Common Prayer.13

Even after moving back to Washington, D.C., to head up the HEW, Oveta kept her hand in the matter of the Houston Red Scare from afar. The Minute Women insisted that Oveta had communist sympathies and charged that HEW was “socialistic.”¹⁴ At that point, Oveta had had enough. She used her behind-the-scenes power and proved herself a superb tactician. Oveta convinced the governor to stop Kilman’s editorial Red-baiting, and the Post editorials became more moderate. The death blow to the Houston part of the movement came when Oveta gave the okay to publish an exposé of Houston’s Red Scare groups, including the Minute Women. She ran the exposé on the front page of the Post, where everyone would be sure to see it, as part of a series by Ralph O’Leary.

The series of articles ran for ten days in October 1953. The articles were so well written, researched, and crafted that progressive groups around the nation started ordering reprints. The demand was so great that the Post printed a special edition containing only the exposé articles; twenty thousand copies sold. This action effectively began the process of discrediting the Minute Women and ending their vicious attacks on Oveta and the HEW.¹⁵