PROLOGUE

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 national 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.

Most political keynote speeches, and the speakers who deliver them, are forgotten in a few weeks or months. But now and then a few leave an aura of eloquence, reason, and passion that lingers on in the theater of democracy. When Ann walked offstage, she asked Wayne Slater, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, “How’d I do?” He laughed and wondered whether she was serious. She had gone out into those lights a national unknown and come off a television superstar.

For several years, Ann had been a friend of the accomplished novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and dramatist Edwin “Bud” Shrake. After her divorce from David, Bud became the second great love of her life. The day after her speech, the avalanche of praise included a letter faxed from Bud.

Dear Ann:

Your speech was wonderful and your delivery was magnificent, and vice versa. You had me laughing, you had me crying. In short, you really got to me, kid.

I am so proud of you it makes my eyes run. Ever since you caught me under your pool table in Dallas (or was it ping pong?) I’ve known you are an incredible person. Now the whole world knows it.

[He told her about a call he’d received from his literary agent in New York.] She said, after much gushing of praise for your speech, “David Letterman’s people will be calling you today to see if they can get Ann on their show.” This is show biz thinking—call this one to get that one. . . .

You looked so beautiful on TV in your blue dress. The Belle of the Ball, for sure. I saw one shot of Mattox, looking like a little boy trying to be brave in the dentist’s waiting room.

You realize what a huge leap you just took? A Hollywood guy might call it “jumping over the shit.”

Love, Bud

After that fall’s election, Ann sent President Bush a telegram wishing him “the very best” in his administration. He responded some days later with a note and a small silver pendant in the shape of a foot. He wrote, “You’ve probably received a hundred of these ‘feet’ but I wanted you to have this one from me—a peace offering.” The gestures inferred that rough-and-tumble politics were just part of the process and were all in good fun, as long as politicians kept their bearings and remembered their purpose. But in the last debate with Dukakis, Bush had said, “I don’t want to be like the kid in the schoolyard—‘he started it.’” Then he went on to be just that kid in the schoolyard, arguing that the “ugly” and “nasty” tone of the race had been set at the Democratic National Convention. Bush and his family were thoroughly annoyed by the impudence of that woman, and as time went by, she made more sport of ridiculing the president. In tongue-lashing the elder George Bush, Ann lit the fuse of a grudge match that may have altered the course of American history.

Tiresome a throwback as televised political conventions seem today, huge numbers of Americans still watch them every four years, and like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in more recent memory, Ann Richards demonstrated that a powerful and personality-enriched speech at either a Democratic or a Republican national convention can be a politician’s fastest climb up ambition’s ladder. Late in life as Ann got started in politics, and with the kind of base she possessed, it is almost inconceivable that she could have gotten elected governor of Texas in 1990 or any other year if she had not been handed that incredibly lucky break in 1988. Boosted into contention by her celebrity and wit, she overcame long odds and brutal campaigns against two veteran Democrats and a rich, colorful Republican to become the first ardent feminist elected to high office in this country. Hillary Clinton was her protégée, even when she was the nation’s First Lady and then a U.S. senator from New York. Some of the cracks in the glass ceiling were put there by Ann.

The question remains, though—what did she accomplish with her high office? In a state that continued to be saddled with a sternly limited governmental structure devised when the South was just emerging from the bruising experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction, she also had to contend with the fact that national politics and changing demographics had left her swimming for her life as a liberal Democrat in an ocean of conservative Republicans. In a failed presidential campaign, Texas’s Republican senator Phil Gramm once boasted that the best thing a politician can have is money. It helps, of course, and yet he was proved quite wrong: the biggest advantage a politician can have is that people like you.

Ann knew she had that going for her, and she shrewdly used it to her advantage. She knew that a governor or president elected with a slim majority or less had better push an agenda hard at the start of the term, before the sheer gravity of governing starts its ineluctable pull. Her greatest accomplishment was to bring to positions of responsibility and power in Texas the women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, gay men, lesbians, and disabled persons who had been so long denied. Because of that, the state government centered in Austin will never be the same. Whatever party wins the elections and controls the appointed boards that keep the bureaucratic agencies and institutions of higher education running, democracy in Texas is better because she won.

And yet like so many politicians who come into office promising reform and change, she found herself stymied and frustrated. As a philosophical leftist, she had to try to establish a footing at the center, and that was not so easy and comfortable as raising hell on the outside of power. Legislative majorities and courts enforcing lawsuits lost by the state forced her into unseemly compromises. She advanced some of the most progressive penal programs the country had ever seen, and yet she oversaw a massive prison buildup and did nothing to steer Texas away from being the nation’s most prolific executioner.

Her ideology constrained her more than once, with damaging political results. Her rigid insistence on support for abortion rights as a litmus test for appointments helped cost her party a chance to retain one of its seats in the U.S. Senate—one that twenty years later appears lost for good. Like many politicians, she was loyal to a fault, sidling up to powerful men who acted as if they were friends and then tried to gut her the first chance they got. The feminist heroine was confounded by the fear, resentment, and obstacle of white males. On one matter of principle—the need to balance the Second Amendment and sporting and other legitimate uses of firearms against a paranoid and murderous rage of gunfire in the streets—she dug in her heels in a way that was counterproductive. She ridiculed men and women who disagreed with her on that issue, and in her mind, their rebellion against her governance cost her more years of opportunity to accomplish things that inspired her.

She far transcended being a mere regional politician, but her time in the spotlight proved fleeting. When the end came, she remarked that if she had known she was going to lose, she would have raised a little more hell. The fact was, she raised plenty of hell. But she found that her state and most likely the nation were not ready to be led by a smart-mouthed woman. She might have gone further and risen higher in politics if she could have adapted to the contemporary necessity of having a squeaky-clean background—or at least making it appear that way—and trying to be all things to all people. In that way, she never veered and remained fundamentally true to herself. One thing Ann Richards could never be was bland. She had a large share of flaws and failures; she could be one hell of a boss to work for. But young people who flocked to her grimy campaign office and worked in her administration described a euphoria and a sense of calling they had never before experienced in politics. In Texas, of all places, one fall night in 1990 a silver-haired fifty-seven-year-old woman climbed on a stage in an Austin hotel, pumped her fist in triumph, and set off scenes of unabashed joy.

But that’s ranging far ahead of her story.

 

 

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