CHAPTER 14

The Speech

Ann turned fifty-five in 1988. She had finally been able to quit smoking. She watched her diet more when an annual physical gave her an elevated reading of her cholesterol. She walked for exercise. She took a great deal of pleasure in being a new grandmother. But she had absorbed more personal blows as she pushed the Treasury agenda and spoke to Lions and Rotary clubs around the state. Her great friend Virginia Whitten had been diagnosed with breast cancer not long after Sam died, and though she lasted longer than he had, until 1997, the dread illness claimed her too.

Ann had periodontal problems that were getting worse by the month. She flew out to Seattle for difficult oral surgery that allowed her to avoid dentures by getting implants and bridges. She complained to her son Dan that the things made it difficult for her to carry on a normal conversation, much less deliver a rousing speech. “Dear Bud,” she wrote. “Happy belated Valentine’s Day. I went to Seattle and got a lot of teeth pulled and bought some new ones. They make me look like Mr. Ed”—television’s talking horse.

She had recently taken part in a ceremony that honored Bud, Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Larry L. King with stars in a sidewalk in downtown Austin. A month after she sent him the Valentine, she got this letter from Bud.

You have been on my mind a lot lately, too, and not just because I saw you hugging and kissing a bloodhound in the newspaper. I got to thinking about all the nice things you said at the 6th Street ceremony, and how much I appreciated what you did. Being kind to dogs and me is a sure way to get a front row seat in heaven, but let’s don’t go there until the last plane out. There are nights when I’d like to dress up like a dancing Tampax again and take you on a tour of Harlem. Can this be done sober? Yes, after you become president of the U.S. and make me culture exchange attaché. (Fletcher is too irritable for the job.) I miss seeing you.

“I don’t believe it either, but I’m not going to turn them down,” Texas state treasurer Ann Richards said to a press aide when informed she had been chosen to give a career-making keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Here she fields local questions at a press conference following the announcement.

“Speaking in public,” Ann would reflect in her book, “is a very personal piece of business. Giving a good speech, especially one with some passion and emotion, you’re revealing a lot about yourself. You’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable position. It’s sort of like Lady Godiva riding down Main Street without clothes on. Or stepping up on a scale and getting weighed. There’s every possibility in the world that you’ll be found wanting.”

In the Democrats’ 1988 presidential race, Delaware senator Joe Biden had barely gotten started when he was found terribly wanting because of one speech. In September 1987, he had made a self-aggrandizing reference to his blue-collar origins in language lifted almost verbatim from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the British Labour Party leader. The plagiarism may have been the sin of the speech-writer, not the orator, but in any case that blunder knocked Biden out of the race.

Another man hoping to challenge Vice President Bush was the former Colorado senator and initial frontrunner Gary Hart. He torpedoed himself when reporters annoyed him with questions about rumors of his possible adultery. “Follow me around,” he dared them. “I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” A pair of reporters from the Miami Herald took him up on it, and the evidence of his affair with Donna Rice spelled the end of his campaign and career.

Following the exits of Biden and Hart, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis emerged and won the nomination, fending off Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Tennessee senator Al Gore. For a while during that summer of 1988, Dukakis’s star shone brightly. He had an accomplished actress cousin, Olympia Dukakis, who that same year had won an Academy Award for her role in Moonstruck, the kind of credit that doesn’t have anything to do with politics or government, but doesn’t hurt. He spoke a great deal about presiding over a “Massachusetts Miracle” of economic policy and achievement. Ann was impressed when Dukakis chose for his running mate Lloyd Bentsen, whose credits included defeating George Bush in a race for the U.S. Senate in 1970. She had urged Walter Mondale to put Bentsen on the ticket in 1984, even though Geraldine Ferraro got the nod.

Three weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta that summer, Ann was headed to make a speech about Treasury business in Houston when she called in from a pay phone at the Austin airport to get her messages. Her life would never be the same.

Bill Cryer was in Louisiana visiting his parents when the boss telephoned him. “She said, ‘Bill, I’m going to tell you something you would never believe.’ I said, ‘What’s that, Ann?’ She said, ‘I’ve been asked to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.’ I laughed and said, ‘Well, you’re right. I never would have believed that.’ She was laughing, too. ‘I don’t believe it either, but I’m not going to turn them down! I need you to get back over here.’”

A Massachusetts attorney named Paul Kirk chaired the Democratic National Committee. He had been impressed by Ann’s delivery and style in a speech nominating Ferraro for the vice presidency four years earlier. Other fans of Ann were Dukakis’s campaign manager, the feminist attorney Susan Estrich, and her then-husband Marty Kaplan, a movie and television producer who had been one of Mondale’s speechwriters. Kaplan later reflected on the selection process: “We talked about what the themes should be. No one should try to out-ring the eloquent oratory of Mario Cuomo four years ago. This should be a speech for the working person. It should spell out the simple needs and hopes of someone like Ann. It should be funny. It should also be common sense. That’s Ann.”

Ann said that she was so naïve about politics at that level that she thought she could keep an appointment at a board meeting and field press inquiries by telephone. But by the end of the first day, the small press operation at the Treasury had been swamped with calls from reporters pressing for an interview with this minor official who was little known outside Texas and feminist circles. Jim Mattox tried to badger Kirk into withdrawing the invitation. Spokesmen for the national party responded that the 1990 governor’s race in Texas was a long way off, that the party would stay out of that race, and that Ann’s selection for the keynote was locked in.

The Houston Post interviewed Mattox’s chief fund-raiser, Tom Green, who said, “I just don’t think it’ll have much impact on the Texas Democratic primary in 1990. . . . I couldn’t tell you one thing Mario Cuomo said four years ago, and everyone thought that was the greatest speech since sliced bread.” Mattox bristled: “It never ceases to amaze me that someone will get out there, get two or three blurbs on TV and in the papers, and all of a sudden they’re considered great candidates.” As Mattox’s displeasure raced outward through his political network and staff at the attorney general’s office, no one was more startled and uneasy than his chief of litigation, David Richards.

Mattox wasn’t the only Texas Democrat jolted by the news. That afternoon, Dorothy and I were shopping for groceries when we ran into Jim Hightower and his longtime companion, Susan DeMarco. Dorothy asked them with a burst of excitement: “Did you hear about Ann?” Jim responded to the news with a quick, sharp frown and a glance at Susan that puzzled me. He was the former Texas Observer editor who had fought for liberal causes in David’s office building, whose election as agriculture commissioner had been the entertaining highlight of the 1982 races. How could he begrudge this break going to Ann? It turned out that Michael Dukakis had been trying to ward off a rebellion at the convention by Jesse Jackson. The camps had been dickering back and forth, mostly about who would make what speech at what hour. In the trade-offs designed to make Jackson happy, Jim and some of his political allies hoped that he might get to deliver the convention keynote.

Ann’s political office had just sent out 39,500 letters to supporters asking for donations to the Ann Richards Capital Council—a euphemism for her political operation. “Of course it was a coincidence,” Jane Hickie said. “We’d been trying to get that out for months.” A gushy profile rushed to print in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times noted that Ann kept a motto on her refrigerator door that read: “Women should be obscene and not heard.” The writer told a story about how Ann had once startled a crowd of Wall Street bankers by pulling on her pig-snout mask and snorting her way through a Harry Porco routine; when the reporter asked whether she wanted to run for governor, she quipped, “It’s about time we put somebody in the Governor’s Mansion that knows how to clean it.”

For a week after the keynote announcement, she had little time to do anything but respond to the press. By the end of that week, alarm had begun to overtake euphoria. Suzanne Coleman, Mary Beth Rogers, and Jane Hickie were all accomplished writers at her command in Austin, but at first she acted as though she had no faith in her team. Ann saw the looming date on the calendar and decided she had two good talking points and little more. “I think I know how to open and close it,” she told Hickie, “which are the two tough parts. But we need a wordsmith.”

Ann called Bob Strauss, a Texan who had been chairman of the national party, and he recommended John Sherman, a veteran Washington speechwriter. Sherman was already juggling several other speeches for the convention, but he flew down to Austin.

Suzanne Coleman was gay, wonderfully gifted, and dedicated to Ann, though the wear and tear brought on by that dedication was already considerable. She was also working full-time at the Treasury, and the boss was being very careful not to get dinged in the press over state employees working for her in national politics while they were on the state payroll. At the meeting with Sherman, Suzanne gave him some old speeches and a first draft for the keynote she had written. He gathered them into his briefcase, flew back to his home in the Virginia suburbs, and went to work. Ann was trying to keep up with Treasury business, all the while fretting about the speech. Of reading Sherman’s draft, she said, “There were pieces in it I liked, pieces in it I didn’t care for, so I did an edit on that and faxed it back to him. The political office fax machine never stopped.”

The morning after Ann’s selection was announced, New York’s polished governor, Mario Cuomo, had called her with much encouragement but also told her, with a note of warning, that she had no idea how profound the change in her life was going to be. Her anxiety about the speech steadily mounted. She called former LBJ speechwriters George Christian and Harry McPherson—the latter had been a close friend of Ann and David during law school and their days in Washington—and she asked her pollster, Harrison Hickman, to draft a profile of a young middle-class family that was having a hard time making ends meet. That was the audience she hoped to connect with.

She called Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter, whom she didn’t know at all. She called Barbara Jordan, who sounded in her speeches as if she had invented the English language. Jane Hickie hired a former television newsman, Neal Spelce, whose mission was to teach Ann how to read and deliver text working off a teleprompter. She also hired an East Texas lawyer and convention veteran, Gordon Wynne, to manage the logistics of her entourage. An entourage! Ann now had a makeup artist from Washington. Women friends all over Texas were yanking fancy clothes off racks and sending them to her. She was a nervous wreck.

A new message from Bud came inside a card bearing a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson.

Dear Ann: I just want you to know that if you get stuck for a big opening—or closing, for that matter—the Flying Punzars, feeble though we have become, stand ready to rush from the wings and do our famous double-pyramid flip that broke a table and three chairs at the University Club.

In case your early jokes about rabbis, nuns, Greeks, and watermelons don’t go over, all you got to do is pucker up and whistle and the Punzars will be there. I am very proud of you.

Love, Bud

He was always good for a laugh and an encouraging word, but the lift was fleeting. Jane Hickie, Mary Beth Rogers, Suzanne Coleman, and Cathy Bonner were helping her edit Sherman’s drafts. The political office didn’t have enough room or furniture to accommodate them, so they moved to Bonner’s office. They were cutting and pasting as Ann complained that it didn’t have the flow she wanted, or the right tone. It was nice to know that Bullock had commented to a reporter, “There’s fixing to be a real stem-winder. Mark it down.” But Ann was aware that members of her team were starting to get pretty disgusted with her.

One of those days, she sent Bud a Far Side card and added a handwritten note.

Bud—

Book a flight for the Punzars. Crafting this speech is arduous and so far the only opening I like is “Here I am from deep in the heart of Texas whose history is principally the saga of what men do outdoors.” The censors have doubts.

Any practice for the triple should be done on the capitol steps since the set in Atlanta looks like a Buzby Berkley [i.e., Busby Berkeley] extravaganza with a Mayan pyramid floor.

I’m pretty scared. The best thing in all this is getting two notes from you.

Ann

The line about the great Texas outdoors, on loan from the author Celia Morris, did not make it into many drafts of the speech, and Berkeley’s name had faded from public awareness, except for moviegoers in the age group of Ann and Bud. Berkeley was a Depression-era choreographer of film and Broadway musicals, which included 42nd Street and its classic “Lullaby of Broadway.” He was also a rampaging martini drinker who disgraced himself by smashing into another car and killing two people. There but for the grace of God—as the saying goes.

“John Sherman was due to fax us more or less his final draft,” Ann reminisced about the keynote writing, “when he called to say that his computer had eaten the speech. He couldn’t get it out. The guy from the computer company was over there that moment and they were working on it, but he was afraid that the speech—and all of our work since the moment I had been chosen to deliver it—was gone forever. It was funny. I mean, I just thought, ‘Whatever can happen will happen. And it’s happening.’”

In the Atlanta airport, Ann was startled by all the shoving and the glaring lights of the media throng: “You feel like they’ve made a mistake. That they really don’t understand that you’re not that important. It was my first true moment in the eye of the media storm, and it took some getting used to. At first just the newness of it was a little distracting. But hour by hour, as it wasn’t going away, I settled into it. I began to think of the attention as just part of my job: this is what I do and this crush is going to be part of it.”

The Democrats had booked her party a number of rooms at the Omni Hotel—one suite became the keynote factory. “I was working the phones in the room adjoining,” Bill Cryer told me. “I’d hear an ongoing chatter from all these women, then there’d be a whoop of laughter, and then more chatter. I wasn’t on any terms at all with the Capitol press corps in Washington, and they were saying, ‘Who is this woman? Why did she get to do this? What is she going to say?’ The party people recognized the situation and sent me over some help.”

From the outset, the speech had two constant components. In one, Ann would describe a scene in which she was pushing a ball back and forth across “a Baptist pallet” with her grandchild Lily. This would be her metaphor for how the good ideas, works, and vision of government were passed on from generation to generation. The other key element was to be drawn from a letter Ann had received at the Treasury just days before her keynote selection was announced. Earlier in the summer, Donna Alexander had heard her speak to a professional trade group in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburb of Arlington. Alexander lived in Lorena, a town south of Waco that had 1,100 residents. She wrote that she and her husband had college degrees, she worked for a Medicaid-funded program, he worked for a public utilities company, and they had jobs with annual salaries that totaled about $50,000. She was the mother of three children, two of them teenagers. Alexander wrote of her concerns: “I’ve written my representatives and have received polite letters back. We vote in hopes of electing people who understand and do something—and I’m not sure to do what. Listen maybe.”

Ann had made a notation—“Needs a good response”—in the margin of the letter, and then passed it on to her Treasury staff. Then, suddenly, a thoughtful and moving letter from a constituent morphed into the linchpin of a prime-time television event. Cryer called Alexander to secure her permission for Ann to use portions of the letter in her speech. He assured the stunned and flattered woman that her identity would remain confidential.

Draft after draft appeared, in different typefaces from different computers and printers, with handwriting in the margins. One would begin with the woman’s letter from Lorena, then that piece would slide downward in the next, and it would start with the ball patted back and forth between Lily and her grandmother. (Lily Adams, who was then sixteen months old, flew out from her home in Los Angeles with her parents, Cecile Richards and Kirk Adams.) Ann’s large, forceful hand could be seen bearing down in the editing. With exasperation, she slashed the line “We’ve always believed what Ralph Waldo Emerson told us years ago, that this time, like all times, is a very good time if we but know what to do with it.” Emerson wrote that? Who could even say that without getting tongue-tied?

Just in time, the team of Ann and Suzanne began to match eloquence with grit and imagery that distinctly came from their Texas roots. One line of attack on Reagan and Bush went: “Let’s take the policy they’re proudest of—their defense policy. We Democrats are committed to an America that is strong militarily. And quite frankly, when our leaders tell us we need a new weapons system, our inclination is to say, well, they must be right. But when we pay billions for planes that won’t fly, billions for weapons that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work, we have our doubts.” Ann realized that last clause defused the ones preceding. She sharpened the paragraph into a rousing battle cry: “Billions for tanks that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work—that old dog won’t hunt.”

They wound up using three paragraphs from Donna Alexander’s letter. They debated back and forth about whether Ann should raise the pages as she read them.

Our worries go from payday to payday, just like millions of others. And we have two fairly decent incomes, but I worry how I’m going to pay for the rising car insurance and food.

I pray my kids don’t have a growth spurt from August to December so I don’t have to buy new jeans. We buy clothes at the budget stores and we have them fray and fade and stretch in the first wash. We ponder and try to figure out how we’re going to pay for college, and braces, and tennis shoes. We don’t take vacations and we don’t go out to eat.

Please don’t think me ungrateful. We have jobs, and a nice place to live, and we’re healthy. We’re people you see every day in our grocery stores. We obey the laws, we pay our taxes. We fly our flags on holidays. And we plod along trying to make it better for ourselves and our children and our parents. We aren’t vocal anymore. I think maybe we’re too tired. I believe that people like us are forgotten in America.

At which point Ann would bellow, “Well, of course you believe you’re forgotten, because you have been!”

In addition to Dukakis and Bentsen, she had to work in praise of Jesse Jackson at some length. Following a three-hour summit between their teams of politicos, Jackson and Dukakis revealed at the last minute that they would henceforth be united—to the disappointment of pundits and commentators, who had been savoring a donnybrook.

No matter how late Ann and her team worked on the speech, during the day she had to bear up under public demands—a profile in the Washington Post’s “Style” section, a taped interview with Charlie Rose, a Village Voice profile, a stern command from USA Today: “Must report to boss—very urgent. Q: major themes she might stress.”

She jockeyed for rehearsal and studio time with Ted Kennedy and the young Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton—enough bullshit gas in that studio to air a blimp. She saw the Texas-born columnist Linda Ellerbee at one rehearsal session and asked whether she wanted attribution for the line about Ginger Rogers matching Fred Astaire step for step in their movies while dancing backward in high heels. The writer told Ann it didn’t originate with her, she may have overheard it on an airplane—she was welcome to it. (The line was eventually credited to Jill Ruckelshaus, who was prominent in Republican politics, but it likely originated in the Bob Thornton comic strip Frank and Ernest.)

Lily Tomlin’s partner, Jane Wagner, weighed in with gusto. She offered the line that would make Ann Richards a household name. Ann’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, argued that she ought to ditch that, it was an old gag—everyone already knew it. “Well, I don’t know it,” Ann replied. “And if I don’t know it, Mama in Waco doesn’t know it either.” Ann’s son-in-law, Kirk Adams, bolstered her trust in her instincts. “Don’t let them talk you into taking that line out. It’s too good.”

A quiet, handsome man, the union organizer steadied his mother-in-law with a critique handwritten on pages of a yellow legal pad. He told her that the speech demanded three different styles and tones—wit, warmth, and charm. “I’ve never heard you put real anger in a speech but I think the feelings and issues of the woman from Lorena should be expressed that way; I think if you get that tone out right, it will really get the crowd going. But it is a very tricky tone to get across in the right way, especially on TV.”

He offered one cautionary note involving his daughter. He urged Ann not to let her eyes tear up or her voice waver in expressing those sentiments about the little girl. And on the crucial ending: “Because you have no large established group in the crowd that will insure a standing ovation at the end, the windup must gradually build that final applause. The language is great; the trick is to have people already on their feet before the end of the speech, rather than forcing them to get up after the speech is over. It is an emotional ending. I even got misty!”

Recalling Ann’s experience in San Francisco in 1984, when she made a speech seconding the vice presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro, she and her logistics manager, Gordon Wynne, got in a strenuous dispute with the convention manager. Ann insisted that she was not going to walk onstage until his crew dimmed the lights.

Ann was running for a second term as state treasurer when she met Lily Tomlin in 1986. The former star of Laugh-In, who by then had a successful film career, became one of Ann’s closest friends and a dedicated political supporter.

“I want to tell you,” he argued, “the networks are going to give us fits.”

“I can’t help it. It’s going to be a worse fit for you if I stop talking.”

Mario Cuomo came by that morning and gave her a beautiful sculpture of a good luck apple molded from Steuben glass. She made an appearance on The Today Show, then looked up Walter Cronkite in the convention hall and told him that she was going to be “talking Texan.” She met at midday with Lloyd Bentsen and Fort Worth’s Jim Wright, who had succeeded Tip O’Neill as Speaker of the House and was chair of the convention. She went back to the hotel at midafternoon and rested, listening to the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire. She dwelled on the Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” She saw Diane Sawyer in the rehearsal room and promised her that she would get to ask the first question after the speech.

Her hair was done up in a masterly silver pompadour, and she wore a simply cut, three-piece silk dress designed by the famous Adele Simpson; the remarkable thing was not the dress itself but the way its shade of blue exploded on a television screen. The climax of her performance came with three paragraphs that slammed the outgoing president, Ronald Reagan, and finished with comic ridicule of George Bush. She pulled off the last line with a slight tilt of her head, a gorgeous grin, all the right pauses, and an outward sweep of her arms.

The greatest nation of the free world has had a leader for eight straight years that has pretended that he cannot hear our questions over the noise of the helicopters. And we know he doesn’t want to answer. But we have a lot of questions. And when we get our questions asked, or there is a leak, or an investigation, the only answer we get is “I don’t know” or “I forgot.”

But you wouldn’t accept that answer from your children. I wouldn’t.

Don’t tell me you “don’t know” or you “forgot.” We’re not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth: not most days but every day—leaders who don’t forget what they don’t want to remember.

And for eight years George Bush hasn’t displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about. And now that he’s after a job that he can’t get appointed to, he’s like Columbus discovering America. He’s found child care. He’s found education. Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

Ann broke her promise to Diane Sawyer and asked the first question herself. In the wings, she saw Wayne Slater, a Dallas Morning News reporter, and asked him, “How’d I do?” There were many reviews of just how well she had done, none gushier than the New Yorker’s imperiously phrased “Talk of the Town.” A star is born.

When Ms. Richards lit into George Bush in her flat Texas twang, we tore ourself loose from the screen and climbed the stairs to the curtain behind the podium, about twenty feet from her, and we could feel the heat. She was out there cooking. She had a hot crowd and a good piece of material, and she was playing it big and letting the crowd go wild. She got to the line “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth”—and the roar of the crowd came in like breakers on the shore. You could hear the wave rise as she unreeled her line, and then it crashed on her and drenched her, and as it receded she paddled straight ahead . . .

“I’m a grandmother now. I have one nearly perfect granddaughter named Lily,” said Ms. Richards. “And when I hold that grandbaby I feel the continuity of life that unites us.” We thought, What a great finish, and then felt a little dry heat in our eyes, then a tear in the corner. At the end, the crowd stood up and threw all the noise at her that it could make.

That night, Ann swept onward in an adrenaline rush to the Nightline booth of Ted Koppel, an experience that rattled her because in the earphones as she tried to keep up with what he was asking, unknown persons, editors, and directors of some kind were talking through every question and answer. She managed to say that she thought the audience needed to have a little fun with George Bush. Then it was on to all the night’s parties. The next morning, she was besieged with requests for interviews and appearances: Reuters, Business Week, a newspaper called India Abroad, Larry King, Lesley Stahl, Diane Sawyer again, an invitation to sit between Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan on CNN’s Crossfire. On the last one, Ann scrawled an emphatic “no.”

Buoying her along the way was a wonderful fax of congratulations from Bud. Liz Carpenter barked directions from a seat in the second row at the press conference. Ann was holding her blond, ruddy-cheeked granddaughter, truly a beautiful child, who gazed about from that perch of love and safety with fascination. “Tell them how to spell her name,” Carpenter hollered.

“Adams, as in Abigail. Lily, as in Tomlin,” Ann replied. (Abigail Adams, the wife of President John Adams, was one of the earliest and strongest proponents of women’s property rights in the newborn country and a fierce opponent of slavery.) In her newspaper column, Ann’s friend Erma Bombeck related her quizzing of Carpenter on the exotic use of English in the speech.

”What about ‘He smells meat cookin’ on the stove?’”

“He’s hungry for the job,” Liz said. “Do I have to explain to you, ‘You can’t return ’em damp and hungry to the stable?’”

“I think I figured that one out, but what’s ‘The cow ate the cabbage?’”

“C’mon, you’re kidding. It means those are real facts.”

“Oh. And ‘I can still hear men laughin’ about Mama puttin’ Clorox in the well when the frog fell in.’”

There was silence. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what that means. But I do like “putting down a Baptist pallet.’”

“Spell it.”

“B-A-P-T—”

“No, I mean pallet.”

“‘P-A-L-L-E-T.’ It’s a bedroll. The one that’s really meaningful was used by LBJ.”

What? There was some lusty secret about Lyndon Johnson’s sleeping bag? Everyone seemed to be having a blast except Jim Mattox and George Bush, his family, and his advisers. Ann’s instant celebrity had repercussions in the nation’s media capitals, New York and Washington. Bud’s literary agent, Esther Newberg, caught up with him on a movie location. “Dear Bud, I forgot you were with Dennis Hopper. I’ve been trying to reach you because I think Ann Richards should do a book and I want you to call her for me. By the way, it might even be a book for you to write—The Wit and Wisdom of a Down-Home Lady—you know the kind of thing I mean. So call me when you return from the set.”

Back home, Texas Monthly’s Patricia Kilday Hart visualized Ann in a race that had been a remote possibility one month earlier.

As Richards enjoyed her big moment, her chief rival for governor, Attorney General Jim Mattox, was sulking in the thunderous ovation rocking the Omni Center. With no official reason to be at the Omni, he had nevertheless cajoled state party officials into giving him a floor pass. Then he sat petulantly in the front row, glaring at delegates waving “Ann Richards” signs, applauding weakly, and sitting glumly through her best lines. He spent the next day telling interviewers that the speech had been okay but no big deal . . .

Though it projected her personality brilliantly, the speech itself cannot answer the most intriguing question about Ann Richards: Can she broaden her appeal enough to become Texas’ first woman governor in half a century?

She is certainly trying. Just as Michael Dukakis chose Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, Ann Richards has embraced the Bentsen wing of the Texas Democratic party, even tapping Bentsen confidant Jack Martin as her campaign treasurer. Already some members of Richards’ core constituency are uneasy. One Austin feminist even quibbled with her keynote speech, protesting that Richards had come off as a “clever grandmother,” belittling her own importance. In coming months other ideologues will be watching Richards closely for signs of compromise and tarnished principles.

When Kilday Hart’s story appeared, Ann was still uncertain what she was going to run for in 1990. Yes, she was a phenomenon. Esther Newberg was a force in both publishing and politics, and Simon and Schuster quickly offered a handsome contract and dispatched an as-told-to veteran, Peter Knobler, to help churn out her memoir Straight from the Heart. (Bud and Ann knew that his working on the book was not a good idea.) A Republican spokesman in Texas wondered just what the treasurer had accomplished to be worthy of writing a book for a big New York publisher. In the Democrats’ camp, the jeering that Jim Mattox received over his appearance in Atlanta stoked the enmity of a man whose most abiding passion was fury.

And the uproar over Ann’s speech produced an unintended victim. After the speech, Bill Cryer was besieged with press demands to know who this woman in Lorena, Texas, was. He doggedly replied that Ann had promised her anonymity. Okay, then—a horde of television trucks and block-walking reporters descended overnight on the little town of Lorena. Reporters and pundits accused Ann and her speechwriters of inventing the woman and her story—it must have been fiction. Ann, Bill, and the rest of the team realized they had no choice. Cryer had to call Alexander and tell her that the promise had to be broken; her identity and private life were about to be thrown into the hungry public maw. Adam Pertman of the Boston Globe wrote a profile under the headline “Thrust into the Limelight,” which portrayed a naïve woman who had, at best, been used, and perhaps betrayed.

Waco, Texas—Donna Alexander is smiling, but the corners of her lips are quivering, just slightly. Behind the cheerful glint in her eyes is a hint of sadness. Last Monday night, words written by Alexander touched millions of Americans; she knows she should feel flattered, probably even thrilled. Instead, she is overwhelmed, confused, worried.

Will the reporters’ phone calls ever end? Will her neighbors resent her? When will she and her husband resume the quiet lives they always cherished? For a week now, her mind has been teeming with questions . . .

Alexander was wrapping up a Tupperware party in her home in nearby Lorena when she and a few friends heard their town (pop. 1,100) being mentioned. Richards, at Alexander’s request, did not reveal her name, but the impact was still intense.

“Whooooooosh. It just came at me like a force through a wind tunnel,” Alexander recalls, sweeping her hands toward her face. “Everything just stopped and we all listened. When they asked me about using the letter, I expected her to just use a sentence or two. It was a shock, let me tell you. It was so weird.”

At first, Alexander was thrilled because Richards is “a personal hero” and because she was allowed to remain anonymous. The next day, though, reporters swept through tiny Lorena, asking everyone in sight if they knew who the author of the letter was. . . . So, last Wednesday, Alexander reluctantly agreed to release her name, and the calls began to pour in, mainly from the local television, radio, and newspaper people. That night, about 10:30, she unplugged her phone.

Alexander is recounting all this as she sips iced tea and lights an occasional, anxious cigarette at a Waco restaurant. . . . She insists this will be her last interview with a reporter, though she wonders aloud whether she is being too dramatic, too sensitive about all the attention she and her family are receiving. Her words are accented with a pleasant Texas twang, she uses her hands to punctuate almost every sentence, and she is so ingenuous as to be disarming.

“I am not a political person, I’m really not,” she says. . . . As she warms to the conversation, Alexander slowly, hesitantly decides that she can talk about the major cause of her discomfort since she became a minor phenomenon in her community. The intrusion on her family’s privacy is at the root, she says, but there is a more specific reason.

On a local radio talk show the other day, people were calling in to criticize her for complaining about making it on $50,000 a year. Alexander is afraid such talk may be prevalent; she’s apprehensive about picking up the newspaper and seeing a letter to the editor ridiculing her, too.

“I know I’m lucky compared to a lot of people,” she says. “The exact amount of money wasn’t the point at all. . . . I am so sorry, because I feel in a way that I’ve alienated the people I was talking about. . . . All I want is to get back to what my grandmother used to call the rat’s belly—you know, back to regular life.”

Donna Alexander’s marriage was shaken by the unwanted scrutiny. She was made to feel guilty for sharing something that had come, as Ann Richards put it in the title of her book, straight from her heart. But she didn’t give up her admiration of the orator. In a photocopy of the story that found its way into Ann’s archives, Alexander added in a handwritten note that Pertman had misquoted her in that last odd sentence. “Actually,” Alexander wrote, “I said ‘get back to rat killing.’”

For Ann, those were tremendous moments, days, and weeks. Her political career was like a NASA rocket given another boost into outer space. But the launch was supposed to fire up a winning presidential campaign. Dukakis enjoyed a fair bump in the polls after the convention highlighted by Ann’s speech, but at the Republican convention weeks later, Peggy Noonan wrote Bush a polished and elegant speech—the speech of his life. Nobody knew exactly what Bush meant by “a thousand points of light,” but it sounded good.

During the vice presidential debate, Democrats whooped with approval when Bush’s running mate, Dan Quayle, flattered himself with a self-comparison to a president and set himself up for the devastating rejoinder of Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” By the end of the race, Democrats were wishing Bentsen had been the presidential nominee.

While Bush took pains to present himself as taking the high road, his young media and message adviser, Lee Atwater, destroyed Michael Dukakis. Atwater introduced the fearsome specter of the paroled murderer Willie Horton in television ads and captured a video that made Dukakis look like a fool. Riding a tank and wearing a combat helmet much too large for his head, the governor looked like a turtle with eyebrows. The governor spent the last part of the race looking dazed and numb. Perhaps he thought he was maintaining his dignity, that voters would respond to that.

After introducing Ann Richards at the national convention and then putting her on the road on the campaign’s behalf, Dukakis had an occasion to join her on a short flight. In his reserved manner, he asked her how she thought the campaign was going. She leaned toward him and said, “What campaign?” Then she tore into him over his listless performance until the wheels touched down. She spoke her mind, and she wasn’t invited back.

But of course she campaigned onward—for Bentsen, for congressional and legislative candidates, for principles that Democrats believed in, and not least of all, for herself. In those days before e-mail, Bud and Ann had discovered that faxes enabled them to communicate in real time. She sent him this report from the road and the North Texas town of Bowie.

Dear Bud,

When we pulled into the parking lot of the Western Sizzler in Bowie, I was surprised to see so many law enforcement cars complete with officers. Sheriff, a deputy, Bowie police, a constable. Cy Young [not the ghost of the great pitcher] was really nervous but I attributed it to his advanced years—maybe his hearing aids were on the fritz. It turned out that we met at the Sizzler not because the event was to be held there but so we could be properly escorted into Bowie by all the aforementioned, whirling lights and all. Traffic is not all that heavy in Bowie at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the four cars and the pickup that we encountered got right out of the way.

A big crowd—three hundred or so—was waiting outside Bowie Senior High and the junior high band (first time they had played together) playing a specially purchased rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” A piece of red carpet was rolled across the sidewalk and a contestant in this year’s Miss Texas pageant handed me the bouquet. Then I saw the source of Mr. Young’s nervousness. Two kids were holding a six-by-eight-foot sign that read, “Ann Richards—These dogs will hunt.”

About eight or ten good old boys were lined up against a wall holding the chains and leashes on more than a dozen coon hounds. They had obviously been standing there in the hot sun a long time if the tongues hanging out of the dogs’ mouths were any evidence. I made a commitment on the spot to come back and go coon hunting as soon as the campaign is over. After the mayor presented me with a Bowie knife mounted on a board, I made a stirring speech to the Montague County Retired Teachers Association. And you think I’m not having fun?

I’d like to see you.

Ann