CHAPTER 27

Troubles by the Score

Ann’s biggest humiliation in 1993 came about not because of anything she did or did not do. It happened because her friend President Bill Clinton named Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen his Treasury secretary.

One would think that with all the proclaimed Democratic talent in Texas that Ann personified, it would have been a pleasant and rewarding chore to appoint one of her peers to fill Bentsen’s Senate seat. She must have wanted to yank her hair out on finding out that was not to be the case. The first choice was the handsome and charismatic former mayor of San Antonio. George Shipley had introduced Ann to Henry Cisneros, and the rapport they established that day won her his active support in the 1990 campaign. George now arranged for them to meet again. “Henry was trying to patch things up with his wife,” he told me. “He had just told her about his affair and the mistress and the money he’d been giving her. He bared his soul to Ann, too, really opened up. Told her all about it.” Ann was blunt with Cisneros, Shipley said. She was there on an important political errand; she was not there to be his confessor. George said she told him, “When Republicans see something they want, things can get kind of nasty. What are you gonna do when they get to this other woman and give her half a million dollars? Are you gonna be able to handle that?”

Henry said he thought he would, hoped he could.

“Well, let me know,” Ann said, and she and George headed back to Austin. Cisneros was a perfect choice in so many ways—a Texas A&M and Harvard graduate who was then just forty-five years old. He was a superb orator and had star quality. When he was San Antonio’s mayor, the U.S. Jaycees had honored him as one of the ten outstanding young men of America. He had been short-listed for a vice presidential nomination. In 1991, VISTA magazine had named him the Hispanic man of the year. The Republicans would have had a hard time fielding a candidate who could beat Cisneros in the 1993 special election, regardless of the deceit and turmoil in his married life.

Ann as seen from behind at one of the birthday parties in major urban centers that launched her 1994 campaign for reelection.

“Unknown to us,” George Shipley told me, “all of this was kind of a catalyst of reconciliation between Henry and his wife. Meanwhile I flew up to Washington and set about getting senators on board. We set a date, a Sunday, for Henry to arrive and get the grand tour. [West Virginia senator] Jay Rockefeller was going to introduce him around. ‘Here, take a seat, this is the very chair where Daniel Webster sat,’ things like that. Then Henry called and said he couldn’t make our meeting on Sunday. You know, a fair amount of work had gone into arranging it, and I said, ‘Do you mind telling me why not?’ He said, ‘On the way up I stopped in Little Rock.’

“In a hall of George’s office was an enlarged photo of Ann and the mayor in their happier days. George beat his feet on his carpet and leaned over his desk in a burst of laughter. ‘Henry said, “I told Governor Clinton the same things I told you, and he said, ‘You did the right thing, giving that woman the money.’”

Clinton nominated Cisneros as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and he sailed through his Senate hearing and was confirmed unanimously. But later he attracted the attention of one of the special prosecutors who were so numerous in those years. He wound up pleading guilty to lying under oath while being questioned by a federal official. It was a misdemeanor, but still a criminal act, and an admission of shameful behavior. He resigned before the end of Clinton’s first term to go into the Hispanic cable-television business. I saw him once amid a group of people who asked why he had let a personal failing like that destroy a career of great promise. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t know how people look at me. You don’t see them staring in the airports.” Politics had damaged that man, for sure.

With her strongest candidate picked off by Bill Clinton, Ann looked anew at her options for filling the Senate seat. Though it would have been the pragmatic and Machiavellian move, appointing Jim Mattox was out of the question—their attacks on each other had been too brutal, too recent. Jim Hightower and Garry Mauro were too scarred by the FBI investigations and damning news stories; they could never win confirmation by the Senate. Ann moved from the class of 1982 to the Democrats’ down-ballot comers of 1990—attorney general Dan Morales and comptroller John Sharp. “Morales didn’t like her,” George Shipley told me. “They did not get on.” In any case, Morales would soon wind up in prison for trying to use his power and office to deal a crony into a lawyer’s share of a huge settlement Texas won in a class-action lawsuit against big tobacco companies. But what disqualified Morales was his opposition to abortion. In contrast, Ann got along very well with John Sharp, but he was raised a Catholic, and as a state senator from Victoria, he had once tried to sneak an amendment onto a bill that would have undercut Roe v. Wade. Since then, his positions on that question had been elusive. To many of Ann’s aides, advisers, and friends, Sharp had proclaimed himself pro-choice much too soon after the vacant Senate seat materialized. Both Morales and Sharp told the press that the governor had approached them and that they had turned her down. They were entitled to spin their own stories.

As time passed and she didn’t offer a nomination, Ann looked hapless; at one point, she considered her sometime nemesis on the ethics front, Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle. A Texas Monthly profile of Earle that I wrote in 2005, when House majority leader Tom DeLay had been indicted for money laundering, contains this scene: “At their home in western Travis County, Twila Earle was reading the paper about the impasse one morning and told Ronnie he was as qualified and as formidable a candidate as any of those being considered. ‘By the time I got out of the shower,’ Ronnie told me, ‘I was feeling positively senatorial.’”

In the end, Ann had to face the fact that the vaunted Democrats had no bench. With such ambivalence that it must have made her dizzy, she turned to a man who had yearned and prepared for years to serve in the United States Senate—the intelligent, decent, fiscally conservative, unexciting Bob Krueger. He had a doctorate in English literature from Oxford, and in his academic career he had attained a prestigious rank, the dean of arts and sciences at Duke University (where he had earned his MA). Returning to his hometown of New Braunfels, he was part of the Watergate class of new members of Congress in 1974, and after the first of his two terms, he was voted “most effective” by his colleagues, largely because of his mastery of energy issues.

In Krueger’s 1978 Senate race against John Tower, the election returns ticked over at two in the morning and he lost a heartbreaker by three-tenths of a percent. Six years later, with Tower retired and Phil Gramm representing the GOP, the favored centrist found himself squeezed out of the Democratic primary by Kent Hance on the right and Lloyd Doggett on the left. Once more, the twist of the knife came at two in the morning.

Between those failed campaigns, President Carter had appointed him ambassador at large to Mexico and United States coordinator of Mexican affairs. And in a 1990 comeback little noted amid the furor of the governor’s race between Ann and Clayton Williams, Bob had run for a Railroad Commission seat, smashed an Austin liberal in the Democratic primary, and led all candidates on the general election ballot, crushing his GOP opponent by a sixteen-point margin. The great irony in early 1993, given the contempt in which several of Ann’s associates held him, was that no man could have been more aligned with the governor on issues that mattered most to her. One of his position papers offered eloquent support of Roe v. Wade and stem cell research: “When I imagine my daughters grown and making their own reproductive decisions, I want them to be able to embrace life as they define it and as they define what makes it fulfilling. I cannot side with people who would bind my daughters and their generation to back-alley solutions or coerced births, nor can I join in repressing medical research that could yield dignity and enrichment for millions of people.”

But Ann couldn’t have been more disingenuous or blasé in her announcement of his appointment: “I had many, many good people from which to choose. Many of them also happen to be good friends. But Bob Krueger is a man who will need no on-the-job training. He can hit the ground running in Washington.” One note that stood out in those remarks, and may have been unintended, was that she did not appear to count him as one of her friends. Bob realized his dream of serving in the United States Senate, but his tour there lasted just less than five months. It had been fifteen years since he had run his best race. The theme song for his prospects in the special election could have been B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.”

The special election was another one of those ninety-day horse races, with six candidates of note heading out of the starting gate. The state treasurer, Kay Bailey Hutchison, outspent and outperformed two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton and Jack Fields, while Krueger fended off the challenges of a Dallas businessman, Richard Fisher, and José Angel Gutiérrez, who had formerly been aligned with the breakaway party La Raza Unida. Hutchison led Krueger by 99 votes, with both candidates gaining just over 593,000. The next round would be a complicated affair for Ann because she genuinely liked Hutchison. But in the interest of Clinton’s young presidency and her prospects for reelection, she had to hope Krueger could hold the Senate seat for the Democrats. She assigned her son-in-law Kirk Adams to get the party strongly behind him.

Hutchison veered to the right as time wore on in her career, but in that pivotal race, she held her ideological cards close to her chest. Her bumper stickers in 1993 were a jaunty bright red and simply read “Kay!” In the Democratic camp, a glum feeling arose that it had really been no dead heat. An incumbent Democrat should have gotten better than 29 percent. Krueger was a very dignified man. His idea of sport was an impromptu recitation of Shakespeare amid Texans who had last given any thought to the bard when required to read a play or two in junior high school. But flash polls showed him twenty points down against Hutchison, and like many other Democrats, he put stock in the brainstorms of Roy Spence, who, with Garry Mauro, had guided him in 1974. The ad man talked him into putting on a Hollywood biker jacket and wraparound shades for his campaign commercial and mimicking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line from Terminator 2, “Hasta la vista, baby!”

The attempt to give Krueger some public flair and illumine his self-deprecating sense of humor was worse than lame. The ads were likened to a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game; the New York Times described them as “zany.” Hutchison put him to rout by a 2–1 margin. It was the worst defeat a challenger had ever inflicted on an incumbent U.S. senator. Krueger had irked Clinton by voting against his first budget—and its tax increase—on the grounds that the government needed to be audited for waste first. But he had excellent diplomatic experience, and the president wanted to do something for a man whose electoral days were over. Jane Hickie had a fine time describing the ambassador’s appointment in an interview by Brian McCall for his book The Power of the Texas Governor. “Do you remember the movie Dave?” McCall quoted her. “They sent the vice president to Burundi. They had to send him away. Which is why Krueger went to Burundi: The people in the White House saw the movie Dave. You think I’m kidding, but no, I’m not. I was at the Governor’s Mansion when they called. There was an encyclopedia at the Mansion, and Ann said, ‘See if you can find out where Burundi is.’ We got the book, and oh, we were just dying laughing.”

If true, the anecdote doesn’t reflect well on Ann Richards, her team, or the Clinton administration. Burundi was one of the ten poorest countries in the world; only four countries from the developed world bothered to have embassies there. The preceding year, the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu ethnic majority, had been assassinated by repeated bayonet thrusts of soldiers’ rifles, and the vice president and leaders of the assembly had also been killed. A retaliatory massacre of ethnic Tutsis ensued, and about 700,000 people fled the country.

In mid-1994, Bob Krueger took his wife and young daughters to the small mountainous country in central Africa. During that time, ethnic genocide in neighboring Rwanda took about 800,000 lives of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a three-month period, and more than three million refugees and avenging militias spilled into neighboring Uganda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, and Burundi. Almost alone among Clinton’s diplomats, Krueger helped protect people from the slaughter. When he challenged Tutsi marauders, two newspapers called for his assassination, and an ambush was soon attempted, leaving Bob unhurt but two people dead and eight more wounded. One day his wife, Kathleen, faced down a dozen African soldiers who were intent on killing one of their household workers. The Kruegers’ bravery and subsequent award-winning book, From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi, won praise from South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter, and the renowned Ethiopia-born American author and physician Abraham Verghese.

Kay Bailey Hutchison’s landslide win was immediately hailed as a novel convergence of feminism and conservatism. But according to an investigative story published by the Houston Press at the end of the saga, four days after Hutchison’s June 1993 victory, a Treasury employee approached the office of the Travis County district attorney and in a purge of guilt said he had taped Hutchison ordering subordinates to destroy possibly incriminating state records. The Public Integrity Unit under Ronnie Earle had been monitoring rumors of Hutchison abusing her staff, but the investigation had not been considered hot. But with that information, the prosecutors moved fast, serving initial subpoenas for fifteen Hutchison aides as well as telephone, computer, and personnel records. The newly elected senator hotly denied the accusations and initially said she would refuse to testify before a grand jury. But according to the Press account, thirty-three witnesses testified, including twenty-six employees of the state Treasury. “Hutchison clearly perceived Austin was brimming with political enemies,” according to a second deputy treasurer, Michael Barron. She was “constantly almost in a state of paranoia,” Barron testified. “From day one, she announced to us that Paul Williams [the governor’s executive assistant] was out to get her; that [Comptroller] John Sharp was out to get her; that everybody in the legislature was out to get her.”

Stories leaked out of the Treasury and grand jury that were not incriminating, but still shocking—the one that most tantalized Austin political junkies had Hutchison whacking John Connally’s daughter with a notebook because she wasn’t doing something fast enough. Her purse boys, characterized by the Press as “taxpayer-subsidized butlers,” were ordered to do things like put her nail polish in the refrigerator. One Treasury aide said she refused their repeated advice to open a political office and would not part with campaign funds to hire a political travel aide. The initial whistleblower—or snitch, in the GOP’s view—carried his evidence to the grand jury in a pizza box.

The Houston Press, an alternative newspaper, did not disclose how it obtained such detailed information from the sealed records of a grand jury, but the New York Times’ Sam Howe Verhovek confirmed that “one person who worked in the treasurer’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the files include handwritten memorandums by Ms. Hutchison suggesting that she was aware of political activities, like fund raising and scheduling of political events, that went on in her office, and that she gave orders to destroy the evidence once it became apparent that it could constitute a legal problem.”

On one point, all parties agreed: just four months after her historic election, Hutchison was indicted on three counts of official misconduct, two of which were second-degree felonies, one a misdemeanor. The most sobering one carried a possible penalty of up to twenty years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Specifically, she was accused of misusing state workers and equipment for political advancement and trying to destroy evidence once an investigation was underway. Michael Barron and Hutchison’s planning director, David Criss, were also indicted.

Furious, Hutchison claimed the indictment—she spoke only of her own—was “merely another chapter in the sleazy campaign tactics employed by Democrats during the U.S. Senate campaign this year.” Bentsen would have been up for reelection in 1994. This meant that she would not only have to run again just eighteen months after winning the office, but also have to campaign with a cloud of serious criminal charges over her head. Why, the GOP’s arguments went, Ann was known to bully her top staff! She had travel aides who were expected to hang on to her purse! The Republican Party charged that the indictments were a cynical ploy designed to lure Henry Cisneros back from Washington and into the Senate race for the Democrats. And one month after the indictments were handed down, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “Rejecting an intense lobbying effort by Texas Democrats, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said Wednesday night that he does not want to run for the Senate next year: ‘I don’t want to lead anybody on.’”

Ronnie Earle’s prosecution and conviction of an incumbent treasurer for misuse of his office had launched Ann Richards’s career in statewide office. His wife and daughter had worked for Ann, and Republicans knew that Earle had offered himself for the appointment that went to Krueger. The Republicans were justified in contending the odor was not perfume.

The state GOP chairman, Fred Meyer, launched a counterattack with considerable help from Karen Hughes. It didn’t take long for them to learn that nine of the twelve members of the grand jury had voted in Democratic primaries, none in those of the GOP, and that Governor Richards had thirteen telephone lines in her office. In her memoir Ten Minutes from Normal, Hughes later wrote, “That was the first time in my career I remember feeling as if I was going to war every morning.” In press releases, she branded the prosecution as a “witch hunt” and “vicious partisan politics orchestrated by a Democrat district attorney and a stacked Democrat grand jury.” Meyer claimed, “Texas Governor Ann Richards and her staff apparently run a massive political operation by telephone from the state governor’s office, using more private telephone lines in the taxpayer-funded state office than the entire Republican Party [has for] its state administrative offices.”

The counterattack’s drift, of course, was that whatever Hutchison might have done at the Treasury, Democrats in statewide office were just as guilty. Over in Bob Bullock’s office, members of his inner circle smiled at the amateurishness of that facet of the governor’s operation; one told me that the lieutenant governor had just a single telephone line of that nature, and its use was tightly controlled. Mary Beth Rogers had left Ann’s staff to write and teach at the LBJ School; an able hand from Mark White’s administration, John Fainter, was now the governor’s chief of staff. The Republican siege via open-records requests, along with disapproving newspaper stories about telephone calls, forced an admission from him that some telephone records had been destroyed in the course of removing mundane clutter, and Fainter had to write a memo to Governor’s Office personnel that read:

The purpose of this memo is to remind all employees that state telephones are to be used for official state purposes only.

Prohibited use of state phones includes: personal business calls, personal social calls and political calls of any kind. In other words, every phone call you make on a state phone should be related to your official work as an employee of the Governor’s Office . . .

We must remember that office telephones are not “Our” phones—they belong to the people of the State of Texas, and must be used to serve them, not ourselves.

How degrading, the Bullock team’s observer said, that Fainter had to take the public fall for that. Nothing about the prosecution of Texas’s junior senator boded well for its governor. The first set of indictments had to be thrown out because a member of the grand jury had been charged with theft in 1988. Another grand jury indicted the three defendants again. A retired appellate judge named John Onion, Jr., presided over the trial. Dick DeGuerin, a Democrat and one of the most gifted trial lawyers in the state, assumed the lead of Hutchison’s defense team. Onion granted a change of venue to Fort Worth and told the prosecutors that some of the charges against Hutchison were so vaguely worded she could not defend herself against them. He gave them ten days to clarify the wording of the charges. Momentum swung back and forth: David Criss, the indicted planning director, told the Houston Chronicle that he was ready to cooperate with Earle. “I won’t be the scapegoat anymore,” he said. “Kay Hutchison lied when she said she didn’t know what I was doing.”

The trial at last began in February 1994. Shortly after the senator pleaded not guilty, a bomb threat emptied the courthouse. It turned out that the threat concerned a simultaneous trial of antiabortion protestors. When they were able to proceed, DeGuerin told me, Judge Onion said he wanted and intended to see the governor’s phone records—a chilling demand, to some Democrats. The judge began the often-tedious task of considering pretrial motions. Then, in a move that baffled many seasoned courtroom observers, Ronnie Earle asked the judge for a pretrial ruling to approve certain evidence in bulk. Onion declined, saying he would rule on each piece of evidence as it was presented. Earle said he would have to drop the charges. Onion told him to proceed with the trial, and Earle refused. The judge angrily swore in another jury and ordered them to acquit the senator. They did, and under the constitutional protection against double jeopardy, she could never be tried on those charges again.

I was having an after-work drink at the Texas Chili Parlor when this thunderous news blew through Austin. An attorney at our table said, “You don’t take it to nuclear war and then fold!” Earle shared some of the disallowed evidence with the press and threatened to make all the grand jury testimony public. But the prosecutors’ tempers cooled, and charges against Barron and Criss were dropped. Some observers speculated that Earle had thought he could get another set of indictments from another grand jury and make his evidentiary case before another judge. Onion said afterward that he probably would have approved the evidence if Earle had agreed to do it his way. After losing the big cases against Mattox and Hutchison, Earle’s reputation as a courtroom lawyer was forever besmirched.

But the Republicans never did get rid of him or his Public Integrity Unit. Eleven years later, Earle attained an indictment of U.S. House majority leader Tom DeLay for money laundering. Ronnie had retired by the time DeLay’s case finally went to trial in November 2010, and his team of prosecutors won a conviction in an upset of Dick DeGuerin. The judge listened to DeLay’s indignant speech in the punishment phase of the trial and, unimpressed, gave him three years. Even if an appeals court of elected Republicans overturned the verdict and he never served a day, as expected, the much-feared Hammer, as he was known in Congress, was reduced to being a pundit and a cha-cha-ing contestant on Dancing with the Stars.

Ann told Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, “The minute I heard about Kay’s indictment, I said, ‘This is the worst thing for everybody.’ I knew how it was going to play out. We’re both women. We both held the same office. I knew that her guys—and I don’t think it was Kay—were going to come after me.”

Burka, who had a law degree, could make no sense of the way the senator’s trial ended. He told Ann that “everybody in Texas” believed she had persuaded Ronnie to tank his reputation to benefit her. “Absolutely not,” she responded. “And, no, everybody doesn’t. I never talked to him about the case or anything else while it was going on.

“I like Ronnie, but we’re not close. I tried to cut his budget when I was county commissioner.”

For Ann, what must have resonated from Hutchison’s trial was her former friend’s taunt when she consented to appear before the grand jury: “They know that if I have a sixty percent margin in 1994, the entire Democratic power structure in this state is finished.”

Attempting a comeback after his bitter loss to Ann, Jim Mattox ran in the Democratic primary for the Senate against a Dallas businessman, Richard Fisher, the same man whom Krueger had defeated and whom Mattox accused of being a closet Republican. Fisher dealt him another hurtful wound, winning with 54 percent. In that fall’s general election, Kay Bailey Hutchison defended her seat with flair, bashing Fisher by 955,000 votes.

Her margin of victory: 60.7 percent.

Ann takes aim from thirty feet at a target on an FBI firing range for handguns, 1993 or 1994.