This article was written by Meg Cullar and published in the Baylor Line Spring 2001 issue.
One of the brightest spots in the political firmament, Ann Richards’s light is still shining.
NOT LONG AFTER HER INAUGURATION AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS, Ann Richards paid a visit to her hometown of Waco. She was greeted warmly by a group of supporters and old friends, among them the late Bob Thomas ’58 , JD ’60, who was chief justice of the Tenth Court of Appeals in Waco. As usual, the judge greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.
“I believe that’s the first time I’ve ever kissed a governor of Texas,” he commented.
“Aw, naw it isn’t, Bobby,” quipped the governor. “It’s just the first time you’ve kissed one on the face.” It’s that snappy wit, delivered on demand and with a jovial twang, that helped bump Richards, a 1954 Baylor graduate, from the ranks of ordinary politicians into legendary status. Though she’s never held a national political office, the former governor has the kind of celebrity typically reserved for those who hold such positions.
In addition, you can still catch her doling out salty political observations on national television shows like Politically Incorrect or Larry King Live. CNN and the King show had an exclusive deal for Richards’s political commentary during last fall’s elections. During the 2000 campaign season, she also spent a lot of time making speeches—both for hire and for political friends.
She also spends time promoting the healthy lifestyle she’s discovered since leaving public office. She makes speeches and chats it up with the likes of The Early Show‘s Bryant Gumbel in an effort to educate post-menopausal women about exercise and dietary practices that can counteract the effects of osteoporosis. She works out with weights and has eliminated fats and carbohydrates from her diet. As a result, she’s dropped three dress sizes, but she claims it’s more about being strong than about looking good.
These days she’s more likely than not to be sporting a Hillary-style pants suit and flat shoes than one of the more elaborate dress suits she typically donned as governor. And her hair has come down a notch, too. Cropped closer in the back, it carries a casual fluff on top to replace that gravity-defying bouffant of gubernatorial days. But it’s still blindingly white and stunning. And on her lapel, as always, you’ll find a Texas star.
Richards splits her time between Washington and Austin, where she’s set up shop in a downtown high-rise. Verner Liipfert opened the office just for her, and the firm has since added a half dozen attorneys also working out of Austin.
Richards’s office suite, housing her and an assistant, is modest and almost temporary-looking, with stark white walls adorned only with a few large pieces of art and a pair of wire-rigged, postmodern light fixtures in the waiting area. In mid-November an unoccupied reception desk still held a plastic jack-o-lantern.
Her private office space is similar—minus the jack-o-lantern. The walls are mostly bare except for one large original oil painting, but personal items occupy space on nearly every surface. Behind her executive tabletop desk, an old-fashioned roll-top is cluttered with photos of her family, especially grandchildren, and a picture of herself with Steven Spielberg. On a bookshelf, there’s her picture with Hillary Clinton and one of Bill Clinton and Liz Carpenter—all personal friends. Her desk area holds a computer along with a coiled clay pot and a pencil holder, obviously the handiwork of some of her seven grandchildren.
Most of Richards’s time is devoted to lobbying for Verner Liipfert clients, with the rest going to her positions on a few corporate boards and a good bit of speech-making, which, she said, accounts for half of her income. “It’s unbelievable that people will pay you the amount of money they do to come and make a speech,” she marveled.
However, because of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, keeping her clients’ identities a secret is one thing she’s not able to effectuate. Gleaning information from disclosure reports required by law, a nonprofit organization called the Center for Responsible Politics lists all lobbyists and their clients on a website.
Richards’s list for 1997 included fourteen clients, mostly heavy-weights in their respective industries—Lockhead Martin, Conrail Inc., and tobacco giants Brown and Williamson, Loews, Phillip Morris, and RJR Nabisco. Her clients also included several health-care-related companies and the City of Austin. In 1998, the list grew, adding the financial companies Citigroup and American Financial Services Association, plus telecommunications company SBC Communications and the Texas Manufactured Housing Association, among others.
By 1999, Richards had honed her clients to half a dozen; the biggest were real estate developer Mills Corporation and SBC Communications. She continued to represent American Financial, the manufactured housing group, and the City of Austin, but the tobacco companies had dropped off the list.
Along with her law firm, Richards has taken some criticism in the press for representing the big tobacco firms as they negotiated settlements with state governments, but it’s nothing compared to the kind of grief she took during her days as a public official.
But Ona Willis’s hide was plenty tough, and she made sure her daughter’s was as well. Richards grew up in Lakeview, a small town just north of Waco. “I don’t know why in the world it would be called Lakeview; there was no lake to view,” she often quips about the town. Her parents provided a strict upbringing, teaching their daughter the value of hard work. “My parents never wanted me to have to work as hard as they did. But that was all I ever saw them do, and the message I got was that the only thing of any real value in life is hard work,” she recalled.
As the state high school champion in women’s debate, Richards was offered scholarships from several schools, but she did what Mama wanted, going to Baylor and living at home. For the second semester of her freshman year, though, she convinced her mother to let her live on campus in Alexander Hall.
But her biggest transgression, she confessed, was smoking—on campus. “We used to park a car over by the bear pit, and everybody knew whose car was going to be there that day” she explained. “So you could go and get in the car and get down on the floor of the car and smoke cigarette.”’ Needless to say, she wasn’t exactly in an upright position.
Slatton, who confirmed that he and Richards were “sweethearts,” said he didn’t really know what made Richards move home. “But she did, at the end of that year, move home and move on with her life,” he said. If it was the work of her mother, he added, “She probably did the right thing for both of us.” Slatton, after going on to earn a doctorate from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, did indeed become a preacher, and now he leads a church in Richmond, Virginia.
But it wasn’t just Mama who thought going to Baylor made sense. With its strong reputation in debate circles, the school was a natural choice for a crack debater like Richards. And working with Professor Glenn Capp, Richards has said time and again, meant working with the best. She counts the “Prof,” who led Baylor’s debate program from 1934 to 1981 and died in December 1998, as one of her greatest influences. She has said that Capp taught her the communication skills essential to her later success in public office.
But she may have meant it. After all, she named her oldest child, Lynn Cecile, after her father, Cecil, and Ralph Lynn. The man she did marry was Waco High School sweetheart David Richards, who would become her husband of thirty years and the father of her four children. They married in May of 1953, following her junior year at Baylor. She dropped off the debate team, and her husband transferred to Baylor while she finished her degree. In June of 1954, they moved to Austin, where Ann earned a teaching certificate at the University of Texas and David attended law school.
After the birth of Cecile in 1957, the Richards family moved to Dallas. Theirs was a typical 1950s marriage—she managed the home, raising chickens as well as children and baking her own bread, while he built a career. Her earliest political contributions, she asserts, were of the most basic type—stuffing envelopes, giving out bumper stickers, and arranging rides to the polls on election day.
While she downplays her first two decades in politics, Richards’s escapades in democracy during that time have a certain Forrest Gump-like quality. She rubbed elbows with almost everyone who was anyone in Texas politics—from Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez to President Lyndon Johnson.
Richards went on to hold leadership positions in several other campaigns, but when the party was looking for a candidate to run for county commissioner in 1975, it was her husband they asked. It was only after he had turned them down that they asked Ann.
And so she was. On the Travis County Commissioner’s Court, Richards quickly proved that she was more than just a skilled campaigner; she knew how to organize and manage the operations of the county.
One of her toughest jobs as a commissioner was winning over the loyalty of the men of the county road crew, a group that was fiercely loyal to the twelve-year incumbent whom she’d ousted. So she gathered the thirty men for a meeting at the road office and planned a speech. As she entered the office, she passed a dog lying in the doorway. “It was a real ugly, coarse-haired animal with big liver spots,” she remembered.
Finally, someone in the back row offered, “Well, you’re gonna find out sooner or later—her name is Ann Richards.” Richards broke out laughing, and all the men did, too. Then a younger man in the front row added, “But we call her Miss Ann!” Richards had made friends of her toughest foes.
But as Richards’s political capital was climbing upward, her marriage was spiraling downward. She and her husband separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. Also spiraling out of control around that time was her drinking. In 1980, friends and family sat Richards down for an intervention session. She went immediately to a residential treatment facility for a month and never looked back.
Though she had openly talked with family and friends about her alcoholism, she initially kept it out of the public eye on the advice of friends. But it wasn’t a secret she would keep for long.
In 1982, a friend called and urged Richards to run for state treasurer. The current treasurer, Democrat Warren G. Harding, was in ethical hot water, and the party didn’t want to be stuck without a good candidate. Richards had two days to decide. During that time, she talked to dozens of friends and party insiders, raised $200,000 in pledges, and found out exactly what it was that a state treasurer actually did.
In 1982, Richards shared the Democratic party ticket with two other Baylor graduates: Mark White for governor and Jim Mattox for attorney general. All three won. Richards was the first woman elected to state-wide office in fifty years, and she was reelected in 1986.
Her record as treasurer was stunning. Her radical streamlining of an inefficient department earned more than $2 billion in nontax revenue for the state of Texas. Though an unabashed feminist, she had conservative bankers singing her praises.
As it turned out, Richards had what it took to get elected—charm, wit, and intelligence—and what it took to govern—organizational skills.
Though her speech didn’t pack enough punch to put the senior Bush down for the count, it was enough to give her the boost she needed to rise up another political notch. On November 6, 1990, two years after George Bush was elected president, Ann Richards was elected the governor of Texas. She was the first woman ever to do so on her own merits; Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, the first female governor, had served in the 1930s, but only on the coattails of her recently impeached husband.
Richards was such a popular governor that, in July 1992, Texas Monthly published a feature story on the possibility of an Ann Richards bid for president. The cover shot is a Texas Monthly icon—Richards as a “White Hot Mama” posed astride a Harley-Davidson. The shot was faked, with a model sitting in for the body of Richards, who was too busy for a lengthy photo shoot.
But Richards was not to be the next Texan to occupy the White House—or even the governor’s mansion. Many of her friends remain perplexed about how a governor with an approval rating above 60 percent could lose her office to George W. Bush in 1994. Many believed she lost her focus. Some thought she ran a sloppy campaign. Others said it was the gun issue.
As the nation watched President-elect George W. Bush in mid-December as he doled out his first Cabinet appointments to women and minorities, Richards’s words seemed particularly poignant.
It’s vintage Richards that her loss to Bush, certainly unintended on her part, ended up having such a powerful impact on national politics. Poor Ann, she can’t help it. She was destined for presidential influence—one way or another.
It would be easy to get bogged down in analyzing Richards’s loss to Bush. But whatever its causes or consequences were, they don’t overshadow her accomplishments as governor.
Richards had vowed to create a “New Texas” and to return the government to the people, and she wasted no time in doing it. Half of her four hundred gubernatorial appointments went to women or minorities. Many observers believe her popularity helped usher many more women into big-time politics. In 1990, as Richards entered office, there were twenty-eight women in the U.S. House of Representatives and just two in the U.S. Senate. By 1994, when Richards left office, those numbers had jumped to forty-seven in the House and six in the Senate. This year thirteen female senators and fifty-nine female representatives took office, and five women were governors—the most ever to serve simultaneously.
As governor, Richards set a progressive agenda in a traditionally conservative state and made significant progress. She forced the resignations of Republican appointees to the agencies regulating insurance, water, and public utilities so she could move forward with her vision for reform in those areas.
She increased space in Texas prisons and instituted a substance-abuse program for prisoners. During her tenure, the state became the national leader in the creation of new manufacturing facilities and new or expanded corporate facilities.
But part of Richards’s charm has always been her ability not to take herself too seriously. She celebrated her sixtieth birthday with an event to remember. In her honor, Texas legends came out of the woodwork—Don Henley, Lyle Lovett, Molly Ivins, Liz Smith, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas playwright Larry King.
Before the performance, as the thousands of attendees waited outside, a vendor distributed cotton candy. Printed on each paper cone, beneath a tuft of pink or blue spun sugar, was the smiling face of Ann Richards.
She claims to be “the grandmother that brings the presents and writes the checks,” but daughter Cecile, predictably, says she’s much more. “She loves to take the kids to shows and do stuff we probably wouldn’t do,” she said. Richards and her grandkids, who call her “Mammy,” frequent New York City and Broadway shows, and they’ve been to Europe together.
The growing families of Richards’s children would seem enough to keep her busy. Cecile and her husband, Kirk Adams, have three children, while Richards’s two sons, forty-one-year-old Dan and thirty-eight-year-old Clark, have two each. Her youngest daughter, thirty-six-year-old Ellen, was married this past year.
But Richards thinks her time in the public limelight is finished, even though last summer a few pundits were promoting her as a possible running mate for Al Gore.
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