Molly Ivins did say that, didn’t she?
Highlights from her Observer years
Molly’s early days of political reporting included the trial of former Texas House Speaker Gus Mutscher, the rise of Bob Bullock, and various other Texas oddities.
Tubing with Lloyd/George
Oct. 30, 1970
Reporters have been tearing around the state for at least a month now following the senate candidates on their appointed rounds. Receptions, rallies, dinners, speeches, hand-shaking, back-slapping, and all the hoopla that traditionally goes with getting elected to public office.
But the reporters have been missing the real campaign, which is being waged on the tube. No point in going into a righteous snit over how immoral it is to sell a senator like a bar of soap: it’s being done. The result is an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of unreality that gets curiouser and curiouser. Those familiar with the cost of buying television time believe that both Bush and Bentsen are putting more than $500,000 into their T.V. campaigns. The cumulative impression one gets from their commercials is an almost hilarious irrelevance—like they’re trying to convince people that they’re the kind of guys who could find Judge Crater.
Bush’s television campaign is big league stuff. The spots were done by Harry Treleaven, the chief brain behind Richard Nixon’s ’68 television campaign. Treleaven figured prominently in Joe McGinniss’ book The Selling of a President, 1968. The material now being shown for Bush is the product of several days of shooting by Treleaven and crew in both Texas and Washington. They followed Bush around on a couple of campaign swings and filmed him in action to get “that natural look.” Treleaven then hired Glenn Advertising, Inc., of Dallas to buy the tube time and handle the details.
Treleaven’s portrait of Bush is in the with it, youth, vigor, action genre. Bush appears jogging across the street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing touch football. The cuts are fast and sharp. Wham, zip. Many of the 30- and 60-second spots consist of a montage of praise for Bush from Just Plain Folks, some of whom get out only a, “just fantastic” before the film cuts to the next fan. The voice over keeps saying that Bush is young and energetic and he understands (it doesn’t say what he understands) and the tag line is always, “He can do more.”
There’s a series of Bush spots based entirely on the “He can do more” theme. Lots of Just Plain Folks come on telling you how they had this problem (trouble with an F.H.A. loan, son who needed to finish the school year before bowing to the draft, a Social Security hitch), and how Congressman Bush just cut through all this red tape for them and expedited left and right.
A few Bush spots feature plugs from others. John Tower tells us what a neat guy Bush is. Sens. Howard Baker and Henry Bellmon say how highly he’s thought of by the Republican leadership and what a good pipeline he has to important people. Shot of Bush conversing with President Nixon and then shaking his hand as he departs. Bud Wilkinson comes on and says how they’re always glad to listen to George at the White House.
Some of the most effective Bush spots are snippets of conversation between Bush and the voters. He moves through crowds in shirtsleeves and once just wipes the sweat off his face like Real People.
Some voter comes up to him in a crowd and tells Bush that he thinks something like student unrest or inflation is a really serious problem. And then Bush says he thinks it’s a really serious problem too. A Bentsen aide noted rather snidely that just when you think Bush is going to say what he thinks should be done about the problem, his voice fades out and the announcer says Bush can do more.
In one spot Bush tells some worried soul, “Look, your kids are good kids and my kids are good kids and it’s always just some small group of radicals over here . . .” It’s not exactly a great solution to student unrest but his concern comes across.
There are a few digs in Bush’s spots. “Sure, it’s tough to be up against the machine, the big boys,” he says modestly, like a U.T. quarterback before a game against Rice. He looks earnest and sincere like Bucky Beaver and then says, “I want to say this, not in a mean way, but I think my opponent is more out of the past. I just plan to out-hustle him and out-campaign him.”
Another standard theme in Bush spots is “He’s in step with the Texans of today.” And he reminds you that his opponent never introduced any bills for the Mexican-Americans when his opponent was in Congress . . . 20 years ago.
Compared all Bush’s leaping around and the fast cuts and such, Bentsen’s commercials give him all the animation of a cadaver.
No bull Bullock
March 3, 1972
AUSTIN — “Bob Bullock is such a mean son of a bitch. Oh, he is mean! Isn’t it great? He hates all the right people.”
An Austin attorney speaking with gleeful affection.
Six months ago, Robert D. Bullock was appointed Secretary of State of Texas, an office from which has seldom been heard either pip or squeak. Ever since then, roars of joyously leonine rage have been emanating from the first floor office in the capitol building — not to mention the roars coming from Bullock’s eclectic targets.
With a fine sense of nonpartisanship, Bullock has managed to infuriate not only the state’s Republicans, but Roy Orr, Crawford Marin, Ben Barnes and the Dallas Establishment to boot.
“Even when I was a kid, I used to get into a lot of fights,” said Bullock, with a splendidly sadistic chuckle. “I can still remember the first one I ever had: I can’t stand the guy to this beautiful day.”
Buck Wood, director of the elections division in the secretary of state’s office, said of his boss, “Bullock’s just not afraid of anybody. He’s not running for anything, he doesn’t plan to run for anything and he doesn’t care who he pisses off. The word for Bullock is intense. He likes more intensely and hates more vehemently than anyone I’ve ever known. He’s full of nervous energy, like a high-strung cat. I don’t think he ever sleeps. He calls me at home at 3 a.m. if that’s when an idea hits him.”
Bullock’s style is an oasis of forthrightness in the desert of mush-mouthed politicians surrounding him. Chain-smoking, popping BC headache powders and prowling around his office, he talks about anything and everything with pleasantly profane candor. One gets the feeling that he would tell an outright lie with no hesitation if he thought there was good reason for it, but that he would never try to weasel out of a question.
The trial of the Abilene Three
March 31, 1972
ABILENE — The Dr. Pepper clock on the wall of the Taylor County Courthouse read 11:04 when Larry Yerger, a 28-year-old freshman at McMurry College, stood up, looked at Gus Mutscher and said, “Guilty.” Yerger said “Guilty” twice more on the Ides of March and that ended the trial of the Abilene Three.
There are a lot of ways to tell what that trial was like, but maybe the best way to start is with clothes. Gus Mutscher and his lawyers wore expensive, well-cut suits, with French cuffs and gold cufflinks. Larry Yerger wore boots, jeans, a cowboy shirt and a chased leather belt with a big imitation silver buckle on it. Robert Smith, the chief prosecutor, looks like an escapee from Robert Hall’s Big and Tall Department. Miss America of 1964 came every day in a lovely new Nieman-Marcus outfit. The women on the jury were given to print housedresses from Sears. They had blue-rinse permanents and cat-eye glasses with sequins on the top.
God knows if it is meet and just that a man’s fate should hang on the differences between those who shop at Nieman-Marcus and those who shop at Sears Roebuck, but those differences were painfully apparent for two and a half weeks in an Abilene courtroom.
So much of Abilene itself came into the trial. It’s a flat, homely, windy city, heavily Church of Christ. The town itself is dry, but two local wet spots Impact and Buffalo Gap, abound with drinking Baptists day and night. The people are cordial and provincial. A well-dressed woman is apt to be told, “Why honey, you just look so Dallas.” The population is 125,000, but the feeling is distinctly small-town. Fluoridation is still a big issue (Communists are for it, you know).
The jury was quintessentially Abilenean. They looked like the cast of “The Grapes of Wrath” with an extra 40 pounds each. Plain people. Sensible people. Not likely to worry overmuch about the fine points of the law. They said afterward that none of them had any doubts about the guilt of Mutscher, Shannon or McGinty. They just looked at the facts and figured it was as plain as the nose on your face.
Some observations on the trial
March 31, 1972
ABILENE — I’d like to address myself to Matthew 5:44.
I wandered back into the courtroom about 20 minutes after the verdict had been announced, about 15 after the judge had dismissed court for the day. Mutscher was sitting on a bench weeping quietly. So I wandered out again.
Reporters not infrequently wind up standing around in the wake of someone else’s personal disaster. I don’t think any of us like the feeling. I got an incredible hate stare from Ms. Joe Shannon before I left. I wasn’t there when she called some reporters who remained in the courtroom “vultures,” but I thought it was an understandable reaction.
That day the pencil press was probably as tactful as it ever gets — no questions. But “the animals with the cameras,” as Art Wiese of The Houston Post calls them, did put on a bad show. “All in the nature of the biz,” is their defense.
While it is one thing to attack the press for a given instance of gross behavior, the events on the day the verdict was announced had nothing to do with the buckets of slop dumped on the press by the defendants, their lawyers and their wives both before and after the verdict came in. Miss America of 1964 harassed the press throughout the trial in niggling little ways. Mutscher did a credible imitation of a martyr in his post-sentencing press conference. Haynes went on at great length about “suggestions and innuendoes” and those of us who “pillory people in public office who have no opportunity to defend themselves.”
A more specious argument I never heard. Public officials have, in fact, unbeatable access to the media to defend themselves ad nauseum. And they do it. Any time Gus Mutscher calls a press conference, reporters come and take down what he’s got to say.
Unfortunately, it is not part of journalistic tradition to print [That is a lie] after each lie quoted. Haynes indulged in Dallas Morning News ratiocination twice in Abilene: once with the jury and once with the press.
The News is much given to bemoaning that “the courts” have made this law or that law unconstitutional. But the courts don’t make the laws unconstitutional: the legislature makes them unconstitutional and the courts point it out, that being their job. The jury in Abilene didn’t make Gus Mutscher guilty. The press in this state didn’t make Gus Mutscher guilty. Gus Mutscher took the loans and passed the bills and made the profits. What he did makes him guilty, not what anyone else has done to him.
How much financial does a financial disclosure disclose?
May 12, 1972
AUSTIN — Not much.
One of the biggest shell games in the state lives on the sixth floor of the Sam Houston Building in the capitol complex. There employees of the Secretary of State’s office keep the financial disclosure statements of candidates for public office. More arcane than the Delphic oracles, more recondite than the Gnostic sects, able to cover up millions in a single bound. It’s fun reading.
There are a number of philosophical questions raised by the process of financial “disclosure” in this state. One mystery is why, given the fact that most of us spend a lot of our time trying to get rich, those who are keep mum about it. They’ve got it, but they won’t flaunt it. If, like Ben Barnes, you’ve gotten rich on a salary of $4,800 a year, your wealth might conceivably raise some questions about your integrity. On the other hand, if you came by it legitimately, why cover it up? It proves you’re smart. Voters don’t mind rich candidates, witness the Rockefellers, et al. Being born in a log cabin (or on a peanut farm) may still be a political plus, but staying there isn’t.
Let’s glow for Briscoe
June 23, 1972
DALLAS, LONGVIEW, etc. — Farenthold called him a bowl of pablum. The press corps speculated that he’d make Preston Smith look dynamic. Even his own supporters carped about his alleged tendency to say nothing.
How unkind. The rumors you have heard that Dolph Briscoe refused to take a stand on the issues are unfounded. He was strong, strong on the issue of thanking people for coming out to see him. He was adamant about thanking them for their support in the primary. And he took a back seat to no one on the subject of asking for their help again in the runoff.
How many times during the runoff campaign did he insist, “I want to make Texas a better state for all Texans.” How many times did he assert, with no hedging whatever, that he wants to help make this a great state by serving the people. And once he said flatly that he wants better government for Texas.
A bowl of pablum indeed. Nit-pickers.
The Republican Convention
Sept. 8, 1972
MIAMI BEACH — More than a thousand reporters have come to this city to cover the Republican National Convention, and as far as I know, I am the only one who is going to tell the truth about it. Nothing happened.
How Bullock got busted
October 20, 1972
AUSTIN — At 1 p.m. on Sept. 18, Governor Preston Smith announced the appointment of Secretary of State Bob Bullock to the chairmanship of the State Board of Insurance.
At 2 p.m., Bullock said to Randall (Buck) Wood, the head of the elections division in the secretary of state’s office, “Buck, get your ass over to the library and check out every book they got over there on insurance.” Bullock stayed up all night for the next two nights studying insurance and figured he then knew more about it than most state senators. The senators were to pass judgment on Bullock’s qualifications for the office in a confirmation vote requiring a two-thirds majority for approval. Quite naturally, Bullock’s fitness for the position, or lack of it, had nothing to do with the way anyone voted.
Bullock has a Triple-A, gilt-edged feud going with Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, the history of which stretches back into Middle Earth. In brief, they used to be friends and now they hate each other’s guts. It’s sort of mixed up in the Barnes-Smith feud and had come to include the staff members of both men, not to mention their assorted friends and enemies. So Barnes naturally set out to get Bullock “busted,” i.e., to get more than 10 senators to vote against him.
Then there came a third party into the act — the insurance lobby. Ordinarily Bullock gets along quite well with lobbyists, having once been one himself. But the state has come to such a pass that various business interest groups consider the regulatory boards and agencies that allegedly control them as their personal property. They are shocked, actually sort of emotionally outraged, when someone whom they have not approved gets appointed to their board.
BULLOCK IS no Ralph Nader. In fact, in his previous incarnations he enjoyed a richly deserved reputation for slimy dealing. But he is a distinctly independent soul, quite capable of forcing an entire industry to cut its profits drastically if hit by one of his periodic fits in which he decides to do good things for the people. At one point he said he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had seen to it that Texas had the lowest insurance premium rates of any state in the union. That’s the kind of thing Bullock might haul off and actually see to, if given the power. The insurance interests got a little hysterical.
Texas Liberals Organize April 27, 1973
HOUSTON — It’s spring of a non-election year so naturally Texas liberals are once again attempting to organize themselves. Only Texas liberals would be silly enough to try a thing like that – everyone else gave up on them years ago. This year successor to DOT, the Coalition, TOLD, TLD, TDC and ACT is called Texas Democrats. As veterans of pervious attempts know, liberals use up most of the creative energy and a good deal of their natural combativeness in trying to decide what to name themselves. The name debate this year raged until 2:30 a.m. on the eighth of April and continued for another gory few hours that afternoon. The walls of the Continental Houston Hotel in downtown Bayou City reverberated with familiar acrimony.
There was a strong minority camp in favor of revising the name Democrats of Texas, DOT having been the first and probably most successful of the Texas liberal organizations. The pro-DOT faction felt it would fit in nicely with the nostalgia craze, and besides, there is some similarity in the historical situations. When DOT was founded in the 50’s Texas liberals kept trying to be Democrats but Texas Democrats wouldn’t let them. The state party was busily supporting Eisenhower and Nixon, while the liberals, eternally foolish, felt that Democrats should support Adlai Stevenson. You see the parallel, of course.