Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
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Briscoe’s eventual opposition was based, he said, on a lengthy legal memorandum prepared by his aides. Over the course of two legislative sessions, Briscoe’s legal advisers have acquired a widespread reputation for strange, off-the-wall, alarmist interpretations of things that come their way—the mark, legislators believe, of the amateur who is unsure of himself. The reasons Briscoe eventually gave for his opposition to the constitution did nothing to dispel that view. One provision would have increased from one to 14 the number of courts available to hear appeals in criminal cases, and the number of criminal appellate judges from five to 42; Briscoe, amazingly, said he could not see how the criminal court reforms “could do anything but slow the process of justice.” He castigated another key provision allowing for annual legislative sessions, although the previous year he had endorsed a constitutional amendment which would have created them. He denounced as inadequate a provision enabling governors to have budget execution authority, although he himself had asked for precisely that power, in precisely those terms, the year before. (The popular liberal notion that the governor was acting as a cat’s paw for Houston industrialist George Brown and other conservative business critics of constitutional reform is emphatically disputed by the document’s leading supporters, who are convinced the decision was home-grown. “There is no evidence,” says Price Daniel, Jr., “that he was influenced by anyone outside his staff.”)
Acting on staff advice, Briscoe vetoed a rider to the 1975 appropriations bill which gave University of Texas regents the power to authorize construction projects without Coordinating Board approval. His action took a favorite toy (and a powerful political weapon) away from influential representatives of the political establishment among the UT regents and gave it to Briscoe’s friends on the Coordinating Board. “Those riders have been in the bills for sixteen years,” says former regent Frank Erwin. “He doesn’t have any power to ‘veto’ them; there’s a line of cases going back to 1911 that establishes that. Everybody knew it but his people. They don’t know the first thing about the legislative process.” In mid-December, the state Supreme Court unanimously found Briscoe’s attempted veto unconstitutional.
There is a distinct Keystone Kops ambience to the governor’s office. When Briscoe vetoed one House member’s bill, he gave reasons which applied to a different bill. Roy Coffee, Jr., Briscoe’s legislative liaison man in 1973, so infuriated legislators with his flagrant lobbying that he was ejected from the floors of both Houses, an unprecedented action in modern Texas politics. The legislative sponsor of a bill that Briscoe had expressly endorsed in his 1975 “State of the State” speech was thunderstruck to discover that members of the governor’s staff were going around bad-mouthing it to other legislators. On one memorable occasion, the governor called a press conference to sign a bill he did not have. Remembers a Senate employee mirthfully: “Everybody arrived in the governor’s office—reporters, cameras, dignitaries, the whole bit—and Briscoe said to an aide, ‘Where’s the bill’ ‘I dunno; I thought you had it.’ And so on, all the way around his staff.” A belated search uncovered the fact that it was still in the possession of legislative clerical personnel who were preparing it for signature. Such a staff goof would have been inconceivable with Briscoe’s predecessors.
The examples, large and small, can be multiplied. The small ones are the most inexplicable. When a group of school children raised the money to build a greenhouse stocked with state flowers, they wrote each state’s governor asking for seeds. A Briscoe aide wrote back, “Governor Briscoe regrets that we are not properly staffed to gather bluebonnet plants for distribution”—despite the fact that the Texas Highway Department has plenty of bluebonnet seeds which it scatters along the medians.
Middle-level employees who brought some Capitol experience to the Briscoe administration have left, frustrated by the unprofessional atmosphere. Says one, a veteran of three decades of staff work for politicians ranging from conservative to semi-liberal: “All new governors have problems; that’s not unusual. But they [Briscoe’s people] didn’t seem to want to learn, or take advice. They seemed to be afraid and suspicious of the press and anyone who had been around the Capitol before. It’s not my job to set policy; I’m just a professional, and I want to do a good job carrying it out once somebody sets it. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the policy at all; it’s that there wasn’t any policy.”
Politicians deal with each other’s staffs all the time, and the experience does not ordinarily produce ill feelings; that is what makes Briscoe’s staff operation unusual. Politicians who want to work with the governor’s office go away shaking their heads. “Briscoe’s people are bothered by the vicissitudes of their responsibilities; it upsets them to have to do things. I nearly had fistfights with those sons-of-bitches when I went to talk to them,” grouses one state representative who doesn’t lose his temper easily.
The frustration is not confined to legislators. Heavyweight conservative lobbyists, including Searcy Bracewell of Houston, have had persistent difficulty with the governor’s organization. Says a fellow lawyer who has watched Bracewell’s efforts: “He can’t get Briscoe on the phone, he can’t get him to move, and so he does what everybody does—he calls Bob Hardesty or [Secretary of State] Mark White, the two people up there who know what they’re doing. It’s now gotten to the point, however, that you can’t get Hardesty or White. The line’s too long. Because nobody talks to The Man, and the guy has surrounded himself with clonkheads.”
Without exception, the most hair-curling criticisms are reserved for George Lowrance, a young San Antonio attorney who is in the key position of handling the governor’s appointments to state boards and commissions. Everything is fine as soon as we clear it with your senator, Lowrance tells prospective nominees, who know as well as he does that the custom of senatorial courtesy allows a senator to block confirmation of any objectionable gubernatorial appointee living in his district. Lowrance then calls the senator and says something on the order of: We’ve talked to Mr. So-and-so, and we’re ready to appoint him to such and such. Do you have any objection? If the nomination then falls through, the disappointed nominee knows good and well why, and the senator catches hell. This technique deprives the senator of any graceful way to forestall a nomination. It is another illustration of the way Briscoe’s operation flouts the usual civilities of politics. Says one veteran senator: “Preston [Smith] used to do this kind of thing every now and then; it was his way of punishing a senator for something. Briscoe’s people do it as a matter of course.”
The obvious question is, Why does Briscoe tolerate this kind of staff? The answer is, Because the only thing he really wants them to do, they do well. They protect his image.
Not only do they shield him from the politicians, the press, and an inquiring public, they also produce a blizzard of paper designed to give the appearance of activity where there is none. For all their lack of political skill, they know exactly how to flimflam the press. Announcements of Briscoe’s official nominations and other ceremonial doings are issued periodically, complete with quotes he never said; these find their way in due course to the state’s daily and weekly newspapers, where, presto! he appears as busy. The system has been perfected to the point where he could be dead, and no one might know for weeks.
One key image is always put forth in Briscoe’s speeches: that he is a decisive, firm, and forthright man. It is a rare address that does not contain at least one, “I firmly believe,” and the incidence of phrases like “I strongly believe” and “I feel very strongly” is usually high enough to take on the aura of cliche. His listeners are reminded of the “tasks” and “decisions that must be made,” requiring “all my energies” for such “pressing duties.” Like the Dr Pepper crate that John Tower’s aides conceal behind a podium so that he can stand on it and look taller, Briscoe’s speeches represent a well-devised effort to obscure the impolitic truth about him. Firmness: it says so right here. The average voter who knows almost nothing about state government except what he reads in the papers or sees in a ten-second TV clip can be satisfactorily hoodwinked by that kind of talk, in precisely the same way he fails to pick up the fact that John Tower is five feet six inches tall.
Briscoe’s staff members have successfully promoted this flattering image of their man, but otherwise the governor’s effort to turn his office over to political amateurs has been a failure of awesome proportions. What began back in 1972 as a vogueish attempt to portray himself as a leader who was independent of all those . . . well . . . nasty political forces that has disgraced Texas soon went awry; you cannot conduct an essentially political job by relying on people who are aggressively proud of their ignorance about things political. Beginning early in 1973, the accumulating avalanche of failures—staff failures—produced in the members of the Briscoe administration not a recognition that something might be wrong with them, but rather the firm belief that something was wrong with everybody else—all those tricky politicians out there who were laying traps, the political system itself. Says one state representative: “They react like you’re trying to put something over on them any time you want to discuss anything. You have to strain to convince them you’re being honest. They act like some country bumpkins who’ve come to town and think everybody they meet is trying to sell them the Congress Avenue Bridge; they’ve got that ‘ain’t no flies on me’ attitude.” Every failure reinforced the garrison syndrome that now dominates the Briscoe inner circle.
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