Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
(Page 5 of 9)
The conventional wisdom in state government today is to yearn for the return of “real politicians” to the governor’s office. Memories are short; the answer is not so simple. Is it easy, today, to forget the sinister mood that hung over the Capitol during the time when Briscoe’s most expertly “political” rival, Ben Barnes, was Lieutenant Governor: a mood (as those who knew it will remember) of deception and intrigue and spyings and knifings and things-are-not-what-they-seem which emanated not from Barnes personally but from the clique that surrounded him. When the Texas Observer headlined Barnes’ fall with DING-DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD, Capitol employees shared a sense of relief that was more than ideological. Briscoe’s staff is incompetent, but they do not deliberately generate an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. They are just part of the joke.
Briscoe’s foremost amateur—the person who, all things considered, is perhaps the ablest and certainly the most influential figure in his administration—is his wife, Janey. A bright woman who holds a masters’ degree in education, she enjoys being First Lady visibly more than her husband enjoys being governor. As a beauty queen at the University of Texas in the Forties, the daughter of an Austin grocer, she found and married the soft-spoken rancher’s son from Uvalde. Her relationship to him soon transcended the usual devotions of a political spouse. When he became a state representative in the 1950s, she often sat beside him on the floor of the House. More recently, former members of the governor’s staff tell of seeing her sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office, opening his mail; it is widely believed that she answers much of it. She has her own department in the governor’s office called the First Lady’s Volunteer Program, complete with its own letterhead and five employees. The extent to which she hovers over him at public gatherings has become a familiar anecdote around the Capitol; “she protects him,” says an old-line lobbyist, “like she’s afraid he’s going to explode.” They are so inseparable that on one rare occasion when she was forced to leave his side for a few minutes—when he was ushered into the Oval Office to discuss energy policy with Richard Nixon while she waited outside—the Houson Chronicle considered the fact newsworthy enough to warrant a separate article headlined WHITE HOUSE SPLITS UP THE BRISCOES.
Her obvious devotion to her husband is never more evident than during his speeches. She will sit on the dais, turned at whatever angle is required to let her face him directly, and watch transfixed. Connoisseurs of this phenomenon say that on occasion as long as eleven minutes have gone by without her looking away. She nods gently when he is about to make a good point. Often she leads the applause; during his addresses to the Legislature, she has repeatedly interrupted him with clapping that gradually spread to the rest of the audience.
A Republican official who came down from Washington to attend Nelson Rockefeller’s White House Conference on Domestic Policy Issues in Austin last November found Janey’s performance during her husband’s address hard to take. “It was sort of creepy, really. It looked more like a mother watching her child get an award at a high school assembly than any sort of husband-wife relationship I’ve ever seen.” As a matter of fact, she has sometimes startled men in the macho world of Texas politics by referring to Dolph as “our boy.”
Her conduct has given rise to the pervasive rumor that Janey wears the pants around the governor’s office. That point of view got its quintessential nationwide airing in a 1975 Newsweek article captioned “Boss Lady”; it suggested that Janey “is really the governor of Texas—her husband, Dolph, just happens to have his name on the door.” It made Dolph furious. Bristling, but all the while keeping a fixed smile on his face, he told reporters that most Texans, including himself, don’t read Newsweek, “and those that do probably don’t pay any attention to it, like I don’t. I have no further comment.” Reporters have never seen him as upset about anything else.
Nevertheless, the popular idea that Janey controls Dolph like a puppet is false. While she obviously guides his behavior in public, and while she does audit his conferences, and while she helps him make up his mind on many things, she does not take command of his official meetings nearly as much as Capitol legend has it. There is no incontrovertible evidence that she actually runs the show. What she does do is make him nervous: a domineering woman with strong opinions about state government, she conveys the appearance of sitting in judgment on his performance. “When you catch him without her, he’s relaxed,” says an Austin political consultant. “When he’s with her, it’s like he’s watching his step so she won’t jump on him later.” To the extent that Briscoe is insecure with his responsibilities, his wife’s constant presence is at best a mixed blessing.
The news media, in their fascination with the Janey phenomenon, have looked through the wrong end of the telescope. She is exactly what he has insisted she is: his “partner.” And the most significant thing about their partnership is not that Janey wields so much influence, but that Dolph wields so little. How can a man seek a position of power, achieve it, and then ignore it? Or if Dolph is not doing that, what is he doing? The question is far more intriguing than Janey’s role, which after all has been quite perceptively explored by Shakespeare in Macbeth.
If the strange crew that occupy Briscoe’s office were in fact carrying out some sort of conscious program, no matter how ill-conducted, one could at least feel there was some useful purpose to what is going on. But they aren’t; and there isn’t.
The Briscoe administration’s program—or what would be the administration’s program if it had one—can best be viewed as a pyramid. At the broad base are his ghostwritten speeches, which recite problems, priorities, and things that need to be done, all carefully spelled out to buttress the necessary appearance of activity. The best of them are excellent. His two “State of the State” addresses in 1973 and 1975 were cogent, occasionally eloquent, explorations of Texas’ condition. During the ensuing legislative sessions, however, his administration ignored or mishandled most of what he had said and backtracked on much of the rest. That, then, is the middle of the pyramid: what his staff actually does.
After Briscoe called for action to import water to the High Plains, including passage of water development bonds, his staff was so unconcerned about the necessary legislation that they dumped the entire matter, including the selection of a sponsor, into the lap of Lieutenant Governor Hobby. A legislator carrying a bill to permit the admission of oral confessions into evidence (one of the key planks in the governor’s anti-crime package) asked Briscoe aides for help in passing it but could recall nothing to indicate they had actually done so. With great fanfare in his 1975 address, the governor announced the creation of a special toll-free long distance telephone assistance service called TEX-HELP, the aim of which was “to make government more available and more open” to anyone “who needs assistance or information involving state government.” The toll-free number is 800-292-9600 but unless you live in Austin you won’t find it in your local telephone book.
Quite apart from the question of whether Briscoe’s administration has selected the right goals is the question of whether they have pursued them in a way calculated to achieve results. Consider the 1975 session’s dominant issue: school finance. At the end of the previous session, Briscoe hired respected educational consultant Richard Hooker, who worked for eighteen months and produced a school finance plan that was theoretically admirable but politically unrealistic. As submitted to the legislators, it entailed substantial tax increases at the local level and it was geared, in the words of one top education expert, “to walk all over the TSTA” [the Texas State Teachers Association, whose political muscle is legendary]. Having thus misread the politics of the 1975 Legislature, the governor’s people then proceeded to refuse any compromises—“which would have helped a lot at several points,” says the expert. “It was obvious very early that the bill was going nowhere in the House, yet no effort was made to modify it to meet the objections and try to salvage something.” The governor himself, who had been extremely supportive of school finance reform in his pre-session speeches, failed to assemble the legislative leadership for a personal selling-job that might have rescued his otherwise doomed bill. The version that finally passed was hastily put together in the Senate during the last two weeks of the session, and though the governor was by then willing to compromise, very little of his original proposal was left.
The real question is what Briscoe himself has wanted done. That, then, is the pyramid’s tiny tip: the issues in which he as an individual, not as an “administration,” has taken a direct, discernible personal interest. What does he himself really want to do?
The answer given by many who have observed and worked with him most closely is, virtually nothing. “I really don’t know of a single piece of legislation he’s taken a personal interest in,” said former Speaker Daniel. “No new taxes,” said current Speaker Clayton, “but that’s all I can think of.” Although Briscoe is popularly regarded as a conservative, his personal political “program” is not so much conservative as it is reactive.
What does he react to? Politicians who have dealt with him agree on two things:
• He resists anything that he interprets as diminishing the power of the governor’s office, regardless of how trivial it may be; and
• If he is ever directly confronted over something, even by accident, he fights hard to avoid losing.
The result has been that a high proportion of the issues in which he has involved himself personally have not been ones that he chose, but rather ones that were thrust upon him by others. Trying to discern a program in all this is impossible; there is none.
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