Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
(Page 7 of 9)
The answer is that although the discontent with Briscoe runs wide among conservatives, it does not run deep: he was safe on taxes, and he was safely in office keeping out some liberal who, in the business community’s eyes, would have been worse. Since a second term has traditionally been automatic for Texas governors, the effort to unseat him would have been prodigious, and it might have failed. Why bother? They could live with him; and at least he was, in his idiosyncratic way, predictable. “Predictability is very important for business,” says one lobbyist. “Briscoe is a no-motion guy, which is an identifiable result, and you can predict and go forward based on that result. That far outweighs the down side of no access when you need him.”
So they kept him; they kept the man who wasn’t theirs, who was a front man for nobody; the man who drove them up the wall, predictably. He was a fluke, but he was a useful fluke. And when he gave his fund-raising dinners they turned out by the hundreds, more than had ever turned out for anyone in Texas before; and they told him Dolph, you’re great.
But as soon as he was gone they laughed at him; laughed at their accidental good luck to have someone like that around: not just what we’d have wanted, you know; pretty weird in fact; but safe, that’s the main thing, safe. Tell him he’s great; he’ll never catch on.
Whatever Dolph Briscoe’s muse may be, the cumulative effect of his behavior has been to deny him, as governor, the unequivocal respect that had come his way spontaneously in private life. Can he not know that? A poignant reminder of the change was the celebrated “Orville Drall” caper last legislative session, in which a simulated press release from a fictitious state representative of that name announced the introduction of a resolution declaring Dolph Briscoe legally dead. Yes indeed: everyone got a good laugh over that one, including (they say) the governor himself; but when he was alone with his thoughts that night, what then? Did his memory roam back to Uvalde; and those first parades; and what it had all meant then, so long ago?
II
Why does Dolph Briscoe want to be governor? Years ago, he himself gave this answer: “You just go through life one time. I think you should try to do everything you can, serve wherever you can.” A man does not, however, pursue something as hard-to-get as the governorship merely to fulfill Duty’s abstract call; he seeks it for some reason. And the unavoidable fact about Briscoe is that none of the traditional reasons men go into politics seem to apply to him.
Executive command? He does not relish it in the manner of a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, a Johnson; his lackadaisical attitude toward his own appointments suggests he does not relish it at all.
A program? He has none, save for a small handful of taboos, of don’ts, of forbidden things like No New Taxes; after three years he has yet to develop and work for a coherent set of legislative enactments.
The pomp and ceremony of the office? He seems indifferent to it. He is feted at his speeches, to be sure, but he often drives away in a red Ford, not the official Lincoln Continental limousine. He seldom socializes at the mansion, rarely has parties at which he, the governor, could bask in adulation. When critics call him another Preston Smith, they could not be further from the truth. The two men are profoundly unalike: Preston loved the usufructs and fanfare of the governorship, reveled in them as much as Dolph ignores them. Briscoe is, in the currently fashionable language of the political science fraternity, a classic “passive-negative” executive. Not only does he not do anything, he seems to have no fun not doing it.
Money? Not a chance. A $65,000 salary is not exactly opulence for a multimillionaire, and if there is anything the Briscoes didn’t need, it was another house. Besides, as their old friend Zeke Zbranek opined, “Ol’ Dolph had a pretty good car when he came.” And the idea of pilfering from the public purse is abhorrent to what everyone agrees is Briscoe’s scrupulous personal honesty. Whatever else Dolph Briscoe may be, he is not a crook.
Political kingfishery? He has shown no interest in securing a place as a party boss, as, say, Shivers did; the State Democratic Executive Committee, which he controls, is down to one secretary and is deep in debt.
Cronyism? Analysts of the Texas governorship have remarked that the most noticeable characteristic of the state’s chief executives since Reconstruction is that they have been front men for other interests. (As someone once remarked of Ben Barnes, the young state representative from De Leon whom the Connally-Johnson Democratic establishment groomed to preserve their control of the Capitol until Sharpstown and Briscoe upset their plans: “They interviewed a lot of people for the job, and Ben Barnes got it.”) Briscoe, by contrast, is not just another front man for corporate business interests; they are frustrated by him personally, even though they are not especially unhappy at what he does. He is a fascinating anomaly in modern Texas politics.
It is not hard to discern definite personal reasons, however, that induced him to put a gubernatorial construction on Duty’s call. His father’s deathbed wish was for young Dolph to become governor. Friends remember the older man as a “backwoods Joe Kennedy” who bred his son from childhood for that office, and the father’s influence is so strong today, 22 years after his death, that Dolph still puts Jr. after his own name. Beyond that, of course, there was the prestige of the office itself. The Texas governorship has been the terminal political achievement of those who hold it, a kind of pinnacle in itself; to Price Daniel in 1958, it was worth leaving the U.S. Senate for. In Texas the governorship is something.
It has prestige, and Briscoe has always gone after the prestige spot—an objective that has less to do with any specific set of goals than with the luster of the position attained, rather like being the titular chairman of a charity fund drive. Precisely: First of the Bankers, First of the Ranchers, and finally First of All the Texans. The crown of a career.
Then too, there is Janey. Not only does she have an abiding interest in things political, she also has plainly drawn vicarious pleasure from her husband’s lifelong ascent in status and esteem—which (alas) was taking place in the relative obscurity of a small South Texas town. For Janey, who grew up in a salt-of-the-earth social-climbing family surrounded by, but not part of, Austin’s tantalizing political and social whirl, marrying Dolph was marrying up. And getting Dolph elected governor was the great escape: a ticket out of Uvalde and back to her hometown in triumph—not merely a ticket of admission to that world she had seen as a child, but admission to the very top of it, able to ordain what that world would be.
All of these things doubtless motivated Dolph to run for governor; but are they enough? Does a shy, aloof rancher really leave the wild solitude of the place he loves and endure two state-wide political campaigns and the vexations of Austin in order to please his wife, add another feather to his cap, and lay to rest the ghost of his father? There must be more. What is it? “The reason,” said a former state official as he turned in his swivel chair and gazed for a long time at the stark winter scene outside his window, “is that he enjoys the power.”
The power?
The power. “He enjoys the power that sets him apart. The lofty pedestal. Being above the crowd, able to deal with people as you please with no accountability. That kind of power. Not the other kind.”
He saw my puzzlement. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Dolph and I were friends back in the Fifties. I admired him, and when he retired from the Legislature because his father had died, I wrote him a letter regretting it, telling him how sorry I was to see him leaving public life and how I hoped he’d be able to come back some day. We kept up a good personal relationship for years after that; I used to go down to Catarina [Briscoe’s ranch headquarters] and fish with him. Naturally, when he became governor we didn’t see as much of each other. But one day I was cleaning out some papers in my office and I ran across a copy of that old letter. I decided to send it to him, along with a little note about the old days and how he had come back after all—not just come back, but come back as governor. Dolph never acknowledged it at all.”
He was not angry. He was hurt; you could tell the difference easily in his eyes. You understood he knew the note was unimportant by itself; you understood without his saying so that it had been meant to say, Dolph, we were together long enough ago for these pages to turn yellow, and I am still your friend. There are tokens that pass between men as affirmations of friendship. This was one.
There is nothing unique about this type of story. Kind personal notes from men as prominent as two former governors have gone unanswered. The more one looks, the more one finds that the distinguishing mark of his relations with the political and social world of Texas has been to emphasize that he is set apart—to do things that remind others he is dealing with them as he pleases. Many of his most inscrutable actions can be explained, at least in part, as a way of saying two things to other people: “I Don’t Need You,” and “Whether You Like It or Not, You Have to Wait on Me Now.” That represents the exercise of power in a very special sense.
It helps explain his failure to greet the legislative delegations on the first day of each session; politics, for all its infighting, is soothed by a network of ritual courtesies among politicians, which are precisely the things Briscoe spurns. It helps explain the unanswered inquiries from legislators asking if he has any objection to their bills. It helps explain the appointments that go unfilled while impatient committees and agencies cool their heels. It helps explain his chilliness toward people who offer him advice, especially old friends; and the phenomenon, often noted, that he subsequently goes out of his way to show he is ignoring it. It helps explain his indifference to almost everything the Legislature does except those that challenge his supremacy or dilute the power of his office.
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