Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
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It helps explain, too, why he would assemble the Capitol press corps for an announcement of his intention to have weekly press conferences and then let 61 days elapse without one. He knows they will arrive incensed, knows someone will stand up and asking, fuming, “Governor, since you said you’d see us every week, why . . .”—but you can finish the question yourself, as he could. Ah, the press; they are all so predictable; they perform on cue, his cue, turn on the lights and watch them go nuts. It’s been eight weeks or so, shall we invite them back for another show? Let’s do. Meanwhile they never catch on; they just chase him around to Rocksprings and line up their friends to block the doors, where he can smile politely as though nothing is wrong and give a few nonresponsive answers. There’s nothing they can do about it, and it’s fun to watch.
The contrast between Briscoe’s unvarying politeness in person and his passive rudeness when he is safely cloistered away from human contact has left many of those who deal with him confused. They begin by telling you what a “nice man” the governor is, but if you visit long enough they finally confide some chilling personal story which contradicts that—some strange sad puzzling recollection over which their memory eventually trips, which they offer to you uncomfortably, tentatively, apologetically, in the form of a confession. “Although he didn’t acknowledge my letter pledging my future cooperation,” said a bewildered Forrest Smith months after Briscoe had deposed him from the Texas Youth Council, “I assume he did get it and appreciates it.” “I don’t know what the situation is,” said a former governor who had written two personal notes. “I never heard anything again, but everything is friendly whenever I see him.” Did you ask him about the letters in person? “Yes. . . . He was friendly but unresponsive.”
Unanswered letters from ordinary citizens could be passed off as bad staff work; letters from prominent people, old friends, former governors, no. Forrest Smith’s story of letters ignored and phone calls unanswered was in the newspapers; a staff that could shield the governor from knowledge of that would have to be dealing with a man who could not read. No, he knew; and he made his choices.
He enjoys the power. Yes: the power to make people worry about him, to need to know what he thinks, to beseech him a bit; the power to ignore those who think they know the answers; the power to ignore his friends. For all these reasons, his behavior on the proposed new constitution was utterly predictable. Not merely that he opposed it, but that he waited so long to say so. In the same way that he had dozed through the Constitutional Convention of 1974—resisting every invitation to participate until, on third reading of the Legislative Article he abruptly produced a list of surprise objections that forced everyone to stop and change things according to his demands—Briscoe concealed his opposition to the constitution until the last possible moment. He had a right to take whatever position he chose, and there were adequate reasons for him to oppose it; but no one can read his statement without realizing that he did not give those good reasons, nor even particularly care what they were. He was against it regardless of the reasons—partly, at least, because Hobby, Hill, Armstrong, Daniel, Calvert, Hutchison, and all the rest had banded together for it. He set them up for the fall; for two years he said things that sounded like endorsement for constitutional revision, set up applause lines for it in his speeches, sounded like he was for it but never quite said so. He let them all climb out on a limb, from which precarious perch they regularly reminded him that new state constitutions do not pass these days, anywhere, unless the governor puts his full weight behind them. They climbed without him, and three weeks before election day he sawed the limb off. Immediately, just like those press conferences, the howl went up. One legislator fired off a three-page letter, dismantling the governor’s arguments as though he were picking wings off flies, and drawing himself up to full height to huff: “Your statement is . . . a personal affront to the Legislature and every member elected to serve in the House and Senate.”
Exactly so, just what it was intended to be. The constitution failed, you see; without his support, it failed. They thought they knew so much: but in the end, they needed him.
Briscoe’s behavior ultimately reveals why he wanted to be governor. It is the behavior of a man who had everything which should have conferred the undisputed highest status—vast wealth, award after award, more land than perhaps any other Texan—but who still was not quite part of the inner circle of the Texas political and social establishment. He was everything in Uvalde, but in a sense that just made things worse: knowing that your position has begun to lose its luster when you get past San Antonio, and that by the time you get to Houston and Dallas, where the movers and shakers are, you are just a very rich, very nice South Texas rancher. The contrast was inescapable. Status, after all, is not a matter of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, which Briscoe could do any time he chose, but rather of the subtle way the rich and powerful hobnob with you: whether they regard you as one of them. As much as Briscoe was admired by those people, it never quite occurred to them that he was one of them. And he knew it.
Worse still, he knew he was real landed gentry, someone who came by his land rightly, who had it before he entered politics: not like the Connallys and the Johnsons and the rest who got theirs afterwards. As landholders they were the imitators; he was authentic. They were parvenus, but they captured the status that eluded him.
For him, the governorship was a way to clinch that last full measure of respect. It is the one position that is by definition, unambiguously, the First Citizen of Texas; and whoever occupies it has pre-eminence. Briscoe’s lingering hope that establishment circles would somehow recognize his achievements and anoint him voluntarily had begun to fade in 1962, when Connally received the nod, and was dashed for good in 1968, when he felt his turn had come and they followed Locke and Carr and Hill and Smith instead. That was the moment of truth, the end of his most fundamental illusion, and it came as a terrible shock. From then on he knew he could count on no one but himself, that he would have to get the governorship and that last full measure of respect entirely on his own. He is a different man now than he was in 1968; more than any other reason, that is why. “They may not think I belong at the top,” his attitude became, “but if I ever get there they are going to have to come to me.” People who think like that usually do not get to be governor; but 1972, as luck would have it, was an unusual year.
Briscoe ascended to the governorship with certain profoundly anti-establishment feelings: anti the politicians, anti the conservative business establishment’s leaders (but not its goals), anti the people for whom the social whirl was everything. What part Janey may have had in shaping these feelings—who can say? The administration in which she plays such a leading role, however, manifests them pervasively, starting with the staff of amateurs that surround the governor. The choice of a complete unknown like Calvin Guest as chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee has emphatically reminded the political establishment that they no longer control the game. Searcy Bracewell’s calls go unreturned; political appointments go to Uvaldeans who pose no latent threat of put-down. If there is any social power in Austin greater than the power to decide who is invited to the governor’s mansion, it is the power to decide who is not invited there. Under the Briscoes not only are the parties few and far between, but also old personal friends in Austin—friends close enough to have made regular annual visits to Catarina for years before Dolph and Janey moved to town—remain coldly and inexplicably uninvited inside the mansion’s door. To invite the social establishment would be to risk the chance their acceptance might still be withheld, somehow, in spite of everything; to invite plain old friends would be an admission that you were still, somehow, no better than their equals. It is lonely at the top.
The Texas establishment had no icon more venerated than the late Miss Ima Hogg. She was especially fond of the state’s fine governor’s mansion, lavishing upon it many notable antique furnishings. Shortly after the Briscoes had won the Democratic nomination in 1972, she telephoned an offer to help with anything that needed to be done during their term in that stately antebellum building where she had lived as a child. Her offer was made “kindly, not being bossy at all,” in the words of someone who knew her well. It was brusquely rejected by Janey, who afterwards remarked to another of Miss Ima’s friends, “Someone had better tell that old women she can’t run this mansion forever.” No small thing, when you think of it; no small thing for a grocer’s daughter: the power to ignore Miss Ima.
The attitudes the Briscoes brought with them were amplified by the rapid deterioration of the first administration. As things began to go wrong—because they were amateurs, because they were in over their heads, because the work of the governorship had changed so drastically since Dolph last saw it in the Fifties—they responded by mistrusting the politicians with whom they had to deal, especially the ones who tried to tell them something was wrong: politics was not a game and he would not play it. Briscoe’s steady shift in sympathy toward conservatives is partly due to the fact that after a while no one but conservatives tried to be nice to him; and even they did so, by and large, not because they liked him or thought he was a good governor, but because he was useful. His usefulness kept them from getting rid of him, but it could not keep them from laughing at him. The governorship, once the very thing that was supposed to secure the respect he craved, instead became a mechanism to destroy it.
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