Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
(Page 9 of 9)
In the end, Dolph and Janey used the governorship to prove they didn’t need anyone else. We grow up thinking politics moves in that great purposeful sweep recorded in the civics texts, but politicians learn differently: they learn about the things that don’t fit together, and the empty spaces. The governorship of Texas is, for a while, one of those empty spaces, a hollow place where two vulnerable human beings are doing an extraordinary dance to music that only they can hear. The rest of state government—the other state officials, the bureaucracy—for the most part restrain the impulse to be introspective about what they see; they regard the dancers as simply part of the setting, as something to be tolerated or circumvented in the course of getting their own jobs done. The dance cannot go on forever, but while it lasts, it is Dolph and Janey against the world.
The irony is this: forty years ago, Dolph Briscoe could have had all the respect he wanted and, with a little luck, a successful governorship as well. There was a time when it would have worked; when he was a child, listening to his father, it would have worked. The myth that linked status to the ownership of land was secure. But Texas would not stand still. Dallas, Houston, aerospace, big oil, insurance, and all the rest elbowed their way into power and status until the myth gave way: there were people in Texas with power and status who did not care, really did not care, that they had no ranch. It came by degrees, but it came.
Lloyd Bentsen, another ambitious member of the South Texas landed gentry, figured all that out and moved to Houston; by contrast, when a friend of Briscoe’s suggested that he might be smart to buy a home in River Oaks before the ’68 campaign—not to pull up stakes from South Texas, but to bolster his contacts in that political and economic center—Briscoe was not interested. He stayed in Catarina, taking his measure of the state from those vast isolated brush country acres. The land: the myth: it was all supposed to work without anything else, the ultimate prestige was supposed to come without anything else; this was Texas. You can stand on the terrace of Houston’s Alley Theater any evening, looking at the lights of the highrise buildings like Shell and Pennzoil and Tenneco and Bank of the Southwest and H L & P, buildings that crowd together until Louisiana Street and Milam Street look like Manhattan’s corner of Wall and Nassau; and you can see why it didn’t come. Forty years ago it could have, but not now.
What has moved Briscoe as governor is, in some atavistic sense rooted deep in two centuries of Texas soil, a rancher’s rejection of this highrise aristocracy and all the other intruders on that cherished myth of the power of the land. By being governor he restores (as he sees it) the proper order to things, an order that without him is untuned; it is a holding action at best, but there is not much more that any governor could do to stop the changes remaking Texas.
There are echoes in all this of Giant, reminders of the gulf between what mattered in the old Texas and what matters in the new. Among Briscoe’s potential successors not one truly belongs to that old Texas where the central myth was constructed from the land. Though several were born in small towns, they are all, in a real sense, urban, and they have all made their separate peace with what Texas has become. Dolph and Janey are quite likely the last of a kind; and their strange statehouse dance, whatever it may mean to them, is for the memory of that simpler Texas a kind of contorted requiem.
* This man like so many others, was willing to speak frankly on the condition that his name not be used. Few people in politics can risk having adverse judgments of the governor quoted. Some are personally dependent on his presence in office; others, on his good will. Any governor holds a great deal of power over things other people need or want. Consequently much of what you will read in this story is from knowledgeable people whoe names have been withheld. It has to be that way.
A Question of Balance
The nuances of the Briscoe Administration are not—let’s face it—of pressing concern outside Texas. For most of the world beyond the Red River, Dolph Briscoe’s name brings to mind just one thing: that unforgettable moment at a press conference on December 12, 1974, when he suddenly interrupted his reading of a prepared statement about Highway Department reorganization to deny that he was mentally ill. None of the reporters present had asked; but the story of his denial went out to newspapers all over the country, giving the governor of Texas an instant, though somewhat mortifying, fame.
No story on Dolph Briscoe would be complete without some discussion of the persistent rumors about his mental and emotional condition. The rumors are fourfold;
First, that he periodically suffers from severe bouts of depression;
Second, that during the years between his defeat for governor in the spring of 1968 and mid-January, 1972, he underwent psychiatric treatment, including electroshock therapy, on several occasions at Galveston’s Jennie Sealy Hospital, Saint Mary’s Hospital, and the Titus Harris Clinic;
Third, that during his term of office he has continued to receive such treatments intermittently, under discreet circumstances at a remote out-of-state medical facility; and
Fourth, that he is habitually maintained on mood-regulating drugs—some say major tranquilizers, and others say lithium carbonate, a controversial antidepressant medication sold under the trade names Eskalith, Lithonate, and Lithane.
The rumors have been fed by his prolonged unexplained absences, by the protective wall Janey and his staff have erected around him, and by his demeanor in public and private. Visitors who receive an audience with the governor sometimes find him relaxed and attentive; other times they find him alarmingly detached. On the latter occasions, says a legislator who has seen him both ways, “It’s spooky to talk to him; he just sits there with that spacey, glazed look on his face. It’s like trying to talk to a TV camera. He seems to be just mentally out there riding the range.” Says another: “I can’t get through to him. It’s like he’s not there.” Recalls a lobbyist: “I guess I’ve been with him ten, twelve, fifteen times for one thing or another….I can’t tell whether he heard what I was saying, or didn’t hear it.” Muses a high elected official uneasily: “He’s almost like a robot sometimes.” Says an experienced political operative who had a series of direct contacts with Briscoe: “There were times when he was able to communicate and produce judgments, and there were other times when he reminded me of people I know on drug therapy—they listen quietly, but there’s no reaction, no penetration at all.”
The last six months of 1974 were a particularly difficult time for Briscoe, causing so much speculation about his emotional state that his blurted denial at the famous press conference did not actually surprise many listeners. He cancelled the last three weeks of his election campaign; his 86-year-old mother was suffering from terminal cancer, and attorneys for his opponent, Frances Farenthold, were trying to take his deposition in her civil lawsuit charging numerous violations of the state’s new campaign finance laws. After his mother’s death on December 2 he went into even deeper seclusion at his Frio River ranch, where, according to the caretaker, he “just looked like he sort of fell apart.”
Among those who know Dolph Briscoe, there is a general agreement that he becomes intensely uncomfortable in the presences of disputes, arguments, or any other kind of personal unpleasantness, regardless of whether it is directed at him. “He wants everyone around him to get along” is the character trait most often ascribed to him. This aspect of his personality has been apparent since at least the 1950s; one of the people closest to him during the outwardly-cheerful period in the House of Representatives remembers that even in those days, “deep controversy made Dolph despondent….He was the sort of person who went to bed with his troubles.”
Today, his recurring remoteness during serious conversations—the kind of thing that perturbs so many official visitors—is not the only symptom that suggests depressive illness or drug therapy. He punctuates his speeches with occasional strange twistings and stretchings of his neck—muscular movements associated with the use of major tranquilizers. He seizes on the literal meaning of isolated words in a question and goes off on a tangent of rambling or indignant responses to them, ignoring their context. He has experienced repeated problems with his eyesight—problems serious enough to impair his reading ability and require others to sit and read to him—one of lithium’s occasional side-effects. After a total of eight weeks of seclusion before and after the 1974 general election, he was rushed to San Antonio’s Nix Memorial Hospital with an extremely serious type of kidney failure called renal tubular necrosis—an illness which is not itself a disease, but is brought about by some other underlying physical disturbance. The governor’s office refused to disclose the nature of that underlying disturbance in his case. Prolonged use of lithium, however, is recognized as one cause of kidney damage.
None of this proves that Briscoe suffers from depression, or that he receives drug therapy. In each instance there are other possible explanations which, standing alone, are equally plausible. Likewise, the rumors of specific psychiatric treatment in Galveston and elsewhere are inconclusive: even though they are detailed to the point of including times and doctors’ names and they come from usually reliable sources, the doctors deny them and they are not documented by tangible evidence, so they must therefore be regarded as unproved.
The fact is, only Briscoe and his doctors know whether the rumors of his depression and treatment are true. Briscoe has flatly denied that he has ever “had a mental health problem,” much less been treated for one; and of course, medical ethics forbid doctors’ discussion of their patients’ care. Paradoxically, there are laws that entitle the public to know almost anything about an officeholder’s campaign contributors, but—as became unhappily apparent during Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’ protracted incapacity last year—there are none that entitle the public to know anything about an officeholder’s health.
In any event, even if it were conclusively proven that Briscoe had received treatment for mental problems, it would be important to keep that information in perspective. Psychiatrists estimate that 15 per cent of the American people suffer from various types of medically recognizable depression. Though the electorate has a right to know if a public servant is unwell—and a right to receive straight answers when it asks—there is a growing awareness that psychiatrist care should not, by itself, be a cause for shame.
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