February 1976
Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want to be Governor?
It was a brisk cloudless Halloween afternoon; the kind of autumn day that redeems six months of unsparing Texas summer; football weather. Inside Austin’s suburban Hilton Inn, Governor Dolph Briscoe had chosen the Tenth Annual Texas Conference on Tourist Development as the occasion for a rare public appearance. To a round of applause led by his wife Janey, he saluted the state’s Coca-Cola bottlers, whom he awarded a Special Citation of Merit for their distinctive contribution to tourism: giving away a package of discount vacation coupons with every case of Cokes. There were other prizes, a speech, handshakes all around.
Outside, the Hilton’s marquee announced in foot-high letters:
now appearing
the total strangers
Another Briscoe anecdote was born.
The sign was not a prank, the Hilton’s management protested later with a hint of dudgeon: there really is a group called the Total Strangers, an easy-listening dance band performing nightly in the hotel’s pub. Just a coincidence.
But a provocative coincidence, nevertheless. Somewhere, no doubt, there are other officeholders as reclusive, as secretive as Dolph Briscoe—a comatose ward-captain in the Bronx, perhaps, or a furtive county clerk in the wilds of Idaho. But are there any equal in stature to the chief executive of the third largest state?
It was not supposed to be that way. Briscoe, after all, once sought the governorship on a promise to throw open his doors to the public every two weeks, so that “anyone who wants to complain, make suggestions, or just talk to the governor will be welcome.” Try that today. For all practical purposes the Invisible Man of South Texas is unique among the country’s leading political figures. His low profile, and the lengths he has gone to protect it, have made him an enigma to many and a joke to others.
A joke. Aggie jokes; Briscoe jokes. Who could have foreseen it? There was a time when ridicule would have ranked near the bottom of any list of problems Dolph Briscoe might reasonably have expected to encounter. Five or ten years ago he was the First Citizen of Uvalde: a respected banker, a civic leader, the largest individual landholder in all Texas, one of its largest bank stockholders. He was a millionaire ten, twenty, some said even forty times over. He had pioneered chain-clearing techniques that helped turn the family’s rough open brush country into extraordinary pastureland; he traded in livestock and land across a half-dozen South Texas counties. He was a gentleman, soft-spoken but possessed of a razor-sharp business sense; the only son of a two-fisted rough-and-tumble rancher (also named Dolph Briscoe) who had settled in Uvalde, with less fortune and no fame, in 1914. He was president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, president of the Texas State Chamber of Commerce, a Boy Scout leader, chairman or trustee of half a dozen livestock groups, Laredo’s Mr. South Texas, an Outstanding Young Texan, a Jaycee, a Lion. He was fondly remembered by his colleagues in the Legislature, where he had built a reputation during four terms in the 1950s as a leader—“a progressive, thoughtful, energetic man.” He had everything; or almost everything. And on the January day in 1968 when he announced for governor from the steps of John Nance Garner’s house, there were citywide celebrations: the stores closed and the schools let out. The Houston Chronicle’s senior political reporter observed that “many who follow politics closely praise him as the man”—in the crowded field of six major candidates—“who probably would make the best governor.” Though he finished a poor fourth in 1968, he projected a convincing image of ability; four years later he won the nomination comfortably. Uvaldeans turned out to cheer as he rode through downtown in a “Dolph and Janey Day” parade.
If the governorship was intended to be the capstone of this glittering career, things took an unexpected turn. His reputation in 1976 bears scant resemblance to the one which carried him into office. His performance has been increasingly marred by doubts: doubts of those who must work with him, doubts of those who watch his behavior month-to-month. Concludes one prominent West Texas conservative: “Briscoe had every opportunity to be a great governor. He blew it.”
How? And why?
The picture of Briscoe that emerges after three years in office is of an inaccessible, ill-informed, and largely inactive man, guided by the strong hand of his wife and sheltered from all but ceremonial contact with the outside world by an apprehensive, amateurish palace guard. It is a peculiar, and disturbing, portrait.
“He really is something of a ghost,” says an aide to Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby. No one outside Briscoe’s innermost circle of advisers is kept regularly informed of his whereabouts; his predecessors’ custom of issuing a travel itinerary has been discontinued, apparently because curious reporters might use it to intercept him for a few moments of impromptu questioning. Routine signings that other governors traditionally held in their formal public office adjacent to the Capitol newsroom are now held, unannounced and usually unreported, in his more secluded private chambers.
Most politicians want to be in the public eye as much as possible; Briscoe’s extreme inaccessibility is one of the most striking facts about him. He has gone as long as eight weeks without a speech or formal public appearance of any sort. When he does appear in public it is usually a hermetic affair in which he is ushered to the head table, waits his turn to speak, and then either engages in a few moments of perfunctory handshakes or is whisked away before the program is finished. There is rarely any serious human contact.
The amount of time he spends in Austin, and what he does while he is there, are subjects he seems determined to shroud in obscurity. His aides have dismissed questions about his customary office hours as “insulting” and have declined to answer them. He himself has admitted he keeps no list of appointments, saying that he learns of his daily business agenda from “informal notes” passed to him by his secretary and “usually discarded at the end of the day.” If a corporation ran its headquarters with the same haphazard unaccountability, it would be out of business in six months.
Lee Jones, a Capitol correspondent for the Associated Press, recently tried to tally Briscoe’s absences from Austin by checking the flight logs of the airplane which the state makes available to its governors. The first obstacle was Briscoe himself, who tried to stymie Jones’ inquiry by contending that his logs of the state-owned aircraft were secret and confidential information the public had no right to see. An opinion by Attorney General John Hill, based on the state’s Open Records Law, made short shrift of that peculiar claim, leaving Capitol observers to wonder how anyone could have been so politically and legally naive as to suggest it in the first place.
The answer is that Briscoe may have been acting out of desperation: the logs were as damaging as everyone expected. They showed the governor had gone to Uvalde for at least a portion of the 135 days during the first ten months of 1975, including 64 non-holiday weekdays and at least one eight-day period during the last legislative session. That was a minimum: any additional trips he might have made in his own personal Lockheed could not be verified from the state plane logs.
In addition, when long-time Capitol newsman Stuart Long checked the state payroll records for “acting governors” who serve when a governor is out of the state, he found that Briscoe had been absent, not just from Austin but from Texas, on an average of one day every two weeks during Fiscal 1975.
Despite the evidence, Briscoe’s executive assistant Ken Clapp continues to insist with a straight face that the governor usually leaves Austin “after work on Friday evenings” and returns “early on Monday mornings.” In truth, not only does Briscoe seldom keep such hours, for him to spend as many as five consecutive days in Austin is the exception, not the rule. Last December, for example, he spent a total of seven days in the capital city.
Briscoe’s friends uniformly report that he seems happier, “more himself,” when he is away from Austin at the ranch. Lyndon Johnson did much of the work of his presidency at home in the Hill Country, so the real question is not whether Briscoe spends an inordinate amount of time in and around Uvalde, but whether he is attending to state business while he is there. The evidence is that he is not. Only three airplane logs showed members of the governor’s staff joining him for the flights, reinforcing speculation that his attention to official duties in Uvalde might be minimal. A caretaker at one of Briscoe’s Uvalde-area ranches told the Dallas Times Herald that the governor sometimes disconnects the telephones when he is there. The governor himself is evasive about his work habits away from Austin. When the Associated Press submitted a written question asking “what sort of communications and other facilities are available at Uvalde to enable [you] to keep in touch and do [your] job as governor,” Briscoe curtly returned their inquiry unanswered.
A public official should be judged in more important ways than the number or press conferences he holds. But Briscoe’s relations with the press have promoted his reputation as a phantom more by his own choice than by theirs. He has gone out of his way to promise regular news conferences and then repeatedly broken his own pledge. On November 10, 1972, shortly after his election, Briscoe promised reporters he would meet with them regularly before the inauguration to discuss his legislative plans; he then virtually disappeared until January. By May 1973, four months into his first term and deep in the midst of the legislative session, he had not called a single conference strictly devoted to answering newsmen’s questions. At the beginning of the 1975 legislative session, he volunteered the promise to meet with reporters once a week; by April, he had gone five consecutive weeks without doing so. When he called in reporters to announce his opposition to the proposed constitution in October, 61 days had passed since his last “weekly” press conference. Challenged by reporters, the governor responded that, well, he might just have press conferences every 61 days instead.
Politicians commonly have friction with the press, but not in the way Briscoe does. The point is not so much that he tries so hard to avoid reporters, as that he makes gratuitous promises of cooperation which he then does not keep.
