The Time of His Life
The moment has come for Henry Cisneros to make the hardest decision of all—what does he really want?
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He was clearly interested in running for governor, but if he took on Bill Hobby he would risk alienating the state Democratic party, to whom his dues were still outstanding. (The prospects for Cisneros improved dramatically in July when Hobby announced he was giving up his own gubernatorial ambitions.) What about lieutenant governor? Would that be read as too cautious a gesture for a politician with a national reputation to support? One obvious next perch for Cisneros was Phil Gramm’s Senate seat, but a fight against Gramm would be hard, expensive, and probably dirty, and it was unclear if Cisneros was up to it. He has never lost a race (in the 1983 mayoral election he received more than 94 percent of the vote), and there exists a perception that he has been almost eerily untested, that a serious political and personal defeat might throw him into despair. This perception has been heightened over the years by occasional uncorkings of the mayor’s temper. When Mayor Lila Cockrell failed to name Councilman Cisneros as mayor pro tem in 1977, he wrote a letter of resignation, which was promptly retracted, but the incident left his affronted ego on public exhibit. Ever since, Henry-watchers have tracked and charted each new cloudburst—the most spectacular being the time in 1983 when he finally had all he could take of Bernardo Eureste, his archnemesis on the city council, and called him “the prince of destruction.”
Of course, the prospect of a state campaign might become moot if Cisneros was considered again in 1988 for the vice presidential slot or was offered a Cabinet post in a new Democratic administration. There was always the possibility, as one Cisnerosologist suggested, that he would “stay in the fetal position forever” and run for another term as mayor. Others believed there was an ascetic, self-punishing side to Henry Cisneros that might just take the glib politician by the hand and lead him away from public life. “What you have to realize about Henry,” says one observer, “is that although he’s not an enigma, he is capable of doing enigmatic things.”
“He’s got an incredible amount of talent,” says Ernie Cortes, the founder of COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), the grass-roots activist organization whose rise to power coincided with Cisneros’ emergence as a mainstream politician. “He’s an effective ally and on occasion a worthy adversary. And he obviously has the ability to look good on a thirty-second TV spot. But what we need now are statesmen who have a capacity for reflection and sadness that indicates a real understanding of the human condition. Henry needs to cultivate those dimensions of his personality and those experiences in his life. He’s going to be flattered by people who have money and power, but he needs to stay close to his roots, to the sorts of values and vision that COPS represents. There’s a war going on for his soul. He’s like Jacob: He needs an angel to wrestle with.”
“The breezes coming out of the Gulf in the evening in San Antonio, the at-times-tropical lushness matched against the old stone walls of the missions. That,” said Henry Cisneros, “is very much the kind of person I am.”
Duly noted, but it was becoming clear that self-analysis was not the most formidable of Cisneros’ talents. He struck me as a man of many facets but not necessarily of many layers.
“Oh, Lordy!” He uttered his standard apropos-of-nothing phrase as he entered his office, put a record on a utilitarian stereo, and sat behind his desk. Soon the room was thrumming with the sounds of the United States Air Force Band.
“‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’” he said. “That’ll wake you up.” He had a wry, self-knowing smile on his face. I wondered if he had a sense of irony or just a fascinating ability to mimic it. His office was filled with a progressive politician’s earnest clutter: busts of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., model airplanes, bookshelves filled with works of history and biography and urban studies.
Cisneros signed papers as he listened to John Philip Sousa. During the record’s next selection, a choral rendition of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus,” he looked up from his work and grew contemplative.
“That’s a beautiful song,” he said. “It’s on the Statue of Liberty. Listen to the words.” We sat there, attentive, as the airmen sang the statue’s hymn to immigration.
“I lift my lamp beside the golden door,” Cisneros sang along, perhaps thinking of his own grandfather, a Mexican intellectual and political activist named Romulo Munguia who had passed through the golden door in 1926, one step ahead of a firing squad.
When the song was over, Cisneros settled down once again to his duties. He signed more papers, consulted with his staff, placed calls to legislators and civic leaders, and hummed “Ain’t Misbehavin’” when he was put on hold.
There was much to occupy the mayor’s attention today. His recent vote against a zoning permit that would allow the construction of a mall on the far northwest fringes of San Antonio had thrown various city factions into a state of full alert. Cisneros, with the puzzling abruptness that has proven to be one of his most significant flaws as a leader, had voted against the change because the mall was located in the ecologically sensitive recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer, which San Antonio depends on for its drinking water. Though the zoning request had passed 8-2, the very fact that Cisneros had been one of the dissenting votes suddenly made protection of the aquifer the city’s highest and most contentious priority. Meanwhile, developers—among them some of the mayor’s leading financial supporters—were furious at what they considered a betrayal of their interests. Cliff Morton, a San Antonio homebuilder, had been openly contemptuous of the mayor at a public hearing on the issue several days before. Cisneros had also infuriated environmentalists by refusing to appoint Maria Berriozabal, the city council member who had been most vocal about the whole issue, to his aquifer task force. Now that both sides were openly hostile, Cisneros announced that he felt liberated, divested of every consideration except what was right. He was ready, he said, to spend a little political capital.
Cisneros had also been busy this week trying to force a bill through the state Legislature in the waning days of its session. The bill would allow San Antonio, in effect, to increase its mass transit tax and use the revenue to finance the fondest of all Henry Cisneros’ dreams: a major league sports stadium. The mayor was passionately—his critics would say peculiarly—convinced that the lack of such a stadium was San Antonio’s chief obstacle to true greatness. Unfortunately the San Antonio legislative delegation was not convinced, and the House was refusing to put the bill on its calendar. Though there was still some support in the Senate, the bill appeared dead, or at least it appeared that way to everybody but Cisneros, who had not yet seen the soul leave the body.
While he was trying to revive the stadium, the mayor was also planning the pitch that he would deliver the next week in Colorado Springs to attract the 1991 United States Olympic Festival to San Antonio and worrying about the future of Sea World, the giant marine theme park scheduled to open in the city next year. Luring Sea World—an attraction that would bring not only trained whales and penguins but also supposedly two thousand jobs and three million tourists per year—was one of Cisneros’ most visible set pieces of economic development. If a British publisher succeeded in taking over Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Sea World’s parent company, the park might suddenly become a neglected stepchild.
“This takeover thing is very serious,” he said, though not unhappily. Each new crisis served only to invigorate him further. An aide came into the office with a poster to be signed for a second-grade class at Oak Hill Elementary School. Tapping his feet to the Air Force band’s rendition of “This Is My Country,” wondering aloud exactly how many second-grade classes there were at Oak Hill Elementary, Henry Cisneros signed his name beneath his image. Wait a minute, I thought: a poster? Was there any other mayor in the country who had his own poster?
Henry Cisneros first ran for the city council in 1975, at a time when the Good Government League—San Antonio’s business-as-usual Anglo ruling party of that era—was starting to lose its political grip on the city and die its dinosaur’s death. Cisneros had recently returned to San Antonio after earning a second master’s degree—in public administration—from Harvard. To the GGL, this energetic and well-mannered young Hispanic, this Aggie who, while a White House Fellow during the Nixon administration, had been coached in how to select a suit by no less a pin-striped eminence than Elliot Richardson, was just the sort of minority candidate that the cautious expansion of its franchise required. He was interviewed and granted a place on the ticket and proceeded to launch a vigorous, high-visibility campaign that promptly—and somewhat rudely, by prevailing standards—eclipsed the other members of the GGL slate. Cisneros won without a runoff, but he drew a higher percentage of votes from Anglos than from Mexican Americans. The endorsement from the mostly Hispanic West Side was a cautious one.
But if Henry Cisneros was an establishment candidate, he had a way of making the establishment over in his own image. In his years on the city council he proved not to be a sellout to Hispanic causes, but at the same time his reasoned, pragmatic presence was a balm to the nervous spirits within the old Anglo power structure. He was, as people kept saying, “the right Mexican at the right time,” the polished man the raw energy of the Hispanic movement required. As a city councilman, Cisneros maintained an effective though not always harmonious alliance with COPS. Working with the organization, he helped lead the fight for single-member districts and capital improvements to the West Side.
When Cisneros was elected mayor in 1981, the national media chose to see him as the symbol of a suddenly powerful minority, but he had been careful to make his constituency in San Antonio as broad as possible. His opponent, John Steen, represented the last gasp of the GGL, but Cisneros was supported by a new sort of oligarchy—the wealthy developers and investors from north of Loop 410 who were eager to take on the downtown elite. Cisneros appealed to the arriviste loop dwellers as much as he appealed to the brash shock troops of COPS. He had a grand vision of San Antonio that was so intense and apparently heartfelt that people were distracted from their factional squabbles. Biotech, high tech, biosciences, the new infrastructure, creative incentive financing, economic development, cutting edge—Henry used all these words and more. When the magic was working he could make the citizens of San Antonio believe that they were all members of one giant task force devoted to creating the dynamic utopia of his dreams.
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