Power
The old establishment is buried or busted. Here’s who is deciding the fate of Texas now—plus, the runners-up, the comers, the wannabees, and the right man to call in Amarillo.
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Familiar names all, and yet they are vastly different in identity and style from their counterparts who constituted the list in the heyday of the establishment.
Take a look at our previous roster of the most powerful people in Texas, published eleven years ago. This time the names appear in alphabetical order:
1. James Aston, chairman, Republic Bancshares, Dallas
2. George R. Brown, chairman, Brown and Root, Houston
3. John Connally, attorney, Houston
4. Ed Cox, oilman, Dallas
5. Trammell Crow, developer, Dallas
6. James Elkins, Jr., chairman, First City Bancorporation, Houston
7. Oveta Culp Hobby, publisher, the Houston Post, Houston
8. Ray Hunt, oilman and developer, Dallas
9. Leon Jaworski, attorney, Houston
10. Erik Jonsson, founder, Texas Instruments, Dallas
11. William Lane, president, Riviana foods, Houston
12. Hugh Liedtke, chairman Pennzoil, Houston
13. Ben Love, chairman, Texas Commerce Bancshares, Houston
14. Walter Mischer, banker and developer, Houston
15. John Murchison, oilman, Dallas
16. Allan Shivers, banker, Austin
17. Bobby Stewart, chairman, InterFirst Bank, Dallas
18. Robert Strauss, attorney, Dallas and Washington
19. Gus Wortham, founder, American General Insurance, Houston
20. Mike Wright, chairman, Exxon USA, Houston
Brown, Jaworski, Lane, Murchison, Shivers, and Wortham are dead. The banks once run by Elkins, Love, and Stewart have been sold. Hobby’s paper also has been sold—twice. Connally is bankrupt. Aston and Wright have stepped down, and Jonsson is retired not only from business but also from public life. Cox’s power lapsed because he was a director of two institutions that suffered prominent disasters—InterFirst and SMU. Liedtke, aside from his company’s mega-lawsuit against Texaco, has scant involvement in public affairs. Only Crow, Strauss, Hunt, and Mischer continue to exercise power in the traditional way, and Crow and Strauss do so far less today than they did in 1976.
Our 1976 list had twenty names and could easily have been expanded to thirty or more. The current list doesn’t stop at ten just because it’s a nice round number; we ran out of contenders. More than the names has changed in eleven years. So has the nature of power.
Think of power in modern Texas as being a lot like oil. There is less than there used to be; what remains is harder to get; and once you get it, it isn’t worth as much as it used to be. Oil production peaked in Texas in 1972 and has declined ever since. The power of the establishment peaked about the same time (the Sharpstown scandal undermined the old order in the 1972 elections) and likewise has declined ever since. Both declines became precipitous in the bust of the mid-eighties. There is less money in Texas today and, because of that, less power.
The big loser has been Houston; the big winner, Dallas. In 1976 Houston placed eleven people in the top twenty, Dallas, only eight. Moreover, the Houston representatives had far more raw clout than their Dallas counterparts, most of whom reflected their city’s traditional self-obsession; only Trammel Crow, Bobby Stewart, and Bob Strauss expanded their influence beyond the city limits. Everything seemed to be going Houston’s way. “The case for Houston’s predominance as a center of power,” wrote author Harry Hurt III, “finds even more support when factors like population growth and economic diversity are considered.” Houston economically diverse! Those were the days. Today oil-battered Houston contributes only three names to the 1987 list, compared with Dallas’ five.
The collapse of oil and real estate prices has devastated the big banks, traditionally one of the two major business sources of power in Texas. The other is not the oil industry but the development community. Bankers and developers get involved in state and local politics because their prosperity (unlike oilmen’s) depends upon growth, and almost everything state and local governments do—taxing, spending, regulating—can be seen as advancing or retarding growth. Of the twenty names on the list in 1976, six were bankers; in 1987 Bum Bright is banking’s sole surviving representative, now that Walter Mischer’s Allied Bancshares is about to be California-owned. Most of the big developers survived the bust better than the bankers, but some did not, notably latecomer John Connally.
Even before the bust, however, power was shifting away from the establishment. The old guard couldn’t keep up with changes like single-member districts and the two-party system that rewrote the political rules. George Brown and Gus Wortham had been part of the 8-F Crowd, the group of Houston business leaders who gathered in that suite of the Lamar Hotel, decade after decade, to play poker and decide who to back for public office. The word was passed out of 8-F to the downtown law firms, and through the law firms to the banks. A man could make three or so phone calls and go back to whiskey and poker. In Dallas there was no suite 8-F, but there was the Dallas Citizens Council (no lawyers allowed, just business leaders who had the authority to make decisions for their companies—one banker called them the yes-and-no men), and it too operated by the three-phone-calls principle.
The Lamar Hotel is gone, and so is that style of politics. It was easier to wield influence in the days before single member districts, when politicians in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio ran citywide instead of in neighborhood districts. Without the blessing—and money—of the men at the top, a politician didn’t have much chance of winning. At the State Capitol too, politics worked from the top down. The influence of the Big Four business lobbyists (representing oil, chemicals, railroads, and the Texas Manufacturers Association) went far beyond their clients’ narrow interests. They advocated the establishment’s number one priority—a good business (always pronounced “bidness”) climate, which in those days meant weak unions, low taxes and minimum regulation. Again the three-phone-calls principle was in effect: Get the lieutenant governor and the Speaker of the House on your side, and maybe a couple of key legislators, and they would pass the word down the line to the rest of the Legislature. When the Dallas legislative delegation was composed of nine white conservative Democrats who had run countywide, as was the case in 1965, it wasn’t likely to produce many mavericks.
Today anyone aspiring to power must be prepared to spend a lot of time on politics and with politicians. All sorts of politicians: blacks and Hispanics, suburbanites who are instinctively hostile to the downtown elites, ideologues, partisans, and small-time egomaniacs who insist upon being treated with exaggerated deference, which the 8-F Crowd and their peers were used to receiving, not giving. It is hard to imagine George Brown walking the halls of the Capitol, going from office to office in search of votes, but Walter Mischer, another 8-F alumnus, understands the new rules and is willing to play by them. That’s why his power has survived. Before the interstate banking bill came to a vote, he swept through Senate offices, delivering his message—“This is good for Texas and good for my personal business”—and didn’t leave an office until he got a definite yes or no. When proposed gasoline-tax increases reached the House floor in 1984 and 1986, Bob Lanier moved into Speaker Gib Lewis’ office and won over wavering legislators with pledges to accelerate highway projects back home. Perot came to Austin this summer to lobby the Hispanic caucus for an appointed state Board of Education. As General McDermott found out, it can be dangerous to stay away.
The two-party system has also contributed to the demise of the old power structure. Before Clements’ election in 1978, an establishmentarian who backed a losing candidate could count on buying his way back into power with a large contribution to the winner after the election. Mischer even had a phrase to describe the process: “catching the late train.” But then the Republicans started winning, and the pressure to guess right began to increase. The late train doesn’t always run anymore. Just ask Robert Bass.
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