Honesty is the Best Politics
The lessons of Lena Guerrero’s fall from grace.
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“I was devastated to learn that I have not received a degree,” she said. “I never, at any time, intended to misrepresent my record.…You learn many things during a political campaign, and I told myself I was prepared for anything. But I must tell you that this came as a complete shock.” She had enrolled in 116 hours, 4 short of what was needed. Privately, she told the same story to Ann Richards. Speaking for the governor, Bill Cryer said, “We absolutely believe Lena’s version of the story.”
But the story would not hold. On Sunday Guerrero held a press conference “to set the record straight.” When the Morning News reporter had called, she said, “I couldn’t have been more surprised if she had information that little Leo [Guerrero’s four-year-old son] had been switched at birth.” Now there was more information about her past to clear up. “The second thing that has come up in the last few hours,” she said, “is frankly even more disturbing—that information that I was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. This is wrong. I do not believe that I ever said that.” The final exchange was memorable:
Q. Do you know what subject matter you’re short in?
A. No. I never took PE. That could be it.
No one believed her. She had apologized for the errors about her past but denied any personal responsibility for creating them. It didn’t take reporters long to demolish her credibility. They discovered the Guerrero had known for several months that her degree status was in question. The Ex-Student’s Association had informed her staff and her husband back in 1991 that she had no degree. Reporters also knew that the Phi Beta Kappa claim had appeared on her own press releases.
On Wednesday she gave in to the pressure to release her UT Transcript, handing reporters “the last shred of my life that I have to offer you.” Among the many bombshells in the transcript was the revelation that Guerrero had failed a course called Mexican Americans in the Southwest. That same day reporters learned that in a speech to Texas A&M graduates this year, she had said, “Now, I remember well my own commencement, and I think I can guess what you’re feeling about right now.” Pressed for an explanation, Guerrero lamely said, “The Commencement I recall is high school.”
Ann Richards was feeling the heat too. For the first time since her election the Republicans had an issue to use against her. “If this individual were the president of the University of Texas, he or she would lose their job,” said GOP state chairman Fred Meyer. But Richards couldn’t just dump Guerrero. She saw in her protégé something of herself—hair up, voice twangy, female underdog. Guerrero alluded to their mutual history so frequently in Richards’ presence that some of the governor’s aides saw it as a tactic.
By the time the transcript was made public, Richards’ staff was ready to cut Guerro loose. Many of them had never really been close to her. They weren’t even very surprised at what had happened; Lena had always been in too much of a hurry. “Good politics starts with being honest with yourself,” said one Richards confidant. “You’ve got to put a spotlight on your soul every once in a while. Lena never stopped to do that.” When Lena blamed campaign aides for the Phi Beta Kappa reference, veterans of Richards’ 1990 gubernatorial race recalled how Guerrero, then the campaign field director, had blamed Richards’ male advisers for shortcomings in the campaign. “She whipped up a frenzy,” said a campaign hand. After Richards’ election, the problem of what to do with Lena had been a major issue. She was too divisive to be in the governor’s office and too combative to be Richards’ floor leader in the Legislature. The Railroad Commission job was the ideal solution. She could rise or fall on her own.
Now she was falling. By Friday, two days after the transcripts were released, Guerrero had suffered the Dan Quayle fate. She was a joke. The Austin American-Statesman began its page-one-story with: “What’s the temperature in Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerrero’s office? Minus one degree.” Fax machines around the state hummed with a satiric biography of the Texas Railroad Commission, Lena had successfully pushed oil companies to drop the price of gas by 75 cents a gallon”). An army of emissaries, from consultants to politicians, shuttled between Guerrero and Richards with advice. Richards sent word to Guerrero’s campaign: “This isn’t politics anymore. This is a personal problem for Lena.” That was as close as Richards came to saying that Guerrero had to resign. All through the weekend, the emissaries laid out Guerrero’s unhappy options: Stay and run for reelection (but Williamson and newspaper editorials would continue to call for her resignation), resign and not run (but that would deny Guerrero a chance for redemption and cede a statewide office to a Republican), or resign and run. On Thursday, September 24, the woman Ann Richards had praised as “an outstanding public servant” gave up her seat and began the race to reclaim it.
IT IS HARD TO SAY WHAT CONSTITUTES an outstanding public servant at the Railroad Commission, because the historical standard has been so low. For years most commissioners did not distinguish between serving the oil and gas industry and serving the public. The agency’s fabled power to set the world price of oil before the seventies was achieved primarily by giving the force of law to oil company recommendations for limits on production. Most of its decisions involve technical oil and gas disputes. With few exceptions, commissioners have bored to death or have yearned for higher office or both. Buddy Temple in 1982 and Kent Hance in 1990 tried to move up to governor and failed.
Lena Guerrero certainly wasn’t bored. She came to her job knowing less about the business of the agency than any commissioner in recent history. So she visited oil fields and truck loading docks and far-flung Railroad Commission offices around the state. “She has a quick mind, understands the issues, and reads the briefs,” said a staff aide for another commissioner.
But she wasn’t out to change the world either. Like the great majority of commissioners who preceded her, Guerrero sided with the interest groups who have always dominated commission politics and are the surest source of campaign contributions—independent oilmen and regulated truckers. She cast a decisive vote to reduce pumping in the East Texas oil field to the advantage of some independents, but the ruling was promptly set aside by a judge who found no evidence to justify the outcome. And although the Texas Department of Commerce had come out for deregulated trucking rates as an aid to economic development, Guerrero consistently voted against enlarging deregulated zones in big cities.
Where Guerrero starred was—where else?—as a politician. She surprised people who said she would never be able to get along with Jim Nugent, an irascible veteran commissioner who has made a career of making enemies and freezing them out. Guerrero made getting along with Nugent a top priority and soft-pedaled her consumer and environmental agenda. Then she went about the essential business of building a constituency of her own. Since Washington didn’t have an energy policy, she said, the state should devise its own. That was the origin of STEPP—the State of Texas Energy Policy Plan. Soon she was networking furiously, bringing together utility companies, pipelines, producers, consumer and environmental groups, anybody with a state in energy. It is hard not to be skeptical about something like STEPP—committees come and go but problems remain, especially global problems beyond the reach of one state. But for Guerrero, STEPP was a politician’s dream: a constituency built out of thin air.
She had shut the door on Barry Williamson. She had the money. She had a campaign issue—his possible conflict of interest because of his wife’s oil and gas holdings. She had the image: He was the old-style commissioner with a broad-based constituency. The only thing she didn’t have was the truth.
LENA GUERRERO’S FUNDRAISER five days after her resignation resembled a reluctant encounter group. The speakers and guests couldn’t very well ignore what had happened, but they weren’t very comfortable talking about it either. Bob Krueger, Guerrero’s colleague on the Railroad Commission, led with Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” John Sharp said that he knew how a person could want to believe something so badly that he could convince himself it was true: “I used to wake up every morning and convince myself that Jim Nugent really did like me.” Nugent turned to the Scripture: “Let him without sin cast the first stone.” Ann Richards said she was waiting for the day when she was so perfect that she would be assumed bodily into heaven. The theme for the evening was, “We all make mistakes.” I’m okay, she’s okay.
But will she be forgiven on election day? The problem is not just that Guerrero lied but that she lied about who she was—the basic link between a politician and a voter. Then, when everyone in politics knew that only the whole truth could save her, she lied about lying. Her only hope now, aside from an improbable Democratic landslide, is that the gruesome episode has changed her—and that she can make people believe it.
When she got up to speak, she did seem a little different. Her makeup was toned down; she looked younger and more subdued. She quoted a country song: “Yesterday is gone, tomorrow isn’t here, so make the most of today.” She hammered on Williamson, touted her record, praised Richards. Then she closed by saying that after winning the elections, “I will remember who my real friends are,” and people left the room wondering whether the remark was gracious or chilling, the new Lena or the same old politician.
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