Sitting Pretty
She is the perfect image of a United States senator—until she loses her cool. Then you see the real Kay Bailey Hutchison, the one who says, “I’ve had to fight for everything I get.”
(Page 2 of 3)
I thought back to how calm, quiet, and soft-spoken Kay had appeared earlier in the day in her office. Her normal temperament is unobtrusive, gentle, mannerly. The word that comes to mind is “ladylike.” Usually she speaks so softly that on more than one occasion I head members of her staff ask her to repeat instructions. I did sense an undercurrent of tension, as if employees were tiptoeing around her. Yet it was difficult to reconcile this soft boss with the Hutchison I had read about in depositions taken from former staff members at the state treasurer’s office. “Very aggressive,” one employee had called her. “Very demanding.” A former supervisor testified that Hutchison once accused him of having “idiots” working for him. She was also portrayed as a “micromanager” who would “lose it” over trivial mistakes. Hutchison’s defense, she told me, is that, “I don’t demand anything of anyone that I don’t demand of myself.” The trouble is that what she demands of herself is perfection.
The legal case against Hutchison was never as damaging as the personal case. She had been indicted on charges that as state treasurer she had used state employees for personal and political tasks and later destroyed or altered computer records to cover up the evidence. Hutchison and the state Republican party protested that the case was motivated by partisan politics; she and her husband, Dallas bond lawyer and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ray Hutchison, charged that she was the victim of a Democratic conspiracy. The GOP claimed that Democrats, including Governor Ann Richards, were violating ethic laws as well. Hutchison was acquitted in the case after a bizarre decision by Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle not to proceed with the prosecution.
In mid-June the Dallas Observer, an alternative newspaper, published an article by reporter Miriam Rozen called “The Case Against Kay.” (The article also appeared in the Houston Press.) Rozen quoted extensively from grand jury testimony that is supposed to be secret under Texas law; she said that she had been given unfettered access to the material, something that Earle vehemently denies. Most of the published material was also in depositions that I had read. Rozen’s account made for a compelling reading, as treasury employees explained how they had secretly preserved the records they had been asked to destroy. But the article is entirely one-sided. Little is mentioned of Hutchison’s legal defenses to the charges. For example, she has said that no records were permanently lost and that their removal from the state computer was actually an attempt to comply with Earle’s initial notification that her office was engaging in improper activity. “I was told that certain information on my computer should not have been there,” she told me. “So I told my employees to get that information off the state’s computer. I wasn’t trying to break the law. I was trying to obey it.”
The real damage of the depositions is that they provide something that rarely appears in print: intimate and detailed revelations about a public personality from named sources, all sworn to under penalty of perjury. They reveal the dark side of Kay Bailey Hutchison’s drive, how it occasionally erupts in rage when things don’t go they way she thinks they should—a rage worthy of the stories that still circulate about Lyndon Johnson. The comparison to male politicians with legendary tempers has not escaped Hutchison. When I asked her why she thinks that her employees would say that she hit them, when she says that she didn’t, Hutchison said, “People expect men to be tough bosses. They don’t like it when women are tough.”
One of the stories about LBJ was that when Nellie Connally had worked for him, he had once thrown a potted plant at her. Hutchison’s lawyers planned to use that story to counteract the most widely reported example of Hutchison’s anger, the allegation that she had struck Sharon Ammann, Nellie and John Connally’s daughter, with a notebook. Hutchison has repeatedly denied hitting Ammann, but two other former employees backed up Ammann in their depositions. In Ammann’s own deposition, she says that Hutchison came out of her office and asked Ammann for the telephone number of a San Antonio physician. When Ammann couldn’t find it, Hutchison lost her temper at the delay. “She came out of the office and started hitting her hands on the desk and doing her hands on the desk and doing her hands up,” Ammann related. “And she started raising her voice.” Then, according to Ammann, Hutchison proceeded to pound Ammann’s left shoulder with the notebook at a rate of one lick for each word: “I-told-you-to-look-in-that-file-cabinet-until-you-found-the-number-and-I-meant-it.”
Trilby Babin, a former administrative assistant to Hutchison, described a second incident in her deposition. She, Hutchison, and Mark Toohey, another aide, were in a car when Hutchison, who was talking on a cellular phone, gestured for Toohey to get something out of her briefcase. Toohey apparently didn’t understand what he was supposed to do, and when he didn’t do what she wanted, Hutchison became frustrated. “It seems to escalate,” said Babin. “She lost her temper and pinched him on the arm.”
Other personal details in the case were less damaging but still highly unflattering. David Criss, her former director of policy and planning at the treasury, told investigators for Earle that Hutchison routinely asked staff members to take the small containers of cream from restaurants so she could later use them at home. Employees were also asked to bring back mints from lunch meets at the Austin Club because Kay enjoyed them. But an investigative report also quoted Criss as saying that he wanted to “hurt Hutchison badly politically.” Other staff members related that Hutchison was obsessed with her political enemies. They told how she limited the circulation of her daily schedule so that Paul Williams, who had been a treasury administrator when Ann Richards held the office and now worked for Richards in the governor’s office, wouldn’t be able to get a copy and know what she was doing.
Hutchison spokesman David Beckwith described Ammann, Babin, and Criss as politically motivated (all have Republican credentials) and not trustworthy. He portrayed Hutchison as a tough boss who pays close attention to details, especially those involving other people’s money. “Once someone in the office overordered sandwiches for an official lunch,” said Beckwith. “Kay didn’t like it. Now we take specific orders to make sure we don’t pay for too many.”
There are two ways to look at these sorts of traits. One is that many people filch creamers and mints from restaurants, get angry at employees, and think their enemies are out to get them. The other is that the opposing forces of Hutchison’s public and private styles—”kissin’ up and pissin’ down,” as one Texas poll described it to me—are so strong that sometimes they just pull her apart.
At minimum, the constant tension can be a drag on her daily life, as was evident one morning in mid-May. Hutchison was seated in a TV studio not far from her Senate office on Capitol Hill, preparing to moderate a Republican-backed, nationally syndicated cable show called Women Who Win.
“Roll the TelePrompTer and let me run through it so I can get a feel for the script,” Hutchison ordered the crew of technicians, smoothing her red business skirt over her knees.
“Hello,” she said, beaming into the camera’s red light. “I’m Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison from Texas. Welcome to Women Who Win.” Against the backlit set, Hutchison looked like the image of the show’s title with her blond backbrushed hair, frosted nails, and a tidy chic suit. She looked self-assured as she explained that the goal of the program was to showcase Republican women who are on the political fast track.
“Tonight we’ll take you on the road to my hometown of Dallas,” said Hutchison, cheerfully, “and then on to the heartland of America”-suddenly a dark shadow crossed Hutchison’s face-”uh...uh...uh,” she stammered, staring helplessly into the camera. “Her eyes were squeezed shut, her lips pressed together. She seemed to be reexperienceing every awful moment of her life. She had made a mistake.
“Ready!” someone shouted from behind a camera. Hutchison regained control. “Tonight we’ll take you on the road to my hometown of Dallas, and then on to the heartland of America,” she said, and her smile was radiant as she paused and said, “Omaha.”
The most surprising thing that I learned about Kay Bailey Hutchison did not come from the depositions but from Hutchison herself. It was that the premier practioner of the politics of pretty does not consider herself pretty.
“I grew up in Texas in an era when being pretty was the goal of all women, and I wasn’t pretty. I was plain,” said Hutchison, leaning forward in a chair in her Senate office. Being pretty was, to young Kay Bailey, a goal to be achieved, just like being perfect and being powerful are goals for her as an adult. The pursuit of prettiness drove her as a child, just as the pursuit of perfection drives her now. “I chose to be pretty, even though I don’t have natural resources,” explained Hutchison. “Don’t you see? I’ve had to fight for everything I get.”
She is a product of time, the fifties; a place, the blue-collar Texas Gulf Coast; and a conventional, prosperous family. She grew up in La Marque, where her father, Allan Bailey, built hundreds of middle-class tract homes primarily for workers at the newly opened Union Carbide plant after World War II. Driving down Bowie Street, her mother, Kathryn, pointed to a neat row of two-bedroom homes and reflected on how Kay got her ambition. “Kay’s a hard worker like her daddy. Mr. Bailey built all these houses,” she said. “Her father was a workaholic. He couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and get to the office, and he was still taking telephone calls past eight o’clock at night. Kay’s just like him.”
But she was also like her mother, attractive and anxious to please. Looking good was always important to her. Kathryn Bailey has a photograph of Kay as a toddler dressed in a sweet, crisp white pinafore. “In the morning she liked to wear rompers, but in the afternoon she always called for her clean pinafores,” recalled Mrs. Bailey. “She always liked to dress, even then.”
My Library
