Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
How the West Was Won Over
She came. She saw. She put us on TV. And as the cattlemen’s $12 million suit against Oprah Winfrey wore on, more and more Texans found themselves lining up on her side.
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Engler and three smaller Amarillo cattle feeders filed suit in federal court under the False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act, a 1995 law that states that those who interfere with the sale of Texas produce by knowingly making false statements can be held liable to the producer for damages. The lawsuit seemed flimsy at best. Winfrey’s announcement that she was swearing off beef was clearly protected by the First Amendment. And even if the show was flagrantly biased against cattlemen, at least some airtime had been given to the beef proponents. Furthermore, it was going to be difficult to pin the cattlemen’s financial losses (Engler said he had lost $6.7 million) directly on Winfrey, since beef prices had already been declining. And then there was the question of whether a law designed to protect perishable produce could be applied to livestock. “It’s questionable just how perishable a thousand-pound steer really is,” quipped Winfrey’s attorney, Chip Babcock of Dallas.
Standing in one of his wind-whipped feedlots last December, Engler said indignantly from beneath the brim of his white Stetson, “The picture presented on that show was that people in the beef industry were picking up dead cows in the middle of the night, tossing them in the back of their pickups, slicing them up, and then dumping bloody cow parts into feed troughs.” His cattle stood quietly in the mud, blinking slowly under their long lashes and chewing their feed. “Exaggerations, untruths, and innuendo,” he bellowed, flashing his thick gold ring emblazoned with a C of diamonds in honor of his company, Cactus Feeders. At the time, his desk was littered with fan letters and checks from ranchers from all over the country. Politicians also got into the act: The state’s agriculture commissioner, Rick Perry, told Engler to “go over and blow the hell out of them.” Engler knew that if he won his lawsuit, he would be considered one of the greatest cattlemen in Texas history, next to Charles Goodnight. “Let’s face it, some of the best days of Amarillo’s cowboy life are long gone,” said Charles Rittenberry, “so here was our chance for one last hurrah.”
Many lawyers figured the case would never get to trial, but late last year federal judge Mary Lou Robinson ruled the suit was valid, and then she shocked Winfrey’s attorneys by announcing that an impartial jury could be seated in Amarillo. The irony seemed too delicious to be true. Oprah was going to be forced to spend at least a month in Amarillo, the board game—flat beef capital of Texas—a city that has been known to smell like a cow patty when the wind comes out of the east and wafts through the stockyards on its way downtown. Yeehaw! Amarillo! The shoot-out was on.
BY THE TIME MOST OF THE NEWS media began showing up in Amarillo in late January for the trial, the city of 175,000 was close to pandemonium. “My God, everybody’s trying to figure out how to get on the jury,” said a local attorney. “I’ve even heard there are some women wanting to get on the jury just so they can pose nude for Playboy the way that O. J. Simpson juror did.”
During the first week of the trial, a dozen satellite television trucks circled the federal courthouse like a bunch of covered wagons, while national reporters fanned out through the city, looking for cowboys and rednecks and steak eaters. The coverage, of course, was not flattering. An Amarillo columnist said the national media had made Amarillo look like “a tumbleweed-strewn nest of yokels.” Kent Harrell, the news director of Amarillo television station KVII, was asked by the producer of a call-in radio talk show in New York whether there was a reporter at the station with a thick Texas drawl who could talk in a rustic way about the upcoming trial. Harrell said he had no such reporters: “We speak regular English out here.”
It was hard to believe that something or someone could interfere with Amarillo’s allegiance to beef. This, after all, is a city the cattlemen built. The lobby of the federal courthouse, where Winfrey would be put on trial, is ringed with a sweeping mural of a cattle drive. Amarillo’s largest private employer, with 3,300 workers, is the Iowa Beef Processors’ slaughterhouse. One of the city’s most famous landmarks is the Big Texan Steak Ranch, which offers a 72-ounce steak (four and a half pounds) free if a customer can eat it and all the trimmings in an hour. Within 150 miles of Amarillo, six million head of cattle, a third of the nation’s cattle supply, are fattened in feedlots. All of which would explain those fire-red bumper stickers proclaiming “The Only Mad Cow in Amarillo is OPRAH” that dotted the city. To show his support for Panhandle cattlemen, Gary Molberg, Amarillo’s chamber of commerce president, issued an internal memo in early January admonishing the chamber’s staff not to attend Winfrey’s show while it was broadcasting in Amarillo nor to give her or her production company “any red carpet rollouts, key to the city, flowers.”
But then came a major defection from the ranks of Amarillo’s power structure. Nancy Seliger, the spunky wife of Amarillo mayor Kel Seliger, sent Winfrey a handwritten note inviting her to a meeting of Seliger’s book club. Every woman in Amarillo knew within days what happened next: Winfrey immediately picked up the phone, called Mrs. Seliger, graciously thanked her, and chatted with her for several minutes about—among other things—where to get her hair done in Amarillo.
Although Engler was no longer talking to the press—the judge had slapped a gag order on all potential witnesses and lawyers involved in the case—the word was that he and his cohorts were dismayed that one of Amarillo’s finer women would cross the line. (“We are proud of the town our cattlemen built,” said Nancy Seliger, “but there was no sense in being rude.”) One can only guess how Engler reacted when phone lines across the Panhandle temporarily shut down one afternoon after an 800-number advertising tickets to tapings of Oprah in Amarillo flashed across television screens. A spokesman for the show said 215,000 calls came in within thirty minutes.
What had happened? Instead of creating a ground swell of support for cattlemen, the industry’s practices were being scrutinized more closely than ever by the media. Ralph Nader wrote a column, printed in newspapers around the country, comparing the cattlemen’s suit with King George III’s attempts to silence Americans. Other writers said that Engler’s lawsuit threatened the First Amendment. The Dallas Morning News received letters calling Engler and his supporters “crybaby cattlemen” and “spoiled children.”
“People in the beef industry,” said one insider, “are saying off the record that this is a public relations disaster.” In an early survey the Amarillo Globe-News found that 1,284 of its responding readers thought Winfrey would win, while only 280 thought the cattleman would. Agriculture commissioner Perry, a gung ho backer of the lawsuit, was conspicuously quiet about it—maybe because he was running for lieutenant governor. By mid-January, the fire-red bumper stickers seemed to have thinned out, outnumbered by “Amarillo Loves Oprah” T-shirts. When Gary Molberg, the hapless chamber of commerce president, realized just what support there was for Winfrey in Amarillo—some residents were lining up alongside a remote highway before dawn in the bitter cold simply to watch her jog—he issued a retraction of his memo and sent her a bouquet of yellow roses.
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