Lonesome Cowboy
He's rich. He's handsome. He ropes. He rides. And he has four years as land commissioner under his belt. So why do so many Republicans (let alone Democrats) hope David Dewhurst is not the next lieutenant governor of Texas?
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This is some of what people say about him, I tell Dewhurst, but they say worse things too. You do not have spend much time in Austin political circles before you hear the rumor that he is homosexual—notwithstanding his six-year marriage to former model Tammy Jo Hopkins, which ended in divorce last year—or the more finely articulated stories that he is obsessed with having his nails manicured or that he changes his shirt eight times a day or that he sometimes wears makeup for public appearances. Whisper campaigns like this are peculiarly effective. They need not be proven: If you believe a man is obsessive about his fingernails, you will believe a lot of other things about him too. You hear variations of this all over Austin, which is where people care enough to whisper about such things. Underlying all of this is a sense of unease, a sense that, for whatever reason, he just doesn’t belong in politics.
Now he is responding, across the breakfast table, to my catalog of things people don’t like about him. The whisper campaign, which he knows about, he finds “despicable.” “Ninety-five percent of any negative gossip that you hear about David Dewhurst is generated from one or more liberal Democratic partisans and lobbyists in Austin,” he says. The gossip, he says, is deliberately, maliciously false, and he suspects it is at least in part the work of John Sharp and his minions. No evidence to support the rumors has ever surfaced, and Dewhurst built a reputation, both before his marriage and after his divorce, for squiring beautiful women around. “You need,” he says, “to listen to what people outside Austin are saying.”
Then there are the political allegations. Of the charge that he is a poor candidate, he says, “If there was any truth to that, I wouldn’t have been the highest non-judicial vote-getter in 1998 after Bush.” He also bridles at the notion that he represents only the far-right wing of the Republican party. “If there was any truth to that,” he says, “the Texas Federation of Republican Women, who represent the whole smorgasbord of Republican women, from pro-choice to soccer moms to conservatives, wouldn’t consider me one of their best friends. I have to allocate more time whenever I speak to any Republican women’s club so everybody has time to give me a hug.”
By the time our breakfast is over, I have spent a late afternoon, an evening, and a morning with him. My impression is that the David Dewhurst of the Snaffle Bit Ranch (as opposed to the political world) is not aloof and is anything but a lightweight. He is voluble, ebullient, and something of a know-it-all. He has a side of him that is pure policy wonk. He can be alternately charming and overbearing. Occasionally he sits quietly and listens. He has a dry, almost nerdy sense of humor; he thinks it is funny, for example, to tell people that he is five feet seventeen inches tall. “Vertically challenged,” he calls it. He is impassioned and expansive on subjects he likes, such as horses and Spanish culture, and he likes good food and fine wine. At dinner the previous night at the Hilltop Café, outside Fredericksburg, he showed me the many scars on his hands from roping cattle. He is, in short, a big, ambitious, rich Texan. This is not at all what the rumor mill had led me to expect.
My last question is why he thinks he can win. “The state of Texas is two or three points more Republican than it was in 1998,” he says. “Today I am a better candidate than I was in 1998. My opponent is not as good a candidate as he was in 1998. I would not be in this race unless I thought I was uniquely qualified to be lieutenant governor and that I will win.”
David Henry Dewhurst III was born in Houston on August 18, 1945, into modest circumstances. His father, a bomber pilot and a war hero, was killed by a drunk driver when David was three. He grew up on the west side of town in a family with limited means. His mother worked as a legal secretary. David attended Lamar High, where he played on the basketball team. He went to the University of Arizona and played basketball his freshman year as a walk-on. He graduated in 1967 with a major in English, a minor in history, and an ambition to go to law school. Instead, he enlisted in the Air Force.
His idea was to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a pilot. But his eyesight did not meet the minimum standards. Instead of flying fighters or bombers, Dewhurst was shipped north to a Strategic Air Command base in chilly Plattsburgh, New York, a few miles from the Canadian border, where his main duties were to guard nuclear weapons and the B-52 bombers that carried them. There he acquired his obsession for planning and detail. “I learned to schedule decision making and conversations in certain downtimes,” he tells me. “I remember having to make a decision, and so I scheduled it for the two minutes that I was going to walk in formation from the barracks to the mess hall.”
In 1971 he finished his hitch in the Air Force and took a job with the CIA. He was sent to La Paz, Bolivia, a hotbed of leftist ferment where governments were routinely toppled and where guerilla leader Che Guevara had been captured and killed just four years before. Dewhurst’s cover was a State Department job dealing with consular issues—passport and visa problems and the like. “I had a full-time embassy job,” he says. “After hours and on weekends I was tasked by my [CIA] boss in Washington to keep in touch with certain groups and foreign embassies and opinion makers that Washington was interested in.” (He later added that he had the responsibility to “monitor certain terrorist and other foreign targets.”) Two months after he arrived in Bolivia, a bloody coup ousted leftist president J. J. Torres. Dewhurst says that the coup was not assisted by the United States (a claim disputed by some historians) and that he had nothing to do with it. (The CIA confirmed that Dewhurst worked for them from 1971 to 1974 but would provide no further information.) In the CIA Dewhurst acquired fluency in Spanish and a lifelong passion for the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries. He has traveled to Mexico and South America more than a hundred times. Twenty-eight years later you can hear him speaking competent Spanish in radio advertisements in South Texas and El Paso.
After he left the CIA, he returned to Texas, where the oil business was booming. Though Dewhurst had no experience in oil, he decided in late 1978—at the age of 33 and with no capital—to move back to Houston from Washington, D.C. (where he had been attending law school and working as a marketing consultant) to try his hand at it. His plan was to sell drilling rigs to Mexican oil companies. He found a partner and in the summer of 1979 launched an oil-field service company later incorporated as Trans-Gulf Supply.
The company was an instant success. Less than two years later, thanks to steadily rising oil prices that supported an enormous demand for drilling rigs, Trans-Gulf had revenues of around $70 million a year, with annual earnings of more than $3 million. Then all hell broke loose. “As of December 31, 1981, when our audited financials were prepared, I was a thirty-six-year-old millionaire,” says Dewhurst. “Six months later, when the price of oil fell, only one of those two facts was true.” Like many Texas companies in those years, Trans-Gulf crashed just as quickly as it had risen. Bankruptcy followed. The company that had once employed 150 people employed only Dewhurst himself at the end. Documents from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court show that at the time of its bankruptcy, Trans-Gulf owed more than $8 million.
While Trans-Gulf was in bankruptcy, Dewhurst had another idea: He would build a type of electricity-producing facility known as a cogeneration plant. It would burn gas, partly from wells he owned through a drilling-and-exploration company called Falcon Seaboard, to produce steam and generate electricity. The electricity would be sold to a utility, the steam to an adjacent refinery. Without capital of his own, Dewhurst persuaded banks to lend him $110 million and by 1988 had built a successful cogeneration plant in Big Spring. It was the foundation of his fortune. Over the next three years, he built two more plants—in his old stomping grounds of Plattsburgh, New York, and in North East, Pennsylvania—and sold them in 1996 for $226 million. He is now worth more than $200 million.
But along the way, especially in the months immediately preceding the closing of the Big Spring deal, he was desperate for money and secured loans any way he could. To get one $200,000 loan, he promised equity in the cogeneration plant to one of his oldest childhood friends, Jay Golding, and a partner. Dewhurst also got a six-figure loan from a Louisiana bank, and to get another $250,000, he got a personal loan from the bank’s chairman, for which he had to promise a six-figure commission linked to the cogeneration deal.
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