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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Some of the wheeling and dealing got Dewhurst into trouble. He lost $150,000 in a short-term deal. In 1990 he was sued by Golding and his partner, who claimed that Dewhurst had cheated them out of equity in his cogeneration plants. In 1991 Dewhurst agreed to pay them what he terms a “substantial” amount of money—roughly a 30 percent stake in his Big Spring plant. (Golding and Dewhurst are once again close friends, and both say they regret the lawsuit; in February of this year Golding contributed $10,000 to Dewhurst’s campaign.) This and other business deals would later haunt him. They became an issue in his 1998 race for land commissioner and have resurfaced in his race for lieutenant governor.
Dewhurst spent twelve years in the cogeneration business. Friends describe him in those years as a solitary, driven figure who worked almost all the time and who seemed to care little for the trappings that his wealth could bring. (Even today, he buys his own groceries and washes his own clothes.) “He lived in a little townhouse,” says Ashley Smith, the president and CEO of the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, a Houston hospital, who has known Dewhurst since high school. “All he did was work. You couldn’t outwork him. He was married to his business.”
Dewhurst had also begun to buy his way into the world of politics. In the late eighties he started spreading political money around. In 1991 he became the finance chairman of the Texas Republican party and one of Phil Gramm’s principal fundraisers. Dewhurst quickly became known around the state as a wealthy man with a ready checkbook. Between 1994 and 1997 he gave $105,000 to George W. Bush’s two gubernatorial campaigns. From 1990 to 2002 he personally contributed more than $500,000 to GOP federal candidates and the Republican party.
In the mid-nineties two events happened that would radically alter Dewhurst’s life. One was his 1995 marriage, at the age of 50, to 32-year-old Tammy Jo Hopkins, a Nebraska-born, New York-based model. The other, coming less than a year after his marriage, was the sudden, stunning windfall from the sale of his cogeneration plants. The two events together completely changed the way Dewhurst lived and how he spent his money. He and Tammy went on a spending spree, indulging in the sort of material acquisitions in which he had never before shown any interest. In 1995 they bought the ranch in Fredericksburg. In 1997 they bought the late John Mecom’s 13,000-square-foot French château-style mansion on Lazy Lane in River Oaks. They added a Mediterranean-style mansion in the Pemberton Heights section of Austin and a condominium in Santa Fe. They bought art and furniture. “To some extent, he lived her life instead of his own,” says John Lyle, a lawyer and former congressman who is a close friend of Dewhurst’s. They were involved in the opera and the symphony and lavished money on local charities. Tammy was named one of the Houston Chronicle’s best-dressed women. The Dewhursts were conspicuous for their good looks, their huge fortune, and what everyone by now said were David’s political ambitions. “He was going to become a candidate,” says Austin political consultant Bill Miller. “There was no doubt about that.”
Dewhurst considered running for lieutenant governor in 1994, a job then held by the formidable Democrat Bob Bullock, and again in 1998 against Sharp, but decided instead on an easier prize: land commissioner. The Republican primary against state senator Jerry Patterson, of Pasadena, turned out to be a tough, negative campaign in which Patterson accused Dewhurst of trying to bribe him to quit the race. In the general election, state representative Richard Raymond, of Benavides, accused him of embezzlement, among other things. Dewhurst was not a great candidate. He was a pedantic, undisciplined stump speaker who was not yet comfortable in public. But he diligently traveled the state, spent $8 million (half of which was his own money) to Raymond’s $1 million, and won the election going away. He put his fortune into a blind trust and turned his full attention to politics. Last fall he agonized over whether he should run for the Senate seat that Phil Gramm is giving up. Despite a clear financial advantage over his rival for the Republican nomination, John Cornyn, Dewhurst chose to run for lieutenant governor instead.
DURING MY VISIT TO THE SNAFFLE bit Ranch—named after a type of bit that looks like two D’s back to back—Dewhurst gave me a tour of the ranch house. It is the sort of weekend place you might see in a design magazine, full of heavy wooden furniture and Native American and Oriental rugs. There are sky-high ceilings and large picture windows, Western paintings by Melvin Warren and spacious Ralph Lauren chairs. As he showed me the house, it seemed in some ways more of a tour through his marriage. He was wistful when describing individual pieces of furniture—a large armoire he and his wife had bought in France or a table they’d gotten in Mexico.
Friends say Dewhurst was devastated by the failure of his marriage. “He had always been able to work harder to make things happen,” says a friend of the couple. “But he couldn’t do that in this case.” In July 1999 Tammy was arrested for drunken driving after her Mercedes-Benz collided with an oncoming car near the ranch at one-twenty in the afternoon. After she pleaded no-contest to the charges, Dewhurst issued a press release: “My wife’s car accident in July was a wake-up call which caused Tammy to completely give up drinking and enroll herself in a clinic full-time. Today she is in the best health of her life.” The couple split up a year later. Though the Dewhursts are constrained by a confidentiality agreement from commenting on their marriage and divorce, Tammy’s lawyer says the divorce was “amicable.” Dewhurst says simply, “Tammy is a special person. I care about her, and we remain friends.” She currently lives in Houston.
Outside the ranch house, around the stables and cattle pens and riding arenas, Dewhurst feels more at home. He is a commercial—as opposed to recreational—cattle rancher and horse breeder. His company, Falcon Seaboard, breeds cattle on leased land in Sutton and Edwards counties (near Sonora) and in western Colorado. He has the third-largest registered Black Angus herd in Texas. At Fredericksburg he breeds mostly cutting, roping, and reining horses for sale and for competition. One of his reining horses is ranked fifth nationally in career earnings, and in 2000 one of his cutting horses won tenth place in the American Quarterhorse Association’s World Show.
The sport that is featured in Dewhurst’s political ads is called team roping, in which two riders, a “header” and a “heeler,” pursue a running steer inside an arena. At full gallop, the header ropes the steer’s horns; riding behind, the heeler then ropes its hind legs. Dewhurst is a header. I watched as he backed a large quarter horse named Jerry into a chute off the arena. When the steer was released, Jerry hit 35 miles per hour in a step and a half. It was a violent, exciting moment. I couldn’t imagine how he stayed on the horse. Dewhurst managed to rope the steer’s horns two out of four times.
His success rate is not as good in politics. Set aside the rumors and the gossip, and you find that David Dewhurst’s real problem is that he does not yet have fully developed political instincts. As a result, he has gotten into tight political situations from which he has been unable to extricate himself without alienating other politicians, including Republicans. The best example of this was his participation last fall on a five-member redistricting board whose job it was to redraw the electoral map of the state House and Senate based on the 2000 census. Dewhurst came up with a Senate map that 30 of 31 incumbent senators said they would support. But Cornyn, who was also on the board, had his own map, favored by big Republican donors, and he had the vote of a fellow Republican, Carole Keeton Rylander, the state comptroller. Speaker of the House Pete Laney, a Democrat, and Lieutenant Governor Ratliff, a Republican, sided with the incumbents. Dewhurst was in the middle. A skilled politician would have tried to cut a deal with Laney and Ratliff, asking for a few concessions to keep the money people happy. Instead, he voted with Cornyn and Rylander. Angry senators who ended up with districts not to their liking blamed Dewhurst, not Cornyn. Two of them, Republicans Robert Duncan, of Lubbock and Jeff Wentworth, of San Antonio, criticized Dewhurst by name in the press. Wentworth—who had been the chairman of the Senate redistricting panel—even suggested that a Republican-controlled Senate would strip Dewhurst of the traditional powers that body has granted to the lieutenant governor. Ratliff, who will return in 2003 as a senator, says, “What he did was heavy-handed, and it is a perfect example of what bothers senators about him. The members’ opinions were not given the kind of weight that a presiding officer would have given them.”
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