Mr. Right
Can you name the most influential Republican in Texas? It's not Rick Perry or any other elected official. It's James Leninger, a little-known San Antonio physician whose ideology and millions are pushing the GOP to be more conservative than ever.
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If he was interested in helping the poor from a young age, he was also eager to make money for himself. When he was four years old, he told an interviewer in 1994, he picked cherries from a tree in his family's yard and proceeded to hawk them to the neighbors. And as an adult, he seems to have remained in touch with his inner salesman. After graduating from the University of Miami, he joined the Army, which brought him to San Antonio's Brooke Army Medical Center; subsequently, he went to work for the Baptist Memorial Hospital System, where he became the director of the emergency room. The emergency department was, in the early seventies, itself a kind of start-up: Previously, doctors from other departments had rotated through the ER. "The specialty was new," says James Potyka, a physician who worked there with Leininger for ten years. "These were uncharted waters." Leininger meanwhile started to distribute a specialty medical bed, invented in Ireland and marketed in the U.S. by a Chicago company, Kincoa, that rotated immobile patients. In 1975 Leininger and his wife, Cecelia, bought Kincoa, which was nearly bankrupt, renamed it Kinetic Concepts, Incorporated (KCI), and ran it out of their one-bedroom apartment. (Moving the patient alleviates bedsores and circulatory problems and relieves congestion, which can lead to pneumonia. According to the company Web site, "Dr. Jim" had seen patients survive trauma in the ER only to develop potentially fatal complications because of their immobility. "He knew that if he could just keep them mobilized, they would survive," says the Web site text. "Then he discovered the Roto Rest bed.")
"He worked three jobs," says Potyka. "He was a practicing emergency physician, the emergency room director, and starting up his company." Despite the pressure of such a workload, Potyka adds, "I don't remember him ever being upset. He was calm and confident."
KCI, however, nearly foundered. "When KCI started, it was such a struggle," says Diane Rath, another prominent Republican who once worked for Leininger; she was KCI's public affairs director from 1991 until 1996, when then-governor Bush appointed her to the Texas Workforce Commission. Creditors prepared to seize its assets in 1979, and one night James and Cecelia knelt to pray for the survival of their struggling company. Whether because of their prayers or their business plan, the Leiningers found additional investors, and the company went on to flourish. Leininger stepped down as chairman several years ago but still owns a third of the company. It now stockpiles beds in some 150 warehouses around the country, renting them to hospitals and other facilities. The company also sells vacuum-assisted devices for closing wounds. "Jim more or less invented this industry of specialty medical beds," says Ray Hannigan, who was the CEO of KCI from 1994 to 2000 and has since been appointed by Governor Perry to the Texas Board of Health. (Democratic critics derided the appointment as a favor to one of Leininger's cronies; Hannigan and Perry insisted it was no such thing.) "He's an astute, smart businessman. He can take a concept and make it into reality," says Hannigan.
Over the years Leininger has invested in a slew of other companies, some of whose names suggest that he continues to seek divine backing. He owns Promised Land Dairy, which prints a biblical verse on its bottles of speciality milk, and he used to own a turkey plant called Sunday House Foods. According to the Texas Secretary of State's office, companies that list Leininger or his San Antonio business partners as officers also include Bionumerik Pharmaceuticals, which researches cancer drugs; ATX Technologies, which develops wireless navigation and communication tools; a direct-mail firm called Focus Direct; several other food companies; two investment companies; a children's Bible publisher; two charitable foundations; and even a company—purpose unknown—called Bugsy-N-Doc.
The route from the executive boardroom to the political back room often passes near—or through—the courthouse, and Leininger's career is no exception. Like many businessmen whose companies risk being sued, he became politically active in an effort to reduce that risk and to keep insurance costs down. KCI was certainly a potential defendant, since its beds would sometimes trap patients between the mattress and the guard rail, according to incident reports filed with the Food and Drug Administration. (Other reports describe all sorts of mishaps—a cable giving way, controls shorting out, the head of a bed spontaneously rising upright, white beads spilling out of a mattress, a company service representative receiving a severe electric shock while testing a bed.) In 1987 the company lost its liability insurance, though according to Leininger, it had never been sued.
That year, the pressure for tort reform was building in Texas, spurred on by a CBS 60 Minutes report suggesting that Texas trial lawyers were exerting undue influence on the state Supreme Court through their campaign contributions. Much of corporate Texas united to try to change the system; what set Leininger apart from the tort-reform crowd was the fact that he started his own political action committee (PAC), Texans for Justice, to which he donated $196,000, or 86 percent of its funding. Leininger entered politics with a flying leap, in other words, and he immediately established himself as a social conservative as well as a business Republican. One piece of voter mail sent by Texans for Justice, written by an alumnus of the Reverend Pat Robertson's presidential campaign, predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would leave it to the states to determine their own abortion laws and that Texas Supreme Court justices would therefore decide the abortion issue in Texas.
It wasn't as if Leininger had never paid attention to politics before. "I had worked with him back in 1980, as a doctor supporting Ronald Reagan," says Cyndi Taylor Krier, a former state senator and Bexar County judge who in 1980 was an attorney frequently involved in election law. "He wanted to align with other doctors. He's been interested in government and politics as long as I've known him." Starting in 1988, though, Leininger emerged as a high-stakes player whose efforts helped Republican Tom Phillips defeat Democrat Ted Robertson in the race for chief justice that year. (The court would continue its conservative turn in the nineties, and in 1998 a 60 Minutes follow-up report concluded that businesses and doctors are now the ones whose contributions seem to tilt the court's decisions in their favor.) Texans for Justice begat more conservative PACs: Over the next six years Leininger launched Texans for Judicial Integrity, the Committee for Governmental Integrity, and Texans for Governmental Integrity. In 1994, after his tort reform efforts had begun to bear fruit, KCI won an $84.75 million settlement in a patent infringement case in federal court—the sort of windfall that, when awarded to a personal-injury plaintiff, causes apoplexy in tort reformers.
Republican consultant Royal Masset says he first encountered Leininger in the late eighties, when Masset was working for the state Republican party. "He did something brilliant," Masset recalls. "He did a mail piece recommending candidates in both parties, and to test whether it was effective, he wanted to send it out to thirty precincts and not send it to thirty comparable precincts. In the precincts where he sent the mailer, the recommended Republicans did one percent better and the Democrats did two or three percent better than in the other precincts. It was staggering how effective that mail piece was. This guy was really scientific; he was looking at all the evidence and seeing what would work."
Democrats were less impressed by some of Leininger's missives. In 1994 Texans for Governmental Integrity sent out a mail piece in East Texas, illustrated by a photograph of a black man and a white man kissing, which warned voters that Democratic State Board of Education (SBOE) incumbent Mary Knott Perkins had voted to approve textbooks that promoted abortion and homosexuality. Leininger also directly supported conservative SBOE candidates to the unfamiliar tune of tens of thousands of dollars, in races that had previously been low-key. "He single-handedly changed the composition of the State Board of Education," says Samantha Smoot, the executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, an organization founded in 1995 to counter religious-right initiatives. "It went from a body that had been dominated by parents and teachers to a group characterized by a bloc of members who are there simply to push a right-wing ideology." The fact that Leininger's money sometimes traveled in circular paths also prompted muttering from his opponents: He would donate to PACs he controlled, and they in turn would hire Focus Direct, his direct-mail company, to produce their materials. This is not illegal, though Texas law does forbid corporations to donate directly to candidates.
PACs and campaign contributions were just the first step. In 1989 Leininger was instrumental in founding the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), because, he later told the Houston Chronicle, "I realized there wasn't any intellectual capital in the state of Texas." (Alas, he is neither the first nor the last to arrive at that conclusion.) Taking the Heritage Foundation, the conservative national think tank, as its model, the TPPF aimed to influence policy by publishing research reports on state issues; its early preoccupations mirrored several of Leininger's own: tort reform, vouchers, and reduced government. Working in tandem with the new SBOE members, the TPPF began objecting to textbook material deemed liberally slanted or morally suspect. The Legislature retaliated in 1995, forbidding the SBOE to question any aspect of textbook content other than "factual errors." Despite the restriction, the TPPF continued to analyze proposed books, hiring researchers to ferret out errors both of fact and of insufficient patriotism. Last winter the group helped bat down an environmental-science textbook (in large part because of a poorly written sentence linking democracy to pollution); this summer it criticized proposed social science and history textbooks for failing to disavow socialism.
Aside from its textbook analysis, the TPPF also develops policy proposals for conservative lawmakers. "Legislators turn to them for ideas about what to pass and also for political cover," says Andrew Wheat, the research director for Texans for Public Justice, a non-partisan but liberal-leaning group that studies the role of campaign contributions in Texas politics. During George W. Bush's presidential race, Wheat notes, the TPPF came to the defense of Bush's, and Texas', much-criticized environmental record, though the foundation had not previously concerned itself with environmental issues. Lately the TPPF seems to be backing away from Leininger; while he has often been described as the group's founder, Jeff Judson, the foundation's president, says that Leininger was merely one of several people who helped establish the group and that he now has little to do with its agenda. "He is one of sixteen people on our board," says Judson. "He has one-sixteenth of the say at our board meetings." The litigation-oriented offshoot of the TPPF, the Texas Justice Foundation, aims to advance conservative causes through legal advice and lawsuits. In addition to advocating for school vouchers and overturning Roe v. Wade, it seeks to invalidate the Endangered Species Act and restrict divorces.
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