What Does Kay Want?
She’s the most popular vote-getter in Texas history. She has a U.S. Senate seat, a Republican leadership position, and at 59, the children she has always longed for. Yet she can’t forget the bitter disappointments of the past. What does she really want? Exactly what she has always wanted. Everything—except psychobabble.
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"Kay is simply a prodigious worker, and she expects everyone she hires to be just as prodigious a worker as she is," said Pat Oxford, one of her closest friends since college, who is the managing partner at the Bracewell and Patterson law firm in Houston and has been her state chairman during her past two senatorial campaigns. "And she will confront you on a regular basis if you are not working prodigiously. She is not one to say to me, ŒPat, you must not feel good today, because you didn’t get this done.’ She’ll say, ŒPat, we talked about this issue yesterday at four p.m., and you said you would have it done at nine a.m., and I need it right now.’"
IT IS THIS PASSION FOR her work that has generated so much of the psychobabble. Anyone who has tried to keep up with her during her race-walks around the Capitol cannot help but ask the question, "What makes Kay run?" Is she running for something—like president? Is she running from something—like disappointment? Or is she running because she constantly feels the need, even now, to prove herself?
Kay once admitted that her mother used to tell her, "Stop working so hard." Growing up in La Marque, between Houston and Galveston, she was not a particularly accomplished student academically—"I made B’s," she said—but she was very much like her father, an insurance agent and homebuilder who worked seven days a week and then came home and made phone calls. She was in a myriad of activities and clubs and won a bundle of school honors and elections, including Miss La Marque High School. Think of the Reese Witherspoon character in the movie Election, whose blond hair and beauty-pageant smile hid a dogged determination. That was Kay Bailey in the early sixties.
At the University of Texas, she was ahead of her time in seeking to have it all—social life (Pi Beta Phi sorority), highly visible position (cheerleader), and career path (law school student, one of only 5 women in a class of 269). But two things happened to her in law school that would have a profound impact on her life. She got married to a young man who was in medical school in Galveston. In that era, of course, just about every sorority girl thought she should get married as soon as she graduated from college. But her marriage lasted less than a year. The divorce had to be a humiliating experience for a young woman who had always had everything working in her favor. "After that experience, I did realize, more than ever, that I’d better be able to know how to make my own way through life," Kay told me. Another disappointment came when she graduated from law school, in 1967, and no established Texas law firm would hire her. The managing partners of the firms told her and other female graduates that they didn’t want to invest time or money in young women lawyers because they were afraid the women would get married, get pregnant, and quit.
"Surely," I said to her one day when we were having lunch in the private dining room reserved for senators, "there must have come a moment when you looked at all those men running the big law firms and said, ŒThose sons of bitches.’"
"No," she said. "What I thought was, ŒThis is a man’s world, and if I’m going to be successful, then I’m going to have to be better prepared than a man—always.’ And I still think that. A woman can’t be just okay to make a difference. She has to be great."
She got a job as an assistant at a one-man firm in Galveston, and then one day she drove past television station KPRC, in Houston. On an impulse, she stopped the car, walked in, and told news director Ray Miller that she thought she’d make a good television reporter. Miller, who had been thinking about hiring the station’s first woman reporter, gave her some basic training, then sent her to Austin to cover the Legislature. She wasn’t a political person—"I hadn’t spent much time thinking about government," she said—but like almost every other member of the Austin press corps who has covered the Legislature, she thought to herself, "I can do better than these guys." In 1972 she ran for a Houston legislative seat. Her Republican primary opponent’s campaign slogan was "A family man who wants to represent your family"—a veiled reference to Kay as a 29-year-old single woman. He also declared that the upstart candidate was not qualified because she hadn’t joined the Young Republicans during her years at the University of Texas. "I didn’t even know UT had Young Republicans," she recalled. She won after knocking on doors throughout her district.
Her major piece of legislation during her two terms in the House was a bill (co-sponsored with Democrat Sarah Weddington, of Austin, a law school classmate) preventing district attorneys from bringing up the sexual histories of rape victims during the rape trials, unless their histories were directly related to the case. She left the Legislature in 1976, when President Gerald Ford named her to the National Transportation Safety Board; while in Washington she had a few dates with a Washington bachelor named Alan Greenspan. But in 1978 she moved to Dallas to marry Hutchison, with whom she had served in the Legislature. He was running for governor but lost the Republican primary to Bill Clements, who went on to become the first GOP governor of Texas since Reconstruction.
In 1982 Kay tried to resume her political career. She ran for a Dallas congressional seat but encountered some old prejudices about women and some new ones about whether she was conservative enough. She says that one of her male Republican opponents pointedly asked voters in an ad, "Who’s tough enough to stand up to Tip O’Neill?"—the clear implication being that a woman was not. During the runoff campaign against Steve Bartlett, an anonymous letter was sent to Republican voters suggesting that she had wrecked Ray Hutchison’s first marriage. "Back then, you beat a woman in an election by degrading her," Kay told me, her eyes narrowing at the memory. When she gave her concession speech on election night, she cried—the only time she has ever broken down in public.
It appeared her political career was over. She bought a candy manufacturing plant and a decorative showroom and settled into a new career as a businesswoman. But when Ann Richards ran for governor in 1990, the state treasurer’s office was open, and Kay decided to try politics for the third time. She won easily, and in 1993, when Lloyd Bentsen resigned as U.S. senator to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, she went after the seat in a special election. The Democrats threw everything at her. Gloria Steinem called her a "female impersonator." Cybil Shepherd pronounced that she was "no good for women or children." Columnist Molly Ivins, drawing on how Kay epitomized the power-suited Dallas career woman, called her the Breck Girl, a line that stuck. But there was no way she was going to lose; the suburbs had mushroomed with Republican voters. Soccer moms especially saw in her a friendly, feminine, conservative face who took traditional Republican positions for lower taxes and less government spending but at the same time wanted more mass transit and arts funding. She rolled up 67 percent of the vote against Richards’ appointee, Bob Krueger, and it wasn’t long before pundits began talking about her as a possibility for a future national ticket.
And then, as had happened before, with her divorce, her law career, and her congressional race, she once again faced a life-changing event that threatened to snatch her dreams away from her. In the spring of 1993 Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle investigated her for committing ethical infractions when she was the state treasurer. In September she was indicted for official misconduct and tampering with government records and physical evidence. Earle contended that she had used public employees to conduct campaign business and had altered phone records kept on state computers. The Almanac of American Politics later called the affair a "rotten prosecution," and the charges, if true, should have been treated as misdemeanors and forgotten. But the prospect of a high-profile felony trial for a sitting U.S. senator created an uproar around the state. Furious Republicans claimed Earle and other Democratic officials were conspiring to get her out of the way so their party could reclaim the Senate seat. But the most damaging publicity for Kay came from her own employees at the treasury and had nothing to do with the charges against her. Sharon Connally Ammann, the daughter of former governer John Connally, claimed in a deposition that her boss had once hit her with a notebook when she couldn’t find a telephone number. Another employee said she had witnessed Kay pinch another aide who didn’t get something out of his briefcase fast enough. The tales painted a portrait of her as manipulative and dictatorial. But she was vindicated when Earle declined to proceed with the trial, and the judge directed the jury to reach a verdict of not guilty.
Kay went on to win a full six-year term in 1994 by a landslide. But the episode tarnished Kay just as she was starting her Senate career. She was forced to give one interview after another declaring that she had passed a polygraph backing her contention that she had never physically abused an employee. When I brought up the decade-old episode in one of our conversations, her face fell and she shut her eyes. It was still the source of enormous pain. "I just cannot believe you want to write about that again," she told me.
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