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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Looking back on that time, her friend Pat Oxford recalled, "It nearly buckled Kay’s knees. I saw a lot of tears back then, a lot of grief. The whole patina of the thing—hiring criminal lawyers, getting a defense lined up, fighting off those Sharon Connally comments—changed her. In the past, she was perhaps a little more ladylike in politics. But after the indictment, she became more aggressive and far more wary. She wouldn’t let the other guy throw the first blow."
As part of that wariness, she became much more cautious around reporters who arrived to write profiles of her—and seldom liked what they wrote. ("They always turn out to be so wrong," she told me.) Although she could be a charming storyteller who rattled off anecdotes from her family history (her great-great grandfather was a signee of the Texas Declaration of Independence), she was determinedly reserved when interviewers asked her to talk about herself, always thinking about how her words might look in print and always trying to push the conversation toward her work. And with her BlackBerry firmly in hand, she made sure that neither she nor her staff was ever caught unprepared regarding a matter of public policy. No one was going to get the chance to publicly humiliate her again. "I’m very intense when it comes to work," she told me. "I don’t lose control, and I never raise my voice, but I’m very hard to work for because I push you. I feel my job is to pull more out of you, to make you better than just okay. I’m just as hard on myself, you know."
For all her exhaustive work, however, Kay is not yet a senator who has defined herself nationally with a particular piece of legislation or an issue, the way Gramm did repeatedly—from budget cuts and banking reform to opposition to the Clinton health care plan. She is considered one of the most active senators in writing legislation aimed at improving the lives of women—sponsoring or co-sponsoring bills to allow homemakers to deduct $2,500 a year for an IRA, to make "cyberstalking" a federal crime, to increase mammogram standards, and to eliminate the marriage-tax penalty—but that doesn’t get you a lot of points in the male-dominated Senate. She did receive belated praise for pushing for legislation to improve airport security before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at a time when no one else was thinking about such matters.
One reason that she may not have become a national figure is that she had to tend to Texas’ interests and needs without any help from Gramm. She has fought for Texas’ military bases, historic sites, and oil industry, and more highway and mass-transit funding. "If there’s a federal bill out there that might adversely affect Texas," says Republican state representative Dianne Delisi, of Temple, "there’s a saying among Democrats as well as Republicans around the Legislature: ŒCall Kay.’ She has always been the go-to person in Washington for almost any Texas issue. And she doesn’t need a staffer to give her a briefing beforehand about what the issue is."
But Gramm was a Senate heavyweight, while Senator Barbie Doll has had to struggle to be taken seriously. The Congressional Quarterly wrote in 2000 that she is sometimes dismissed as a senator who is "more fluff than substance." That perception, if it was ever widely held, seems to be changing. Majority leader Frist chuckled at the criticism when I talked to him, pointing out that she had, on her own, without any committee chairmanship, pushed her way to the forefront of the debate on defense and national security. Republican senator John Warner, of Virginia, told me that Kay would be highlighted more on domestic issues during this coming session because the Republicans will need a female face to counteract Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives. Perhaps one of the problems for Kay—one that Phil Gramm never had—is that the Senate, despite now having fourteen female senators, remains a boy’s club.
"The Senate can be a lonely place for a woman," Kay told me. "But Washington in general is a lonely place. The women senators meet socially for dinner once a month, but other than that, everyone lives autonomous lives. There’s no real life here. I still think back on those days in the Legislature, where we got together at someone’s apartment and played bridge at night."
MAYBE LONELINESS WAS ONE OF the reasons the idea of children came back to Kay. No matter how much work she did every day as a senator, she still felt that childless void in her life. A couple of her close friends told me that Kay reevaluated her life after the death of her mother, Kathryn Bailey, in 1998, five years after the death of her father. Kay worshiped her mother. She was a woman, Kay once told me, "who spent her life chauffeuring me around, telling me I could become whatever I wanted to be, which few mothers were telling their daughters back in the fifties." When she died, said one of Kay’s friends, "Kay looked around and said, ŒWe need to keep this family going.’ And Kay being Kay, she decided to do something about it." I asked her if she had to give the speech of her life to persuade Ray, who has children in their forties from his first marriage, of the advantages of becoming a father one more time at age seventy. Although she kept insisting to me that she was going "to keep our private lives private"—she said she didn’t want her children to grow up and have to read some "psychobabble" about their adoptions—she did want to make it clear that Ray was just as ecstatic about having children as she was. When I went to see him at his Dallas office, he pulled out half a dozen photos of the kids from his briefcase and roared with laughter as he talked about the way Houston liked to wrestle with him on the floor
For people who have known this very political, very career-driven couple, the transformation has been remarkable. They have been seen taking Bailey and Houston to a Dallas park, to a Fourth of July fireworks celebration, and to Dallas’ Valley View Mall, where the kids climbed on small rubber sculptures designed for children. At Republican gatherings, Kay finds herself besieged by women who want to hear what she has to say about the children, not Iraq. And at night, instead of turning to Robert Caro’s recent book on Lyndon Johnson’s Senate years, she is reading Beauty and the Beast to her children. "The Caro book is one I’m dying to read, and I haven’t gotten past page two," she said, giggling like a young mother.
It was moments like this that made me wonder whether her attitude about her career was changing. As driven as she is by politics, she exhibited a delight regarding her children I never saw when she was discussing her Senate achievements. She is obviously not fond of life in Washington, and she has never hesitated to tell her friends that she wants to raise her children in Texas and send them to schools there. The question is, How does she get back home and stay in politics? She has never made a secret of her desire to be governor, and she considered running against Rick Perry in the 2002 Republican primary, but she told me she passed up the chance when Gramm announced his retirement: "I knew I couldn’t walk away from the Senate at the same time as Phil and leave Texas with two freshman senators." (GOP insiders say Perry adroitly got the backing of big-money GOP contributors early in 2001 to keep her from launching a major challenge to him.) If Perry has a good run as governor and decides to run for reelection in 2006, her next good chance to be governor would not come until 2010, when she would be 67 years old. When I asked her during a flight if she would still consider a run in that year, she said, "It’s hard to say what’s going to happen."
"Well," I said, "have you thought about life outside politics?"
There was a long pause. She seemed, once again, to be weighing her answer, deciding how it would look in print. Finally, she said with a soft, almost wistful voice, "I have thought about what it would be like to have free time again. And as the children get older, I do want to be there to take them to The Nutcracker and to soccer games, to stand on the sidelines and cheer."
But then she began to talk about all the things she still wanted to do for Texas. It was amazing to listen to her; she talked nonstop about projects ranging from a national heritage site for Buffalo Bayou in Houston and national monument status for the Waco Mammoth Site to more mass-transit funding for the cities. "I know this is what all politicians say," she said, "but I love this state. I will do anything for this state." The airplane was landing, and the senator, as always, checked her BlackBerry. A message had arrived from one of her staffers about an impending piece of business. Before she got off the plane, she had pulled out her cell phone and was telling a staffer about five or six things that she wanted done. "We need to get on this now, right now," she said. She grabbed her satchels and walked briskly out of the plane, where an assistant was waiting to take her to a meeting. Within moments, she was getting into a car and making another phone call. She grabbed some papers from a satchel and put them on her lap. She barely had time to wave good-bye to me before she was gone.
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