25 Stories About Bob Bullock

IT'S BEEN FOUR YEARS SINCE former lieutenant governor Bob Bullock drew his last breath at his home in West Austin at the age of 69, when the body he wrecked with cigarettes and alcohol finally succumbed to lung cancer and congestive heart failure. For those closest to him—lobbyists, lawmakers, state officials, and long-suffering employees—the silence has been deafening: no scorching tirades, no hair-trigger insults or profanity-laced firings, no three-in-the-morning phone calls or faxes demanding instant action. No devilish schemes hatched at midnight, no forced negotiations on legislative minutiae at dawn.

And, God, do they miss him. Old-timers at the Capitol, watching the new Republican leaders lurch clumsily through the seventy-eighth legislative session, often sighed, "If only Bullock were here."

He'd know what to do about the $9.9 billion deficit.

He'd know how to replace the state's collapsing school-finance system.

He'd whip this place into shape in no time.

It would never have worked though. As his longtime aide Tony Proffitt remarked to me, "He was a politician of the twentieth century. He would not have survived in the twenty-first." The observation was not a criticism, just an acknowledgment that Bullock burned too brightly for our pale, proper political world, where actions are determined by polls and staged for the media. Paralysis sets in lest someone—an interest group or a contributor—take offense. And Bullock? He was intemperate in love, liquor, and power. Married five times, a recovering alcoholic who lost part of a lung to his cigarette habit, a survivor of a grand-jury investigation, bypass surgery, and DWI arrests, he was a manic-depressive who routinely abused his employees and even his friends with scarring diatribes yet just as often surprised them with kindnesses. Lamentably, Proffitt is right: Bullock fits best in a long-gone era, though the correct century might be the sixteenth, when another student of politics, by the name of Machiavelli, first put into writing the rules of engagement Bullock mastered so well.

He began his career as a state representative from Hillsboro in 1957 and later served as Secretary of State under Governor Preston Smith. After his appointment to the State Board of Insurance was rejected by the Senate, in 1972, Bullock was elected comptroller in 1974 and lieutenant governor in 1990. He left an imprint on the most important public policy issues in Texas—from public education to taxes—and a state history museum that bears his name. Along the way, he made a lot of friends and a lot of enemies, all of whom have great stories about the great man. Spinning yarns about Bullock has become an endlessly entertaining Austin pastime. Here are some of our favorites:

[management by fear]

Ralph Wayne:
When he was comptroller, the unrest in the office was unbelievable, because he was drinking. One of his drinking buddies would say something like, "How come Patti doesn't like you?" and the next day Patti would be gone. He'd put all your things in a box and put it outside, but he might put some water in the box, so that when you picked it up, everything would fall out. He just loved things like that. Most people used MBO—management by objective. He used MBF—management by fear.

Bill Ratliff:
He could use his temper as a technique so skillfully. I felt at times he was doing that for effect. In 1993 we were trying to come up with a school-finance plan, and it was pretty tense. We were in Bullock's office, just the two of us, and he got into one of his tears with me. He jumped on me horribly, with really vicious profanity. I walked out and found [Senator Bob] Glasgow, and I said, "I want you to go in there and I want you to tell him this: I'm 57 years old. I will bust my butt to try to help him solve these problems, but if he ever raises his voice with me again, I'm out of here." About 24 hours later he called me in and apologized, and he never raised his voice with me again. If he could avoid doing it for the rest of our relationship, then he could have avoided it in other cases. I think it was a tool. He knew who to use what tool with. He was a master.

Wayne:
I was with two lobbyists one day when he was jumping on them, and he finally says, "Okay, I got to get to work." And then he winked at me and grinned real big when they went out. It had all been an act. He gave them hell and made them nervous for a day or two. Then he'd call them and have them come over for coffee, acting like nothing ever happened. But he kept people's attention.

[tight ship]

Steve Bresnen:
I was just out of law school when I was invited to work at the comptroller's office. The very first thing I did was tear pages out of a report that was going to the Legislature, because Bullock had discovered there was some information that was inaccurate, but not a large amount. Instead of putting an errata sheet in the report, Bullock had the page torn out of every copy. It just wasn't up to the level of accuracy and professionalism that he demanded. He was not letting that piece of paper off the eighth floor with an inaccuracy in it.

Glen Castlebury:
He was in my office, and he said, "Do you know what Don Ray [a lawyer at the comptroller's office] told me? He thinks we have authority to go seize inventory and padlock delinquent taxpayers." He turned around to my secretary and said, "Get Don Ray on the phone. Goddammit, get Buck Wood [another staff attorney] on the phone." And he tells them, "Me and Castlebury are going over to Scholz's to eat lunch"—that meant drink beer—"but you get me a goddam answer by the time I get back." Don and Buck showed us how we could do it. And Bullock said, "There's that damn whiskey dealer down in San Antonio, and they told me that son of a bitch owes over $200,000. Here's what I'll do: I'm gonna padlock that son of a bitch. I can sell that stuff and get my money, right? We're gonna haul all that shit off. Get me a trailer to haul all that whiskey away in. Get a guy to change the locks. Buck, you get me whatever legal documents I need to walk in the door and tell the son of a bitch I'm taking over." We said, "When do you want to do this?" He said, "When the hell do you think I want to do this? Tomorrow." The next morning, Bullock saddled up and went down there and walked into this liquor dealer's and said, "I'm Bob Bullock. You owe me $236,000." The guy said, "Say again?" And Bullock said, "I'm the state comptroller, and you owe the people of Texas $236,000 in sales taxes you haven't paid and I'm here to collect it." The guy just laughed and said he didn't have that kind of money. Bullock said, "I think you've got that kind of whiskey." And he turned around to someone and said, "Start hauling this shit out of here." In the end, it took two eighteen-wheelers. The media called us Bullock's Raiders.

Bruce Gibson:
I've worked with a lot of people who worked as hard as Bullock did. I have never worked with anyone who worked as efficiently as Bullock did. It was a tight ship. Bullock's typical workday, in session or out, we would hit the ground running before seven-thirty. We'd be in meetings, staff meetings or strategy meetings, till lunch. Then he'd have a working lunch with somebody. The afternoons were his reflective time. He would talk to staff members about some far-removed project, or he would make phone calls, and by three he was worn out. So between two-thirty and three-thirty, we would pack a box. The box went home with him at the end of every day, and it was very meticulously put together. It would have every report filed in the past 24 hours in state government, with a summary of that report in the front, and it would have anything of significance from the paper flow that had gone through the office. He would go home and take a nap. And during his nap period, I had to read everything in that box. When he got up, he would go through the box and pull out things that interested him. He'd read all the executive summaries so he would have familiarity with them. And then he would read the reports he thought were important until midnight. He'd read and read and read. He'd call me at nine at night and ask me about one of these reports, and I was supposed to know any detail he'd ask about.

[a very complex personality]

Bresnen:
I sort of quit for three days. We were working on his lieutenant governor's campaign. He started giving me a hard time about something, and I told him, "Hey, I'm not going to take an ass-chewing for something I didn't do." He got really mad. Bullock was only about five feet eight or five feet nine, and I probably outweighed him by sixty pounds. He got right up in my face and it was "Damn you. Get the f—— out of here." And I said, "Okay, I will." I thought, "This man's gonna hit me and I'm gonna have to hit him back to prove my manhood." I have not been that mad in my adult life. About three days later the phone rings and he says, "Bresnen, I'm fixin' to say x and y in this campaign. Can I say that and be honest about it?" And I said, "Yes," and he said, "Bring your stuff down here and prove it." And I documented what he was about to say. He never said another word. He never apologized. He was not one to apologize. He was one to just go on down the road.

Chuck Bailey:
I spent about four hours on Palm Sunday one time in a royal ass-chewing. I got paged to come to the Capitol as I was going into church with my family. The Department of Public Safety was doing an investigation of the money coming into TCADA [Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse], and he didn't think I was keeping a close enough eye on it. I was, but because it involved alcohol abuse, it was real important to him. That was the surface issue. The real issue was that it was probably time for me to go. And in fact, I quit about two weeks later. With Mr. Bullock, you knew when it was time to go. You just knew. One time I had to let a guy go who had been with him for 25 years, and when he came in, I said, "You know better than I do that there just comes a time, and your time has come. My time will come next year."

Jack Roberts:
Once I got a call from Senator Rodney Ellis, and he said to me, "I know that you are friends with Mr. Bullock. I respect him, I admire him, but I just got a terrible scolding from him that I couldn't believe I deserved." I told Senator Ellis that the people that got scolded the hardest were those he was closest to and related to the most. No one likes to be scolded. No one likes to be fussed at. But you had to realize it was an integral part of a very complex personality.

Ratliff:
When I was in my second session, we were working on the conference committee for the ethics bill. It was the most hectic, bizarre time I have ever witnessed. Bruce Gibson was on the House conference committee, and Bullock started building one of his rages in his direction. It got louder and fiercer, and literally their noses were this far apart, and they were screaming at each other. And then three months later, he hires Bruce as his executive assistant. If Bullock could absolutely bully somebody, he had no respect for them.

[power plays]

Ronnie Earle:
Soon after I became the DA, we investigated Bullock for using a state airplane for personal purposes and using office stuff for personal and political business. It took awhile, and sometime later, the grand jury decided not to indict him. He called me after that at my secret, double-secret, unlisted home telephone number. I don't know how he got it, but he said, "I just want to thank you for that no-bill." I had been trying to get our public integrity unit funded by the Legislature, but Bullock had been blocking it. As soon as the investigation was over, we got funding. It was kind of like, "Since you didn't indict me, I'm going to remove my opposition." The only other time we were in jeopardy of losing that funding is when we investigated Speaker Gib Lewis. The House was raising all kinds of hell. Bullock was lieutenant governor, so I went to see him. We sat down at his kitchen table, and he was smoking a cigarette and looking at me through the smoke with that heavy-lidded stare, and he said, "You know that investigation you did on me years ago?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I was guilty as hell."

John Whitmire:
The first time he made an impression on me was on closing night [of the Legislature] in 1989. [Former senator John] Leedom wanted to do audits of state government, but it had a huge cost. Unless they got the audits, Leedom and others were not going to vote for the budget. Bullock comes into the members' lounge and says, "You give me more auditors, and I'll find money for Leedom's bill." He just saved the day.