The Time of His Life
The moment has come for Henry Cisneros to make the hardest decision of all—what does he really want?
(Page 4 of 5)
It was ten o’clock before Cisneros returned home to the family’s temporary quarters in the King William neighborhood, a sagging, colonnaded house in need of a coat of paint on Adams Street. The house was still furnished with the antiques and kickknacks of the elderly lady from whom they were renting, and portraits of her ancestors looked down sternly from the wall along the stairway. Cisneros led me into a little room behind the kitchen, where Mary Alice lay in a hospital bed, half-watching a TV movie as she made notes on a legal pad about their daughter Mercedes’ upcoming twelfth-birthday party. She was a slight, pretty woman who looked worn out and frustrated by her forced confinement.
“I have shower and bathroom privileges,” she explained. “That’s about it.”
It’s a worker-bee family. Mimi works with the Southland scholarship program, the J.C. Penney volunteer program, the Lutheran General Hospital Board, the PTA at Incarnate Word High School, the Women’s Employment Network, Leadership Texas, the high school dropout prevention program. She’s the chairman of the San Antonio school bond issue to get air conditioning for the schools. She’s pretty busy, I’d say.”
“I’ve lost momentum, though,” Mary Alice said wearily.
“As soon as the baby comes, you’ll be able to get back on track. You’ll have had a good rest, physically and mentally.”
Mary Alice gave him a skeptical look. They watched the news on TV, and when it was over the mayor drove me back to my hotel in his Caprice Classic.
“After the news I usually dillydally around and waste fifteen minutes,” he said, “then I sit down and read. I’m reading a book on trade right now—about how nations can forge peace. It’s called The Emergence of the Trading States.”
Only a few moments earlier, back at his house, Cisneros had seemed as tired as any mortal at the end of a long day, but now as he talked about international trade he grew animated again.
“Onions! Classic case! Texas produces the best onions in the country. Then we send them off to some plant in Illinois to be sliced into onion rings. Then they’re covered with some sort of material and fried in Oklahoma or someplace. Typically colonial.”
Watching him recharge, I remembered something he’d said to me a few days before. “If you take sustenance and energy from what you’re doing,” he’d told me, like some crazed inventor who truly believed he had found the secret of perpetual energy, “you don’t need downtime!”
“I’m going to start being more careful about accepting these honorary degrees,” Cisneros said the next day. He was scheduled to fly to New England that afternoon to be honored by Amherst College, and he hated to leave San Antonio just at the critical point when the stadium bill, against all reasonable hopes, seemed to be gaining momentum and there was a chance it could still get through before the session ended. For that to happen, the members of the Bexar County delegation would need to be “briefed,” i.e., “massaged.” It galled Cisneros that just when his talents as a masseur were most needed he would be two thousand miles away, parading around an eastern campus in a cap and gown.
“There might be some use in canceling out of Amherst,” Cisneros said to his aide Robert Marbut as they rode in the city car to take a big wad of the mayor’s suits and shirts to the dry cleaners. “I’d be willing to miss the Memorial Day celebrations on Monday and go up to Austin instead to brief the delegation. I’d also be willing to call a special council meeting, though I think our chances with the delegation are better than our chances with the council.”
“Who are the council members who’ll be for it?” Marbut asked.
“Webb, Wing, Nelson, Thompson. LaBatt I don’t know. Maria will be against it. Helen might be a surprise; she might bounce for it.”
Cisneros was on the phone all the way to the airport, and up until his flight was called he was busy chunking quarters into the pay phones in the loading lounge. Lugging a drab carry-on bag, he made his way down the aisle of the plane to a window seat in the coach section, nodding hello and talking to the passengers en route, hardly a one of whom failed to recognize him.
When he was seated Cisneros was handed a note from the captain inviting him to upgrade to first class. He politely refused. “People may think the city’s paying for it,” he explained to me. “Plus if it gets back to the gossip columnists, they may write a piece complaining about me riding first class, and I have to spend weeks fixing it.”
When we were airborne Cisneros began sifting through a thick pile of invitations. The mayor was in demand by the Texas Association of Landscape Contractors, a group of young men from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who wanted him to talk about honesty in politics, and a karate school that wanted to award him an honorary black belt. After dealing with his correspondence he began to update his intricate but unrevealing diary.
“Every week,” he explained, sorting through a mass of handwritten notes and neatly typed agendas, “I do two lists. One on the record of The Week That Was and one on The Week Ahead. The Week That Was I keep and use to do an analysis of what I accomplished during the year.
“The Week Ahead I do every weekend. It has a list called Mega Projects to Focus On Daily. This is the list on which I say to myself, ‘You haven’t had a day that’s worth having without focusing on one of these projects.’”
He focused until dinner came, then laid the pile of documentation aside. Later he would work on the speech he planned to give at Amherst, a variant of the speech I had already heard him deliver—quite effectively—several times. It warned against the growing gulf between rich and poor and the consequent loss of the middle class, and it closed by challenging the audience with the concluding lines from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” Cisneros writes his own speeches and charges at least $7,500 for those arranged through his New York agent. Part of the reason for his constant travel is the simple need to make a living, since the job of mayor of San Antonio—conceived long ago as a more or less ceremonial pastime—pays just over $4,000 a year. In addition to lecturing, Cisneros teaches urban affairs and government at Trinity University.
What had it been like, I asked Cisneros as he probed at a cube of airline cake with his fork, to be considered for vice president?
“I wasn’t nervous,” he said. “Because I wasn’t trying. It wasn’t as if this was something very important to me, and if I failed it would all be over. I was comfortable with the issues that were likely to be talked about—Central America, social policy, cities. I do best in those kinds of situations when I’m relaxed.
“Mondale and I went for a long walk. He never did ask me directly, but I indicated to him that I didn’t think it was my time. I just didn’t want to do it. It’s a question of internal timing. I trust that clock in my own case.
“This year I’m more confident about national issues. I’ve been president of the League of Cities; I’ve learned the financial community. But I would not rule out simply saying that I would not want to be considered for vice president and restrict myself solely to helping other candidates. I’m not anxious and I’m not seeking and I don’t intend to take any overt steps to put myself in that position.”
“Do you think you could do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Be president.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I could do it.”
That sort of open-air speculation clearly made him uncomfortable. He had a reticence about his public career that went beyond the sly caution of the average politician.
“I could enjoy leaving politics,” he said wistfully. “Maybe doing something in business on a small, unglamorous scale. I can do a lot of things well. I can wait tables well. I can type eighty words a minute. I was real good at manual labor—picking watermelons, digging ditches.”
He leaned his head back and fantasized about being a Peace Corps volunteer, a junior high school guidance counselor, a priest.
“From the day I was elected mayor and the national press covered it, I was on the track,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily my own choice. Of course, I could have resisted it harder.”
Cisneros was met at the Hartford airport by two Amherst undergraduates who had been entrusted with driving him the fifty miles to the campus. The mayor’s mood was even more upbeat than usual, since he had just discovered that he was not expected to make the commencement address, as he had assumed, but merely to take his place among a procession of notables that included Leontyne Price and Katharine Graham.
“I may get some sleep tonight after all,” he said. The two young men in the front seat stared nervously ahead at first, but Cisneros warmed them up with an unending barrage of questions. He wanted to know their majors and where they were from, what rivers flowed through their hometowns, what highway we were driving on, whether people skied in the nearby mountains, and whether if you proceeded due north from Amhert you would hit Vermont or New Hampshire.
“Name me some of the more famous graduates of Amherst.”
“Uh … Calvin Coolidge.”
“Calvin Coolidge was the governor of Massachusetts,” Cisneros said. “Put down a big strike in Boston as I recall—rode it all the way to the presidency. What’s the history of this area? Colonized early?”
“Yeah, and there was this famous rebellion—”
“That’s right!” Cisneros broke in. “Shays’ rebellion! The rebellion against the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution.”
The commencement took place the next morning on the green in front of the Robert Frost Library, a perfect setting for the “Road Not Taken” speech that Cisneros did not now have to deliver. The Amherst Choral society sang “Gaudeamus Igitur,” and their voices, wafting through the maples, struck primal notes of nostalgia and privilege.
My Library
