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 5 of 5)
“Henry Cisneros,” intoned the president of Amherst, when it came time to recognize the Mexican American Aggie from the West Side of San Antonio, “you have applied the intellectual skills of study and understanding to public service. Proud of what you have done to fight poverty and shame bigotry, your citizens have three times elected you as mayor. Amherst is proud to honor you today for your visionary and always constructive leadership.”
Cisneros’ visionary leadership was much in demand back in San Antonio. The mayor’s agenda was filled with Mega Projects: the ongoing legislative strategies regarding the stadium, the first meeting of his aquifer task force, and—at week’s end—the trip to Colorado Springs to make the pitch for the Olympic Festival.
He was not optimistic about the city’s chances for landing the festival, even though civic leaders and members of his staff had been preparing for this presentation for two years. They had worked with developers to plan ice rinks and a natatorium; they had produced a slick multimedia presentation that included a video of a local weatherman artfully explaining how, meteorologically speaking, San Antonio’s humidity wasn’t as bad as it seemed; they had lobbied and wined and dined the members of the site-selection committee; they had given them flyers and cascarones imprinted with “Viva Fiesta 1991,” and hung door hangers on their Olympic Village rooms the night before the presentation that said “Shhh! Siesta in progress. I’m dreaming of San Antonio.”
Now, as their ultimate gesture, they had chartered a Southwest Airlines plane and loaded it with business leaders, amateur athletes, and mariachis whose mission was to overwhelm the Colorado Springs committee with civic enthusiasm.
Henry Cisneros’ role was to stand up after the presentation and, as one delegate put it, “close the sale.” It would not be an easy sale to make. San Antonio had made it to the finals, along with four other cities, but it was up against heavyweight contenders like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cities that were plentifully equipped with just the sort of sports facilities—like the mayor’s longed-for stadium—that San Antonio lacked. But there was no question in Cisneros’ mind that it was worth the effort. He wanted the Olympics, not only because it would ratify his vision of San Antonio as an emerging metropolis but also because he believed that amateur sports could help rescue poor inner-city neighborhoods from “indolence, despair, and self-pity.”
“What we’re shooting for,” he said through the flight attendant’s microphone when the delegation was en route to Colorado Springs, “is a long-term legacy for San Antonio—a legacy of sports facilities, a legacy of athletics, a legacy of … wholesomeness!”
“We’re there to overpower these people with San Antonio—style can-do optimism. If we can do Sea World, if we can do the visit of the pope, then we can do this!”
They gave it their best shot. The San Antonio multimedia presentation (featuring a theme song with the intriguing refrain “Tacos, burgers, and escargots/S.A. is the place for those who know”) far outclassed the visual sales pitches of the other cities, and the zeal of its delegation could not be dismissed.
“What we are presenting is more than just a proposal to bring another Olympic festival to another American city,” Cisneros told the selection committee when it was his turn to speak. “You will have left a physical legacy of enhanced sports activity for all the people of the southwestern United States.
“Ours is a new city, in some sense a city just now coming on-line. You’re catching us on the cusp of our emergence!”
It was an ardent summation, and when the San Antonio delegation boarded the plane for home, it was besotted with civic pride. The city would have its answer from the committee on the next day. For now, the boosters could sit back and congratulate themselves on their efforts and daydream about San Antonio’s impending greatness. At the head of the cabin, the man who had put that vision into their heads and had bent all their disparate and sometimes antagonistic goals into a common focus took up the microphone again.
“I want to talk to you for a moment, if I may, about a different subject. And that,” insisted Henry Cisneros, “is a stadium.”
San Antonio was not chosen for the Olympic Festival. In the end, its lack of preexisting sports venues weighed too heavily against its selection. But the stadium bill—thanks to Cisneros’ constant lobbying—did finally make it through the Legislature before the end of the session. Now the voters of San Antonio would have to approve the stadium-financing scheme in a January referendum. That would be a tough fight, given the large number of citizens who saw the stadium as a risky capital expenditure that was irrelevant to San Antonio’s real problems. The failure of the Olympic bid only gave the mayor more ammunition for his argument that a city without a stadium was viewed with pathetic disregard when it tried to play in the big leagues.
Late in the evening of June 10, just a few hours shy of Henry Cisneros’ own fortieth birthday, his son was born by cesarean section, and suddenly the mayor’s agenda was reduced to one grim and chronic item. The boy’s heart was badly deformed due to a condition called congenital asplenia syndrome; instead of the normal four chambers, the heart functioned as if it had only two. As a result, the blood that cycled through the baby’s system was poorly oxygenated and threatened to flood his lungs as the heart grew. The condition also meant that John Paul Anthony Cisneros—named for the pope who would visit the city in September and for the city itself—was born without a spleen and was therefore fifty times more likely to contract a fatal infectious disease.
There were various palliative surgeries to be performed along the way, but John Paul’s essential problem was uncorrectable by current medical standards. He might die tomorrow, or he might survive to a physically impaired adolescence or adulthood.
Some people speculated that the baby’s illness had left Cisneros so shaken that he would resign his office, while others reported that he was attacking the problem in the classic Cisneros way, studying diagrams of his son’s defective heart and aggressively consulting with the country’s top pediatric cardiologists. It was not long before he was in the newspapers again, stumping with John Connally in support of threatened higher education reforms and speaking at a national League of United Latin American Citizens convention in Corpus Christi. The local television stations covered the baptism of John Paul and the blessing by Archbishop Flores of the Cisneros family’s newly remodeled home on West Houston Street.
I went to see Cisneros on the Fourth of July weekend. A workman was scraping paint off a window when I walked up to the door, and from inside I could hear the mayor playing the piano—a surprisingly fluid and dreamy piece of his own composition.
Though it was a holiday he was wearing a tie. He seemed thinner, and that made him seem taller. As he showed me around the house he apologized for the unpleasant noise the man at the window was making with his scraper.
“I read an article the other day that explained why we don’t like squeaking sounds,” he said. “It’s because they resemble the distress call of our ancestors.”
He opened a door off the kitchen and led me into a small nursery, where John Paul lay sleeping in his crib. He was a small baby, still officially a preemie for a few more days, with thick black hair and a healthy complexion.
“You’d never know anything was wrong with him, would you?” the mayor said. “But of course he’s got a little problem—well, a big problem—right about here.” With his index finger Cisneros drew a circle in the air above the sleeping infant’s heart.
“The birth of this baby is a different kind of experience.” He took a seat on a couch in his new living room. “Most of my life has revolved around doing things that you can know and predict what the outcome will be, and everything’s done on a deadline. With this there’s no solution and no deadline. You just have to keep building him up and hoping that some mildly life-extending procedure will be invented that will buy you time. You can’t engineer a solution.” He made a fist and shook it. “You can’t fix it!
“The first hour after he was born was sheer bliss. It was almost too good to be true. When they pulled him out by cesarean section, the doctor said he looked great. Everything was perfect. And then about nine-thirty the pediatrician said there was a little blueness and that he heard a little heart murmur. Then about midnight all three of them—the obstetrician, the pediatrician, the cardiologist—sat me down and explained it to me. They said, ‘We know of cases where these kids have lived to their teenage years.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute, you mean that’s all we can expect—that he’ll live to his teenage years?’ It was quite a … quite a …
“Quite a shock,” he said finally, after a longer pause than I had ever heard sink into his conversation. And when he resumed speaking his voice sounded uncharacteristically soft and private.
“I wanted more family,” he said. “I wanted a son, someone who could jog with you, throw the football around—and maybe that’ll all come true. But I don’t feel burdened or wronged or cheated. There’s a trust that’s been given here—a child who has some difficulties but who has a purpose.”
The baby woke up with barely a fuss from his nap, and Mary Alice brought him into the living room and fed him from a bottle as he grazed up alertly at his mother’s eyes.
“My attitude, frankly, is that life cannot stop,” the mayor said. “Our job is to create for him the most normal circumstance possible for as long as we can. But I’ve set forward a very busy, no-nonsense schedule for the city the next few months. The budget. The aquifer hearings. Preparation for a November streets-and-drainage bond issue. The stadium agenda goes forward. Major community effort in small business …”
But as he talked all our eyes were on the baby. I could not help thinking of what Ernie Cortes had told me—that Henry Cisneros needed an angel to wrestle with.
“We’ll go forward,” the mayor said when Mary Alice had taken the baby back to his room. “It’s a day-by-day thing. If the test here is to see how much I can carry—well, I can carry it.”
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