Mr. Happy Man Goes to Washington
Ron Kirk would like to ride his record as the mayor of Dallas and his jovial personality into the U.S. Senate. Alas, the Republicans keep bringing up race—and so do the Democrats.
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In high school Kirk was active in the choir and student government. He was elected president of his senior class, and friends like Stuart King were convinced that politics was his future. But Kirk had something else in mind. Growing up black in the sixties, he saw that the main agent of social change had been the courts. “From ninth grade on, I wanted to be a lawyer,” he says. He wanted to be a “civil rights crusader,” like his hero, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who had argued the school integration case before the Supreme Court and later became its first black justice. The law was where the power was. “Do you remember the old sixties joke?” Kirk asks. “What’s the difference between the KKK and the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court wears black robes and scares the hell out of white people.”
HE CHOSE AUSTIN COLLEGE because it had a strong reputation for preparing students to go on to professional schools and because he wanted to travel a different path from his siblings, who had gone to UT and Texas Southern University. On the first day of school, he went to the gym and met two other freshmen, one Hispanic, the other white, in a pickup game of basketball. For a time they were inseparable, but then the identity crisis of his sophomore year led to his return home. “I felt like I was in two worlds,” Kirk says now. “I was alienated from my black friends.”
His father’s insistence that he find a job led Kirk to politics. Thanks to the recommendation of a family friend, he was hired by Austin lawmaker Sarah Weddington, who had successfully argued Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, the landmark case that established a woman’s right to have an abortion. Returning to the Capitol from whose bathrooms he had been excluded as a child, Kirk got to know some of the powerhouses of Texas politics. He met Mickey Leland and Craig Washington, two black lawmakers from Houston who went on to be elected to Congress. (He still keeps a large portrait of Leland, who died in a plane crash in Africa in 1989, in his Dallas law office.) And he became friends with Weddington’s savvy, wisecracking office manager—a woman named Ann Richards. He also managed to earn credit through a work-study program at Austin College. After a semester off, he returned to Sherman to finish school. But for Kirk something had changed: “I fell in love with politics.”
In doing so, he moved away from the Thurgood Marshall career track of the crusading lawyer; he was less and less engaged in principle and more and more engaged in process. Two events occurred while he was at UT Law School that accelerated this trend. The first came when he was tapped to play on the Legal Eagles intramural football team, coached by the renowned constitutional law scholar Charles Alan Wright. When the Eagles won a game—and they have seldom lost in their 47-year history—Wright would reward the players by taking them out for a cold beer. Formidable in the classroom, Wright was almost like a father in those post-game sessions. Austin attorney Mike McElroy, a friend and Legal Eagles teammate of Kirk’s, says that the experience gave the team members intellectual confidence. “You could cut up and tell jokes and Wright was in the thick of it,” McElroy says. “You learned you could be around people like him and hold your own.” Kirk calls Wright “an awesome man. I was blessed to be part of his family.”
The second formative event was working during law school at the House Study Group, a nonpartisan legislative staff group charged with analyzing legislation for House members. McElroy was there too. “Our job was simply to give legislators pros and cons and let the Legislature make up its mind,” he recalls. “Ron undoubtedly gained from that. It’s important in politics to understand where the other side is coming from and to hold discussions in a way that makes people want to continue to talk. He learned that skill.”
A chance conversation in a Capitol elevator in 1979 put Kirk on the path to Dallas. State representative David Cain, now a state senator, asked him to join the law firm he was starting up. But Kirk missed politics. After two years in private practice, he joined the staff of U.S. senator Lloyd Bentsen in October 1981. There Kirk learned that the lesson his father had taught him about race—you have to be comfortable with who you are—could also be applied to politics. Bentsen was wealthy and patrician; he had defeated incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough, the darling of the liberals, to reach the Senate, and most Democrats, left and right, expected him to continue the factional warfare that had divided the party for two decades. Instead, Bentsen unified the party and became a national figure. “Lloyd Bentsen never tried to live up to other people’s expectations of him,” Kirk says. “He was a different type of Texas politician. Some people would easier understand him in the House of Lords. I’ve got some blue jeans and a work shirt and some boots I could scuff up, but that would be a made-up image. Voters are smarter than that. You’ve got to be comfortable with yourself.”
He returned to Dallas in 1983 to join the city attorney’s office and drew the assignment of lobbying for the city’s interests before the Legislature in Austin. In the summer of 1984, he went to a charity banquet and found himself sitting next to a woman named Matrice Ellis. One conversation centered on Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, whose reputation had been marred by the publication of nude photos. “Everybody at the table said she should resign,” Kirk says. “Matrice took the argument against that. I was impressed that she was not only articulate but strong enough to stick to her convictions,” Kirk says. “What I should have known was that she is just hardheaded. She thought I was loud and abrasive. Can you imagine that?” Three years later they were married. Today they have two daughters: Alex, age thirteen, and Catherine, ten.
Kirk lobbied for Dallas until 1989 and then joined Johnson and Gibbs, a large downtown firm. Once again, however, the pull of politics was irresistible. Ann Richards, the former office manager from his first Capitol job, had been elected governor in 1990, and she soon named him chairman of the board that oversaw the purchasing agency for state government. Later she made him Secretary of State, the most prestigious appointive job in state government, and one that is frequently a stepping-stone to high office.
That office, of course, turned out to be mayor of Dallas. Kirk came to prominence during a period when the city was beset by racial divisions on the city council and the school board. The business leadership, still a potent force in Dallas, came to the conclusion that the time had come for the city’s first black mayor. It gave its blessing to Kirk. He won in 1995 with 62 percent of the vote, defeating a large field without a runoff.
BY ANY MEASURE, HIS TENURE as mayor was a huge success. Unlike Houston, Dallas does not have a strong-mayor form of government; a professional manager oversees the bureaucracy, and the mayor is a part-time, nonpartisan official who wields power mainly by persuasion. (His new law firm, Gardere, Wynne, and Sewell, paid him $227,000 a year, though he worked only a few hours a week.) Nevertheless, Kirk was able to get just about everything he wanted. His brook-no-nonsense style brought an end to the racial bickering on the council. He pushed through two major projects backed by his business constituency: $125 million in public revenue for a downtown sports arena, a private venture whose owners at the time included Ross Perot, Jr., and radio mogul Tom Hicks; and a $543 million bond package, which included funding for the long-sought Trinity River development project, encompassing flood control, freeways, and parks. Both projects had to be approved by the voters, no easy feat, and both were. (The sports arena is in operation, but Kirk’s plan for the Trinity project has been stalled by lawsuits and opposition by Kirk’s successor as mayor, Laura Miller.) When suburban officials threatened to lead their towns out of the DART light-rail system, Kirk turned on the charm and persuaded them to stay in. Voters rewarded him at the polls by reelecting him in 1999 with more than 74 percent of the vote.
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