November 7, 2003

The Man in Plaid

Taking a trip down memory lane with a governor who cut through the bull and left a lasting mark on the state

By MIKE HAILEY

He wheeled around and caught me square in the chest with an elbow, his eyes glowering as they burned into mine. The guy was scrappy, tough as a tire tool, an ex-roughneck from the oil patch who was born to fight and played to win.

"Don't push on me," Governor Bill Clements growled. I was staggered slightly, and stunned, while trying to piece together the circumstances that had erupted in violence on the Texas Senate floor. A television cameraman had blindsided me while several other reporters and I were trying to interview the governor as he stormed out of a meeting in Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby's office and through the Senate chamber. The force of the collision shoved me into the governor, who was already in a foul mood and needed his space.

He was really mad at Hobby - though he probably did have reasonable cause to be fed up with me and my questions day after day about whether he'd sign a tax bill to cover a $6 billion deficit or veto it like he'd been threatening all along.

It was 1987, the cantankerous Dallas oilman's first year back in office after exacting sweet revenge against Democrat Mark White and seizing his old job back just a few months before. The Capitol was lined wall to wall with characters. Rick Perry was a second-string put bull Democrat looking for fat to trim on the House Appropriations Committee. Dan Morales was a Ways and Means Committee vice-chair who would sponsor the world's biggest state tax bill before the second special session would end later that summer. Bruce Gibson was a House Democrat who figured out ways to help Gib Lewis the Speaker beat Clements and the Republicans at the kind of political hardball that record deficits lead people to play. Hobby had been around for 15 years. But Clements was Elvis - the king in a gold plaid cashmere jacket - who drove an old Mercury station wagon known as the "war wagon" from the Capitol to the Governor's Mansion across the street every day.

While clearly innocent of wrongdoing in the near-Senate melee, I took the governor's admonishment that day seriously. If Clements said something, he usually meant it. In a world spooled with spin, he was a rare breath of unabashed and often brutal honesty. He cut through the rhetorical superfluities the way he would have liked to cut the state budget if not for being outnumbered by Democrats in the House and the Senate and every statewide office except one U.S. Senate seat and the job that he first won in 1979 when he defied the conventional odds and became the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

Clements' candid, shoot-from-the-hip style was his greatest strength and his most glaring weakness. When an oil rig manufactured by SEDCO, the exploration company he'd founded, blew out in the Bay of Campeche during his first term in 1979, he took a helicopter ride out over the Gulf of Mexico to observe the massive, encroaching black slick. He told reporters that fears of an environmental disaster were "much ado about nothing" - and he shrugged it off saying there was "no use crying over spilled milk." The next day the gargantuan gob of slime came washing up on Texas beaches and barrier reefs, turning a gold coast into a thick, tarry black mess. Clements dined on crow that night.

He didn't think much of White's promise to put a housewife on the Public Utility Commission when they were running against each other in 1982. That was a key reason Clements lost the election. But while the oil gaffe played a role in his defeat that year, oil prices proved to be White's undoing four years later when they collapsed and gave Clements an opportunity to pin the blame on the Democrat. And he did.

But just when it appeared he was starting to have fun again, fighting with Democrats and promising to veto tax bills, a question from a television reporter at an otherwise uneventful press conference produced the shocking admission that he'd sanctioned and encouraged illegal payments to football players the year before while serving as chairman of the board of governors at SMU. Asked in so many words if he'd lied to NCAA investigators, Clements responded, "Well, there was never a Bible in the room."

Clements was a sincere conservative, but he didn't drink the Kool-aid. One time he was asked if he'd been "born again" like many other Republicans. "No thanks, once was enough," he replied.

Being governor once hadn't been enough - and after abandoning his promise of a veto and signing a record tax increase to keep the state in business - he went on to make a lasting positive imprint on many areas of state government. He helped put the state on a more disciplined financial footing, made economic development a high priority, strengthened relations with Mexico - and he made appointments to boards and commissions that provided the foundation and springboard for the State GOP as we know it today. Being a Republican no longer meant being a radical right wing outcast. It became the businesslike thing to do.

Today - November 7, 2003 - marks the 25th anniversary of Clements' first election as Texas governor. He's 86 timeless years old.

One day back when Clements was a ripe 78, my Dad and I were playing golf in Taos, New Mexico when I heard a voice barking instructions on technique to a woman who was lining up a putt on a green down a hill below us. A minute later the couple came bouncing down the path in an electric riding cart - and I waved them over. The ex-governor of Texas gave me a warm handshake instead of an elbow. It was an honor to introduce him to my father - and we had a nice visit before moving on to the next tee-box.

When looking back, it's easy to say that Clements was the most interesting and entertaining of five governors I've covered as a journalist. That's a given. But the benefit of hindsight makes me realize now that - all in all - he did a good job in a tough position as well.

Mike Hailey's column appears weekly in the Viewpoints section