Who Let the Dogs In? (50 page)

Yes. Upon being shown the Great Wall of China, Nixon said, “This is, indeed, a great wall.”

June 1994

Barbara Jordan

T
HE
PUBLIC BARBARA JORDAN
from the directory of distinguished Americans is easy. She was always a First and an Only.

First woman, only black; in the Texas Senate, in the Texas congressional delegation, from the entire South. She served on the judiciary committee during the decision on Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Her great bass voice rolled forth, “My faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion is whole, it is com-plete, it is to-tal.” She sounded like the Lord God Almighty and her implacable legal logic caught the attention of the entire nation.

The degree of prejudice she had to overcome by intelligence and sheer force of personality is impossible to overestimate. She wasn’t just black and female: she was homely, she was heavy, and she was dark black. When she first came to the Texas Senate, some of her colleagues referred to her as “that nigger-mammy washerwoman.” It was considered a great joke in those years to bring one’s racist friends into the Senate gallery when B.J. was due to speak: they would no sooner spot her and gasp, “Who is that nigger?” than she would open her mouth and out would roll language Lincoln would have envied. Her personal dignity was so massive, even those who admired her hesitated to approach her. No one will ever know how lonely she was at the beginning.

Her friend Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton justly reminds us that Barbara Jordan was not effective solely because she sounded like God. Among educated Southern blacks—Jordan’s Baptist preacher daddy was one—speaking with perfect enunciation was one way of fighting the everlasting stereotype. Jordan was born and raised in the Fifth Ward of Houston, the biggest black ghetto in the biggest state in the Lower Forty-eight. She went to Texas Southern University and Boston University law school. It was neither her exceptional voice nor her extraordinary diction that got her ahead in life, but the force of her intellect.

One of those quaint Texas sayings is: “If you don’t know the difference, it don’t make any difference.” Barbara Jordan knew the difference: which is to say she was so smart it almost hurt. Lord, she was a good legislator; but never wasted a minute on a hopeless cause, no matter how righteous. Don’t ask any of the Senate liberals of that era about Jordan; ask those cornered-cottonmouth, mean-as-hell-with-the-hide-off conservatives what they thought of Jordan. Fought her on the floor in head-up debate, fought her in the back room over article 53, subsection C, part II: Jordan always knew what she was talking about, and almost always won. She traded some public suck-up with the Texas Democratic Establishment of that day—Lyndon Johnson, Ben Barnes—and got the first black congressional district ever drawn in Texas. Smart trade.

As it happened, the night B.J. spoke in favor of the impeachment of Richard Nixon, it was also
sine die
(the last night) of the Texas legislative session. Dozens of bills were still in the balance, every member was bargaining, finagling, and sweating through the final hours: came B.J.’s turn to speak on national television and the entire Texas capital came to a halt. Legislators, aides, janitors, maids, everyone gathered around scattered television sets to hear this black woman speak about the meaning of the Con-sti-tu-tion. And they cheered for her as though they were watching the University of Texas pound hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.

She cut her own congressional career short. She said later she didn’t have the patience to deal with the legislative process anymore. But it seems likely she already knew she had this weird variant of multiple sclerosis and that it would kill her before long (took almost fifteen years as it turned out). Of course she wanted a seat on the Supreme Court and Jimmy Carter could have given it to her. If there is one thing I would ask you to accept on faith, it is that Barbara Jordan had Judicial Temperament. Her faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion was whole, it was complete, it was total. I consulted her about appointments from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, and never found her less than fair. George Bush the Elder will tell you the same.

In the last years of her life, B.J. was a magnificent teacher, at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. For many more students she was quite simply the stonewall inspiration for a life in public service. No perks, no frills, no self-righteousness, no money, no glory: just a solid commitment to using government to help achieve liberty and justice for all—within the realm of the practical: She was always practical.

Her role as a role model may well have been her most important. One little black girl who grew up in the Fifth Ward used to walk by Jordan’s house every day on her way to Wheatley High School and think, “Barbara Jordan lived right here in my neighborhood. Barbara Jordan grew up right here, too.” Today Ruth Simmons is the president of Smith College.

Jordan was a helluva poker player, used to play regularly with a group of women friends. And before the disease twisted her poor hands so badly, she loved to play guitar. Sing, my God, with a voice like that do you doubt she could sing? It was like God singing the blues. “St. James Infirmary”—Let her go, let her go, Looord, let her go.

But let’s not let her go without remembering that the Woman Who Sounded Like God had a very dry, very wry sense of humor.

Former Senator Don Kennard of Fort Worth once took the ghetto-bred Jordan deer-hunting in South Texas. As dawn broke, the two of them were talking quietly in a clearing, leaning comfortably against an old, tumped-over table. Suddenly Kennard glanced over the table and there stood a beautiful buck. “There’s your buck, Barbara, take the shot,” he urged. But she got buck fever and just couldn’t do it. So Kennard took the shot and that buck dropped straight down like a rock. The two of them strolled over to inspect their prize, whereupon the buck shot straight up again and took off like a bat out of hell, without a scratch on it. Jordan said, “Good thing you’re a better senator than you are a deer slayer.”

One time, Barbara Jordan invited Ann Richards, who later became governor of Texas, but was then a mere county commissioner, out to Jordan’s house in the country for dinner. Jordan lived down a dirt road and had a troublesome, indeed totally batty neighbor. This neighbor had taken it into her head that she owned all the land along the dirt road, and consequently kept locking the gates on it. Jordan, never one to miss an opportunity to Make Government Work, asked Commissioner Richards to do something about the locked gates. Richards dutifully made some phone calls, but was never able to get the dingbat to see reason.

Time went by and Professor Jordan invited Governor Richards to another dinner at her house. As they meandered down the dirt road, Ann inquired idly, “Barbara, whatever happened to that dreadful neighbor of yours? Did she ever quit lockin’ the gates on you?”

Jordan, the great voice still strong, said, “Well, Ann. I am pleased to report that the woman in question has since died. And gone to hell.”

Today Barbara Jordan is the first and only black woman resting in the Texas State Cemetery.

January 1996

Ralph Yarborough

T
HE
IRONY
OF RALPH
Yarborough’s death coming so quickly after Barbara Jordan’s escaped no one. There went 60 percent of the courage, 50 percent of the compassion, and 50 percent of the intellect in Texas politics in just a few days. My God, we are bereaved.

Yarborough the Lion-Hearted, dead at ninety-two, at least had his full measure of years. And to what splendid use he put them. If you look back through “Raff” Yarborough’s years with the full benefit of historical perspective, his integrity and courage are astounding. He was simply right, so early, so often, and with such courage.

Politically, he was a very lonely man. From his early days in the attorney general’s office in the 1930s (when he fought for the dedication of the oil royalties on our public lands for the public schools) to the 1960s (when he was the only Southern senator to vote for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and one of the very first to oppose the war in Vietnam), Yarborough often fought alone.

Since I cannot begin to encompass his entire political career, I will only try to give you a sense of him, of how he worked and spoke and was, and of his passion for justice. He was pure East Texas populist but with a populism informed by vast learning. His 1927 grade-point average at the University of Texas at Austin’s law school is the stuff of legend. He was a judge at thirty-three. He read so widely that he knew whole civilizations the way most of us know the neighborhoods in our town. He had not an ounce of arrogance to him; he dedicated his life to “plain folks.”

Picture a campaign summer in the 1950s, say, in East Texas, Raff Yarborough on the back of a flatbed truck with a C&W band in tow. Yarborough on a tear, explaining to plain folks in plain words the right and the wrong of Jim Crow, of McCarthyism, of communism, of Hispanic field workers, of the oil companies ripping off Texas, of the gutless politicians who let it happen. Any politician who gets off an applause line today will stop and enjoy the clapping. Not Yarborough. Folks would start clapping, and he’d get off an even better line over the applause. And then another. And then another. And then another, until the people were on their feet cheering, and then, he’d top them all.

We had retail politics in those days, and going out to hear Raff Yarborough talk was high entertainment; everybody would bring Granny and the kids and a blanket and a picnic and settle down to hear him. It was better than the Chautauqua. No one makes speeches that long nowadays; Yarborough never did learn to shorten them for the television age. The Bible and Homer, Sam Houston and Marcus Aurelius, James Madison and Bob Wills, all in one speech. And always with that drumbeat for justice, simple justice, because he believed so passionately that’s what this country is about.

In those days, children, there were no Republicans in Texas. Young people used to call home from college to report to their parents that they’d actually met one. We had only two flavors of Democrats. The Democratic Establishment was Lyndon B. Johnson, who whored for the oil companies back then; Allan Shivers, who was a dreadful man; and John Connally, who served them both. Yarborough fought them all, and against a stacked deck to boot. The party had the unit rule and all other manner of rules that could be used to suppress dissident opinion. This lead to famous walkouts and shutouts at state conventions. The liberals’ greatest exit line was to march out singing, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “John Bowden Connally lies a-moldering in the grass: John Bowden Connally is a goddamn horse’s ass.”

The means used to defeat and suppress Yarborough, who was anathema to the Establishment, were legion. One of the most famous was
The Port Arthur Story,
a “documentary” film used to defeat Yarborough in his 1954 gubernatorial race. It was the first half-hour political ad ever run on statewide television, and it began with a camera panning the deserted streets of downtown Port Arthur.