RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

Pioneering Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 8, 2012, during broadcast of Rag Radio. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2012

Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

You can listen to the show here:


Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.

The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an "outpost of reason in the Southwest."

In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.

Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.

Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper's, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.

Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal -- and colorful -- figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.

Once, when Molly Ivins -- who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit -- was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied ("quick as a whip"): "When we have a chance to win."

On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war -- an issue that he has always considered preeminent -- and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course," Dugger says, "the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people."

We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.

And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer -- “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer's circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”

“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”

Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”

“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.

Above (and in inset photo): Thorne Dreyer, left, and Ronnie Dugger at the KOOP studios. Behind Dugger is Grace Alfar of ZGraphix. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.


Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

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Ronnie Dugger : LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

Former Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger with President Lyndon Johnson. Photo by Yoichi Yokamoto / Courtesy LBJ Library / Texas Observer.
LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make.

By Ronnie Dugger / The Texas Observer / June 6, 2012

Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[This article was originally published by The Texas Observer on August 21, 2008, and was reposted at The Rag Blog the next day.]

The confrontation between Lyndon Johnson on one side and The Texas Observer and me on the other arrived on its own terms at his ranch in the Hill Country in 1955.

He was the senior United States senator from Texas and the new majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He had developed his concept of journalism as the editor of his college paper sucking up to the college president, and by 1955 he was hell-bent on the presidency.

A group of national liberal Democrats and I, chosen as editor, had launched the Observer the preceding December. I had been editor of my high school and college newspapers, a sportswriter, columnist, an occasional correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, and a hanger-out with Edward R. Murrow’s boys at CBS News in London when I was studying in England. Johnson was 47; I was 25.

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make, and I was about to be trapped in his persona and career. He was not an idealist, but he served ideals when it suited and expressed him. He was not a reactionary, but he fanned reaction when it helped him advance himself.

As I wrote in my 1982 book about him, “Lyndon Johnson was rude, intelligent, shrewd, charming, compassionate, vindictive, maudlin, selfish, passionate, volcanic and cold, vicious and generous. He played every part, he left out no emotion; in him one saw one’s self and all the others. I think he was everything that is human. The pulsing within him, his energy, will, daring, guile, and greed for power and money, were altogether phenomenal, a continuous astonishment.”

Ahead of us lay his ascension to the presidency after the assassination of John Kennedy and his calamitous Vietnam presidency, but also his presidency of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Head Start, federal aid for the education of the poor, bilingual education, affirmative action, and the establishment of public radio and television.


Lyndon was the driven son of an ambitious, all-empowering mother and a failed liberal politician who made it no higher than elected membership in the Texas House of Representatives. After a lot of hell-raising, Lyndon, following his mother’s lead, took $100 from his folks and enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College in San Marcos. The 700 students there came from the farms and towns in the area. They were almost all white, only a few Mexican-American.

Already aiming to be president, Lyndon was set on getting power even in school, and having watched his father, he knew how to try and how not to try for it. Since he got not another nickel from his parents, he had to work his way through Southwest Texas, but after a stint janitoring around the campus, he simply strode into the office of Cecil Evans, the president of the school, and talked his way into a slightly better job.

Walking on campus with his cousin Ava, Lyndon divulged to her his theory of how to get ahead. “The first thing you want to do,” he told her, “is to know people -- and don’t play sandlot ball; play in the big leagues ...get to know the first team.”

“Why, Lyndon,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t dare to go up to President Evans’ office.”

“That’s where you want to start,” he told her.

“I knew there was only one way to get to know him, and that was to work for him directly,” Johnson told me later in the White House. For most of his time at Southwest Texas, he was special assistant to the president’s secretary, with his desk next to the secretary’s. This paid him $37.50 a month, but he wanted to be editor of the student paper because that would pay him another $30.

In his first signed editorial in the student paper, the College Star, Lyndon rebuked fellow students-- “celebrities,” he called them -- who were using the college bulletin board for personal messages. The board “must be kept free for school matters,” he wrote, of course thereby pleasing Cecil Evans. Lyndon “knew how to ingratiate himself,” as one of the English teachers there said, and when the student council made him editor of the Star, he demonstrated further that he would use the paper as a tool for personal advancement. Profiling his own boss, Lyndon wrote: “Dr. Evans is greatest as a man,” what with “his depth of human sympathy... unfailing cheerfulness, geniality, kind firmness,” and so on.

Throughout his career on the make, Johnson cottoned up to selected powerful political leaders, both accommodating and abetting them, and thus predictably becoming a favored protégé. He did this, for example, with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, President Roosevelt, and Sen. Richard Russell, as well as with business leaders such as contractors George and Herman Brown. In flattering Dr. Evans in the college paper that he edited, he was just warming up his game of protegeship through the opportunities provided him by his temporary status as a journalist.



In 1955, Rayburn and Johnson, the Democratic Party’s bosses over the two branches of the distant Congress, were gigantic figures in one-party Texas politics. The Democrats in Texas were venomously divided between the “loyal Democrats” -- also called national Democrats, who generally favored the policies advanced by Roosevelt and Truman -- and the reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, and his fellow segregationists and conservatives, who had total control of the state Democratic Party.

The previous October, a group of about 100 “loyal,” that is, national, Democrats in Texas, sensing that Shivers and his followers would go for Eisenhower for president in 1956 (as they did), gathered in Austin to found a liberal journal and asked me to edit it.

They knew, of course, that my views were liberal. They had some knowledge of my years of reporting on the thoroughly corrupt Texas Legislature in The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, and my year as editor there championing racial integration, repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and other liberal causes. For a year my columns from abroad, laced with some of my policy opinions, had run in the San Antonio daily. A speech I had given to the Houston Rotary Club advocating, among other things, national health insurance, had provoked the physicians in the club to issue an outraged written objection.

Most of the liberals who had assembled in the hotel downtown, however, appeared to want a party organ, its editorial voice subordinated to the calculations of the national Democrats in Texas. My models for reporting were: the great muckrakers; Ed Murrow; James Reston. My idea of journalism included standing enough apart from government and political parties to report independently of them and to criticize any institution when that was called for. Although party organs have their place, I did not want to work on one.

Acting through Jack Strong, a lawyer in East Texas, the liberals offered me the editorship on the Friday before the Monday when I was leaving for Corpus Christi to work on a shrimp boat and jump ship in Mexico, eventually to write a novel about the Mexicans who (then as now) were wading, swimming, and drowning in the Rio Grande in search of work.

That night I batted out a long letter to the group addressed to Mrs. R.D. Randolph, one of the group’s leaders who was an heiress to the Kirby lumber fortune in East Texas, outlining what sorts of stories I would want the Observer to investigate and what sorts of editorial crusades we likely would launch, but also my position on a party organ. Addressing the group in the hotel downtown, I told them I was not interested in editing a party organ, but I would stay and edit the new journal, provided I had exclusive control of all the editorial content. The paper’s publisher could fire me at any time for any reason, but as long as I was the editor, I would determine the editorial content.

This arrangement, which protects the journalists and the journalism from politics or the business of publishing, I later, as Observer publisher until 1994, explicitly ceded to every editor who succeeded me.

Bob Eckhardt, the great legislator of my generation in Texas and soon to become one of my closest friends, told me later that a fierce debate occurred after I left the hotel. He said that Mark Adams, a New Dealer and a yeoman printer, said that “if ever a rattlesnake rattled before he struck, Dugger has.” Mark, who became my first printer at the Observer, denied saying it.

But they accepted my terms, and as we prepared to begin, I settled on a motto for the front-page masthead, Thoreau’s “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth,” and wrote a policy credo that contained the sentence, “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it.”


I had no sting out for Johnson, far from it. While a student at UT, I had worked downtown in Austin as a reporter and news announcer for his and Lady Bird’s radio station, KTBC. His senatorial office, that is, he, had helped me get a job in Washington one summer in the division of international organizations at the Department of State. Returning from abroad, I had applied unsuccessfully for a job on his Senate staff. I learned that Horace Busby, one of his top advisers, had said to him something like, “Ronnie’s not our kind of guy,” but I didn’t know that for many years.

The first year or so at the Observer, I was the only reporter and editor, and we had one subscription person. The founding group watched quietly as I did my best to begin to wreak havoc on racism, corruption, poverty, discrimination, and the rancidness of the plutocratic ideals blatted forth by the allegedly Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers.

When I reported the racial murders of two black children in Mayflower, Texas, near Tyler, I was told that one of the Observer founders, Franklin Jones Sr., a very successful plaintiff’s lawyer in Marshall, exploded profanely on seeing my photograph of the body of one of the dead children on the front page: “Here I am working my ass off getting subscriptions for the Observer, and Dugger sends us pictures of dead Negroes all over the front page.” But if Franklin did say that, or something like it, he said nothing to me.

A new Democratic National Committee member from Texas had to be chosen, and it became known that Sen. Johnson had exerted his power to achieve the selection for that honor of the reactionary and racist Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey, who presided as the dictator over the Texas Senate to the purring pleasure, protection, and profit of every corporate fat cat in the state, the oilmen most of all. In editorials, I damned Johnson to hell and back for it.

Johnson had been opposing the Texas liberals -- on Ben Ramsey, by effectively favoring conservative Price Daniel over the liberal Ralph Yarborough for governor, and in other ways -- to get Texas reactionaries behind him, or at least to quiet them down, for his candidacy for president, which Rayburn and he would soon make public.

Nearly all of us at the Observer and all our readers were in agreement on a new drive to build a grassroots uprising of the liberal and populist Democrats to throw Ramsey and his ilk -- Shivers, Sen. Daniel, the lot of them -- into the Republican Party where they belonged. Obviously a Democratic Party answering to well-organized Democrats in the cities directly challenged and would at least diminish the boss-rule powers that Rayburn and Johnson exercised and enjoyed, and Johnson went to calling all of us involved in this organizing effort “the redhots.”


At some point that fall, with the Ramsey controversy smoking, I received a phone call that Sen. Johnson would like to see me, and would I call on him at the ranch at a certain hour on a certain afternoon. I had never been out there. After wheeling my family’s 1948 Chevrolet, which we called the Green Hornet, through the Pedernales River muscling itself shallowly over Johnson’s low-water bridge, I pulled up in front of his grand spread and saw that he was swimming in the pool, off to the right there. We greeted, nodding, and for some time I shifted from one foot to the other by the pool, feeling rather high in the air, as he continued his swim and, desultorily, we talked.


Toweling off and sitting us down on the pool furniture, cocking his long face toward me, Sen. Johnson asked me:

“Ronnie, what’s the circulation of your paper?”

“Oh, about 6,000.”

“Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000,” Johnson said.

I knew at once what he meant. “Stick with me” meant support his policies and decisions, about Ben Ramsey and anything else, celebrate his sagacity and wisdom in all that I wrote about him, and support his presidential ambitions; “and we’ll make it 60,000” meant that in return, he would employ his standing, power, and connections to build up the Observer. The one great rule of composition would be to promote Lyndon Johnson. The Observer would be not a party organ, but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor

The senior senator from Texas and the Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate had called me out here to propose straightforwardly that the Observer and I replace journalistic integrity with loyalty to him. He was trying to bribe me and The Texas Observer, or, if this was not to be a bribe, the deal -- the secret understanding -- the quid pro quo, obedient loyalty and feigned adulation in return for the other’s use of his power on your behalf, would have been not different from a bribe by a dime.

Johnson’s problem was, he would soon make public his campaign for the presidency. He knew the Observer was a novelty, conspicuous in reactionary Texas, reporting long-covered-up events and expressing unpredictable opinions; he knew that national newspeople, traipsing to and from his ranch from Austin, would often drop by the Observer offices for inside dope or just for the devilment of it, as in fact they were to do for the rest of the decade; and he knew that if his sellouts to the Texas yahoos and rednecks on the way to the White House became clear to the national Democrats, they might not nominate him for president.

My problem was how to get out of there. I could have just said, “I’m sorry, senator, no deal,” but this was not my style while practicing rebellious journalism in Texas. I extended myself and taxed my fellow Observer reporters to be fair and accurate, both in order to be fair and accurate and in self-defense, although, that done, in editorials I let miscreants and villains have it straight on.

In person, in my life day after day, I was carefully polite and civil with all parties. If I was formally polite to a fault, well, it was a kind of protective coloration. On this afternoon with Johnson, I realized that the Observer and I had been misgauged and underestimated, but that for the rest of the occasion my part was to avoid any accusative remarks or implications, any incautious, offensive, or popinjay responses, and to graciously take my leave as soon as that might appear mannerly.

Sitting there side by side on plastic chaise lounges -- someone brought us cold drinks, I believe lemonades -- we talked along gingerly for maybe an hour. Well, senator, it’s an honor to have met you, and I appreciate your having me out -- don’t want to overstay, I’d better be getting back to town -- I said something like this, starting to rise to head back to my Green Hornet.

No, he said, why don’t you stay to dinner. No trouble, Bird’ll have plenty.

Although I had nothing more to say to him, I had not said no, and he had something more to say to me.

After an interim during which nothing happened, I sat down to dinner in a half-dark chamber at the center of the Johnsons’ well-staged home with Lady Bird Johnson and Johnson’s personal secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, who had been my managing editor in high school in San Antonio when I had edited the Brackenridge Times. Mary Margaret is a beautiful person. While I had perceived no romantic flash in our friendship and work together in high school, we admired and respected each other; I was glad she was there.

As Johnson sat down at my left at the head of his table, though, I realized, silently appalled, “My God, the subject is at hand, all I can do is explain journalism to him as if he actually doesn’t know what it is.” If the situation had not been unbelievable, it would have been incredible.

I struck forth uncertainly, as if we were dining on a pitching log, addressing only Johnson to describe, as best I could, the role of journalism, the Fourth Estate, separation from government, providing facts and explanations, democracy’s inexpendable need for an independently informed electorate. I may even have quoted Jefferson.&

I might as well have been talking to the log I was riding. Johnson said to me, No, the thing a smart young reporter does, and should do, is survey the field of candidates, pick the best one, and enter into a deal to help that one win whatever office and prevail in whatever controversy, subordinating his reporting and comment to the interests of the candidate.

Johnson was far too smart to really think that is what journalism is or should be. He was feigning adherence to a theory of journalism, a blend of his own practice on his college paper and his political strategy of protegeship upended for the advance of his juniors, that might work somewhat, with me and others, as a disguise for his use of journalists to serve his will to power.

Later it became embarrassingly clear that he had induced some of the leading reporters and columnists in Texas and the nation to make some such a deal with him or assent to some such understanding: Leslie Carpenter, William S. White, Joseph Alsop, some of the authors of those surprising articles in the big magazines in the late 1950s promoting the lanky Lyndon Johnson of Texas for president of the United States.

I remember (I am not referring, for this essay, to my notes on all of this) that neither Lady Bird nor Mary Margaret said one word all evening. Oh, perhaps one or two, but I don’t remember even one. They sat silent and still as good women of old were supposed to during an argument among the men. Yet both Bird and Mary Margaret were highly intelligent.

How strange the evening must have seemed to them, their guy trying to turn a journalist into his secretly bought public promoter, their senator and this younger guy battling over irreconcilable opinions, completely missing each other, reaching no agreement.

Many’s the time since that evening there has replayed on the stage in my mind a vivid re-seeing of what happened upon my departure that evening. I am five or six feet away from Lyndon and me, watching the two of us illuminated by the ranch-house lighting locked in animated argument in front of his house at his low wire fence, he inside the fence, I outside, our knees braced against it and each other, intensely disputing directly into each other’s faces a few inches apart, he leaning first a little into my face, and then a little more, and then so much my head is bent back, and I shift my heels backward to be able to stand up straight to him again.


My first associate editor at the Observer, Billy Lee Brammer, a reporter on the Austin daily (and later the author of the classic Texas novel The Gay Place), started showing up unbidden evenings and helping me clip the 3-foot-high mounds of the rotgut Texas daily newspapers of that era, then quit downtown and came on staff. He flourished in reporting Texas politics for us, most memorably “the Port Arthur story” and the Austin lobby’s junket for Texas legislators to the Kentucky Derby, until Johnson hired him onto his Washington staff.

The liberal Democratic organizing of the ’50s caught hold in the cities, especially in Houston and San Antonio. In the 1956 Democratic state convention, over the furious objections of Johnson and his operatives there, the delegates elected Mrs. Randolph, who had become the de facto publisher of the Observer, to the Democratic National Committee.

Four years later, favorite son Johnson trounced his opponents in Texas and swept into that year’s state convention, where he had Mrs. Randolph replaced. In one of these conventions, Mrs. Randolph told me, Johnson sent her word asking her to call on him, and when she did he asked expansively, “Well, Mrs. Randolph, what can I do for you?” She replied: “Nothing.”

Texas labor leaders Fred Schmidt and Hank Brown told me that, when they lobbied the Democrats’ Senate leader in Washington, he railed against the Observer and me, on some specified occasion with a copy of the journal on his desk. Mrs. Randolph said that when he asked her to get me to do something or other she replied, “Talk to him.” At least I could think, when for example I wrote a series of columns on the horrors of nuclear weapons, or during the Vietnam war when I ran a headline across the front page, “Will Johnson Bomb China?” that the man himself might be reading it.

During one state Democratic convention, I was running tandem some with Mark Sullivan, the Southwest bureau chief for Time-Life, for which I was a stringer. Mark and I approached Johnson on the convention floor for an interview. Johnson barked out that he wouldn’t talk to us with me there because “that boy prints lies about me.” We left him -- or at least I did; I am not sure what Mark did.

That was the first and has been the only time in my life when I have directly experienced from another person the will to ruin me. The Time-Life connection was enabling me to hold up my financial end with my wife and children despite my annual Observer salary of $6,500. With this one ferocious remark to my boss at Time-Life, Johnson surely meant to kill me professionally. Deep in my convention story in the Observer, I reported the scene and what Johnson had said about me. I was deeply offended, and a year or two had to pass before my anger about it subsided. But Time-Life stood by me (in fact in 1961, after a lunch with Henry Luce, I was invited to join the staff of Time, which I did not).

In 1959, preparing a special focus for the Observer on Johnson’s candidacy for president, I asked him for an interview in Washington, and he granted it. I remember that on my way into his regal office as majority leader, I saw Mary Margaret at her desk, and we exchanged cautious smiles and slight nods when my eyes briefly met hers as I passed. The interview went well enough. This time I got the full Johnson treatment of persuasion, charm, raillery, and menace -- stories, brags, ridicules of his colleagues, jokes, hands on my knees -- again and again the leaning into my face.

Perhaps I should also record that, in the early 1960s when Johnson was vice president, I became a correspondent in Texas for the then-liberal Washington Post, and I intuitively suspect on the basis of the facts and context of what happened, but I have no evidence, that Johnson used his extremely close ties to that newspaper’s executives to have them eventually drop me.

The Observer never endorsed Johnson for president except in his contest with Barry Goldwater in 1964. In columns, I was for Estes Kefauver in 1956, Averell Harriman in 1960.

Except for an oblique column in the Observer full of obscurities after the confrontation at the ranch, this is the first report I have written about these events since they occurred half a century ago. Initially there was the off-the-record problem, but that’s gone now. I have not wanted to write about it, too, because how could I without being perceived as possibly self-serving? I relate them here now because the Observer editor asked me to.


In November 1965, I was one of the eight speakers who addressed the first massive demonstration against Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, and afterward I typed out a copy of my speech and sent it to President Johnson (the Observer ran the text of it). Johnson had George Reedy, then his press secretary, send me a note that “the President asked me to tell you he seeks no wider war,” the first time I saw or heard him hide behind that lying bromide.

In 1967, having signed a contract with W.W. Norton for a book on Johnson, I wrote him asking him for biographical interviews and telling him that I intended a fair and accurate book worthy of the attention of serious people, and he gave me extensive interviews in the White House in late 1967 and 1968. He introduced me around the White House as “the leading liberal in the Southwest.” Discounting that as the Texas blarney it was, he had given off accusing me, or the Observer, of printing lies about him.

He tried to bring you into his field of overmastering personal power; that failing, he tried to ruin you; that failing, well, OK, he would deal with you again. In my last interview with him in the White House, on March 23, 1968, we were carrying along merrily. He was telling me a story when he suddenly interrupted himself and said, “Now, Ronnie, I’m giving you all these great stories, I want a friendly book!” I leaned forward and began, “Well, now, Mr. President -- ” but he shut me off and continued with the story.

He was so charming, engaging, such an engrossing person, funny, fun to be with, such a good raconteur, I did not remember that he had said that until I was outside the White House that night. I went on back in and spoke with his press secretary then, my old friend George Christian, whom I had reported alongside years earlier in the offices of the International News Service in the Texas Capitol.

I reminded George I had told Johnson I intended to write a fair and accurate book worthy of the interest of serious people, but that during our interview that evening he had said he wanted “a friendly book.” Oh, hell, George said, you know Lyndon, he didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe George was right, but “Yes, he did,” I said, “and please tell him from me, on that point, no deal.”

The next day, I suspected pro forma in light of what had occurred, I asked that my next interview with the president be scheduled, and then I waited some days in the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Park from the White House, where I was staying. No call came. A week later Johnson quit the presidency. Another week later, he began his interviews with Doris Kearns.


The Observer maintained its integrity and its independence of Lyndon Johnson before and during his presidency. He was who and what he was, the Observer and I were what and who we were and are, and this is the story of Lyndon Johnson, The Texas Observer, and me.


[Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer and, later its publisher, was also co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and has written for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive, and other periodicals.]

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Dick J. Reavis : Something Missing at Texas Writers' Festival?

"The Texican." Painting © Mike Aston /
mikeastonart.com .
Artaud and Arizona:
Tempest at Texas Observer's writers' fest

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2010

This weekend a startling email come to my inbox and to those of others who are identified with journalism in Texas. Its title line read, “To Liberal Activists Who Happen to be Latina/o/s.” Though I don’t fit either the Liberal or Latino categories, being a nosy former reporter, I read what its poster, antonioartaud@grandecom.net, had to say.

“The revered journal of Texas liberal politics The Texas Observer is having a writer’s festival,” its opening blandly began. “Guess what -- they forgot to invite any Tejana /o/s and African Americans. Impossible, you say. Que fue eso? Did we forget to show our papers? How do we prove we’re Texans too?

“And to make matters worse, they’re in cahoots with Texas Monthly,” Artaud continued. “Almost all the writers invited are either the editor of Texas Monthly or former/present Texas Monthly writers. Yes, the same magazine that has ignored us for over 25 years as personas non grata in their Texas.”

The post closed with an exhortation and a warning: “Cancel your subscription, write a letter, protest the event at Scholz Biergarten, but above all, consider yourself on notice.”

I am told that the author of the post, Antonio Artaud, is a student of journalism at a college in San Antonio. His sentiment was, to use an oldster’s term an Anglo journalist friend applied: “Right on!” Artaud knows of what he speaks -- and what he pointed to is a scandal.

Monday Artaud followed with a post containing messages of support from, among others, the novelists Dagoberto Gilb of San Marcos and the all-around San Antonio wordsmith, Gregg Barrios (who also wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin). Something was building. “Latina/o/s” were, for the moment anyway, rising to protest against business as usual in the circles of Texas journalism.

The hubbub died late Monday or early Tuesday when Artaud sent a third post, announcing that the Observer had agreed to include a Latino writers panel and issue an apology. Better late than never, I suppose. But as always in American history, it appears that no arrangement was made to include blacks.

Before the hubbub died, I did some thinking. Placing myself in the shoes of the editors of the Observer and TM, I asked what might be done to permanently integrate those publications without fundamentally altering anything.

I’d have canceled the Writers’ Festival (or “writers’ festival,” as the Observer’s announcement so graphically put it.) I’d have rescheduled it and expanded its panel to include -- two or three New York Puerto Ricans or Dominicans! After all, Nuyoriqueños are as much Latinos as Mexican-Americans, and many of them are as African-American as anybody in the United States.

If this idea doesn’t make sense, it should: the Texas nonfiction establishment has already applied the same logic to Anglo Texans.

I may get some of the facts wrong because I’ve been outside of Texas for six years, but to the best of my knowledge, the editors of the daily newspapers in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are white non-Texans. The editors of The Texas Observer and Texas Monthly, Bob Moser and Jake Silverstein, fit the same category, even though the general report is that they’ve improved those publications.

I am less sure about the Observer, but at the Monthly, the tally is plain: the magazine has had four editors, only the first of whom was a Texan. My observations, when I was a journalist in Texas, were that at both dailies and elite magazines in Texas, only about half of the editorial staffers were Texans before they became reporters in Texas.

The Observer and the Monthly are, of course, by now “old media.” The most contemporary entry into the ranks of elite Texas journalism is the online daily, The Texas Tribune. I would note that its first and only editor, Evan Smith, is from the city of New York.

A few years ago I put together a still-unpublished statistical study of the Monthly which showed that Texans, 95 percent of the editorial staff at the magazine’s outset, became a minority during the ‘80s, and stabilized at about half during the ‘90s. The Monthly has never hired a Mexican-American staff writer and its one African-American reporter vanished within months of his engagement.

None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. It is accepted wisdom among educated Americans today that class and regional differences don’t count for anything: we live in a placeless, classless meritocracy, people believe.

When Texas Monthly, as today, calls itself the “National Magazine of Texas” it in no way means to imply that it is the magazine of a state which sometimes imagines itself a nation. Instead, it is a magazine of national quality -- which in the publishing world, means “as good as what’s published in New York” -- that, incidentally, happens to be published in Texas.

The sensibilities of the locale mean nothing, the standard of reporting means everything. Journalism is an acultural scientific product, disconnected to land, the past, and tradition. It produces sterile news, cleansed of the smell of the dirt from which it came.

With that as the accepted wisdom, it’s clearly heresy to bring even ethnicity, as Arnaud did, into the equation. Meritocracy knows no gradations, so what difference can it make that the editor of the Tribune is from New York, the editor of the Monthly from California and the editor of the Observer from North Carolina?

I dissent from the accepted view for reasons that are as inchoate and instinctual as sometimes studied and glib. Suspicions haunt me, the latest of them because of the controversy over Mexican immigration in Arizona.

Several years ago Texas was the home to two or three border-control militias, just as Arizona was. I looked into the Texas outfits and found that even though they were led by small-time ranchers whose spreads were near the border, those ranchers -- and most of their lieutenants -- were recent arrivals from the rural Midwest.

My suspicions and speculations tell me that, Arizona being the retirement destination of the Midwest, as Florida is for New York, Arizona’s anti-Mexican hysteria is probably traceable to the state’s non-natives. In a way, it comes naturally to them: Mexico is as foreign to rural
Midwesterners as Iraq is to most Texans.

Anglo, Latino, and African-American natives of the frontera alike have traditionally regarded immigration restrictions as a joke, though in recent years they have become a real annoyance. But inlanders tend to see border walls, passport requirements, and crossing-bridge shakedowns as dignified embodiments of American law.

As reactionary as Texas may otherwise be, its last president, the Islamophobic George W. Bush, made an honest attempt at humanizing immigration law, and the state’s current governor, Rick Perry -- a lifetime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, no less! -- has said that Arizona’s anti-Mexican ethnocentrism is not for him or his state.

I can find no other factor that uniquely explains the “progressive” character of the Bush and Perry stand except this: growing up even as Anglos in Texas, their attitudes towards Mexico and its descendants took a better-than-American form. Neither regards immigration as a merely legal or economic -- or racial -- issue, as most Americans do.

According to the theory of meritocracy common to the American empire, success and placement depend, not upon the question of national or regional origin, but instead upon one’s educational credentials. Other differences between Americans have no place in this scheme.

This is why state-supported universities, for example, conduct national talent searches for almost all faculty jobs. The same placelessness has been at bottom of the selection of editors and writers for the Monthly and the Observer and probably, the Tribune as well. If in Texas we hire editors and journalists who are often non-Texans, according to meritocratic ideology, it must be because competent writers are hard to come by in Texas; if we also wind up with editors and writers who are not Mexican-American or black, why would the same conclusion not apply? The theory that marginalizes Anglo Texans downgrades all Texans, Latinos and African-Americans as well.

In his original posting, Artaud attached a copy of the Observer’s announcement of its bash. I counted 13 panelists. Perhaps because I have been away, I recognized the names of only seven of them, among them one writer from the city of New York. I wondered to myself, “how many of these Texas writers are really Texans?” I do not know the answer yet, but my guess is that it’s more than one. Were the same sort of celebration being staged in New York, I do not believe that a single paisano would be on the billing; more than one -- certainly not! Yet Texas is today more populous than New York.

The Observer, in deciding to heed Artaud’s complaint, at least in regard to Latinos, may have decided at long last to remedy its lack of sincerity and vision -- for a month or two, anyway. But the notion that the self-expression of Texas should be the affair of non-Texans is only an extension of the otherwise-hidden hegemony which skin color makes plain.

Today I was thinking that, perhaps because I’ve been called a “horse’s ass” more than once, I should feel a little bit sorry for horses as well. In the eyes of most of them, I’ll wager, all equine magazines should be written and published -- by equines, not by their riders!

Horse sense tells me that in Texas, whites are riding on the back of a culture that has always included Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, and white non-Texans are riding on the back of the cultural mix that only Texans, of any color or ethnicity, fully appreciate or understand.

[Dick J. Reavis is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

Antonio Artaud passed along this letter, sent to The Texas Observer by UT professor Emilio Zamora:

Editors,

I published a book on Mexicans and the Texas home front with Texas A&M Press and co-edited an anthology on Latinos and Latinas in WWI with UT Press, both in 2009. I have received two awards for the first book from the Texas State Historical Association and the Institute of Texas Letters. Despite this, I was not invited to participate in your writers' festival. This is not the first time that public programs on new books have slighted me, but I have recently discovered that this time you have also overlooked other recently published authors of Latino/a descent. You may have included one of these noted authors, Belinda Acosta, but only after she pointed out the glaring problem.

I should add that Latino and Latina writers are also usually absent from the pages of The Observer and this is not necessarily due to our failure to submit materials to you. A case in point is Professor Angela Valenzuela's excellent review of Avatar which she submitted on February 5, 2010. You have not published the piece nor have you even sent her a note acknowledging her submission.

I cannot help but think that the problem of under-representation and erasure of major portions of U.S. and Texas history (women, minorities, labor, civil rights, for example) in our public school curriculum extends far beyond the Texas State Board of Education. Isn't it really a sorry shame that we should be talking like this among ourselves when major battles for equal rights (with the State Board of Education, for instance) require our undivided attention.

Emilio Zamora, Professor
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin

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The Texas Observer : Molly Ivins, Barack Obama, and Dishing the Null Set

Unveiling the new look: Page one of the January 8, 2010 Texas Observer.

The legendary crusading Texas biweekly The Texas Observer is still in there fighting after all these (56) years -- and they have a cool new look. Observer editor Bob Moser and publisher Carlton Carl will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

Below, see Bob Moser on the Texas tea party movement and Carlton Carl on Molly Ivins and Barack Obama.

Dimwitted populism:
Hanging with the null set

By Bob Moser / February 1, 2010

See 'Barack, Molly, and Me of Little Faith' by Carlton Carl, Below.

[The following commentary by Bob Moser, editor of The Texas Observer, first appeared in the Observer on January 22, 2010.]

It hit me about halfway through the Texas Nullification Rally.

Several hundred tea-party types had gathered at the State Capitol on a sunshiny Saturday to wave U.S. and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, brandish handmade signs with slogans like “Guns and Ammo/Be Ready,” and holler about the evils of health care, President Obama, illegal immigrants and government in general.

I was listening to the keynote speech by John Stacy, a bespectacled, suit-wearing, squeaky-voiced youngster from Dallas who’s organized an anti-health-reform group called Not in Texas. He had just called for cutting off Social Security and Medicare for all Americans born after January 1, 1980 -- why that date? why not? -- and was working himself up to a full-throated finish, screeching, “I don’t care if all 49 other states and every country in the world socializes their medicine, Texas ain’t gonna!”

As I squinted into the bright winter sun, watching the working- and middle-class white folks who’d come from Waco and Waring and Texas City to cheer such sentiments with all their hearts, I suddenly realized: Moser, you are surely the only openly gay, government-loving, socialist health-care-supporting, gun-hating member of the media in America who gets his jollies from hanging out with people who loathe everything you stand for.

It’s a sickness. What can I say? But I simply adore a good tea party, and can’t help wishing its denizens well. Maybe it’s the anti-establishment streak that makes my spirits soar whenever people of any stripe gather together to spit in the face of power. Maybe it’s the fact that when I go to these functions, it’s like attending a family reunion back in North Carolina, where I grew up among folks who were partial to George Wallace because, as my daddy said, “He might be a nut, but he’s a working man’s nut.” (Which was true enough, I guess, if your idea of a working man was limited to the white, segregationist kind.)

But as with family reunions, I always leave these rallies feeling simultaneously envious and bummed out. Envious because my kind of anti-establishment folk -- those on the populist left -- have turned into a tame, passive, MSNBC-watching bunch by comparison. Bummed because I always come away thinking, Why can’t these people make a lick of sense?

To my mind, there’d be nothing better for America -- or for Texas -- than an ongoing, free-for-all debate between those who hold a consistent set of small-government ideals and those of us who believe in the social contract and good government and a more perfect union.

I’d much prefer to slug it out with thoughtful states’ rights libertarians than with the followers of mealy-mouthed corporate flacks like Rick Perry or George W. Bush, who make their political hay by giving lip service to true believers while serving no one but the wealthy. (Partly, I’ll admit, this is because I’m convinced that the left would have a much better chance of winning an open and honest debate.)

But to my constant dismay, there is no set of consistent ideas on the tea-party right -- only a jumble of half-baked notions, conspiratorial hobgoblins and inchoate anxieties stoked to a fever pitch by the specter of an African-American president who is not Clarence Thomas.

Take the Nullification Rally. It was supposed to have a clear, though quixotic, purpose: calling for a special session of the Texas Legislature to vote on nullifying all future laws passed by Congress -- health-care reform, most pressingly -- until they’ve also been approved by Texans. But the messages were all over the map, and they tended to be both dimwitted and self-contradictory.

Exhibit A: Republican state Rep. Leo Berman, who started his oration by saluting military veterans (including himself), went on to declare Obama a “fraud” and a “socialist” whose health-care bill will force Texans to “spend $2 billion a year for the next 10 years to give Medicaid to illegal aliens” -- and then piously quoted, with absolutely no sense of irony, from the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”). The crowd ate it up.

Unlike many a liberal, I’m not deeply offended by the people who show up at these rallies wearing T-shirts depicting Obama as Stalin or Hitler. I don’t really give a hoot if somebody yells out, as somebody did at the Nullification shindig, “Kill Obama!” What truly depresses me is that there’s nothing at the bottom of all this fist-waving fury but a mess of nonsense. That, and the fact that the only fist-waving, spit-at-power, publicly protesting folks in contemporary Texas are on the far right.

[Bob Moser became editor of The Texas Observer in October 2008. He edited North Carolina's Independent Weekly, an award-winning alternative paper modeled on the original Texas Observer, was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University and an award-winning senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, reporting on American extremists, particularly the religious right and the anti-immigrant movement.

He has also written for publications including Out and Rolling Stone, where he won the 2006 GLAAD Award for best magazine article, and was a writer and editor at The Nation. His first book, Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority, was published in August 2008.]

Texas Observer publisher Carlton Carl; former Observer editor, the late Molly Ivins; and Barack Obama -- at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Photo by Dave McNeely / The Texas Observer.
Barack, Molly, and me of little faith

By Carlton Carl / November 5, 2008

[This article by Texas Observer publisher Carlton Carl was originally publshed on The Texas Observer website on November 5, 2008.]

“You know,” she said after we met him. “That young man could be President some day.”

“What?” I said. “Are you crazy? Not in our lifetimes.” We both knew what I meant. After all, that young man was black. And she and I had both grown up white and liberal in a segregated Houston with “Colored” restrooms, “Whites Only” water fountains, and lily-white lunch counters.

In the mid-1960s we had both worked on the Houston Chronicle, where there were a grand total of two black faces in the newsroom, and where we had to plead with and cajole our editors to let us do a long story on poverty in the city. There wasn’t much coverage of the black community back then that didn’t involve crime.

She was Molly Ivins, my dear friend of 45 years before she died in 2007, having had an illustrious career as a reporter, editor of The Texas Observer, and widely syndicated columnist.

“That young man” was Barack Obama. The occasion was the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, where Obama had given the keynote address.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Molly should have said to me.

We both saw stardom in that young man. But Molly saw more. Molly saw a time when the United States of America could put aside racial division and elect a black person President.

I fear I still saw those “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs, the fire hoses and police dogs, and Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”

Well, it did happen in my lifetime. Sadly, not in Molly’s.

Looking at this picture taken by our old friend Dave McNeely (the veteran reporter who was there with us in those Houston Chronicle days), I thought about that night in Boston a little over four years ago. I thought about Molly’s hopeful words.

How she would have loved last night. How she would have loved to hear: “President-Elect Barack Obama.”

Ken Bunting, another old friend who’s now associate publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said of Molly by email this morning, “I’m not much of a believer, but I think our friend is looking down and smiling right along with Barack’s grandma.”

You know, I think he is right.

[Carlton Carl became the CEO and Executive Publisher of The Texas Observer in January, 2008. A native of Houston and longtime resident of Austin who recently returned to Texas after 25 years in Washington, D.C., Carlton is a graduate of Columbia College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has done reporting for the Houston Chronicle and The New York Times, as well as freelance writing for other publications.

He has also served as a Texas gubernatorial press secretary, chief of staff to a Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and in numerous other political and media consultant positions. Most recently he worked in non-profit advocacy for the American Association for Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America).]

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Texas' Dr. Death : Executing the Mentally Retarded

Daniel Plata, a mentally retarded criminal saved from execution in Texas, is shown in picture on a bookshelf at his home. Photo by Michael Stravato / The Texas Observer.
Cruel and unusual in Texas:
Executing the mentally retarded

'When you have junk science in a case, it's like pouring poison into a punch bowl,' -- Attorney Kathryn Kase

By Yana Kunichoff / January 18, 2010

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews The Texas Observer's Renée Feltz. See Video below.

An investigative report reveals that Texas continues to execute mentally retarded prisoners despite a U.S. Supreme Court ban. The state has been basing its decisions on unreliable mental health testimony by a court-appointed psychologist.

In a series of articles in The Texas Observer, Renée Feltz reported the mistakes made by George Denkowski in psychiatric evaluations of a number of patients -- and how catching a similar mistake saved the life of Daniel Plata.

"To those of us familiar with the right way to do these things," said Jerome Brown, a Texas psychologist, "it is very apparent that what he's doing is wrong." Brown was referring to the medical evaluations Denkowski did of inmates deemed potentially mentally ill.

In a Supreme Court ruling in 2002, Atkins v. Virginia, it was decided that "executions of mentally retarded criminals are cruel and unusual." The impetus behind this decision was that, although mentally disabled people can distinguish between right and wrong, their ability to control impulsive behavior or learn from mistakes was curtailed.

To decide whether a defendant suffered from a severe enough level of mental disability, the court ruled that persons with an IQ score of 70 or below could legally be considered to have below-average intellectual abilities and "deficits in adaptive behavior" since before the age of 18. This ruling exempted Daryl Atkins, the defendant, from death row.

One of the men focused on in the investigative series, Daniel Plata, was saved from Death Row by an investigation into methods used by the prosecution's appointed psychologist, George Denkowski, to determine whether Plata was mentally capable and it was therefore legal to execute him.

Plata, whose mother said his brain had been denied oxygen at birth because of an umbilical cord tied around his neck that led a nurse to assume he would have cognitive difficulties, was interviewed by Denkowski, who then concluded that Plata had a score of 77, high enough to be deemed sufficiently psychologically aware to execute.

However, the article points to Denkowski making assumptions during the test (specifically of the English-language ability of Plata, a Mexican immigrant), making non-procedural changes such as rewording test questions he asked the defendant, and giving Plata more points than some answers merited. Each of the sessions was videotaped by Plata's attorney.

Denkowski has thus far testified in nearly two-thirds of the appeals related to a death row prisoner's mental ability in Texas -- 29 cases. He found the defendants mentally disabled only eight times.

Robert Morrow, an attorney familiar with Denkowski's cases, said that he [Denkowski] had an "almost Dr. Death status" among defense lawyers, and "Denkowski pretty much thought that if you had engaged in criminal behavior you were not retarded."

Though Denkowski concluded that Plata was not mentally retarded, a psychologist hired by Plata's lawyer did find him to be, and after hearing the case U.S. District Court Judge Brock Ellis ruled that Plata is "a person with mild retardation" and should be removed from Death Row.

Not all the inmates interviewed in Texas's system have been so lucky. Only 13 men have been removed from Death Row in Texas since 2002 because of their low mental development -- 28 percent of cases appealed under the Atkins ruling, while the national rate is 40 percent.

"I suppose you could imagine that Texas Death Row inmates are smarter than everyone else," said Sheri Lynn Johnson, a professor at Cornell Law School who co-directs its Death Penalty Project, "but I'd be surprised."

An additional eight states have passed laws that make use of the clinical definition for mental retardation in the Atkins case -- Texas has not been one of them. In 2001, the Texas legislature passed a law allowing life sentences for mentally retarded people who have committed capital crimes. However, Gov. Rick Perry did not allow the measure to pass, saying it amounted to a "backdoor attempt to ban the death penalty."

Since Ellis's decision to disregard Denkowski's decision in Plata's case, Jerome Brown, another Texas psychologist, filed a complaint with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists.

Brown, who worked with defendants in five cases where Denkowski worked for the prosecution, said the techniques used by Denkowski ultimately amounted to "essentially junk science. It is science that appears to be scientific, but it doesn't have any background of validation to it."

The state Board of Examiners of Psychologists recognized Brown's complaint, and said that Denkowski had made "administration, scoring and mathematical errors" in three cases, including the Plata case. Denkowski has a hearing scheduled for February 16 in Austin, Texas, at which he risks losing his license.

The cases of Steven Butler and Joel Escobedo, inmates now on Death Row, have been put aside until the results of Denkowski's hearing are known, and there are several other requests for appeals.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office [said it] no longer works with Denkowski since his evaluation of Plata was overturned.

Plata's lawyer, Kathryn Kase, said all of Denkowski's cases should be reviewed. "When you have junk science in a case, it's like pouring poison into a punch bowl," she said. "You aren't going to get the poison out. So you have to pour out the punch, clean the bowl, and start all over again."

Source / truthout

• See "Cracked: Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ban, Texas has continued to send mentally retarded criminals to death row," By Renée Feltz / The Texas Observer / January 8, 2010
• Go here for The Texas Observer's interactive graphic featuring Dr. George Denkowski's 29 "Atkins" cases.

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman interviews
The Texas Observer's Renée Feltz

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Texan Creekmore Fath : He Paddled His Own Canoe

Creekmore Fath with former law partner -- and U.S. Congressman -- Bob Eckhardt. Photo by Alan Pogue.
So Long to the 'Communist Threat':
Creekmore Fath, last of a generation of progressive activists

I met Fath during... future U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough’s losing 1954 campaign for governor against conservative Democrat Allan Shivers... To win, Shivers campaigned for the death penalty for Communist Party members...

By Dave Richards / August 27, 2009

[This article appears in the August 21 issue of The Texas Observer, Texas' progressive biweekly that's been fighting the good fight for more than five decades.]

When Creekmore Fath died in June at 93, we’d officially seen the last of an influential cluster of liberal activists who came of age during the Great Depression at the University of Texas. It’s a generation worth celebrating, especially since they deserve plenty of thanks for what modicum of racial justice exists in Texas.

Fath’s often-storybook life (even his name sounds Elizabethan) in many ways exemplified what set apart these UT liberals -- Chris Dixie of Houston, Otto Mullinax of Dallas, Maury Maverick Jr. of San Antonio, Bob Eckhardt of Houston, and Fath of Austin. And what kept them together.

I met Fath during my initial foray into politics, future U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough’s losing 1954 campaign for governor against conservative Democrat Allan Shivers. The race was close enough to alarm the ruling elite. To win, Shivers campaigned for the death penalty for Communist Party members, along with traditional racist attacks on the NAACP and integration.

By 1956, Texas’ conservative rulers were so worried about the Yarborough threat that they persuaded Price Daniel to abandon his Senate seat and run for governor against the liberal menace. That same year, U.S. Sen. Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn decided to challenge the Shivercrats for control of the Texas Democrats. Yarborough forces, including Fath, also mounted a challenge from the left.

I ended up an Austin delegate to the state convention from the liberal wing. We arrived to find ourselves locked out because the Johnson forces controlled the tickets. Some of us got into the building through a women’s restroom window. Others made it to the floor with counterfeit tickets printed up by Harry Holman, a union carpenter from Austin. We scrambled in to find the 200-plus-member Travis County delegation in disarray, equally divided between Johnson and Yarborough.

At one point, the key vote was seating the liberal delegation from Harris County. Travis County delegates had to be polled. Fath counted for the liberals, and Johnson lawyer John Cofer for the other side. At the conclusion of each polling, the two would solemnly announce results that were contrary. Fath had the liberals winning, Cofer had the Johnsonites winning. After polling the delegation three times and getting the same contradictory outcomes, Travis County had to pass without a vote. Even so, the convention was a success. The liberal dynamo from Houston, Frankie Randolph, defeated Johnson’s candidate for the Democratic National Committee. The next year, Yarborough won Price Daniel’s Senate seat in a special election—the first liberal win since Jimmie Allred in the 1930s.

All of this strange carrying-on had its roots at UT in the 1930s. While the university was the heart of intellectual ferment in the state, the Texas Legislature was focusing its periodic red-baiting hysteria on the campus as a hotbed of radicalism. At UT, Fath joined with Dixie, Mullinax, and Herman Wright to reorganize the Young Democrats into the Progressive Democrats. In 1936, Mullinax, Wright, and Dixie (with Fath running the latter’s campaign) ran losing state-legislature campaigns from their home counties. All ran on a Progressive Democratic issue: taxing the extraction of sulfur, a notion floated by another influential liberal, Bob Montgomery.

Montgomery was a favorite target of the red-baiters in Austin. Soon after the election, at the instigation of Johnson friend Roy Miller, a powerful sulfur lobbyist, the Legislature began investigating Montgomery and trying to expose the Progressive Democrats as communists. Along with Montgomery, Mullinax was subpoenaed. “Three of us ran for the Legislature on a program to tax sulfur,” he told the lawmakers, “and were defeated on the charge of being communists.”

Asked during his testimony whether he believed in the “profit system,” Montgomery replied: “I most certainly do. I would like to see it extended to 120 million people.”

The UT liberals all went on to law school and into practice in the early ’40s. Fath and Eckhardt, one of the state’s first labor lawyers, briefly had a joint practice in Austin. Fath went into the army during World War II and then served the aging President Franklin Roosevelt as an aide.

Back in Austin, Fath plunged back into politics. When Johnson ran for Senate in 1948, Fath announced for Johnson’s vacant U.S. House seat as an unreconstructed New Dealer. He and his wife, the daughter of a former secretary of state, campaigned in a car with a canoe roped on top and painted with the slogan, “Fath for Congress ... He Paddles His Own Canoe.”

Somehow the slogan didn’t do the trick. Fath finished third in the Democratic primary. Then he went to work, with mixed feelings, for Johnson’s Senate campaign. Liberals like Fath had never been cozy with the future president’s go-with-the-political-wind ideology. “We viewed Johnson with some reserve,” Fath wrote, with appropriate reserve, decades later in an autobiographical essay.

With no Republican Party to speak of, the state’s liberal and conservative Democrats were bitter enemies. Fath and fellow liberals liked to call themselves “loyal Democrats.” Shivers and Daniel preferred to be known as Democratic Regulars who had supported GOP presidential candidates. Johnson often tried to play both sides. With Fath and other liberals reluctantly behind him, he pulled off his infamous 48-vote “landslide” in a Democratic Senate runoff still notorious for its corruption.

In William Roger Louis’s collection of autobiographical essays, Burnt Orange Brittania (2006), Fath opens his often-witty entry by writing, “The history of my life can be summed up by saying that I am devoted above all to two things: the Democratic Party and the University of Texas.”

He might have added ­liberalism to the list. After failing in his one run for elective office, Fath went on to be a political rainmaker and strategist behind the ’50s and ’60s Yarborough campaigns, and the early ’70s near-misses of Sissy Farenthold for ­governor. “He could pick up the phone and call,” Farenthold recalls, and “I don’t care what county it was, he’d know somebody there. There would have been no campaign without Creekmore.”

While Fath was working for a more liberal-minded Texas, fellow UT’ers Dixie and Mullinax joined Herman Wright in Houston, representing labor unions in what was becoming an industrial ­center. Unlike their British ­counterparts at Cambridge, who wandered off to communism, the Texas liberals mostly remained staunch New Dealers. In 1948, Wright linked up with Henry Wallace and became the Progressive Party candidate for governor. Dixie and Mullinax broke with their friend and supported the Democrats. Shortly thereafter, Eckhardt joined Dixie in his Houston practice. Maury Maverick Jr. practiced law in San Antonio and soon joined Fath in the political arena.

Maury Junior, as he was called, became one of the state’s foremost civil liberties lawyers. Early on, he represented a black prizefighter, Sporty Harvey, in a challenge to the Texas prohibition against interracial boxing matches. Later he sued the state on behalf of John Stanford, secretary of the Texas Communist Party, attacking the search and seizure of Stanford’s library and correspondence in a case that made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After leaving the Legislature, he spent his later years writing somewhat incendiary columns for the San Antonio Express-News, inveighing against the Vietnam War and later speaking out about the plight of the Palestinians.

Eckhardt, who died in 2001, ended up in both the Legislature and Congress, championing progressive populist causes and becoming a leading advocate for open beaches. (See Gary Keith’s excellent biography, Eckhardt: There Once Was a Congressman from Texas.) Dixie was always a pre-eminent union lawyer. He successfully sued the notorious Texas Ranger, A.Y. Allee, on behalf of Pancho Medrano and others involved in the famous 1966-67 farm workers’ strike at La Casita Melons in Rio Grande City. On the political front, along with Frankie Randolph, Dixie was the driving force behind the Harris County Democrats, the first organization that truly took the battle to the Shivercrats. He was, as founding Observer editor Ronnie Dugger once said of him in these pages, “tough as cactus.”

So was Mullinax. Not long into his career, Mullinax did what was almost unthinkable for the times: He filed a damage suit on behalf of a young black man against the police chief of Nacogdoches, alleging police brutality. The case was lost, of course, but it speaks volumes about these liberals’ tenacity; Mullinax later told me he always carried a firearm when he drove with his client back and forth across East Texas.

These liberals practiced classic coalition politics. Among other accomplishments, they brought together elements of organized labor with historically disenfranchised blacks and Latinos—to the point where, by 1962, it was no longer politically possible to attack the NAACP or the GI Forum, Hector Garcia’s Hispanic organization. When John Connally ran for governor in 1962, he became the first establishment Democrat to court and win segments of this coalition—reportedly at the urging of Johnson.

One other thing to know about Fath, Eckhardt, Dixie, Mullinax and Randolph, along with another great liberal, Minnie Fisher Cunningham of New Waverley: They all helped found the Observer in 1954.

While they never lived to see the Texas they’d worked toward since the 1930s, Creekmore Fath and his liberal cohorts made many previously unthinkable things happen. (And Fath got to witness the once-unfathomable election of Barack Obama before he died.) They opened the way for a progressive future in the state that could be broader and far more influential. It wouldn’t hurt the new liberal Texans to aim for the same kind of integrity and stubbornness that Fath and the “commie ­liberals” showed.

[Dave Richards is an attorney and author.]

Source / The Texas Observer

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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The Late Great Molly Ivins : What Would She Think?

Carlton Carl and Elna Christopher hug beside a portrait of Molly Ivins, during a memorial service for the late columnist and political sage, on Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007, in Austin. Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez / AP.
After Barack Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic convention, Molly Ivins said, 'You know... that young man could be president some day.'

By Betsy Moon / January 30, 2009

AUSTIN -- The question I have been asked most often during the last two years is, "What would Molly think about this?" Molly Ivins would have loved this election. She would have loved the beautiful sight of "We the People" finally stepping up to become the real deciders. She would have loved the drama, the comedy and the characters.

We miss her regular twice-weekly comments and insights, and want to hear her dissect, slice and dice, and make fun of the events and revelations of the week. No one could do it like she did. She made us feel like we weren't alone. She made us want to be our better selves and stand up and use our power. She would be so proud that we finally woke up and worked to make this happen.

In many of her lectures, she would exhort her audience to believe in their power. She'd say: "I hear people whine: 'I can't do anything. I'm just one person.'" Then she'd lift her head high and quote from the Declaration of Independence in her Barbara Jordon voice and remind them, "as a U.S. citizen, you have more political power than most humans who've ever lived on this earth."

In fact, we know how she would have felt, because she was as prescient about this election before her death two years ago as she was about all the other tragedies of the Bush years. Carlton Carl, CEO/publisher at Molly's beloved Texas Observer, recalls her saying after Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic convention, "You know ... that young man could be president some day."

Before Barack Obama announced his candidacy, Chicago Magazine asked a number of luminaries if they thought he should run. Opinions varied. Molly was succinct and direct, and with her usual wit and certainty said: "Yes, he should run. He's the only Democrat with any Elvis to him."

And, in her column on Jan. 20, 2006, she said: "It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief. If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator ... with the guts to do it." She was speaking about Gene McCarthy then, but it might as well have been Barack Obama.

She'd be so happy that her beloved Constitution (she donated one speech a month to groups working to preserve and maintain the First Amendment) is in safer hands -- that some of the worst things ever done in our name are over. She'd love that Barack Obama began his community organizing knowing that power lies in all of us united, and that he continues to remind us that we are the deciders.

I saw and heard many interviews after Nov. 4 and during inaugural celebrations with people who all said they wished their mother or father or grandmother or friend had been here to witness this history in the making. Tens of thousands of us wished that Molly could have been here to see it.

I choose to believe she and all of them did see it because they live on in our hearts, minds and actions. Molly is honored with awards, lectures and scholarships in her name. Many of her readers formed "Pots & Pans" Brigades, following the advice in her final two columns to take to the streets and demand an end to the Iraq war. She always signed her books and her letters with, "Raise more hell," and you can make her live on by doing just that.

She lives in everyone who took courage in who they are and what they thought when they read her columns and books, and knew they weren't alone and they weren't crazy. She lives on in The Texas Observer and the ACLU, to whom she left a large portion of her estate.

In a letter for the ACLU, she says: "Every time someone down the line is irreverent about authority, I'll have my monument. Every time some kid who was born a nigger, a kike, a wop, a Polack, a gook, a gimp, a fag, or just a plain maverick lifts up her head and dares anyone to stop her, I'll have my monument. Every time they peaceably assemble to petition their government for redress of a grievance, I'll be there. Whenever they worship as they please (or not at all), I'll be there. Whenever they speak up and speak out and raise hell, I'll be there. And every time some blue-bellied, full-blooded nincompoop who holds elected office is called to the floor for deciding to keep us safe by rewriting the Constitution, or by suspending due process and holding a citizen indefinitely without legal representation, I'll be there. Now that is immortality. I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin. I figure freedom and justice beat having my name in marble any day. Besides, if there is another life after this one, think how much we'll get to laugh watching it all."

Ken Bunting, an old friend of Molly's who's now associate publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said of Molly on Election Day, "I'm not much of a believer, but I think our friend is looking down and smiling right along with Barack's grandma." You know, I think he is right.

]Betsy Moon was Molly Ivin's former assistant and "Chief of Stuff" from 2001 to 2006. This article was distributed by Creative Writers Syndicate, Inc.]

Source / CommonDreams

The Rag Blog

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