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THE  RED-HEADED  STRANGER   FROM  WEATHERFORD,  TEXAS

            When Jim Wright called me at home one Sunday morning late in 1961, I was a little puzzled.  Without saying what was on his mind, he asked if I could meet him that afternoon for a cup of coffee.

            The more I thought about his call, the more curious it seemed.  It had been a long time since the Tincy Eggleston caper, so surely he wasn’t calling to chew me out for getting his office mixed up in such a ridiculous episode.  Besides, since he was not in his office that day, I wasn’t sure the Congressman himself even knew what happened.  I had talked to him several times since then, but somehow the subject of Tincy Eggleston never came up.

            What’s more, in the intervening years my whole life had changed.  I left The Fort Worth Press in 1958, spent a year as managing editor of a little afternoon daily in East Texas, then returned to Fort Worth to work, of all places, in the newsroom of my old arch-enemy, the Star-Telegram.

            Life had changed even more dramatically for Jim Wright.  No longer was he merely the red-headed stranger from Weatherford, Texas, noted only for pulling an astonishing political upset in 1954.  Nor was he any longer an obscure novice lawmaker on Capitol Hill.  After three terms in Congress, he had proved he could bring home the bacon for the voters of Fort Worth.  Moreover, his legislative skills were beginning to catch the eye of the House leadership.  In December, 1961,  Jim Wright was clearly a young lawmaker on his way up.

            Earlier that same year, he had stunned the conservative Texas political establishment by finishing near the top in a spectacular off-year election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Lyndon B. Johnson when he became Vice President.  To everybody’s surprise, this special Senate election attracted an outlandish field of 71 candidates.  Some  were nutty enough to be ideally suited for something like an old Mack Sennett slapstick comedy--maybe Keystone Kongress, or perhaps Kandidates R Us. 

            In this wild race, Jim Wright came in a close third, narrowly missing a chance to offer a runoff challenge to the ultimate winner, Republican John Tower. Even so, Jim Wright’s strong showing in this race stirred a groundswell of support for him to run for Governor of Texas in 1962.  

            When the phone jangled that Sunday,  I was sleepily browsing through the weekend papers.  His entire conversation with me lasted hardly more than a minute.

            “Who was that on the phone?” asked my wife, Eddie.

            “Jim Wright,” I said.

            “Jim Wright the Congressman?  What did he want?”

            “He didn’t say.  He just said he wanted to talk to me.”

            Eddie knew the Star-Telegram had pulled me in the previous day to cover a Jim Wright press conference.  “You made a mistake in the story,” she concluded.

            “I didn’t make a mistake in the damn story.  He said he had decided not to run for Governor, and that’s what I wrote.”

            “Why else would Jim Wright want to see you?” Eddie asked with a certain degree of logic.

            Over coffee at a nearby cafe that afternoon, the Congressman astonished me by inviting me to join his Congressional staff in Washington.  He said he needed somebody to help with writing and press work, and that he had admired my work as a reporter.  He said he believed I would make a valuable addition to his team.  Even though flattered and intrigued by this offer out of the blue,  I realized that for Eddie and me, this would be a tough call.

            On the one hand, she and I loved Fort Worth.  The kids were doing well in school, and I had a great job on the Star-Telegram.  My bosses in the newsroom had enough confidence to give me some great assignments.  In recent months I had done what turned out to be an award-winning story on the dramatic landing of a crippled airliner, a state legislative investigation, a one-on-one interview with Vice President Johnson, the funeral of Speaker Sam Rayburn, a travel piece that took me to Mexico, and even an East Coast missile launching.

            Moreover, compared to The Press, working on the Star-Telegram was fat city.  In 102-degree Texas summers, the news staff  luxuriated in real, honest-to-goodness air-conditioning.  Reporters got expense money and could rent cars if needed. What’s more,  we didn’t even have to turn in our pencil stub to get a new one.

            Even so, Jim Wright’s offer was exciting.  Washington--and especially Capitol Hill--held a professional fascination for most reporters.  While I might wind up as only a spear carrier on Jim Wright’s staff,  at least I would be able to see from the inside how Congress really worked.  And who knows where the job would lead?  Jim Wright obviously was hard-driving and ambitious.

            Never would I have imagined that I would spend more than a quarter of a century on Capitol Hill at the right hand of this man, first as his Administrative Assistant and then, when he became Speaker, as his Chief of Staff.  Had I any inkling of the interesting, chaotic and often hilarious adventures that loomed ahead for me, I surely would have wanted to ask Jim Wright several important questions.

            I would have inquired, for example, whether he would eventually forgive me for disclosing the secret of Ted Kennedy’s shoes.

            Also I would have wanted to know--a purely hypothetical question, you

understand--whether he would ever consider taking a bunch of high-ranking old geezers from the Kremlin into a rip-roaring Texas honkytonk.

            Additionally, it would have been useful for me to know how my Congressional career path would be affected in the off chance that my son happened to ram the U.S.S. Sumter into an oil tanker in Chesapeake Bay.

            But of course I had no way of foretelling what events might lie in the future if I joined his staff.  I should have known, however, that life would hardly be placid working for the young whippersnapper who slapped Amon G. Carter in the chops at the height of his political power--and managed to get away with it.

As one of Texas’s most influential figures, Mr. Carter was Publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Grand Poobah of Everything Else in Town, Amen.  In 1946, just after World War II, Mr. Carter had chosen and orchestrated the election of a man he considered his own personal Congressman—a war veteran and lawyer named Wingate Lucas.  Later, as a reporter, I covered Wingate.  He was a decent and friendly fellow, but not exactly a shining star in the Congressional firmament.  

Then, in 1954, this young upstart named Jim Wright suddenly stepped onto the Fort Worth’s political scene--an unlikely challenger from an unlikely place.  From the charming but drowsy little city of Weatherford, 24 miles west of Fort Worth, emerged this latter-day prairie populist with impressive talent and a personal agenda to match. 

At 31, Jim Wright was trim, quick and muscular.  From his school days he held a hatful of Golden Gloves awards, and in World War II he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as a B-24 combat flier in the South Pacific.           

            Almost invariably people found him outgoing and likable, but close friends  knew that he possessed a volcanic Irish temper as well.  Usually he kept this under the same rigid control Alan Greenspan exercises today on the prime rate.  On rare occasions, though, Jim Wright’s temper flared up like the eruption of Vesuvius--as it once did at an American Legion breakfast in Weatherford.  A loud-mouthed fellow Legionnaire, who may have had several stiff eye-openers before breakfast, made three mistakes.  The first was being unable to fathom the difference between a populist and a communist.  The second was to apply the latter appellation to Jim Wright.  The third (and worst) was to throw a haymaker at him.  Ducking, the former Golden Glover responded with a fast-forward series of lefts and rights which reduced his antagonist to the threat level of  a bag of dirty laundry.  Old-timers in Weatherford still cackle over episode.    

As a voracious reader with a quick, analytical mind, Jim Wright consumed information like kids gulped Big Macs.  In high school and college he steeped himself in history, economics and government, and later, as a lay minister, demonstrated that he knew more about the Bible than your average seminary student.

In marching to his destiny as a giant-killer, young Jim Wright brought all the necessary credentials.  His name, for example, was a political natural—short, easy to remember, ideal for political sloganeering (the Wright slant, the Wright man for the job, etc.).  Most important of all, he developed a speaking talent capable of persuading Lucifer to give up his pitchfork.

A moderate Democrat (liberal by Fort Worth standards), Jim Wright defined national political issues in Texas horse-sense terms that impressed even the leathery-faced old curmudgeons who sat, spitting and whittling, outside the pool hall.  And when he smiled, giddy little old ladies melted and ran down into their shoes.

He had sharpened his political skills with a term as a state legislator, as Mayor of  Weatherford and as President of the Texas League of Municipalities.  Now, in 1954, he had the effrontery to take on Wingate Lucas, the fair-haired favorite of the Fort Worth Establishment, Amon G. Carter, Prop.

In Texas Congressional elections, these were the tantamount days--the days when the newspapers invariably pointed out that victory in the Democratic primary was tantamount to election in November.  While the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 signaled the beginning of a new era for Republicans in Texas, local and Congressional races in 1954 were still strictly Democratic shows.  The standing joke was that Republicans held their state convention in a phone booth.

Faced with this smart-aleck upstart from Weatherford, it didn’t take Mr. Carter long to roll out his most potent political weapon--his newspaper.  With both morning and afternoon editions, the Star-Telegram in those days provided almost legendary news coverage of Fort Worth and the far reaches of West Texas.  And its editors knew only too well where Mr. Carter’s political preference lay.  When Jim Wright’s poor-boy Congressional campaign showed signs of gaining momentum, the Star-Telegram brushed it aside with a few snippy little stories back among the hemorrhoid ads.

And then, only days before the crucial Democratic primary election, Mr. Carter made a grave political error.  In a Star-Telegram front-page editorial, he attacked Jim Wright, accusing him of refusing to spell out his position on important national issues.  This triggered a monumental political event.  Suddenly the focus of the campaign shifted.  Jim Wright was no longer running against Wingate Lucas, the man whose name was listed  on  the ballot.  He was running against a Higher Authority.  He was running against the string puller, the ventriloquist himself.  He was running against Amon G. Carter. 

Infuriated by the editorial,  Jim Wright struck what turned out to be the campaign’s decisive blow.  He dashed off “An Open Letter to Mr. Amon G. Carter” that was destined to shake the political foundations of the city.  Defiantly he plunked down $974.40 out of his savings account to buy the biggest damn ad that amount would buy.  To everybody’s astonishment,  Mr. Carter allowed the Star-Telegram to accept the ad.  Whether he did this in a spirit of fairness, or merely to avoid the added embarrassment of having this in-your-face challenge published in a scrappy little Fort Worth Press,  nobody will ever know.

“You have at last met a man, Mr. Carter,  who is not afraid of you...who will not bow his knee to you...and come running like a simpering pup at your beck and call,” Jim Wright’s letter proclaimed.   He charged the publisher with ignoring his clear-cut statements on crucial national issues like taxes, spending and the cold war.  He asserted that one of his campaign speeches had been censored by Mr. Carter’s television station and that the publisher had deliberately ordered the Star-Telegram to pooh-pooh the growing strength of his campaign.      

“Is this how you have controlled Fort Worth so long?” Jim Wright demanded.  “By printing only that which you wanted people to read?  By refusing to quote a man in your paper when he does take a stand and then running a front-page editorial saying he has not taken any stand?” 

Today it’s hard to appreciate the guts it took to throw down such a challenge to Amon Carter and the political establishment in the Fort Worth of the 1950’s.  In those days the crusty old publisher wielded such immense political power it was virtually unthinkable for him to be kicked in the political shins by this obstreperous interloper from Weatherford. 

As the political and economic godfather of Fort Worth, Mr. Carter dominated not only the city’s most powerful newspaper but also was board chairman of  its leading television and radio stations.  Nor did his influence stop at the Texas border.  He was a founder and the largest stockholder of American Airlines.  In his great biography, Amon,  Jerry Flemmons wrote that at the time of his death in 1955, Mr. Carter was responsible for bringing to Fort Worth companies which employed half the population of the city.  

At his Shady Oak Farm and in the Fort Worth Club, where Mr. Carter entertained dignitaries who dropped into town to pay homage to him, the guest books bristled with names like Calvin Coolidge, Jack Dempsey, Charles Lindbergh, Will Rogers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sally Rand, Babe Ruth, the Mellons, Whitneys, Doolittle, Rickenbacker, Durante, Nimitz and Luce.

Flemmons recounts how, in 1941, with Pearl Harbor still smoldering after the Japanese attack,  Mr. Carter wrote a long letter to President Roosevelt, giving instructions on how to the run the war:

“The disaster at Pearl  Harbor, as tough as it is, may be a blessing in disguise.  It certainly unified the country overnight.  [You] silence those [expletive] isolationist and America First sons of bitches, Lindburg, [sic] Wheeler, Bennett, Clark, Nye and Fish.  If they open their mouths again they ought to be put in concentration camps.  From now on, all sabotage of any nature should be answered with a sharp bayonet or a good old Texas Forty-Five.”  

This, then, was the man Jim Wright challenged—a shrewd and powerful sagebrush Goliath who had no tolerance for latter-day Davids.  Challenging Mr. Carter with an advertisement in his own newspaper was seen as a silly, foolhardy thing for Jim Wright to do.  There was only one good thing you could say about it.  It worked.

            From then on, the race was not between Wright and Lucas, but Wright and Carter.  The ad captured the imagination of the townspeople.  Many who thought Wright’s act was crazy nevertheless admired his guts.  On election day, Jim Wright won with 60 per cent of the votes.  Even today, old-timers in Fort Worth talk wistfully about the election that dethroned Amon Carter and changed forever the political complexion of the city.

            In June, 1955, only five months after Jim Wright took office, Mr. Carter died at the age of 75.  By the time Jim Wright offered me a job six years later, the ink-stained wretches at the Star-Telegram had become so impressed with Jim Wright’s record in Washington that all had been forgiven.  What’s more, the late publisher’s son, an incredibly nice guy named Amon G. Carter, Jr., became one of Jim Wright’s closest friends.  Before Amon Jr.’s own death in 1982, he headed, of all things, the Congressman’s local support group, the Wright Appreciation Committee.

            So close had the two men become, in fact, that at Jim Wright’s request, Amon Jr. granted me a leave of absence so I could return to the Star-Telegram if I didn’t like working on the Congressman’s staff in Washington.  In the face of a no-lose proposition like that, the temptation was too great.  I agreed to give the job a try.  Eddie, who was so proud of our modest little GI home in Fort Worth, threatened not to accompany me.  But later, after the kids finished the school year, she reluctantly did.

            So it was, on a bright Sunday morning in January, 1962, I landed at Washington National Airport, grabbed my bags and stepped outside the terminal. There,  just across the Potomac, loomed the stately Washington Monument and the imposing white dome of the Capitol.  Then, crossing Memorial Bridge toward downtown Washington,  I saw the horses.

            On either side of the bridge, then as now, two gilded equestrian statues  sparkled in the sun.  The massive horses in these statues face east, toward the downtown area.  Thus when visitors approach the city from the west, they are confronted by a greeting unique to the Nation’s Capital--two big, prominent, glistening horses behinds.  I began to wonder what kind of people I would meet in Washington.