Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical
Association, 2012 Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History
of Women, Texas State Historical Association, 2012 When Ann
Richards delivered the keynote of the 1988 Democratic National
Convention and mocked President George H. W. Bush—“Poor George,
he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his
mouth”—she instantly became a media celebrity and triggered a
rivalry that would alter the course of American history. In 1990,
Richards won the governorship of Texas, upsetting the GOP’s
colorful rancher and oilman Clayton Williams. The first ardent
feminist elected to high office in America, she opened up public
service to women, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, gays, and the
disabled. Her progressive achievements and the force of her
personality created a lasting legacy that far transcends her rise
and fall as governor of Texas. In Let the People In, Jan Reid draws
on his long friendship with Richards, interviews with her family
and many of her closest associates, her unpublished correspondence
with longtime companion Bud Shrake, and extensive research to tell
a very personal, human story of Ann Richards’s remarkable rise to
power as a liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state.
Reid traces the whole arc of Richards’s life, beginning with her
youth in Waco, her marriage to attorney David Richards, her
frustration and boredom with being a young housewife and mother in
Dallas, and her shocking encounters with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy
Carter. He follows Richards to Austin and the wild 1970s scene and
describes her painful but successful struggle against alcoholism.
He tells the full, inside story of Richards’s rise from county
office and the state treasurer’s office to the governorship,
where she championed gun control, prison reform, environmental
protection, and school finance reform, and he explains why she lost
her reelection bid to George W. Bush, which evened his family’s
score and launched him toward the presidency. Reid describes
Richards’s final years as a world traveler, lobbyist, public
speaker, and mentor and inspiration to office holders, including
Hillary Clinton. His nuanced portrait reveals a complex woman who
battled her own frailties and a good-old-boy establishment to claim
a place on the national political stage and prove “what can
happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people
in.”
General
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