William Hobby Jr. was the son of a Texas governor, and also a newspaper man – the scion of the family-owned Houston Post. He would go on to serve as Texas’ lieutenant governor for a record 18 years during the 1970s and 80s.
During his five terms in office, Hobby became one of the most powerful politicians in the state. Along with former Gov. Ann Richards, and his successor in the lieutenant governor’s office, Bob Bullock, Hobby was one of the last Texas Democrats who could make that claim.
Don Carleton and Erin Purdy, authors of “Bill Hobby: A Life in Journalism and Public Service,” joined the Standard to share more about their new book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I heard this is the first time someone’s written a book, other than Hobby himself, about the man? He caught on the Texas stage and by extension, the national stage. Why write a book about Bill Hobby, though? What makes this guy an important figure in Texas history?
Don Carleton: Well, one thing, he was really an integral part of a pioneering family. They were pioneering newspaper people who created a sort of a media empire for a long time. And so he was very much a part of that. That’s one thing.
The other thing is that he decided eventually to get in[to politics] because his father had been governor and lieutenant governor as well. He was kind of born for politics in some respects. And so he decided he wanted to run for public office here in Texas, and that office that he thought was really best suited to him was the office of lieutenant governor.
He had listened to his father – who was more like a grandfather, much older than him; I think he was in his 50s when Bill was born – who had been lieutenant governor, tell stories about the Senate. And before that, [Bill] had been a parliamentarian for another lieutenant governor. So that was the office that he felt really that he could do something with.
[That’s] a powerful office in Texas, since you have control of the Senate. What sort of politician was he? Was he a fellow with sharp elbows?
Erin Purdy: Well, he was not your typical politician. In fact, he was known for not having a great sartorial sense. He didn’t really look slick or flashy. He was not a self-promoter. So he was a very atypical politician, and maybe part of the reason people don’t know that much about him is because he was not a self-promoter.
He was about substance. And I think that’s something that we hope as the readers review the book, they appreciate the substance that he brought to the role of politician. He had a lot of integrity. He was good at creating compromise, and he was good at wielding power when needed.
So I think that those were some characteristics that were incredibly important but aren’t maybe what we think of when we think of the dictionary definition of a politician.
I want to pick up on something that Don was talking about here, and that’s this idea that he came from this political family; he knew about the dynamics of Texas politics in particular. And the fact that he would run for lieutenant governor, what does that say about the man?
Purdy: I think it says, again, he was more interested in the substance of getting things done and making policy happen. He also, I think, at some point had ambitions to move further – toward becoming governor. And that’s one of the things that we discuss in the book – how that actually he ended up stepping away from that.
But the idea of lieutenant governor, as Don mentioned – he worked with Ben Ramsey, who was lieutenant governor in the 50s, and he saw how Ramsey used the rules of the Senate to control what legislation was passed. He could see how policy was made. And he really built that into his role as lieutenant governor from the beginning.
I think in some ways, when we say it’s an incredibly powerful position, the reason we say that is because of what Bill Hobby accomplished in the ’70s and ’80s.
I’ve been struck, with the recent passing of former President Jimmy Carter, with how short our memories can be when it comes to politicians. And I’m wondering if you look back on Bill Hobby and how Texas bears his mark if it still does today.
Carleton: Well, you bring up a good point. I’m a historian, and I live with the fact every day that most people are lost to history, no matter how important they were. It’s amazing, really.
Texas Standard: What was Hobby? What was his thing?
Carleton: Well, public policy. He was really just a fanatic about public policy and the details of government, particularly the Senate. And that’s why there was a public policy center at the University of Houston now named the Bill Hobby School of Public Affairs
The nuts and bolts is what he was interested in. I mean, his favorite job as lieutenant governor, part of his job, he had to be on the Legislative Budget Board. Well, that’s really a boring numbers-crunching job. That was his favorite job.
You think of some of the issues that were very hot in that day. Obviously, civil rights was a major issue in Texas – continues to be. You look at infrastructure: Texas was growing really rapidly at that time. Were there issues per se?
Carleton: Well, you talk about infrastructure. I mean, that was another goal of his as lieutenant governor. He felt strongly that the state needed to be brought out of an economy that was dependent on extractive industries and agriculture – oil and gas and agriculture. And that you’d go from brawn to brain, bring in high tech.
This was a big time for high tech in Texas.
Carleton: He was right in the middle of it – it was a very important contribution that he made. Another one of his causes was public education. Because it was obvious that those two things were tied together. And those were really, I think, the things.
Purdy: He was a long-standing advocate for public education because of how it would benefit the entire state. And he championed education, especially higher education. Even if we look at his speeches that he gave in the 1960s as a journalist, this is something that he continued to explore after he left lieutenant governor. So he was very committed to that.
I think he was also very pragmatic and knowledgeable, as Don mentioned, about the budget. He knew that to make these improvements in the state, there needed to be the money to pay for it. So he was a very fiscally careful figure, but he also was trying to marshal resources that the state had to benefit the greatest number of Texans. And it wasn’t just the privileged Texans; it was the entire state.
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I know sometimes when writing about less well-known but important figures, a biography can come across as a bit like hagiography. I know you all were sensitive to that. And so in that context, as much of a giant as he was, what was his Achilles heel?
Purdy: It’s so funny you ask that, because I asked Don while we were in the process of working on this book – Don being the much more experienced biographer than me – is it possible to be too fond of your subject? I think what we found is that while he certainly is a flawed human being like we all are, there is a level of integrity and intelligence that was just consistent and impressive.
We looked for the warts. I asked. I did a lot of interviews with people who knew him – his family, his contemporaries in the Senate. And I was asking, what are his flaws? Help make him human. And they were minor, frankly.
Carleton: Things like he could be non-communicative with people. We had stories of senators flying with him in the Hobby family airplane. And they would get on a plane and fly someplace for some political reason or legislative reason or whatever. And he would never say a word. They said he would never talk and he was lost in his thoughts.
He was a very, very interior kind of a guy. And he hated publicity.
He hated publicity? He came from a journalism family.
Carleton: Right. Well, he didn’t mind talking about other people, but not himself.
There was a story, a joke: They used to say that if there was a party and a lot of press were at the party and he was there and Mark White, the former governor, was there, and television cameras were rolled in, Mark White would jump in front of the camera and Bill would look for the exit. And I think that story is probably apocryphal, but it’s a good example of how he was – I should say, is; he is still with us, by the way.
Purdy: In meetings with senators, he would just get up mid-conversation and leave because something came to mind that he needed to take care of. So these are these minor personality quirks. But again, we looked, and the integrity, the dedication to being an honest and capable public servant, never wavered.
Having said that, we’re talking about the family jet – he was born with a silver spoon.
A lot of Texans have to do without. And certainly things were by many indices far worse in the ’70s and a good part of the ’80s. How connected was he with the everyday Texan?
Carleton: Well, that’s a great question. He was an aloof person. He was not a hail fellow well-met, backslapping, go out and kiss all the babies.
He never did that. He hated it. And he hated to go to shopping centers and shake hands with people. He preferred radio and television, in terms of campaigning.
Purdy: I think the important thing on a macro level to remember about Hobby is that you’re right, he did come from privilege – privilege not only in terms of economic benefit, but also the position of his parents and their network, in terms of political network – but he made the choice to stay in public service for two decades. And that is a really powerful choice. He didn’t have to.
Carleton: He wasn’t drinking margaritas on a yacht, which he could have done.
Purdy: And his policy choices, especially his dedication to things like education, show his concern for all Texans. There are ample examples, especially later on in his his career as lieutenant governor, where he was very concerned about how the poorest were treated in Texas, how people who were not white and privileged were treated. He did show that in terms of his policy efforts.
So, yes, he was privileged, but he wore it well.
Well, you know, of course, Texas has had a major transition politically. And I think especially for a lot of newcomers, it’s sometimes hard to imagine – you squint and you think, what was Texas like when it was much more of a bipartisan place?
And frankly, I mean, during much of this period we’re talking about here, Democrats were in control in Texas; it wasn’t considered a red state. Ann Richards’ success, obviously, people point to. But I can remember when George W. Bush, when he was governor, being quite proud of the fact that he was a leader of a state where you had folks who were Democrats and Republicans working together on policy. That was a big point he tried to make.
Did he get out because he saw the change that was coming in Texas, or are we really talking about before the changes that a lot of people are most familiar with?
Carleton: Well, I think he felt like he had run his time as lieutenant governor – 18 years. There’s no question about it, he would have liked to have run for governor. His father had been governor. But I don’t think he liked the political environment and what was happening politically.
He was lieutenant governor until 1991. This is the ’90s, when things really started getting nasty. And he didn’t want to deal with that. He could see that coming already.
And you’ve got to remember, I’m talking about bipartisanship – it was all Democrats. There were no Republicans; you had to hire a detective to go out and find one up until really the late ’60s and even then more in the ’70s. And so it was fairly easy to be bipartisan in the ’80s because the Republican Party was coming on.
Sort of a shift happening in the Reagan era.
Carleton: And it was only later really after he left office that things really went south. Now, you’re right, W was very good as a governor in terms of reaching out. I mean, in some ways he had to because Democrats still were running the Legislature. So there was that as well.
But he also, while he was lieutenant governor, was very good about appointing the new Republicans who were coming in. And they were a different breed than the ones we have today. And he would appoint them, make sure that there were Republicans who got appointed to certain chairs of certain committees, for example. This is still an issue today, by the way, in the House.
Just ask Dade Phelan.
Carleton: Yeah, exactly. But that was something he felt was important to do. And while he and Bill Clements – the first Republican elected governor of Texas since Reconstruction – bumped heads all the time, they had breakfast every Tuesday morning with Gib Lewis or whoever was the speaker of the House at the time, and work things out, talk to each other – and different parties. So it was a different time, no question about it.
You mentioned that he is still with us. Were you able to talk with him at all or communicate with him?
Purdy: Well, the Bill Hobby book came about as an outgrowth of a longer research project that Don was involved with, including writing a book called “The Governor and the Colonel” about Hobby’s parents. And in the course of that work, Don did multiple interviews with Bill and was able to connect with him on quite a number of things that then carried forward into this book.
So we had that as a basis. We had his papers. The Briscoe Center is the home of his papers and the papers of his father. And so we had wonderful source material for the book because of the interviews Don did and also the papers.
But we knew we had to fill in the gaps because, as we’ve mentioned, Bill Hobby is not one to sit back and pontificate about himself. So we had to do a lot of supplemental interviews, oral history interviews with his family, his peers, his contemporaries. And those interviews were absolutely essential.
Carleton: And Erin did those interviews and did a great job doing them.
One of the reasons I was asking about that was I wondered if he had any thoughts on where we are politically in Texas today, or is there any way of knowing?
Carleton: Well, yeah. I mean, as Erin said, I did a lot of conversations. They weren’t formal interviews so much as just going to Houston and having breakfast with him and visiting with him and so forth. But he is very bitter about the politics of today.
And he’s written – after he left the lieutenant governor’s office and then he served as interim chancellor of University of Houston because they had an administrative mess there that he cleaned up – after that, he contributed columns over to some of the Texas newspapers, basically lamenting what was happening. And it really started with Rick Perry’s years as governor. He was very unhappy about all of that.
