My life

I worked South Texas with Franklin Garcia, a tough labor organizer with a tender heart, and his friend Pat Robards. One night Franklin and Pat drove Hillary and me over the Rio Grande to Matamoros, Mexico. They took us to a dive with a mariachi band, a halfhearted stripper, and a menu that featured cabrito, barbequed goat head. I was so exhausted I fell asleep while the stripper was dancing and the goat head was looking up at me.

One day when I was driving alone in rural South Texas, I stopped at a filling station for gas and struck up a conversation with the young Mexican-American who was filling my tank and asked him to vote for McGovern. “I can’t,” he said. When I asked why, he replied, “Because of Eagleton. He should not have abandoned him. A lot of people have troubles. You have to stick with your friends.” I never forgot his wise advice. When I was President, Hispanic-Americans knew I had tried to be their friend, and they stuck with me.

In the last week of the campaign, though all was lost, I had two memorable experiences. Congressman Henry B. Gonzales hosted the Bexar County Democratic Dinner in San Antonio at the Menger Hotel near the Alamo, where more than two hundred Texans under Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett died fighting for Texas’s independence from Mexico. More than sixty years later, Teddy Roosevelt had stayed at the Menger while he was training the Rough Riders for their epic battle on San Juan Hill in Cuba. The Menger serves fantastic mango ice cream, to which I became addicted. On election eve 1992, when we stopped in San Antonio, my staff bought four hundred dollars’ worth of it, and everyone on the campaign plane ate it all night long.

The speaker at the dinner was the House majority leader, Hale Boggs of Louisiana. He made an impassioned speech for McGovern and the Democrats. The next morning I got him up early to catch a plane to Alaska, where he was scheduled to campaign with Congressman Nick Begich. The following day, on a swing through the snowcapped mountains, their plane crashed and was never found. I admired Hale Boggs and wished we’d overslept that day. He left a remarkable family behind. His wife, Lindy, a lovely woman and a first-rate politician herself, took his New Orleans House seat and was one of my strongest supporters in Louisiana. I appointed her U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. The other notable event occurred during Sargent Shriver’s last visit to Texas. We had a great rally in McAllen, deep in South Texas, and rushed back to the airport, almost on time, to fly to Texarkana, where Congressman Wright Patman had raised a crowd of several thousand people on State Line Boulevard, the border between Arkansas and Texas. For some reason, our plane didn’t take off. After a few minutes, we learned that a pilot flying a single-engine plane had become disoriented in the foggy night sky above McAllen and was circling the airport, waiting to be talked down. In Spanish. First they had to find an instrument-rated pilot who could speak Spanish, then they had to calm the guy down and bring him in. As the drama unfolded, I was sitting across from Shriver, briefing him on the Texarkana stop. If we had any doubt how low the campaign’s fortunes had sunk, this removed it. Shriver took it all in stride and asked the flight attendants to serve dinner. Soon there were two planes full of staff and a large press corps eating steak on the tarmac in McAllen. When we finally got to Texarkana, more than three hours late, the rally had disbanded, but about two hundred diehards, including Congressman Patman, came to the airport to greet Shriver. He jumped off the plane and shook hands with every one of them as if it were the first day of a close election.

McGovern lost Texas 67 to 33 percent, a slightly better showing than he made in Arkansas, where only 31 percent of the voters supported him. After the election, Taylor and I stayed around a few days to thank people and wrap things up. Then Hillary and I went back to Yale, after a brief vacation in Zihuatanejo on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. It’s built up now, but then it was still a little Mexican hamlet with bumpy unpaved streets, open bars, and tropical birds in the trees. We got through our finals in good shape, especially considering our long absence. I had to work hard to master the arcane rules of Admiralty Law, which I took only because I wanted to have a course taught by Charles Black, an eloquent, courtly Texan who was well liked and respected by the students and who was especially fond of Hillary. Much to my surprise, the jurisdiction of admiralty law extended to any waterway in the United States that had been navigable in its original condition. That included lakes built from damming once-navigable rivers around my hometown.