Ben Barnes [interview], Part 1

This is Dr. Michael Phillips and today is September 27, 2004, and I am with Dr. Patrick Cox from the Center for American History, and we are speaking to former Lieutenant Governor and former House Speaker, Ben Barnes, at his office in Austin, Texas.

MP: . . . Mr. Barnes, I think that what we want to start with first of all is getting a sense of. . . your family background and how that may have prepared you for your life in politics. And first of all, was there anyone else in your family when you were growing that chose a political career that might have gotten you in that direction . . .?

BB: No, there is not anybody in my immediate family or several generations back. I had in doing a genealogy of my family, I find that my dad's great, great, great, great, great, ever how many great grandmothers got married to William Bradford who was the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

So I have a political ties way back in my family and my mother was a Franklin and that Franklin family is descended from Benjamin Franklin, but I did not have anybody in four or five generations that I know of that ever ran for public office.

MP: Now, how was your immediate family viewed in the community and what did your father do for living and, you know, what was your mother's background?

BB: Well, my father only had an eighth grade education. He had fifteen brothers and sisters. They owned a farm and the sons were all made to drop out of school and work in the farm and maintain the farm and build to make them more independent on the farm. My mother was born about 15 miles from my father's farm and she too was raised on the farm. She graduated from high school in a little town called Proctor, Texas. My dad was farmer, also worked for Humble Pipeline, a pipeline came to that part of the world taking crude from West Texas down to the eastern refineries.

MP: You father's name again?

BB: B.F. Barnes. My grandfather's name was Benjamin Franklin Barnes and then my father ended up just B.F. Barnes ... and my name is Ben Frank Barnes, [which] I shortened to Ben Barnes because I decided to run for office.

MP: And your mother's name was?

BB: Ida B. Carrigan.

MP: What do you recall about the atmosphere when you were a child, did you recall much discussion of politics or world events...

BB: Well, I grew up during the Second World War, and that's my first memory when my father because he worked on the pipeline did not go to the army because the pipeline was considered a national defense job. But six of his brothers did and my mother had two brothers and they went so, my memories were remembering my uncle's in uniforms and remembering the discussion of the Second World War.

I was only two years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed but as I grew older I remember the furloughs that my uncles got and returning home for the holidays and I remember, barely, but I remember the VE-Day, and VJ-Day and I remember how happy everyone was.

MP: I guess, the first president you would remember would be really Harry Truman then right. . .?

BB: I remember my parents getting, and we had a radio and I remember my parents listening to Roosevelt on the radio. I would like to say I remember when he made the "This day will always live in infamy speech" but I don't remember that. But I remember Roosevelt's voice on the radio.

MP: Was there anything in that early time that made you think about, I guess, politics or power or, you know, what you could do in that kind of position .. .?

BB: No, I can tell a yarn about how that I used to dream about being in office and being governor and being president and being lieutenant governor but that would all be pure fiction. I didn't grow up thinking about anything about public service. I grew up thinking about the chores I had to do on the farm and I was an avid sports participant and so I participated in sport and I made good grades.

My mother wanted me to get a college education and she reminded me of that almost everyday. And that was then, that I'm very fair complected and that was before that sun lotion became created. And I would say many time if there had been sunscreen I might still be on the farm but I wanted to get off of that farm blistering and healing and get out of that sand [with the] peanut straws going down my neck so I wanted to get an education.

MP: So what were your chores in the farm what did you?

BB: Oh, I did everything. I planted peanuts, hoed peanuts, planted maize, rode the combine. I milked two cows, I started when I was seven years old, I milked two cows every morning and sold milk to the neighbors. I delivered that milk before I went to school and we raised hogs and we raised chickens. I delivered the eggs and slopped the hogs. I did everything a farm boy was expected to do.

PC: Did you all have electricity on your farm...?

BB: We did not have electricity. Later in politics ... much to the chagrin of public utility companies, I voted in my early days of the legislature with the REA because they had brought electricity to my farm. I think my first six years or seven years we had gasoline, or coal lamp.

PC: So not until after World War II did the rural co-op really bring power into your area?

BB: Right, right.

MP: Did you have like a schoolhouse type of situation where there were eight grades . . .?

BB: I had schoolhouse operation where there were twelve grades and I think in my elementary school, there were probably eleven, twelve people in my class, I know... I don't remember the size, but we consolidated all the schools in part of Comanche County into DeLeon and there ended being a 100 people in my graduating class. I think that is probably the largest graduating class DeLeon has ever had.

PC: Was this after Gilmer-Aiken, when the consolidation took place?

MP: Were you drawn to particular subjects when you were just in public school...?

BB: Oh, I liked to read and I think that probably different teachers had greater influence on me. I had an English teacher, she assigned the class to read the book The Egyptian and then make a book report and somehow I found time to read it, and read it in a hurry and she got through and I went up and said to her, "I'm ready to do my report." This was way early before the other class, and she said, well, no, you are going to read another book.

And she gave me Les Misérables and I read Les Misérables and that probably had a little impact on me on sparking my imagination about what young people could do. And I had an assistant football coach that taught me history, American History, and I was a great fan of Andrew Jackson, and he did not like Andrew Jackson and we had a continuing argument going on about Andrew Jackson...

PC: Was he a Henry Clay supporter? [Laughs]

BB: Yeah, he was a Henry Clay supporter. So I had, I defended Andrew and Rachel Jackson through my high school years and belittled my football coach and history teacher, but I was always interested in history and government.

MP: So you got through high school and what was the next step in your education?

BB: I went to TCU my first semester and then I went to Tarleton back home and then came to the University of Texas when I was a sophomore.

MP: What was the demographics of DeLeon when you were growing up there? Was it almost entirely Anglo? Or was there a Mexican American population?

BB: It was almost entirely Anglo.

MP: Do you remember the first time you encountered segregation...?

BB: . . .Comanche County used to even have a sign it said, "Nigger don't let the sun set on you" and a black man had been hanged there. But, my father was always, he ingrained in us, my mother and my younger brother made it that we should be tolerant of other people and I never really paid a great deal of attention to what people's color was and my dad, we have a peach and melon festival there and one of the things that made a great impression on me, there was a black man that came into the Bearcat Grill in DeLeon and ordered a cheeseburger and french fries and they would not serve him.

And I remember my dad getting up from the table where we were and ordering french fries and a hamburger and taking the man out and sitting him in the car and gave him the hamburger. And we sat there while he ate, because it was a very hot day, where you just eat and pick up, and my dad, he was a man of few words, and he said, "Don't you ever let anybody take advantage of another person like that."

So that made a very big impression. And my first term in the legislature, the East Texas delegation was still trying to pass segregation laws, and think they probably even passed some segregation laws. But later Barbara Jordan and I were going to repeal one morning when I was the lieutenant governor any remaining statutes, any remnants of any segregation laws on the books that were passed. But I voted against a lot of my friends in the House and voted against the East Texas delegations' conservative segregation bills.

MP: What do you think your father's position on that came from? Was that a religious view...?

BB: No, it was not, it was not necessarily a religious view. It was just my father. My father was an uneducated man, and like I said a man of few words, but he had his social values well rounded and well grounded.

He had a neighbor's house burn down and took some of the money that he had in the bank, the mortgage payment, and our farm was mortgaged like all other farms and I remember I was with him at the bank who chewed him out like heck for taking it to him. I think he gave $500 to him and he was totally wiped out. I think we owed $1800 to the bank or something and the bank went berserk, but my dad was a guy, he had a lot of compassion.

MP: Would you say he was your biggest influence as an adult?

BB: My dad and my mother, my mother was a constant encourager. She's the one told me that I could do all the things. My dad was not a guy to heap a lot of praise on you and my mother, probably to compensate for that probably heaped entirely too much praise on me and told me I was better looking that what I was and I was smarter than what I was and she probably spoiled me a great deal.

MP: Just to jump ahead a little bit, because you talked about the segregation bills, you know, they were being introduced still by East Texas, now you had a pretty close working relationship with Byron Tunnell and he is part of that East Texas delegation...

BB: That's right, I was his campaign manager when he ran for Speaker.

MP: What do you think the motives were for that delegation? Why were they doing it at the late, because we are talking about late '50s and early '60s aren't we?

BB: Well, we are talking about the '60s...

MP: The early '60s.

BB: I assume that was what their constituents wanted, I didn't really, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure what made somebody else what they were or what caused them to have a political philosophy. I was a young man trying to learn as much as I could and trying to figure out what I ought to do. I tried to learn from other people but I never got to that step of trying to analyze what caused people, I assume that they are trying to representing their districts...

MP: When you would vote against that, would they talk to you about it?

BB: Oh yeah, they would tease me and say, "What in the world is somebody from Comanche County not voting with these bills for?" and I would say, "Just because I don't believe in them."

MP: Okay. Now, do you recall, were there any Mexican-Americans in your community or do you recall?

BB: Very few of any, that was before, today I bet if you go to the DeLeon High School graduating class I know 40 percent are Hispanic, maybe 50 percent.

MP: So you went to TCU and what was your course of study there...?

BB: Well, I was just a freshman, I took freshman courses. I didn't make up, when I got the University of Texas I decided I wanted to go to business school, I wanted to go to law school and then my education got interrupted by running for the Legislature, got interrupted by running for Speaker.

MP: What prompted you to do that while you were still pursuing your college degrees and...?

BB: Well I was a freshman at the University of Texas Law School and I was working about five blocks from the Dome on 5th Street at the State Health Department and I got to be supervisor after about six months of all the part-time employees. Part-time employees' primary job was filing birth and death certificates. You did that by hand, now it is all done by computer but then you did it by hand. You actually took the screws out of the book and put the new death certificate or birth certificate in its proper place and screw back the book and put it back together.

One of my responsibilities of being a supervisor of part-time employees was cosigning the checks that... the bank account and the profits went into this account. They called it the employees' flower fund, it was meant to pay for flowers for people when their granddads died or to pay for Thanksgiving parties or Christmas parties.

And I had to cosign the checks and a guy named Mike Erta brought me some checks to sign and that was back when Texas just had private clubs and a lot of the checks were to the Tower Liquor store and the Tower Hotel and the Tower Club and I said, "What are these for?" And he said, "It is none of your business, if you like the job, sign it."

Well it made me very angry, and I thought I had a responsibility to the state employees so I questioned him and he said, "You'll sign them tomorrow or else." Well I went to the, there was a former state representative that worked at the Health Department named Bert Hall who is now deceased. I went to see Bert Hall and I said, "What should I do?" and he said, "I advise you to go up the Legislature and see your state representative and tell him what happened at the Health Department."

And I did. My state representative took me over to see a man who was going to later serve as chairman of my appropriation committee, Bill Heatly. Bill Heatly and Truett Latimer got involved and the district attorney got involved and now you wouldn't get away with nearly as good a deal as the Commissioner of Health, his secretary, his assistant made, but they had to resign.

He had to leave Texas, he and his assistant, he had to give up his right to practice medicine in Texas, a doctor, and they never came back here to visit, and they had to reimburse some, maybe it was thousands of dollars, I don't know seven, eight, maybe nine thousand dollars that they had taken out of this fund over a period of time.

They had to reimburse that and so I had not ever been to the Capitol a lot. I had probably been there as a tourist, but I had to go up there two or three times and testify and assisting in making this case I thought, you know, I fell in love with the Capitol and I saw what those men were doing, and women, and so my state representative was not going to run for re-election and I did.

I went back to DeLeon, took a law school classmate and we went to see ten people and nine of them told me to go back to law school and forget about running. And DeLeon had 800 votes and Brownwood had 8,000 votes and I will show you how naïve and really politically stupid I was. I had a tremendous population disadvantage and the man that was running against me was a man that had a feed mill in Brownwood but he also had a radio show every morning that gave farm news over all the three counties in my district.

And also his name was Ike Hickman and Eisenhower was just leaving office and he had all these "I like Ike" buttons [laughs] so you know it was the stupidest thing that a young man could do because nobody knew me and so it was crazy and I started to get out of the race.

We had a big rally, for the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Farm Bureau and Hickman he drew to speak and he got to speak first and told about being a prisoner of war and spending two and a half years in a German concentration camp and how he loved his country and how he nearly died for it, gone through all the abuses in prison, and now he wanted to come back and serve one more time and I seriously contemplated standing up and saying, "I'm going to resign and go back to law school."

And I don't know I just got some kind of almost divine intervention because it just popped in my head about what I was doing in World War II. I just said, "Well, I was two years old when Pearl Harbor was invaded, but I remember my brother and I did what we could do as young boys."

I said, "I had a red wagon and I would take that red wagon and try to fill it up every Saturday with scrap iron and put it in the back of the car and take it to the scrap iron dealer and that was the way I tried to serve." And I saw a bunch of women in the audience just kind of nodding their head about that red wagon, I said that I would go ahead and run another day.

But anyway, I ran, and he took me very lightly and literally took the soil conservation map, I had worked for the extension service measuring peanut allotment and so I knew, and I took the soil conservation map and I took a red pencil and every time I went to a house I put an "X" on it and when I got through I had these three counties soil conservation maps where I literally knocked on every door in all three of those counties and he didn't get out and work like that, he couldn't miss. I ended up beating him two to one surprisingly and I felt very good, I got 90 percent of the vote in my home county.

PC: You don't still have those soil conservation maps that marked, do you?

BB: I may do, we have got to talk to my mom about that.

PC: That would be great to include as part of the archives.

MP: ...Do you recall the issues you talked about? When you were knocking door to door, what were people interested in?

BB: Well, you know, he talked about jobs and bringing industry to Brownwood and he talked about he was part of the utility companies, and I didn't, and Texas Power and Light was a very powerful force in Brownwood and I said I was for the REA's and that was an issue.

It was a very conservative district... but I went before the Railroad Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and got their endorsement and he made a big pitch out of the fact that I had labor's endorsement. I didn't know what labor was, I wanted the railroad guys to vote for me, so I was happy to have their endorsement...

MP: So he's trying to paint you as an AFL-CIO stooge?

BB: Yeah, and he said that he knew that Barnes would be for repeal of the "right to work" law and a lot of things like that. But I was sleeping in my car, getting up at three o'clock in the morning and going to dairy barns and I would be with those dairy farmers when they were bringing the cows it in the morning to milk.

And then late at night I was going to the truck stop and the bowling alleys, the bowling alley didn't close till midnight, and they would see me campaign at midnight and then they started talking about how, "Hey you can't believe it, this crazy Barnes was out at my dairy barn at three-thirty or four o'clock." And I bathed and shaved at the truck stop. I worked out a deal where they would let me take a shower and shave there if I bought my gasoline. It was a shoe leather campaign, I had no money, it was crazy.

PC: But you won, two to one.

MP: Now, what was like going into the legislature at such a young age? I mean, there were lot of young legislators weren't there in that session?

BB: Well, there were a few young legislators, but not nearly as many as it had been when World War II had ended back in the '40s when a lot of people came back from the service. But I think out of 150 House members there was probably only about four or five that were under thirty years old and I was 22 on April the 17th and I got nominated the May the 3rd so I was 22 by only 16 days.

MP: So that's 1964, right?

BB: No, 1960.

PC: ... So, Price Daniel was Governor,

BB: Price Daniel was Governor.

PC: And the speaker that year is...

BB: Jimmy Turman.

PC: Jimmy Turman...

BB: I voted for Wade Spillman.

PC: I was going to say, because that was a very tumultuous Speaker's election...

BB: That was a very divided election . . . Jimmy Turman was only speaker that I knew of that actually lost control of the appropriations bill... [W]e passed a substitute appropriation bill and that's when The Houston Chronicle referred to me, after my speech on the appropriations bill, they referred to me as the freshman Barry Goldwater because of it. Now all these people today, they are accusing me of being the big liberal Democrat. I should mail them the Barry Goldwater article.

MP: . . . Why, because you were voting for conservative budget?

BB: Yeah, I was for a conservative budget.

MP: .... What was your assessment as a freshman legislator seeing a tumultuous session like that and what was your assessment on Jimmy Turman as a Speaker?

BB: Well, Jimmy Turman was a schoolteacher, a very nice guy. He had gotten elected by the coalition of labor and more liberal democrats, Ralph Yarborough and Price Daniel. Price Daniel wanted Jimmy Turman to be speaker and he ran against a guy named Wade Spillman, a very bright lawyer from the valley who was a little lazy and didn't work as hard as Turman did. A lot of people were double pledged and personalities divide the Legislature. . . . [I]t was a good experience for me to see a real divided House. I learned some things of having to work under that atmosphere.

I asked Jimmy Turman, I said, "I don't deserve any appointment of any committees because I voted for Wade Spillman. And I worked for him, because after I got elected I actually tried to get some of the younger member to vote for him. And he said, "Is there any committee you don't want on?"

And I said, "Yes, Mr. Speaker there is one committee I really don't want to serve on because that is liquor regulation because I come from a dry district. There's 27 Baptist churches and I don't want to vote on any liquor bills in committee. And he said, "Well, that's fine." He wrote that down and when they called out the liquor regulation committee the first name on that list was Barnes.

PC: Was that your only committee to serve on?

BB: Well, I had a couple others, but I think that was the only one that met.

MP: So how did you end up voting when you were on that committee?

BB: Oh, I voted dry, but I don't know what the votes were, but later as speaker of the House I'm going to come out for the liquor by the drink...

BB: [A]nd I had to back up there and run for re-election in 1967. Of course, I was very fortunate. I never had an opponent after I got elected the first time. I never had an opponent. My district was very good to me. But I had to come for liquor and my district still understood it, but I had to go back and sell it to them.

MP: One of things I am interested in, in reading some of the clips from your career, it strikes me that that would have been an interesting time to be as young as you were and to be, I guess, part of the establishment in the Legislature and being someone running for higher office. Eventually when you had all these student movements, and by 1960 that was the year of first sit-in, did that put you kind of in a strange place in terms of people in your age group?

BB: Well, not as far as the sit-ins and not as far as the racial problems of the '60s. The position that I was put into that put me kind of out-of-step with my generation that I was born into was Vietnam and my very strong defense of President Johnson's position in Vietnam and it was very difficult at times, defending and supporting President Johnson's position in Vietnam.

And I got elected chairman of the Southern Legislative Conference and I got elected president of the National Legislative Conference and I got on the board of directors as the Council State Governments and I was the chairman of the Council State Governments so every one of these organizations I was appointed to I was passing resolutions supporting President Johnson's Vietnam position.

PC: So when did you first meet President Johnson? Obviously he was a big presence in his time...

BB: I met him probably in during the campaign, in the fall campaign in 1960.

PC: In the Presidential election...

BB: I probably shook his hand; maybe before that but I did not have any serious conversation with President Johnson until really 1963 in planning the trip of Kennedy to Texas.

MP: What were your feelings about Johnson in '60 when he was running for President and became Vice-President? Were you a supporter right away?

BB: Oh yes, I was a supporter of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn and you know, I had grown up, they were my political heroes. I mean, Mr. Rayburn he became Speaker of the Texas House when he was 28 years old and I had been a fan of his. And President Johnson, I marveled about he was able to majority leader in the United States Senate and I started watching and learning some of the ways that he was able to be successful in political influencing.

MP: If I could ask you, you mentioned also that you learned some things watching a divided House under Turman and you just mentioned that you learned somethings from Lyndon Johnson, what would you say would be the lesson from those periods?

BB: .. . [H]ere's what I tried to do I tried to go see all the other 149 members of the House and I was a 22 year old state representative and I asked their advice. There is a lot of people that could probably say well I didn't like Ben Barnes for this or that, but there is not anyone that is a member that couldn't say that I didn't come asking for advice in the House.

I told them I was young and inexperienced and anytime they saw anything I was doing wrong or any way I can help with their legislative program I just wanted to be their friend. And I made friends with both sides of the House, the Turman people and the Spillman people and that's the reason why I think that's the reason why we were elected by such an overwhelming majority. I don't want to over-emphasize my role, but we elected Byron Tunnel, an East Texas segregationist, at that time - well I don't want to be saying East Texas segregationist, but a conservative legislator from East Texas got elected speaker almost unanimously.

MP: By working both the conservatives and the liberals ...

PC: So looking at the two Speakers then, back to back, what was your assessment about Byron Tunnell...

BB: Well you have got to see, Bryon Tunnell he had 125 House members that we for him and Jimmy Turman had 76 and he probably didn't have 76 for two or three days. I mean, people got mad ... Tunnell didn't have a divided House and people were working together a lot better than, Turman had a difficult House.

PC: What did Tunnell do as far as his key chairman that he appointed, is he the first one that makes Bill Heatly head of appropriations?

BB: Oh no, Bill Heatly served as head of appropriations under Waggoner Carr . . .Tunnell's was the first one that really set up the rules committee to run the House and I got appointed chairman on the rules committee, so I dealt with all the personnel problems.

And that gave Tunnell time to really be speaker and work on the issues and it helped a great deal that John Connally got elected to Governor because Price Daniel had a lot of enemies in his Legislature that time and Turman had to deal with a lot of Price's enemies and to deal with a lot of other things and you have got to understand, I'll say in defense of Turman, we were passing a major tax bill. We did not have a broad-based tax in Texas and the sales taxes had to be passed.

And tax bills are tough to pass and they are really tough when you are trying to write one when the public is way ahead of you and Jimmy Turman and Price Daniel were both against the sales tax .. . Tunnell had an easier political situation. Turman is trying to pass Daniel's, an unpopular last term Governor's legislative program and Tunnell was having to get along with the guy, a popular governor, who just come back and got re-elected.

PC: I wanted to get back in and pick up, talking about the speakers and specifically, Byron Tunnell, because he is your predecessor, and you have obviously a good relationship that you built up with him. What did you, in looking at his speakership, what did you pick up on, or find particularly useful in the way of leadership...

BB: Well Byron was very careful to tell everyone the truth. Byron was very plain spoken and he was candid and not very man people left his office not know where he stood on an issue. That was a pretty good thing for me to follow.

PC: Would you characterize him as a hands-on Speaker, somebody that really kept in touch with all of his committee chairs and was involved in the day to day process?

BB: Well no, I would say he delegated every responsibility he could.

PC: How big a staff does he have in this era, do you remember?

BB: Well you didn't have a staff, the staffs are altogether different. I don't know how many people I had, I had more people than Tunnell had, but I'm sure that guy who followed me had more people than I had. The Speakers office grew and my gosh, Bob Bullock, what he did to the Lieutenant Governor's office and Ben Ramsey had two employees when he was lieutenant governor and Bullock had a hundred. It is very different.

PC: One of the things that we are interested in this day, is I think the era that you were serving as speaker we are seeing a real transition, actually the office itself, and the professional component, that goes with it...

BB: ... [F]irst of all, you have got to understand that... because of having worked in Tunnell's campaign, because of having worked in John Connally's campaign for governor, I knew the people that were politically active then. All of a sudden the speaker's office kind of had a statewide base. A speaker just had to worry about his own district and worry about the members.

But when I started I was probably taking more positions on more issues before they got to the Legislature. And I opened up. I got the Sigma Delta Chi Friend of Journalism award because I invited the press, they had never been invited. I invited them to the speaker's office every Monday morning to let them ask me questions and tell them what I wanted to get done that week. And they couldn't believe that when that practice got started. Speakers normally played their cards very close to their vest.

PC: Did you have a legislative director and communications director, the equivalent of what we call those today? Did you start expanding the scope...

BB: Well maybe the last term I did. I never, I don't think ever had a press person per se. Maybe I did my second term as speaker maybe, but I had those people when I was lieutenant governor but I'm just trying to think. I don't think I did.

I had a very good helpmate in Ralph Wayne. He got elected as a state representative of Plainview. Ralph Wayne was one of my floor leaders as Speaker and then he became my political operator and Ralph Wayne did a wonderful job in that I didn't handle any money. Campaign contributions and things such as that, I left that up to Ralph Wayne and Ralph Wayne did that.

I just had a policy too . . . sometime, people would bring a check to you, but then you would have the rules of the session and all that, but I just tried not to take any campaign contribution from anybody in the Capitol building. I would just say you need to go talk to Ralph Wayne about that. I think I started drawing the line between the session, and you know we started changing the rules...

PC: Well, in addition to Ralph, who were some of the other members that you relied on?

BB: Well Dick Corey was a workhorse and he had been chairman of state affairs under Tunnell, not under Tunnell but he had been chairman of state affairs under Carr. If I told you he was a great lawyer, I'd be lying. I think he'd be chairman of the appropriations committee. Bill Parsley from Lubbock, I made chairman of the rules committee. Parsley was a real good mate.

But I had a large team and we worked the floor and members knew, I didn't try to pull any rabbits out of hat and try to surprise the members with legislation. And that was something that Turman had done that the members resented, they didn't know what was going to happen. This last session I looked and was appalled at the fact that they started using the rules to take the amendments off of the desk and let them go amend, make the legislation, allow previous questions and it would be interesting to go back and see how many times I had a previous question, there would be very, very few.

And I did that, maybe I might do it on a piece of legislation that had 135 votes and somebody is just trying to shove it to death and taking up valuable legislative time, but not in controversial legislation I gave people a run with their amendments and I think that is very important to the democratic process of the House.

PC: When you were serving as speaker, Governor Connally is in the governor's office, did you have a fairly close relationship with him in so far as your legislative agenda.

BB: Yes I did.

PC: You had mutual goals...

BB: We had disagreements on things, but no, we were close and I worked close with Governor Connally's staff. . . [Y]ou know, everybody feels that they were more important, that their terms was the best, that they were the absolute priceless at the job, and it was strange that Texas didn't abolish the speakers office when I left because I was the greatest...But we were getting a lot of things done. You look at what we did in higher education and public education, creating the tourist development agency, creating the Texas water development board.

We got a lot of thing done that have been a great success and I still think the emphasis we placed on higher education, particular the money we invested in research and development and building up these two flagship universities, we need more than the two, but we got the two, I think the things we did paid off in the '80s and '90s and I think that is one of the reasons why Austin, and in particular with the University of Texas here, which has prospered so because I think with the money we created them a national reputation.

I appointed a committee and the House thought I was crazy. Some of the old timers came up and said, "What are we doing?" I appointed a committee on faculty fringe benefits and that had never been heard of and they said, "Why are we doing that?" and I said "Because the University the Texas has got to be competitive with other schools. We have got to fringe benefits. It's amazing guys, you don't believe it, but parking is even important to attract faculty members."

But things like that, we did some things. I went to a lot of other states and I learned and my term as President of the Council State Governments, we started encouraging the legislative branches to build up their staffs, where they could be on an even par with the executive branch, where they understood what was going on.

PC: Was there any particular legislation that you were interested in while you were speaker that you were frustrated that you couldn't get it through?

BB: I was frustrated that because it got repealed I was frustrated because we didn't make a point and we didn't continue to make a foreign language a requirement in public schools ... and I was very frustrated that we couldn't find the money to fund a statewide kindergarten and there are some things that, you know, the superintendents got my foreign language bill repealed.

I passed that you had to have six years of foreign language, but you know we got a German exchange student that is living with us this semester that speaks five languages and our public education system in Texas is a rotten failure and it is incredible that we rank 50th in so many areas and number one in percentage of kids that don't graduate from public schools.

The University of Texas has gone from 17th to 49th. We are adrift as far as public and higher education is concerned and they are the priorities that state government can build and the University of Texas, when of the last appropriations bill I wrote, 71 cents out of every dollar the University of Texas got was state money. This last session is was down to 19 cents and that's wrong.

This Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill that put a 38% increase in tuition and tuition were probably too low, and they can go one time to the students, but they can't go back to the students, where are they going next time? We are in real serious trouble. And I think that maybe, I don't know ... the other speakers that followed me, Gib Lewis and Bill Clayton and Pete Laney, those people probably think .. . that they really shouldered the responsibility for higher education and public education.

And they did in a way, but I think probably what we did in the '60s, and John Connally deserved a lot of credit for he had been a lot of places and he had seen a lot things, and he knew why it was important to do this in higher education. And Eric Johnson and Cecil Green and Eugene McDermott, the three founders of Texas Instruments, they took me as a 26 year old speaker and took me to Boston for two days and let me look at MIT and Harvard and I visited with the President of MIT and Harvard and learned first hand, and saw those great institutions that had been there almost 200 years and I saw what Texas needed to be done.

... [W]e didn't graduate the engineers that we needed here and at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Austin. But it is not only Texas that's failing. In 2003, the United States produced 50,000 of all colors and stripes, 50,000. China graduated 500,000 engineers that same year we produced 50,000. I had just gotten back on a tour of Europe.

We went to four countries, John Huntston, the client, and I, and he's got the largest private chemical company in the world and I tell you what we aren't going to graduate enough engineers from Texas to meet John Huntston's needs for the next ten years. And one of the reasons, I think it is important what you all are doing, I think these things need to be written down.

I hope that the speakers of the House and the lieutenant governors for the next 50 years read this work and realize that they can have a tremendous impact. It takes some political courage, it takes some guts, it takes not letting the political parties run your office, it takes having the courage to get out there and walk the plank and rather than trying, the executive branch and the legislative branches are two separate entities and it is not the job of the Texas legislative branch to cover the butt of the executive branch.

PC: When you mentioned higher education, and funding of higher ed., back in the '60s and when you were speaker and became lieutenant governor do you remember about the foundation school program, in so far as the support for public ed....

BB: Well we were passing, what we did, the first thing you have got to deal with, you have got to deal with the teacher salaries and increasing gasoline taxes, 25 percent of that goes in the public school fund, that was one way we were doing it. We even started then something no one had heard of in the '60s, I made a speech in '67 or '68 once that we needed to reduce the class size and it had not been mentioned at that time, or not to a large extent.

But, public education, we started some experimental English classes for Hispanic students, where they could have English before, you know, and you had a lot of problems with Texas State Teacher's Association and . . . they really kind of felt like it was proprietary that they ought to tell us what we are going to do and we needed some visionary. But here is the most important thing. Someone said, "What is the most important that you did while you were in office?"

I'll tell you what was the most important thing I did. I was able to work to get a majority of the House and a majority of the Senate to vote for a tax bill every single session I was in the legislature when I was lieutenant governor/speaker. We passed, I served 12 years and I passed 8 tax bills and that takes a lot of courage. It is a different time, but I tell you what, I don't know anybody, I don't even know and this is not about Republican or...