Several people mentioned this one to me over the weekend, but I couldn’t find a good obit. Lawrence sent me one from the Midland Reporter-Telegram, but I thought it was incomplete.
It seems like about five minutes after I hit publish on yesterday’s obit watch, the NYT put their obit up. Timing. The secret of comedy.
So, without further delay: Clayton Williams, the man who, as Lawrence put it, “could have changed the course of Texas politics and history, if he’d just been able to keep his mouth shut”.
…
I recall one campaign ad in which he promised to introduce convicts to “the joys of busting rocks”.
But during the campaign, he repeatedly sabotaged himself.
His comment about rape came early in the campaign, when he was sitting around a campfire in bad weather with reporters he had invited to his ranch. He compared the bad weather to rape, saying, “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”
An Associated Press report quickly made the comment national news. He said he was joking and, Texas Monthly reported, was apologetic “but not contrite.”The comment didn’t sink his campaign immediately. But in the end, it added to the weight of other blunders.
He bragged about going to prostitutes as a young man, saying that doing so was the only way to get “serviced” in the 1950s. At a debate, he refused to shake hands with Ms. Richards, a gesture widely criticized as poor sportsmanship.
When a poll showed Ms. Richards, a recovering alcoholic, gaining on him, he responded by saying, “I hope she hasn’t gone back to drinking again.” He then vowed to “head her and hoof her and drag her through the mud,” as if she were cattle.
And if all this hadn’t sealed his fate, especially with Republican women, he disclosed in the final days of the campaign that he had not paid income taxes in 1986, thanks to an oil bust that had touched off a recession — even though just four years later he was pouring $8 million of his own money into the race for governor. Ms. Richards made hay with that disclosure.
Mr. Williams blew a massive lead, and lost the election. He was the last Republican to lose a governor’s race in Texas.
An entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded more than two dozen companies, Mr. Williams had a business portfolio that also included farming, ranching, banking and real estate concerns.
He even dabbled in telecommunications. In 1984, he and his second wife, Modesta (Simpson) Williams, founded the first all-digital long-distance company in Texas, ClayDesta. He starred in his own television commercials, which were filmed on his Alpine ranch.
When proposed legislation threatened the business, he galloped up to the state capitol on a horse to hold a news conference opposing the bill. (The bill died.)
For the Texas A&M graduates in my audience, he was also a loyal Aggie, who gave a lot of money to the school.
You don’t see color like that much these days.
