Who Let the Dogs In? (58 page)

W
ARREN
BURNETT,
the legendary Texas trial lawyer—and if ever there was a legitimate use of the word
legendary,
this is it—died on a veranda overlooking a garden in West Texas on a beautiful afternoon in September with a cold beer in his hand. He was seventy-five. He was the least sentimental idealist I ever knew.

Burnett was, simply, the finest trial lawyer in Texas and quite possibly in the nation in his day. Some will argue that Edward Bennett Williams, on the other side of the Ditch, was pretty good too, but I point out that when Burnett visited John Connally’s bribery trial as an observer, Williams moved him up to the defense table after the first day. Burnett was so revered by his colleagues that whenever he tried a case, lawyers and law students would show up like groupies to watch him. I once saw former congressman Craig Washington, himself famous for having three times successfully defended an impossible case—a black convict who had killed a white guard—come up to Burnett at a reception, kneel, and kiss his hand.

Burnett was raised poor in the mountains of Virginia, and the only books in the house were the Bible and Shakespeare. He memorized much of both, and as a result his command of language was stunning. I never heard him utter a graceless sentence. He could tell priceless stories, his wit was quick as a cobra; when the occasion called for grand rhetoric, he did grand rhetoric Clarence Darrow would have wept for. But his particular genius, as both a lawyer and a friend, was for telling the mordant truth.

Warren had a habit of marrying badly. At the end of another sad chapter in his love life, he said, in that great, deep, rumbling voice, “Well, I consider this further evidence of a long-held theory of mine, which is that you cannot cure alcoholism with pussy.”

He finally got it right on the fourth try, his wife Kay, a woman of such sweetness and devotion that his old friends envied him.

The son of a miner, Burnett had a strong sense of how the legal system in this country grinds down on those without money. As district attorney in Odessa, he didn’t enjoy prosecuting people and quit after two terms. His daughter Melissa says he sent a young, homeless man to the electric chair and was ever-after haunted by it. He switched to defense.

Burnett did not practice law just for money—which he never disdained, since he felt he had spent enough of his life being poor—but for justice as well. A dewy-eyed idealist he was not.

Nevertheless, he took cases for the Texas Civil Liberties Union, for the United Farmworkers, for black people and brown people with no money in hopeless circumstances—and won a staggering number of them. But he was just as cutting about the bull on the left as he was about the racists on the right.

At the sort-of famous Wimberly Conference in 1968 between anti-war movement radicals and the handful of Texas lawyers willing to defend them (the anti-war people were then getting busted all over the state and put away for long sentences for exercising their constitutional rights), there promptly developed a grand split, as was the custom of the left in those days. The radicals wanted the lawyers to go into court, call the judges racist pigs, and denounce the system as a fascist fraud. The lawyers, bound by their professional principles, felt that their primary obligation was to keep these damn fools from spending ten years in the Texas pen, as civil-rights lawyer David Richards notes in his memoir,
Once Upon a Time in Texas.

Burnett, “who had been much in evidence at the open bar,” finally rose to announce the consensus. “We are lawyers who are prepared to represent movement causes when the time arises, and to do so in the manner we, as lawyers, feel the cause should best be presented in court; and if this approach is not satisfactory to the young radicals foregathered on this occasion, then, to borrow from the rhetoric of the movement, ‘Fuck ’em.’ ”

Burnett to the bone.

November 2002

John Henry Faulk

O
N
A BLAZING
hot summer day last year, the director of the Central Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was frantically phoning members to announce that the First Amendment was in dire peril from the Austin City Plan Commission. The First Amendment tends to be under steady fire in the Great State, but the Austin Plan Commission is rarely found on the side of jackbooted fascism. What happened was, the Reverend Mark Weaver, a fundamentalist divine with a strong local following, hell-bent on driving all the dirty bookstores out of town—he had come up with a zoning scheme by which this was to be accomplished. The Plan Commission held a hearing that night attended by more than three hundred members of Weaver’s group, Citizens Against Pornography, and by six members of the Civil Liberties Union. The Libertarians flocked together. Nothing like sitting in the midst of a sea of Citizens Against Pornography to make you notice that your friends all look like perverts.

The Reverend Weaver rose to address the Commission. An eloquent preacher, he took right off into the tale of a woman who lives directly behind the pornography theater on South Congress Avenue. The very day before, she had watched a man come out of that theater after the five-o’clock show, go into the alley behind the theater, right behind her house, and . . . masturbate. Three hundred Citizens Against and the members of the Plan Commission all sucked in their breath in horror. Made a very odd sound. “YES,” continued the Reverend Weaver, “that man MASTURBATED right in the alley, right BEHIND that lady’s house. And she has two little girls who might have SEEN it—if it weren’t for the wooden fence around her yard.” And with that the Reverend Weaver jerked the stopper and cussed sin up a storm. It looked bad for the First Amendment.

When it came their turn, the Libertarians huddled together and decided to send up their oldest living member. He shuffled to the mike, gray hair thin on top, a face marked with age spots and old skin cancers, one eye useless long since. He spoke with a courtly Southern accent. “Members of the Plan Commission, Reverend Weaver, Citizens Against, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Henry Faulk. I am seventy-four years old. I was born and raised in South Austin, not a quarter of a mile from where that pornography theater stands today. I think y’all know that there was a
lot
of masturbation in South Austin before there was ever a pornography theater there.” Even the Citizens Against laughed, and the First was saved for another day.

Thirty years ago John Henry Faulk destroyed the blacklisting system that had terrified the entertainment industry during the McCarthy era. His was one of the most spectacular show trials of that sorry time; he won the largest libel award that had yet been granted in the United States ($3.5 million) and was honored up to his eyebrows by freedom lovers everywhere. Then he went back to Texas—broke, his career still ruined—never saw any of the money, and learned you can’t eat honor. This is the story of John Henry Faulk’s life since Louis Nizer won out over Roy Cohn in their courtroom battle about whether the man called the Will Rogers of his generation was actually a communist.

BEEN SO
long since Texas freedom fighters couldn’t count on Johnny Faulk almost no one can remember the time. He is a folklorist and humorist by profession, a storyteller, and a scholar of the Constitution. He’s also a good man to have around when guerrilla tactics are called for.

Back in 1975, there was an unholy uproar in the state over another preacher, Brother Lester Roloff of Corpus Christi, since gone to glory. Brother Roloff ran a home for “wayward girls” without a state license; claimed he didn’t need permission from the State of Texas to beat the Devil out of those girls and the Lord into them. At one point the state was forced to throw him into the slammer for contempt of court, and this caused his followers to swear vengeance on every godless politician and every godless licensing law in Texas.

Safe in Austin was State Senator Ron Clower of Garland, a cheerful fellow who followed the old legislative precept “Vote conservative, party liberal.” Clower had done a substantial amount of beer-drinking, river-running, and good-timin’ with a crowd of Austin liberals, of whom Johnny Faulk is one. Vast was the surprise of the senator’s friends when an item appeared in the papers saying Clower had introduced a tiny amendment to exempt Brother Roloff from state supervision. It was felt he should have known better.

The day of the hearing on his amendment, Clower’s office received a call from a Reverend Billy Joe Bridges of Lovelady, leader of the White Christian Children’s Army, a full-immersion, foot-washing fundamentalist sect headed toward Austin to help Brother Clower hold off the forces of Satan. “We’re bringin’ three busloads of children. Red-white-and-blue buses,” crooned Bridges. “We’ll take those Christian children right up into the Senate gallery, and they’ll float little paper airplanes with the words of Jesus written on them onto the Senate floor. We’ll be the Christian Children’s Air Force for the day, you see. Heh, heh.”

Clower had been hoping to avoid publicity on this misbegotten amendment, but Cactus Pryor, a television newsman at KLBJ in Austin, called to say he’d heard the White Christian Children’s Army was coming and the station wanted to have its cameras on the Capitol steps to catch the “charge.” Could Senator Clower’s office tell him what time the buses were expected? “Oh God, television!” groaned Clower. The liberal
Texas Observer
called: “We’ve just received a press release from some outfit called the White Christian Children’s Army. What the hell is going on?”

“They’ve put out a press release!” screamed Clower’s aide.

Came a call from Belton, the voice low and threatening. “This is Officer Joe Don Billups with the Department of Public Safety. We’ve just stopped three red-white-and-blue buses for speeding. They said your office could explain.”

Clower, no idiot, took only a few more hours to realize it was all a put-on. The culprits never confessed, but a few months later, when Johnny Faulk received a call at 3
A.M.
from the Democratic Telethon to verify his pledge of $500,000, Senator Clower was the chief suspect.

IN THE
ugly, angry time of “Lyndon’s War” against the Communist Vietnamese, which all good Texans felt called upon to support, John Henry Faulk was making a slim living as an after-dinner speaker—and, for that matter, after-lunch—in front of such prestigious and high-paying organizations as the Grimes County Taxpayers Association and the Madisonville Kiwanis. He was never fool enough to come out against the war. But he would recount conversations he’d had with his cousin Ed Snodgrass, an old geezer so retrograde he has a sign over his mantelpiece that says,
ROBERT E. LEE MIGHT HAVE GIVE UP, BUT I AIN’T.
Cousin Ed would get to fussin’ about all the dirty, long-haired peaceniks. “Don’t you believe in the right to dissent, Cousin Ed?” Faulk would ask.

“Dissent? Oh hell yes, I believe in dissent. H’it’s in the Constitution. What I can’t stand is all this criticism. Criticize, criticize, criticize. Why can’t they leave ol’ Lyndon alone and let him fight his war in peace? Lookit this war. We send our best boys over there, in broad daylight, in million-dollar airplanes, wearin’ pressed uniforms, to bomb them Veetnamese, and what do they do? Come out at night. On their bicycles. Wearin’ pyjamas. Not even Christian. I tell you what, if we wasn’t bombin’ ’em, they would not be able to bomb theirselves. If they don’t like what we’re doing for ’em, they ought to go back where they come from.” Johnny Faulk could get laughs out of Republicans with this routine, and no one ever got mad at him. They did, however, go away with the notion that there was something, well, ludicrous about the war.

“I never attack people for what they think,” explains Faulk. “That’s crucial. If I want to say something I know will stir folks up, I make one of my characters say it. Then I disagree with my character, chide him for being foolish.” Which is why the man accused of being a Red is now asked to speak everywhere in Texas.

JOHNNY FAULK
got branded a communist when he ran for union office in New York in 1955. At the time, Faulk remembers, “I was choppin’ in the tall cotton.” He was starring in his own five-day-a-week network radio show on CBS, called
Johnny’s Front Porch,
and also appearing twice weekly on television on two panel quiz programs and in a variety of other slots as a guest panelist or guest host. Faulk ran as part of an anti-blacklisting slate for the board of AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Other members of the ticket included the CBS News reporter Charles Collingwood and the performers Orson Bean, Faye Emerson, Garry Moore, and Janice Rule. The anti-blacklisters won twenty-seven of the thirty-five seats on the board. A month after the new officers took over, AWARE, Inc.—“An Organization to Combat the Communist Conspiracy in Entertainment-Communications”—issued this bulletin about the group: “The term ‘blacklisting’ is losing its plain meaning and becoming a Communist jargon-term for hard opposition to the exposure of Communism.” The newsletter then presented a number of allegations against Faulk. He once appeared on a program with Paul Robeson. He helped the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948. He sent second-anniversary greetings to a record company that sold “people’s folk songs.” Item No. 4 said, “A program dated April 25, 1946, named ‘John Faulk’ as a scheduled entertainer (with identified Communist Earl Robinson and two non-Communists) under the auspices of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (officially designated a Communist front, and predecessor of the Progressive Citizens of America).”