News from Cibolo

By William Garland

Whats it mean to be Texan? Thats the ultimate question and finally the news in News from Cibolo. A Texas reporter in Washington finds clues to his own loyalties and identity as he crosses paths with a mesmerizing leader bent on bringing Texas back from statehood to nationhood sparked by a feud over oil, but also latent legal claims that eventually shake political foundations from Austin to the nations capital.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467061056

William Garland

William Garland worked many years as a reporter in the Southwest and Washington, where he was bureau chief for a chain of Texas dailies. His other experience has included working on a natural gas pipeline crew in the Texas Panhandle and as editor for a small-town Texas bi-weekly. He also was Washington editor for World Oil magazine based in Houston.

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Contents

ABOUT THE BOOK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE BOOK

What’s it mean to be Texan? That’s the ultimate question and finally the ‘news’ in News from Cibolo. A Texas reporter in Washington finds clues to his own loyalties and identity as he crosses paths with a mesmerizing leader bent on bringing Texas back from statehood to nationhood—sparked by a feud over oil, but also latent legal claims that eventually shake political foundations from Austin to the nation’s capital.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All primary characters in this story are fictional, including Texas political figures. While some major public figures are depicted or mentioned, their comments with few exceptions are fictional. A speech by Oliver North, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, is quoted verbatim. Also fictional are members of the Texas separatist movement, who have no factual relation to figures involved in any similar schemes. Some conclusions about U.S. government involvement in oil markets were based on reporting by the author for Texas newspapers. Also helpful was research by Peter Schweizer, author of Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union and by Edwin Rothschild, formerly energy director in Washington, D.C. for Energy Action. Among books on Texas annexation and its aftermath, one of the most useful was The Howling of the Coyotes: Reconstruction Efforts to Divide Texas by Ernest Wallace.

A document by early Texas settler James Trainer, partly included herein, is quoted verbatim with any changes in spelling or phrases in parentheses.

Our life, like a river, strikes its banks not to find itself closed in by them, but to realise anew every moment that it has its unending opening toward the sea.

Tagore Sadhana

Are you a horse? bear riders! Are you an ox? wear your yoke! A borzoi? chase animals! A hunter? kill bears… Everyone should recognize his people, and in his people, himself. Are you a Russian? be one… Are you a Pole? be a Pole! Are you a German? act as a German! A Frenchman? act as a Frenchman! A Tatar? act as a Tatar! Everything is good in its place and in its measure… not false, not amalgamated, but existing in its own way.

Skovoroda

I think it’s the feeling of having a lot of room that makes people like it down there.

Willie Nelson

I.

It was Marsh Nolan, an unlikely suspect, who tipped me off. Pushing my way with a group of well-heeled oilmen into a New Orleans ballroom, glittery with chandeliers, Nolan caught my attention with a wave from across the dark-suited pack. He gestured toward the back and I reversed course, squeezing through shoulders and looks of slight annoyance, surprised not that he had something to pass along but he seemed so insistent, something in the glance short of panic but definitely in the range of urgency. It flashed through the mind that someone might have died or been injured, something startling and personal. So I was relieved, more suspicious than anything, when I reached the thinning edge of the herd and understood what he wanted.

You seen much other press? he asked.

At this thing? I think they’ve mostly left, haven’t they? They might be up getting a last cold one in the Quarter. Anything special?

You’re the only one I’ve seen. Anyway, Harold told me to tell you guys this is a non-recording session, to keep off the recorders.

Nolan, overweight and always rumpled with his loosened tie revealing an unfastened top shirt button, looked like a newspaper reporter and except for occasional rants favoring the oil industry got along well with the press. He squinted an eye toward me and waited.

Keep off the recorders? What’s the deal? I’m not broadcast.

You can take notes.

I always use the recorder as backup.

He looked too serious and shook his head. I can only tell you what Harold said. Besides, how long you been doing this? You’ll get it.

Who’s here? This just says general session.

He turned and began moving away, apparently unwilling to push it further.

Some military guy. Just a procedural thing with the military types is all it is.

I melded into the rear of the group funneling through the doors, finally entering the ballroom and finding an outer perimeter seat. I thought Harold Arnold looked my way from the elevated rows of seats at the front, backed by a massive banner proclaiming this temporary territory of the National Independent Producers Association. A smaller banner on the podium in the center also bore the symbol of NIPA, a seal with the name of the group circling the edges, framing a hoisted oil rig. Arnold had risen through NIPA’s ranks for 20 years before becoming executive vice president, originally writing for the group’s magazine in Washington after a youthful tour as a reporter for Oklahoma City’s Daily Oklahoman. It had been similar to my own career route until the day I sat in his corner office overlooking 16th Street toward the White House and told him that after more than a year as associate editor on NIPA’s Independent Producer, I had decided to return to newspapering. There was no surprise. I had been recruited by Robert Doudney, editor of the magazine and friend from the University of Texas, and had shown up from the daily newspaper in Santa Fe with long hair and skepticism. Writing for the bi-monthly magazine had seemed almost a vacation with weeks to spend on one or two stories, compared with daily or at best weekly deadlines in Santa Fe. It was a time of energy crises and intrigue. But I had been ready to get back behind the notebook on broader fronts. I took a job with Capitol News Service, a small Washington operation serving as a bureau for dozens of dailies. I remembered Arnold that day stroking his chin, looking toward the White House and beginning slowly to smile. He began to tell tales of Oklahoma City and his own reporter days rife with schemes often intermingling oil and politics.

You know, if you make a go with that here, there’s prestige in it, he had said. The sons of bitches all have too much ego, but the ones that remember where they’re from, and I don’t mean just the talking heads, make a name for themselves. Not a bad living either.

Maybe Arnold’s advice had guided my path toward reporting for Texas newspapers, after a year or two reporting at the news service for larger dailies in New England. Covering the politics of a tax credit for wood stoves had taken the place of worrying about oil politics. But here I was again, now bureau chief in Washington for Harding-Price Newspapers published in the home state of Texas, sitting in the same crowd of oilmen I had covered for the petroleum magazine when I moved to Washington eight years before. And there was Harold Arnold, peering out over the thousand or so oil producers in the crowd, no doubt thinking about last words of encouragement to producers whose basic commodity was worth less than half what it was only a half-year before.

It was the end of a two-day meeting and I had hung around in case some oil guy from Shreveport or Amarillo or Denver went on a quotable tirade about a sorry state of affairs brought on by what he might describe as worthless Arabs intent on squeezing smaller producers like themselves out of the flooded world market. Arnold had been expected to keep a tight rein on things and there probably wouldn’t be much, apparently the verdict of other absent reporters most likely already filing stories elsewhere in the hotel or packing for return trips, if not, as I had suggested to Nolan, starting a night on the town. My own mind turned toward a roam through the French Quarter, maybe sooner than later if this went flat. It was becoming Saturday evening and I hadn’t promised the West Texas papers a daily story. El Paso and Corpus Christi might be less interested and anything new could go into a column the following week.

After a hasty welcome, Arnold quickly got to the point at the podium, promising that Washington was sobering up after almost six months of oil prices at unimagined lows. The crash was beginning to hit banks and savings and loans, he told the group, and when federal dollars were forced to the table they would see a turnaround.

There was a microphone in the middle aisle and a line began to form, which was when Arnold launched what I thought must have been a preconceived strategy. He said he could take only one question because NIPA had lined up an extraordinary speaker who was on very short leave from Washington, cutting off what otherwise might have become a long and testy debate. I wondered if he also had put a ringer up front in the middle aisle, maybe ready to throw out some tepid or at least manageable question about the outlook for the oil depletion allowance.

But Martin Simpson of Tyler, Texas, turned out not to be a ringer.

Harold, I just can’t understand why we’ve got the speaker of the House from Texas, a Texas senator heading the finance committee, a Texas vice president and nobody up there seems to care if we live or die. There was some immediate applause. How is it we can’t get them to even acknowledge that we’ve got a hell of a serious mess, many of us already out of business or headed there and they don’t give a damn? What on God’s earth are we doin’ wrong that we can’t get them to listen? Many of us in this room put up money for Reagan.

Arnold let the applause fade. Well Martin it’s like I just said. These guys in Washington, let’s face it, the economy’s goin’ great with low prices and people in New York City or Philadelphia don’t care if their gas is from Saudi or Oklahoma. I think once the federal dollars are on the line…

Martin interrupted and gave voice to what had been a topic behind closed doors. "Harold we’ve just got to have an import fee or this whole damn industry is gonna be gone. We might as well face it and put it on the line up there, whether they like it or not."

Many stood up applauding, some whistling. An import fee could put a floor under cratered prices.

I know what you’re saying Martin but it’s just not the time…

When the hell is it time? someone shouted from the back.

It’s not time because it just plain won’t work, Arnold said, his emphatic voice becoming cautious, slowing into a more noticeable Oklahoma accent. Not one-fifth of Congress, let alone one-half, is going to back it. I can tell you the back and forth is getting better. Bush’s office is doing us some good. And I think I might have something positive to tell you in a month, maybe even a few weeks. I know it’s tough. Everybody’s on the line with this thing. He let some of the groans die. We’re at the bottom of it and we’ve got a speaker here from inside the administration who’s going to give us a broader perspective about some areas where they could use some of our help up there. I think it would do us all good to listen and think about it a little. Ed Lee, chairman of the crude oil committee, is going to introduce him.

Maybe Arnold knew he had to allow a final public venting of anger, one pop and then on with the show. I watched as the line of about a dozen would-be questioners melted back into the murmuring crowd. Ed Lee, heavyset and middle-aged but with a stout bearing, also was a good pick to follow Arnold. As a well-liked leader of the group for years, a Texas producer from the small town of Sweetwater with heavier production in oil than natural gas, he would be expected to bring a certain calmness, a sense of business-as-usual at the yearly gathering.

First of all, I want you to know everybody up here knows what you’re talking about, he started. "We’re there too. Same boat with the same worries. $10… $11 oil is killing us and if things don’t change, there won’t be many people left in this room for the annual next May. And our towns might not have banks and we might all be sitting behind the check-in desk of a Best Western, those of us with any money left to buy one.

Now the administration people up in Washington really are the best hope we’ve got and we’ve got a fella here today from way inside things who’s going to tell us something we all need to hear about, said Lee. His name is Lt. Col. Oliver North and he’s with President Reagan’s National Security Council at the White House. You don’t often hear much about the National Security Council, or the NSC as they call it up there, because they don’t want you to. It’s kind of like the CIA but deals with things at the command of the president. The lights began to dim somewhat in the ballroom. Lt. Col. North today is going to tell us about the real threat down in Central America, things we’re not seeing much on the network news or our newspapers. Some of it our media people might not even know about themselves.

North was an unknown who, by the hush now in the room, seemed to have caught the group’s attention. Heads turned as a figure in green uniform, his left breast emblazoned with medals, briskly moved up the center aisle carrying a black briefcase. Those up front began to applaud as North maneuvered to the podium and shook Lee’s hand. The lieutenant also will be giving a slide presentation so if you could go ahead and put down the lights all the way.

I was impressed immediately by the earnestness of the speaker, his voice loud enough with the microphone but seeming almost to be a sincere whisper, easy to imagine imparting matters of urgency within the stiff elegant hallways and offices of the Old Executive Office Building where NSC was headquartered as part of the White House complex. I glanced nonchalantly around the room and not seeing Nolan, slipped a hand into my left jacket pocket and slowly pushed the record button. Sometimes the button would slip and the recorder would begin, sometimes loudly, to play a tape. I pressed firmly until I could feel the button set in place and hear the slight whirring hum it made when activated.

The tape would pick up with North describing a slide of a satellite photo that he said showed an airfield in Nicaragua on which Soviet and Bulgarian and Cuban engineers had worked day and night to finish… The revetments which you see in the Christmas tree pattern in the upper left will accommodate a Mig25.

They don’t have any Migs, they don’t have any fighters, he said with hushed intensity, then paused. I feared in the silence that even the slight hum of the recorder might be heard. Why then did they build this airfield? We truly don’t know. But we do know that it was started shortly after the United States announced that it was building a nuclear submarine base in Bremerton, Wash. and it does give the Soviets that capability to reconnoiter our West Coast.

History shows us that when a Communist revolution succeeds between 10 and 25 percent of the population of that country will get up and flee to the next-nearest democracy, he continued, almost hypnotically earnest in the dimmed cavern. There are 100 million human beings between the Rio Grande River and the Panama Canal. If one takes the low end of history, (which would be) 10 percent, where do we put 10 million people? How will we care for them? . . . Yet very clearly they intend this revolution to spread well beyond even Central America.

He began to talk about the resistance movement against the Sandinistas. These young men and women have taken up arms against their government. And the fact is they are not Somazistas. This man (on the slide) is a university-trained 59-year-old coffee farmer who ran a collective farm, whose family’s only crime was to give water to a resistance patrol and for that his wife and five sons were laid out on the kitchen floor and shot through the forehead. He took up his shotgun and walked for 45 days to join the resistance. There somehow ought to be something that this country can do for people like this, a family fleeing totalitarian oppression… Yet our Congress has denied that they should even have boots, food, clothing. The growth in that resistance has coincided precisely with the increase in repression inside Nicaragua to the point today where there are over 27,000 young men and women who have taken up arms against dictators that run Nicaragua. And yet we can’t even give them hospitalization.

The slides continued showing threadbare soldiers and leaders of the Contra resistance that he said had been branded unfairly as Somazistas, even though they had opposed former dictator Somoza during the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Ladies and gentlemen, there is something wrong when this nation cannot offer young men and women more than the hope of dying for a cause they believe in.

The applause, while not emotional, lingered for about half a minute. We have time for just a few questions, said Lee, clearing his throat.

Why is it that it’s so distorted? asked North, repeating a question. "The anchormen you see every night on the TV (are) the very people who were out carrying signs in front of our White House and Pentagon while I was getting my back-end shot off, literally, in a far-away war. They were out protesting. Their perspective isn’t just anti-right wing, conservative or things like that. Their perspective is basically if the U.S. government says it’s so, it ain’t and they automatically come out again’ it, no matter what it is. And when you take that synergism between the intelligentsia that justifiably fled right-wing dictatorships for years and you take that natural anarchy that’s so glorious in the fourth estate of America and combine them, it’s no wonder the truth doesn’t get out. They do it by omission and they do it by commission. The natural bias is one against the policy… no matter what the policy is.

In fact joking with the president up at Camp David a few weeks ago while we were talking Central American issues and terrorism issues, I said you know maybe the thing to do is come out in favor of the Sandinistas. Maybe the press would come along and say back the Contras. I don’t really mean that but it’s almost that bad.

Attacking the press seemed to go over well in the conservative crowd and final applause was more robust, if brief. I reached in the pocket, shut off the recorder and dismissed the speech and Nolan’s paranoia as unwarranted. The tape could have helped with quotes but would be of little use since I didn’t plan a story on his remarks. Maybe the lieutenant would think I was one of his lefties in the media, but there was little apparent value for my purposes. I was there to cover a crisis in the oil patch, not Nicaragua, and with the meeting drawing to a close my thoughts wandered outside the hotel. North left after his speech, walking alone back down the center aisle, perhaps nodding at people or shaking hands, the briefcase clutched at his side. I later wished I had kept watching or even followed him out the doors on the pretense of needing a follow-up quote. If others went out with him, I didn’t notice.

Moving slowly again with the crowd, I hit Nolan just outside the doors and was surprised that he again seemed anxious, given the paucity of material he seemed anxious to guard.

What did you think of it? Get what you needed?

Yeah, I got it OK, I guess. Did I miss something?

I thought his eyes widened. It was what it was. A little out of the ordinary I suppose. He paused a moment. You going to do anything on it?

You mean a story? I asked incredulously. "That was more for our friends at Armed Forces Journal I think. The earlier stuff was pretty good with the guy from Tyler, probably for a column. Where the hell did you get this military guy anyway?"

***

I would be leaving the next morning, returning to a work week in Washington, so the weekend would be the evening in New Orleans and then Sunday in taxis, airports and 727s. The room at the Marriott towered over a bend in the Mississippi River where the French Quarter clung to the western bank. Barges, freighters and tourist boats, not yet loaded with gamblers in late spring of 1986, glided up and down the wide green river, occasionally booming a fog horn, their lights beginning to ornament the dark currents. From above, I thought, it all looked much more authentic and understandable than in the streets of the Quarter where the river became lost in the crowds and drink, the eyes of panhandlers and women and the mix of music that grew louder and momentarily distinct with the passing of each tavern. Maybe that was why I decided to go back to Johnny White’s, which I found in the mid-80s still to have vestiges of the earlier hangout I had known as a college student on anonymous leave from the Austin campus. Rolling into New Orleans for the first time, stopping in the distant western outskirts of the city, I remembered asking the desk clerk, sometime after midnight, if the French Quarter were still open. He had looked up slowly from paperwork on the counter, eyed my naive and anxious countenance, and told me, Son, they only close the French Quarter at sunup to sweep out the dead bodies. Later that same night, or early morning, I had stumbled on Johnny White’s.

It had lost its rougher edges from the `70s. Gone was the poker table in the front window with the single dangling light, a bulb with a black metal shade, helping T-shirted dock workers and seamen scour their cards. Tourists had been scarce then, with the bar filled, if filled at all, mostly with locals who made obvious their lack of affection for the swirling mass of visitors beyond the doors. On this visit I ordered a Dixie beer, still by far the favorite in the unpretentious place, and took a look around. In the warm May evening, the glass front door actually was open but still receiving little notice from passerby. The bar itself was of deep heavy wood, probably oak, with scarrings and cigarette burns from thousands of long New Orleans nights. Only six or seven others were there, including two younger men and a younger woman, probably college students, at one of the few tables against the narrow bar’s wood-grained wall. Older men, two white and one black, sat on stools, mostly sipping Dixies. As an hour passed, the bar gradually began to fill, both with people and higher volumes of recorded blues, occasionally blending seamlessly with zydeco or cajun. The three younger drinkers, including the twentyish woman with long black hair and quick but cautious eyes that seemed always focused on her companions, had moved to the front and begun to throw darts in the space occupied in earlier days by poker players. She reminded me of a former student I had known at UT, a reporter on The Daily Texan with whom I had shared deadlines and parties, lending to the impression of their university status. The dangling light also was gone from the bar’s front, its purpose no doubt extinct, at least in the front window, and also now an unnecessary hazard for dart throwers.

I turned around and let my eyes skip over the mementos of New Orleans and river-faring that hung on the back wall, above the rows of bottles with brand names for booze. There was a peeling wooden turquoise and white buoy, shaped somewhat like a bowling pin, a circular life preserver with the name of its former ship, the Trawler, written in black that also was flecking away, along with mostly black-and-white framed pictures of boats, favorite patrons and an occasional athlete. Reaching the far end of the wall, I picked up glints from the graceful black hair of the dart thrower and then landed on another black-haired woman with her back toward me. I quickly recognized that facing her was an oil guy, a rarity who, as an independent producer from Refugio near Corpus Christi, was one of the few Hispanics in NIPA and probably one of the few prominent ones anywhere in the tight-knit world of U.S. independents. He glanced up and saw me a moment later.

What the hell are you up to, being a lonely-hearts on a Saturday night in Orleans? asked Albert Sanchez after wandering over toward my spot at the bar, moving through what had become a denser crowd, now about two deep in most places. He spoke with the accent of many successful Hispanic Texans, elements of a Texas drawl stirring but not quite fully blending with unmistakable tinges of border Spanish. In oil circles he was known as Al Sanchez, but my bet was he was better known in South Texas as Albert or Alberto, though probably not by a first name at all to Spanish-speaking roughnecks from both sides of the border that made up the majority of his drilling crews.

I think you know the lady I’m here with, he said before I could answer. Come on over.

I grabbed the longneck Dixie and pushed away from the seat that was instantly filled. The profile of Anna Castano soon came into view and I remembered our conversation a week or so earlier.

Well, aren’t I the lucky one, said Sanchez as we pulled up in front of Anna. Not one but two members of the glorious press to tell me what’s really going on in the world.

Well you actually took me up on my suggestion, huh? I said to Anna. My back was toward the dart throwers, almost infringing on their throwing lane, but I was forgetting about the black-haired woman and the memories she inspired.

Yeah, but I’m trying to decide why, she said, looking around. Her Spanish accent was much different, perhaps more pure with its absence of Texan tinges.

Come on, I said. This place is more real than the tourist hangouts.

I was pleased and impressed that she had remembered my suggestion in the halls of the National Press Building to visit Johnny White’s when she covered the oil meeting. She worked across the hall as a reporter for Venpres, the Venezuelan news service, and closely followed oil policy in the United States. Venpres was a government-sponsored news agency and leaders of government in Caracas, with the country’s membership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, cared as much about the American role in petroleum politics as international trade. Castano often knocked on the door of my press building office