Molly Ivins September 9

AUSTIN — We hope Henry B. is enjoying all the bouquets being tossed his way. Hard to think of anyone who deserves them more. Notice how often the word "honorable" occurs in the political obits? Of how many people now serving in the United States Congress is "honorable" the first word that comes to mind? But me, I wish we had honored this honorable man less on his way out of our political life and had listened to him more.

It's amazing, when you look at the record, how often Henry B. Gonzalez was right — many times when nobody else was. If only we had listened. If only Congress had listened that night in 1981 when it was passing the Garn-St. Germain bill between midnight and 1 a.m. with no debate. The new Reagan administration was full of ideological certitude that deregulation was what the country needed — get the government off business's back, get rid of all the petty rules and regulations. And the place to start was the savings-and-loan industry, whose lobbyists had been allowed to write their own deregulation bill.

Of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only four rose in the middle of the night to oppose that bill: Jim Leach, that decent Republican from Iowa, and three Texas Democrats, all of them with populism bone-deep in their political makeup. There's a reason that Texans describe freezing weather by saying "cold as a banker's heart." Because the Garn-St. Germain bill had been written largely in secret, no one was quite sure what was in it. But the Texans rose to oppose it anyway: Jim Wright, Jim Mattox and Henry B. Gonzalez. You can look it up.

If only we had listened to Henry B. as early as 1983, when he warned that Reagan's HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce was an agent for politically favored special interests. If only we had listened to Henry B. when he warned us how often PAC money was making our representatives the captives of special interests rather than the public interest.

If only we had insisted they follow his example and not accept money from special interests before their own committees. If only we had listened to Henry B. when he warned us about the concentration of power in larger banks instead of encouraging it. If only we had listened to Henry B. when he told us over the years that the Federal Reserve was too secretive, too powerful, too unresponsive to the public interest. And when Henry B. tells you that Alan Greenspan is a liar, you can look for the man's nose to grow.

And, Texas, beloved Texas, how many years of agony would we have saved ourselves if we had listened to Henry B. during the hideous "seg session" in 1957, when he single-handedly tried to fend off some of the ugliest, most racist legislation ever to disgrace this state? Ronnie Dugger of The Texas Observer described Henry B.'s famous filibuster in the Texas Senate as follows:

"He started roaring, he roared on, and he closed roaring; never has his like been seen here before. For 22 hours he held the floor, an eloquent, an erudite, a genuine and a passionate man; and any whose minds he didn't enter had slammed the doors and buried the keys.

"He spoke for those who have no voice of their own. He spoke for the Latin-Americans who have been sweated, cheated and rat-holed. 'Who speaks for the Negroes? What about them?' he cried. 'Why do one-tenth of the people of Texas have no representatives in the Legislature? Why do they get the lowly jobs always? Is Texas liberty only for Anglo-Saxons?' He rose to help prevent 'the loss of just one liberty for which men have died — men have died, not just talked, talk is easy.' His colleagues were ready to quit, but he would not.

'What a noble opportunity to enlist in a cause that's eternal, the maintenance of the dignity of a human! For whom does the bell toll? You, the white man, think it tolls for the Negro. I say, the bell tolls for you. It is ringing for us all, for us all.'"

Henry B. in full rhetorical flight is eloquent like few others. Thirty-nine years after that astonishing filibuster, a fool named LaFalce from New York tried to take Henry B.'s job as the ranking Democrat on the House Banking Committee. Henry B. rose to speak and gave that new generation of politicians a lesson in how it's done: "How can I acquiesce in a thing that ignores my record of honorable and successful leadership? How can I be silent in the face of such an injustice?" LaFalce later confessed to reporters, "Henry was so good, I almost voted for him."

Henry B. is not always high-flown. In the 1950s, the politically correct way to refer to Chicanos was "Latin-Americans." Henry B. once observed that a Latin-American is "a Mexican with a poll tax." Nor did he later cotton to "Chicano." Just plain "American" was always good enough for Henry B., no hyphens, as was just plain "Democrat."

On Flag Day in 1993, disgusted by the syrupy display of patriotism, Henry B. said the House was "like a good little herd, reminiscent of the Hitlerian period: Sieg heil, sieg heil." When outraged Republicans demanded that he be censured, Henry B. said, "It must have hit pretty close to those goose-steppers."

I once wrote that Henry B. had a barely perceptible accent (I was wrong; he has no accent — only the faintest Hispanic intonation in his speech) and could not understand why he was so infuriated by what seemed to me a harmless remark. I later learned from reading an old issue of the Observer: "When the time came for him to go to junior high, his accent was so thick they made fun of him. He had read that Demosthenes of Athens developed his oratory by shouting at the sea with pebbles in his mouth, so he, Henry Gonzalez, did that. Long evenings, he read Carlyle aloud with rocks in his mouth 'until papa thought I was nuts and told me to stop.' He had a friend correct his enunciation as he read out from Robert Louis Stevenson. Nights, his sister and brothers would creep up to his bedroom window and watch him declaiming to a mirror, and they would run off, giggling."

No one in Washington seemed to understand Henry B.; he was always stigmatized as a "maverick," a "loner," a "lone wolf." What did Henry B. Gonzalez ever care about running with the pack? From his earliest days on the San Antonio City Council, he was at the lonely end of many an 8-1 vote. "The vote that carries the weight of moral conviction behind it, it has been my observation, is a vote that eventually triumphs," he once said.

Of course, we all relished Henry B.'s proper Texan tendency to duke it out when necessary. He had been an amateur boxer at the University of Texas at Austin, and over his years as a probation officer, city official and even in Congress, he was willing to mix it up. He once got into a shoving match in the cloak room with another congressman who had insulted him on the floor. And at the age of 70, he slugged some jerk who had called him a communist in a restaurant. Served the guy right, we all felt.

Like Barbara Jordan, who later followed him in the Texas Senate, Henry B. has been a First and an Only for much of his life. First Mexican-American in the Texas Senate, first elected to Congress from Texas. And I think, like her, his most important contribution may be as a role model. For four generations of Tejanos, Henry B. has been the model, the one from whom they all learned. They could not have had a better.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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