John Hill for the State of Texas

Preface

Preface Had he not died unexpectedly in July 2007, John Hill would have written this preface with my help. Sadly, it now bears only my name. John wanted to write this book about his years as attorney general because he considered those the most exciting and fulfilling in his long and active life. Those years, to John, meant more than his success in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the state’s most respected trial attorneys, his two campaigns for governor, his service as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, or his service to and friendships with governors and presidents. The attorney general’s office offered greater opportunity for doing good for more people than any other state office, he believed, and the many good results he achieved validated the wisdom of his determination to provide Texans with first-class legal advocacy. His goal was a book that would demonstrate that these types of accomplishments—as well as his commitment to enforcing the law without fear or favor, a standard to which he believed too many in government did not adhere—were within the grasp of any public official who simply refused to cut corners for political expediency. We agreed that I would write the book in his voice. To reconstruct the events and decisions that shaped his administration’s destiny, the book would meld together his recollections shared during several interviews with me, his three oral histories, published references, and my thirty interviews of his former assistants and others in and out of government who were involved. To help readers imagine conversations conducted in private meetings where comments were not recorded, we relied on the memories of living participants to create dialogue. Quotations in the text lacking a source citation were derived using this technique. Each chapter was reviewed for accuracy by the principal assistants and others who served as my sources. John, of course, had the last say, with his edits of my manuscript. We submitted it to Texas A&M University Press in January 2007, five months before he died. John chose depth over breadth in directing content. Among the dozens of knotty issues engaged by his staff but passed over for inclusion in the book were deep involvement in a massive constitutional revision (xiv) Preface process ultimately rejected by voters; critical advice on wording of government reform laws defining open records and open meetings criteria and strengthened ethics laws affecting officeholders’ financial disclosure and lobby registration requirements; contentious legislative redistricting lawsuits that traveled to the Supreme Court of the United States and back several times before finally requiring single-member districts for the first time in all urban counties; and devising implementation strategies for state agencies after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Another casualty of the content selection process was two mammoth sets of litigation caused by a shortage of natural gas the year he took office. One involved lawsuits filed against thirty oil and gas companies to force them to adjust their royalty payments from production on state-owned lands to reflect natural gas price increases that often reached 400 percent. The other involved refereeing the flurry of lawsuits caused by the collapse of Oscar Wyatt’s natural gas delivery system, which was essential to Austin and San Antonio gas buyers. In the state’s royalty cases, Hill’s staff recovered more than $1 billion in additional royalty income for the state’s permanent education fund by forcing natural gas producers to pay royalties based on the value of the state-owned gas on the unregulated intrastate market, where soaring demand and supply shortages produced prices much higher than interstate market prices, which were kept lower by federal regulators. The demise of Wyatt’s Lo-Vaca Gathering Company, a subsidiary of his Coastal States Gas Producing Company, generated lawsuits against Lo-Vaca and Coastal States by Austin, San Antonio and its public utility, the University of Texas, and the Lower Colorado River Authority seeking millions in damages suffered when Wyatt’s companies failed to provide gas in volumes mandated in purchase contracts. Hill and his staff took commanding roles in steering the case as it swirled through the courts and the Texas Railroad Commission for five years, producing several precedents in natural gas public policy later incorporated into federal law. The process of winnowing the book’s content left eight issues for comprehensive development. They are a mixture of legislative and judicial accomplishments and frustrations that reflect the overriding cultural and political...