Jim Mattox died last week in his sleep of a massive heart attack. He was 65 years old. We will join his wife, son and daughter, and sister and brother and literally hundreds of friends to bury him in the Texas State Cemetery tomorrow. My husband knew him for at least 30 years, I knew him for 20 years. He was my mentor, my boss, my friend. He was larger than life and yet he knew how difficult life is for many, many people.
He saved an innocent man from execution. Death row inmate Henry Lee Lucas was not guilty of capital murder and Mattox investigated the situation. His report on the Lucas matter was merciless. Mattox and investigators revealed that the so called serial killer did not kill the victim for which he was scheduled to die. He went to the Board of Pardons and Paroles and asked that Lucas' sentence be commuted to life. Governor George W. Bush took the Board's recommendation and did not execute Lucas.
Lucas died in his sleep in general population in Huntsville, Texas. He was 64. My husband and I attended his funeral there on the prison grounds.
Lucas came to our attention because my husband's employer, McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell, discovered that Lucas' confession spree was nothing more than a fraud. Mattox noted that the "Lucas Task Force" headed by the Texas Rangers had participated in a "hoax." Lucas could not have killed between 350 and 600 people without leaving any physical evidence. His confession in his death row case claimed that he raped and murdered the unknown woman and left her in a drainage ditch. The rape kit performed in her autopsy showed no signs of rape or sexual abuse.
When we told 60 Minutes the truth about the Lucas matter, Jim Mattox was on camera supporting us. When the FBI and the Texas Rangers wiretapped our phones, Jim Mattox called me and told me we were being "trapped and traced." He was almost gleeful that his phone number would be included.
Jim Mattox gave me my first job in state government. He gave me my first job on a statewide political campaign. He ate at my dining table in my home, played with our dog, regularly bought my lunch at a cafeteria in Austin and ate off my plate. He had me research speeches, rewrite speeches, and listen to him complain. We talked about politics, life, hard childhoods, law school, his beloved children and his wife.
He fought for Texas consumers, Texas children, and he worked tirelessly to make Texas better. He was never harder on anyone than he was on himself. His grasp of public policy and the political system was phenomenal. He didn't go a long to get a long and he wasn't interested in making friends but he was loved across the state of Texas by every person who was in need of Jim Mattox in their corner. I could count on him for anything. And I watched him give his everything to his employees, his constituents, his family, friends, and his state. My life is better for knowing him and your life is better because of his devotion to the underdog, the unloved. He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. And even if it was a lost cause, he never backed away from a fight. He took on the fight sometimes simply because no one else would.
When the Texas Legislature gave his office the responsibility of pursuing child support collections, they did it with the hope that he would fail. His abrasive nature, his inability to court the Establishment, the fact that his home phone number was in the Austin phone book and he believed it was an honor to serve the people and not serve corporations made him a lone figure in the legislature. But he was not really alone.
Even some of the so called liberal journalist--the two or three in the entire state--did not like Mattox because he didn't drink with them, didn't have their birthright, didn't think he was entitled. He was no elitist. He had callouses on his hands and knew what it was to go without limousine liberals generosity. His charity did not come with tuxedos and taffeta. Poverty was not an abstract concept to him. It wasn't something to fight at charity balls.
He listened to people. He didn't listen to critics. He was nearly Rooseveltian in his philosophy about measuring himself by the enemies he made. He believed in a Great Society. Texas certainly did not. The Democratic Party changed. The conservative Democrats became conservative Republicans and the poor, the middle class found a meaner colder Texas. Jim Mattox's liberalism died with the death of the Texas Democratic Party after George W. Bush and Karl Rove reinvented Texas politics. But the people they used and abused were the same ones that conservative Democrats had used, too. Democrats couldn't compete with Republicans in the polarized "liberal" verses "conservative" depiction of Texas.
Most Democrats in Texas were conservative and didn't really care so much about the people Jim Mattox served. After all those people suffered under Democratic administrations for years and Jim Mattox suffered at the hands of a press that championed the Democratic Establishment. Hell, the press was the Democratic Establishment. The Houston Post was owned by Lt. Governor William Hobby. The Dallas Morning News was a reactionary paper that long endorsed Democratic candidates when their was no real Republican Party in Texas until the election of Republican Senator John Tower. For eight years in the mid 1980s every statewide official was a Democrat--but what kind of Democrat? None were liberal Democrats like Jim Mattox.
