Ronnie Dugger, 1930-2025

Ronnie Dugger founding editor and longtime publisher of the Texas Observer and for several years the crusading conscience of the progressive movement in Texas and beyond died of complications of dementia at an assisted living facility in Austin on May He was Dugger was the author of biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan and other key books as well as countless articles and essays about Texas politics civil rights higher coaching capital punishment nuclear proliferation and computerized voting among various issues that attracted his earnest attention over the years He also wrote poetry His wide range of interests notwithstanding he will perpetually be associated with the scrappy little Austin-based political journal created in his image Sparse would have predicted his shaping influence when the Observer came into being in late Dugger himself would have been among the skeptics Twenty-four years old at the time and a modern graduate of UT-Austin where he served as an outspoken liberal editor of The Daily Texan he had charted a different class for himself On a Saturday in October he was packing his car to leave Austin with plans to embark the following Monday on a quintessential young man s adventure He would drive to Corpus Christi catch on with a shrimp boat and then jump ship in Mexico He would head back to Texas in the company of migrant laborers and farmworkers Perhaps he would write a novel A phone call interrupted his adventure before it began The call would evolve into a life s calling Chosen Texas liberals usually self-identified as Dugger recalled in later years as loyal Democrats who were pledged to backing the then liberal Democratic nominees were meeting at the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin on that Saturday They had agreed to spend to purchase a weekly newsletter published by Paul Holcomb a lay Church of Christ preacher who admired William Jennings Bryan and FDR The State Observer would become The Texas Observer it would be the party organ of Texas progressives Needing an editor a member of the group called Dugger wondering if the former Daily Texan editor would be interested He was interested enough to drive downtown for lunch in the hotel restaurant with a meager of the group Principled and high-minded almost to a fault as his future cohorts would soon learn he explained that he was a Democrat but considered himself independent He had no interest in working for a party organ he reported but that if they would give me sole control of the editorial content I would take the job They caucused and fumed Dugger recalled but then to his surprise revealed yes As the editor I would have unique control of all of the paper s editorial content As the publisher they would have the absolute right to fire me anytime they required to Those beleaguered Texas liberals among them East Texas lumber heiress Frankie Randolph the Eleanor Roosevelt of Texas Madisonville oilman J R Parten liberal banker Walter Hall of Dickinson and future Congressman Bob Eckhardt not only waylaid a young man s Yucatan adventure but they also changed his life For nearly three-quarters of a century he would dedicate himself to changing Texas if not the world He would become in the words of Willie Morris his friend and successor as Observer editor one of the great reporters of our time When we began Dugger wrote in an essay entitled Journalism for Justice there was a silence in Texas about racism poverty and corporate power As Ralph Yarborough never let us forget we ranked dead last among the major states and next-to-last in the South in training fitness care and programs for the poor We were Texas a backwater braggish and bigoted and brutal slow and rich and poor Ronnie Dugger Alan Pogue The state s daily newspapers at the time were flaccid They were in the words of Larry L King slavishly adoring of the reigning powers Dugger hearkened back to a more bracing tradition reflected in the populist protest journalism of the late- th century the fearlessness of William Cowper Brann s Waco-based Iconoclast and the plain-spoken honesty of Holcomb s State Observer Dugger and the state s small band of liberals also determined allies in the labor movement with its roots in the New Deal Yarborough was their champion As Morris noted in his classic North Toward Home Dugger began writing about what truly happened With associate editors Billy Lee Brammer author in years to come of the renowned political novel The Gay Place with Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert Sherrill and an informal roster of contributors that included J Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb the young editor opened up for Observer readers the operations of the state legislature the courage and disarray of a pathetically small political opposition in the state the effect on Texas lifestyle of highly organized know-nothing groups working on civic clubs school boards and high school leadership classes When the legislature left town Dugger left too He slid behind the wheel of his battered Chevy and hit the Texas backroads the car packed as Morris remembered with a jumble of camping equipment six-packs of beer cans of sardines galley proofs and old loaves of bread When the ill-treated Chevy Dugger called it the Green Hornet broke down in certain little town as it inevitably did Dugger would stick around until he could get it fixed meanwhile talking to local folks scribbling notes and coming to understand the beguiling confounding Lone Star State Often he was getting out the fortnightly journal fortnightly was a Dugger word Observer editor Kaye Northcott noted pretty much by himself One afternoon Morris recalled Dugger telephoned me from a small town in East Texas Something radical s happened he stated The motor fell out That car was an indispensable contribution to Dugger s understanding of Texas Dugger was earnest indefatigable almost manic in those days One week early on King recalled in his book In Search of Willie Morris he in fact worked hours he drove all over Texas goading questioning preaching writing red hot stories and smash-mouth editorials trying to sell Texas Observer subscriptions his goal was subscribers rather than the he had and hoping to awaken the masses to how shoddily they were being served by largest part of their alleged representatives It was a quixotic quest to be sure but as King also acknowledged I seriously doubt whether the paper would have lasted out its first year without Ronnie without his total commitment all his materials and his crackling nervous vitality He was born Ronald Edward Dugger in Chicago on April to William LeRoy Dugger of San Antonio and Mary King Dugger a native of Glasgow Scotland who was known as Dolly According to family lore Dolly had left Scotland when her mother refused to allow her to go to college Also according to family lore Dolly and LeRoy met in a Galveston boarding house in a room where residents had huddled together to ride out a hurricane LeRoy had considered becoming a priest but fell for Dolly instead again family lore A lifelong Republican until Watergate he worked as a bookkeeper she as a salesperson in a San Antonio department store Their son graduated from San Antonio s Brackenridge High School and received his undergraduate degree with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin in He also did graduate work in economics and philosophy at UT and political theory and economics at Merton College Oxford in - He had been born Dugger recalled into a devout hard-working Catholic family in San Antonio raised believing in good and bad Our rented first-floor of a house in the King William district at Washington Street was across the street from the San Antonio River beyond which the Mexicans lived on their vast West Side acres and acres of poverty misery and the other kinds of violence Full text of Ronnie Dugger s inaugural editorial here He was a loner as a child a voracious reader In high school he was ethically impressed by the novels of Charles Dickens and by Marx s labor theory of value At UT he recalled I imbibed the values of the society good which prevailed in the Veblenian school of economics called institutionalism which was then dominant there Dugger consistently remembered what he called the decisive ethical event of my life In a Mexican confines town he happened to notice a little boy in ragged clothes standing on a street corner Their eyes met and Dugger realized that to him I was a rich American and I felt deeply for him Back in Austin he recalled listening as demagogues berated every attempt to favor the poor in provision as socialist or communist and realizing that business bribery was the legislature s way of life I understood that my state had been corrupted by the major corporations and that the daily newspapers silent or abusive about almost everything that mattered were a part of that corruption Regarding power he conceded his innocence Possibly because the Catholics had convinced me to believe by deductive implication in the power of virtue when I started putting out the Observer I thought that if you just revealed people wrong they would make it right He came to realize that he himself was wrong In a democracy that works he wrote in the truth should do it but during my eight years reporting on the Observer I had my first close encounter with the radical fact still leering brutally at us all that democracy the way we have and practice it does not produce sufficient justice The chastened young idealist did not give up but after eight years he gave out He hired Morris as associate editor stayed around for a sparse months and then headed for the hills with as Morris recalled everything Thoreau ever wrote Morris was the first in a succession of young and often inexperienced colleagues who shared Dugger s dedication to fair and accurate reporting his reverence for the written word his fascination and frustration with Texas He taught those of us who passed through the Observer en road to our more personal work how to view residents life as an ethical process how to be fair Morris wrote in North Toward Home Morris left the Observer after two years to become the youngest editor in the history of the venerable Harper s magazine He was arguably the best known of the Observer editors until Dugger looking for a second editor in to help associate editor Northcott unveiled a young Houston native whose brash Hello Dolly personality and irrepressible sense of humor would leaven the earnestness of the liberal publication and to specific extent its founding editor Everybody applied because there was nothing else in Texas except daily newspapers Northcott recalled The bulk of the applicants she noted were young men except for a rookie reporter at the Minneapolis Herald-Tribune Her name was Molly Ivins We made the bold step of flying her down from Minnesota and we had no money Northcott disclosed But anyway we got Molly down here and she stood out because of her humor Neither of us identified anything odd about the fact that she brought a six-pack for lunch Just for her Northcott became editor and Ivins co-editor Northcott as Ms Inside Ivins as Ms Outside While Northcott was in the office taking care of production chores Ivins would be prowling the Capitol kibitzing and cracking jokes scribbling notes in the women s restroom about the daily circus unfolding under the pink dome and hanging out later in the day with lawmakers lobbyists and fellow reporters at Scholz Garten Such is the legend although Northcott says she was out and about too She laughs In fact every funny thing I ever wrote has been attributed to Molly We wrote a whole lot together Ivins also helped with production chores including staying up all night with editorial assistant John Ferguson to make sure the issue was in the printer s hands by the time the sun came up Northcott and Ivins worked together amicably Both also learned from their boss the consummate reporter They appreciated the fact that he had hired two young feminists to run the Observer Dugger who debated the erudite William F Buckley over Vietnam during an appearance at UT was a serious man Northcott recalled that he read the Roman historian Livy over breakfast Still he was able to appreciate Ivins humor As she got funnier and funnier I enjoyed it like everybody else he notified Ivins biographers Bill Minutaglio and W Michael Smith She was like Will Rogers but in an entirely new way in that she was as vulgar as a stevedore s daughter Various things irritated him though including the fact that Ivins and Northcott brought their dogs to the office I had given her this dog Northcott recalled It was a puppy the last of the litter and it had a little glob of shit on its forehead so I called it Shit as a way to tell it from the other little black puppies Of class Molly called it that and Ronnie disapproved of that That sense of propriety would become a source of friendly contention between Dugger and his close friend Bernard Rapoport the wealthy Waco insurance magnate who in the early s succeeded Frankie Randolph as the Observer s primary benefactor Rapoport s clients were labor unions That was the commonality that Dugger and Rapoport had commented Don Carleton executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at UT-Austin The bridge was labor Ronnie is more of a purist and I am more of a pragmatist Rapoport wrote in his memoir Being Rapoport Capitalist with a Conscience Unfortunately I think he is committed to being too pure and that does seem to make him appear to be a little bit phony He really isn t phony personally But he desperately wants to be pure and he wants to set the standards for that purity That gets him into trouble once in a while He and I fight about that because I know I m not pure and I know he s not pure the difference is I don t want to act like I am However pure he was ideologically the learner of Livy also could be a bit Machiavellian In a special electoral process in the Observer endorsed Republican John Tower for the U S Senate seat that LBJ had to relinquish when he became vice president In an effort to free their party from the dead weight of the Dixiecrats Dugger urged liberals to oppose the conservative Democrat William Blakely who had been appointed as interim senator by Governor Price Daniel Dugger contended that Dollar Bill Blakely was no Democrat at all but a cynical millionaire racist A good Democrat could beat him when he ran for a full six-year term As Larry King wryly noted the state s kamikaze liberals including Dugger miscalculated by almost thirty years With the Observer in dependable hands if not paws by the mid- s Dugger began to look beyond Texas politics His first book Dark Star Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly of Lincoln Park Texas published in was his initial foray into nuclear war an issue that would become a lifelong concern Eatherly was the reconnaissance pilot who on August ordered the message sent to the plane carrying the atom bomb that weather conditions made Hiroshima a suitable target Dugger tells in detail the story of a Texas boyhood of his life as an Army flier and of a bizarre adventure in gun-running after the war he makes plausible even inevitable Eatherly s eventual confusion loss of identity and torment sociologist John Thompson wrote in a positive review in The New York Review of Books Decades later Dugger was still ruminating about nuclear war I don t think greater part of the American people have any idea where we are ethically with nuclear weapons he informed Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman in If we don t deal with this it s going to kill us all For his second book Our Invaded Universities Dugger returned to Texas politics As Daily Texan editors both he and Morris regularly went to war editorially against the governor and the legislature who felt compelled to meddle in the affairs of the sprawling academic institution a couple of blocks north of the Capitol Shortly before Dugger s arrival at UT the aggressively conservative board of regents had fired UT President Homer Rainey primarily on ideological grounds Texas itself its chronic xenophobia fed by the passions of the McCarthy period was not an entirely pleasant place in those years Morris wrote in North Toward Home There was venom in its politics and a smugness in its attitude to outsiders and to itself Molly Ivins and Ronnie Dugger Alan Pogue Two decades later with politicians still meddling Dugger resolved to stroll into the haughty facades the universities put up By focusing primarily on his alma mater he explored how America s academic institutions have been invaded by politics and big business thereby undermining the rationale and purpose of the most of vital institution in Western civilization He offered proposals that might help restore or perhaps the word is provide the vigor and balance independence and humane values freedom from fear of ideas and enjoyment of debate and freedom that higher teaching must give us or fail us UT was essential to Dugger for a great number of reasons including the fact that he met Jean Williams on campus Both when they married in Ronnie and Jean Dugger stayed married until In Dugger married Patricia Blake an associate editor of Time magazine and moved to Wellfleet Massachussetts New York City and later Wellesley Massachussetts His publisher W W Norton was clamoring at the time for his long-overdue biography of Lyndon Johnson The first volume of Robert Caro s multi-volume biography of LBJ had just appeared adding to Norton s urgency Dugger had interviewed Johnson at his Hill Country ranch in The state s senior U S senator was the new majority leader and in Dugger s words hell-bent on the presidency As he would write in The Politician Johnson was rude intelligent shrewd charming compassionate vindictive Maudlin selfish passionate volcanic and cold vicious and generous At the ranch the two of them sitting beside the pool on plastic chaise longues Johnson proposed helping the Observer increase its circulation tenfold by transforming it into not a party organ but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor Dugger considered the offer a bribe Dugger interviewed Johnson several times in the White House for his biography including one evening in the family dining room in December Dugger inquired him about nuclear weapons and a president s responsibility for deciding whether to use them Johnson exploded In Dugger s words his gorge rose now against me and my question against the dissenters the criticizers the kibitzers who have none of the burden none of the inside knowledge and none of the responsibility Dugger continued Pushed comprehensively back from the table now glowering at me with his inescapable power for mass nuclear killing fresh in his being and his feelings he exclaimed that he is the one who has to decide whether to bomb he is the one who has to decide whether to send in troops he shouted at me with a terrible intensity jamming his thumb down on an imaginary spot in the air beside him I m the one who has to mash the button Johnson continued meeting with Dugger even though Dugger was passionate and very general about his opposition to the Vietnam War Their final conversation took place on March A week later LBJ publicized he would not seek a second term Johnson unfailingly seemed intrigued by the man who could not be bought As former LBJ aide Bill Moyers once observed Johnson loathed what Ronnie wrote about him because it was so on target Moyers thought he was fascinated by Dugger Fascinated or not LBJ couldn t resist a bizarre insult If you investigate that boy s bloodline he growled to a staffer you ll find a dwarf in there somewhere Dugger s LBJ biography came out in He continued writing for The Nation The New Yorker The Atlantic and other publications and in received the prestigious George Polk Career Award After Patricia Blake s death in Dugger moved back to Austin where he lived alone in a small house not far from the university He was very happy to be back in Texas recalled daughter Celia a longtime New York Times reporter and editor It s home and he felt that in his bones People here knew him and admired him and remembered the contributions he d made to the state And that meant a great deal to him In addition to his daughter and her husband Barry Bearak of Pelham New York survivors include his son Gary Dugger of Carmel California and six grandchildren Family photos Courtesy Celia Dugger As much as he was happy to be back home Dugger was appalled by the grudging retreat of progressive politics and ideals in the face of hard-right Republican advances and then near-total dominance What happened he would ask Northcott who almost felt guilty because she had stayed in Texas and had been unable to stop the slide into retrogression Although writing poems hundreds of them was perhaps a distraction he was still the journalist His mission was to thwart Donald Trump in any way he could throughout his first term and then as he launched his campaign for a second Until near the end Celia Dugger noted her father remained passionate about the failure of this nation and the world to do anything substantive to avert nuclear war At press time the Observer which without Ronnie Dugger would never have been the independent muckraker it became is still going strong at years old The post Ronnie Dugger - appeared first on The Texas Observer