“Genius” started pondering government issues at early age

Corrie MacLaggan | The Austin American-Statesman

In January 1975, a Harvard University junior from Texas named Bill White left school for the semester to work for a newly elected congressman from New Braunfels.

That came as a surprise to the congressman, Bob Krueger, who had met the redheaded student at a Harvard reception but doesn’t remember promising him a position.

Krueger says he figured he could send White back to Harvard if things didn’t work out. Within hours, Krueger knew he wouldn’t be getting rid of White. The student had a keen interest in energy policy and became his trusted adviser. The New York Times declared that as a freshman Democrat, Krueger had become the energy expert in the House.

“If that was true, it was entirely because I had Bill White, who tutored me all the way along,” Krueger said. “Bill is not bright; he is a genius.”

Now, White, 55, who went on to become a U.S. deputy secretary of energy and mayor of Houston, is running for governor as a Democrat. Inspired as a boy by watching TV images of civil rights-era events like the 1963 March on Washington — and injustices he saw in his native San Antonio — White began his involvement with politics years before he arrived at age 20 at Krueger’s office on Capitol Hill.

White’s parents — both school teachers — remember that as an elementary school child, he would roam along a wall near their San Antonio house and just think. Then, he’d come inside and talk to his dad about what was on his mind. “It was always way out of line for what you’d think a child would think about,” said Bill’s mother, Gloria White. Once, his father said, Bill had been contemplating the poultry surplus. His father found pamphlets scattered around his son’s room from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Bill White remembers his mother grading papers until the 10 o’clock news and his father holding a job at a department store in addition to teaching. On weekends, Bill — a freckle-faced boy who was known at home as Rusty — and his younger brother Robert did yard work.

“I learned to work hard,” Bill White said. “That was just expected in our family.”

The family managed money carefully. Gloria White still has a ledger from their early days of marriage where she wrote down everything she spent — $6.95 for a pair of shoes, $1.50 for gas.

Bill White’s Castle Hills Elementary School classmate Linda Greendyke remembers their neighborhood as a place where kids played in the street. The school itself “was mostly white, middle class — I remember everyone looking like me,” she said.

The Whites were Methodist Sunday school teachers, and once, Bill’s mother found him preaching in the backyard to nobody. “He was talking to the air,” she said. “All these feelings about God, how people should believe.”

White, who would later become a Methodist Sunday school teacher, says that his faith has taught him “that I and other people were not the center of the universe. That we were all a part of something much bigger.”

White developed an interest in government, sparked in part, he says, by “the horrors of Selma and Birmingham and the awakening of the civil rights movement.”

“That interested me, engaged me, when I saw that laws could make a difference,” he said, “and where there was a stark choice between some who felt we needed to defer making good on the promises made in our founding documents and others who thought, as did my parents … that every person is made in the image of God.”

White became aware that though San Antonio had a large Mexican American population, Mexican Americans were underrepresented in the business and political leadership of the city.

He became a page at the Texas Legislature in 1967, when he was in seventh grade. He remembers watching Barbara Jordan begin serving as Texas’ first African American state senator since 1883 and understanding that key changes were taking place in the state.

“He was very, very keenly interested in the many personalities that we had in the Senate,” recalled former Democratic state Sen. Joe Bernal, White’s boss and a bowling buddy of White’s father. “He’d ask me a lot of questions.”

White continued political work in high school, block-walking during the summers to register Hispanic voters who hadn’t cast ballots before because of the poll tax. The experience had a deep impact on White.”Those efforts by us and others changed the face of San Antonio politics,” White said. “Hispanics still were not fully represented in the political process.”

Also in high school, White became a champion debater, winning the national American Legion Oratorical Contest. The topic was duties and responsibilities of citizenship under the Constitution. The prize was a scholarship , which White used for his Harvard education.

Socially, White was “a little geeky” but didn’t “have any problem getting along with people,” said family friend John Bell. White’s debate partner , Scott Bage , remembers White’s “great sense of humor” and many evenings at the White home spent playing pingpong. In college, White developed a broad spectrum of friends, said Parker Folse, a classmate who arrived at Harvard from a similarly modest upbringing.

“You had the blue-blooded aristocracy from New England and New York who had generations before them go to Harvard,” said Folse, who also attended law school with White at the University of Texas. “There were all these famous names from not just the U.S. but from around the world. And then there were people like Bill and me.”

White’s assigned roommate was Mir Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and brother of Benazir Bhutto. One summer in college, White visited Pakistan for several weeks, glimpsing its government in action by accompanying Mir Murtaza Bhutto to town hall-type meetings where villagers would outline their grievances against the government.

Recalling White’s time working for him, Krueger said White drafted his bills to phase out oil and natural gas price controls and allow market pricing. As Krueger debated amendments on the House floor, White sat in the gallery and sent Krueger notes via a page on how to respond. The proposals narrowly failed, but Krueger remembers the impact White had.

White said he was very passionate then and now about reducing oil imports and having a more independent energy policy. “For me, it wasn’t a job,” White said. “It was a cause.”

cmaclaggan@statesman.com; 445-3548