Cisneros’ Grand Opera : With All the Nation a Stage, San Antonio’s Mayor Went From Rising Political Star to Tragic Hero

Halfway into a city council meeting, Henry Cisneros leaves the chambers and walks across the Mexican-tiled hallway to his office, its outer security door serving to politely scrape off the doting crowd that the mayor of San Antonio invariably accumulates like a human snowball wherever he moves.

He closes the door of his office, a corner one on the ground floor, then slides Pavarotti off the stereo and cranks up some rock ‘n’ roll.

Outside, a staff member cocks his head and listens. After more than seven years, they can usually gauge the mayor’s moods by the music he plays: the Aggie fight song from his alma mater, Texas A&M; a Verdi opera; a march by Sousa.

Unprecedented Days

Through the paneled walls, through the bookcases with their carefully labeled shelves of “art, urban affairs, philosophy, crime” as well as volumes praising the person and accomplishments of Henry Cisneros, the rhythm pulses.

It is a Beach Boys song, “Good Vibrations.” And just what that might mean, no one can hazard a guess. For these are unprecedented days in the life of the brilliant young Latino mayor of the nation’s ninth-largest city.

Not two weeks earlier, in an extraordinary 45-minute mea culpa at the gate of his gray clapboard house, faced with morning headlines about an extramarital affair, he took a deep breath and began to talk.

He acknowledged that among all the bizarre rumors this town had been chewing over for months like a stick of Doublemint, this much was true: there were longtime difficulties in his 19-year marriage, and he was involved with a woman who is not his wife.

‘Dark Poetry’ of His Life

It was the envoi of what Cisneros, 41, had recently characterized as the “dark poetry” of his life of late. In just the last 18 months, he had hosted the Pope and the king of Spain, fathered a son who is gravely ill, become enamored of this other woman, bailed out of plans to campaign for governor, turned down an offer to address the Democratic National Convention, and finally chose not even to stand for a fifth term as mayor.

This was not just a minor embarrassing froth in an up-and-coming Sun Belt city. This was not just the lame-duck mayor of some South Texas burg doing penance at his fence--characteristically, the only white picket fence the length of West Houston Street.

Because for nearly 15 years, Henry Cisneros--whether he liked it or not, and usually he did--has been a publicly traded corporation in which thousands of people bought emotional and political stock:

Latinos nationwide saw in Cisneros the able new crossover politician to carry them forward. Local families put up his poster alongside portraits of President John F. Kennedy. City leaders cheered Cisneros’ genius in bringing unity and a new can-do spirit to the city.

He was backed by booted and suited Texas money men who know politicians as well as they know horses and don’t stake money ill-advisedly on either. National political observers had been tracking his progress for years.

At a public forum here last week, one speaker, resident Bob Rios, with an edge of sarcasm but no want of truth, limned Cisneros’ political aura--”mayor slash hero slash maybe next governor slash maybe President.”

Hence, this was not just a mayor of San Antonio, said a local journalist. This was the future.

And the morning that a local paper headlined “Cisneros Confesses Deep Love for Medlar”--the splashiest from three days of news stories that had broached the matter--the future stood on his front lawn and opened his veins.

‘New Rules of the Game’

“Given what public life is today and the new rules of the game where absolutely everything is public, all I would ask for is understanding. . . . I’m sorry that as leader of the community, San Antonio and my name go together on these problems. I guess human beings just aren’t made of plastic and wiring and metal; they’re made of flesh and blood and feelings.”

The man a Texas magazine once said resembled an Aztec lord all but laid his own heart on the altar of public judgment, while acting out the credo of the early Puritans: public confession, public contrition, public forgiveness.

“It’s hard to believe,” said a 20-year-old local Air Force brat who watched him on TV. “Here he is admitting adultery, and when he’s done, you’re saying, ‘Oh poor Henry.’ ”

If it was, as one Texas columnist adjudged it, the soliloquy of “a Tex-Mex Hamlet,” it demanded a glossary the Prince of Denmark never knew: burnout and stress and mid-life crisis.

Ruben Munguia Sr. is Cisneros’ uncle and early political guru, and although he is not pleased at his promising nephew’s impolitic frankness, he nonetheless feels constrained to ask: “Don’t all of us play Hamlet at one time or another?”

In a frame that has found a place on just about every desk Henry Cisneros has used in public life is a speech by Robert F. Kennedy.

Cisneros has been known to quote it often, for it expresses much of his belief about how life can be lived: “Our future may be beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine destiny. . . .”

On San Antonio’s Latino westside, there was another framed speech on the wall of his middle-class house: Douglas MacArthur’s West Point address about duty, honor, country. Cisneros, the eldest child, took it as seriously as did his parents, an Army colonel-civil servant and the daughter of a Mexican political intellectual.

Like the Kennedys, much was expected of the Cisneros children. Self-discipline and hard work worked. You made your destiny, not vice versa. It was also the Aggie philosophy of Texas A&M;, where he was an outstanding cadet. At 23, Cisneros was named a fellow in the Nixon White House, and later earned graduate degrees from Harvard and George Washington University in urban policy, finance and government.

Cisneros was blue chip, a Hispanic Jimmy Stewart going to Washington, a man of staggering promise. He could not seem to put a foot wrong. By age 28, he was back in San Antonio and a city councilman. At 33, he was elected mayor.

Instinctive Charisma

Many politicians are smart. Many share Cisneros’ technocratic relish for the minutiae of governing. But it was his rare, instinctive charisma that breathed life into the other two.

The morning after Cisneros’ election, stacks of pink phone message slips awaited him from across the country, and Walter Mondale was on the line. It was heady stuff. He would talk to Mondale again in 1984, as a possible vice presidential running mate.

For the next seven years, San Antonio became a sort of exciting Oz, and Cisneros its wizard. From his endless lists of ideas, new projects sprang up. Ventures like bio-tech plants and Sea World came to town. Cisneros’ name appeared in high school history textbooks. Business and government groups clamor to hear his speeches at $7,500 per--vital moonlighting income for Cisneros, who earns $4,040 a year as mayor, less than $1 an hour with his relentless work schedule.

If people had expected a ‘60s “Pancho Villa,” said former press aide Jill Collins, “what they got was Brooks Brothers,” a scholarly, politically moderate, humane, results-oriented work machine who sought to build coalitions in a faction-fraught city.

Millionaire businessman Red McCombs--rancher, auto tycoon, owner of the Spurs basketball team--was among Cisneros’ first powerful converts. “I am a soldier who will move at his command at any time, and I wouldn’t even ask why.” Cisneros’ photo sits in McCombs’ office alongside a picture of his grandchildren.

Of course he had skirmishes, even petty fits of temper. Miscalculating public opinion, he scourged the divorced city manager for vacationing with a divorced woman--a remark which has come back to snap at his heels. He lost a fight over fluoridated water, of all things. Some barrio organizations looked askance at his business ties. Some Democrats took Cisneros, who cherishes a friendship with George Bush, for a lukewarm loyalist.

But even Cisneros’ enemy C. A. Stubbs--the head of a local taxpayers group, who is gleeful at the fall of “Glamour Boy”--admits, “If he’d been a Republican, he’d probably be President of the U.S. right now.”

Cisneros won four mayoral elections by fairy-tale margins--once, by 94%.

The only question was, when would Henry make his move? And how high would he go?

“We knew he was going to move on at some point,” says Helen Ayala, former president of the barrio organization COPS. “He wasn’t always going to be mayor of San Antonio.”

Breakfast With Gorbachev

In fact, much of his power lay not in who he was, but in what he might become. Mere mayors of San Antonio are not appointed to President Reagan’s Commission on Central America, headed by Henry Kissinger. They do not not have breakfast with Mikhail Gorbachev. They are not courted as a potential president from as far away as Japan.

Henry Cisneros’ career, then, was proof of his desktop credo that your life is what you make it. And until recently, it worked.

The situation began splintering well over a year ago, sources said. There had long been “deep problems in the marriage,” Cisneros said on television. He and his wife, Mary Alice, are “two good people,” he said in his front-lawn musings, but “together they’re not as good a team.”

Some advisers long ago urged him to divorce and cut his losses, but there were two daughters and a lot of Catholic and personal considerations. “Your failure to make bold decisions catches up with you at some point,” he admitted on TV.

In June 1987, Mary Alice bore a son. John Paul Anthony, named for the Pope and the city’s patron saint, received a papal blessing. Within a day of his birth, Cisneros revealed that the boy was critically, perhaps fatally ill, with no spleen and a heart with two valves instead of four.

At age 40, Cisneros had encountered a problem beyond the command of charm and sweat and intellect. In a local TV documentary, he remarked of his ailing son, “I’ve never been handed a sentence . . . which says, you cannot fix it.”

It was a textbook formula for burnout, said acquaintances. With 80-hour weeks and little staff, the prospect of huge medical bills for the baby , and weighted down by expectations that he would run for governor, Cisneros had other, private dilemmas. Even before the baby was born, he had supposedly fallen in love.

A Perilous Course

Some people close to him tried to warn how perilous a course this was; “I tried to tell him about the rumors; he didn’t believe it,” said one unhappily.

Rumors of other women had floated for years, Texas sources say. Almost any woman who had passed within 10 feet of him--staffers, reporters--was fair game for political gossip. When reporters asked, Cisneros dismissed the rumors lightly with remarks like “that’s not what I’m about.”

One former associate called it his “Achilles heel.” True or not, appearances matter in politics. “Women just melted” around Cisneros, no longer the gawky bookworm whose bow tie was wider than his neck, but a star with the face of an hidalgo in an El Greco painting. “Anyone in the family who spoke to Henry did advise him to clean up his act if there was any such (problem),” said his uncle Ruben. “Rumors and lies,” he added pointedly, “are the same thing.”

But this time it was not just rumors. In recent months, Cisneros himself had confided in “2,500 of his close personal friends,” the quip went, that he had been involved since 1987 with Linda Medlar, 39, a political fund-raiser now reportedly separated from her husband. When Cisneros haltingly told reporters that “the spirit seeks the sustenance it needs and the happiness it needs,” it was clearly Medlar he was talking about.

Some journalists speculate that Cisneros may have half-wanted the story to break, to clear the air and free him to act once the political stakes were lost. But other sources say that he was retreating methodically from public life, hoping the lid would stay on until spring, when his term expires, so he could handle matters, says McCombs, “with honor and dignity”--and privacy.

State Rep. Dan Morales says his friend was simply “burned out . . . Henry is among those who understand that there are indeed more important things than holding public office.”

Citing his son’s health and the conflicting demands of office-holding and office-seeking, Cisneros said last fall he would not run for governor, sending Texas political handicappers into a tizzy. He said this fall he would not run for mayor. He would not address the Democratic convention, as he had in 1984, lest he raise hopes.

“I wanted him to run for governor,” said a disappointed McCombs, and when he didn’t, “I think it was understood it was more than John Paul.”

According to Cisneros’ own televised explanation, he was trying “to work this out outside of public office so I could never embarrass . . . the dignity of the job and I thought I could make it that far.”

‘Honestly Confused’

“I think in the beginning he was honestly confused,” said a Texas political source close to the situation, then tried to tough it out. “He’s forever dodged the bullets and saw another bullet coming and thought, ‘I’m gonna dodge this one.’ He felt he played by a different set of rules.”

That Cisneros was, the source said, “living a double life . . . while maintaining the mantle of a family person,”--declaring 1987 the Year of the Family, hosting the Pope while involved with another woman--did not go over well in some quarters.

Even his mother, Elvira, told interviewers her son was unfairly blaming his ailing baby to shield the “other woman,” and reportedly suggested Medlar was a political plant. (Cisneros’ brother Tim, a well-known Houston architect who wryly ranks politics “slightly below drug-dealing” as a career, noted with a laugh that maybe his mom “should have ‘no comment’ written on her forehead.”)

Two people left the the mayor’s private political organization, the now-defunct Committee for Progress. The word hypocrisy has surfaced elsewhere.

“He is popular and he’s shown himself to be a good leader,” says Houston-area Democratic official Jack Carter. “At the same time I think most people feel some uneasiness (that) he was leading a double life because when he was not telling the truth to his wife, he was not telling the truth to us.”

“The long-term issue,” says the Texas political source, “is, how does he deal with (crisis) when he gets in a tight spot?”

Cisneros himself acknowledged on television, “I did my best to try to put a mythic family hold on it because of religion and a lot of other things, but there’s no way to paper over the difficulties of life.”

Everyone here calls him Henry.

For all its new big-city gloss, San Antonio preserves a small-town intimacy. When a local TV newsman and his wife faced infertility, viewers followed their televised progress, including sonograms and birth.

And for years, Cisneros made himself accessible, and his private life public.

San Antonio is “family,” Cisneros has said. Opening a local newspaper was almost like opening a Cisneros family album: Henry taking a shovel to a pothole, Henry tossing trash in a garbage truck, Henry serenaded by mariachis on his birthday. He conducted a press tour of his remodeled home. Reporters learned about his wife’s troubled pregnancy, were filled in on details of his son’s birth defects, and invited to cover the christening. In what local journalist Linda O’Connell characterized as Cisneros’ “male Madonna pose,” he and his infant son were photographed for “Texas Monthly” last year, clad in white on clouds of bedding.

Some reporters, even while priding themselves on having a good relationship with the famous mayor, were also puzzled by his candor on matters public and private. So when the rumors began months ago, reporters were in a quandary.

The city became “a million-person rumor mill.” Dwight Silverman, a reporter at the alternative weekly The Current--which wrote the first story in which Cisneros all but acknowledged his extramarital relationship--was scolded by a supermarket checker for not writing about Cisneros’ “love child,” in whose existence she firmly believed.

Spreading Rumors

Cisneros had been shot in one leg by his wife and taken to one hospital, the rumors went. No, he had been shot in the other leg by the other woman and taken to a different hospital. (Cisneros is said to have obligingly limped around City Hall after hearing that one.)

Reporters in this competitive news town looked in vain for the hard evidence: birth certificates, hospital records.

Some residents accused the press of protecting the mayor. Others congratulated their silence. There were even rumors about rumors, that a big advertiser had threatened to yank his ads if anything was published.

Cisneros had already confided in certain reporters and editors. “He was going around putting fingers in dikes,” believes San Antonio Light columnist Rick Casey, “selling us on reasons why not to run the story.”

Some he told off the record. Some told on the record, like investigative TV reporter Hollis Grizzard, apparently decided that as long as it didn’t affect Cisneros’ work, there was no story. He wasn’t running for office. “We elected him mayor, not husband,” said Grizzard.

Other journalists, among them O’Connell, argue that matters had preoccupied and distracted Cisneros, leaving him “uncharacteristically unfocused. We didn’t see the great coalition builder, and why was the question,” she said.

In short, reporters in the post-Gary Hart age wrung their hands.

But Cisneros is a mayor. He knows what an easement is: What has been public for years cannot suddenly be made private. “My whole life,” he later said, “is laid out on a glass platter.”

Throughout this Hispanic-majority town, many women are perturbed at what they see as cavalier treatment of his wife, Mary Alice, who two days after the revelations took her children to a public prayer meeting at her new church, where the Baptist minister prayed for “a miracle” of reconciliation.

But phone calls and letters to the mayor’s office have been running four to one in support of Cisneros. He still ranks high in state polls, and damage controllers must be ready to believe Cisneros has eight lives left: He serves a few years in the penalty box, and makes a comeback, at least in Texas--or so the scenario goes.

“When people like someone, they look for reasons to forgive them,” said a San Antonio barrio activist, “and they like Henry.”

Some of what Cisneros has lost in idol-worship he may have gained back in sympathy--the flawed hero. At the juvenile hall where his brother George Jr., a musical scholar, volunteers to teach, a 14-year-old juvenile delinquent--the kind of kid to whom Cisneros was maddeningly held up as a role model--bounded up to George recently and said delightedly, “ ‘it makes me feel so good that he’s one of us.’ Meaning,” recounted George, “he makes mistakes, gets up and goes again.”

‘Do Your Business’

Henry had “a bad booster, a rubber ring that didn’t work well,” suggests his uncle, the political science Ph.D. “Now we’re back in the space program again.” And he “should have learned a big lesson” from this: “ Callete (keep quiet) and do your business as it’s supposed to be done.”

“(To) those attempting to write Henry’s political obituary, I think it’s premature,” believes Morales.

And, so far, no official has been willing to risk publicly putting a stake in Cisneros’ heart; he is too well-liked, and perhaps too viable still.

Not long ago in Houston, Cisneros moderated a national Hispanic issues debate. Three participants were past or present governors, one of whom had run for president. When it was over, nearly half of the audience of 400 elbowed aside the governors to reach Cisneros, to clamor for his autograph and urge him to run again.

But though recent polls speak to Cisneros’ enduring popularity, none can realistically gauge how he would stand up to the snake pit of a statewide, much less a national campaign--if indeed he really wants to. “That’s another question mark,” Morales says.

His brother George is annoyed that anyone should feel deprived and disappointed by Cisneros’ retreat.

“I think a lot of people project their lives and expectations on other people. . . . If people want to make him a sacrificial lamb and he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t have to do it.”