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The last Maverick: when Maury Maverick, Jr., died last January, Texas lost a legendary liberal, an eccentric curmudgeon who was a tireless champion of the downtrodden--and I lost a friend. (Letter from San Antonio).

Article Excerpt
LAST JANUARY, AS MAURY MAVERICK, JR., the legendary Texas liberal, lay dying of kidney failure in a San Antonio hospital, a small group of us--including his wife, Julia--stood near his bed, listening to his raspy, labored breathing. He was 82 and not yet ready to die. "I'm dying," he'd told me a few days before, "and I don't know what to do about it." There it was: the whole truth, blurted out from his deathbed, with his eyes wide open and his fists clenched. Bravery was a sharp instinct with Maury, part of his DNA, and it was with him until the end. * Standing over him in the hospital, I was unable to separate any aspect of my own personal or professional life from his illuminating and at times lacerating influence. In my mind, Maury was Don Quixote and I was Sancho Panza. But his influence was more than mythic. The flesh-and-blood Maury was a constant presence. I named him an official "bridesmaid" at my wedding in 1981. During the service, he stood under a live oak tree and gave a speech about the importance of fighting for personal liberty, even--in fact, especially--in marriage. I named my daughter Maury, hoping to give her some of his courage. * Now he was dying, the last of a political archetype--the real Texas Mavericks. Anglo liberals like Maury have long held a fragile stake in Texas. In San Antonio, where Mexican Americans outnumber Anglos and Catholics outnumber Protestants, that stake is largely demographically driven. The kind of evangelical conservatism that you find in East Texas and in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston just doesn't hold much sway. As a state legislator in the fifties, Maury supported the right of blacks and Mexican Americans to vote and of unions to organize. Crafty, contrarian but never cynical, he studied the Constitution the way other people study their horoscope: for fun. Consequently, anyone who thought of himself as down-and-out, put down, or picked on felt that Maury was his special ally. But times have changed in San Antonio, just like everywhere else. Unions don't have the power they once had. Minorities now speak for themselves. In San Antonio today, there is not a single Democratic politician of promise under fifty who is an Anglo. Maury was old and eccentric enough to ignore the new rules. He kept right on speaking out for labor and minorities as if it were still the fifties, and no one seemed to mind.

Maury was not by nature a nurturing man. Years ago his mother, Terrell Maverick Webb, described his father to me as "gently rough and roughly gentle." The same was true of Maury. If he and I went longer than a week without an argument, he...

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