A Reporter Remembers Tom Murphy

Dick Pettys writes in InsiderAdvantage Georgia:

My usual sources had blinders on. They didn’t really think it was possible for Tom Murphy, powerful Speaker of the Georgia House, to lose that election back in 2002, even though he’d had a close call just two years before and refused to let his friends change the district through reapportionment to make it better for him. (That would have meant harming a friend in an adjacent district.) Still, they expected him to pull it out, as he had for decades, although not with ease; after all, the district was trending Republican.

They said he was pulling out all the stops this time; running an up-to-date campaign. So one day in the fall I decided to go out and see for myself, and caught up with the towering figure in Georgia politics at a community center in Dallas.

He looked different away from the Capitol, far from the constant stream of supplicants, the security, the palace guard. And absent the usual trappings of his office, he looked a little older, a little worn by the grind of nearly 30 years in office and, perhaps, even a little vulnerable. It was a side of Murphy, then 78, I had never noticed before.

It was only a modest campaign event, and it chiefly brought out older people Murphy had known for years in his west Georgia district. It was clear they loved him and he loved them, but he seemed to be missing a key ingredient: the newer, younger people who’d moved into the district and didn’t know who Tom Murphy was, despite the radio commercials Zell Miller had cut for him that said: “This district can’t afford to lose the likes of Tom Murphy.”

He and I talked some that evening for a story I was preparing, and I watched him tease some of the ladies - the old smoothie! - as he posed with them for digital photos that a supporter printed out for them on the spot. The matrons giggled like schoolgirls when he told them he planned to put some of their pictures on his web site. This from a man who liked to boast he had never used a computer!

Life changes and you’ve got to adapt. Murphy knew that better than anyone. As conditions changed in his own House, he shrewdly shifted to accommodate them - a device that served him well until his own party became too fractured and too small to cope with much more of that dynamic.

I first observed that technique in action back in the 70s when a lawmaker who’d been a pain in Murphy’s side - much to the delight of reporters, who found his rebelliousness colorful - all of a sudden quit talking to the press. After being rebuffed by him for comment several times, I finally said, “You’ve been muzzled!”

He replied: “Yeah, and it was the sweetest little muzzle I’ve ever walked into in my life.”

The rebel had been brought into the inner circle as part of the elite - and, to many, the mysterious - “Green Door Committee,” the group that wrote the budget for the House.

Capturing the enemy by making him part of the team was a technique Murphy used time and again as the House became more diverse through reapportionment, and as the Democratic membership started sliding to GOP electoral gains.

In 2002, there was no more change left in Tom Murphy, it seems, and yet the man I talked with on that fall evening seemed more comfortable with himself than I had ever seen him at the Capitol. I had one of those souvenir photos made with the Speaker that night, and I like that photo of him better than most I have seen during the recent coverage of his death, where he’s been caught with a scowl or a frown. Murphy wears his trademark Stetson and the maroon sport coat he loved. And he’s smiling. I’m reproducing it at the bottom of this column.

Everybody’s got a Murphy story, and I hope those who were part of the “fraternity” will soon weigh-in. By “fraternity,” I mean that brotherhood of people brave enough to put their names on a ballot and let voters judge them every two or four years. They understood Murphy best, those folks like Larry Walker, Terry Coleman, Zell Miller, Bill Lee, Matt Towery, Tom Buck and so many, many others.

I hope some of them will tell you what it was like to be part of the House “family.” Murphy wasn’t just “Mr. Speaker,” he also was the ultimate father figure to many in the chamber. There weren’t many he didn’t refer to as “son,” and there weren’t many who didn’t try to please him - not because they felt they had to do so, but because they wanted to do so. He scolded them like an angry father when he had to, but he also took the heat for them when that was necessary to do.

At the height of his power, watching Murphy make an appearance on the third-floor corridor was an event in itself. Wearing his hat like a crown and his overcoat over his shoulders like a cape, he would sweep out of his office with a crowd of followers, headed for lunch, and return the same way.

Ego? I don't think so. He was applying the theatrical skills any good courtroom lawyer possesses, but just on a different stage. The grand entrances and exits with an entourage simply added to the mystique and, thus, the power of Tom Murphy, much as the gruff and sometimes brusque exterior concealed an old Irishman’s soft heart for the weak and the downtrodden.

He and I didn’t always have an easy relationship, but I think it improved toward the final years of his career. Maybe it was because I got a little wiser and, despite the smug and cynical attitude reporters tend to develop, gained a deeper appreciation for a man who endured the Great Depression, went to war when his country called in World War II, and returned to raise a family and try to give something back to the wider community.

Anyway, here is that picture - one of perhaps 10,000 taken of him posing with people over the years. But one I value.