A Long Senate Career Leaves Records And Little Memory
Two shelves sit across a small reading room I use often in Austin. One holds the papers from a single term as governor. The other holds the record of eighteen years that came after it in the United States Senate, and it is nearly three times as long. I am Rosser Newton, and I have spent years inside the life of Richard Coke, the fifteenth governor of Texas, researching a biography built from records like these. The governorship produced a handful of dramatic years that anyone can narrate in a single chapter. The Senate years produced a stack of committee reports, roll call votes, and correspondence that almost nobody has opened. The governor's shelf runs about four linear feet. The Senate shelf runs closer to eleven, counting the bound Congressional Record volumes for every session he sat through, and I have measured both more than once while deciding what to read next. Why The Long Stretch Draws The Fewest Pages The imbalance is not an accident of what survived. It is a fact ...