The freakout, in case you missed it, involves Stanley Druckenmiller, a billionaire investor with a habit of being right about markets, who published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal disagreeing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bond market maneuvers. The argument itself barely survived the news cycle. What survived was the discovery that Druckenmiller had used AI to help write it — and that he wasn’t the least bit sorry about it. “Of course I used AI,” he told a reporter. “My name is on the piece. It’s my message.”

That should have been the end of it. Instead, it set off exactly the kind of tut-tutting I’ve come to expect from an industry that spent the last decade losing readers and the last two years finding new ways to blame everyone but itself.

Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial page editor and a man who has forgotten more about opinion journalism than most of his critics will ever know, didn’t blink. He called AI a fact of modern life — the same category as spellcheck, search engines, and every other tool people already lean on for research, grammar, and editing. His standard for what runs on his page isn’t whether a tool touched it. It’s whether the argument is genuinely the author’s own, and whether the author has earned the standing to make it. That’s not a man abandoning standards. That’s a man who understands what the standard was actually protecting in the first place — and it was never the typewriter.

Naturally, the professional scolds disagreed. One media critic reached for the kind of language you’d expect at a heresy trial, and Gigot returned fire in kind, unbothered. Another argued that opinion journalism is being devalued by turning it into an industrial product manufactured without human involvement — the implication being that a hedge fund legend’s argument stops being his own the moment a machine helps him organize it.

I’ve heard this tune before. It’s the same one my old colleagues in the newsroom used to hum about word processors replacing typewriters, and then about the internet replacing the newsroom itself, and now about AI replacing the writer. Every generation of media gatekeeper has found a reason why the new tool is the one that finally crosses the sacred line — usually right around the time the tool stops requiring their permission to use.

Let’s call this what it is: elitism dressed up as ethics. The people most offended by AI in media are, more often than not, the people who benefited most from being the only ones with the printing press. For a hundred years, having your byline mean something required an institution behind it — a wire service, a desk, an editor with the authority to say yes. AI doesn’t threaten the truth. It threatens the toll booth. And there is a very old, very human instinct to dress up “you’re taking my toll booth” as “you’re endangering civilization.”

I say this as someone who started at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times when a byline still meant a story had survived three sets of skeptical eyes. I was, by the way, a genuinely terrible speller — the kind of terrible that gets noticed. An editor there caught it early and offered a piece of advice I’ve carried around for close to fifty years now: “There’s no shame in not knowing how to spell. The shame is in not knowing how to use a dictionary.” He wasn’t handing me an excuse. He was handing me a tool, and telling me the only sin available was refusing to pick it up. Nobody in that newsroom thought less of a reporter for owning a dictionary. They’d have thought a great deal less of one who let a story go out wrong because he was too proud to open it. AI is the dictionary. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you principled. It just makes you the reporter still too proud to open the book.

I also spent nearly twenty-five years standing next to a man, Boone Pickens, who trusted very few people’s first drafts of anything, including his own. Boone didn’t fear new tools. He built an entire second career, at Mesa and then BP Capital, betting on the idea that the world runs on energy nobody has figured out how to fully harness yet. He’d have looked at this AI panic in the media business and asked the same three questions he asked about everything else: Is it smart? Does it serve the truth? Does anybody pushing back on it have a conflict of interest they’re not naming? Ask those questions honestly about the AI debate in media, and the answers get uncomfortable fast for a lot of the loudest critics.

Here’s my actual point, and it’s not “AI good, humans irrelevant.” It’s the opposite. We are living through the single greatest restructuring of the media landscape in its history — bigger than the printing press reaching a mass audience, bigger than radio, bigger than cable news, bigger than the internet’s first wave. Every one of those previous restructurings got denounced by the establishment it displaced, and every one of them ultimately made information more available, not less. AI is the current chapter of that same story, playing out simultaneously across a newsroom at Dow Jones and a stranger’s Substack and somebody’s TikTok account, and pretending otherwise — pretending this is uniquely dangerous rather than uniquely fast — is just Ludditism with better vocabulary.

The tool isn’t the threat. The tool used lazily is the threat. I use AI constantly in this very newsletter — not to think for me, but to argue with, to test a structure against, to chase down a fact before I embarrass myself in front of readers who know and will absolutely call me on it. It sharpens my thinking. It doesn’t replace it. Used that way — to reinforce accuracy, to pressure-test an argument, to spur a creative angle you wouldn’t have found alone — AI makes individual thought sharper, not smaller. Used the other way, to manufacture a stranger’s opinion and slap a byline on it, it deserves every bit of the scorn the scolds want to throw at it. The tool was never the ethics problem. The user always was.

So here’s where I’ve landed, same place I usually land in this space: the answer isn’t to decry the disruption happening to media, in any of its forms, traditional or social. The answer is to run toward it with your standards intact. Boone never once, in twenty-five years, told me to fear a new market. He told me to understand it faster than the next guy. That’s still the only advice worth following.

These days I write, I consult, and I’m slowly wrestling a memoir into shape — a project that mostly consists of me remembering a great story, calling someone to check it, and discovering I had the punchline right and everything else wrong. If that sounds humbling, it is. It’s also the whole reason I still believe in accuracy over vibes, in this newsletter and everywhere else.

This Substack is where I put the stuff that doesn’t fit in a memoir but won’t leave me alone — media, Texas, Pickens-isms, or whatever, all filtered through a guy who’s old enough to remember carbon paper and stubborn enough to still be curious about whatever comes next. My goal isn’t to convince you I’m right. It’s to convince you it’s worth thinking it through yourself — with a dictionary, a healthy suspicion of easy answers, and yes, on occasion, a little help from the machines. Pull up a chair. I have no idea what we’ll get into next, and I’d argue that’s half the fun.

The word is alleged. I thought I knew the story of how I learned to respect that word -- a story I’d told for decades, about a principled colleague and a lede that started a firestorm. Then, while writing this piece, I did something I probably should have done forty-five years ago: I called the guy the story was actually about and asked him if I had it right.

I didn’t. Not really. What follows is the corrected version, and it turns out to be a better story than the one I’d been -- and a lot more human.

The last great age of the daily paper

It’s easy to forget now, in an era when a single push alert can outrun an entire news cycle, that there was a time when the news arrived on a schedule. The morning paper told you what happened yesterday. The afternoon paper -- and in a lot of Texas towns back then, there still was one -- told you what was happening today, updated by deadline, printed by five, on your porch by six. Radio filled in the gaps. The 6 p.m. news gave you pictures. And that was it. If you missed them all, you waited until tomorrow.

That rhythm shaped the reporting itself. You had hours, not seconds, to check a fact, track down a second source, or decide whether a word like alleged actually belonged in your sentence — and, crucially, hours in which a copy editor could still catch you if you didn’t. The deadline was real, but it wasn’t a countdown clock lit up in the corner of your screen. It was a fixed point you worked toward, with layers of people between your “word processor” and the reader.

Texas in those years had a number of two-newspaper towns, and the competition between the papers in each one did as much to keep reporters honest as any editor did. Dallas had the Morning News squaring off against the Times Herald, two staffs chasing the same city hall stories and cop shop tips, each one terrified of getting beat by the other. San Antonio had the Express-News in the morning and the Light in the afternoon. Houston had the Chronicle and the Post, locked in the same daily footrace. None of those second papers survived the century -- the Times Herald folded in 1991, the Light in 1993, the Post in 1995 -- but while they lasted, they made for a specific kind of newsroom pressure: not “get it right eventually,” but “get it right and get it first, because the other guy’s paper hits the same driveways yours does.”

Corpus Christi wasn’t a two-paper town by the time I got there, but it had its own gravity. In many ways, that mid-size market newspaper was setting the tone for newspapers of the day, both in design and investigative reporting. Corpus Christi was -- and remains -- a heavily Hispanic city, its politics, its parish life, its high school football rivalries all carrying the imprint of generations of Mexican-American families who’d been there long before the oil derricks and the Naval Air Station.

City council meetings were conducted with one ear always tuned to how a decision would play in the barrios on the west side of town, and a reporter who didn’t understand that wasn’t going to last long on the beat. It also meant that anything touching the Catholic faith -- a statue of Christ, say -- was not a subject you got to treat lightly. Which is exactly what Doug Swanson didn’t quite understand, for about twelve hours in the late 1970s.

Doug Swanson, city hall

Doug covered city hall for the Caller-Times, and he was, in every sense I understood the term then and still do now, a consummate reporter. He wrote clean. He wrote fast. He had the particular gift -- rarer than people think -- of being able to sit through three hours of a droning council meeting and walk out with the one sentence that actually mattered.

Doug went on from Corpus Christi to the Dallas Times Herald, where he became a finalist for journalism’s ultimate award, the Pulitzer Prize. For some color, the winner in the category he competed with was Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, and her story of an 8-year-old heroin addict that was later revealed to be complete fiction. The prize then went to Theresa Carpenter of the Village Voice, whose account of the death of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten was later made into the movie “Star 80.”

Doug then moved to the Dallas Morning News, where he spent years as an investigative reporter and editor. He later reinvented himself again as an author -- first a run of crime novels featuring a Dallas private eye named Jack, and later as a serious nonfiction historian, with Blood Aces, his book on the Benny Binion gambling empire, and Cult of Glory, his unsparing history of the Texas Rangers. But in the late 1970s, none of that had happened yet. He was just the guy who covered the council for the newspaper, and he was very good at it.

One of the stranger stories that landed on his beat that year involved a proposal to place a statue of Jesus Christ out in Corpus Christi Bay. There was something almost too on the nose about it, if you stopped to think about the city’s own name -- Corpus Christi is Latin, and it translates literally to “Body of Christ,” so named, according to local lore, because the bay was supposedly sighted by Spanish explorers on the feast day of Corpus Christi. A statue of Christ rising out of the water of a bay called the Body of Christ was the kind of detail you couldn’t have invented if you’d tried, and it was, I think, exactly that irresistible bit of cosmic irony that got Doug into trouble.

What I had wrong

For years I told this as a story about principle: that Doug had written a lede calling the statue’s subject the “alleged savior,” that it had touched off a genuine backlash, and that when the paper’s readers demanded to know why, Doug had calmly defended the word on the merits — you say “alleged murderer,” you say “alleged robber,” so why not “alleged savior”? I found that admirable, in a stubborn sort of way, even though I never fully agreed with him.

When I reached out to Doug to check the story before publishing it, he set me straight. Here’s how he tells it.

He’s almost certain the word wasn’t in the lede at all -- it was buried somewhere in the body of what was probably a four-inch story, tucked deep inside the local news section, easy to miss unless you were reading closely. And it wasn’t a matter of principle. By his own account it was “a bit of stupid wise-assery,” a line he thought was clever and slipped in fully expecting the copy desk to catch it and cut it during the edit. Nobody caught it. It ran.

Some subscribers read it anyway, and they called the paper to complain. The county judge, Bob Barnes, phoned in and, laughing, asked to speak to the “alleged city editor.”

The next morning, while Doug was out covering the regular council meeting, word came down that the editor, Bob Rhodes, wanted to see him right away. Doug ran into a colleague, Scott Parks, who by then had left the newspaper and moved on to a local TV station, and told him what was happening. Scott’s advice was blunt: whatever you do, don’t walk in there and argue that “alleged” was technically defensible. Apologize. Apologize a lot. Promise it’ll never happen again.

Doug took the advice. By his own description, he did everything short of getting down on his knees. Bob Rhodes let him sit with it-- stared at him, Doug says, for what felt like an eternity -- before finally saying, “I thought you were going to come in here and be a jerk, and I was going to fire you.” Then: “All right, fine, go back to the city council meeting.”

About a decade later, when Rhodes retired, Doug wrote him a letter thanking him for not firing him that day. And almost 50 years on, Doug’s old newsroom friends -- Scott included-- still bring the story up now and then, purely to needle him. He says they laugh. He cringes.

What the word actually taught me

I’ve been sitting with the difference between the story I told for 45 years and the one that actually happened, and I think the corrected version teaches a better lesson than the one I invented.

The version I remembered flattered everybody involved, including me. It had a principled young reporter defending a legally precise word choice against an outraged public that didn’t understand journalism — a comfortable, self-serious story for people in our business to tell each other. The real version has a young reporter being a wise-ass, a copy desk that missed something it shouldn’t have, a county judge with a good sense of humor, and an editor who had every right to fire someone and chose mercy instead. Nobody in that version gets to feel superior. Everybody in it is just a person doing an imperfect job under deadline pressure, which is closer to what a newsroom actually is.

There’s a real lesson in there about the word “alleged” itself -- it exists to hold the line between an accusation and a conviction, and that legal function is serious and worth protecting. But there’s a bigger lesson sitting right next to it: a word can be technically defensible and still be the wrong word, especially when it’s dropped into a sentence as a private joke for an audience of one, on the assumption that someone else down the line will catch it before it reaches the public. Doug’s copy desk didn’t catch it. Mine, in the sense of my own memory, didn’t catch it either -- I carried an inaccurate, flattering version of this story for most of my career before Doug corrected me. Both failures came from the same place: trusting a later checkpoint that never actually checked.

I also think there’s something worth saying about Bob Rhodes. He had a young reporter dead to rights and a subscriber base still smarting from the joke, and he chose to let the apology be enough. Newsrooms don’t always get remembered for the times they showed mercy. This one probably should be.

Doug went on to bigger stories and better bylines than the Corpus Christi City Council ever gave him. I’ve always thought that if you want to understand what he became as a reporter -- sharp, unsentimental, willing to write the sentence other people were too nervous to write -- you could once have pointed to a four-inch story about a statue that never got built. Turns out the better lesson was in what happened after that story ran: the apology, the mercy, and the fact that almost 50 years later, the person the story happened to still cared enough to set the record straight.

I didn’t know it then, but that cafeteria line would end up teaching me more about American life — and American hunger — than almost anything else in my childhood.

A Texas institution built on a simple idea

Luby’s traces its roots back to 1911, when Harry Luby opened the New England Dairy Lunch in Springfield, Missouri, built around a twelve-foot counter and the then-radical idea of feeding people quickly, cheaply, and well. His son Bob carried that idea to Texas, and in 1947 opened the first true Luby’s Cafeteria in the basement of a building in downtown San Antonio, serving a city full of returning servicemen and postwar families looking for something that felt like home.

The formula was almost stubbornly simple: fresh food, reasonable prices, a line you walked down yourself, and a tray you carried to your own table. By the time I was slipping in the back door as an underage employee decades later, Luby’s had grown into a fixture of Texas life — the place you went after church, the place three generations of the same family showed up together, the place where nobody hurried you.

The coffee cup and the ketchup

Here’s what I remember most from that job — not the trays, not the steam tables, not the Hobart Dishwasher, not the manager who never asked to see ID.

I remember the elderly customers.

They came in mostly alone, at odd hours, moving slowly and deliberately. And a number of them didn’t walk down the cafeteria line at all. They walked straight to the drink station, to the hot water spigot meant for tea, filled a coffee cup, grabbed two packets of ketchup, stirred them in, and took a seat.

I was a teenager. I noticed it because it was strange. I didn’t understand it. I just filed it away as one of those odd little habits old people have.

It took me years — and a fair amount of listening to my own family’s history — to understand what I’d actually watched. Those were not eccentric snacks. That was tomato soup. It was the tomato soup of the Great Depression, when ketchup and hot water were sometimes what stood between a person and nothing at all. These weren’t quirky old folks. These were Depression survivors, and some of them, decades later, in a cafeteria with a full hot line twenty feet away, were still making the soup that had once kept them alive. Whether it was habit, memory, or simply what a fixed income allowed that day, I never knew. But I never forgot it.

Sunday nights with my grandmother

That memory connects to another one, closer to home.

On Sunday nights, my grandmother would have us upstairs to watch Bonanza, and our “meal” for the evening was a bowl of ice with sliced onions on top. That was it. That was Sunday supper, and we thought nothing of it — it was just what we did with “Granny.”

My grandmother was born in 1916, which put her at the leading edge of the generation the Depression shaped most. The stock market crashed on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and by the time the country hit bottom in 1933, roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed and nearly half the banks in America had failed. My grandmother was 13 when the crash hit and 17 at the Depression’s worst point — old enough to fully understand what was happening around her, and young enough that those years shaped her habits for the rest of her life.

Sliced onions weren’t a random choice for a Sunday-night snack. They were one of the great workhorse foods of the 1930s — cheap, easy to grow, and able to stretch almost any meal. Home gardens across the country leaned on onions alongside potatoes, cabbage, and beans as staples that could feed a family through a lean season. Onions turned up in “poor man’s meals” of potatoes and hot dogs, in Depression-era stews, and even, in one of the era’s stranger government-endorsed dishes, roasted and stuffed with peanut butter by home economists trying to stretch protein as far as it would go.

Eaten raw and sliced, cold, they were about as simple and inexpensive as food got — no cooking required, no ingredients beyond what was already growing in the yard. Decades later, with a full pantry and a television upstairs, my grandmother still reached for that same bowl of onions on a Sunday night. Not because she had to. Because the habits formed in the years that shaped her didn’t disappear just because the hard times eventually did.

I didn’t understand any of that as a kid watching Little Joe and Hoss with a bowl of onions on my lap. I understand it now.

Why I keep thinking about this

I keep coming back to these two memories — the coffee cup of ketchup soup and the bowl of ice and onions — because we are, once again, living through a stretch where American families are recalculating what they can afford to eat.

Grocery prices haven’t spiked the way they did in 2022, when food-at-home costs jumped nearly 12% in a single year, but they also haven’t stopped climbing. Food prices rose 3.1% in the twelve months ending in May 2026, after a 3.2% increase the month before. Meals away from home are climbing even faster, up 3.5% year-over-year as of that same month. Some of the swings are startling in isolation — fresh vegetable prices were nearly 12% higher than a year earlier, and fresh tomatoes alone were up 32%.

Forecasters disagree on exactly where the rest of 2026 lands, with some projecting relief closer to the historical average and others warning that tariffs on steel and aluminum packaging, fertilizer and fuel costs tied to overseas conflicts, and crop disease could push grocery inflation as high as 4% to 4.5% by year’s end. What’s consistent across every forecast is this: nobody is telling families that food is about to get meaningfully cheaper.

And the people who feel it most acutely are often the people with the least room to absorb it — retirees on fixed incomes, single-income households, families already stretched thin by rent and medical bills. A majority of Americans now say everyday life has become less affordable over the past year, and three-quarters of them point to grocery prices — more than gas, healthcare, or housing — as the leading cause. That’s not a small statistic. That’s a whole country quietly doing math at the checkout.

The lesson in the ketchup

I don’t tell these stories to be morbid, or to suggest we’re all one bad year away from hot water and condiment packets. Most of us aren’t, and I’m grateful for that.

But I think about that Luby’s dining room a lot, especially now. I think about how those elderly customers weren’t announcing anything. They weren’t asking for sympathy or a discount or attention. They simply walked in, quietly did what they knew how to do to get by, and sat down with whatever dignity the moment allowed. Nobody at that cafeteria stopped them. Nobody made it a scene.

That, I think, is the real lesson — not just about the Depression, but about hunger and hardship in general, then and now. It rarely announces itself. It doesn’t always look like an empty refrigerator or a viral news story. Sometimes it looks like a coffee cup of hot water at a drink station. Sometimes it looks like a bowl of onions upstairs on a Sunday, dressed up as a tradition. The people living through hard stretches are often the ones working hardest to make the hardship invisible — to themselves, and to everyone around them.

So when I read that food prices are still climbing, and that most families feel it more than any other line item in their budget, I don’t just see a statistic. I see a woman with a coffee cup. I see my grandmother slicing onions before Bonanza came on. And I try to remember that the people quietly stretching a dollar at the grocery store today are doing exactly what those two generations before me did — coping without complaint, and hoping nobody notices.

Maybe the smallest thing we can do, as prices keep moving in the wrong direction for too many families, is notice anyway. Ask how someone’s really doing. Don’t assume the person filling a free water cup, or skipping the meat aisle, or splitting a rotisserie chicken across three meals, is doing it by choice. And if you’re the one doing the stretching — there’s no shame in it. There never was. Some of the strongest, most resourceful people I’ve ever known learned that lesson at a drink station, or a kitchen counter, with almost nothing to work with at all.

I had been there earlier in the week. I went back the day before it closed. Dallas has a way of pulling you back, especially when you know it’s the last time.

Thirty Years on Preston Road

Jim “Sevy” Severson opened Sevy’s Grill in 1997 at 8201 Preston Road, tucked into Preston Sherry Plaza in the heart of the Park Cities. For nearly three decades it became exactly what the best neighborhood restaurants become: irreplaceable.

It was never the flashiest room in Dallas. It did not need to be. The duck flautas with black bean pico were a required appetizer. The chopped salad, piled under a small mountain of crispy onions, inspired something approaching poetry among the loyal. The service was warm and professional in the old-fashioned sense — you felt looked after, not managed. Eight members of the staff were there all 29-plus years, and the average kitchen tenure exceeded fifteen years. That is not a restaurant. That is a family.

Sevy’s survived the dot-com crash. It survived the 2008 recession. It survived COVID. It survived Jim Severson’s own health struggles. It seemed, to those who loved it, genuinely immune to the ordinary forces that kill restaurants.

What it could not survive was the new landlord.

In September 2025, Preston Sherry Plaza was acquired by Austin-based Endeavor Real Estate, making it the company’s first mixed-use purchase in Dallas. After months of negotiations, the Seversons were unable to reach agreement on a fourth ten-year lease. The final day was Saturday, June 27, 2026.

The Seversons are still searching for a new location. As of this writing, that search has not yielded an answer. The cruelty in that, as one observer noted in the Dallas Observer, is particularly sharp: Sevy’s was always a neighborhood restaurant. What is the point of a neighborhood restaurant without a neighborhood to put it in?

The Room Itself

Walk into Sevy’s and the first thing you noticed, beyond the comfortable hum of the room, was what lined the walls and booths of that spacious dining room: nameplates. Small brass rectangles, the size of a business card, affixed to booths and column throughout — a quiet, accumulated roster of Dallas itself. This was not a wall of fame in the self-congratulatory sense. It was more organic than that. You earned a nameplate by showing up, again and again, until the place recognized you as its own.

The room was littered with them, if littered is the right word for something so deliberate. Oil executives. Real estate titans. Business tycoons. greatSports legends. Civic figures. A who’s who of Dallas society spread across that spacious dining room in the unassuming way that only truly confident cities can manage — not announced, just present.

The corner booth was its own particular constellation.

Boone. Twice.

Earlier in the week, wandering that dining room one last time, I found what I had hoped to find: a nameplate in the hallowed corner booth reading T. Boone Pickens.

T. Boone Pickens, the wildcatter from Holdenville, Oklahoma, who moved his headquarters to Dallas in 1989 and proceeded to make himself one of the most consequential figures in the city’s history. He built an oil empire from $2,500 and borrowed credit, launched the modern shareholder rights movement, championed wind energy before it was fashionable, and gave away more than a billion dollars. As his longtime chief of staff, I sat across from him in enough rooms to understand instinctively why the corner booth at Sevy’s would have suited him: quiet authority, good food, no pretense. He died on September 11, 2019. The nameplate was still there, holding his place years after he was gone to sit beneath it.

On a return visit there, a friend called me over. She had looked more carefully than I had.

At the booth directly adjoining the corner — close enough to touch — there was a second nameplate. Also reading T. Boone Pickens.

Two of them. Side by side.

Make of that what you will. Boone himself would have found it funny. He was not, in the end, a man who needed two nameplates — but he was absolutely a man who would have appreciated the symmetry of having them. In the corner of one of Dallas’s great dining rooms, apparently even the furniture couldn’t quite contain him.

I carried that story with me to my last lunch there.

The Corner Booth and Its Company

On June 26th, the day before Sevy’s closed, I was back at the table with Linda Rutherford, who spent decades as the longtime public relations director for Southwest Airlines — one of the people who helped build and protect the legend of that institution from the inside. I recounted the two nameplates, the corner booth, the particular pleasure of finding Boone’s name still affixed to a seat in one of his favorite rooms. She smiled the way people do when a story lands exactly right.

And then, naturally, we talked about Herb.

Herbert David Kelleher co-founded Southwest Airlines in 1967 with client Rollin King — the idea sketched on a cocktail napkin, connecting Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio with low-cost air service. After four years of legal battles that Kelleher waged personally, the first Southwest flight took off on June 18, 1971. He served as CEO from 1981 to 2001, building the airline into one of the most admired companies in America. He settled a trademark dispute not with lawyers but with an arm-wrestling match at the Dallas Sportatorium. He put employees first, loudly and unapologetically, because he believed they would then take care of the customers — and he was right. He died on January 3, 2019, at age 87.

Sitting across from Linda, the question seemed almost to ask itself: did Herb Kelleher have a nameplate at Sevy’s?

We asked management. They didn’t hesitate. Of course he did.

And where was it?

At the bar.

Of course it was. Herb Kelleher was famous for the bar. He was said to have settled into Sevy’s early on Saturday mornings, when the room was quiet and the rest of Dallas was still sleeping off Friday night. The bar was his. That was entirely, perfectly, unmistakably Herb.

But when we looked — the nameplate was gone.

This is the thing about high-traffic spots. They take the wear. The bar at Sevy’s was a busy place for thirty years, and somewhere along the way, in the shuffle of a thousand Saturday mornings, Herb’s nameplate went missing. It happens. It is also, in its small way, a kind of metaphor: the busiest, most beloved spots are the ones most likely to lose their markers, precisely because so many hands passed through them.

There was something sad about its absence. And something entirely appropriate about where it had been.

The Others on the Wall

Roger Staubach’s nameplate was there in that corner. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he won the Heisman Trophy at the Naval Academy in 1963, served four years of active military duty including a tour in Vietnam, then reported to the Dallas Cowboys as a 27-year-old rookie in 1969. For the next eleven seasons he was, simply, Captain Comeback — leading 23 fourth-quarter comebacks, winning two Super Bowls, earning induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985. After football he built the Staubach Company into a global commercial real estate powerhouse, later merging with Jones Lang LaSalle in 2008. He has lived in Dallas all his adult life. He is, by any measure, one of the most respected men in this city.

In the days before Sevy’s closed, his wife Marianne drove up to the restaurant and came inside — not for a last meal, but to quietly leave a gratuity for the staff. That gesture, understated and gracious, felt very much like the Staubachs. It also said everything about what Sevy’s meant to the people who had made it their place for thirty years.

Norm Brinker’s nameplate was there as well. Norman Brinker, who died in 2009 at seventy-eight, was arguably the most influential figure in the history of American casual dining. He served as president of Jack in the Box, founded Steak and Ale in 1966, helped establish Bennigan’s and Chili’s, and ultimately built Brinker International into a company operating nearly 1,900 restaurants across twenty-five countries. He is credited with inventing the salad bar. He also served on the U.S. Olympic equestrian team at the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki. He was, like most of the men whose names appear on those small brass plates, larger than the nameplate suggested.

What a Nameplate Means

There is something both democratic and elitist about a restaurant nameplate. Democratic because anyone can earn one — you just have to show up, again and again, until the place is yours. Elitist because the people who earn them at a place like Sevy’s tend to be the people who have already built something worth being remembered for.

That spacious dining room, scattered with its brass plates, was a kind of living archive — not curated, not commissioned, just accumulated over thirty years of the same people returning to the same seats because the food was good and the staff knew their names and there was no reason to go anywhere else.

The nameplates will come down now. Some will go to the families and estates of the people they honored. Some may end up in a box somewhere, waiting for the new location that Jim Severson is still searching for. And at least two of them will carry the name of a man who, characteristically, took up more room than anyone expected — even here, even in brass, even at the very end.

The corner booth at 8201 Preston Road is quiet now. Thirty years of deals and friendships and power lunches and early Saturday mornings at the bar have come to a close. Dallas is good at building things. It is less practiced at holding onto them.

Sevy’s deserved better than a landlord dispute. So did we.

It’s the singing.

Specifically, it’s the moment when tens of thousands of fans from countries that couldn’t find West Virginia on a map — fans from Senegal, Japan, Iran, Ecuador, South Korea — lock arms and belt out Take Me Home, Country Roads with a conviction that would make a coal miner weep. In Portuguese. In Arabic. In melodic, slightly off-key Japanese.

The first time I witnessed it, I stood there slack jawed. How? I thought. How does a song written about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia become the emotional lingua franca of a global sporting event watched by half the planet?

Then I thought: I actually know where this started.

The Lodge on Broadway

Let me take you back to Lubbock, Texas. Bear with me. This will make sense.

I was a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity at Texas Tech University. Now, when you hear “fraternity house,” you probably picture a columned antebellum mansion, or at least something with a functioning dishwasher. Our “house” was a converted funeral home on Broadway Avenue.

Yes. A funeral home.

The lodge retained several features from its prior incarnation that gave it a certain... ambiance. High ceilings. Strange back rooms with no clear purpose. A dearth of windows. A basement meeting room that was once the embalming studio. A general feeling that the building had seen things and wasn’t ready to talk about it. The décor skewed toward the eccentric. But the crown jewel — the thing that made our lodge truly unique among Greek organizations across America — was the vending machine.

Twenty-five cents. One cold bottle long-neck beer.

This was in an era when such things were not merely tolerated but practically celebrated as an expression of the free market and personal liberty. Freshmen from across West Texas made pilgrimages to insert a quarter and receive what amounted to the world’s most affordable cold beer. It was, in retrospect, a marvel of logistics and a potential health code violation. We loved it dearly.

The Composite and the Ghost in the Picture

But the vending machine was not what haunted me.

It was the composites.

For the uninitiated, a fraternity composite is a large framed photograph — think old-fashioned yearbook page, but bigger and mounted on the wall — featuring individual headshots of every member of a certain class, arranged in rows with names beneath. Delta Tau Delta had decades of these lining the walls. Class after class, row after row, going back generations. Faces from another era staring out at you while you tried to remember the words to the creed.

Pledge training at Delt was serious business. One of the sacred arts was memorizing the “Top 3” of every member: their full name, hometown, and major. Get it wrong? Drop and give them twenty. Or worse, forfeit your quarter and lose your long-neck.

Among the composites, there was one from 1963 that always caught my eye.

It wasn’t in perfect condition. One of the headshots had clearly been the subject of repeated attempts at removal — scratched at, perhaps peeled at, the photo slightly damaged but stubbornly persisting. Whoever was responsible for the maintenance of this composite had tried more than once to make this particular face go away.

The name beneath it read: John Deutschendorf.

And I knew his Top 3 cold, the way pledges know things they’ve drilled a hundred times:

Henry John Deutschendorf. Architecture. Fort Worth, Texas.

I filed it away. Moved on. Got my long-neck. Did my push-ups.

The Rest of the Story

Years passed. I eventually found myself working not in architecture, but in Texas politics — serving as executive chief of staff at the Texas Railroad Commission under a man named Kent Hance.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell, here’s the résumé: Delt president at Texas Tech in the early 1960s. Later a Texas state senator. Then a U.S. Congressman. Then chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission. Then Chancellor of Texas Tech University. Kent Hance has had more third acts than a Shakespeare festival.

I had a simpler name for him when I worked for him at the Railroad Commission: “Boss.”

One day, the conversation turned — as conversations in Texas so often do — to the past. To Tech. To the Delts. And Boss told me the rest of the story about that scratched-up composite photo.

Henry John Deutschendorf had walked into Hance’s office one day and announced that he was leaving. Dropping out of Texas Tech. Resigning from the fraternity. Moving to Nashville to pursue a career in music.

Hance, a practical man with the political instincts of someone who would spend decades in public life, offered his honest assessment.

“I’ve heard you play,” he said. “You should stay enrolled, get a degree and make some money.”

He was not being cruel. He was being real. The boy could carry a tune, sure. But Nashville? Music? In 1964? That was a long way from Fort Worth, Texas, and a longer way from an architecture degree and a sensible career.

Deutschendorf could not be deterred.

He dropped out. He moved. He changed his name — Deutschendorf being, let us say charitably, not optimally suited for a marquee — to something that evoked the mountains and the sky and the wide open spaces.

He called himself John Denver.

And one of the first songs he ever wrote, scratched out in an era when he was broke and obscure and living on hope, was about a road leading home through the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia.

Take me home, country roads.

From Appalachia to the Entire Planet

Here is the truly absurd part.

The song was written by John Denver and two collaborators — Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert — in 1971. It was inspired not by West Virginia but by a drive through Maryland. Denver had barely spent time in West Virginia. The song was a feeling, not a documentary.

But West Virginia adopted it anyway. It became the state’s unofficial anthem and eventually, in 2014, official state song. Which is either a beautiful case of art transcending biography or the most successful geographic misattribution since Columbus called the people he met “Indians.”

Then the World Cup happened.

Japan adopted the song in the 1990s. The Japanese national football team’s supporters began singing it at matches because one of their beloved clubs, Kyoto Purple Sanga, had used it as an anthem. When the World Cup came to South Korea and Japan in 2002, the song spread to other supporters. By 2010, by 2014, by 2018, it had become something inexplicable and wonderful: the default hymn of international football’s biggest tournament.

Walk into a stadium in Qatar in 2022 — hosting a World Cup in a country where you might expect the musical reference points to skew elsewhere — and you would hear it. Tens of thousands of voices, from dozens of countries, singing about country roads and mountain mamas and the Blue Ridge Mountains, most of them with no precise idea what a “Blue Ridge Mountain” is but singing it with full emotional commitment anyway.

The song had become less about West Virginia and more about the universal longing for somewhere that feels like home. Whatever your home is. Wherever your roads lead.

John Denver, who died in a plane crash in 1997, never knew any of this. He never knew his song would become the anthem of the beautiful game’s biggest stage. He never knew that the scratched-up composite in an old funeral home on Broadway in Lubbock, Texas, would one day be a footnote in the story of a song that made Japanese soccer fans cry in Qatar.

What the Dropout Taught Me

Boss Hance — Kent Hance, Texas statesman and former skeptic — tells that story about Deutschendorf with the rueful affection of a man who has had decades to sit with being wrong. He wasn’t wrong to be skeptical. He was just wrong.

And here, from an old Delt pledge who memorized a stranger’s name and hometown and major without knowing why, are the life lessons I take from all of it:

1. You cannot always hear what someone is going to become. Hance heard a boy who could play guitar. He did not hear the song that wasn’t written yet. Most of the time, we are listening for what exists, not what is possible.

2. The name you start with is not the name you end with. Henry John Deutschendorf became John Denver. The architecture dropout became the man who built something invisible and enduring. Reinvention is not deception. Sometimes it’s the most honest thing a person can do.

3. Stubbornness and vision look identical from the outside. Every person who ever chased something impractical looked, at the moment of departure, exactly like someone making a terrible mistake. The only difference between a dreamer and a fool is, usually, time — and sometimes luck.

4. You never know whose Top 3 you’re memorizing. I learned Henry John Deutschendorf, Architecture, Fort Worth, Texas as a ritual exercise. I carried it for years as trivia. It became, eventually, the beginning of a story I’m still telling. Pay attention to the names on the wall. You don’t always know which ones matter yet.

5. A song is a road. It goes where it wants to go. You can write it about Maryland and it becomes West Virginia’s anthem. You can perform it in Colorado and it becomes Japan’s World Cup hymn. Art has its own itinerary, and it rarely checks in with the person who made it.

And perhaps most importantly:

6. Sometimes the person everybody tried to scratch out of the picture is the one who lasts.

Take me home, country roads.

Even if home is a converted funeral home in Lubbock with a 25-cent longneck beer machine. Even if it’s a stadium in Doha, or Yokohama, or wherever the next chapter of the story happens to be played.

We all know the words. We just don’t always know why.

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First Encounter: The Donald Trump Connection

Every relationship has an origin story. Ours with Trace Adkins begins, as so many improbable things did in the 2000s, with Donald Trump hosting a reality television program.

You may recall that the big man from Sarepta, Louisiana — Tracy Darrell Adkins, known to the world as Trace — appeared on Celebrity Apprentice, Trump’s NBC boardroom extravaganza where celebrities competed for charity while the future president fired them with barely concealed glee. Trace’s team reached out to us for a donation to benefit the American Red Cross. This was, as it happened, a cause close to Trace’s heart: his family had survived a house fire, and Red Cross volunteers had been among the first on the scene.

We cut the check. It went through Trace to the Red Cross. That is how these things work — through people, through trust, through a handshake and a hat-tip in the general direction of a man who could crush a guitar with one hand and had, at various points in his life, had his finger severed on an oil rig (he asked the doctors to reattach it at an angle so he could keep playing) and survived being shot through both lungs and both lower chambers of his heart by his second wife. When I say Trace Adkins is a man who has been through things, I mean it in the most literal physiological sense possible.

Trace went on to win that season of All-Star Celebrity Apprentice, raising over $1.5 million for the American Red Cross and defeating Penn Jillette in the finale. Donald Trump called him “a star all the way.” Boone would have appreciated that. We all appreciated that. And so a friendship was born, funneled through a donation, sealed by a reality TV crown, and destined to culminate — as the best stories do — in a football stadium argument about echo acoustics.

The Negotiation: How We Rewrote OSU Athletics Policy

Flush with newfound camaraderie, we had a thought: Wouldn’t it be something if Trace Adkins sang the National Anthem at an Oklahoma State University football game? Boone loved OSU with a ferocity that bordered on the theological. Trace was a bona fide country music star, a man’s man, a walking recruiting poster for the sort of patriotic, rough-hewn Americanism that makes college football stadiums feel like cathedrals. We made the call to Athletic Director Mike Holder.

Mike Holder, for the uninitiated, is a man of considerable principle. He is also, when he believes he is right, approximately as movable as the Chickasaw Turnpike. His position was clear: OSU does not allow live singers for the National Anthem. The reasons were practical and, he was at pains to note, entirely sensible. If you allow one live singer, everyone asks. Every act with a regional following and a cousin on the booster committee suddenly has an in. And then there were the acoustics — Boone Pickens Stadium, for all its grandeur, has the sound profile of a large metal bowl, which is essentially what it is.

“The echo issue,” Holder said, with the resigned patience of a man who had explained this before, “is real.”

We did not accept this answer.

What followed was, I will say with some professional pride, a masterpiece of negotiating strategy dressed up as a simple policy suggestion. We proposed a solution that was technically a restriction but functioned as an invitation: Limit live National Anthem performers to artists who have sold one million or more records.

It was elegant. It was defensible. It was, not coincidentally, a policy that Trace Adkins could sail through on a golden ticket while approximately ninety-nine percent of the people who would otherwise “ask” were quietly filtered out. Mike Holder considered this.

We won.

Game Day: The Echo Issue Was, In Fact, Real

Trace arrived at Boone Pickens Stadium that day, November 9, 2013, for the OSU game against the Kansas Jayhawks. He brought with him the unhurried confidence of a man who has performed for arenas full of people and knows exactly how large he is. He was gracious, warm, and exactly what you’d hope for.

He sang. The crowd responded. It was a moment.

The echo, however, was also a moment.

I will not belabor this. I will only say that Mike Holder’s concerns were not entirely unfounded, and that when you have a six-foot-six baritone projecting a voice built for oil rigs and honky tonks into a curved concrete bowl that seats over fifty thousand people, the laws of physics do not pause out of courtesy. The National Anthem bounced around Boone Pickens Stadium like a pinball, catching up with itself at odd intervals, creating a layered sonic experience that was patriotic, impressive, and — at several key moments — approximately a quarter-beat behind.

Trace handled it like the professional he is. He had, after all, survived far worse than stadium acoustics.

The 2011 Bedlam Game: OSU’s Greatest Night and Its Chaotic Aftermath

December 3, 2011. No. 3 Oklahoma State versus No. 13 Oklahoma in the final game of what was arguably the greatest season in OSU history. The Cowboys were 10–1, had risen to No. 2 in the AP Poll — the highest ranking in school history — and had their eyes on the BCS National Championship Game. The Sooners came to Stillwater and left, to put it plainly, in pieces.

It was OSU’s first Bedlam win since 2002. The Cowboys clinched the Big 12 Championship. Both goalposts came down. Thousands of fans — and I mean thousands — stormed the field in a wave of orange euphoria that is still discussed in Stillwater with the reverence normally reserved for religious experiences.

And then things got complicated.

The crowd was so massive, so immediate, so joyously uncontrollable, that it took police approximately 45 minutes to clear fans from the field. Thirteen people were injured in the chaos. Eleven were taken to local hospitals. Two were airlifted to Oklahoma City with critical injuries. Students jumped from the roughly nine-foot retaining wall separating the stands from the field. One individual, in the particular grip of the moment and the altitude, fell at least fifteen feet onto concrete.

That person — a student, young and invincible in the way that only twenty-year-olds can be — survived. Survived with injuries, yes. But survived. It was, as these things go, a story that ended well enough that it could be told later. Which is how it ended up in my hands, and eventually in Trace’s ears, while we were watching what I believe was a subsequent OSU game from our seats.

The Line That Closed the Evening

I told Trace the story the way you tell these things — with the genuine relief of someone who was there, who remembers the alarm, who is grateful for the outcome. A student fell fifteen feet during the field rush. Lucky to be alive. A reminder that the line between jubilation and catastrophe is sometimes just a matter of inches and a forgiving concrete surface.

Trace Adkins listened to this story. He considered it for a moment with the gravity appropriate to a tale of near-tragedy.

And then, in the voice that has sold eleven million albums, he said: “That’s how you thin the herd.”

I should note, for the record, that no one who actually fell that night was permanently harmed by Trace Adkins’ commentary, delivered as it was with impeccable timing into a closed stadium suite approximately two years after the fact. I should also note that Boone Pickens, a man who made a fortune in energy markets by operating on a very similar philosophical principle about separating winners from the field, would have absolutely loved it.

There are people in this world who survive being shot through both lungs, who reattach their fingers at useful angles, who win Celebrity Apprentice, who sing the National Anthem into a sonic echo chamber without flinching, and who summarize the Darwinian stakes of a Big 12 championship celebration with the efficiency of a man who simply does not have time for the other interpretation.

Trace Adkins is that person.

We were glad to have him in our orbit. Even if the orbit occasionally echoed a little.

Those are days gone by, and evidence of that abounds in Dallas. And Dallas, more than almost any city in America, should have the intellectual honesty to say so out loud.

The Verdict Is In

The data has been building for years. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom coined the phrase “donut effect” to describe the hollowing out of central business districts as populations, employers, and economic activity migrate outward. Dallas is the proof of concept. By nearly every metric — population growth, corporate relocations, job creation — Dallas is booming. Yet at the center of this Sunbelt success story is a struggling downtown, now facing one of the highest office vacancy rates in the country at 27.2 percent.

AT&T’s relocation of nearly 6,000 workers to a new Plano campus by mid-2028 was a statement, not just a move. Toyota, Fisher Investments, Caterpillar — they made the same calculation. This is not a Dallas problem. It is an American metropolitan reality.

The departures have not been limited to corporate suites. Comerica Bank left its namesake park neighborhood years ago. Now the Dallas Stars and Dallas Mavericks — the two franchises that gave downtown its most reliable pulse of foot traffic, energy, and civic identity — are headed to new arenas outside downtown . When the teams that filled the streets on game nights are gone, the case for downtown as an experience destination, not just an office address, becomes considerably harder to make.

And then came the news that landed like a eulogy: Neiman Marcus is closing its downtown Dallas flagship — the store that was born here, that defined this city’s self-image as a place of elegance and ambition. If that sequence of departures doesn’t clarify what chapter we’re in, nothing will.

The City Hall Dilemma — and a Number That Demands Scrutiny

Now comes the most consequential chapter in Dallas’s reckoning: the future of Dallas City Hall itself.

I.M. Pei’s gravity-defying inverted trapezoid is, by any measure, a masterpiece of civic architecture. But a city report estimated bringing it to modern standards could exceed $1 billion over the next two decades — a figure Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson has cited in calling the building “obsolete” and urging the city to cut its losses.

Before Dallas makes a billion-dollar decision based on that number, someone should ask how we got here.

The $1-plus billion figure is not an indictment of the building. It is an indictment of the city’s stewardship of it. Deferred maintenance on a public structure doesn’t accumulate because buildings are inherently unworkable — it accumulates because successive administrations chose, year after year, to kick the can down the road. Outdated electrical systems, failing roofing, aging elevators: these are not the inevitable fate of a 47-year-old building. They are the predictable result of chronic underfunding and institutional neglect. The city allowed City Hall to deteriorate, and now proposes to use that deterioration as the justification for abandoning it.

That is a remarkable piece of circular logic, and Dallas deserves better than to accept it unchallenged.

Independent verification of that billion dollar plus estimate is not obstruction — it is due diligence. Phased renovation plans, alternative financing structures, adaptive reuse that keeps the shell while modernizing the interior: none of these options has received the serious public analysis the decision warrants. The three council members working to slow this process down are not wrong to demand more scrutiny before the city commits to a course of action with irreversible consequences for one of its most significant civic assets.

The Polycentric City Is Not a Failure

That said, the council members’ instinct to protect the building should not become a mandate to preserve downtown’s old identity alongside it.

The dispersal of economic activity is not a failure of downtown. It is the success of the metropolitan area. Legacy West, Frisco, McKinney, Las Colinas — these places didn’t need a revival movement because they were never in decline. The polycentric city is not an anomaly; it is the dominant form of American metropolitan life. Dallas — a city that barely had a meaningful downtown before World War II — should feel no guilt about following this logic to its conclusion.

What Downtown Can Still Be

The Arts District is one of the finest in the country. Deep Ellum pulses with creative energy. These things don’t require AT&T, a sold-out Mavericks crowd, or a fully restored City Hall to survive. They require imagination uncoupled from nostalgia.

If Dallas ultimately decides to leave City Hall, let it do so honestly — with a verified price tag, exhausted alternatives, and a clear vision for what comes next. Preserve the facade. Fill it with housing, arts space, a clinic, a school. Let Pei’s concrete poem mean something new.

But don’t let a number that reflects decades of municipal neglect be the closing argument. And don’t let the departure of corporations, retailers, and sports franchises become an excuse to stop asking what downtown can still honestly be.

Dallas deserves a better reason to walk away — and a bolder vision for what stays. And it’s a case study for cities across the nation to understand…and deal with.

On Monday, veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley stood up in a staff meeting and accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of trying to “kill” the newsmagazine. Two days later, he was fired. The whole thing played out in real time — in front of colleagues, on social media, in the press — a very public unraveling of one of the most trusted brands in American journalism.

You can debate who’s right. Pelley argued that corporate leadership was making political calculations to curry favor with the Trump administration. Weiss said she tried to find common ground and couldn’t. Both things can be partially true.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: this isn’t really a story about Scott Pelley or Bari Weiss. It’s a story about what happens when the institutional trust that holds journalism together — between reporters and editors, between networks and audiences, between the press and the public — starts to crack.

I was talking about exactly this on a recent episode of Reputation Matters with Crayton Webb. If you haven’t listened, I’d encourage you to — the full conversation is worth your time. But one story I told has been rattling around in my head all week.

When I worked for Governor Bill Clements in the late ‘80s, his press secretary used to host reporters in his office every Friday afternoon. Off the record. He’d pull out a bottle of Scotch — Pinch, was the brand — and just talk. Free-flowing. What the governor was thinking. What was really going on behind the headlines. The context that never made it into print.

And here’s the remarkable thing: every reporter in that room honored it. Nobody burned him. Nobody ran the story.

Back then, everybody was honor bound. You could actually have that conversation.

I don’t think you can have it today. And the Pelley situation is Exhibit A. What was supposed to be a private meeting with management became a public confrontation, reported on in real time, with sources speaking anonymously to every outlet that called. The walls between “off the record” and “on the record” — between internal and external — have essentially dissolved.

That’s not entirely bad. Transparency has real value. Institutions that operated in the dark for too long got away with too much. I know that. But what we’ve lost in the exchange deserves an honest accounting.

The 24/7 news cycle has quietly replaced the obligation to be right with the reward for being first. And “first” now means posting before you’ve left the building. Get it out, clean it up later. Plenty of things don’t get cleaned up. They just become part of the record.

The Pelley story also has a corporate layer that matters: Paramount settled a Trump lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview rather than defend the program in court. The network’s new ownership has sought a close relationship with the administration. Critics see a direct line between those facts and what’s happening to the newsroom now.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. But here’s what I know from decades in communications: when a company goes quiet about who it is and what it stands for, someone else writes that story. And they won’t be as generous. 60 Minutes may be learning that now — except in their case, the silence isn’t coming from them. It’s being imposed on them.

One current staffer put it this way: “It’s like being awake during surgery.”

That’s a haunting line. And it captures something real about what’s happening across the entire media landscape right now — not just at CBS. The Dallas Morning News. The Washington Post. Dozens of local papers that used to anchor communities. They’re all going through some version of the same surgery, awake or not.

What worries me most isn’t the business restructuring. That’s painful but honest — industries change, models break, difficult decisions get made. What worries me is the growing gap between people who look like journalists and people who actually practice journalism as a discipline. No editors. No correction policy. No requirement to call the other side. Just a platform and a monetization strategy.

I spent my whole career trying to shape how stories get told. I know the communications professional’s job is to protect and position. But even in that role, I always believed the story had to be grounded in something real. You can manage how something gets communicated — you can’t manufacture the underlying truth.

So here’s what I keep landing on: we don’t just need better journalists. We need better news consumers. We need to teach people — seriously, as a core curriculum — how to evaluate a source. How to recognize the difference between a reporter and an advocate. How to ask, who benefits from me believing this?

The reporters who sat in Reggie Bashur’s office on those Friday afternoons were good at their jobs precisely because they understood that trust, once spent, doesn’t come back. They were playing a long game.

Scott Pelley spent his career playing that same long game. Whether you think he was right or wrong this week, his departure signals something: that the era of journalism built on institutional trust — earned slowly, protected carefully — is being replaced by something faster, louder, and a lot less predictable.

I’m still trying to figure out what we build in its place.

You can hear my full conversation with Crayton Webb on the Reputation Matters podcast — available at sunwestpr.com or on your favorite podcast platform.

Today is Al Franken’s 74th birthday. Most people will remember him as the Saturday Night Live writer who became a U.S. Senator, or as the guy who wrote Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. I remember him for something else entirely — a sweltering July afternoon in 2009 on Capitol Hill, when the freshman U.S. Senator from Minnesota sat down, refused to stand up, and turned a routine Washington meet-and-greet into a five-alarm confrontation.

I was there. Not as a senator, not as a Senate staffer. I was there as chief of staff to T. Boone Pickens.

In Boone’s Orbit

Working for T. Boone Pickens was never dull. He was in his early eighties and moving at a pace that would have exhausted men half his age. I traveled with him constantly — to Senate hearing rooms, to corporate boardrooms, to wind farms stretching across the Texas panhandle, to TV studios where hosts treated him like a folk hero for his energy independence crusade, the “Pickens Plan.”

Boone had reinvented himself — or more precisely, he had expanded himself. The man who’d made a fortune in oil had become the loudest voice in America for natural gas and wind power. He was spending hundreds of millions of his own money on it. He genuinely believed the country was in an energy crisis, that dependence on foreign oil was a national security catastrophe, and that he could move the needle. Whether you agreed with him or not, the mission was real.

That summer, the mission brought us to Capitol Hill with some regularity. And on July 31, 2009, it brought us to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee’s weekly lunch.

The Lunch

Most of the Democratic caucus showed up. It was a warm reception — Boone was promoting clean energy, and the Democrats were broadly sympathetic to that message. There was handshaking, nodding, the polite theater of Washington. Senator John Kerry was notably absent; his office cited a previously scheduled lunch with interns and pages. The Politico reporters noticed. We noticed too. Nobody said anything out loud. Nobody had to.

The lunch itself went fine. Boone was in his element — big room, big ideas, big personality. He could work a crowd of senators the same way he worked oil executives or TV cameras: direct, confident, a little folksy, always with a number or a statistic loaded and ready.

When it ended, people milled around the room just off the Senate floor. That’s when Boone spotted Al Franken — the freshest face in the Senate, seated, still deep in conversation with someone.

Boone walked over to introduce himself.

The Moment

What happened next made the papers.

Franken didn’t stand. He didn’t extend his hand. He looked up at one of the most famous billionaires in America, a man who had just addressed the entire Democratic caucus, and he stayed in his chair.

And then he let him have it.

The subject was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In 2004, Boone had put $3 million behind the campaign that challenged John Kerry’s Vietnam record — ads that most Democrats believed cost Kerry the presidency. The term “Swift Boated” had entered the political lexicon permanently, a shorthand for the kind of targeted, devastating opposition campaign that could sink a frontrunner. Five years had passed. Boone was spending his money on windmills now. But he had never once apologized for the Swift Boat funding, and he wasn’t about to start.

He was proud of it.

Franken had clearly done his homework — and he had not moved on.

He confronted Boone directly, forcefully, right there in a hallway off the Senate floor, surrounded by aides and colleagues. According to the accounts that leaked to Politico, the confrontation grew heated. That was accurate. It was not a quiet conversation.

I watched it happen. Boone had walked over expecting to be charming and collegial — to talk energy, wind, the future. He had not expected a brand-new senator, still seated, to dress him down in public over something Boone considered not just defensible but a point of pride.

Boone’s Response

What I remember about Boone in that moment was that he didn’t flinch. He was 81 years old. He had survived hostile corporate raiders, oil busts, market catastrophes, and quadruple-bypass surgery. He had funded a campaign he believed in, watched it work, and watched it permanently reshape how political opposition was waged in America. Al Franken, freshman senator, still in his chair, was not going to make him feel ashamed of that.

He pushed back. Hard. He told Franken he stood by what he’d done. He made clear that the Swift Boat campaign was about challenging a record he believed deserved to be challenged — and that the fact it had worked, and that the tactic had become part of the political vocabulary, only confirmed that it mattered. Then he pivoted to the Pickens Plan, because that’s what he was there to talk about.

Later, away from the Capitol, there was no quiet hand-wringing. Boone’s position was consistent: he had done what he believed was right in 2004, and he was doing what he believed was right in 2009. He didn’t see a contradiction that required resolving. He saw two separate chapters of a life spent playing to win.

We put out a statement that afternoon. It said he was “grateful for the impressive turnout of Democrats” and that he was “focused on a mission to solve the foreign oil dependency problem.” It said he had “clearly moved on.”

What it didn’t say — but Boone would have told you directly if you’d asked — was that moving on didn’t mean backing down.

The Lesson

I’ve thought about that afternoon many times over the years.

Boone Pickens never believed the Swift Boat campaign was something to apologize for. He believed John Kerry’s record deserved scrutiny. He believed political campaigns were contact sports. And he believed that if you fund something, you own it — including the outcome. He owned it completely, without hedging, even in a room full of Democrats who despised him for it.

That kind of conviction is rare. It’s also clarifying.

What struck me in that hallway wasn’t the confrontation itself — it was the collision of two men who each refused to pretend. Franken refused to perform collegiality he didn’t feel. Boone refused to perform remorse he didn’t have. In a city built on strategic ambiguity, that was almost refreshing.

The tension between them — between accountability and conviction, between holding a grudge and holding a position — didn’t resolve that afternoon. It doesn’t resolve cleanly ever. But there was something honest about two people who said exactly where they stood and didn’t soften it for the audience.

Washington doesn’t see that very often.

On Al Franken’s 74th birthday, I find myself thinking that the most Washington thing about the whole episode was that it happened at all — and the least Washington thing was how both men handled it.

If you’ve worked at the intersection of power, money, and politics long enough, you collect moments like this. Drop a comment if you’ve seen something similar — the confrontation nobody expected, the room where someone finally said exactly what they meant.

May 30.

May 22.

Eight days apart on the calendar. A lifetime of meaning between them.

On May 30, 2012, my son Kent died. He was 19.

On May 22, T. Boone Pickens — my boss, mentor, and friend for nearly 25 years — would have turned 98 this year.

I’ve been carrying both of them every May since.

Kent lived 19 years. I’ve never measured his life in years, though. I measure it in the wake he left — friendships that still hold, laughter that still echoes, the quiet way he changed people simply by being present. When you lose someone that young, the temptation is to grieve what didn’t happen. The graduation, the career, the family, the arc that feels cut short.

But time has a way of refining truth. Kent’s life wasn’t incomplete. It was concentrated.

Boone lived nearly a century and never coasted. He reshaped the oil business, gave away billions, championed energy independence before it was a talking point, and long after most people his age had stepped back, he leaned forward. What made him remarkable wasn’t just what he built — it was that he never stopped building. Even when the arena changed. Even when the tools were unfamiliar.

Including Twitter.

In late May 2012 — right in that stretch of days — something unexpected happened.

@Drake posted: “The first million is the hardest.”

@boonepickens saw it. And he did what he always did when he spotted an opening.

“The first billion is a helluva lot harder,” he replied — a clean callback to his own book title — and tagged Drake on the way out.

Drake’s response came quickly: “@boonepickens just stunted on me heavy.”

Three lines. A few hours. And it traveled everywhere.

What most people never knew was that it wasn’t random. Someone on Boone’s team had spotted Drake’s tweet and flagged the overlap with the book. Boone laughed — and acted. No overthinking, no hesitation about whether the platform skewed young or whether the conversation belonged to a different world entirely.

He engaged.

I didn’t understand then how symbolic that timing would feel later. A 25-year-old global icon and an 84-year-old Texas oilman, meeting in the simplest possible way — right there, in the same May window where I now mark both a birthday and a death.

Kent and Boone lived lives that couldn’t look more different. But they shared something I keep coming back to: they showed up.

Kent showed up for people. For ordinary moments. For whoever was in front of him.

Boone showed up for opportunity, for change, for conversations — even unlikely ones. Especially unlikely ones.

And Drake, to his credit, didn’t brush it off. He acknowledged it. Two completely different worlds, meeting each other without flinching.

Every year I come back to the same quiet conviction: impact doesn’t correlate with time. It correlates with engagement.

Kent had 19 years and made them count.

Boone had 91 and never stopped counting.

Most of us keep telling ourselves we’ll have more time — to reach out, to speak up, to step into some conversation that feels unfamiliar or uncertain.

Kent didn’t have that option.

Boone refused to lean on it.

May 30 will always break something open in me. May 22 will always remind me what’s possible. And somewhere in that narrow stretch between them lives a small, strange, unforgettable moment — a young artist and an old oilman, three tweets, a mark bigger than either probably intended.

I try to carry what both of them taught me into whatever’s still ahead.

Because it was never about how long they were here.

It was about how fully they showed up while they were.

Kent. Boone. Always intertwined this time of year.

Watching GameStop’s attempted run at eBay this year—bold, unsolicited, and widely dismissed—I couldn’t help but think back more than four decades to when a far smaller company tried to take on a giant of its own era.

In 1982, I wasn’t on the inside of that story.

I was a reporter.

And like a lot of people covering politics or business at the time, I was completely captivated by what was unfolding.

The protagonist was Boone Pickens.

A Familiar Kind of Audacity

GameStop’s bid for eBay struck many as improbable the moment it surfaced—a company with a fraction of the scale proposing to acquire something vastly larger. Predictably, the response was swift: skepticism, resistance, dismissal.

But beneath the surface, it’s a familiar argument.

It’s about value.

About whether management is doing enough to unlock it.

And whether an outsider has the standing to force that question into the open.

That exact argument was playing out in 1982—only then, it felt like something entirely new.

Watching Boone Take On Cities Service

From a reporter’s vantage point, Boone Pickens didn’t look like the kind of person who was supposed to disrupt the established order of corporate America.

Mesa Petroleum was small compared to the majors. The oil industry was dominated by giants with global reach and deeply entrenched management teams.

And yet, Boone saw something that became the core of his thesis:
these companies were often worth more broken apart—or better managed—than they were as they existed.

His line—that it was cheaper to “drill for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange”—cut through the noise.

When Mesa moved on Cities Service, it wasn’t just a takeover attempt. It was a challenge to the entire system.

From where I sat, it had everything:

• accumulating stakes quietly

• a bold, unsolicited offer

• fierce resistance from the target

• countermeasures that seemed almost theatrical

• and a media spotlight that grew brighter by the hour

Cities Service didn’t just resist—they fought back with every tool available, including defensive maneuvers that would later become staples of takeover law and corporate strategy.

At one point, the target turned the tables and tried to acquire the aggressor—a move so novel it earned its own name: the “Pac-Man defense.”

Eventually, the company found a white knight, and Boone didn’t end up owning Cities Service.

At the time, it was easy to call it a loss.

But even then, it didn’t quite feel like one.

What Was Really Changing

Looking back now—with the benefit of years, and eventually having worked alongside Boone starting in 1990 to help shape his and Mesa’s corporate profile—it’s much clearer what was actually happening in that moment.

Boone wasn’t just trying to buy a company.

He was forcing a reckoning.

Before that era, large corporations operated with relatively little pressure from shareholders. Management teams often acted with broad autonomy, and the idea that an outsider could challenge them—publicly, aggressively—wasn’t just rare. It was disruptive.

Boone changed that.

The Cities Service battle, win or lose, helped ignite a broader shift:

• Shareholders began asking harder questions

• Boards became more accountable

• The concept of “unlocking value” entered the mainstream

• Corporate restructuring became proactive, not reactive

As a journalist in 1982, you could sense something was different—but it was hard to fully grasp the magnitude of it.

By the time I joined Boone years later, that shift had become the landscape.

Same Playbook, Different Era

Which brings us back to today.

GameStop’s approach—however it ultimately plays out—echoes the same fundamental strategy:

• Identify a perceived gap between market value and intrinsic value

• Make a public case for change

• Apply pressure—on management, on boards, on shareholders

The tools are different now. The media ecosystem is faster, louder, more fragmented.

But the underlying question is identical to the one Boone raised in 1982:

Is this company doing the best it can with what it has?

That question used to feel confrontational.

Today, it’s standard.

The Power of the Attempt

One of the things that fascinated me as a reporter—and later, as someone tasked with helping translate Boone’s approach to a broader audience—was that success didn’t always require closing the deal.

The act of making the bid changed the outcome.

Cities Service’s shareholders benefited as the spotlight intensified and competing interests emerged.

Management teams across the country took notice.

And quietly, across boardrooms, a new awareness set in:
they were no longer operating without scrutiny.

A Turning Point That Still Echoes

GameStop is unlikely to succeed in acquiring eBay.

But then again, Boone didn’t succeed in acquiring Cities Service either—at least not in the conventional sense.

And yet, that moment helped redefine how corporate America thinks about accountability, ownership, and value creation.

History doesn’t repeat itself exactly.

But it does rhyme—especially when someone smaller decides to challenge something bigger, and forces a conversation that others would rather avoid.

Back in 1982, watching Boone Pickens take that shot, it felt like disruption.

Now, it feels like precedent.

And every time it happens again, it’s a reminder of just how much that moment changed the rules of the game.

Turner wasn’t just a media mogul. He was a force of nature—brash, instinctive, sometimes outrageous, always forward. He built CNN in 1980, the world’s first 24-hour news network, fundamentally changing how people consume information and how events unfold in real time.

To many, that would be enough.

But to those of us who lived around another outsized figure—T. Boone Pickens—it was only part of the story. Because Boone and Ted shared something deeper than notoriety or net worth. They shared a way of seeing the world.

I had a front-row seat to that friendship for nearly 25 years, working as Boone’s chief of staff—managing media, politics, and philanthropy. I watched firsthand as two of the biggest personalities in American business forged a genuine bond, one built on mutual respect, healthy debate, and a shared appetite for disruption.

The Ranches and the Respect

Their friendship didn’t live in boardrooms. It lived on ranches.

Boone’s Mesa Vista Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Ted’s vast holdings stretching across Montana and beyond—millions of acres where he built one of the largest private bison herds in the world.

They visited each other often—two titans trading ideas under big skies, talking energy, politics, conservation, and the future of the country.

Boone admired Ted deeply. He said so publicly and privately. In fact, when TIME asked Boone to write about Turner, he didn’t hesitate: Ted, he said, was one of the people he admired most—an innovator whose legacy was “bettering the world around him.”

That admiration wasn’t casual. Boone didn’t hand out compliments easily.

What he saw in Ted was something familiar.

Creative Disruptors

“Creative disruptor” wasn’t a phrase people used back then, but it fits both men perfectly.

Boone disrupted the oil and gas industry—first as a wildcatter, then as a corporate raider, later as a national voice on energy independence.

Ted disrupted media—first by beaming a local TV station nationwide via satellite, then by launching CNN and daring to believe people would watch news 24 hours a day.

Both were willing to take risks that looked absurd—until they worked.

Both trusted instinct over convention.

And both understood something most leaders don’t: if you’re not making some people uncomfortable, you’re probably not changing much.

CNN and the Fall of the Wall

Boone once said something about Ted that stuck with me.

He gave him partial credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now that may sound like hyperbole—until you think about what CNN actually did.

Before CNN, global events were filtered, delayed, packaged. Governments controlled narratives. By the late 1980s, that began to change. Real-time television coverage made events immediate and unavoidable. The world watched history unfold as it happened—from Tiananmen Square to the crumbling Eastern Bloc.

CNN didn’t tear down the Berlin Wall, of course. But it helped create something that made walls harder to sustain: transparency.

When people on both sides of an ideological divide begin seeing the same reality—uncut, in real time—it’s harder to maintain illusions. Harder to suppress momentum. Harder to stop change.

That was Boone’s point.

Ted didn’t just build a network. He built a window—and once opened, it couldn’t be closed.

A Friendship of Equals

What made their relationship special wasn’t that they agreed on everything.

They didn’t.

In fact, they often approached issues from different angles—especially on energy, where both cared deeply but disagreed on the path forward.

But they respected each other’s thinking.

That’s increasingly rare.

Two men from entirely different industries—oil and media—who saw each other not as competitors or caricatures, but as peers. Innovators. Builders.

Friends.

What We Can Learn

It would be easy to remember Ted Turner simply as the man who founded CNN or owned the Braves or changed television forever.

All of that is true.

But there’s a quieter lesson in his friendship with Boone Pickens.

Great builders recognize great builders—even when they take different roads.

They don’t shy away from debate. They seek it.

They’re curious about each other’s worlds.

And most importantly, they understand that big ideas don’t live in silos. They cross industries. They cross politics. They cross personalities.

Boone and Ted were proof of that.

Two creative disruptors.

Two outsized lives.

And a friendship rooted not in agreement, but in admiration.

In a world that increasingly sorts people into boxes, that may be their most enduring legacy of all.

The Pulitzer Prizes are announced today, that annual moment when journalism pauses just long enough to recognize its very best work. Since 1917, when the first prizes were awarded under Joseph Pulitzer’s will, the honor has come to represent more than just great writing—it’s about public service, accountability, and the stubborn belief that truth still matters.

Every Pulitzer has a backstory. Some are heroic. Some are exhausting. And some, like the one involving my friend Dan Malone, come wrapped in a little bit of karma.

Dan Malone was part of the Dallas Morning News team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative reporting, highlighting how Texas police officers engaged in misconduct, abuses of power, and often avoided accountability. It was powerful, consequential reporting—the kind that forces change and reminds people what journalism is supposed to do.

But long before Dan was a Pulitzer winner, he was the guy who greeted me with one of the most unforgettable introductions of my life.

To understand that moment, you have to rewind a bit.

Back in 1977–78, I was editor of the University Daily at Texas Tech University. That summer, I oversaw a redesign of the paper, moving it into the modular layout that was just beginning to reshape newspaper design. We were proud of it—clean, modern, disciplined. It felt like we were doing something cutting-edge.

Then I saw the Daily Texan, the University of Texas paper.

Same look. Same feel. In my mind, at least, it was a little too similar.

So I did what any overly confident, under-experienced editor might do: I wrote a letter. Not a friendly note. Not a professional inquiry. A letter. Sharp. Terse. A full-throated accusation wrapped in righteous indignation. I got it all off my chest and sent it on its way, feeling like I’d defended the honor of West Texas journalism.

Fast forward two years.

I’m at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, starting out as a young reporter, trying to figure out how the real world of journalism actually works. I’m meeting people, learning the rhythms of a newsroom, figuring out where I fit.

And then I meet Dan Malone.

I walk up, introduce myself, hand extended, doing the usual first-day, good-impression routine.

Dan looks at me, pauses just long enough to make it uncomfortable, and says:

“Oh, I know you. You’re that son of a b^E#$( who wrote me that letter.”

Imagine my shock.

Of all the people I might run into in a professional newsroom, here stood a direct connection to one of my more… spirited editorial moments. The letter had found its mark—and it had a memory.

Now, that kind of opening could go a lot of ways.

It could turn awkward. It could turn cold. It could turn into a slow-burn rivalry.

Instead, somehow, it turned into a friendship.

Not just a casual newsroom friendship, either. Dan and I became fast friends—and, eventually, roommates, covering politics in Austin for two separate media outlets. That’s the strange alchemy of journalism in your early years: shared stress, long nights, and a mutual understanding that nobody outside the business quite gets what you’re going through.

Living with Dan came with its own set of… educational experiences.

For starters, there was his cat—an animal with the improbable name “The Governor.” The Governor had a particular gift: he thrived on spraying in my shoes. Not occasionally. Not by accident. With consistency and purpose. It became less a pet behavior and more a political statement.

Dan, for his part, found this endlessly amusing.

And he wasn’t content to let The Governor handle all the mischief.

Dan had a habit—one he seemed particularly proud of—of waiting until I was in the shower, then casually pouring pickle juice into my hot coffee. There is nothing quite like stepping out, expecting that first civilized sip of the day, only to be greeted by something that tastes like it came straight out of a deli jar.

He delighted in it. Absolutely delighted.

Somewhere between the cat, the coffee, and the constant low-level chaos of newsroom life, something more important was happening: we were learning the craft together. Watching each other work. Seeing what it really took to be good—not just loud, not just opinionated, but thorough, disciplined, and persistent.

Dan stood out in that regard even then.

He had the instincts. The patience. The willingness to keep digging when a story got complicated. The qualities that, years later, would culminate in work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Fast forward again—to 1992.

By then, I was working with my boss, the late T. Boone Pickens. One day, we were flying on Boone’s Falcon 50, high above the ground, moving fast in every sense of the word. It was a different world from those early newsroom days, but some connections never really leave you.

Word came through: Dan Malone had won the Pulitzer Prize.

I had the chance, from 40,000 feet, aboard that Falcon 50, to pick up a phone and call him. To congratulate him. To tell him how proud I was.

It was one of those full-circle moments that only life can script.

From a sharp-edged letter written by a self-assured college editor… to an unlikely friendship forged in a Corpus Christi apartment… to a congratulatory call from the sky as he reached the pinnacle of our profession.

That’s the journey.

The Pulitzer Prize is about excellence, no question. But behind every winner is a string of human moments—some serious, some ridiculous, some that make you wince in hindsight.

I still think about that first letter sometimes. About the certainty I felt when I wrote it. About how little I understood then about the bigger picture—about the profession, about people, about how small the world can be.

Dan never let me forget it. And in a way, I’m grateful he didn’t.

Because if there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s a simple one:

Be careful what you say—and who you say it to.

You never know when you’ll be shaking their hand a couple of years later… or calling them from 40,000 feet to say congratulations on a Pulitzer Prize.

I wasn’t surprised.

That’s not bravado, and it’s certainly not satisfaction. It’s the quiet, sinking feeling of a prediction finally proving itself — the kind that brings no pleasure whatsoever.

When word broke Saturday night that a gunman had opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton, rushing a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives before exchanging gunfire with law enforcement and being tackled to the ground, my mind didn’t go to shock. It went straight back — across more than four decades of instinct, observation, and quiet dread.

Let me explain why.

March 30, 1981

I was 25 years old, a young political reporter in Austin, Texas, and I was living what I thought was going to be the highlight of my fledgling journalism career. I was stationed in the Texas House of Representatives, press credentials freshly minted, waiting to cover an address by then-Vice President George Bush. The room buzzed with that particular electricity that only comes when power walks through the door. I was ready.

The address never happened.

Word came in waves — confused at first, then urgent. The Vice President’s plane had been redirected. Something had happened in Washington. And then the full weight of it landed: President Ronald Reagan had been shot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel — the very same hotel that would host Saturday night’s chaos — by a young man with a handgun and a delusion.

It was March 30, 1981. Reagan nearly died. The country held its breath. And I stood in a Texas statehouse, reporter’s notebook in hand, staring at an empty podium.

That moment never fully left me.

The Correspondents’ Dinner Years

Decades passed. My career took turns I couldn’t have scripted. I spent many years as chief of staff to T. Boone Pickens, one of the most recognizable and consequential figures in American business and energy policy. That role brought with it a social calendar that few outsiders ever fully appreciate — and that calendar, year after year, included the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

If you’ve never attended, understand what it actually is: it is not simply a dinner. It is a sprawling, multi-day affair — a gravitational event that pulls in the most prominent names in media, politics, entertainment, and influence. The dinner itself is the centerpiece, yes. But surrounding it is an entire ecosystem of pre-parties, receptions, and gatherings jammed wall-to-wall with media notables, their guests, their guests’ guests, and the kind of VIP access that gets traded like currency.

And almost every year, as Boone and I made our way through that world, I would find myself scanning the rooms — the lobbies, the hallways, the packed cocktail receptions — with a familiar unease settling in my chest.

I would tell friends afterward, reliably, almost ritually: This is a security concern, top to bottom. Something will happen here one day.

I wasn’t alone in that assessment. I remember a former White House advance man — someone who had spent years thinking professionally about exactly these scenarios — raising the same concern. He put it with a dark humor that stuck with me: Sure, you send everyone through detailed metal detectors. And then you put them in a room where everyone is armed with a dinner knife.

He wasn’t entirely joking.

But the dinner knives were never really my primary concern. My worry lived in those pre-parties. The receptions that packed hundreds of people into hotel ballrooms and rooftop terraces with little more than a clipboard and a smile at the door. Minimal security. No meaningful ID verification. Incredible concentrations of powerful, recognizable people — and almost no buffer between them and anyone determined to get close.

CBS News reported that identification did not need to be presented in order to enter the Correspondents’ Dinner itself — only a ticket was needed to pass through magnetometers, and a national security analyst who attended noted he was never once asked for his ID throughout the entire evening, calling the security situation “perplexing” even before the attack occurred.

Perplexing. That was the polite word for it.

Saturday Night

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, a teacher and engineer from Torrance, California, had checked into the Washington Hilton the day before the event. On Saturday evening, he sent family members writings that clearly stated he wanted to target administration officials. Minutes later, armed with a shotgun and a handgun, he charged a security checkpoint outside the ballroom.

A Secret Service agent was struck by at least one round but was protected by a bulletproof vest and is expected to recover. President Trump and the First Lady were evacuated safely.

The system held — barely, and not by design so much as by fortune and the extraordinary courage of agents who put themselves in the line of fire. The Secret Service acknowledged there was no way to check every room in the 1,100-room hotel. A man with murderous intent had simply booked a room, waited, and walked toward the sound of power.

The last several years have seen a troubling escalation of political violence — two assassination attempts on Trump alone, an arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, the killing of a Minnesota lawmaker, and other incidents that should have forced a serious national reckoning about the security of high-profile public gatherings.

That reckoning never fully came. And so Saturday night happened.

The Lesson Nobody Wants to Learn

I think about that 25-year-old reporter standing in the Texas statehouse in 1981. I think about the decades in between — the dinners, the parties, the hallways full of important people and porous perimeters. I think about that advance man’s joke that wasn’t really a joke.

Here is what I know: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not merely a security challenge. It is a security philosophy problem. The event has always carried the quiet assumption that its own prestige is a form of protection — that the elaborate ritual of black ties and camera crews and celebrity guests somehow renders it a different category of target. That assumption is wrong, and it has always been wrong.

The dinner itself is one thing. But those pre-parties — those joyful, chaotic, beautifully uncontrolled gatherings — are another matter entirely. You cannot build a meaningful security perimeter around an ecosystem. You cannot magnetometer your way to safety when the real exposure happens two blocks away at a hotel rooftop with a cocktail list and a clipboard.

The problem will get worse. The political temperature in this country is not cooling. The tools available to those who wish to do harm are not diminishing. And the appetite for these grand, sprawling, high-visibility events — events that announce their locations, their guest lists, and their schedules to the world — shows no signs of abating.

Unless we learn serious lessons from the past — from 1981, from the near-misses that never made the news, from Saturday night — the next time will not end with a bulletproof vest saving a life. The courage of the Secret Service is not a security strategy. It is the last line of defense, and a last line of defense is a sign that every other line has already failed.

I’ve been saying this for years.

I wish I’d been wrong.

The author is a former political reporter and long-time chief of staff to T. Boone Pickens, with decades of experience attending and observing security at Washington’s highest-profile political events.

Cover politics in Texas long enough and you absorb two truths that never change. First, campaign seasons don’t reward restraint. Second, when the gloves come off, they don’t just come off in Washington—they come off everywhere.

My days as a political reporter ended long ago, but my affinity for attack ads has waned little.

The 2026 election cycle is already proving that the modern attack ad hasn’t grown more subtle with time or technology. It’s grown sharper, faster, and, in some cases, more synthetic. What follows are five of the dirtiest political ads currently circulating in state and national races, presented not as endorsements or rebukes, but as artifacts of how American campaigns now communicate when persuasion gives way to demolition.

1. Texas Senate: “Funding the Left” — Ads Targeting Ken Paxton

Texas rarely needs encouragement to get abrasive, and the Republican Senate primary between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton has delivered early.

Cornyn‑aligned groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee, have aired ads accusing Paxton of directing taxpayer money to organizations the ads describe as liberal or left‑leaning. One widely circulated digital spot claims Paxton “quietly connected your tax dollars to liberal organizations,” citing state contracts and grant programs awarded during his tenure as attorney general. [nrsc.org], [texaspolitics.com]

The ads stop short of alleging criminal conduct. Instead, they compress complicated funding mechanisms and third‑party affiliations into a moral judgment about ideology—an approach as familiar to Texas reporters as courthouse steps in August. Paxton has dismissed the ads as distortions, calling them emblematic of a negative primary campaign.

Watch / Reporting with video:

• NRSC ad: [nrsc.org]

• Texas Politics breakdown: [texaspolitics.com]

2. Texas Senate: The AI Deepfake of James Talarico

If the Paxton ads feel like vintage Texas politics, the next example points to its future.

In March 2026, Senate Republicans released an online ad using artificial intelligence to create a lifelike but entirely fabricated version of Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico. The deepfake video depicts an AI-generated Talarico reading excerpts from real past social media posts, while also appearing to make new self‑praising comments he never actually uttered. Small on‑screen text discloses that the video is AI‑generated, but experts told CNN and others that many viewers would struggle to recognize it as fake at a glance. [yahoo.com], [kvia.com]

The ad demonstrates a darker evolution of the attack spot: not framing an opponent’s words, but re‑animating them.

Watch / Reporting with embedded video:

• CNN/Yahoo coverage: [yahoo.com]

• KVIA repost: [kvia.com]

3. Illinois Senate Democratic Primary: Krishnamoorthi vs. Stratton

In Illinois, the normally civil scramble to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin turned sharply negative on television in February.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi began airing ads attacking Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton over her acceptance of corporate and donor-backed funds in prior state campaigns, contrasting that record with her Senate‑campaign pledges to reject such money. The 30‑second spot cites investigative reporting and frames the attacks as credibility questions rather than ideological ones—but the intent is unmistakable: undermine trust just weeks before the primary. [chicago.suntimes.com]

Stratton’s allies responded in kind, illustrating how quickly escalations now move once the first ad crosses the line.

Watch / Reporting:

• Chicago Sun‑Times article with ad details: [chicago.suntimes.com]

4. Maine Senate Democratic Primary: Mills vs. Platner

Negative ads are no longer confined to outside groups. In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills’ Senate campaign released an ad attacking rival Graham Platner by spotlighting deleted social media posts in which he appeared to dismiss sexual assault concerns.

The video shows women reading Platner’s past comments aloud before concluding he is unfit for office. The Platner campaign labeled the ad a desperate smear, while Mills’ team described it as a character test for a general election. The spot represents a modern strand of negativity: resurfacing old digital behavior and letting voters draw conclusions from tone alone. [wtop.com]

Watch / Reporting:

• Associated Press via WTOP (embedded video): [wtop.com]

5. Kentucky GOP Primary: “Woke Eddie” — Massie vs. Gallrein

In Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie did not wait for outside groups to define his biggest primary threat.

Massie released an attack ad repeatedly branding challenger Ed Gallrein as “woke,” citing Gallrein’s past association with a business leadership organization that offers diversity and inclusion resources. “He’ll fight for they/them, but never us,” the narrator says, collapsing culture‑war shorthand into a single phrase designed for repetition rather than explanation. [spectrumnews1.com]

The Gallrein campaign disputed the characterization, but the ad reflects a broader 2026 pattern: cultural labeling as political shorthand, untethered from legislative records.

Watch / Reporting:

• Spectrum News coverage with video: [spectrumnews1.com]

What This Cycle Reveals

From Texas to Maine, from AI‑driven deepfakes to culture‑war branding, the 2026 cycle is showing how negative advertising has become faster, more personalized, and more technologically unmoored. Campaigns now assume that rebuttals will lag and that emotion will land first.

For reporters—and for voters—the task hasn’t changed, even if the tools have. Watch closely. Slow the tape. Ask what’s being said, what’s being omitted, and why this moment demanded the low road.

In Texas, we’ve seen this movie before. The surprise isn’t that it’s playing nationally. It’s how quickly everyone learned the lines.

Eager for you to weigh in with other examples.

Today is Tony Dorsett’s 72nd birthday, and I find myself grinning at a memory that involves a Gulfstream 550, a torrential Oklahoma downpour, a sold Gulfstream, and a soaking wet Hall of Famer sprinting through Will Rogers World Airport while strangers chanted his name.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, let’s talk about why Tony Dorsett matters — not just to football, but to those of us who grew up believing the Dallas Cowboys were less a football team and more a civic religion.

America’s Team, My Team

I’ll confess it plainly: the Dallas Cowboys have always been idols to me. Not in a casual, “yeah I follow them” kind of way. In a full, committed, paint-the-star-on-your-face, argue-with-strangers-at-Thanksgiving kind of way. America’s Team. My team.

And Tony Dorsett? He was — and remains — one of the genuine immortals of that franchise.

Number 33 from the University of Pittsburgh arrived in Dallas as the Cowboys’ first-round draft pick in 1977, already a celebrity. And he didn’t disappoint. Not even a little.

The Three Plays That Live Forever

1. The 99-Yard Run (January 3, 1983)

In the 1982 regular season finale during a Monday Night game against the Minnesota Vikings, Dorsett set a record that may someday be tied but will never be broken — a 99-yard touchdown run. Ninety-nine yards. From his own end zone. With only 10 men on the field (yes, the Cowboys had a man in the huddle who didn’t make it out — and Tony still scored). It is, mathematically speaking, impossible to run farther. That play is not just a highlight. It is a monument.

2. Super Bowl XII — A Rookie Announces Himself

As a rookie, Dorsett rushed for 1,007 yards and 12 touchdowns, and marched all the way to Super Bowl XII. For a kid from western Pennsylvania who had just won the Heisman at Pitt, winning a Super Bowl in your first NFL season is the sort of thing that only happens in sports movies — and yet there was Tony, doing it in real life, in real January Dallas cold, making it look routine.

3. The 1981 Season — Pure Artistry

Dorsett reached the peak of his career in his fifth season in 1981, when he rushed for a team record 1,646 yards. That year, he was All-Pro, all-world, and all-everything. If you want to understand what a complete running back looks like — vision, speed, balance, instinct — you go back and watch the 1981 Dallas Cowboys. You’re welcome.

The Day I Flew With Tony Dorsett (And Then Ran With Him)

Now, about that airport story.

It was September 2016. I’d been Boone Pickens’ chief of staff for nearly two decades, and I’d had the great privilege of suggesting to Boone that we invite Tony Dorsett and his wife to join us in Stillwater for a very unique football game: Oklahoma State hosting the University of Pittsburgh — Tony’s alma mater, where he won the Heisman Trophy — at Boone Pickens Stadium.

Boone loved the idea. Tony graciously accepted.

What made this particular trip extra memorable — bittersweet, even — was that this was essentially my last ride on Boone’s beloved Gulfstream 550, tail number522BP. After dropping us in Stillwater, the plane was heading straight to New York, where it would be sold. I tried not to think too hard about that as we settled into those impossibly comfortable leather seats. Some endings you just have to let happen.

The game itself was extraordinary. Oklahoma State and Pittsburgh had never played each other — this was the first meeting in program history. And what a game to inaugurate the rivalry. OSU quarterback Mason Rudolph threw for a school-record 540 yards. Receiver James Washington hauled in 296 of them. Running back Rennie Childs scored four touchdowns. The Cowboys won 45–38.

It also featured a nearly two-hour lightning delay in the fourth quarter, which, honestly, felt cosmically appropriate given everything else going on that day.

Now here’s where the story gets good.

Tony, his wife, and I slipped out just before the final whistle — a decision that seemed perfectly sensible at the time. The only problem was that 522BP was already wheels-up to New York, which meant our ride home was a rental car to Oklahoma City, and our flight was a Southwest Airlines puddle-jumper back to Dallas.

We were tight on time. Then the skies opened.

Not rain. Biblical rain. The kind of rain that makes you question your life choices in real time. We were drenched within thirty seconds. Completely, thoroughly, comically soaked. Three adults who had just watched a magnificent football game were now essentially swimming through a parking lot.

We made it to the airport. We checked in. And then — we ran.

I don’t mean jogged. I mean ran. Through the terminal. Carry-on bags bouncing, shoes squeaking, hair plastered flat, looking like we’d swum from Stillwater.

And that’s when it happened.

Someone recognized Tony. Then someone else. And then — I still get chills — the chant broke out, echoing off the terminal walls:

“Run, Tony, Run!”

The man who had run 99 yards against the Vikings. The man who had taken a Heisman handoff at this very university’s rival stadium. The Hall of Famer. The legend.

Running for a Southwest flight. Soaking wet. And loving every second of it.

We made the flight. Barely. Tony collapsed into his seat laughing. His wife looked at me with an expression that said, “Is it always like this with you people?”

Honestly? Kind of, yeah.

Happy 72nd birthday, Tony Dorsett. You are widely considered one of the best running backs in the sport’s history — and I can personally confirm you are also one of the fastest men through a terminal gate at Will Rogers World Airport.

It was an honor to run alongside you. Even drenched.

Jay served as Chief of Staff to legendary oil tycoon and philanthropist Boone Pickens from 1988 until Boone’s passing in 2019, managing his political, philanthropic, and media relations.

And then I thought of a conversation I’d had with Mitch Barnhart.

Barnhart, Kentucky’s athletic director, is one of the rare thoughtful souls in a business that rarely rewards reflection. We were talking about the upheaval in college sports — NIL money, the transfer portal, the collapse of the old amateur myth. I mentioned, with a trace of pride, that I had served as press secretary to the governor who helped deliver the SMU death penalty in 1987 — the harshest sanction the NCAA ever imposed, one that hollowed out a program for a generation.

Clements, I explained, had been on the SMU Board of Governors and had acknowledged authorizing payments to players even after the NCAA warned the school. While he authorized a phase-out of those payments, his candor — blunt, unvarnished, costly — was pure Clements.

I was making the point that what once brought the hammer down — paying players — is now the operating principle of the sport.

Barnhart listened, then smiled.

“Did you know,” he said gently, “that I was a senior administrator in SMU’s athletic department right before all of that came out?”

I had not known. It was the conversational equivalent of stepping on a rake, and he handled it with more grace than I deserved. We laughed. But the moment stayed with me: history is always more personal than we think. Decisions made in boardrooms and governor’s offices land on actual people, actual careers.

And Bill Clements made more of those decisions than almost anyone in Texas public life.

A Wildcatter in the Statehouse

William Perry Clements Jr. was not a politician by temperament. He was a roughneck turned billionaire, a man built from grit and certainty, direct to the point of abrasion, and usually right when it mattered.

He founded SEDCO in 1947 and built it into one of the world’s largest offshore drilling companies. By the time he entered government, he had nothing left to prove. He chose public life anyway.

As Deputy Secretary of Defense under Nixon and Ford, he pushed a post‑Vietnam Pentagon toward readiness and order. He was not a natural bureaucrat. He was a natural fixer.

Breaking the Monopoly

Then came 1978.

Texas had not elected a Republican governor since Reconstruction. The Democratic hold on the state was muscle memory. Clements decided that was a solvable problem.

He outworked and outspent his opponent, winning by fewer than 17,000 votes. A sliver — but enough to crack a century‑old monopoly. Modern Texas politics begins there.

His first term was defined by fiscal discipline, impatience with bureaucracy, and a management style that prized results over ritual. He was not universally loved. He was effective.

He lost in 1982. Most men would have gone home. Clements came back.

In 1986, he won again. His second term would be the more consequential.

The Second Act

Texas was in crisis when he returned. The oil bust had gutted revenues. The savings and loan collapse was gathering force. Clements managed the emergency with steadiness and a willingness to make hard choices.

He pushed education reforms, demanded higher standards, and championed a business climate that let enterprise breathe. And despite his deep ties to the oil industry, he became a staunch advocate for a diversified Texas economy (and we see the full fruits of that today).

And yes — he stood at the center of the SMU scandal. Whatever one thinks of that saga, his response was unmistakably his: he didn’t hide, didn’t spin, didn’t pretend. He accepted consequences. Accountability is rarer than it should be.

What He Leaves Behind

Clements died in 2011 at 90, having lived long enough to see the Texas he helped shape — politically, economically, institutionally. His legacy is woven into the state’s fabric: Republican dominance, modern fiscal management, a steadier Pentagon, an offshore drilling industry he helped build from nothing.

As his staff gathers Wednesday night, I find myself thinking less about the headlines and more about the man — the impatience that was really expectation, the bluntness that was really honesty, the refusal to accept that something couldn’t be done simply because it hadn’t been done before.

And I think back to late 1986, when I joined his team after the election — a 31‑year‑old, financially struggling journalist who had spent years grinding as a Capitol reporter. My first stop after being hired wasn’t the Governor’s Office. It was a second‑hand clothing store, where I bought a used suit and a pair of used dress loafers that, nearly forty years later, have been resoled at least five times. That was how I walked into the job: eager, grateful, threadbare, determined.

I think, too, of Mitch Barnhart’s patient smile when I stumbled into my own historical blind spot. Good staff can make good governors look better. Great governors don’t need much help.

Bill Clements was one of the real ones.

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The author served as a press secretary to Governor Bill Clements during his second administration.

It started innocently enough.

I was driving somewhere forgettable — probably to pick up something I didn’t need at a store I’d sworn to stop patronizing — when the radio served up something that made me nearly swerve into a ditch. “Dead Ringer for Love.” Meat Loaf and Cher. Together. On purpose.

Now, I knew this song existed. I’d heard it before. But in that moment, in the fluorescent haze of a Tuesday afternoon, it hit me differently. These two people are singing at each other. Meat Loaf, the operatic Texas-born rock behemoth who sang songs about making out in a Chevy and running from demons. And Cher. Just… Cher. The woman who has somehow outlasted every trend, era, and generation since roughly the Eisenhower administration.

And it works. That’s the thing. It shouldn’t, but it does. Meat Loaf plays the swaggering lovelorn guy at the bar, Cher plays the woman who absolutely will not be charmed by him, and together they produced one of the most gloriously unhinged duets in rock history. The song climbed to #5 in the UK. Jim Steinman wrote it. Naturally.

I arrived home having forgotten what I went out for. But I had a new obsession.

What other musical pairings exist that have absolutely no business existing?

I’m glad you asked. Or rather, I’m glad I asked myself. Loudly. While pacing around my kitchen.

The Joe “King” Carrasco Rabbit Hole

In my research (and by “research” I mean a hysterical two-hour plunge into Wikipedia, music forums, and dusty blog posts that haven’t been updated since the Obama administration), I stumbled onto what may be the single greatest footnote in music history.

In 1982, a Tex-Mex new wave bandleader named Joe “King” Carrasco — the self-proclaimed King of Tex-Mex Rock and Roll, crown and all — was recording his album Synapse Gap (Mundo Total) at Studio 55 in Los Angeles. In the next room over, the Jackson family was mixing a live album. Michael Jackson — who had just gone platinum with Off the Wall and was about nine months away from dropping Thriller on an unsuspecting planet — was not hanging out with his brothers much. He’d wander into the office between the studios and just… sit there.

Joe King, displaying the energy of a man whose entire brand is “why not,” struck up a conversation about Bob Marley. He lent Michael his Walkman loaded with African music. Michael spent three days listening to his own Off the Wall album on that Walkman, because of course he did. They became, in some casual hallway sense, friends.

Then one day, Joe King told Michael he didn’t have anyone in his band who could sing high. Michael said he’d like to sing on the album. Just like that.

Someone by the mixing board wisecracked that Joe’s vocals should be mixed out of the recording so they could release a dub version of Michael Jackson singing the song. The producer instead left both voices in, and the song — a reggae-tinged number called “Don’t Let a Woman (Make a Fool Out of You)” — was released as a single on Synapse Gap. The session musician who arranged the whole thing had to pay Michael union scale and cut him a check for $100.

One hundred dollars. For Michael Jackson. In 1982. While he was in the middle of recording Thriller.

The song generated some airplay for a few weeks, then faded into the void, largely because — as the music business being the music business — MCA didn’t particularly care about Joe “King” Carrasco; he’d been signed as a favor from one accountant to another. And so the King of Tex-Mex and the future King of Pop made one glorious, baffling, wonderful song together, and history mostly shrugged and moved on.

I, however, could not move on. I was completely unhinged by this point. I needed to know more. I needed a list.

My Proposed Top 10 List of Utterly Unhinged Musical Pairings

(Note: These are real. I cannot stress that enough. These actually happened.)

1. Bing Crosby & David Bowie — “Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy” (1977)

This is my personal Christmas favorite, and if you’ve never seen the television footage, please stop what you’re doing immediately. Bing Crosby, 73 years old, the very embodiment of cardigan-wearing American nostalgia, sits down with David Bowie — a man who had recently been living as a cocaine-fueled alien rock god named Ziggy Stardust — to duet on a gentle Christmas medley. The two men had apparently never met before the taping. Bing died less than a month after filming it. The song became a beloved holiday classic. The universe works in mysterious ways, and sometimes those ways involve glam rock and eggnog.

2. Frank Sinatra & Bono — “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1993)

Ol’ Blue Eyes needed someone to duet with on his Duets album. His people called U2’s people. Bono showed up. Frank was not in the studio at the same time. They recorded their parts separately on different continents, which somehow feels very right for this pairing. Bono reportedly cried. Frank reportedly did not.

3. Dolly Parton & Slipknot’s Corey Taylor — “9 to 5” (Live, 2023)

Dolly Parton, who had already invaded the rock world by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which she initially declined, then accepted), performed her classic “9 to 5” at the ceremony with Slipknot’s masked, face-painted, metal-screaming frontman Corey Taylor. It went exactly as chaotically wonderful as you’d imagine. Dolly wore sequins. Corey wore a mask. Nobody was surprised that Dolly held her own.

4. Willie Nelson & Snoop Dogg — “Superman” (2004)

Two men who have each, at various points in their lives, been in possession of truly remarkable amounts of marijuana sat down and made music together. The result was a laid-back reggae-adjacent track that felt less like a musical collaboration and more like a very chill Thursday afternoon. The overlap in their Venn diagram is basically a circle.

5. Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga — The Cheek to Cheek Album (2014)

In a world of surprising duos, this one actually became genuinely beautiful. Tony Bennett, a 88-year-old jazz legend, and Lady Gaga, who had recently emerged from an egg at the Grammy Awards, released a full album of jazz standards together. It won a Grammy. They made a second album in 2021. Gaga cried constantly in interviews talking about him. Everyone softened considerably.

6. Elton John & Eminem — “Stan” (Live at the Grammys, 2001)

Eminem was under fire for allegedly homophobic lyrics. Elton John, an openly gay icon, performed “Stan” with him live at the Grammy Awards, then held his hand on stage afterward. It was a statement, a performance, and a pop culture earthquake all at once. Elton later said Eminem was one of the best artists he’d ever worked with. Nobody saw any of this coming.

7. Johnny Cash & Nine Inch Nails — “Hurt” (2002)

Trent Reznor wrote “Hurt” as a tortured industrial confessional about addiction and self-destruction. Then Rick Rubin handed it to 70-year-old Johnny Cash, near the end of his life, and Cash recorded it so devastatingly well that Reznor reportedly said the song no longer felt like his. The music video made everyone cry. This is less “odd pairing” and more “accidental masterpiece,” but the concept alone — Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails — earns its place on this list forever.

8. Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson & Stevie Wonder — Various 80s Collaborations

In the early 1980s, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney were legitimate friends who recorded several songs together, including “The Girl Is Mine” and “Say Say Say.” They were, by all accounts, having a lovely time. Then Michael bought the rights to the Beatles’ song catalog, and Paul never quite got over it. The friendship cooled somewhat. Stevie Wonder hovered nearby throughout this era, collaborating with both men separately, blissfully above the drama.

9. David Lee Roth & the New York Philharmonic

In 1986, the former Van Halen frontman — a man whose entire artistic identity was built on spandex, splits, and screaming — released a version of “Just a Gigolo” backed by an orchestra. It charted. It was in heavy MTV rotation. Classical musicians played it with straight faces. Diamond Dave was delighted.

10. Joe “King” Carrasco & Michael Jackson — “Don’t Let a Woman (Make a Fool Out of You)” (1982)

We come full circle. The Tex-Mex King and the King of Pop, united by a borrowed Walkman, a hallway conversation about Bob Marley, and $100 in union scale. As Carrasco himself once said: “I can’t think of a stranger pairing than you and Michael Jackson.” Neither can we, Joe. Neither can we.

The Conclusion I Did Not Expect to Reach

Music, it turns out, is at its most interesting when it refuses to stay in its lane. The collaborations that make absolutely no sense on paper — the ones where you squint at the lineup and say wait, who thought of this? — are often the ones that reveal something true about the artists involved. Or they’re just gloriously weird. Both outcomes are acceptable.

Somewhere out there, a radio is playing “Dead Ringer for Love,” and someone is swerving into a lane change they didn’t plan for.

That someone is doing exactly the right thing.

If you enjoyed this particular descent into musical madness, hit the like button, share with someone who still owns a turntable, and by all means suggest your own favorite unhinged pairings in the comments. I have a feeling we’re just getting started.

One of the best involves a guitar.

A few years back, Boone paid $135,000 for a guitar. Prudent people might be aghast. But let me explain. The guitar was signed by George Strait — Boone’s good friend, fellow Texan, and, in Boone’s unapologetic estimation, the greatest musical talent of a generation. And the check didn’t go to George. It went to Park Cities Quail Coalition (PCQC).

Only Boone Pickens could turn a charity auction item into a philosophical statement. As he put it himself: someone once asked why divorces are so expensive. The answer, of course, is “because they’re worth it.” That’s how Boone felt about that guitar. Expensive? Sure. Worth every penny? Absolutely.

Conservation’s Greatest Night

I share that story because this week the PCQC holds its 20th Annual Dinner and Auction at SMU’s Armstrong Fieldhouse in Dallas. If history is any guide, the room will be packed wall-to-wall with more than 1,000 hunters, conservationists, and sporting life enthusiasts from across the country.

They call it “Conservation’s Greatest Night,” and it is hard to argue that point. Since its founding in 2006, PCQC has donated more than $19.5 million to quail research, conservation, and youth programs across Texas — virtually every dollar raised going directly to the cause, thanks to an all-volunteer operation with one of the best gross-to-net ratios of any conservation group in the country.

The centerpiece of every dinner is the presentation of the T. Boone Pickens Lifetime Sportsman Award — a custom bronze sculpture created each year by world-renowned wildlife artist Walter Matia, given to a sportsman who has distinguished themselves through a life of adventure, love of the outdoors, respect for natural resources, and above all a spirit of giving back.

In other words, they give out an award for living the way Boone Pickens lived.

How Boone and George Strait Made This Thing Fly

The story of Boone and Park Cities Quail begins in 2008, when PCQC’s chairman and co-founder Bubba Wood convinced his close friend to join the cause. As Bubba later said, Boone wasn’t a rich guy who became a quail hunter. He was a quail hunter who became a rich guy. That’s an important distinction.

Once Boone was in, the organization, in Bubba’s words, went to “stratospheric levels.” Boone became chairman emeritus, donated hunts on his 68,000-acre Mesa Vista Ranch in the Texas Panhandle for the live auction year after year, and his foundation became the group’s first dinner sponsor. In 2008 alone, the Mesa Vista hunt rocketed to $140,000 at auction — a Quail Unlimited chapter record at the time. Over the years, his auction donations alone raised more than $1.5 million.

Then in 2014 came the year that tells you everything you need to know about both men.

George Strait received that year’s T. Boone Pickens Lifetime Sportsman Award. And the concert package that Boone bid on — the signed guitar, the backstage passes to what was to be the final arena performance of George’s career — went for $130,000 at auction. (Boone, ever the competitor, eventually took it to $135,000. As he later wrote, he wanted to be sure the point was made.)

George told the crowd that night about growing up in quail country, learning to hunt on his family’s lease, watching the birds disappear from his South Texas ranch over the years. “There’s a lot more we can do,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that we have these people called PCQ.”

Boone called George the greatest musical talent of the generation, citing — because Boone was always a numbers man — the fact that George’s 60 No. 1 hits exceeded the combined total of Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. He nominated him for the Dallas Morning News ”Texan of the Year” award. And he said, with the confidence of a man who had seen a few things, that George would retire in a pine box.

“He might not go on tour again,” Boone wrote, “but he’s going to be making music until the day he dies.”

Coming from a man who himself refused to stop working until his body gave him no choice, that was about the highest compliment in the vocabulary.

A Roll Call Worth Reading

The T. Boone Pickens Lifetime Sportsman Award has been given to some remarkable people over the years, and the list reads like a who’s-who of the sporting and conservation world:

• T. Boone Pickens (2008) — the inaugural recipient, honored by the organization he would go on to define

• Ray Sasser (2009) — legendary outdoor writer

• Bob Carter (2010)

• Ray Murski (2011)

• Ted Turner (2012) — one of the few people, as one writer noted at the time, who might cast a longer shadow than Pickens himself

• A.V. Jones Jr. (2013) — energy entrepreneur and lifelong Albany, Texas rancher

• George Strait (2014) — the King of Country and, as Boone would tell you, the greatest musical talent of our generation

• Johnny Morris (2019) — Bass Pro Shops founder, who announced on the spot a $100,000 annual pledge to PCQC for the next ten years

• Carl Allen (2020) — entrepreneur and conservationist, and the youngest recipient to that point, whose wife had bought a quail hunt at Mesa Vista Ranch that sparked his whole relationship with Boone and the cause

• Jerry Jones (2025) — Cowboys owner, Pro Football Hall of Famer, and lifelong duck and quail hunter who called receiving an award named for his “good friend and long-time hunting buddy” especially gratifying

This week, a new name joins that list: Robert Earl Keen.

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting honoree. REK — as his devoted following has always called him — is one of the founding fathers of Texas Country and a major architect of the Americana genre. Over 41 years on the road and 12 studio albums, he wrote some of the most enduring songs ever to come out of the Lone Star State: four-minute short stories set to melodies that never leave you. When he finally retired from touring in 2022, the State of Texas issued him an official proclamation honoring his career. That’s the kind of send-off reserved for legends.

But what makes Keen a natural for this particular award — the one named for a quail hunter who became a billionaire — is that the outdoor life was never an affectation for him. Growing up in Houston, he spent every Christmas and summer vacation hunting and working cattle on his cousins’ ranches in West Texas. He rode horseback, followed rodeo, and dreamed of a rural life even when suburban Sharpstown was the reality. He eventually bought that reality: a ranch in the Texas Hill Country where he now lives year-round, hunts birds and deer with a pair of English Cocker Spaniels, and writes songs in a stone building he calls the Scriptorium.

A quail hunter who became a music legend. Boone would have loved that framing.

The parallel with George Strait — the 2014 honoree, the same year Boone wrote that famous $135,000 check — is hard to miss. Both are Texas originals. Both spent decades at the pinnacle of their craft without losing the ranching, hunting, plainspoken authenticity that defined them from day one. And both, when the road was finally done, came home to Texas and the land.

What Boone Built

I have thought about Boone Pickens a lot over the past several years — what he stood for, what he built, what he left behind. The energy plans, the philanthropy, the Oklahoma State athletics program he transformed, the corporate battles he waged. There was never a shortage of material.

But I keep coming back to Park Cities Quail. Because in a lot of ways, it captures something essential about the man that the bigger headlines don’t always reach.

He didn’t get involved because it was good for his brand. He got involved because he was, at heart, a quail hunter from the Texas Panhandle who watched the birds disappear and couldn’t stomach the idea of doing nothing about it. He put his name on it. He put his money on it. He put his Gulfstream jet on it — that first Mesa Vista auction in 2008 included transportation to the ranch aboard his plane, because Boone Pickens didn’t do anything halfway.

And when Boone passed away in September 2019, the Park Cities Quail dinner the following March began with a standing ovation for his memory. Then they got back to work raising money for quail. That’s exactly what he would have wanted.

There is no ritual quite like it in American political life. Once a year — or at the dawn of a new administration — the President of the United States walks down the center aisle of the House chamber to thunderous applause, takes a place at the lectern before a joint session of Congress, and does something the Constitution actually requires: reports on how the country is doing.

It is theater. It is governance. And at its best, it is history.

A Brief History of the Address

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution is admirably spare on the matter: the President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

George Washington delivered the first such address in person in January 1790, setting a precedent of ceremony and directness. John Adams followed suit. Then came Thomas Jefferson, who — either out of republican modesty or because he was a genuinely poor public speaker — decided the whole theatrical exercise smacked too much of a British king addressing Parliament. For more than a century, from 1801 to 1913, presidents sent their messages to Congress in writing, where a clerk would read them aloud to largely indifferent legislators.

Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person address in 1913, and it has remained so ever since. Calvin Coolidge’s 1923 address became the first heard on radio. Harry Truman’s 1947 address was the first televised. And in 1965, Lyndon Johnson moved the address from midday to evening primetime — a decision that transformed it from a procedural formality into must-see television for the entire nation.

The phrase “State of the Union” itself didn’t become the official name until Franklin D. Roosevelt began using it in the 1940s. Before that, it was simply called the Annual Message. But whatever you call it, the speech has become America’s annual conversation with itself — a moment when the President must stand before the nation and make the case for where we are and where we’re going.

The Five Greatest Moments

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” — January 6, 1941

If there is one State of the Union address that transcends the genre and becomes genuine literature, it is this one. With Europe already consumed by the Second World War and America still deeply reluctant to enter the conflict, Roosevelt used this speech not to declare war — that would come almost exactly a year later — but to define what America would be fighting for when the moment arrived.

Near the end of the address, Roosevelt articulated a vision so clear and so enduring that it would be illustrated by Norman Rockwell and enshrined in the United Nations Charter:

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... anywhere in the world.”

The speech is remarkable for its moral clarity at a moment of profound national uncertainty. Roosevelt didn’t just describe a military strategy. He articulated a philosophical foundation for liberal democracy itself — and he did it in plain, declarative sentences that a child could understand. More than eighty years later, the Four Freedoms remain the most succinct expression of what American power is supposed to be for.

2. James Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine — December 2, 1823

This one belongs in the category of speeches whose greatness was not fully apparent in the room but whose consequences rippled across two centuries.

In his seventh annual message to Congress, President James Monroe announced a principle that would become the bedrock of American foreign policy for the next two hundred years: the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to European colonization and interference, and the United States would treat any such attempt as a threat to its own peace and security.

Monroe wrote it plainly, without fanfare:

“The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

At the time, the great European powers largely shrugged. America barely had a navy worth mentioning. But the doctrine would be invoked to justify American intervention across Latin America, used by Theodore Roosevelt to assert near-imperial authority in the Caribbean, and cited as recently as the Cold War to pressure the Soviet Union over Cuba. A few sentences in an annual message became the defining statement of American geopolitical identity. Not bad for a speech most people in that room barely noticed.

3. Lyndon B. Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” — March 15, 1965

Strictly speaking, this was a special joint address to Congress rather than a formal State of the Union — LBJ delivered his annual address earlier that January. But it was a joint address before Congress, and it deserves a place here because no President before or since has ever used a speech of this kind for such a direct, emotionally raw, and politically consequential moral appeal.

It came eight days after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Johnson went before Congress to introduce what would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he did so by borrowing the anthem of the movement itself:

“What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome.”

Senator Ted Kennedy later wrote that when Johnson paused before those final four words, the chamber fell completely silent — and then erupted. Civil rights leaders watching on television reportedly wept. It remains the single most dramatic moment of moral solidarity any American president has displayed before Congress.

4. Bill Clinton’s “The Era of Big Government Is Over” — January 23, 1996

Not every great moment in State of the Union history is an act of soaring idealism. Some are acts of breathtaking political judo — and Bill Clinton was its undisputed master.

Six weeks after a government shutdown had been widely blamed on the Republican Congress, and a year after his party had suffered a historic midterm drubbing, Clinton walked into the House chamber and stole the opposition’s most prized rhetorical property with a single sentence:

“We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.”

The line stunned Democrats in the chamber. Republicans didn’t know whether to cheer or feel robbed. Clinton had effectively moved the entire debate on his own terms, triangulating so successfully that he coasted to reelection ten months later. Whether you admired the move or deplored it, it remains the single most tactically brilliant moment in modern State of the Union history — a reminder that these speeches are also, always, politics.

5. George W. Bush Names the “Axis of Evil” — January 29, 2002

Four months after September 11th, with the nation still raw and Afghanistan newly invaded, President George W. Bush delivered an address that would define — and, many would argue, haunt — the rest of his presidency. He used the moment to dramatically expand the scope of the “War on Terror” beyond al-Qaeda and the Taliban, bundling together Iraq, Iran, and North Korea into a phrase his speechwriter David Frum had coined:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger... I will not wait on events while dangers gather.”

The phrase landed like a thunderclap. Allies were alarmed. Iran and North Korea responded with fury. Iraq would, of course, become the subject of a U.S. invasion fourteen months later. Whether history judges the speech as a moment of necessary clarity or catastrophic overreach — and it has, so far, leaned hard toward the latter — no one can dispute that this was a State of the Union address that directly shaped the course of world events. It belongs on this list precisely because it reminds us how much weight these words can carry, and at what cost.

Why It Still Matters

The State of the Union has attracted its share of mockery over the decades — the interminable length, the scripted applause lines, the parade of guests in the gallery held up as human props for policy arguments. Much of that criticism is fair. The speech has become overproduced, often bloated, and frequently forgotten by the following morning’s news cycle.

But the ritual itself endures because the democratic need it serves is real. Once a year, the most powerful person in the United States government must stand before the people’s representatives — all of them, not just the friendly ones — and make a case. They can’t avoid the room. They can’t fire the audience. They have to show up.

Washington did it. Lincoln did it. Every president since has done it, in one form or another.

The podium keeps the promise alive.