Rick Perry

Rick Perry served as the secretary of energy in the cabinet of President Donald Trump from 2017 through 2019. Before that, he served as the forty-seventh governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015. Perry, a Republican, also ran for president twice, in 2012 and 2016, on a platform of fiscal conservatism.

Childhood and Early Life

James Richard Perry was born on March 4, 1950, in West Texas. A fifth generation Texan, his family has deep roots in farming, ranching, and public service. Perry's great-great grandfather, D. H. Hamilton, was a Confederate veteran and farmer who also served as a state representative. Perry's father, Ray, continued the family tradition of both farming and political life. After serving in the military during World War II, Ray Perry returned to Haskell, married his wife, Amelia, and started his farm with a lease on 312 acres. He also began a long career as a county commissioner and school board member. Perry was raised on the farm in rural Paint Creek, working alongside his father, riding horses and playing football. As a boy, he was also active in scouting, and earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

Today the family farm is a thriving 10,000-acre ranch operation that includes two oil wells, but Perry grew up in a frame house that had no indoor plumbing until he was six years old. Amelia Perry sewed most of the clothes worn by Perry and his older sister, Milla. Amelia laughingly recalled sending Perry off to university with "homemade underdrawers."

Education and Military Service

In 1972, Perry graduated from Texas A&M University, where he earned a degree in animal science. When he started college, he dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but his grades were not high enough to be successful in the highly competitive program. However, Perry did succeed in politics. While he was in school, he served as a junior and senior yell leader, one of five men cheering for the fiercely loyal Texas A&M football fans, who have yell leaders rather than traditional cheerleaders. Perry also served as a member of the Corps of Cadets. The friends he made as a young leader during his college years remain an important part of his political success today.

After graduating from A&M, Perry joined the Air Force and flew C-130 tactical airlift aircraft in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. According to Perry, the travel made him miss his home in Texas.

Family Life

In 1977, at the end of his tour of duty, Perry decided to return to the family farm. He ran the ranching operation, while his father tended to farming. In 1982, Perry married his high school sweetheart, Anita Thigpen. The two met years earlier at a piano recital while they were both in elementary school, and went on their first date when Perry was sixteen years old. While he was busy with college and the military, Anita received a bachelor's degree in nursing from West Texas University and went on to earn a master's in nursing from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Finally, after sixteen years of courtship, the two settled in their hometown of Haskell and went on to have a son, Griffin, and a daughter, Sydney.

Political Career

In 1984, Perry decided to run for state legislature as a Democrat, and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives. In his second term, he was appointed to the influential Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for the state budget. In 1987, as Texas faced falling oil prices and a faltering economy, Perry and his fellow committee members were challenged with decreasing state spending. More often than not, Perry found himself voting with his Republican colleagues.

Two years later, Perry visited the home of a Dallas couple, where an intense young man named George W. Bush invited him to join the Republican Party. It was Perry's first conversation with the man who would later become president of the United States.

After switching parties, Perry was elected to his first statewide office as Texas Commissioner of Agriculture in 1990. He served two terms, promoting agriculture and expanding the market for Texas products. During these years, the most notable aspect of his tenure was the controversy surrounding the influential Texas Farm Bureau, an organization of farmers and ranchers committed to grass roots policy development. Onetime supporters of Perry, the Farm Bureau disagreed with him over his endorsement of home equity loans and other issues.

Lieutenant Governor

In 1997, Perry announced his decision to run for lieutenant governor under Governor George W. Bush, who was running for election to a second term. Perry's competition was an old college friend, state comptroller John Sharp. They engaged in a bitter campaign, with Sharp receiving the Farm Bureau endorsement. In the final days of the campaign, a $1 million loan from a major supporter helped Perry increase his visibility and win the election; he took office in January 1999.

As lieutenant governor, Perry received high marks for his bipartisan leadership. In response to his bipartisan work with legislators to pass a balanced state budget that included record tax cuts, teacher pay raises and a school funding increase, The Houston Chronicle editorialized, "Perry has an essential ability to work effectively across party lines." Another newspaper, the El Paso Times, stated, "Promises made, promises kept. That is the slogan by which Texas Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry should be remembered."

When Bush was elected president in 2000, Perry served out the remainder of Bush's term, taking office as the forty-seventh governor of Texas on December 21, 2000.

Governor

Perry was elected to serve a full four-year term as governor on November 5, 2002, and expressed his commitment to improving educational standards. During his term, public school funding was increased by $6 billion, a $300 million TEXAS Grant Scholarship Program was passed to make Texas colleges and universities more accessible, and funding for higher education was increased by $3 billion.

With the support and help of his wife, Perry also focused on improving the state's health care by addressing children's healthcare needs, and made improvements in nursing home and border health care.

Perry retained his reputation as a strong fiscal conservative. Facing a budget deficit of nearly $2 billion for the year 2003, he put forward a first budget with zeroes beside every item to set the tone for the cuts that would follow. He continued pursuing a fiscally and socially conservative agenda, signing a law to cap medical malpractice settlements, cutting property taxes used to fund schools, and opposing the economic stimulus package put forward by President Barack Obama to deal with the Great Recession. He opposed abortion and same-sex marriage and was a climate-change skeptic.

Perry was reelected in 2006. In April 2010, Perry was criticized by the nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which listed him as one of the least politically ethical governors in the US. Nonetheless, Perry was reelected again in 2010, defeating Democratic Party challenger Bill White to become the first Texas governor elected to three four-year terms.

On August 13, 2011, Perry announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination in the 2012 presidential election. After finishing last in the 2012 New Hampshire Republican primary, he ended his campaign on January 19, 2012 and endorsed GOP colleague Newt Gingrich in the race for the nomination.

In 2013, Perry announced he would not seek a fourth term as governor in 2014. He left office in January 2015 having served more than fourteen years, the longest of any Texas governor. Later that year, he announced his entry into the race for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. His campaign again failed to gain traction, and Perry eventually dropped out and endorsed nominee Donald Trump, who was elected in November 2016.

US Secretary of Energy

In December 2016, Trump announced Perry as his choice to head the Department of Energy. The irony of this pick was not lost on those who remembered candidate Perry's vow to eliminate the Department of Energy, along with a number of other federal agencies, if elected president. Nonetheless, the Senate confirmed Perry as energy secretary in March 2017. During his time in the job, Perry continued to be known as a supporter of fossil fuels and a critic of mainstream climate science.

In 2019, Perry became embroiled in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, in which a whistleblower complaint about Trump's efforts to get the Ukrainian government to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a front-running 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, led to a congressional impeachment inquiry against Trump. A major source of concern for Trump's critics were revelations of an unofficial policy channel for US-Ukrainian relations, led by Perry, US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and US special representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, as well as Trump's personal lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. While admitting no wrongdoing, Perry announced in October 2019 that he would step down as energy secretary at the end of the year.

Bibliography

Davenport, Coral. "Rick Perry, Ex-Governor of Texas, Is Trump’s Pick as Energy Secretary." The New York Times, 13 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/rick-perry-energy-secretary-trump.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.

Haberman, Maggie, and Lisa Friedman. "Perry to Resign as Energy Secretary." The New York Times, 17 Oct. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/politics/rick-perry-energy-secretary-resigns.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.

MacGillis, Alec. "The Permanent Candidate: What’s Driving Rick Perry? The New Republic, 28 Sept. 2011, newrepublic.com/article/95448/rick-perry-texas-economic-development-funds. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.

Reeve, Elspeth. "A Timeline on How Rick Perry Evolved: It Started with Braces." The Atlantic, 28 Sept. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/timeline-how-rick-perry-evolved-it-started-braces/337385/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.

"Rick Perry Fast Facts." CNN, 13 Nov. 2019, www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/us/rick-perry-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.