But six feet was too far, Berry discovered when Hutchison chewed her out later in front of other employees. Testified Berry: "She let me always know when I did something that did not please her."
Four Hutchison aides -- Ammann, Snead, Babin and Berry -- testified that they told their boss she was making them perform too many personal and political tasks on state time. Snead testified that she and Stephanie Nooner complained to Hutchison so frequently, and the treasurer reacted so poorly, that they began flipping a coin to decide who would take on the task of raising the issue yet again.
Snead said she urged Hutchison to install a separate phone line for her personal and political calls -- a change that Hutchison ultimately approved. The treasurer refused, however, to open a campaign office in Austin, as many of her fellow statewide officeholders have done. (She instead instructed staffers, the women testified, to use the Austin office of her husband's law firm for time-consuming tasks.) Nor would Hutchison follow their suggestion to use campaign funds to hire a traveling aide, another common practice among politicians trying to avoid blurring the lines between state and political obligations.
"We are doing nothing that Ann Richards didn't do," the treasurer told Berry when she complained about Hutchison's practices for getting nonstate chores accomplished at the office. Snead testified, "She said we were always nipping at her, just telling her that things were not like they should be. She called us mosquitos."
"I don't like to say that she just didn't care, but she didn't -- I mean she expected us to do what she told us to do," Snead testified. "And she just didn't want to hear when we would tell her, you know, 'We just don't feel comfortable doing this.' She would say, you know, 'Do it. That's nonsense. Just do it.' "
A basic mistrust underscored the relationship between Hutchison and her employees. Hutchison failed, for example, to tell even her two deputy treasurers where she was when calling them from the road. Nor would she allow them copies of her complete daily schedule.
Hutchison griped to her state-paid subordinates that they were failing to protect her politically. "She complained that we didn't have any political sense and could not help her, and she needed somebody politically who could help her," Bell testified.
Shortly after Hutchison appointed Barron and Bell as her top deputies, she gave the pair an article written by the governor's chief of staff in another state; she told them the article's thinking reflected "her philosophy in total," Barron testified. "The article said that the staff of an elected official needed to remember that they were not elected by anyone; that the elected official was the elected person and the staff was only there to serve the elected official."
Most of those who displeased the boss escaped with a caustic scolding. But Hutchison hit, pinched and shoved employees with enough regularity to make such outbursts a kind of leitmotif of her management style.
Trilby Babin, who served as Hutchison's scheduler, recalled one such minor assault during a drive to the Capitol. Inside the automobile, Babin recalled, Hutchison was trying to maintain a conversation on the car phone and, at the same time, instruct Mark Toohey, her press secretary, to remove an item from her attache bag. Toohey apparently couldn't determine from Hutchison's silent gestures precisely what the treasurer wanted.
"She was becoming very irritated," Babin recalled. "Mark was flustered. It seemed to escalate. And she lost her temper, and pinched him." Babin testified that Hutchison got Toohey on the arm. When they returned to the office, Babin recalled, Toohey half-jokingly compared battle scars with other members of the Treasury staff.
Hutchison's too-close encounter with Executive Assistant Sharon Ammann generated so much embarrassing publicity after Ammann detailed the incident to reporters on the eve of the special election for the Senate that the treasurer took a lie-detector test -- she told reporters she passed -- to buttress her denial that the incident ever took place.
But both Ammann and secretary Sharon Snead provided sworn testimony about the encounter to the grand jury. The two women testified that Hutchison had grown angry at Ammann for failing to find a phone number fast enough. Hutchison had asked Ammann to find the telephone number of a wealthy San Antonio doctor who had contributed to her campaign, assigning her aide the very sort of minor political chore that would later provide the basis for her criminal indictment.
In this case, the treasurer was traveling to San Antonio and wanted to inform the doctor of her visit. But Ammann couldn't uncover the number anywhere. She went into Hutchison's office to apologize for her ineptitude, only to discover she was searching with an incorrect spelling of the name. Ammann then learned from directory assistance that she needed to provide the doctor's specialty to narrow down the list of numbers. So she returned to Hutchison's office to ask about the doctor's practice.
That query apparently struck a nerve. Hutchison came into the secretarial area, screaming and banging on the desk, Ammann and Snead recalled. Stunned, Ammann stood near a file cabinet, where she was frantically searching for the number in other records. That's when, the executive assistant testified, Hutchison punctuated her tirade by whacking her subordinate on the shoulder with a notebook. "She just pounded me every time," Ammann testified. According to the two women, Hutchison ended her tantrum by walking back into her office and slamming the door.
