OPINION: Remembering Richard Parker

Every few months or so for the last decade, I’d get an unexpected phone call. The greeting was always the same: “What’s going on? Whaddaya got?”

It was Richard Parker, imitating one of our overcaffeinated editors from the 1990s at the Albuquerque Journal. Richard — who died last week at the way-too-young age of 61 — was far more than just an ex-newspaper colleague. He changed my life for the better.

Thirty years ago, my career as a reporter felt unfulfilling. Even though I loved living in New Mexico (and still greatly miss the state), big and historic things were happening elsewhere – especially in Washington, D.C. For better or worse I yearned to be a part of, and to try to understand, that distant and still-often-baffling Beltway world.

Richard, the Journal’s ambitious and smooth-talking Washington correspondent, cooked up a solution. He would take an extended hiatus to hit the campaign trail with the presidential candidates, producing pieces in the vein of his hero Richard Ben Cramer, author of the political masterpiece "What It Takes." Somehow, he persuaded our bosses to go along with it. He found me an apartment on Capitol Hill and gave me a crash course in how Washington works — and how it doesn’t.

After chasing lawmakers down Capitol hallways for the Journal, I landed a job covering the Senate for Congressional Quarterly. Since then, I have built a rewarding career here. There’s no way I would’ve gotten that initial position without those first few months in D.C. under my belt. It was a testament to Richard’s lofty powers of persuasion — an attribute that would serve him well through a series of jobs of his own.

Though he didn’t have a ton of experience covering the military, he convinced the prestigious (and now defunct) Knight-Ridder Newspapers’ Washington bureau that he should become its Pentagon correspondent. From there, he was off and running. He went to the Texas-based strategic intelligence publishing company Stratfor and served as executive editor. He returned to D.C. as associate publisher at the New Republic. And he founded his own consulting firm to dispense advice to media-company bigwigs. In 2019, NBC News named Richard — the product of a Mexican mother and Anglo father — to its list of America’s most influential Latinos.

But he never stopped writing. He penned numerous pieces for the New York Times. He churned out eloquent opinion columns for the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News and other papers. In one such column published this month, he offered a tongue-in-cheek yet provocative suggestion: El Paso should secede from Texas and become part of more politically like-minded New Mexico.

And he wrote books. First came "Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America," an acclaimed examination in 2014 of how Texas was ahead of the curve economically and politically. Then, more recently, he finished his passion project: "The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest and America’s Forgotten Origin Story."

The Crossing — published the week of his death, following years of delays he found deeply frustrating — grew out of his desire to explain his hometown after the 2019 Walmart massacre there in which 23 people were slain. El Paso, he wrote, “provides the nation with a valuable contemporary lesson: American history started here, and it is very different from the beginnings of American history taught for centuries.” It and the rest of the Southwest, he added, “holds out hope for a future in which democracy is expanded and the Constitution is defended by and for all.”

During Richard’s phone calls to me, we often encouraged each other about our work. I sometimes expressed my appreciation for helping me get my start in D.C., but never felt it was properly conveyed. I pondered that after I dug out an old piece of his writing in which he found himself in pretty much the same situation.

After our Journal colleague Paul Wieck died in 2000, Richard asked me to go to Paul’s memorial service so I could read a tribute Richard had composed. In it, he discussed making a trip from Austin to D.C. to say a final goodbye to Paul, who had plucked him from serving as a press secretary for then-congressman Bill Richardson to joining him in the Washington bureau.

Over lunch, I explained this to him: How deeply I felt the debt of gratitude and how he changed my life for the better. And then I understood why describing Paul was always so hard. He was the exact opposite of what his critics always claimed; he was nearly selfless. He looked at me, over his hamburger, bemused at my thanks. “Why are you telling me this?” he said. “What did I ever do?” He had no idea how much he had meant.

I’m sorry that I never had a final hamburger with Richard. But he’s not someone I’ll soon forget. RIP.