Mountain Brook’s ambassador
A large painting canvasses the left wall of the entry to the Cabaniss home off Old Leeds Road. On it, faces of elderly women sitting and talking show their resilience from surviving 40 years of Communist control.
Catherine Cabaniss had invited this group over once a month to have tea in their residence while her husband, Bill, was serving as ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2004-2006. One day, instead of conversing with her in broken English and broken Czech, they asked Catherine to paint them.
Works of various Czech artists the Cabanisses befriended during those years now accentuate their home, but most of Bill’s memorabilia lives in his Office Park office. As ambassador, his focus had been on the political and business community — a realm in which he had spent most of his career, only most of it had been in a very different climate back in Alabama.
This journey, and all of Bill’s life, has been chronicled in a new biography, William Jelks Cabaniss, Jr.: Crossing Lines In His Business, Political, and Diplomatic Life, written by Worth Earlwood “Woody” Norman Jr.
A mission for change
After serving four years in the Army following graduation from Vanderbilt University, Bill and his wife, Catherine, returned to Birmingham in 1964. He had grown up in Mountain Brook, where his dad had served on the first Mountain Brook City Council and he attended Shades Valley High School one year before leaving for boarding school in New Jersey.
In 1970, he became the owner of a small metal grinding company. His business travels around the Southeast in this role introduced him to companies’ negative view of Alabama.
“I was as unpolitical as anybody could be, but the more I talked to plant managers moving their companies to the South, the more I learned about Alabama politics,” Bill said. “That began a question as to who was at work in Montgomery and began a buildup of a feeling [of wondering,] ‘If I can run for the legislature, could I make a difference?’”
At that time, he had never been inside the state Capitol building — he thinks he might have been sick on the day of that school field trip. But beginning in 1978 he would spend three months a year there for the next 12 years, working to change the business environment of the state, among other issues.
In 1966, Leland Childs of Mountain Brook had been the first Republican elected to the Alabama Senate since Reconstruction. In 1978, Bill was one of four Republicans elected among 105 legislators in the State House.
Author Norman notes that although these four were not the first Republicans in the House, they were the first to continue in office “long enough to establish the voice and credibility of Republican leadership in the State of Alabama.” According to Norman, 1978 “marked the potential emergence of Alabama as a two-party state where Alabama citizens could experience competitive political engagement.”
Ushering in a new era
Bill remembers when he first started in the Legislature, one Democrat he passed daily would ask him, “What are you Republicans going to do today?”
“I guess they had never seen a Republican legislator before, but I think he finally figured out that Republicans are not all bad people,” he said.
Bill became fast friends with Fob James, who was governor during his House term, because both were new to government and came with business backgrounds. They both wanted to change Alabama’s antibusiness, “jackpot justice” reputation.
One way to make that change was by changing tort laws, but getting there meant starting an uphill battle against the strong plaintiff lawyer influence, Bill said.
His second term in office, this time in the state Senate, was also an uphill battle for the first four years.
“The mood was not friendly to business issues until a vice president from Boeing, which had a plant in Huntsville, came to Huntsville and told [Governor] George Wallace publicly that Boeing wouldn’t add one more employee in Alabama until the employee lawsuit problems were fixed,” Bill said.
At the same time, more and more Democrats were abandoning conservative positions for more liberal ones, and conservative Democrats were switching parties. When district lines were redrawn in 1983, 16 Republicans and eight independents entered the Alabama Legislature, providing help to push bills that Bill and his comrades had been trying to pass.
Furthermore, in 1986, a Republican governor, Guy Hunt, came into office. Bill said the next four years in office were much friendlier to business development, but that wasn’t the only matter on their agenda. Republicans’ attempts to create a state ethics commission were defeated three times.
“There were a few of us Republicans, very much the minority, trying to pass strong ethics laws,” Bill said. “We were trying to change the way government in Alabama had been working. It was very special interest-oriented.”
Over just more than a decade in office, Bill said the Republicans gradually saw more and more legislation pass as more people were elected who cared about the business environment in the state, job creation and the Legislature’s ethical conduct. It was changes during this time that would pave the way for Mercedes to come to the state in 1993, with much growth in the auto industry in the state to follow.
Budding relationships with the Bushes
Bill first met the father of the president who would appoint him ambassador at an event in Birmingham at Temple Tutwiler’s house. Temple’s daughter, Margaret Tutwiler, had advised Bill in running his first campaign and would go on to work for George H.W. Bush’s campaign in 1980.
Catherine would become friends with Barbara Bush later when, following the death of the Cabanisses’ son, Catherine took up a career as an artist and spent summers in Maine painting. When Bill would go up there, he would see George H.W. and would meet his son, George W. Bush, whom Cabaniss said was “just a young man” at the time.
In 1988, Bill was chair of the Alabama delegation to the Republican Convention that nominated George H.W. for president. That year Bush Sr. would also come to Alabama to help Bill campaign for his run for Senate (he would lose to Democratic incumbent Howell Heflin) and attend a rally at the BJCC. The state was familiar to him, Bill said. Bush Sr. would come to fish with his friend Ray Scott, who founded the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, outside Montgomery, and George W. had worked for the 1972 U.S. Senate campaign for Winton “Red” Blount, a Montgomery native who had served as U.S. Postmaster General under President Richard Nixon and would start the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
“[The Bushes] were very fine people,” Bill said. “[George Herbert Walker] has had a long career in government responsibilities, so he was well qualified to be president.”
Fast-forward to 2003. The Cabanisses attended a barbecue George W. and Laura Bush hosted in Texas to thank their supporters. At the event, George W. said something about wanting to learn more about the art in the White House. Catherine would later write him to offer her help with that as an artist, and the couple received an invitation to dinner at the White House to talk about art. That night, Laura Bush asked Bill if he would be interested in serving as an ambassador.
“It came out of the clear blue sky,” Bill recalled, but he told her he would be honored to do so.
In January 2004, he was installed as ambassador to the Czech Republic, where he would serve through 2006.
Czech diplomacy
The Cabanisses’ time in the Czech Republic allowed them to act as partners. Bill developed relationships with political and business leaders in the country while Catherine entered the Czech art community. They would bring together people for receptions at their residence in Prague.
“If it hadn’t been for her involvement in the arts, I would never have gotten to know people outside the political and business community,” Bill said. “It was a wonderful merging of different groups of Czechs.”
Unlike the business environment he had experienced in Alabama in the 1970s, the Czech Republic was welcoming U.S. plants and offices at the time due to its strong business environment and its positive national feeling toward the U.S.
Going back to the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was close friends with Czechoslovakian President Tomas Masaryk. General Patton’s Army liberated part of the country during World War II, but afterward the Soviet Union gained control of the country. Before World War II, Czechoslovakia, with its mere population of 15 million, had the ninth largest economy in the world, but things changed under Communist rule. Cabaniss said the people were “basically captives of the Communists.” After 40 years of their rule, the country became free and, a few years later, peacefully split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
“The Czechs gave a lot of credit to Reagan and George H.W. Bush for the wall coming down and supporting the path to freedom for countries like Czechoslovakia in 1989,” Bill said.
When the Cabanisses arrived 15 years later, Bill was optimistic about the country’s future and the character of its people.
While the Cabanisses were serving, their Prague residence also held a reception for judges who came to Prague shortly after being freed from Iraq, and in 2005 George W. Bush came to the country to attend the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Plzen by American troops in 2005.
Bill spoke to many college classes and was impressed by how many of the country’s young people spoke English well, as well as by their kindness. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the Czech Republic was one of the first countries to send relief supplies without being asked. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the Czechs sent mobile hospital units into the country, and when they found many Afghan children had a congenital heart condition, they would fly the children and their parents to Prague for a procedure that would correct it.
Since returning to Birmingham, Bill has been active with the American Friends of the Czech Republic. Most recently, they have installed a bust of former president Vaclav Havel next to one of Winston Churchill in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C. Havel, a leading dissident, poet and playwright, was the country’s first president after the Russian rule ended. Bill is also part of an effort to build a Havel Presidential Library in Prague that will be the first library established outside the U.S. that will be dedicated to a foreign leader.
“We want to remember his contributions to freedom and human rights during that time,” Bill said.
William Jelks Cabaniss, Jr.: Crossing Lines In His Business, Political, and Diplomatic Life, by Worth Earlwood Norman Jr., is available at Little Professor Book Center, the Print On-Demand center at the Brookwood Books-A-Million, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and booksamillion.com.