Remembering Paul Burka — the state’s most revered political writer was the heart and soul of Texas Monthly

With Paul Burka’s death Sunday night at age eighty, there are almost too many losses to count. Galveston-born, educated at Rice University and the University of Texas law school, Paul loved Texas and knew more about it than anyone else on the Texas Monthly staff, where he worked as an editor and writer from its earliest days in 1974 until his retirement in 2015. He knew its tiniest towns, its best barbecue, its worst small-time pols and best baseball players. More important, he knew what Texas should be and could be, and devoted his life to trying, heroically, to make it so. All these qualities made him, in turn, a great journalist, one who knew intuitively what Texans wanted—and needed—to read. Swimming holes and chili were as coverage-worthy as governors and senators, and even Chevy Suburbans, which all came within his purview. He had vision to spare in that way. Paul scared the bejesus out of Texas politicians who knew he could always outthink them, see through them, and at least try to shame them into doing the right thing. “He has no ideas, but he knows the name of every precinct chairman in Texas,” he once said of our current governor, “having no ideas” being about the worst thing Paul could think or say about anyone.

He was also, of course, a great editor, one who reminded us constantly that our primary obligation was not to the rich or the powerful or even our subjects, whoever they were, but to our readers. He hated the back-and-forth, “he said/she said” of newspaper reporting, and always pushed us toward what was right and true. He always, always made even the best pieces better—and everything had to be the best in his eyes before it went into Texas Monthly, even a dumb gossip column I wrote many years ago. (“It’s flat,” he said of my copy, as if he were describing a roadkill platter situated in the center of an otherwise glorious banquet table.) He was confident in his beliefs, and arguing with Paul could be bracing but never nasty—he just wore you down until you saw that you were sadly misguided. Paul was also generous with all that he knew; he was a natural mentor, eager to share, as virtually all the Texas Monthly writers and, later, his students at UT learned. Maybe because he adored his wife Sarah and daughter Janet as much as his sons Barrett and Joel, his expectations for and faith in women—“girls” to him, yes—were the same as for the guys. You might not have recognized your story when you got an edit back, but you learned from it, if you were smart. Eventually your pieces would start coming back with some resemblance to what you wrote. “All the sentences were mine,” one writer bragged of his National Magazine Award–winning story. “Just in a different order,” quipped Paul, his editor. But maybe the most wonderful thing about Paul—and the reason so many loved him so much, as I did and will to the end of my own days—was that he was as wonderfully flawed as he was brilliant and generous. He was a man of prodigious proportions. He was the only staffer who could pose for a magazine spread with an upside-down bowl of chili on his head and still look august. But whenever he wore a tie, it came accessorized with a stain of mustard or barbecue sauce.