Ronnie Dugger, founding editor and longtime publisher of the Texas Observer and for many years the crusading conscience of the progressive movement in Texas and beyond, died of complications of dementia at an assisted living facility in Austin on May 27. He was 95.
Dugger was the author of biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan and other significant books, as well as countless articles and essays about Texas politics, civil rights, higher education, capital punishment, nuclear proliferation, and computerized voting, among many issues that attracted his earnest attention over the years. He also wrote poetry. His wide range of interests notwithstanding, he will always be associated with the scrappy little Austin-based political journal created in his image.
Few would have predicted his shaping influence when the Observer came into being in late 1954. Dugger himself would have been among the skeptics.
