"Wade was happy to go unrecognized. (Working for the FBI after law school, he’d posed in Ecuador as a journalist.) And that a Texas DA would keep his liberalism quiet made sense. Crime and convictions kept him employed. Says his son Kim: “I don’t think his liberal tendencies would have helped him get elected.” Those tendencies extended to abortion. Unknown to everyone, Henry Menasco Wade was pro-choice. Wade would never say so publicly. But almost 20 years after a lawsuit had pitted him in perpetuity against Roe, he would confide in his son—as they drove east in a Chevy pickup toward the family farm in Sachse—that he had disagreed with the abortion statutes it had been his charge to defend. Says Kim: “he was not anti-abortion.” Wade had generally looked past the statutes; his few prosecutions regarding abortion had sought less to protect the unborn than the women carrying them, the DA targeting only the most reckless of practitioners. But no longer could he do so. For Coffee, the young and brilliant lawyer who’d once sought to work for him, had named him the defendant in Roe. That was actually a mistake. Coffee had sought to enjoin all the district attorneys in Texas from enforcing the abortion statute, not merely Wade. She ought to have named the Texas attorney general, Crawford Martin, as defendant. But the court did not instruct Coffee and Weddington to amend their complaint, and Wade’s office readied to work together with the office of the Texas AG."