COLLEGE STATION — When Rick Perry arrived at Texas A&M University in 1968, it was at the end of a summer in which Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring, protesters at the Democratic National Convention were met by a police riot and the United States reeled from the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

With its conservative culture, military tradition and focus on agriculture, few places in the U.S. might have seemed more insulated from the prevailing currents of the age. But A&M was in the midst of its own political awakening.

Facing falling enrollment, the school had begun admitting women and had made participation in the ROTC-like Corps of Cadets — long mandatory at this military academy — optional. This created a sudden and deep divide on campus between the civilian and military undergraduates. Many corps members shunned civilians (one corps leader even forbade them from speaking to non-corps members), and civilians sought student government posts to encourage the changing climate.

Among these civilian reformers were several future Texas politicians: Garry Mauro, who would go on to serve as land commissioner and was a Democratic nominee for governor; Chet Edwards, who would become a state senator and then a U.S. congressman; and Kent Caperton, a future state senator. They found a like-minded ally in the corps: John Sharp, who would serve in the Texas House and Senate, as a railroad commissioner and as the comptroller of public accounts. But not Rick Perry.

Perry, who decades later would serve in the Texas House, as agriculture commissioner and as lieutenant governor before becoming the first A&M graduate to occupy the Governor’s Mansion, was a staunch traditionalist devoted to the corps. When he finally won elective office his senior year — he’d been prohibited from doing so before because of scholastic probation — it was thanks to the votes of his fellow cadets.

A spokesman for the governor said A&M is very important to him and “helped shape who he is today.”

Sharp told The Texas Tribune in June that, as a young A&M cadet alongside Perry, nothing was further from their minds than national politics.

“We were insulated from all that stuff,” Sharp said. “You’ve got a whole lot of things on your mind other than national politics, like how to get breakfast in the morning without getting chewed out.”

College pranksters

Despite their opposing views, Perry’s time at A&M was defined in part by his relationship with Sharp: The two were in the same outfit of the corps and lived on the same floor of their dorm for three years. Their friendship would evolve into one of the great Texas political rivalries of the 1990s when they faced off in the 1998 race for lieutenant governor.

In a joint 1989 interview with the Abilene Reporter-News, Sharp recalled meeting Perry for the first time freshman year.

“When I first saw him, I thought he looked stupid,” Sharp said, referring to the regulation haircut that Perry had received as a freshman corps member. He told Perry so.

As buddies and corps compatriots, Perry and Sharp’s relationship was at first more mischief-making than politics. If you believe Sharp, it was Perry whose ingenuity and disrespect for seniority led to the most memorable stunts.

“Rick chose his targets pretty carefully. If he chose you, it was a pretty good clue that everybody else hated you, too,” Sharp told the Reporter-News. “Perry just did it with a lot more style.”

On one occasion, Perry put live chickens in the closet of an upperclassman and left them there during Christmas break. “You can just imagine the smell,” Sharp said. “Needless to say, he didn’t mess with Perry again.”

Another more elaborate prank took Perry months to execute. It involved M-80 firecrackers and an acquired knowledge of the plumbing in A&M buildings.

Perry learned that he could drop something down the second floor toilet and get it to come out the first floor toilet. Then he learned M-80s had waterproof detonators — a perfect combination. His accomplice, Sharp, would give the high sign out the window when a potential target wandered into a stall. Perry, from the floor above, would flush the lit firework down.

“It kind of launched the guy off of the seat,” Sharp told the Tribune in June. “It was quite a hoot. It was one of our more perfect deals.”

But Perry wasn’t the only one with success in hijinks. In a 1988 interview with the Reporter-News, Perry recalled how Sharp, at a stoplight in Hillsboro, once intimidated a group of motorcycle thugs by eating live crickets.

Political rivals

By their senior year, Perry and Sharp had run each other’s campaigns and ended up in different places. Sharp was student body president, working to reform the campus to make it more hospitable to civilians. Perry was elected a yell leader — an esteemed male cheerleader who has traditional responsibilities at major athletic events — and social secretary for his class. And he was exceedingly loyal to the corps, which he credited with giving him the discipline to get an animal sciences degree — his 2.5 grade point average wasn’t high enough to go the veterinary route — and join the Air Force.

“I was probably a bit of a free spirit, not particularly structured real well for life outside of a military regime,” he said in the 1989 interview. “I would have not lasted at Texas Tech or the University of Texas. I would have hit the fraternity scene and lasted about one semester.”

Sharp’s position — student body president — may have seemed a better predictor of a career in politics. Perry saw it another way. “Really, being yell leader had more political consequence than anything else,” he said. “It was really visible.”

The distinction between substantive roles and visible roles would rear its head again: After stints as an analyst for the Legislative Budget Board, a state representative and a senator with policy-heavy positions, Sharp sat on the Railroad Commission and later became the state comptroller. Perry served as a state representative and, after switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party, as agriculture commissioner, allowing him to build on his rural base. By the early ’90s, with both men elected statewide, a competitive edge surfaced. The agencies run by Perry and Sharp repeatedly came into conflict. On one occasion, Perry even interrupted Sharp’s press conference.

State Rep. Rick Perry with Railroad Commissioner John Sharp (D) on the floor of the House during the 70th Legislative session, May 20, 1987.

“If you’re running against Rick Perry,” Sharp said in his June interview with the Tribune, “you better bring your lunch.”

By the time the two Aggies took each other on in the close 1998 race for lieutenant governor, Perry’s high profile, combined with shifting political tides, made him formidable. Less than two years after winning that contest, Perry was headed for the governorship. And six years after that, the two reconciled after striking up a conversation in an Austin gun store. Perry and the Legislature were struggling to pull together a school finance package. He turned to Sharp, putting him in charge of a blue-ribbon task force of business leaders and others. That panel devised a controversial package that lowered local school property taxes and replaced them with a new business margins tax. The governor got anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to bless the idea, while Sharp convinced the business community. In special session in spring 2006, the two got the Legislature to bless it. The tax remains controversial — many blame it for the recurring $5 billion annual hole in the state budget — but the changes forestalled lawsuits over school finance, and the two old friends turned rivals turned friends have remained close ever since.

Mauro, now an attorney, said that of all the student leaders he dealt with at A&M, Perry was not the one he would have expected to become governor. “Anyone that isn’t kind of in awe of what he’s done is jealous,” he said.

But in the 1989 interview with the Reporter-News, Sharp said A&M was the ultimate political training ground.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said at the time. “Politics outside A&M was much easier than politics inside A&M. It was a microcosm.”

Jay Root contributed to this article.

Texas seceded from the Union 150 years ago this month. It turned out to be a remarkably unprofitable idea.

It’s not a red-letter date, although Confederate Heroes Day (Jan. 19) is still on the books. Excepting historians and other nerds, the anniversary of the state’s decision to quit the Union generally goes unnoticed.

Most people think secession would be a pretty rotten idea now, but it still comes up sometimes. In April 2009, Gov. Rick Perry popped off about it at a Tea Party Tax Day rally where some in the crowd shouted “secede.”

After his speech, Perry told reporters that there are times when Texans might want to secede but that he didn’t endorse the idea.

“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry told The Associated Press. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

Texas retained the right, when it joined the Union, to split into as many as five states, but actually seceding? That was settled by the Civil War. After Perry’s early flirtation with the Tea Party, he has stayed out of secession conversations with reporters, toning down his rhetoric after a wave of national news and news jabber.

But the germ of the idea remained, growing into the anti-federalist talking points that fueled Perry’s re-election campaign last year and provided the outline for his book, Fed Up!

The governor will make his State of the State speech to the Legislature next week, and it’s likely to be a central theme.

It’s in the fight over federal health care reform and what it does and doesn’t require of state government and Texas taxpayers and insurance customers. Texas is among the states that won a round against “Obamacare” in Florida federal court this week. The issue was featured in Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s re-election ads. Attorney General Greg Abbott has been outspoken on both the political and legal fronts.

They’re not leaving home, just yelling at their parents.

It’s in the fight over who should regulate the state’s environment, the subject of another lawsuit the state has filed over the Environmental Protection Agency’s moves into regulatory territory that it had delegated to the state, in North Texas gas fields, in industrial areas in the Houston region, in definitions and rules about greenhouse gases. That one is spun as a battle between economic development and careful flexibility on the state’s part versus overreaching federal environmental regulators who don’t even follow their own rules. The EPA jumped in strong, its supporters say, because the state put a little too much emphasis on encouraging business and too little on regulating air and water.

You would think they had ordered the state to clean up its room.

It’s in the conversation here and elsewhere in the U.S. about Medicaid and how much leeway the federal government should allow along with all of the money it provides for that program, about the strings attached to other federal money — like the requirements Texas refused to adopt for its unemployment insurance program in 2009, forfeiting $556 million, or the state’s decision against applying for $700 million in federal Race to the Top money for education.

Medicaid’s the one to watch here. State officials would like to have the money with more flexibility — Perry has talked for a while about turning it into block grants with fewer rules. It’s a cost runaway that could bust the budget, which gives teeth to the argument for forbearance. He’s talked to other governors, including Jerry Brown, Democrat of California, to enlist them in the cause.

The state’s independent streak doesn’t go all the way, as it did (and for vastly different reasons) 150 years ago. One problem for writers of the state’s next budget is that they used one-time federal stimulus money for ongoing expenses in the current budget. The plug is gone, but the hole it filled remains. And while the state can yell, it can’t afford to go it alone. The Texas government will get almost 40 percent of its money from the federal government over the next two years — $70.2 billion, against a total of $177.8 billion, according to the state comptroller.

This isn’t a war. It’s just a rebellion.