My Life, page 18
My eleven-year-old brother looked up and said, “Tom, am I a mature intellect?” It was good to end a roller-coaster day and a heartbreaking ten weeks with a laugh.
After a few days to pack up and say last good-byes, I drove back to Arkansas with my roommate Jim Moore to work on Senator Fulbright’s reelection campaign. He seemed vulnerable on two counts: first, his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War in a conservative, pro-military state already upset with all the upheaval in America; and second, his refusal to adapt to the demands of modern congressional politics, which required senators and congressmen to come home on most weekends to see their constituents. Fulbright had gone to Congress in the 1940s, when expectations were very different. Back then members of Congress were expected to come home during vacations and the long summer recess, to answer their mail and phone calls, and to see their constituents when they came to Washington. On the weekends when Congress was in session, they were free to stay in town, relax, and reflect, like most other working Americans. When they did go back home on long breaks, they were expected to keep office hours in the home office and to take a few trips out to the heartland to see the folks. Intensive interaction with voters was reserved for campaigns.
By the late sixties, the availability of easy air travel and extensive local news coverage were rapidly changing the rules for survival. More and more, senators and congressmen were coming home on most weekends, traveling to more places when they got there, and making pronouncements for the local media whenever they could.
Fulbright’s campaign encountered no little resistance from people who disagreed with him on the war or thought he was out of touch, or both. He thought the idea of flying home every weekend was nuts and once said to me, in reference to his colleagues who did it, “When do they ever get time to read and think?” Sadly, the pressures on members of Congress to travel constantly have grown only more intense. The rising costs of television, radio, and other advertising and the insatiable appetite for news coverage put many senators and congressmen on a plane every weekend and often out many weeknights for fundraisers in the Washington area. When I was President, I often remarked to Hillary and my staff that I thought one reason congressional debate had grown so harshly negative was that too many members of Congress were in a constant state of exhaustion.
In the summer of ’68, exhaustion wasn’t Fulbright’s problem, though he was weary from fighting over Vietnam. What he needed was not rest, but a way to reconnect with voters who felt alienated from him. Luckily, he was blessed with weak opponents. His main adversary in the primary was none other than Justice Jim Johnson, who was back to his old routine, traveling to county seats with a country band, bashing Fulbright as soft on communism. Johnson’s wife, Virginia, was attempting to emulate George Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, who had succeeded her husband as governor. The Republican Senate candidate was an unknown small-business man from east Arkansas, Charles Bernard, who said Fulbright was too liberal for our state.
Lee Williams had come down to run the campaign, with a lot of help from the young but seasoned politician who ran Senator Fulbright’s Little Rock office, Jim McDougal (the Whitewater one), an oldfashioned populist who told great stories in colorful language and worked his heart out for Fulbright, whom he revered.
Jim and Lee decided to reintroduce the senator to Arkansas as “just plain Bill,” a down-to-earth Arkansan in a red-checked sport shirt. All the campaign’s printed materials and most of the TV ads showed him that way, though I don’t think he liked it, and on most campaign days he still wore a suit. To hammer the down-home image into reality, the senator decided to make a grassroots campaign trip to small towns around the state, accompanied only by a driver and a black notebook filled with the names of his past supporters that had been compiled by Parker Westbrook, a staffer who seemed to know everyone in Arkansas who had the slightest interest in politics. Since Senator Fulbright campaigned only every six years, we just hoped all the folks listed in Parker’s black notebook were still alive and kicking. Lee Williams gave me the chance to drive the senator for a few days on a trip to southwest Arkansas, and I jumped at it. I was fascinated by Fulbright, grateful for the letter he had written for me to the Rhodes Scholarship Committee, and eager to learn more about what small-town Arkansans were thinking. They were a long way from urban violence and anti-war demonstrations, but a lot of them had kids in Vietnam.
One day Fulbright was being followed by a national television crew as we pulled in to a small town, parked, and went into a feed store where farmers bought grain for their animals. With cameras rolling, Fulbright shook hands with an old character in overalls and asked him for his vote. The man said he couldn’t give it because Fulbright wouldn’t stand up to the “Commies” and he’d let them “take over our country.” Fulbright sat down on a pile of feed bags stacked on the floor and struck up a conversation. He told the man he’d stand up to the Communists at home if he could find them. “Well, they’re all over,” the man replied. Then Fulbright commented, “Really? Have you seen any around here? I’ve been looking all over and I haven’t seen the first one.” It was funny to watch Fulbright do his thing. The guy thought they were having a serious conversation. I’m sure the TV audience got a kick out of it, but what I saw bothered me. The wall had gone up in that man’s eyes. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t find a Commie to save his soul. He had turned Fulbright off, and no amount of talking could bring the wall in his mind down again. I just hoped there were enough other voters in that town and the hundreds like it who were still reachable.
Notwithstanding the feed-store incident, Fulbright was convinced that small-town voters were mostly wise, practical, and fair-minded. He thought they had more time to reflect on things and were not all that easy for his right-wing critics to stampede. After a couple of days of visiting places where all the white voters seemed to be for George Wallace, I wasn’t so sure. Then we came to Center Point, and one of the more memorable encounters of my life in politics. Center Point was a little place of fewer than two hundred people. The black notebook said the man to see was Bo Reece, a longtime supporter who lived in the best house in town. In the days before television ads, there was a Bo Reece in most little Arkansas towns. A couple of weeks before the election, people would ask, “Who’s Bo for?” His choice would be made known and would get about two-thirds of the vote, sometimes more. When we pulled up in front of the house, Bo was sitting on his porch. He shook hands with Fulbright and me, said he’d been expecting him, and invited us in for a visit. It was an old-fashioned house with a fireplace and comfortable chairs. As soon as we were settled, Reece said, “Senator, this country’s got lots of troubles. A lot of things aren’t right.” Fulbright agreed, but he didn’t know where Bo Reece was going, and neither did I—maybe straight to Wallace. Then Bo told a story I’ll remember as long as I live: “The other day I was talking to a planter friend of mine who grows cotton in east Arkansas. He has a bunch of sharecroppers working for him. [Sharecroppers were farmhands, usually black, who were literally paid with a small share of the crops. They often lived in run-down shacks on the farm and were invariably poor.] So I asked him, ‘How are your sharecroppers doing?’ And he said, ‘Well, if we have a bad year, they break even.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘And if we have a good year, they break even.’”
Then Bo said, “Senator, that ain’t right and you know it. That’s why we’ve got so much poverty and other troubles in this country, and if you get another term you’ve got to do something about it. The blacks deserve a better deal.” After all the racist talk we’d been hearing, Fulbright nearly fell out of his chair. He assured Bo he’d try to do something about it when he was reelected, and Bo pledged to stick with him.
When we got back in the car, Fulbright said, “See, I told you, there’s a lot of wisdom in these small towns. Bo sits on that porch and thinks things through.” Bo Reece had a big impact on Fulbright. A few weeks later at a campaign rally in El Dorado, a south Arkansas oil town that was a hotbed of racism and pro-Wallace sentiment, Fulbright was asked what was the biggest problem facing America. Without hesitation he said, “Poverty.” I was proud of him and grateful to Bo Reece. When we were driving from town to town on those hot country roads, I would try to get Fulbright to talk. The conversations left me with great memories but sharply curtailed my career as his driver. One day we got into it over the Warren Court. I strongly favored most of its decisions, especially in civil rights. Fulbright disagreed. He said, “There is going to be a terrible backlash against this Supreme Court. You can’t change society too much through the courts. Most of it has to come through the political system. Even if it takes longer, it’s more likely to stick.” I still think America came out way ahead under the Warren Court, but there’s no doubt we’ve had a powerful reaction to it for more than thirty years now.
Four or five days into our trip, I started up one of those political discussions with Fulbright as we were driving out of yet another small town to our next stop. After about five minutes Fulbright asked me where I was going. When I told him, he said, “Then you better turn around. You’re headed in exactly the opposite direction.” As I sheepishly made the U-turn, he said, “You’re going to give Rhodes scholars a bad name. You’re acting like a damned egghead who doesn’t know which way to drive.”
I was embarrassed, of course, as I turned around and got the senator back on schedule. And I knew my days as a driver were over. But what the heck, I was just shy of my twenty-second birthday and had just had a few days of experiences and conversations that would last a lifetime. What Fulbright needed was a driver who could get him to the next place on time, and I was happy to go back to headquarters work, to the rallies and picnics and the long dinners listening to Lee Williams, Jim McDougal, and the other old hands tell Arkansas political stories.
Not long before the primary, Tom Campbell came for a visit on his way to Texas for his Marine Corps officer training. Jim Johnson was having one of his courthouse-steps, country-band rallies that night in Batesville, about an hour and a half north of Little Rock, so I decided to show Tom a side of Arkansas he’d only heard about before. Johnson was in good form. After warming up the crowd, he held up a shoe and shouted, “You see this shoe? It was made in Communist Romania [he pronounced it “Rooo -main- yuh”]! Bill Fulbright voted to let these Communist shoes come into America and take jobs away from good Arkansas people working in our shoe factories.” We had a lot of those folks back then and Johnson promised them and all the rest of us that when he got to the Senate there would be no more Commie shoes invading America. I had no idea whether we in fact were importing shoes from Romania, whether Fulbright had voted for a failed attempt to open our border to them, or whether Johnson made the whole thing up, but it made a good tale. After the speech Johnson stood on the steps and shook hands with the crowd. I patiently waited my turn. When he shook my hand, I told him he made me ashamed to be from Arkansas. I think my earnestness amused him. He just smiled, invited me to write him about my feelings, and moved on to the next handshake.
On July 30, Fulbright defeated Jim Johnson and two lesser-known candidates. Justice Jim’s wife, Virginia, barely made it into the gubernatorial runoff, beating a young reformer named Ted Boswell by 409 votes out of more than 400,000 votes cast, despite the best efforts of the Fulbright folks to help him in the closing days of the campaign and in the six days following, when everybody was hustling to keep from getting counted out or to get some extra votes in the unreported precincts. Mrs. Johnson lost the runoff by 63 to 37 percent to Marion Crank, a state legislator from Foreman in southwest Arkansas, who had the courthouse crowd and the Faubus machine behind him. Arkansas had finally had enough of the Johnsons. We were not yet in the New South of the seventies, but we did have sense enough not to go backward.
In August, as I was winding down my involvement in the Fulbright campaign and getting ready to go to Oxford, I spent several summer nights at the home of Mother’s friends Bill and Marge Mitchell on Lake Hamilton, where I was always welcome. That summer I met some interesting people at Marge and Bill’s. Like Mother, they loved the races and over the years got to know a lot of the horse people, including two brothers from Illinois, W. Hal and “Donkey” Bishop, who owned and trained horses. W. Hal Bishop was more successful, but Donkey was one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever met. He was a frequent visitor in Marge and Bill’s home. One night we were out at the lake talking about my generation’s experiences with drugs and women, and Donkey mentioned that he used to drink a lot and had been married ten times. I was amazed. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “When I was your age, it wasn’t like it is now. If you wanted to have sex, it wasn’t even enough to say you loved ’em. You had to marry ’em!” I laughed and asked if he remembered all their names. “All but two,” he replied. His shortest marriage? “One night. I woke up in a motel with a horrible hangover and a strange woman. I said, ‘Who in the hell are you?’ She said, ‘I’m your wife, you SOB!’ I got up, put my pants on, and got out of there.” In the 1950s, Donkey met a woman who was different from all the rest. He told her the whole truth about his life and said if she’d marry him, he would never drink or carouse again. She took the unbelievable chance, and he kept his word for twenty-five years, until he died. Marge Mitchell also introduced me to two young people who had just started teaching in Hot Springs, Danny Thomason and Jan Biggers. Danny came from Hampton, seat of Arkansas’ smallest county, and he had a world of good country stories to prove it. When I was governor, we sang tenor side by side in the Immanuel Baptist Church choir every Sunday. His brother and sister-in-law, Harry and Linda, became two of Hillary’s and my closest friends and played a big role in the ’92 presidential campaign and our White House years.
Jan Biggers was a tall, pretty, talkative girl from Tuckerman, in northeast Arkansas. I liked her, but she had segregationist views from her upbringing, which I deplored. When I left for Oxford, I gave her a cardboard box full of paperback books on civil rights and urged her to read them. A few months later, she ran off with another teacher, John Paschal, the president of the local NAACP. They wound up in New Hampshire, where he became a builder, she kept teaching, and they had three children. When I ran for President, I was happily surprised to find that Jan was the Democratic chair in one of New Hampshire’s ten counties.
Though I was preparing to go to Oxford, August was one of 1968’s craziest months, and it was hard to look ahead. It began with the Republican convention in Miami Beach, where New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s bid to defeat a resurgent Richard Nixon showed just how weak the moderate wing of the party had become, and where Governor Ronald Reagan of California first emerged as a potential President with his appeal to “true” conservatives. Nixon won on the first ballot, with 692 votes to 277 for Rockefeller and 182 for Reagan. Nixon’s message was simple: he was for law and order at home, and peace with honor in Vietnam. Though the real political turmoil lay ahead when the Democrats met in Chicago, the Republicans had their share of turbulence, aggravated by Nixon’s vice-presidential choice, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, whose only national notoriety had come from his hard-line stance against civil disobedience. Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, the first black to play in the major leagues, resigned his post as an aide to Rockefeller because he could not back a Republican ticket he saw as “racist.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, moved the Poor People’s Campaign from Washington to Miami Beach in hopes of influencing the Republican convention in a progressive way. They were disappointed by the platform, the floor speeches, and Nixon’s appeals to the ultra-conservatives. After the Agnew nomination was announced, what had been a peaceful gathering against poverty turned into a riot. The National Guard was called out, and the by now predictable scenario unfolded: tear gas, beating, looting, fires. When it was over, three black men had been killed, a three-day curfew was imposed, and 250 people were arrested and later released to quiet charges of police brutality. But all the trouble only strengthened the law-and-order hand Nixon was playing to the so-called silent majority of Americans, who were appalled by what they saw as the breakdown of the fabric of American life.
The Miami strife was just a warm-up for what the Democrats faced when they met in Chicago later that month. At the beginning of the month, Al Lowenstein and others were still looking for an alternative to Humphrey. McCarthy was still hanging in there, with no real prospect of winning. On August 10, Senator George McGovern announced his own candidacy, clearly hoping to get the support of those who had been for Robert Kennedy. Meanwhile, Chicago was filling up with young people opposed to the war. A small number intended to make real trouble; the rest were there to stage various forms of peaceful protest, including the Yippies, who planned a “countercultural” “Festival of Life” with most of the celebrants high on marijuana, and the National Mobilization Committee, which had a more conventional protest in mind. But Mayor Richard Daley wasn’t taking any chances: he put the entire police force on alert, asked the governor to send in the National Guard, and prepared for the worst. On August 22, the convention claimed its first victim, a seventeen-year-old Native American shot by police who claimed he fired on them first near Lincoln Park, where the people gathered every day. Two days later, a thousand demonstrators refused to vacate the park at night as ordered. Hundreds of police waded into the crowd with nightsticks, as their targets threw rocks, shouted curses, or ran. It was all on television.
