My life

On the way back to Fayetteville, I stopped in Harrison, where the trial was held, to discuss it with Miss Ruth Wilson, a public accountant who did tax work for lots of hill people. I told Miss Ruth that I understood she had helped Holder’s lawyer, my friend F. H. Martin, with the jury selection. She said she had. I asked her half jokingly if she had packed it with Democrats. I’ll never forget her reply: “No, Bill, I didn’t. Actually, there were a fair number of Republicans on that jury. You know, those young men who came down from Washington to prosecute the sheriff were smart fellows, and they looked real good in their expensive suits. But they just didn’t know our folks. It’s the strangest thing. Nine of those twelve jurors had been audited by the Internal Revenue Service in the last two years.” I was glad Ruth Wilson and her boys were on my side. After she worked over those Washington lawyers, the Justice Department began to ask prospective jurors in tax cases about their own experiences with the IRS. With about two weeks to go, the congressman finally got his campaign in gear. He had seen a poll that said if he didn’t, my momentum might carry me to a narrow victory. His people pulled out all the stops. His business friends and the Republicans went to work. Someone began calling all the papers asking for the nonexistent photo of me demonstrating against President Nixon at the 1969 Arkansas-Texas game, giving birth to the infamous “tree story” I mentioned earlier. In Hot Springs, the chamber of commerce had a big dinner to thank him for all he’d done. Several hundred people showed up, and it received extensive coverage in the local paper. Across the district, Republicans scared businesspeople by charging that I had so much support from unions, I would be a puppet for organized labor in Congress. In Fort Smith, six thousand postcards we sent to political supporters identified in our phone canvass were never delivered. Apparently my labor support didn’t extend to the postal workers there. The cards were found a few days after the election in the trash outside the main post office. The state branch of the American Medical Association came out strongly for Hammerschmidt, hitting me for my efforts to get doctors in the Springdale area to treat poor people on Medicaid. Hammerschmidt even got federal revenue-sharing funds to pave the streets of Gilbert, a small town in Searcy County, a few days before the election. He carried it 38–34, but it was the only township in the county he won. I got an inkling of just how effective his work had been the weekend before the election when I went to a closing rally at the Hot Springs Convention Center. We didn’t have as many people there as had attended his dinner a few days before. Our people had worked their hearts out, but they were tired. Still, on election day, I thought we might win. As we gathered in my headquarters to watch the returns, we were nervous but hopeful. We led in the vote count until nearly midnight, because the largest and most Republican county, Sebastian, reported late. I carried twelve of the fifteen counties with fewer than eight thousand total votes, including every voting box along the Buffalo River in Newton and Searcy counties. But I lost five of the six biggest counties, suffering narrow defeats of fewer than five hundred votes each in Garland County, where I grew up, and Washington County, where I lived, losing Crawford County by eleven hundred votes and getting killed in Benton and Sebastian counties, where my combined losses were twice the total margin of victory. We each won one county by about two to one. He won Sebastian County, the biggest, and I won Perry County, the smallest. It seems ironic now, when rural Americans vote overwhelmingly Republican in national elections, that I began my political career with a profoundly rural base, born of intense personal contact and responsiveness to both their resentments and their real problems. I was on their side, and they knew it. The final total vote was 89,324 to 83,030, about 52 to 48 percent.