My life

Longtime friends like Mack McLarty and Vince Foster helped me break into the Little Rock business and professional communities. I still had good support from labor leaders, though some of it fell off when I refused to sign a petition supporting labor’s effort to repeal Arkansas’ right-to-work law by putting the question on the November ballot. Right-to-work laws enable people to work in plants with unionized workforces without paying union dues. Back then, the law appealed to my libertarian side. I later learned that Senator McClellan was so impressed by my position that he asked Paul Berry to call his main supporters and tell them he was for me. A few years later, I changed my mind about right to work. It’s wrong, I think, for someone to reap the superior salaries, health care, and retirement plans normally found in union plants without making a contribution to the union that secures those benefits. My base in the Third District seemed secure. All the folks who had worked for me in 1974 were willing to go again. I got some extra help from Hillary’s brothers, both of whom had moved to Fayetteville and enrolled at the university. They also added a lot of fun to our lives. One night, Hillary and I went over to their place for dinner and spent the whole evening listening to Hugh regale us with tales of his adventures in Colombia with the Peace Corps—stories that sounded as if they came straight out of One Hundred Years of Solitude but that he swore were all true. He also made us piña coladas that tasted like fruit juice but packed quite a punch. After two or three I was so sleepy that I went outside and climbed into the back of my Chevy El Camino pickup truck, which I had inherited from Jeff Dwire. The back was covered in Astroturf, so I slept like a lamb. Hillary drove me home, and the next day I went back to work. I loved that old truck and drove it until it completely wore out. Out in the state, I found strong support in and around Hope, where I was born, and in the five or six counties outside the Third District where I had relatives. I got off to a good start among blacks in central, south, and east Arkansas, thanks to former students who were practicing law in those areas. And I had support from Democratic activists who had cheered my race against Hammerschmidt from the sidelines or been involved in the work of my affirmative action committee. Despite all that, there were still gaping holes in the organization. Most of the campaign was an attempt to fill them. As I traveled the state, I had to contend with the rise of a new political force, the Moral Majority, founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a conservative Baptist minister from Virginia who had won a large television following and was using it to build a national organization committed to Christian fundamentalism and right-wing politics. In any part of the state, I might find myself shaking hands with someone who would ask if I was a Christian. When I said yes, I would be asked if I was a born-again Christian. When I said yes, there would be several more questions, apparently supplied by Falwell’s organization. Once when I was campaigning in Conway, about thirty miles east of Little Rock, I was in the county clerk’s office, where absentee ballots are cast. One of the women who worked there started in on me with the questions. Apparently, I gave the wrong answer to one of them, and before I left the courthouse she had cost me four votes. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t about to answer a question about religion falsely, but I didn’t want to keep losing votes. I called Senator Bumpers, a good liberal Methodist, for advice. “Oh, I get that all the time,” he said. “But I never let them get past the first question. When they ask me if I’m a Christian, I say, ‘I sure hope so, and I’ve always tried to be. But I really think that’s a question only God can judge.’ That usually shuts them up.” After Bumpers finished, I laughed and told him now I knew why he was a senator and I was just a candidate for attorney general. And for the rest of the campaign, I used his answer.