My life

With the Orange Bowl case behind me, I went home to make my next move. After Senator McClellan publicly announced his retirement, I went to see him to thank him for his service and ask his advice. He strongly urged me to run for his seat; he didn’t want David Pryor to win it and had no particular ties to Tucker and Thornton. He said that the worst I could do was lose, as he had done on his first try, and that if I lost, I was young and could try again, as he had. When I told him I was thinking of running for governor, he said that was a bad idea, that all you did in the governor’s office was make people mad. In the Senate you could do big things for the state and the nation. The governor’s office, he said, was a short trip to the political graveyard. Historically, McClellan’s analysis was right. While Dale Bumpers had ridden the wave of New South prosperity and progressivism from the governor’s office to the Senate, he was the exception to the rule. Times were tough in Pryor’s tenure and he was facing a stiff challenge whether I ran or not. And it was hard to serve as governor longer than four years. Since Arkansas adopted a two-year term in 1876, only two governors, Jeff Davis before World War I and Orval Faubus, had served more than four years. And Faubus had to do wrong at Central High to hang on. McClellan, at age eighty-two, was still sharp as a tack, and I respected his advice. I was also surprised by his encouragement. I was much more liberal than he was, but the same could be said for all his potential successors. For some reason, we got along, in part because I had been away at law school when Governor Pryor ran against him and therefore couldn’t have helped Pryor, which I would have done had I been home. I also respected the serious work McClellan had done to crack organized-crime networks. They were a threat to all Americans, regardless of their political views or economic circumstances. Not long after our meeting, Senator McClellan died before he could finish his term. Despite his advice and the assurances of support for the Senate race that I’d received from around the state, I decided to run for governor. I was excited by the prospect of what I could accomplish, and I thought I could win. Though my age, thirty-one, was more likely to be an issue against me in a race for governor than one for the Senate, because of the heavy management and decision-making responsibilities, the competition wasn’t as stiff as it was in the Senate race. Four other candidates ran in the Democratic primary: Joe Woodward, a lawyer from Magnolia in south Arkansas who had been active in Dale Bumpers’s campaigns; Frank Lady, a lawyer from northeast Arkansas, who was a conservative evangelical Christian, the favored candidate of the Moral Majority voters, and the first, but not the last, of my opponents to publicly criticize Hillary, explicitly for practicing law and implicitly for retaining her maiden name when we married; Randall Mathis, the articulate county judge of Clark County, just south of Hot Springs; and Monroe Schwarzlose, a genial old turkey farmer from southeast Arkansas. Woodward promised to be the strongest candidate. He was intelligent and articulate and had contacts all over the state because of his work with Bumpers. Still, I started with a big lead. All I had to do was keep it. Because all the real interest was in the Senate race, I just had to run hard, avoid mistakes, and go on doing a good job as attorney general. Despite its relative lack of drama, the campaign had its interesting moments. The “tree story” surfaced again when a state policeman who was supporting Joe Woodward swore he had taken me out of that infamous tree back in 1969. In Dover, north of Russellville, I answered another challenge to my manhood by participating in a tug-of-war with a bunch of very large log haulers. I was the smallest man on either team and they put me in front. We pulled the rope back and forth across a hole full of water and mud. My side lost, and I wound up caked in mud, with my hands torn and bleeding from pulling the rope so hard. Fortunately, a friend who had urged me to compete gave me a new pair of khakis so that I could return to the campaign trail. In St. Paul, a town of about 150 near Huntsville, I was shaking hands with all the marchers in the Pioneer Day parade, but I chickened out when I saw a man walking right toward me with his pet on a leash. It was a full-grown bear. I don’t know who was reassured by the leash, but I sure wasn’t.