My life

Now that I’ve been President, I have some idea of the pressures Jimmy Carter was under. He was dealing with both rampant inflation and a stagnant economy. The American hostages in Iran had been held by the Ayatollah Khomeini for almost a year. The Cubans weren’t rioting anymore, so they were the least of his problems. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had both voted for him in 1976, and they had more electoral votes than Arkansas, which he had won with almost two-thirds of the vote. I was still more than twenty points ahead of my opponent, Frank White, in the polls, so how could I be hurt?

At the time I saw it differently. I knew the President would be hurt badly by breaking his commitment to Arkansas. Whether or not the forts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had to be closed for weather or for political reasons, sending the remaining Cubans to the one place he had promised not to, in order to save

$10 million, was nuts. I called Rudy Moore and my campaign chairman, Dick Herget, to see what they thought I should do. Dick said I should fly directly to Washington to see the President. If I couldn’t change his mind, I should talk to the press outside the White House and withdraw my support for his reelection. But I couldn’t do that, for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to look like a modern version of Orval Faubus and other southern governors who resisted federal authority in the civil rights years. Second, I didn’t want to do anything to help Ronald Reagan beat Carter. Reagan was running a great campaign, with a big head of steam, fueled by the hostages, the bad economy, and the intense support of right-wing groups outraged about everything from abortion to Carter’s turning the Panama Canal over to Panama.

Gene Eidenberg asked me not to announce the relocation until he could come to Arkansas and put the best face on it. The story leaked anyway, and Gene’s visit to Arkansas did little to help. He made a convincing case that there would be no further security problems, but he couldn’t deny that the President was breaking a clear commitment to the state that had been more supportive of him than any other outside his native Georgia. I won a larger role in controlling the security arrangements and made some improvements, but I was still the President’s man in Arkansas who had failed to hold him to his word. I returned home from Denver to a very volatile political situation. My opponent in the general election, Frank White, was gaining ground. White was a big man with a booming voice and a bombastic style that belied his background as a graduate of the Naval Academy, savings-and-loan executive, and former director of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission under Governor Pryor. He had strong support from all the interest groups I’d taken on, including utility, poultry, trucking, and timber companies, and the medical associations. He was a born-again Christian with the strong backing of the state chapter of the Moral Majority and other conservative activists. And he had the pulse of the country people and blue-collar workers upset about the car tags. He also had the advantage of a generally disgruntled mood, due to the economy and the drought. When the bad economy led state revenues to decline below projections, I was forced to lower state spending to balance the budget, including education cuts that reduced the second year’s $1,200 pay raise for teachers to about $900. Many teachers didn’t care about the state’s budget problems; they had been promised $1,200 for two years and they wanted the second installment. When it didn’t come, the intensity of their support for me faded considerably.

Back in April, Hillary and I had seen Frank White at an event and I told her that no matter what the polls said, he was starting with 45 percent of the vote. I had made that many people mad. After the announcement that all the refugees would be housed at Fort Chaffee, White had his mantra for the election: Cubans and Car Tags. That’s all he talked about for the rest of the campaign. I campaigned hard in August but without much success. At factory gates, workers changing shifts said they wouldn’t vote for me because I had made their economic woes worse and betrayed them by raising the car tags. Once while campaigning in Fort Smith, near the bridge to Oklahoma, when I asked a man for his support, he gave a more graphic version of the answer I’d heard hundreds of times: “You raised my car tags. I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the only SOB on the ballot!” He was angry and red in the face. In exasperation, I pointed over the bridge to Oklahoma and said, “Look over there. If you lived in Oklahoma your car tags would be more than twice as expensive as they are now!” Suddenly all the red drained out of his face. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “See, kid, you just don’t get it. That’s one reason I live on this side of the border.”