My life

At that moment, there didn’t seem to be much future for me in politics. I was the first Arkansas governor in a quarter of a century denied a second two-year term, and probably the youngest ex-governor in American history. John McClellan’s warning about the governor’s office being a graveyard seemed prophetic. But since I had dug my own grave, the only sensible thing to do seemed to be to start climbing out.

On Thursday, Hillary and I found a new home. It was a pretty wooden house, built in 1911, on Midland Avenue in the Hillcrest area of Little Rock, not too far from where we’d lived before moving into the Governor’s Mansion. I called Betsey Wright and asked her if she’d come help me get my files organized before I left office. To my joy, she agreed. She moved into the Governor’s Mansion and worked every day with my friend State Representative Gloria Cabe, who had also been defeated for reelection after supporting all my programs.

My remaining two months in office were tough on my staff. They needed to find jobs. The usual route out of politics is through one of the big companies that do a lot of business with state government, but we had angered all of them. Rudy Moore did a good job trying to help everyone and make sure we cleared up all outstanding public business before we turned the office over to Frank White. He and my scheduler, Randy White, also reminded me, in my periods of self-absorption, that I needed to show more concern for my staff and their future welfare. Most of them had no savings to sustain a long job hunt. Several had young children. And many had worked only for the state, including a number of people who had been with me in the attorney general’s office. Though I really liked the people who had worked for me and felt grateful to them, I’m afraid I didn’t demonstrate that as clearly as I should have on many of the days after I lost.

Hillary was especially good to me in that awful period, balancing love and sympathy with an uncanny knack for keeping me focused on the present and the future. The fact that Chelsea didn’t have a clue that anything bad had happened helped me realize that it was not the end of the world. I got great calls of encouragement from Ted Kennedy, who said I’d be back, and Walter Mondale, who showed extraordinary good humor in the face of his own disappointing defeat. I even went to the White House to say good-bye to President Carter and thank him for all the good things his administration had done to help Arkansans. I was still upset about his broken pledge and how it contributed to my defeat and led to his loss in Arkansas, but I felt history would be kinder to him because of his energy and environmental policies, especially the establishment of the massive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and his accomplishments in foreign policy—the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Panama Canal treaties, and the elevation of the human rights issue.

Like the rest of the employees of the governor’s office, I had to find a job, too. I got several interesting offers or inquiries from out of state. My friend John Y. Brown, governor of Kentucky, who had made a fortune with Kentucky Fried Chicken, asked if I’d be interested in applying for the presidency of the University of Louisville. In typical John Y. short-speak, he made the pitch: “Good school, nice house, great basketball team.” California governor Jerry Brown told me his chief of staff, Gray Davis, himself a future governor, was leaving and asked me to replace him. He said that he couldn’t believe I’d been thrown out over car tags, that California was a place full of people who had moved there from other states and I’d fit right in, and that he’d guarantee my ability to influence policy in areas I cared about. I was approached about taking over the World Wildlife Fund, a Washington-based conservation group, which did work I admired. Norman Lear, producer of some of the most successful television shows in history, including All in the Family, asked me to become head of the People for the American Way, a liberal group established to counter conservative assaults on First Amendment freedoms. And several people asked me to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee against Charles Manatt, a successful Los Angeles lawyer with Iowa roots. The only job offer I got in Arkansas was from Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, a fine law firm, which asked me to become “of counsel” for $60,000 a year, almost twice what I’d made as governor.