My life

I took a hard look at the Democratic committee job, because I loved politics and thought I understood what needed to be done. In the end, I decided it wasn’t right for me. Besides, Chuck Manatt wanted it badly and probably already had the votes to win before I got interested. I discussed it with Mickey Kantor, a partner of Manatt’s whom I had gotten to know when he served with Hillary on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. I liked Mickey a lot and trusted his judgment. He said if I wanted another chance at elected office, I shouldn’t try for the party job. He also advised against becoming Jerry Brown’s chief of staff. The other out-of-state jobs had some appeal to me, especially the one at the World Wildlife Fund, but I knew they didn’t make sense. I wasn’t ready to give up on Arkansas or myself, so I accepted the offer from Wright, Lindsey & Jennings.

Almost immediately after I lost, and for months afterward, I asked everybody I knew why they thought it had happened. Some of the answers, beyond Cubans, car tags, and making all the interest groups angry at the same time, surprised me. Jimmy “Red” Jones, whom I had appointed adjutant general of the Arkansas National Guard after he’d had a long career as state auditor, said I had alienated the voters with too many young beards and out-of-staters in important positions. He also thought Hillary’s decision to keep her maiden name had hurt; it might be all right for a lawyer, but not for a first lady. Wally DeRoeck, who had been my chairman in 1976 and 1978, said I got so caught up in being governor that I stopped thinking about everything else. He told me that after I became governor, I never asked him about his children again. In harsher language, my friend George Daniel, who owned the hardware store in Marshall up in the hills, said the same thing: “Bill, the people thought you were an asshole!” Rudy Moore told me I had complained a lot about how much trouble I was in but never seemed to really focus on my political problems hard and long enough to figure out what to do about them. Mack McLarty, my oldest friend, who knew me like the back of his hand, said he thought I was preoccupied all year by the arrival of Chelsea. He said I had always been saddened by the fact that I never knew my own father, that I really wanted to focus on being Chelsea’s father, except when something like the Cuban crisis tore me away, and that I just didn’t have my heart in the campaign.

After I was out of office a few months, it became clear to me that all these explanations had some validity. By that time, more than a hundred people had come up to me and said they’d voted against me to send a message but wouldn’t have done it if they’d known I was going to lose. I thought of so many things I could have done if I’d had my head on straight. And it was painfully clear that thousands of people thought I’d gotten too big for my britches, too obsessed with what I wanted to do and oblivious to what they wanted me to do. The protest vote was there, all right, but it didn’t make the difference. The post-election polls showed that 12 percent of the voters said they’d supported me in 1978 but voted the other way in 1980 because of the car tags. Six percent of my former supporters said it was because of the Cubans. With all my other problems and mistakes, if I had been free of either of these two issues, I would have won. But if I hadn’t been defeated, I probably never would have become President. It was a near-death experience, but an invaluable one, forcing me to be more sensitive to the political problems inherent in progressive politics: the system can absorb only so much change at once; no one can beat all the entrenched interests at the same time; and if people think you’ve stopped listening, you’re sunk. On my last day in the governor’s office, after taking a picture of ten-month-old Chelsea sitting in my chair holding the telephone, I went up to the legislature to give my farewell address. I recounted the progress we’d made, thanked the legislators for their support, and pointed out that we still had America’s second-lowest tax burden and that, sooner or later, we would have to find a politically acceptable way to broaden our revenue base to make the most of our potential. Then I walked out of the Capitol and into private life, a fish out of water.

My father, William Jefferson Blythe, 1944

My father and my mother, Virginia Cassidy Blythe, at the Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, 1946

Mother and I

Here I am in 1949. Above, far left: at my father’s gravesite on the afternoon Mother left for nurse’s training in New Orleans; above, center: in our backyard; above, right: posing for a photo for Mother’s Day

My grandmother Edith Grisham Cassidy, 1949. She was a private duty nurse.

My grandfather James Eldridge Cassidy (right) in his grocery store in Hope, Arkansas, 1946