My life

Betsey and I also signed up three young black leaders who proved invaluble. Rodney Slater left Attorney General Steve Clark’s staff to help. Even back then, he was a powerful speaker, drawing on his deep knowledge of the scriptures to fashion powerful arguments for our cause. I had known Carol Willis when he was a student at the law school in Fayetteville. He was a great old-fashioned politician who knew all the players in the rural areas like the back of his hand. Bob Nash, who was working on economic development for the Rockefeller Foundation, helped on nights and weekends. Rodney Slater, Carol Willis, and Bob Nash stayed with me for the next nineteen years. They worked for me the whole time I was governor. When I was President, Rodney served as federal highway administrator and secretary of transportation. Carol kept our fences mended with black America at the Democratic National Committee. Bob started as under secretary of agriculture, then came to the White House as director of personnel and appointments. I don’t know what I would have done without them. Perhaps the defining moment of the primary campaign came at a meeting of about eighty black leaders from the Delta who came to hear from Jim Guy Tucker and me so that they could decide which one of us to support. Tucker had already won the endorsement of the Arkansas Education Association by promising teachers a big pay raise without a tax increase. I had countered with the endorsement of several teachers and administrators who knew the state’s bad economy wouldn’t permit Tucker’s promise to be kept and who remembered what I had done for education in my first term. I could still win with a split among educators, but not with a split among blacks in the Delta. I had to have nearly all of them.

The meeting was held in Jack Crumbly’s barbeque place in Forrest City, about ninety miles east of Little Rock. Jim Guy had come and gone by the time I got there, leaving a good impression. It was late and I was tired, but I made the best case I could, emphasizing the black appointments I’d made and my efforts to help long-ignored rural black communities get money for water and sewer systems. After I finished, a young black lawyer from Lakeview, Jimmy Wilson, got up to speak. He was Tucker’s main supporter in the Delta. Jimmy said I was a good man and had been a good governor, but that no Arkansas governor who had lost for reelection had ever been elected again. He said Frank White was terrible for blacks and had to be defeated. He reminded them that Jim Guy had a good civil rights record in Congress and had hired several young black people to work for him. He said Jim Guy would be as good for blacks as I would, and he could win. “I like Governor Clinton,” he said, “but he’s a loser. And we can’t afford to lose.” It was a persuasive argument, all the more so because he had the guts to do it with me sitting there. I could feel the crowd slipping away.

After a few seconds of silence, a man stood up in the back and said he’d like to be heard. John Lee Wilson was the mayor of Haynes, a small town of about 150 people. He was a heavy man of medium height, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, which bulged with the bulk of his huge arms, neck, and gut. I didn’t know him very well and had no idea what he would say, but I’ll never forget his words.

“Lawyer Wilson made a good speech,” he began, “and he may be right. The governor may be a loser. All I know is, when Bill Clinton became governor, the crap was running open in the streets of my town, and my babies was sick because we didn’t have no sewer system. Nobody paid any attention to us. When he left office, we had a sewer system and my babies wasn’t sick anymore. He did that for a lot of us. Let me ask you something. If we don’t stick with folks who stick with us, who will ever respect us again? He may be a loser, but if he loses, I’m going down with him. And so should you.” As the old saying goes, it was all over but the shouting, one of those rare moments when one man’s words actually changed minds, and hearts.

Unfortunately, John Lee Wilson died before I was elected President. Near the end of my second term, I made a nostalgic trip back to east Arkansas to speak at Earle High School. The school principal was Jack Crumbly, the host of that fateful meeting almost two decades earlier. In my remarks, I told the story of John Lee Wilson’s speech for the first time in public. It was televised across east Arkansas. One person who watched it, sitting in her little house in Haynes, was John Lee Wilson’s widow. She wrote me a very moving letter saying how proud John would have been to have the President praising him. Of course I praised him. If it hadn’t been for John Lee, I might be writing wills and divorce settlements instead of this book.