My life

I won the primary with more than 60 percent of the vote, but Faubus pulled a third of it. Even at seventysix, he still had some juice in rural areas. Frank White took up where Faubus left off. Although he had called teachers “greedy” when they pushed for higher pay during his tenure, he got the endorsement of the Arkansas Education Association in the Republican primary when he changed his position from support of the teacher test to opposition. Then he started in on Hillary and me. White began by saying the new education standards were too burdensome and needed to be changed. I hit that one out of the park, saying if he were elected, he would “delay them to death.” Then he went after Hillary, alleging she had a conflict of interest because the Rose firm was representing the state in its fight against the Grand Gulf nuclear plants. We had a good response to that charge, too. First, the Rose firm was working to save Arkansans money by lifting the burden of the Grand Gulf plants, while White, as a board member of one of the Middle South Utilities companies, had voted three times to go forward with construction of the plants. Second, the Public Service Commission hired the Rose firm because all the other big firms were representing utilities or other parties in the case. Both the legislature and the attorney general approved the hiring. Third, the money the state paid to the Rose firm was subtracted from the firm’s income before Hillary’s partnership profits were calculated, so she made no money from it. White seemed more interested in defending the utility’s effort to soak Arkansas ratepayers than protecting them from a conflict of interest. I asked him if his attacks on Hillary meant he wanted to run for first lady instead of governor. Our campaign even made bumper stickers and buttons that said, “Frank for First Lady.”

White’s final charges did him in. He had been working for Stephens, Inc., then the largest bond house outside Wall Street. Jack Stephens had supported me when I first ran for governor, but then he drifted to the right, heading Democrats for Reagan in 1984, and by 1986 he had become a Republican. His older brother, Witt, was still a Democrat and supporting me, but Jack ran the bond house. And Frank White was his guy. For many years, Stephens had controlled the state’s bond business. When I dramatically expanded the volume of bond issues, I insisted that we open all of them to competitive bidding by national firms, and that we let more Arkansas firms have the opportunity to sell the bonds. The Stephens firm still got its fair share, but it didn’t control all the issues as it had in the past and would again if White won the election. One of the Arkansas firms that got some business was headed by Dan Lasater, who built a successful bond firm in Little Rock before he lost it all to a cocaine habit. Lasater had been a supporter of mine and a friend of my brother’s, with whom he had partied hard when they were both chained to cocaine, as too many young people were in the 1980s.

When Betsey Wright and I were preparing for our television debate with White, we learned that he was going to challenge me to take a drug test with him. The ostensible reason was to set a good example, but I knew White was hoping I wouldn’t do it. The blizzard of rumors spawned by Lasater’s downfall included one that I had been part of Dan’s party circle. It wasn’t true. Betsey and I decided to take a drug test before the debate. When White hit me on television with his challenge, I smiled and said Betsey and I had already taken a test and he and his campaign manager, Darrell Glascock, should follow suit. Glascock had been subjected to his share of rumors too. Their clever trick had backfired. White turned up the heat with the nastiest TV ad I’d ever seen. He showed Lasater’s office, followed by a tray of cocaine, with an announcer saying I’d taken campaign contributions from a cocaine-using felon, then given him state bond business. The clear implication was that I’d given Lasater preferred treatment and at the least I had known about his cocaine habit when I did. I invited the Arkansas Gazette to review the records of the Development Finance Authority, and the paper ran a front-page story showing how many more bond houses had done business with the state since I’d taken over from Governor White. The number had gone from four to fifteen, and Stephens still had handled over $700

million of bond business, more than twice as much as any other Arkansas firm. I also hit back with a TV