My life

Robinson and Nelson, and their backers, all onetime friends, went after one another with a vengeance, in a race full of name-calling and mudslinging, which included Robinson’s charge that Nelson and Jerry Jones, a long-time friend of both men who owned some of the gas fields that supplied Arkla, were rapacious businessmen who soaked Arkla’s ratepayers for personal gain, and Nelson’s charge that Robinson was unstable and unfit to be governor. About all they agreed on was that I had raised taxes too much and had too little to show for it in terms of educational improvement and economic development. On the Democratic side, Steve Clark withdrew from the race, leaving Jim Guy Tucker and Tom McRae, who took a different approach, more clever than that of the Republicans, to discourage me from running. They said I’d done a lot of good, but I was out of new ideas and out of time. Ten years as governor was long enough. I couldn’t get anything done in the legislature anymore, and four more years would give me too much control over all aspects of state government. McRae had met with “focus groups” of representative voters who said they wanted to continue the direction I’d set in economic development, but were open to new ideas from a new leader. I thought there was something to their argument, but I didn’t believe they could get more out of our conservative anti-tax legislators than I could. Finally, still uncertain of what to do, I set a March 1 deadline to announce my decision. Hillary and I hashed it over dozens of times. There was some press speculation that she would run if I didn’t. When asked about it, I said she’d be a great governor but I didn’t know if she would run. When I discussed it with her, Hillary said she’d cross that bridge if I decided not to run, but what she might do should be no part of my decision. She knew, before I did, that I wasn’t ready to hang it up. In the end I couldn’t bear the thought of walking away from a decade of hard work, with my last year marked by repeated failures to fund further improvements in education. I never was one for quitting, and whenever I was tempted, something always happened to give me heart. In the mid-eighties, when our economy was in the tank, I was about to land a new industry for a county where one in four people was unemployed. At the last minute, Nebraska offered the company an extra million dollars and I lost the deal. I was crushed and felt I had failed the whole county. When Lynda Dixon, my secretary, saw me slumped in my chair with my head in my hands, she tore off the daily scripture reading from the devotional calendar she kept on her desk. The verse was Galatians 6:9: “Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” I went back to work. On February 11, I witnessed the ultimate testimonial to the power of perseverance. Early that Sunday morning, Hillary and I got Chelsea up and took her down to the kitchen of the Governor’s Mansion to see what we told her would be one of the most important events she’d ever witness. Then we turned on the television and watched Nelson Mandela take the last steps in his long walk to freedom. Through twenty-seven years of imprisonment and abuse, Mandela had endured, and triumphed, to end apartheid, liberate his own mind and heart from hatred, and inspire the world.

At the March 1 press conference, I said I would run for a fifth term, “although the fire of an election no longer burns in me,” because I wanted another chance to finish the job of improving education and modernizing the economy, and because I thought I could do a better job of it than the other candidates. I also promised to keep bringing new people into state government and to bend over backward to avoid abuse of power.