My life

In August, as I was winding down my involvement in the Fulbright campaign and getting ready to go to Oxford, I spent several summer nights at the home of Mother’s friends Bill and Marge Mitchell on Lake Hamilton, where I was always welcome. That summer I met some interesting people at Marge and Bill’s. Like Mother, they loved the races and over the years got to know a lot of the horse people, including two brothers from Illinois, W. Hal and “Donkey” Bishop, who owned and trained horses. W. Hal Bishop was more successful, but Donkey was one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever met. He was a frequent visitor in Marge and Bill’s home. One night we were out at the lake talking about my generation’s experiences with drugs and women, and Donkey mentioned that he used to drink a lot and had been married ten times. I was amazed. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “When I was your age, it wasn’t like it is now. If you wanted to have sex, it wasn’t even enough to say you loved ’em. You had to marry ’em!” I laughed and asked if he remembered all their names. “All but two,” he replied. His shortest marriage? “One night. I woke up in a motel with a horrible hangover and a strange woman. I said, ‘Who in the hell are you?’ She said, ‘I’m your wife, you SOB!’ I got up, put my pants on, and got out of there.” In the 1950s, Donkey met a woman who was different from all the rest. He told her the whole truth about his life and said if she’d marry him, he would never drink or carouse again. She took the unbelievable chance, and he kept his word for twenty-five years, until he died. Marge Mitchell also introduced me to two young people who had just started teaching in Hot Springs, Danny Thomason and Jan Biggers. Danny came from Hampton, seat of Arkansas’ smallest county, and he had a world of good country stories to prove it. When I was governor, we sang tenor side by side in the Immanuel Baptist Church choir every Sunday. His brother and sister-in-law, Harry and Linda, became two of Hillary’s and my closest friends and played a big role in the ’92 presidential campaign and our White House years.

Jan Biggers was a tall, pretty, talkative girl from Tuckerman, in northeast Arkansas. I liked her, but she had segregationist views from her upbringing, which I deplored. When I left for Oxford, I gave her a cardboard box full of paperback books on civil rights and urged her to read them. A few months later, she ran off with another teacher, John Paschal, the president of the local NAACP. They wound up in New Hampshire, where he became a builder, she kept teaching, and they had three children. When I ran for President, I was happily surprised to find that Jan was the Democratic chair in one of New Hampshire’s ten counties.

Though I was preparing to go to Oxford, August was one of 1968’s craziest months, and it was hard to look ahead. It began with the Republican convention in Miami Beach, where New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s bid to defeat a resurgent Richard Nixon showed just how weak the moderate wing of the party had become, and where Governor Ronald Reagan of California first emerged as a potential President with his appeal to “true” conservatives. Nixon won on the first ballot, with 692 votes to 277

for Rockefeller and 182 for Reagan. Nixon’s message was simple: he was for law and order at home, and peace with honor in Vietnam. Though the real political turmoil lay ahead when the Democrats met in Chicago, the Republicans had their share of turbulence, aggravated by Nixon’s vice-presidential choice, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, whose only national notoriety had come from his hard-line stance against civil disobedience. Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, the first black to play in the major leagues, resigned his post as an aide to Rockefeller because he could not back a Republican ticket he saw as “racist.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, moved the Poor People’s Campaign from Washington to Miami Beach in hopes of influencing the Republican convention in a progressive way. They were disappointed by the platform, the floor speeches, and Nixon’s appeals to the ultra-conservatives. After the Agnew nomination was announced, what had been a peaceful gathering against poverty turned into a riot. The National Guard was called out, and the by now predictable scenario unfolded: tear gas, beating, looting, fires. When it was over, three black men had been killed, a three-day curfew was imposed, and 250 people were arrested and later released to quiet charges of police brutality. But all the trouble only strengthened the law-and-order hand Nixon was playing to the so-called silent majority of Americans, who were appalled by what they saw as the breakdown of the fabric of American life.