W hile I was trying to decide whether to run again, the governors race was shaping up to be a real donnybrook, whether I ran or not. Years of pent-up ambitions were being unleashed. On the Democratic side, Jim Guy Tucker, Attorney General Steve Clark, and Rockefeller Foundation president Tom McRae, whose grandfather had been governor, all announced they would run. They were all friends of mine, and had good ideas and progressive records. On the Republican side, the contest was even more interesting. It involved two formidable former Democrats: Congressman Tommy Robinson, who didnt like Washington, and Sheffield Nelson, former president of Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Company, who said he had switched parties because the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left. It was the standard explanation white southerners gave, but more interesting coming from him because he had supported Senator Ted Kennedy against President Carter in 1980.
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 Robinsons 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 Arklas ratepayers for personal gain, and Nelsons 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 Id done a lot of good, but I was out of new ideas and out of time. Ten years as governor was long enough. I couldnt 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 Id set in economic development, but were open to new ideas from a new leader. I thought there was something to their argument, but I didnt 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 didnt. When asked about it, I said shed be a great governor but I didnt know if she would run. When I discussed it with her, Hillary said shed 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 wasnt ready to hang it up.
In the end I couldnt 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 Governors Mansion to see what we told her would be one of the most important events shed 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.
Looking back on it, I can see how the statement looked ambivalent and a touch arrogant, but it was an honest expression of how I felt, as I began the first campaign since 1982 that I could have lost. I got a break soon afterward, when Jim Guy Tucker decided to withdraw from the race and run for lieutenant governor instead, saying a divisive primary would only increase the chances of a Republican victory in the fall, no matter who won. Jim Guy had made a judgment that he could win the lieutenant governors race easily, then become governor in four years. He was almost certainly right, and I was relieved.
Still, I couldnt take the primary for granted. McRae was waging a vigorous campaign and had a lot of friends and admirers around the state from his years of good work at the Rockefeller Foundation. When he made his formal announcement, he had a broom in his hand and said he wanted to make a clean sweep of state government, clearing out old ideas and career politicians. The broom tactic had worked for my neighbor David Boren when he ran for governor of Oklahoma in 1974. I was determined that it wouldnt work this time. Gloria Cabe agreed to manage the campaign, and she put together an effective organization. Maurice Smith raised the money. And I followed a simple strategy: to outwork my opponents, do my job, and continue to preach new ideas, including college scholarships for all high school students with a B average or better; and a plant the future initiative to plant ten million more trees a year for a decade to do our part to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming.
McRae was forced to become more critical of me, which I think made him somewhat uncomfortable, but which had some impact. All the candidates hit me for my involvement in national politics. In late March, I went to New Orleans to accept the chairmanship of the Democratic Leadership Council. I was convinced the groups ideas on welfare reform, criminal justice, education, and economic growth were crucial to the future of the Democratic Party and the nation. The DLCs positions were popular in Arkansas, but my high profile was a potential liability in the race, so I got back home as soon as I could.
In April, the AFL-CIO refused for the first time to endorse me. Bill Becker, their president, had never really liked me. He thought the sales-tax increase was unfair to working people, opposed the tax incentives Id supported to lure new jobs to Arkansas, and blamed me for the failure of the tax-reform referendum in 1988. He was also furious that I had supported a $300,000 loan guarantee to a business involved in a labor dispute. I spoke to the labor convention, defending the tax increase for education and expressing amazement that Becker would blame me for the failure of tax reform, which I had supported but the people voted against. I also stood by the loan guarantee because it saved 410 jobs: the company sold its products to Ford Motor Company, and the loan enabled it to build a two-month inventory, without which Ford would have canceled the firms contract and put it out of business. Within two weeks, eighteen local unions defied Becker and endorsed me anyway. They didnt fall into the classic liberal trap of making the perfect the enemy of the good. If the people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 hadnt made the same mistake, Al Gore would have been elected President.
The only dramatic moment of the primary came when I was out of state again. While I was in Washington presenting the report of the Delta Development Commission to Congress, McRae called a press conference at the state Capitol to criticize my record. He thought he would have the Arkansas press all to himself. Hillary thought otherwise. When I called her the night before, she said she thought she might show up at the conference. McRae had a cardboard likeness of me by his side. He attacked me for being absent from the state, implied that I had refused to debate him, and began to criticize my record by posing questions for me and supplying the answers himself.
In the middle of McRaes routine, Hillary stepped out of the crowd and interrupted him. She said Tom knew I was in Washington promoting the Delta commissions recommendations, which would help Arkansas. She then produced a prepared summary of several years of Rockefeller Foundation reports praising my work as governor. She said that he had been right in the reports, and that Arkansas should be proud: Weve made more progress than any other state except South Carolina, and were right up there with them.
It was unheard of for a candidates wife, much less the first lady, to confront an opponent like that. Some people criticized Hillary for it, but most people knew she had earned the right to defend the work we had done together for years, and it broke McRaes momentum. When I got home, I lit into him for his attacks and went after his economic development strategy, saying he wanted to build a wall around Arkansas. I won the election with 55 percent of the vote over McRae and several other challengers, but Tom had run a smart campaign on a shoestring budget, and had done well enough to encourage the Republicans about their prospects in the fall.
Sheffield Nelson beat Tommy Robinson in the Republican primary and promised to run against me on my tax and spend record. The strategy was flawed. Nelson should have run as a moderate Republican, praised my work in education and economic development, and said ten years was long enoughI should be given a gold watch and a respectable retirement. By switching from his original position in support of the school standards and the sales-tax increase to pay for them, Nelson allowed me to escape the straitjacket of tired incumbency and run as the only candidate of positive change.
The fact that Nelson was running against the education program and taxes had the added benefit that, if I won, I could argue to the legislators that the people had voted for more progress. As we moved toward election day, the AFL-CIO finally endorsed me. The Arkansas Education Association recommended me because of my commitment to raising teacher salaries, Nelsons promise not to raise taxes for four years, and AEA president Sid Johnsons desire to bury the hatchet and get on with business.
Nelson, meanwhile, moved farther to the right, advocating a reduction in welfare benefits for illegitimate children and hitting me for vetoing a bill the National Rifle Association had pushed through the legislature. The bill would have prohibited local governments from enacting any restrictions on firearms or ammunition. It was a smart move by the NRA, because state legislators were invariably more rural and pro-gun than city councils, but I thought the bill was bad policy. If the Little Rock City Council wanted to ban cop-killer bullets in the face of increasing gang activity, I thought they should have the right to do so.
The work of the governors office didnt stop for the campaign. In June, I approved the first executions in Arkansas since 1964. John Swindler was convicted of murdering an Arkansas policeman and two South Carolina teenagers. Ronald Gene Simmons killed his wife, three sons, four daughters, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, and two people he had grudges against. Simmons wanted to die. Swindler didnt. They were both executed in June. I didnt have qualms about either of them, but I knew there were tougher cases awaiting us.
I had also begun to commute the sentences of a few murderers with life sentences, so that they could be eligible for parole. As I explained to the voters, I had not commuted a sentence for years, after the bad experience during my first term, but both the Prison Board and the Paroles and Pardons Board pleaded with me to resume commuting some lifers. Most states made lifers eligible for parole after serving several years. In Arkansas the governor had to commute their sentences. The decisions werent easy or popular, but were necessary to keep peace and order in a prison system where 10 percent of the inmates were serving life terms. Its fortunate that many lifers are unlikely to repeat their crimes and can return to society without risk to others. This time, we made extensive efforts to contact the victims families for comments. Surprisingly, many did not object. Also, most of those whose sentences were commuted were old or had committed their crimes when they were very young.
In mid-September, a disgruntled former employee of the Development Finance Authority first raised the sex question against me. Larry Nichols had made more than 120 phone calls from his office to conservative supporters of the Nicaraguan Contras, a cause the national Republicans strongly supported. Nicholss defense was that he was calling the Contra supporters to get them to lobby congressional Republicans to support legislation beneficial to his agency. His excuse didnt fly, and he was fired when the calls were discovered. Nichols called a press conference on the steps of the Capitol and accused me of using the finance agencys funds to carry on affairs with five women. I drove into my parking place in front of the Capitol not long after Nichols had made his charges and was hit cold with the story by Bill Simmons of the Associated Press, the senior member of the political press and a good reporter. When Simmons asked me about the charges, I just suggested he call the women. He did, they all denied it, and the story basically died. None of the television stations or newspapers ran it. Only one conservative radio announcer who supported Nelson talked about it, actually naming one of the women, Gennifer Flowers. She threatened to sue him if he didnt stop. The Nelson campaign tried to stoke the rumors, but without corroboration or evidence.
At the end of the campaign, Nelson put on a television ad that was misleading but effective. The announcer raised a series of issues and asked what I would do about them. To each question, my own voice answered, Raise and spend. Nelsons campaign had lifted those three words from a section in my State of the State address, in which I compared Arkansas budget with that of the federal government. While Washington could engage in deficit spending, if we didnt have money, we had to raise and spend, or not spend at all. I put out a response ad comparing Nelsons claim to what I had really said and told the voters that if they couldnt trust Nelson not to mislead them in the campaign, they couldnt trust him to be governor. A couple of days later, I was reelected, 57 to 43 percent.
The victory was sweet in many ways. The people had decided to let me serve fourteen years, longer than any other Arkansas governor in history. And for the first time, I had carried Sebastian County, which was then still the most hard-core Republican big county in the state. In a campaign appearance in Fort Smith, I had promised that if I did win there, Hillary and I would dance down Garrison Avenue, the towns main street. A couple of nights after the election, along with a few hundred supporters, we kept our commitment. It was cold and raining, but we danced away and enjoyed every minute of it. We had waited sixteen years for a general-election win there.
The only really dark moment of the general election was purely personal. In August, Mothers doctor discovered a lump in her right breast. Forty-eight hours later, while Dick, Roger, and I waited in the hospital, Mother had the lump removed. After the procedure, she was her usual chipper self and was back at work on the campaign in no time, though she faced months of chemotherapy. The cancer had aleady spread to twenty-seven nodes in her arm, but she didnt tell anyone thisincluding me. In fact, she never told us how bad it was until 1993.
In December, I resumed my work for the Democratic Leadership Council, launching the Texas DLC chapter in Austin. In my speech, I argued that, contrary to our liberal critics, we were good Democrats. We believed in keeping the American dream alive for all people. We believed in government, though not in the status quo. And we believed government was spending too much on yesterday and todayinterest on debt, defense, more money for the same health careand too little on tomorrow: education, the environment, research and development, the infrastructure. I said the DLC stood for a modern, mainstream agenda: the expansion of opportunity, not bureaucracy; choice in public schools and child care; responsibility and empowerment for poor people; and reinventing government, away from the top-down bureaucracy of the industrial era, to a leaner, more flexible, more innovative model appropriate for the modern global economy.
I was trying to develop a national message for the Democrats, and the effort fueled speculation that I might enter the presidential race in 1992. During the recent campaign, I had said on more than one occasion that I would serve out my term if elected. Thats what I thought I would do. I was excited about the coming legislative session. Though I strongly disagreed with many of his decisions, like killing the Brady bill and vetoing the Family and Medical Leave Act, I liked President Bush and had a good relationship with the White House. Also, a campaign to defeat him looked hopeless. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the United States was beginning its buildup for the Gulf War, which in two months would drive the Presidents approval ratings into the stratosphere.
On the morning of January 15, 1991, with ten-year-old Chelsea holding the Bible for me, I took the oath of office in Little Rock for the last time. Following the custom, I delivered my informal address in the crowded chamber of the House of Representatives, then, at noon, made a more formal address at the public ceremony, which was held in the Capitol rotunda because of inclement weather. The new legislature had more women and blacks than ever. The Speaker of the House, John Lipton, and the president pro tempore of the Senate, Jerry Bookout, were progressives and strong supporters of mine. Jim Guy Tucker was lieutenant governor, probably the ablest person ever to hold the job, and we were working together, rather than at cross-purposes, for the first time in years.
I dedicated my inaugural address to the men and women from Ar-kansas serving in the Persian Gulf, and noted that it was appropriate that we were making a new beginning on Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, because we must go forward into the future together or we will all be limited in what we achieve. Then I outlined the most ambitious program I had ever proposed, in education, health care, highways, and the environment.
In education, I proposed a big increase in adult literacy and training programs; apprenticeships for non-college-bound youths; college scholarships for all middle-class and low-income kids who took the required courses, made a B average, and stayed off drugs; preschool programs for poor kids; a new residential high school for math and science students; conversion of fourteen vo-tech schools into two-year colleges; and a $4,000 raise for teachers over two years. I asked the legislature to raise the sales tax half a cent and the corporate income tax half a percent to pay for them.
There were also several reform measures in my package, including health insurance for pregnant women and for children; the removal of more than 250,000 taxpayers, more than 25 percent of the total, from the state income tax rolls; and an income tax credit to offset the sales-tax increase for up to 75 percent of the taxpayers.
And for the next sixty-eight days, I worked to pass the program, bringing legislators to my office; going to their committee hearings to argue personally for bills; cornering them in the halls, at nighttime events, or early in the morning at the Capitol cafeteria; hanging around with them outside the chambers or in the cloakrooms; calling them late at night; and bringing opposing legislators and their allied lobbyists together to hammer out compromises. By the end of the session, virtually my entire program had passed. The tax proposals received between 76 and 100 percent of the vote in both houses, including the votes of a majority of Republican lawmakers.
Ernest Dumas, one of the states most distinguished and astute columnists, said, For education, it was one of the best legislative sessions in the states history, arguably the best. Dumas noted that we also passed the largest highway program ever; greatly expanded health care for poor families; improved the environment by passing proposals for solid-waste recycling and reduction and for weakening the hand of polluting industries at the states pollution control agency; and spurned a few religious zealots by providing school health clinics in poor communities.
The legislature had its biggest fight over the school health clinics. I favored allowing the clinics to distribute condoms if the local school board approved. So did the Senate. The more conservative House was devoutly anti-condom. Finally the legislature adopted a compromise offered by Representative Mark Pryor, who in 2002 became Arkansas junior U.S. senator: no state money could be used to buy condoms, but if bought with other funds, they could be distributed. Bob Lancaster, a witty columnist for the Arkansas Gazette, wrote a hilarious article chronicling the struggle of the condom Congress. He called it, with apologies to Homer, the Trojans War.
The legislature also passed the National Rifle Associations bill to prohibit cities and counties from adopting local gun-control ordinances, the same measure I had vetoed in 1989. No southern legislature could say no to the NRA. Even in the more liberal Senate, this bill passed 267. At least I got the Senate to pass it late, so I could veto it after they went home and they couldnt override it. After the bill was sent to me, I had an extraordinary encounter with the young NRA lobbyist who came down from Washington to push the bill. He was very tall and well dressed and spoke with a clipped New England accent. One day he stopped me as I was crossing the rotunda from the House to the Senate side of the Capitol. Governuh, Governuh, why dont you just let this bill become law without your signature? I explained for the umpteenth time why I didnt support the bill. Then he burst out, Look, Governuh, youre going to run for President next year, and when you do, were going to beat your brains out in Texas if you veto this bill. I knew I was getting older and more seasoned when I didnt slug him. Instead, I smiled and said, You dont get it. I dont like this bill. You know gun control will never be a problem in Arkansas. Youve just got a chart on the wall in your fancy office in Washington with this bill at the top and all the states listed below. You dont give a damn about the merits of this bill. You just want to put a check by Arkansas on that chart. So you get your gun and Ill get mine. Well saddle up and meet in Texas. As soon as the legislature went home, I vetoed the bill. Soon afterward, the NRA began running television ads attacking me. It wasnt until I began writing this account that I realized that in my confrontation with the NRA lobbyist, I had acknowledged that I was considering running for President. At the time, I didnt think there was a chance Id do it. I just didnt like to be threatened.
After the session, Henry Oliver told me he wanted to leave. I hated to lose him, but after decades of proud service in the marines, the FBI, and local and state government, he had earned the right to go home. For the time being, Gloria Cabe and Carol Rasco took over his responsibilities.
I spent the next few months making sure our massive legislative program was well implemented and traveling the country for the Democratic Leadership Council. Because I was out there making the case for how we could regain mainstream, middle-class voters who have left the party in droves for twenty years, the press continued to speculate that I might run in 1992. In an interview in April, I joked about it, saying, As long as nobody runs, everybody can be on the list, and its kind of nice. It makes my mother happy to read my name in the paper.
While I still didnt believe I could or should run, and President Bushs approval ratings were still above 70 percent in the afterglow of the Gulf War, I was beginning to think a DLC Democrat who could relate both to the partys traditional base and to swing voters might have a chance, because the country had serious problems that werent being addressed in Washington. The President and his team seemed determined to coast to victory on the wings of the Gulf War. I had seen enough in Arkansas and in my travels around the country to know America couldnt coast through four more years. As 1991 unfolded, more and more people came to share that view.
In April, I went to Los Angeles to speak to a luncheon for Education First, a citizens group dedicat............