Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

LITTLE ROCK

Bill Clinton’s first election victory as Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976 was anticlimactic.

He had won the primary in May and had no Republican opponent. The big show that year was the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

Bill and I had met Carter the year before when he gave a speech at the University of Arkansas. He had sent two of his top lieutenants, Jody Powell and Frank Moore, to Fayetteville to help in Bill’s 1974 campaign, a sure sign he was surveying the political landscape with an eye toward a national run.

Carter introduced himself to me by saying, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m going to be President.” That caught my attention, so I watched and listened closely. He understood the mood of the country and bet that post-Watergate politics would create an opening for a newcomer from outside Washington who could appeal to Southern voters. Carter correctly concluded he had as good a chance as any, and as his introduction implied, he certainly had the confidence necessary to undertake the ego-mangling of a presidential campaign.

He also guessed that President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon would be a good issue for the Democrats. Although I believed Ford’s pardon was the right decision for the country, I agreed with Carter’s analysis that it would remind voters that Gerald Ford had been Richard Nixon’s choice to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew as Vice President. At the end of our meeting, Carter asked me if I had any advice for him.

“Well, Governor,” I said, “I wouldn’t go around telling people you’re going to be President. That could be a little off-putting to some.”

“But,” he replied with that trademark smile, “I am going to be.”

With Bill’s election assured, we both felt free to get involved in Carter’s campaign when he became the Democratic nominee. We went to the July convention in New York City to talk to his staff about working for him in the election. Then we left for a glorious two-week vacation in Europe that included a pilgrimage to the Basque town of Guernica.

I had wanted to visit the site that inspired Picasso’s masterpiece since Don Jones showed my Methodist youth group a reproduction of the painting. Twentieth-century warfare started in Guernica in 1937 when Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, called in the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force, to annihilate the town. Picasso captured the horror and panic of the massacre in a painting that became an antiwar emblem. When Bill and I walked Guernica’s streets and drank coffee in the central plaza in 1976, the rebuilt town looked like any other mountain village. But the painting had branded Franco’s crime into my memory.

Upon our return to Fayetteville, Carter’s staff asked Bill to head the campaign in Arkansas and me to be the field coordinator in Indiana. Indiana was a heavily Republican state, but Carter thought his Southern roots and farming background might appeal even to Republican voters. I thought it was a long shot, but I was game to try. My job was to set up a campaign in every county, which meant finding local people to work under the direction of regional coordinators, mostly brought in from around the country. The Indianapolis campaign office was in a building that had housed an appliance store and a bailbonding firm. We were right across the street from the city jail, and the neon sign flashing “Bail Bondsman” still hung above the Carter-Mondale posters in the front windows.

I learned a lot in Indiana. One night I had dinner with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Election Day. I was the only woman at the table. They wouldn’t give me any specifics, and I kept pressing for details about how many phone calls, cars and door hangers they planned to put out on Election Day. All of a sudden, one of the men reached across the table and grabbed me by my turtleneck. “Just shut up, will you. We said we’d do it, we will, and we don’t have to tell you how!” I was scared. I knew he had been drinking, and I also knew that all eyes were on me. My heart was beating fast as I looked him in the eye, removed his hands from my neck and said, “First, don’t ever touch me again. Second, if you were as fast with the answers to my questions as you are with your hands, I’d have the information I need to do my job. Then I could leave you alone―which is what I’m going to do now.”

My knees were shaking, but I got up and walked out.

Even though Carter did not carry Indiana, I was thrilled that he won the national election, and I looked forward to the new administration. But Bill and I had more immediate concerns. We had to move to Little Rock, which meant leaving the house we had been married in. We bought a 980-square-foot house on a quaint street in the Hillcrest section not far from the Capitol. Fayetteville was too far to commute, so I couldn’t continue teaching at the university, which saddened me because I enjoyed my colleagues and students.

I had to decide what to do next, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to work for any state-funded institution or in any other public job such as prosecutor, defender or legal aid lawyer where my work might overlap or conflict with that of the Attorney General.

I began to seriously consider joining a private firm, a career choice I had resisted before.

Representing private clients, I thought, would be an important experience and would help us financially since Bill’s salary as Attorney General would be $26,500.

The Rose Law Firm was the most venerable firm in Arkansas and reputed to be the oldest firm west of the Mississippi River. I had gotten to know one of the partners, Vince Foster, while I was running the legal