the state Department of Pollution Control and Ecology found that more than 90 percent of the streams in northwest Arkansas, where the poultry industry was concentrated, were polluted. We spent several million dollars trying to correct the problem, and two years later, the Pollution Control people said over 50 percent of the streams met the standard for recreational use. I got the industry to agree to a set of “best management practices” to clean up the rest. I was criticized for not mandating an industry cleanup—something easier said than done. The Democratic Congress could not do it; the agricultural interests had enough influence to get themselves completely exempted from federal regulations when Congress passed the Clean Water Act. Poultry was Arkansas’ biggest business and number one employer and very influential in the state legislature. Under the circumstances, I thought we had done a pretty good job, though it was the weakest spot in an otherwise solid environmental record. Both the
I tried to keep things in perspective. The press had an obligation to examine the record of someone who might be President. Most reporters knew nothing about Arkansas or me when they started. Some of them had negative preconceptions about a poor, rural state and the people who lived there. I had also been identified as 1992’s “character problem” candidate; that made the media vulnerable to whatever dirt they were handed to support the preconception.
Intellectually, I understood all this, and I remembered and appreciated the positive coverage I had received earlier in the campaign. Nevertheless, it felt more and more as if the investigative stories were being prepared on the basis of “shoot first, ask questions later.” Reading them felt like an out-of-body experience. The press seemed determined to prove that everyone who thought I was fit to be President was a fool: the Arkansas voters who had elected me five times; my fellow governors, who had voted me the most effective governor in the country; the education experts who had praised our reforms and progress; lifelong friends who were campaigning for me all over the country. In Arkansas, even my honest adversaries knew I worked hard and wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon. Now it seemed I had snookered all these people from the age of six on. At one point, when things got really bad in New York, Craig Smith told me he didn’t read the papers anymore, “because I don’t recognize the person they’re talking about.”
Near the end of March, Betsey Wright, who was at Harvard doing a stint at the Kennedy School, came to my rescue. She had worked hard for years to build our progressive record and to run a tight ethical operation. She had a prodigious memory, knew the records, and was more than willing to fight with reporters to set the record straight. When she moved into the headquarters as director of damage control, I felt much better. Betsey stopped a lot of factually incorrect stories, but she couldn’t stop them all. On March 26, the smoke seemed to clear a little when Senator Tom Harkin, the Communications Workers of America, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union endorsed me. I was also helped when Governor Cuomo and New York senator Pat Moynihan criticized Jerry Brown’s 13 percent flat-tax proposal and said it would hurt New York. It was a rare day in the campaign; the news was dominated by people concerned with issues and their impact on people’s lives. On March 29, I was back in the soup again, with a problem of my own making. Jerry Brown and I were in a televised candidates’ forum on WCBS in New York when a reporter asked me if I had ever tried marijuana at Oxford. This was the first time I had ever been asked that specific question directly. In Arkansas, when asked generally if I had ever used marijuana, I had given an evasive answer, saying I had never broken the drug laws of the United States. This time, I gave a more direct and answer: “When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and I never tried it again.”
Even Jerry Brown said the press should lay off because the issue wasn’t relevant. But the press had found another character issue. As for the “didn’t inhale” remark, I was stating a fact, not trying to minimize what I had done, as I tried to explain until I was blue in the face. What I should have said was that I couldn’t inhale. I had never smoked cigarettes, didn’t inhale with the pipe I occasionally smoked at Oxford, and tried but failed to inhale the marijuana smoke. I don’t know why I even mentioned it; maybe I thought I was being funny, or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to a subject I didn’t want to discuss. My account was corroborated by the respected English journalist Martin Walker, who later wrote an interesting and not altogether flattering book on my presidency,
As the old country song goes, I didn’t know whether to “kill myself or go bowling.” New York was suffering from severe economic and social problems. The Bush policies were making things worse. Yet every day seemed to be punctuated by television and print reporters shouting “character” questions at me. Radio talk-show host Don Imus called me a “redneck bozo.” When I went on Phil Donahue’s television show, all he did for twenty minutes was ask me questions about marital infidelity. After I gave my standard answer, he kept on asking. I rebuffed him and the audience cheered. He kept right on. Whether I had a character problem or not, I sure had a reputation problem, one I had been promised by the White House more than six months earlier. Because the President is both the head of state and the Chief Executive of the government, he is in a sense the embodiment of people’s idea of America, so reputation is important. Presidents going back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have guarded their reputations jealously: Washington, from criticism of his expense accounts during the Revolutionary War; Jefferson, from stories about his weakness for women. Before he became President, Abraham Lincoln suffered from debilitating episodes of depression. Once he was unable to leave his house for a whole month. If he had had to run under modern conditions, we might have been deprived of our greatest President.
Jefferson even wrote about the obligation of a President’s associates to protect his reputation at all costs: “When the accident of situation is to give us a place in history, for which nature had not prepared us by corresponding endowments, it is the duty of those about us carefully to veil from the public eye the weaknesses, and still more, the vices of our character.” The veil had been ripped from my weaknesses and vices, both real and imagined. The public knew more about them than about my record, message, or whatever virtues I might have. If my reputation was in tatters, I might not be able to be elected no matter how much people agreed with what I wanted to do, or how well they thought I might do it. In the face of all the character attacks, I responded as I always did when my back was against the wall—I plowed on. In the last week of the campaign, the clouds began to lift. On April 1, during a meeting with President Bush at the White House, President Carter made a widely reported comment that he supported me. It couldn’t have come at a better time. No one had ever questioned Carter’s character, and his reputation had continued to grow after he left the presidency, because of his good works at home and around the world. In one comment, he more than made up for the problems he had caused me during the Cuban refugee crisis in 1980.
On April 2, Jerry Brown was booed in a speech to the Jewish Community Relations Council in New York for suggesting Jesse Jackson as his running mate. Meanwhile, Hillary and I spoke to a large crowd at a midday rally on Wall Street. I got some boos, too, for referring to the eighties as a decade of greed and opposing a cut in the capital gains tax. After the speech, I worked the crowd, shaking hands with supporters and trying to convince the dissenters.
Meanwhile, we poured the whole campaign operation into the state. Besides Harold Ickes and Susan Thomases, Mickey Kantor was camped out in a hotel suite, joined by Carville, Stephanopoulos, Stan Greenberg, and Frank Greer and his partner, Mandy Grunwald. As always, Bruce Lindsey was with me. His wife, Bev, came up, too, to make sure all the public events were well planned and executed. Carol Willis organized a busload of black Arkansans to come to New York City to talk about what I had done as governor for and with blacks. Black ministers from home called counterparts in New York to ask for pulpit time for our people on the Sunday before the election. Lottie Shackleford, a Little Rock city director and Vice-Chair of the National Democratic Committee, spoke in five churches that Sunday. Those who knew me were putting a dent in the Reverend Jackson’s efforts to bring a big majority of New York’s black voters to Brown.
Some people in the press were coming around. Maybe the tide was turning; I even got a cordial reception on Don Imus’s radio show.
