Judge Holt, she said she couldn’t because she hadn’t paid her poll tax. I told her that Congress had eliminated the poll tax two years earlier and all she had to do was register. I don’t know if she did.
Still, there were signs of a new day. While campaigning in Arkadelphia, thirty-five miles south of Hot Springs, I met the leading candidate for the south Arkansas congressional seat, a young man named David Pryor. He was clearly a progressive who thought if he could just meet enough people he could persuade most of them to vote for him. He did it in 1966, did it again in the governor’s race in 1974, and again in the Senate race in 1978. By the time he retired, much to my dismay, from the Senate in 1996, David Pryor was the most popular politician in Arkansas, with a fine progressive legacy. Everybody thought of him as their friend, including me.
The kind of retail politics Pryor mastered was important in a rural state like Arkansas, where more than half the people lived in towns with fewer than five thousand people, and tens of thousands just lived “out in the country.” We were still in the days before television ads, especially negative ones, assumed the large role in elections they have now. Candidates mostly bought television time to look into the camera and talk to voters. They also were expected to visit the courthouses and main businesses in every county seat, go into the kitchen of every cafe, and campaign in sale barns, where livestock are auctioned. The county fairs and pie suppers were fertile territory. And, of course, every weekly newspaper and radio station expected a visit and an ad or two. That’s how I learned politics. I think it works better than TV air wars. You could talk, but you had to listen, too. You had to answer voters’ tough questions face-toface. Of course, you could still be demonized, but at least your adversaries had to work harder to do it. And when you took a shot at your opponent, you had to take it, not hide behind some bogus committee that expected to make a killing from your time in office if its attacks destroyed the other candidate. Though the campaigns were more personal, they were far from just personality contests. When there were big issues at stake, they had to be addressed. And if a strong tide of public opinion was rolling in, and you couldn’t go with the flow in good conscience, you had to be tough, disciplined, and quick to avoid being washed away.
In 1966, Jim Johnson—or “Justice Jim,” as he liked to be called—was riding the tide and making big, ugly waves. He attacked Frank Holt as a “pleasant vegetable,” and implied that Rockefeller had had homosexual relations with black men, a laughable charge considering his earlier well-earned reputation as a ladies’ man. Justice Jim’s message was simply the latest version of an old southern song sung to white voters in times of economic and social uncertainty: You’re good, decent, God-fearing people; “they’re” threatening your way of life; you don’t have to change, it’s all their fault; elect me and I’ll stand up for you just as you are and kick the hell out of them. The perennial political divide, Us versus Them. It was mean, ugly, and ultimately self-defeating for the people who bought it, but as we still see, when people feel discontented and insecure it often works. Because Johnson was so extreme in his rhetoric, and largely invisible on the traditional campaign trail, most political observers thought it wouldn’t work this time. As election day neared, Frank Holt refused to answer his attacks, or the attacks from other candidates, who assumed he was way ahead and also began to hit him for being the “oldguard machine” candidate. We didn’t have many polls back then and most people didn’t put much stock in the few that floated around.
Holt’s strategy sounded good to the idealistic young people around him, like me. He simply replied to all charges with a statement that he was completely independent, that he wouldn’t respond to unsubstantiated attacks or attack his opponents in return, and that he wanted to win on his own merits “or not at all.” I finally learned that phrases like “or not at all” are often used by candidates who forget that politics is a contact sport. The strategy can work when the public mood is secure and hopeful and when the candidate has a platform of serious, specific policy proposals, but in the summer of 1966 the mood was mixed at best, and the Holt platform was too general to inspire much intense feeling. Besides, those who most wanted a candidate who simply embodied opposition to segregation could vote for Brooks Hays.
Despite the attacks on him, most people thought Frank Holt would lead the ticket, but without a majority, and then would win the runoff two weeks later. On July 26, the people spoke, more than 420,000 of them. The results surprised the pundits. Johnson led with 25 percent of the vote, Holt was second with 23 percent, Hays was third with 15 percent, Alford got 13 percent, and the other three split the rest.
We were shocked but not without hope. Judge Holt and Brooks Hays had gotten slightly more votes between them than the segregationist combo of Johnson and Alford. Also, in one of the more interesting legislative races, a long-serving old-guard House member, Paul Van Dalsem, was defeated by a young, progressive, Yale-educated lawyer, Herb Rule. A couple of years earlier Van Dalsem had infuriated supporters of the rising women’s movement by saying women should be kept at home, “barefoot and pregnant.” That got Herb, later Hillary’s partner at the Rose Law Firm, an army of female volunteers, who dubbed themselves “Barefoot Women for Rule.”
The outcome of the runoff election was very much up in the air, because runoffs are about voter turnout, about which candidate will do a better job of getting his own voters back to the polls, and a better job of persuading those who voted for candidates who were eliminated or people who didn’t vote the first time to support him. Judge Holt tried hard to make the runoff a choice between the Old South and the New South. Johnson didn’t exactly undermine that framing of the race when he went on TV to tell the voters that he stood “with Daniel in the lion’s den” and “with John the Baptist in Herod’s court” in opposing godless integration. I think somewhere in that talk Justice Jim even got on Paul Revere’s horse. Though the Holt strategy was smart and Johnson was willing to fight it out as Old versus New, there were two problems with Holt’s approach. First, the Old South voters were highly motivated to vote and they were sure Johnson was their champion, while the New South voters weren’t so sure about Holt. His refusal to really take the gloves off until late in the race reinforced their doubts and reduced their incentive to vote. Second, an undetermined number of Rockefeller supporters wanted to vote for Johnson because they thought he’d be easier than Holt for their man to beat, and anyone, Republican or Democrat, could vote in the Democratic runoff as long as he or she hadn’t voted in the Republican primary. Only 19,646 people had done that, since Rockefeller was unopposed. On runoff election day, only 5,000 fewer people voted than in the first primary. Each candidate got twice as many votes as the first time, and Johnson won by 15,000 votes, 52 to 48 percent.
I was sick about the outcome. I had come to care deeply about Judge Holt and his family, to believe he would have been a better governor than he was a candidate, and to dislike what Justice Jim stood for even more. The only bright spot was Rockefeller, who actually had a chance to win. He was a better organized candidate the second time around. He spent money as if it was going out of style, even buying hundreds of bicycles for poor black kids. In the fall he won with 54.5 percent of the vote. I was very proud of my state. I had gone back to Georgetown by then and didn’t watch the campaign unfold firsthand, but a lot of people commented that Johnson seemed less animated in the general election. Perhaps it was because his financial support was limited, but there was also a rumor that he might have gotten some “encouragement” from Rockefeller to cool it. I have no idea if that was true or not. Except for a brief interregnum in the Carter years, when I was President Carter’s point man in Arkansas, and when he wanted a federal appointment for his son, Jim Johnson remained way out there on the right, where he grew more and more hostile toward me. In the 1980s, like so many southern conservatives he became a Republican. He ran again for the supreme court and lost. After that, he made his mischief in the background. When I ran for President, he planted ingenious stories, directly and indirectly, with anyone gullible enough to believe them, and got some surprising takers among the so-called eastern liberal media he loved to revile, especially for Whitewater tales. He’s a canny old rascal. He must have had a great time conning them, and if the Republicans in Washington had succeeded in running me out of town, he’d have had a good claim to the last laugh.
After the campaign I got to wind down by taking my first trip to the West Coast. A regular customer of Uncle Raymond’s wanted a new Buick he didn’t have in stock. Uncle Raymond found one at a dealership in Los Angeles, where it was being used as a “demonstrator,” a car prospective customers could test-drive to see how they liked it. Dealers often swapped these cars or sold them to one another at a discount. My uncle asked me to fly out to L.A. and drive the car back, along with Pat Brady, whose mother was his secretary, and who had been in my high school class and the band. If we both went, we could drive straight through. We were eager to go, and back then student fares were so cheap Raymond could fly us out for nearly nothing and still make a profit on the car. We flew into LAX, got the car, and headed home, but not in a straight line. Instead, we took a minor detour to Las Vegas, a place we thought we’d never have another chance to see. I still remember driving across the flat desert at night with the windows down, feeling the warm, dry air and seeing the bright lights of Vegas beckoning in the distance.
Las Vegas was different then. There were no big theme hotels like the Paris or the Venetian, just the Strip, with its gambling and entertainment. Pat and I didn’t have much money, but we wanted to play the slot machines, so we picked a place, got a roll of nickels each, and went to work. Within fifteen minutes I had hit one jackpot and Pat had pulled two. This did not go unnoticed by the regular hostages to the one-armed bandits. They were convinced we were good luck, so every time we left a machine without hitting, people rushed to it, jostling for the
