economic populists, as Nixon defeated McGovern 74 to 26 percent. Hammerschmidt got 77 percent. No wonder no one else wanted to make the race. A few days after Hillary left, Carl Whillock took me on my first campaign trip, a swing across the district’s northern counties. We stopped first in Carroll County. In Berryville, a town of about 1,300, I visited the store of Si Bigham, a prominent local Democrat, who had his four-year-old grandson with him. More than twenty years later, that little boy, Kris Engskov, would become my personal aide in the White House. I also met the local Methodist minister, Vic Nixon, and his wife, Freddie. They were liberal Democrats who opposed the Vietnam War, and they agreed to support me. They wound up doing far more. Freddie became my county coordinator, charmed the socks off the leaders in all the rural voting precincts, and later worked for me in the governor’s office, where she never stopped trying to convince me that the death penalty was wrong. When Hillary and I got married, Vic performed the ceremony.
We drove on east to Boone County and then drove to Mountain Home, county seat of the district’s northeasternmost county, Baxter. Carl wanted me to meet Hugh Hackler, a businessman who told us right off the bat that he was committed to another candidate in the primary. Still, we started talking. When he found out I was from Hot Springs, he told me Gabe Crawford was a good friend of his. When I replied that Gabe had been Daddy’s best friend, Hugh got out of his commitment to the other guy and supported me. I also met Vada Sheid, who owned a furniture store and was the county treasurer. She noticed a loose button on my shirt and sewed it on while we visited. She became a supporter that day, too. She never sewed another button for me, but after I became governor and she went to the state Senate, her votes often bailed me out in other ways.
After we left Mountain Home, we drove south to Searcy County. We stopped in St. Joe, which had about 150 people, to see the county Democratic chairman, Will Goggins. Will was over eighty, but still sharp as a tack, physically strong, and passionate about his politics. When he said he’d be for me, I knew it meant a lot of votes, as you’ll see. In the county seat of Marshall, I met George Daniel, who ran the local hardware store. George’s younger brother, James, was a student at the law school who gave me one of my first thousand-dollar contributions; his older brother, Charles, was the county’s doctor. I got a lot of laughs out of George’s homespun humor and learned one searing lesson. A Vietnam veteran who’d been away from the county for several years came into his store one day and bought a pistol. He said he wanted to do some target practice. A day later he killed six people. It turned out he had just walked away from Fort Roots, the federal mental-health facility for veterans in North Little Rock, where he’d been for several years, apparently because of trauma from his war experiences. It took George Daniel a long time to get over that. And it was the best argument I ever encountered for the kind of background checks on gun buyers required by the Brady bill, which I finally signed into law in 1993, after nineteen more years of avoidable killings by known felons, stalkers, and people with mental disorders.
When Carl and I got back to Fayetteville, I was higher than a kite. I had always liked one-on-one “retail” politics when I was working for other candidates. Now I really loved going into the little towns, or stopping at country stores, cafes, and filling stations along the road. I was never very good at asking for money, but I liked going into people’s homes and businesses and asking for their votes. Besides, you could never tell when you would meet a colorful character, hear an interesting story, learn something worth knowing, or make a new friend.
That first day on the campaign trail would be followed by scores of others just like it. I would set out in the morning from Fayetteville, work as many towns and counties as I could until late at night, then head back home if I had to teach the next day or, if I didn’t, stay with a hospitable Democrat so that I could go on to the next county in the morning.
The next Sunday I went back east to finish up the mountain counties. I almost didn’t make it. I had forgotten to fill the tank of my 1970 American Motors Gremlin before the weekend. Because of the gasoline shortage, federal law required filling stations to be closed on Sunday. But I had to get back to the hills. In desperation, I called the president of our local natural-gas company, Charles Scharlau, and asked him if he would let me have a tank of gas from the pump in his equipment yard. He told me to go on down there and he’d take care of it. To my astonishment he showed up and filled my gas tank himself. Charles Scharlau single-handedly kept my fledgling campaign going. First I drove to Alpena to see the county Democratic chairman, Bo Forney, whom I had missed on my first stop there. I found his little house with no trouble. There was a pickup truck with a gun rack in the front yard, standard equipment for mountain men. Bo met me at the front door in jeans and a white Tshirt over his ample girth. He was watching TV and didn’t say much as I made my pitch for his support. When I finished, he said that Hammerschmidt needed beating, and that although he would win his hometown of Harrison by a large margin, he thought we could do some good in the rural part of Boone County. Then he gave me the names of some people to see, told me I’d get more votes if I got a haircut, said he’d support me, and went back to his television. I wasn’t sure what to make of Bo until I took a closer look at his pickup on my way back to the car. It had a bumper sticker that said “Don’t Blame Me. I Voted for McGovern.” Later, when I asked Bo about the bumper sticker, he said he didn’t care what the critics said about McGovern, the Democrats were for the common people and the Republicans weren’t, and that’s all there was to it. When I was President and Bo was in ill health, our mutual friend and fellow yellow-dog Democrat Levi Phillips brought him to spend the night with us in the White House. Bo had a good time, but refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. He couldn’t forgive him for the Republican Party’s excesses during the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, or for its devotion to the wealthy and powerful throughout the twentieth century. Now that Bo and Mr. Lincoln are both in heaven, I like to think they’ve gotten together and resolved their differences. After Alpena, I went to Flippin, a town of about a thousand in Marion County, which had more miles of unpaved roads than any other in our state. I went to see two young men I wanted to run my campaign there, Jim “Red” Milligan and Kearney Carlton. They put me between them in Red’s pickup and took off down one of those dirt roads to Everton, a tiny place in the most remote part of the county, to see Leon Swofford, who owned the only store and whose support was worth a couple of hundred votes. About ten miles out of town, Red stopped the truck in the middle of nowhere. We were engulfed in dust. He took out a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco, put a wad in his mouth, then handed it to Kearney, who followed suit. Then Kearney handed it to me and said, “We want to see what you’re made of. If you’re man enough to chew this tobacco, we’ll be for you. If you’re not, we’ll kick you out and let you walk back to town.” I thought about it and said, “Open the damn door.” They glared at me for about five seconds, then roared with laughter and took off down the road to Swofford’s store. We got the votes there, and a lot more over the years. If they had measured me by my taste for Red Man, I might still be wandering the back roads of Marion County.
A few weeks later, I’d be tested like that again. I was in Clarksville in the Arkansas River valley with my twenty-two-year-old county leader, Ron Taylor, who was from a prominent political family and politically wise well beyond his years. He took me out to the county fair to see the county sheriff, whose support Ron said we had to have to carry the county. We found him at the rodeo grounds, holding the reins of a horse. The rodeo was about to begin with a parade of horses marching around the arena. The sheriff handed me the reins and told me to join the parade and I’d be introduced to the crowd. He promised that the horse was well behaved. I was wearing a dark suit and tie and wing-tipped shoes. I hadn’t been on a horse since I was five, and then only to pose for a picture in a cowboy outfit. I had turned down the chewing tobacco, but I took the reins and mounted the horse. After a lifetime of watching cowboy movies, I thought, how hard could it be? When the opening ceremony started, I rode out into the arena just as if I knew what I was doing. About a quarter of the way around the arena, right after I’d been introduced, the horse stopped and reared up on its hind legs. Miraculously, I didn’t fall off. The crowd clapped. I think they believed I’d done it on purpose. The sheriff knew better, but he supported me anyway.
I finished my round of the Ozarks in Newton County, one of the most beautiful places in America, home of the Buffalo River, which recently had been named the first river protected by Congress under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. I stopped first in Pruitt, a small settlement on the Buffalo, to see Hilary Jones. Though he lived in a modest home, he was a road builder and might have been the wealthiest man in the county. His family’s Democratic heritage went all the way back to the Civil War and before, and he had the genealogical books to prove it. He was deeply rooted in his land along the river. His family had lost a lot of it in the Depression, and when he came home from World War II he worked for years to put it all back together again. The Buffalo’s designation as a protected river was his worst nightmare. Most landowners along the river were given life tenancies; they couldn’t sell the land to anyone but the government in their lifetimes, and when they died only the government could buy it. Because Hilary’s homestead was on the main highway, the government was going to take it by eminent domain in the near future and make it part of the headquarters operation. He and his wife, Margaret, had eight children. They wanted the kids to have their land. There was an old cemetery on it where people born in the 1700s were buried. Whenever anyone died destitute and alone in the county, Hilary paid for the burial in his cemetery. I supported protecting the river, but I thought the government should have let the old homesteaders keep their land under a scenic easement,
