flying in the Ozarks for forty years. Often when we hit bad weather, he swooped down below the clouds to follow a river valley through the mountains, all the while telling me stories or bragging on Senator Fulbright for knowing Vietnam was a mistake before anyone else did. Steve Smith did a brilliant job of research on issues and Hammerschmidt’s voting record. He came up with a series of ingenious pamphlets comparing my positions on issues to his votes on them, and we put out one a week for the last six weeks of the campaign. They got good coverage in the local papers, and Steve turned them into effective newspaper ads. For example, the Arkansas River valley from Clarksville to the Oklahoma border south of Fort Smith was full of coal miners who had worked for decades in the open pit mines that scarred the landscape until federal laws forced the land to be restored. Many of the miners had debilitating black-lung disease from all the years of breathing the coal dust and were entitled to benefits from the federal government. The congressman’s casework operation helped them get the benefits, but when the Nixon administration wanted to cut back the program, he voted for the cutbacks. Folks in the river valley didn’t know that until Steve Smith and I told them. I also had a number of positive proposals, some of which I advocated for twenty years, including a fairer tax system, a national health-insurance program, public funding of presidential elections, a lean and more effective federal bureaucracy, more federal education funding and creation of a federal Department of Education (it was then still an office in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), and incentives to promote energy conservation and solar power.
Thanks largely to financial support from the national labor unions, which my friend and regional AFLCIO leader Dan Powell pushed hard for, we got enough money to do some television ads. Old Dan Powell was talking about me becoming President when I was still twenty-five points behind for Congress. All I did was stand in front of a camera and talk. It forced me to think in twenty-eight-second segments. After a while, I didn’t need a stopwatch to tell me whether I was a second or two long or short. Production costs were low for the ads.
The TV ads may have been rudimentary, but our radio ads were great. One memorable ad, produced in Nashville, featured a country singer who sounded just like Arkansas-born Johnny Cash. It opened, “If you’re tired of eating beans and greens and forgotten what pork and beefsteak means, there’s a man you ought to be listening to.” It went on to slam the Nixon administration for financing huge grain sales to the Soviet Union, which drove up the price of food and animal feed, hurting poultry and cattle operations. The song said, “It’s time to push Earl Butz [Nixon’s agriculture secretary] away from the trough.” In between verses came this refrain: “Bill Clinton’s ready, he’s fed up too. He’s a lot like me, he’s a lot like you. Bill Clinton’s gonna get things done, and we’re gonna send him to Washington.” I loved that spot. Don Tyson, whose costs of poultry production had soared with the grain sales and whose brother, Randal, was working hard for me, made sure I had enough money to run the song to death on rural radio.
As we moved closer to election day, the support got stronger and so did the opposition. I got the endorsement of the
One of the most exciting rallies of the election occurred one fall afternoon on the White River, not far from the infamous Whitewater property I later invested in but never saw. The Democrats in the area were all stirred up because the Nixon Justice Department was trying to send the Democratic sheriff of Searcy County, Billy Joe Holder, to jail for income tax evasion. Under our 1876 constitution, the salaries of the state and local officials have to be approved by a vote of the people; they had last been raised in 1910. County officials made just $5,000 a year. The governor made only $10,000, but at least he had a mansion, and his transportation and food costs were covered. A lot of the local officials were forced to use their expense accounts, which as I recall were about $7,000 a year, just to live. The Justice Department wanted Sheriff Holder to go to jail for not paying income tax on his personal expenditures from the account. I believe the Holder case was the smallest income tax–evasion prosecution ever brought by the federal government, and the hill people were convinced it was politically motivated. If so, it backfired. After an hour and a half of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. It turned out they voted to acquit right away, then stayed in the jury room more than an hour longer just to make it look right. Billy Joe walked out of the courthouse and drove straight to our rally, where he was greeted like a hero home from war.
On the way back to Fayetteville, I stopped in Harrison, where the trial was held, to discuss it with Miss Ruth Wilson, a public accountant who did tax work for lots of hill people. I told Miss Ruth that I understood she had helped Holder’s lawyer, my friend F. H. Martin, with the jury selection. She said she had. I asked her half jokingly if she had packed it with Democrats. I’ll never forget her reply: “No, Bill, I didn’t. Actually, there were a fair number of Republicans on that jury. You know, those young men who came down from Washington to prosecute the sheriff were smart fellows, and they looked real good in their expensive suits. But they just didn’t know our folks. It’s the strangest thing. Nine of those twelve jurors had been audited by the Internal Revenue Service in the last two years.” I was glad Ruth Wilson and her boys were on my side. After she worked over those Washington lawyers, the Justice Department began to ask prospective jurors in tax cases about their own experiences with the IRS. With about two weeks to go, the congressman finally got his campaign in gear. He had seen a poll that said if he didn’t, my momentum might carry me to a narrow victory. His people pulled out all the stops. His business friends and the Republicans went to work. Someone began calling all the papers asking for the nonexistent photo of me demonstrating against President Nixon at the 1969 Arkansas-Texas game, giving birth to the infamous “tree story” I mentioned earlier. In Hot Springs, the chamber of commerce had a big dinner to thank him for all he’d done. Several hundred people showed up, and it received extensive coverage in the local paper. Across the district, Republicans scared businesspeople by charging that I had so much support from unions, I would be a puppet for organized labor in Congress. In Fort Smith, six thousand postcards we sent to political supporters identified in our phone canvass were never delivered. Apparently my labor support didn’t extend to the postal workers there. The cards were found a few days after the election in the trash outside the main post office. The state branch of the American Medical Association came out strongly for Hammerschmidt, hitting me for my efforts to get doctors in the Springdale area to treat poor people on Medicaid. Hammerschmidt even got federal revenue-sharing funds to pave the streets of Gilbert, a small town in Searcy County, a few days before the election. He carried it 38–34, but it was the only township in the county he won. I got an inkling of just how effective his work had been the weekend before the election when I went to a closing rally at the Hot Springs Convention Center. We didn’t have as many people there as had attended his dinner a few days before. Our people had worked their hearts out, but they were tired. Still, on election day, I thought we might win. As we gathered in my headquarters to watch the returns, we were nervous but hopeful. We led in the vote count until nearly midnight, because the largest and most Republican county, Sebastian, reported late. I carried twelve of the fifteen counties with fewer than eight thousand total votes, including every voting box along the Buffalo River in Newton and Searcy counties. But I lost five of the six biggest counties, suffering narrow defeats of fewer than five hundred votes each in Garland County, where I grew up, and Washington County, where I lived, losing Crawford County by eleven hundred votes and getting killed in Benton and Sebastian counties, where my combined losses were twice the total margin of victory. We each won one county by about two to one. He won Sebastian County, the biggest, and I won Perry County, the smallest. It seems ironic now, when rural Americans vote overwhelmingly Republican in national elections, that I began my political career with a profoundly rural base, born of intense personal contact and responsiveness to both their resentments and their real problems. I was on their side, and they knew it. The final total vote was 89,324 to 83,030, about 52 to 48 percent.
The Democrats had a good night nationally, picking up forty-nine House seats and four seats in the Senate, but we just couldn’t overcome Hammerschmidt’s enormous popularity and his last-minute push. When the campaign began, his approval rating was 85 percent. I had whittled it down to 69 percent, while mine had gone from zero to 66 percent, very good but not good enough. Everybody said I made a good showing and had a bright future. That was nice to hear, but I’d wanted to win. I was proud of our campaign and I felt that somehow I had let the steam go out of it in the last few days, and in so doing let down all the people who worked so hard for me and the changes we wanted to make. Maybe if I’d had the money and the sense to run effective television ads on the congressman’s
