My Life

voting record, it would have made a difference. Probably not. Nevertheless, in 1974, I saw firsthand, in thousands of encounters, that middle-class voters would support government activism to solve their problems, and those of the poor, but only if the effort was made with due care for their tax dollars, and if efforts to increase opportunity were coupled with an insistence on responsibility.

After I spent a few days traveling and calling around to thank people, I went into a funk. I spent most of the next six weeks at Hillary’s house, a nice place near campus. Mostly I just lay on the floor, nursing my regrets and trying to figure out how I was going to pay off my campaign debt of over $40,000. My new salary of $16,450 was more than enough to live on and pay off my law school debts, but nowhere near enough to cover the debt from the campaign. Sometime in December, there was a big band dance at the university, which Hillary coaxed me into taking her to. After we danced a few hours, I began to feel better. Still, it would be a good while before I realized the congressman had done me a favor by beating me. If I had won and gone to Washington, I’m sure I never would have been elected President. And I would have missed the eighteen great Arkansas years that lay ahead.

NINETEEN

In January 1975, I went back to my teaching, the only full year I did it uninterrupted by politics. In the spring term, I taught Antitrust and held a seminar in White-Collar Crime; in summer school, Admiralty and Federal Jurisdiction; in the fall, White-Collar Crime again and Constitutional Law. In Constitutional Law, I spent two full weeks on Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that gave women a constitutional privacy right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy, the approximate amount of time it takes a fetus to become “viable”—that is, able to live outside the mother’s womb. After viability, the Court ruled, the state could protect a child’s interest in being born against the mother’s decision not to have it, unless her life or health would be threatened by continued pregnancy or childbirth. Some of my students who saw Constitutional Law as just another course in which they had to memorize the rule of law in each case couldn’t understand why I spent so much time on Roe. It was easy to remember the three-trimester rule and the reasoning behind it.

I made them delve deeper, because I thought then, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is the most difficult of all judicial decisions. Whatever they decided, the Court had to play God. Everyone knows life begins biologically at conception. No one knows when biology turns into humanity or, for the religious, when the soul enters the body. Most abortions that don’t involve the life or health of the mother are chosen by scared young women and girls who don’t know what else to do. Most people who are pro-choice understand that abortions terminate potential life and believe that they should be legal, safe, and rare and that we should support young mothers who decide to complete their pregnancies, as most of them do. Most ardent pro- lifers are all for prosecuting doctors but grow less certain when their argument that an abortion is a crime is carried to its logical conclusion: prosecuting the mother for murder. Even the fanatics who bomb abortion clinics don’t target the women who keep them in business. Also, as we’ve learned first with Prohibition and later with our drug laws, which have more support than a total ban on abortion does, it’s hard to apply the criminal law to acts that a substantial portion of the citizenry doesn’t believe should be labeled crimes.

I thought then and still believe that the Court reached the right conclusion, though, as so often happens in American politics, its action sparked a powerful reaction, the growth of an active, effective national anti-abortion movement, which over time drastically reduced the practical availability of abortions in many places and drove large numbers of voters into the new right wing of the Republican Party. Regardless of what opinion polls show about voters’ positions on abortion, our national ambivalence about it means that its impact on elections depends on which side feels more threatened. For most of the last thirty years, for example, during which a woman’s right to choose has been secure, pro-choice voters have felt free to vote for or against candidates on other issues, while for anti-abortion voters, the other issues often didn’t matter. Nineteen ninety-two was an exception. The highly publicized court of appeals decision in the Webster case, narrowing the right to choose, combined with the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies in the near future, threatened and galvanized the pro- choice voters, so I and other pro-choice candidates weren’t hurt by our position that year. After I was elected, with the right to choose secure again, pro-choice suburbanites again felt free to vote for anti-abortion Republicans for other reasons, while pro-life Democrats and independents, who approved of my record on economic and other social issues, nevertheless often felt compelled to support pro-life candidates who were almost always conservative Republicans.

In 1975, I didn’t know or care much about the politics of abortion. I was interested in the Supreme Court’s herculean effort to reconcile conflicting convictions about law, morality, and life. In my opinion they did about the best they could do, lacking access to the mind of God. Whether my students agreed with me or not, I wanted them to think hard about it.

In the fall, I got a new teaching assignment: I was asked to come down to the university’s Little Rock campus once a week to teach a night seminar in Law and Society to students who worked during the day in law enforcement. I was eager to do it and enjoyed my interaction with people who seemed genuinely interested in how their work in police departments and sheriffs’ offices fit into the fabric of both the Constitution and citizens’ daily lives.

Besides teaching, I kept my hand in politics and did some interesting legal work. I was appointed to head a state Democratic Party committee on affirmative action. It was designed to assure increased participation by women and minorities in party affairs without falling into the trap of the McGovern rules, which gave us delegates to the national convention who were representative of every demographic group but often hadn’t ever really worked for the party and couldn’t get any votes. The assignment gave me a chance to travel the state meeting Democrats, both black and white, who cared about the issue. The other thing that kept me politically active was the necessity to pay off my campaign debt. I finally did it in much the way we financed the campaign, with lots of small-dollar events and with the help of some generous larger givers. I got my first $250 from Jack Yates, a fine lawyer in Ozark who, along with his partner, Lonnie Turner, had worked hard for me in the election. Jack gave me the check within two weeks after the election. At the time, I wasn’t sure where my next dollar was coming from and I never forgot it. Sadly, a couple of months after he helped me, Jack Yates died of a heart attack. After the funeral, Lonnie Turner asked me if I would take over Jack’s black-lung cases. The Nixon administration had promulgated new rules making it harder to get benefits and requiring the cases of people already receiving them to be reviewed. In many cases, the benefits were being revoked. I began to drive down to the Ozarks once or twice a week to review the files and interview the old miners, with the understanding that any pay I got would come from fees from the cases I won.

Lonnie knew I cared a lot about the issue and was familiar with how the program worked. It’s true that when the black-lung program was first implemented the evaluations were too lax and some people did get benefits who didn’t need them, but as so often happens with government programs, the attempt to correct the problem went too far in the other direction.

Even before I took over Jack Yates’s cases, I had agreed to try to help another man in his fight for blacklung benefits. Jack Burns Sr., from a small town south of Fort Smith, was the father of the administrator of Ouachita Hospital in Hot Springs, where Mother worked. He was about five feet four inches tall and couldn’t have weighed much more than one hundred pounds. Jack was an old-fashioned man of quiet dignity, who was severely damaged by black lung. He was entitled to the benefits, and he and his wife badly needed them to help pay their bills. In the months we worked together, I came to respect both his patience and his determination. When we won his case, I was almost as happy as he was. I think there were more than one hundred cases like Jack Burns’s in the stack of files Lonnie Turner gave me. I enjoyed going down to Ozark from Fayetteville over the winding road known as the “Pig Trail” to work on them. The cases were heard first by an administrative law judge, Jerry Thomasson, who was a fair-minded Republican. They could then be appealed to the federal judge in Fort Smith, Paul X. Williams, who was a sympathetic Democrat. So was his longtime clerk, Elsijane Trimble Roy, who was a great help to me. I was elated when President Carter appointed her Arkansas’ first female federal judge.

While I continued my teaching, politics, and law work, Hillary was settling into life in Fayetteville. I could tell she really liked being there, maybe even enough to stay. She taught Criminal Law and Trial Advocacy, and oversaw both the legal-aid clinic and the students who did work for prison inmates. Some of the crusty old lawyers and