percent. Because I liked him and had enjoyed working with him in state government, I urged him to seek advice from my new pollster, Dick Morris, a young political consultant who had been active in New York City politics. Morris was a brilliant, abrasive character, brimming with ideas about politics and policy. He believed in aggressive, creative campaigns, and was so cocksure about everything that a lot of people, especially in a down-home place like Arkansas, found him hard to take. But I was stimulated by him. And he did me a lot of good, partly because I refused to be put off by his manner and partly because I had good instincts about when he was right and when he was wasn’t. One thing I really liked about him was that he would tell me things I didn’t want to hear. In the fall campaign, my opponent was a cattleman and the chairman of the state Republican Party, Lynn Lowe. The race was uneventful except for the press conference on the steps of the Capitol in which his campaign accused me of being a draft dodger. I referred them to Colonel Holmes. I won the election with 63 percent of the vote, carrying sixty-nine of the seventy-five counties. At thirty-two, I was the governor-elect of Arkansas, with two months to assemble a staff, put together a legislative program, and wrap up my work as attorney general. I had really enjoyed the job, and thanks to the hard work and dedication of a fine staff, we had accomplished a lot. We cleaned out the backlog of requests for legal opinions, issuing a record number of them; recovered more than $400,000 in consumer claims, more than in the previous five years of the division’s existence combined; told the state boards that regulate professions that they could no longer ban price advertising by the professional groups they regulated, a common practice in those days all across America; pushed for better nursinghome care and an end to age discrimination against the elderly; intervened in more utility-rate hearings than the office had ever done before, saving the ratepayers millions of dollars; drafted and passed legislation to compensate victims of violent crime; and protected the privacy rights of citizens with regard to personal information held by state agencies. One other thing I accomplished was especially important to me. I convinced the required three-quarters of both legislative chambers to amend the state’s voting rights law to restore the right to vote to convicted felons upon completion of their sentences. I argued that once the offender had paid in full, he should be restored to full citizenship. I did it for Jeff Dwire, a hardworking, tax-paying citizen, who never got a pardon and who died a thousand deaths every election day. Sadly, more than twenty-five years later the federal government and most states still haven’t followed suit.
TWENTY-ONE
We started planning for my first term after the primary election in May and really got going after November, converting the headquarters into a transition office. Rudy Moore and Steve Smith, who had both served in the legislature, helped me as we prepared budgets, drafted bills to enact my policy priorities, analyzed the major management challenges, and began to hire a staff and cabinet. In December, the Democratic Party held its midterm convention in Memphis. I was asked to travel across the Mississippi River to moderate a health-care panel featuring Joe Califano, President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare, and Senator Edward Kennedy, the Senate’s chief advocate for universal health coverage. Califano was articulate in his defense of the President’s more incremental approach to health-care reform, but Kennedy won the crowd with an emotional plea for ordinary Americans to have the same coverage that his wealth provided for his son, Teddy, when he got cancer. I enjoyed the experience and the national exposure, but was convinced that the convention only highlighted our intra-party differences, when it was supposed to unite and reinvigorate Democrats in nonpresidential election years. The midterm meetings were later abandoned. Not long before Christmas, Hillary and I took a much-needed vacation to England. We spent Christmas Day with my friend from Oxford, Sara Maitland, and her husband, Donald Lee, an American who had become a priest in the Church of England. It was Donald’s first Christmas church service. He had to be a little nervous, but he began the service with a surefire winner, a children’s sermon. He sat down on the steps in front of a lovely nativity scene and asked all the children to come and sit with him. When they settled down, he said, “Children, this is a very special day.” They nodded. “Do you know what day this is?” “Yes,” they said. Donald beamed and asked, “What day is it?” In unison, they all shouted, “Monday!” I don’t know how he carried on. Perhaps he was consoled by the fact that in his church, kids told the literal truth.
In a month, it was time to move into the Governor’s Mansion and get ready for the inauguration. The mansion was a big colonial-style house of about ten thousand square feet in the beautiful old Quapaw Quarter of Little Rock, not far from the Capitol. The main house was flanked by two smaller ones, with the one on the left serving as a guest house and the one on the right providing a headquarters for the state troopers who watched the place and answered the phone twenty-four hours a day. The mansion had three large, handsome public rooms, a big kitchen, and a little breakfast room on the first floor; a spacious basement, which we converted into a rec room complete with pinball machine; and living quarters on the second floor. Despite its overall size, the mansion’s living area occupied just five small rooms and two modest bathrooms. Still, it was such a step up from our little house on L Street that we didn’t have enough furniture to fill the five rooms.
The hardest thing about the transition was getting used to the security. I had always prided myself on my self-sufficiency and prized my private time. I had been self-supporting since I was twenty, and over the years had gotten used to cleaning house, running errands, and cooking. When Hillary and I got together, we shared the household duties. Now other people cooked the meals, cleaned the house, and ran the errands. Since I was sixteen, I had enjoyed driving alone in my own car, listening to music and thinking. I couldn’t do that anymore. I liked to jog every day, usually before or after work. Now, I was being followed by a trooper in an unmarked car. It really bothered me at first—it made me want to run up oneway streets the wrong way. In time I got used to it and came to appreciate the work the folks at the mansion and the troopers did; they gave me more time for the job. Because the troopers drove me, I got a lot of paperwork done in transit. Eventually we agreed that I’d drive myself to church on Sundays. It wasn’t much of a concession, since my church and the Methodist church Hillary attended were both within a mile of the mansion, but I really looked forward to my Sunday freedom ride. One of the troopers ran with me when he was on duty, and I liked that a lot better than being followed. After I had been in office several years and there was clearly no imminent threat, I often ran alone in the mornings, but along a predictable downtown route with lots of people around. Frequently I ended those runs at the McDonald’s or the local bakery, both about a half mile from the mansion, where I’d get a cup of water, then walk back home.
The troopers did have real security work to do on occasion. In my first term, an escapee from one of our mental institutions called the mansion and said he was going to kill me. Since he had decapitated his mother a few years earlier, they took it seriously. He was caught and returned to confinement, which might have been his subconscious desire when he called. One day, a massive man carrying a railroad spike walked into the governor’s office and said he needed to meet with me all alone. He was not admitted. In 1982, when I was trying to regain the governor’s office, a man called and said he’d had a message from God telling him my opponent was the instrument of the Lord and I was the instrument of the devil and he was going to do God’s will and eliminate me. He turned out to be an escapee from a Tennessee mental institution. He had an odd-caliber revolver and went from gun store to gun store trying to buy ammunition for it, and because he couldn’t produce any identification, he didn’t succeed. Still, I had to wear an uncomfortable bulletproof jacket for several days near the end of the campaign. Once, when the front door was accidentally left unlocked, a deranged but harmless woman got halfway up the stairs to our living quarters before the troopers caught her as she was calling out to me. Another time, a small, wiry man in combat boots and shorts was apprehended trying to break down the front door. He was high on some kind of drug mixture that made him so strong it took two troopers bigger than I am to subdue him, and then only after he’d thrown one of them off and put his head through a window in the troopers’ quarters. He was carried away in a straitjacket strapped to a stretcher. Later, when he sobered up, the man apologized to the troopers and thanked them for keeping him from doing anyone harm. The troopers who served me became an issue in my first term as President when two of them who were disgruntled and had financial problems spread stories about me for a modest amount of money and fame and the hope of a bigger payoff. But most of those who served on the security detail were fine people who did their jobs well, and several of them became good friends. In January 1979, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to twenty-four-hour security coverage, but I was so excited about my job I didn’t have much time to think about it.
In addition to the traditional inaugural ball, we hosted a night of Arkansas entertainment called “Diamonds and Denim.” All the performers were Arkansans, including the great soul singer Al Green, who later turned to gospel music and the ministry, and Randy Goodrum, the pianist in our high school trio, the 3 Kings. At thirty-one, he
