San Antonio, Texas, and no matter what the White House had said to me, his orders hadn’t changed. Drummond was a real straight shooter; he was obviously telling the truth. I called Gene Eidenberg, told him what Drummond had said, and demanded an explanation. Instead I got a lecture. Eidenberg said he’d been told I was overreacting and grandstanding after my disappointing primary showing. It was obvious that Gene, whom I considered a friend, didn’t understand the situation, or me, as well as I had thought he did.
I was fit to be tied. I told him that since he obviously didn’t have confidence in my judgment, he could make the next decision: “You can either come down here and fix this right now, tonight, or I’m going to shut the fort down. I’ll put National Guardsmen at every entrance and no one will go in or out without my approval.”
He was incredulous. “You can’t do that,” he said. “It’s a federal facility.”
“That may be,” I shot back, “but it’s on a state road and I control it. It’s your decision.”
Eidenberg flew to Fort Smith on an air force plane that night. I picked him up, and before we went to the fort I took him on a tour of Barling. It was well after midnight, but down every street we drove, at every house, armed residents were on alert, sitting on their lawns, on their porches, and, in one case, on the roof. I’ll never forget one lady, who looked to be in her seventies, sitting stoically in her lawn chair with her shotgun across her lap. Eidenberg was shocked by what he saw. After we finished the tour he looked at me and said, “I had no idea.”
After the tour, we met with General Drummond and other federal, state, and local officials for an hour or so. Then we talked to the horde of press people who had gathered. Eidenberg promised that the security problem would be fixed. Later that day, June 2, the White House said the Pentagon had received clear instructions to maintain order and keep the Cubans on the base. President Carter also acknowledged that the people of Arkansas had suffered needless anxiety and promised that no more Cubans would be sent to Fort Chaffee.
Delays with the screening process seemed to be the root cause of the turmoil, and the people doing the screening made an effort to speed it up. When I went to visit the fort not long afterward, the situation was calmer and everyone seemed to be in a better frame of mind.
While things seemed to be settling down, I was still troubled by what had happened, or hadn’t, between May 28, when Eidenberg told me the army had been ordered to keep the Cubans from leaving Chaffee, and June 1, when they let one thousand of them escape. Either the White House hadn’t told me the truth, or the Justice Department was slow in getting its legal opinion to the Pentagon, or someone in the Pentagon had defied a lawful order of the Commander in Chief. If that’s what happened, it amounted to a serious breach of the Constitution. I’m not sure the whole truth ever came out. As I learned when I got to Washington, after things go wrong, the willingness to take responsibility often vanishes. In August, Hillary and I went to Denver for the summer meeting of the National Governors Association. All the talk was of presidential politics. President Carter seemed to have survived a vigorous challenge to his renomination from Senator Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy had not withdrawn. We had breakfast with the famous criminal lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, whom Hillary had known for years and who had wanted her to come to work for him after law school. Williams was strongly for Kennedy, and believed he’d have a better chance to defeat Ronald Reagan in the fall campaign because the President was bedeviled by a bad economy and the ten-month-long captivity of our hostages in Iran. I disagreed with him on the politics and the merits. Carter had done a lot of good things as President, wasn’t responsible for the OPEC price increases that had fueled the inflation, and had few good options for dealing with the hostage crisis. Besides, despite the problems with the Cubans, the Carter White House had been good to Arkansas, giving financial aid and support for our reform efforts in education, energy, health, and economic development. I had also been given remarkable access to the White House, for both business and pleasure. In the latter category, the best visit was when I took Mother to hear Willie Nelson sing on the South Lawn of the White House at a picnic the President hosted for NASCAR. After the event, Mother and I accompanied Nelson and the President’s son Chip to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Square from the White House, where Willie sat at the piano and sang for us until two in the morning.
For all those reasons, I was feeling good about my relationship with the White House as the National Governors Association meeting began. The Democratic governors and their Republican counterparts held separate meetings. I had been elected vice chairman of the Democratic governors at the winter meeting, thanks to my nomination by Governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina, who would become one of my closest friends among the governors and an ally in the fight for education reform all the way through the White House years. Bob Strauss, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, asked me to get the Democratic Governors Association to endorse President Carter over Senator Kennedy. After a quick canvass of the governors present, I told Strauss the vote would be twenty to four for Carter. We had a civilized debate, with Strauss speaking for the President and Governor Hugh Carey of New York arguing for Kennedy. After the 20–4 vote, Strauss and I spoke briefly to the press, touting the endorsement as a show of confidence in and political boost for President Carter at a time when he needed it.
About fifteen minutes later, I was told the White House was trying to reach me on the phone. Apparently the President wanted to thank me for helping line up the governors’ support. Appearances can be deceiving. What the President wanted to tell me was that the weather was about to turn cold in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the rest of the Cubans were being housed. Because those forts weren’t insulated from the winter weather, he said it would be necessary to move the refugees. Then came the kicker. Now that the security problems were solved at Fort Chaffee, they would be moved there. I responded, “Mr. President, you promised that no more refugees would be sent to Arkansas. Send them to a fort in some warm place out west you’re not going to win in November anyway.” The President replied that he’d considered that but couldn’t do it because it would cost $10 million to outfit a facility out west. I said, “Mr. President, your word to the people of Arkansas is worth $10 million.” He disagreed, and we ended the conversation.
Now that I’ve been President, I have some idea of the pressures Jimmy Carter was under. He was dealing with both rampant inflation and a stagnant economy. The American hostages in Iran had been held by the Ayatollah Khomeini for almost a year. The Cubans weren’t rioting anymore, so they were the least of his problems. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had both voted for him in 1976, and they had more electoral votes than Arkansas, which he had won with almost two-thirds of the vote. I was still more than twenty points ahead of my opponent, Frank White, in the polls, so how could I be hurt?
At the time I saw it differently. I knew the President would be hurt badly by breaking his commitment to Arkansas. Whether or not the forts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had to be closed for weather or for political reasons, sending the remaining Cubans to the one place he had promised not to, in order to save $10 million, was nuts. I called Rudy Moore and my campaign chairman, Dick Herget, to see what they thought I should do. Dick said I should fly directly to Washington to see the President. If I couldn’t change his mind, I should talk to the press outside the White House and withdraw my support for his reelection. But I couldn’t do that, for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to look like a modern version of Orval Faubus and other southern governors who resisted federal authority in the civil rights years. Second, I didn’t want to do anything to help Ronald Reagan beat Carter. Reagan was running a great campaign, with a big head of steam, fueled by the hostages, the bad economy, and the intense support of right-wing groups outraged about everything from abortion to Carter’s turning the Panama Canal over to Panama.
Gene Eidenberg asked me not to announce the relocation until he could come to Arkansas and put the best face on it. The story leaked anyway, and Gene’s visit to Arkansas did little to help. He made a convincing case that there would be no further security problems, but he couldn’t deny that the President was breaking a clear commitment to the state that had been more supportive of him than any other outside his native Georgia. I won a larger role in controlling the security arrangements and made some improvements, but I was still the President’s man in Arkansas who had failed to hold him to his word. I returned home from Denver to a very volatile political situation. My opponent in the general election, Frank White, was gaining ground. White was a big man with a booming voice and a bombastic style that belied his background as a graduate of the Naval Academy, savings-and- loan executive, and former director of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission under Governor Pryor. He had strong support from all the interest groups I’d taken on, including utility, poultry, trucking, and timber companies, and the medical associations. He was a born-again Christian with the strong backing of the state chapter of the Moral Majority and other conservative activists. And he had the pulse of the country people and blue-collar workers upset about the car tags. He also had the advantage of a generally disgruntled mood, due to the economy and the drought. When the bad economy led state revenues to decline below projections, I was forced to lower state spending to balance the budget, including education cuts that reduced the second year’s $1,200 pay raise for teachers to about $900. Many teachers didn’t care about the state’s budget problems; they had been promised $1,200 for two years and they wanted the second installment. When it didn’t come, the intensity of their
