support for me faded considerably.
Back in April, Hillary and I had seen Frank White at an event and I told her that no matter what the polls said, he was starting with 45 percent of the vote. I had made that many people mad. After the announcement that all the refugees would be housed at Fort Chaffee, White had his mantra for the election: Cubans and Car Tags. That’s all he talked about for the rest of the campaign. I campaigned hard in August but without much success. At factory gates, workers changing shifts said they wouldn’t vote for me because I had made their economic woes worse and betrayed them by raising the car tags. Once while campaigning in Fort Smith, near the bridge to Oklahoma, when I asked a man for his support, he gave a more graphic version of the answer I’d heard hundreds of times: “You raised my car tags. I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the only SOB on the ballot!” He was angry and red in the face. In exasperation, I pointed over the bridge to Oklahoma and said, “Look over there. If you lived in Oklahoma your car tags would be more than twice as expensive as they are now!” Suddenly all the red drained out of his face. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “See, kid, you just don’t get it. That’s one reason I live on this side of the border.”
At the end of August, I went to the Democratic National Convention with the Arkansas delegation. Senator Kennedy was still in the race, though he was clearly going to lose. I had some good friends working for Kennedy who wanted me to encourage him to withdraw before the balloting and make a generous speech supporting Carter. I liked Kennedy and thought it was best for him to be gracious, so that he wouldn’t be blamed if Carter lost. The blood between the two candidates was bad, but my friends thought I might be able to persuade him. I went to the senator’s hotel suite and gave it my best shot. Kennedy ultimately did withdraw and endorse the President, though when they appeared on the platform together he didn’t do a very good job of faking an enthusiasm he clearly didn’t feel. By convention time, I was the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and was invited to give a five-minute address. National conventions are noisy and chaotic. The delegates normally listen only to the keynote address and the presidential and vice-presidential acceptance speeches. If you’re not giving one of those three, your only chance of being heard over the constant din of floor talk is to be compelling and quick. I tried to explain the painful, profoundly different economic situation we were experiencing, and to argue that the Democratic Party had to change to meet the challenge. Ever since World War II, Democrats had taken America’s prosperity for granted; their priorities were extending its benefits to more and more people and fighting for social justice. Now we had to deal with inflation and unemployment, big government deficits, and the loss of our competitive edge. Our failure to do so had driven more people to support Republicans or to join the growing cadre of alienated nonvoters. It was a good speech that took less than the allotted five minutes, but nobody paid much attention to it. President Carter left the convention with all the problems he had when it started, and without the boost a genuinely enthusiastic, united party usually gives its nominee. I returned to Arkansas determined to try to salvage my own campaign. It kept getting worse.
On September 19, I was home in Hot Springs after a long day of politics when the commander of the Strategic Air Command called me to say that there had been an explosion in a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas, about forty miles northwest of Little Rock. The story was unbelievable. An air force mechanic was repairing the missile when he dropped his three-pound wrench. It fell seventy feet to the bottom of the silo, bounced up, and punctured the tank full of rocket fuel. When the highly toxic fuel mixed with the air, it caused a fire, then a huge explosion that blew the 740-ton concrete top off the silo, killed the mechanic, and injured twenty other air force personnel who were near the opening. The explosion also destroyed the missile and catapulted its nuclear warhead into the cow pasture where the silo was located. I was assured that the warhead wouldn’t detonate, that no radioactive material would be released, and that the military would remove it safely. At least my state wasn’t going to be incinerated by Arkansas’ latest brush with bad luck. I was beginning to feel snakebit, but tried to make the best of the situation. I instructed my new director of public safety, Sam Tatom, to work out an emergency evacuation plan with federal officials in case something went wrong with one of the seventeen remaining Titan II missiles.
After all the other things we’d been through, now Arkansas had the world’s only cow pasture with its very own nuclear warhead. A few days after the incident, Vice President Mondale came to our state Democratic convention in Hot Springs. When I asked him to make sure the military cooperated with us on a new emergency plan for the missiles, he picked up the phone and called Harold Brown, the secretary of defense. His first words were “Damn it, Harold, I know I asked you to do something to get the Cuban problem off Arkansas’ mind, but this is a little extreme.” Contrary to his restrained public demeanor, Mondale had a great sense of humor. He knew we were both tanking, and he still made it funny.
The last few weeks of the campaign were dominated by a new phenomenon in Arkansas politics: completely negative television ads. There was a tough one on the car tags. But White’s most effective campaign ad showed rioting Cubans, with a strong voice-over telling viewers that the governors of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cared about their people and they got rid of the Cubans, but I cared more about Jimmy Carter than the people of Arkansas, “and now we’ve got them all.” When Hillary and I first saw it, we thought it was so outrageous that no one would believe it. A poll taken right before the ad started running had shown that 60 percent of the people thought I’d done a good job at Fort Chaffee, while 3 percent thought I’d been too tough and 20 percent, the hard- core right, too weak. I could have satisfied them only by shooting every refugee that left the fort.
We were wrong about the ads. They were working. In Fort Smith, local officials, including Sheriff Bill Cauthron and Prosecuting Attorney Ron Fields, strongly defended me, saying I had done a good job and had taken risks to protect the people around the fort. As we all know now, a press conference will not counter the effect of a powerful negative ad. I was sinking in the quicksand of Cubans and car tags. Several days before the election, Hillary called Dick Morris, whom I had replaced with Peter Hart because my people hated dealing with Dick’s abrasive personality. She asked him to do a poll to see if there was anything we could do to pull it out. To his credit, Dick did the poll, and with characteristic bluntness said that I would probably lose. He made a couple of suggestions for ads, which we followed, but as he predicted, it was too little, too late.
On election day, November 4, Jimmy Carter and I got 48 percent of Arkansas’ vote, down from his 65 percent in 1976 and my 63 percent in 1978. However, we lost in very different ways. The President carried fifty of the seventy-five counties, holding on to the Democratic strongholds where the Cuban issue cut into but didn’t eliminate his margin of victory, and getting annihilated in the more conservative Republican areas in western Arkansas, where there was a high turnout, fueled by voters’ anger over his broken pledge on the Cubans, and by Reagan’s alliance with Christian fundamentalists and their opposition to abortion and the Panama Canal treaties. Arkansas still hadn’t gone over to the Republicans. Carter’s 48 percent was seven points better than his national percentage. If it hadn’t been for the broken pledge, he would have carried the state.
By contrast, I carried only twenty-four counties, including those with heavy black populations and a few where there was more support for or less opposition to the highway program. I lost all eleven counties in Democratic northeast Arkansas, almost all the rural counties in the Third District, and several in south Arkansas. I had been killed by the car tags. The main effect of the Cuban ad was to take away voters who had been supporting me despite their reservations. Public approval of my performance on the Cuban issue kept my poll ratings higher than they would have been in the face of the car tags, the interest groups’ opposition, and the dour economic situation. What happened to me in 1980 was strikingly similar to what happened to President George H. W. Bush in 1992. The Gulf War kept his poll numbers high, but underneath there was a lot of discontent. When people decided they weren’t going to vote for him on the war issue, I moved ahead. Frank White used the Cuban ad to do the same thing to me.
In 1980, I ran better than President Carter in the Republican areas in western Arkansas, where there was more direct knowledge of how I had handled the Cuban situation. In Fort Smith and Sebastian County, I actually led the Democratic ticket, because of Fort Chaffee. Carter got 28 percent. Senator Bumpers, who had practiced law there for more than twenty years but who had committed the unpardonable sin of voting to “give away” the Panama Canal, got 30 percent. I got 33 percent. That’s how bad it was. On election night I was in such bad shape I didn’t think I could bear to face the press. Hillary went down to the headquarters, thanked the workers, and invited them to the Governor’s Mansion the next day. After a fitful night’s sleep, Hillary, Chelsea, and I met with a couple hundred of our die-hard supporters on the back lawn of the mansion. I gave them the best speech I could, thanking them for all they’d done, telling them to be proud of all we’d accomplished, and offering my cooperation to Frank White. It was a pretty upbeat talk considering the circumstances. Inside, I was full of self-pity and anger, mostly at myself. And I was filled with regret that I would no longer be able to do the work I loved so much. I expressed the regret but kept the whining and anger to myself.
