At that moment, there didn’t seem to be much future for me in politics. I was the first Arkansas governor in a quarter of a century denied a second two-year term, and probably the youngest ex-governor in American history. John McClellan’s warning about the governor’s office being a graveyard seemed prophetic. But since I had dug my own grave, the only sensible thing to do seemed to be to start climbing out.
On Thursday, Hillary and I found a new home. It was a pretty wooden house, built in 1911, on Midland Avenue in the Hillcrest area of Little Rock, not too far from where we’d lived before moving into the Governor’s Mansion. I called Betsey Wright and asked her if she’d come help me get my files organized before I left office. To my joy, she agreed. She moved into the Governor’s Mansion and worked every day with my friend State Representative Gloria Cabe, who had also been defeated for reelection after supporting all my programs.
My remaining two months in office were tough on my staff. They needed to find jobs. The usual route out of politics is through one of the big companies that do a lot of business with state government, but we had angered all of them. Rudy Moore did a good job trying to help everyone and make sure we cleared up all outstanding public business before we turned the office over to Frank White. He and my scheduler, Randy White, also reminded me, in my periods of self-absorption, that I needed to show more concern for my staff and their future welfare. Most of them had no savings to sustain a long job hunt. Several had young children. And many had worked only for the state, including a number of people who had been with me in the attorney general’s office. Though I really liked the people who had worked for me and felt grateful to them, I’m afraid I didn’t demonstrate that as clearly as I should have on many of the days after I lost.
Hillary was especially good to me in that awful period, balancing love and sympathy with an uncanny knack for keeping me focused on the present and the future. The fact that Chelsea didn’t have a clue that anything bad had happened helped me realize that it was not the end of the world. I got great calls of encouragement from Ted Kennedy, who said I’d be back, and Walter Mondale, who showed extraordinary good humor in the face of his own disappointing defeat. I even went to the White House to say good-bye to President Carter and thank him for all the good things his administration had done to help Arkansans. I was still upset about his broken pledge and how it contributed to my defeat and led to his loss in Arkansas, but I felt history would be kinder to him because of his energy and environmental policies, especially the establishment of the massive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and his accomplishments in foreign policy—the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Panama Canal treaties, and the elevation of the human rights issue.
Like the rest of the employees of the governor’s office, I had to find a job, too. I got several interesting offers or inquiries from out of state. My friend John Y. Brown, governor of Kentucky, who had made a fortune with Kentucky Fried Chicken, asked if I’d be interested in applying for the presidency of the University of Louisville. In typical John Y. short-speak, he made the pitch: “Good school, nice house, great basketball team.” California governor Jerry Brown told me his chief of staff, Gray Davis, himself a future governor, was leaving and asked me to replace him. He said that he couldn’t believe I’d been thrown out over car tags, that California was a place full of people who had moved there from other states and I’d fit right in, and that he’d guarantee my ability to influence policy in areas I cared about. I was approached about taking over the World Wildlife Fund, a Washington-based conservation group, which did work I admired. Norman Lear, producer of some of the most successful television shows in history, including
I took a hard look at the Democratic committee job, because I loved politics and thought I understood what needed to be done. In the end, I decided it wasn’t right for me. Besides, Chuck Manatt wanted it badly and probably already had the votes to win before I got interested. I discussed it with Mickey Kantor, a partner of Manatt’s whom I had gotten to know when he served with Hillary on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. I liked Mickey a lot and trusted his judgment. He said if I wanted another chance at elected office, I shouldn’t try for the party job. He also advised against becoming Jerry Brown’s chief of staff. The other out-of-state jobs had some appeal to me, especially the one at the World Wildlife Fund, but I knew they didn’t make sense. I wasn’t ready to give up on Arkansas or myself, so I accepted the offer from Wright, Lindsey & Jennings.
Almost immediately after I lost, and for months afterward, I asked everybody I knew why they thought it had happened. Some of the answers, beyond Cubans, car tags, and making all the interest groups angry at the same time, surprised me. Jimmy “Red” Jones, whom I had appointed adjutant general of the Arkansas National Guard after he’d had a long career as state auditor, said I had alienated the voters with too many young beards and out- of-staters in important positions. He also thought Hillary’s decision to keep her maiden name had hurt; it might be all right for a lawyer, but not for a first lady. Wally DeRoeck, who had been my chairman in 1976 and 1978, said I got so caught up in being governor that I stopped thinking about everything else. He told me that after I became governor, I never asked him about his children again. In harsher language, my friend George Daniel, who owned the hardware store in Marshall up in the hills, said the same thing: “Bill, the people thought you were an asshole!” Rudy Moore told me I had complained a lot about how much trouble I was in but never seemed to really focus on my political problems hard and long enough to figure out what to do about them. Mack McLarty, my oldest friend, who knew me like the back of his hand, said he thought I was preoccupied all year by the arrival of Chelsea. He said I had always been saddened by the fact that I never knew my own father, that I really wanted to focus on being Chelsea’s father, except when something like the Cuban crisis tore me away, and that I just didn’t have my heart in the campaign.
After I was out of office a few months, it became clear to me that all these explanations had some validity. By that time, more than a hundred people had come up to me and said they’d voted against me to send a message but wouldn’t have done it if they’d known I was going to lose. I thought of so many things I could have done if I’d had my head on straight. And it was painfully clear that thousands of people thought I’d gotten too big for my britches, too obsessed with what I wanted to do and oblivious to what they wanted me to do. The protest vote was there, all right, but it didn’t make the difference. The post-election polls showed that 12 percent of the voters said they’d supported me in 1978 but voted the other way in 1980 because of the car tags. Six percent of my former supporters said it was because of the Cubans. With all my other problems and mistakes, if I had been free of either of these two issues, I would have won. But if I hadn’t been defeated, I probably never would have become President. It was a near-death experience, but an invaluable one, forcing me to be more sensitive to the political problems inherent in progressive politics: the system can absorb only so much change at once; no one can beat all the entrenched interests at the same time; and if people think you’ve stopped listening, you’re sunk. On my last day in the governor’s office, after taking a picture of ten-month-old Chelsea sitting in my chair holding the telephone, I went up to the legislature to give my farewell address. I recounted the progress we’d made, thanked the legislators for their support, and pointed out that we still had America’s second-lowest tax burden and that, sooner or later, we would have to find a politically acceptable way to broaden our revenue base to make the most of our potential. Then I walked out of the Capitol and into private life, a fish out of water.
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