weekend gathering in Hilton Head, South Carolina, called Renaissance Weekend. The event was then only a couple of years old. Fewer than one hundred families gathered to spend three days talking about everything under the sun, from politics and economics to religion and our personal lives. The attendees were of different ages, religions, races, and backgrounds, all bound together by a simple preference for spending the weekend in serious talk and family fun rather than all-night parties and football games. It was an extraordinary bonding experience. We revealed things about ourselves and learned things about other people that would never have come out under normal circumstances. And all three of us made a lot of new friends, many of whom helped in 1992 and served in my administration. We went to Renaissance Weekend virtually every year after that until the millennium weekend, 1999–2000, when the national celebration at the Lincoln Memorial required our presence in Washington. After I became President, the event had swelled to more than 1,500 people and had lost some of its earlier intimacy, but I still enjoyed going.
In early 1984, it was time to run for reelection again. Even though President Reagan was far more popular in Arkansas, and across the country, than he had been in 1980, I felt confident. The whole state was excited about implementing the school standards, and the economy was getting a little better. My main primary opponent was Lonnie Turner, the Ozark lawyer I’d worked with on black-lung cases back in 1975, after his partner, Jack Yates, died. Lonnie thought the school standards were going to close rural schools, and he was mad about it. It made me sad because of our long friendship and because I thought he should have known better. In May, I won the primary easily, and after a few years we made up.
In July, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, the director of the state police, asked to see me. I sat with Betsey Wright in stunned silence as he told me that my brother had been videotaped selling cocaine to an undercover state police officer, one who ironically had been hired in an expansion of state anti-drug efforts I had asked the legislature to fund. Tommy asked me what I wanted him to do. I asked him what the state police would normally do in a case like this. He said Roger wasn’t a big-time dealer but a cocaine addict who was selling the stuff to support his habit. Typically, with someone like him, they’d set him up a few more times on videotape to make sure they had him dead to rights, then squeeze him with the threat of a long prison term to make him give up his supplier. I told Tommy to treat Roger’s case just like any other. Then I asked Betsey to find Hillary. She was at a restaurant downtown. I went by to pick her up and told her what had happened.
For the next six miserable weeks, no one outside the state police knew, except Betsey, Hillary, and, I believe, my completely trustworthy press secretary, Joan Roberts. And me. Every time I saw or talked to Mother I was heartsick. Every time I looked in the mirror I was disgusted. I had been so caught up in my life and work that I’d missed all the signs. Shortly after Roger went to college in 1974, he formed a rock band that was good enough to make a living from playing clubs in Hot Springs and Little Rock. I went to hear him several times and thought that with Roger’s distinctive voice and the band’s musical ability, they had real promise. He clearly loved doing it, and though he went back to Hendrix College a couple of times, he would soon drop out again to return to the band. When he was working, he stayed up all night and slept late. During the racing season, he played the horses heavily. He also bet on football games. I never knew how much he won or lost, but I never asked. When our family gathered for holiday meals, he invariably came late, seemed on edge, and got up a time or two during dinner to make phone calls. The warning signs were all there. I was just too preoccupied to see them. When Roger was finally arrested, it was big news in Arkansas. I made a brief statement to the press, saying that I loved my brother but expected the law to take its course, and asking for prayers and privacy for my family. Then I told my brother and Mother the truth about how long I’d known. Mother was in shock, and I’m not sure the reality registered on her. Roger was angry, though he got over it later when he came to terms with his addiction. We all went to counseling. I learned that Roger’s cocaine habit, about four grams a day, was so bad it might have killed him if he hadn’t had the constitution of an ox, and that his addiction was rooted, in part, in the scars of his childhood and perhaps a genetic predisposition to addiction he shared with his father.
From the time he was arrested until almost the date of his court appearance, Roger couldn’t admit that he was an addict. Finally one day, as we were sitting at the breakfast table, I told him that if he wasn’t an addict, I wanted him to go to jail for a very long time, because he had been selling poison to other people for money. Somehow, that got through to him. After he admitted his problem, he began the long road back.
The case had been taken over by the U.S. attorney, Asa Hutchinson. Roger gave up his supplier, an immigrant even younger than he was, who got cocaine from family or friends in his home country. Roger pleaded guilty to two federal offenses before Judge Oren Harris, who had been chairman of the Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives before going to the bench. Judge Harris was in his early eighties but still sharp and very wise. He sentenced Roger to three years on one charge and two years on the other, and suspended the three-year sentence because of his cooperation. Roger served fourteen months, most of it in a federal facility for nonviolent offenders, which was hard on him but probably saved his life.
Hillary and I were in court with Mother when he was sentenced. I was impressed by the way the whole thing was handled by Judge Harris, and by the U.S. attorney. Asa Hutchinson was professional, fair, and sensitive to the agony my family was experiencing. I wasn’t at all surprised when later he was elected to Congress from the Third District.
In the summer, I led the Arkansas delegation to the Democratic convention in San Francisco to see Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro nominated and to give a five-minute tribute to Harry Truman. We were in trouble to start with, and it was all over when Mondale said he would propose a hefty tax increase to reduce the budget deficit. It was a remarkable act of candor, but he might as well have proposed a federal car-tag fee. Still, the city put on a great convention. San Francisco had lots of pleasant small hotels within walking distance of the convention center, and well-organized traffic, so we avoided the crushing traffic jams that characterize many conventions. The Arkansas host, Dr. Richard Sanchez, was heavily invested in the efforts to treat and prevent the relatively new disease of AIDS, which was sweeping the city. I asked Richard about the problem and what could be done about it. That was my first real exposure to a battle that would claim a lot of my attention in the White House and afterward.
I had to leave San Francisco early to return to Arkansas to recruit a high-tech industry for our state. In the end it didn’t pan out, but I couldn’t have done any good staying in California anyway. We were headed for defeat. The economy was rebounding and the President told us it was “morning again in America,” while his surrogates sneered at those of us on the other side as “San Francisco Democrats,” a not-so-veiled allusion to our ties to the city’s large gay population. Even Vice President Bush fell into the macho mode, saying he was going to “kick a little ass.”
In the November election, Reagan defeated Mondale 59 to 41 percent. The President won 62 percent of the vote in Arkansas. I received 63 percent in my race against Woody Freeman, an appealing young businessman from Jonesboro.
After our family enjoyed Chelsea’s fifth Christmas and our second Renaissance Weekend, it was time for a new legislative session, this one devoted to modernizing our economy. Even though the overall economy was improving, unemployment was still high in states like Arkansas that were dependent on agriculture and traditional industries. Most of America’s job growth of the eighties came in the high-technology and service sectors, and was concentrated in and around urban areas, primarily in states on or near the East and West coasts. The industrial and agricultural heartland was still in bad shape. The pattern was so pronounced that people began to refer to America as having a “bicoastal” economy.
It was obvious that in order to accelerate job and income growth, we had to restructure our economy. The development package I presented to the legislature had some financial components that were new to Arkansas but already in place in other states. I proposed to broaden the state’s housing agency into a Development and Finance Authority that would be able to issue bonds to finance industrial, agricultural, and small-business projects. I recommended that the state’s public pension funds set targets of investing at least 5 percent of their assets in Arkansas. We were a capital-poor state; we didn’t need to export public funds when there were good investment options at home. I recommended allowing state-chartered banks to hold assets they foreclosed on for longer periods of time, primarily to avoid dumping farmland in an already depressed market, which would make it even harder for farmers to hold on. I also asked the legislature to allow state-chartered banks not only to lend money, but also to make modest equity investments in farms and businesses that couldn’t borrow any more money, with the provision that the farmer or small-business person had a right to buy the bank out within three years. Other farm-state governors were especially interested in this bill, and one of them, Bill Janklow of South Dakota, passed a version of it through his legislature.
