Then Bo said, “Senator, that ain’t right and you know it. That’s why we’ve got so much poverty and other troubles in this country, and if you get another term you’ve got to do something about it. The blacks deserve a better deal.” After all the racist talk we’d been hearing, Fulbright nearly fell out of his chair. He assured Bo he’d try to do something about it when he was reelected, and Bo pledged to stick with him.
When we got back in the car, Fulbright said, “See, I told you, there’s a lot of wisdom in these small towns. Bo sits on that porch and thinks things through.” Bo Reece had a big impact on Fulbright. A few weeks later at a campaign rally in El Dorado, a south Arkansas oil town that was a hotbed of racism and pro-Wallace sentiment, Fulbright was asked what was the biggest problem facing America. Without hesitation he said, “Poverty.” I was proud of him and grateful to Bo Reece. When we were driving from town to town on those hot country roads, I would try to get Fulbright to talk. The conversations left me with great memories but sharply curtailed my career as his driver. One day we got into it over the Warren Court. I strongly favored most of its decisions, especially in civil rights. Fulbright disagreed. He said, “There is going to be a terrible backlash against this Supreme Court. You can’t change society too much through the courts. Most of it has to come through the political system. Even if it takes longer, it’s more likely to stick.” I still think America came out way ahead under the Warren Court, but there’s no doubt we’ve had a powerful reaction to it for more than thirty years now.
Four or five days into our trip, I started up one of those political discussions with Fulbright as we were driving out of yet another small town to our next stop. After about five minutes Fulbright asked me where I was going. When I told him, he said, “Then you better turn around. You’re headed in exactly the opposite direction.” As I sheepishly made the U-turn, he said, “You’re going to give Rhodes scholars a bad name. You’re acting like a damned egghead who doesn’t know which way to drive.”
I was embarrassed, of course, as I turned around and got the senator back on schedule. And I knew my days as a driver were over. But what the heck, I was just shy of my twenty-second birthday and had just had a few days of experiences and conversations that would last a lifetime. What Fulbright needed was a driver who could get him to the next place on time, and I was happy to go back to headquarters work, to the rallies and picnics and the long dinners listening to Lee Williams, Jim McDougal, and the other old hands tell Arkansas political stories.
Not long before the primary, Tom Campbell came for a visit on his way to Texas for his Marine Corps officer training. Jim Johnson was having one of his courthouse-steps, country-band rallies that night in Batesville, about an hour and a half north of Little Rock, so I decided to show Tom a side of Arkansas he’d only heard about before. Johnson was in good form. After warming up the crowd, he held up a shoe and shouted, “You see this shoe? It was made in Communist Romania [he pronounced it “Rooo -main- yuh”]! Bill Fulbright voted to let these Communist shoes come into America and take jobs away from good Arkansas people working in our shoe factories.” We had a lot of those folks back then and Johnson promised them and all the rest of us that when he got to the Senate there would be no more Commie shoes invading America. I had no idea whether we in fact were importing shoes from Romania, whether Fulbright had voted for a failed attempt to open our border to them, or whether Johnson made the whole thing up, but it made a good tale. After the speech Johnson stood on the steps and shook hands with the crowd. I patiently waited my turn. When he shook my hand, I told him he made me ashamed to be from Arkansas. I think my earnestness amused him. He just smiled, invited me to write him about my feelings, and moved on to the next handshake.
On July 30, Fulbright defeated Jim Johnson and two lesser-known candidates. Justice Jim’s wife, Virginia, barely made it into the gubernatorial runoff, beating a young reformer named Ted Boswell by 409 votes out of more than 400,000 votes cast, despite the best efforts of the Fulbright folks to help him in the closing days of the campaign and in the six days following, when everybody was hustling to keep from getting counted out or to get some extra votes in the unreported precincts. Mrs. Johnson lost the runoff by 63 to 37 percent to Marion Crank, a state legislator from Foreman in southwest Arkansas, who had the courthouse crowd and the Faubus machine behind him. Arkansas had finally had enough of the Johnsons. We were not yet in the New South of the seventies, but we did have sense enough not to go backward.
In August, as I was winding down my involvement in the Fulbright campaign and getting ready to go to Oxford, I spent several summer nights at the home of Mother’s friends Bill and Marge Mitchell on Lake Hamilton, where I was always welcome. That summer I met some interesting people at Marge and Bill’s. Like Mother, they loved the races and over the years got to know a lot of the horse people, including two brothers from Illinois, W. Hal and “Donkey” Bishop, who owned and trained horses. W. Hal Bishop was more successful, but Donkey was one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever met. He was a frequent visitor in Marge and Bill’s home. One night we were out at the lake talking about my generation’s experiences with drugs and women, and Donkey mentioned that he used to drink a lot and had been married ten times. I was amazed. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “When I was your age, it wasn’t like it is now. If you wanted to have sex, it wasn’t even enough to say you loved ’em. You had to marry ’em!” I laughed and asked if he remembered all their names. “All but two,” he replied. His shortest marriage? “One night. I woke up in a motel with a horrible hangover and a strange woman. I said, ‘Who in the hell are you?’ She said, ‘I’m your wife, you SOB!’ I got up, put my pants on, and got out of there.” In the 1950s, Donkey met a woman who was different from all the rest. He told her the whole truth about his life and said if she’d marry him, he would never drink or carouse again. She took the unbelievable chance, and he kept his word for twenty-five years, until he died. Marge Mitchell also introduced me to two young people who had just started teaching in Hot Springs, Danny Thomason and Jan Biggers. Danny came from Hampton, seat of Arkansas’ smallest county, and he had a world of good country stories to prove it. When I was governor, we sang tenor side by side in the Immanuel Baptist Church choir every Sunday. His brother and sister-in-law, Harry and Linda, became two of Hillary’s and my closest friends and played a big role in the ’92 presidential campaign and our White House years.