LITTLE ROCK — Good morning, class. Books off your desks. Time for a pop quiz. Stop groaning. If you did your reading, it’ll be easy. Ready? Here goes.
Match the Arkansas governor with the subjects:
(a) Bill Clinton
(b) Frank White
(c) Orval Faubus
(d) Sid McMath
(1) Creation science
(2) Central High
(3) Standing up to the Dixiecrats
(4) Teacher testing
We could go on. Robert L. Brown does for 10 successive governorships (pre-Mike Beebe) in his new book Defining Moments: Historic Decisions by Arkansas Governors From McMath Through Huckabee (University of Arkansas Press, $19.95). But you surely see the intention here. If Brown’s bookdoesn’t sufficiently entertain or edify the over-the-hill gang - those of us who lived through the moments of most of these guys and may not be overly keen on revisiting all this - it would work fine as a text for a highschool course on contemporary Arkansas history. Which Brown should consider high praise.
A surfeit of in-the-weeds books by and about our more recently former governors has been dropped on the public of late. Details abound. Brown’s slice-of-history approach seems more instructional, if not more telling.
Daily life, even daily political life, stockpiles moments which hold little real interest. Our goal is but to row against the current, to muddle through the everydayness long enough to arrive at consequence. In reflection, we edit our lives. After having lived in theennui of Now, we look back almost solely on those defining moments.
Thus is Brown less author than editor out to separate revealing wheat from political chaff.
One could quibble about Brown’s selection of defining moments. For example, he finds Mike Huckabee’s moment in his damn-the-establishment attempt to overhaul the state’s system of public education after the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. But I submit that no less impressive and history-kneading for the Republican governor was his resolve during his first few hours on the job. It was the way he calmed an entire state reeling from Jim GuyTucker’s refusal to honor his word to resign after his conviction in federal court - an act of temporary insanity at best but more likely the arrogant act of a politician with an overdeveloped sense of privilege and put-upon-ness in general.
But, again, it’s a quibble. And Huckabee’s attempt, and semi-success, at education reform in Arkansas should prove the more lasting legacy.
For the most part, Brown uncovers the wheat. Part of this is undoubtedly due to his inside-politics knowledge as a result of serving two of these governors, Tucker and Dale Bumpers, as an aide; part to his four decades as a player in and observer of some showstopping Arkansas political theater; and part to his fine inquisitive mind. (He currently sits on the Arkansas Supreme Court.)
Consider that he writes about the tragedy of Orval Faubus and the uplift of Winthrop Rockefeller - the dominant and lasting personalities of the 1960s - with the kind of authority that comes from not just knowing about a subject but attempting to understand him and placehim in the multilayered context of his times. For it is often context that is lost in the re-telling. Brown takes care not to judge from too great atemporal distance.
Of Faubus, now the very symbol of racially troubled Arkansas circa 1957, Brown writes: “Faubus made a Faustian decision to block integration at Central High in 1957. His advisers and Jim Johnson’s unabashed engagement in fear-mongering were instrumental in that decision. Faubus would subsequently tell David Pryor he thought they would have agreed on most issues ‘if it hadn’t been for the people around us.’”
In the end, however, it was Faubus’ decision alone - andit cost him and the state dearly in the long run.
Rockefeller fares better under Brown’s examination. The Arkansan-by-choice and legatee of one of the great American family names arrived at his moment in the uneasy days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Riots had broken out across the country, including gunfire and arson in some Arkansas cities. A decade removed from Central High, with race still Issue Nos. 1 through stillcounting in Arkansas, Rockefeller faced this test: Should he attend a memorial service on the state Capitol steps organized by black leaders, including the president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? Or should he lay low for the sake of political expediency?
It wasn’t a decision at all for Rockefeller; it was moral obligation. He made the service as its final speaker. Indeed, Win Rockefeller is sometimes iconized in a photograph of the governor holding hands with black leaders that day on the Capitol steps, singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Brown sums up, “[Rockefeller] set an example of how best to act in time of crisis and to be guided by what is in our hearts.”
Not a bad legacy, that.
Because of the distance and personalities it covers in just 135 pages, Defining Moments also serves to remind us how intertwined were the political lives of these men; it’s a reminder, too, of that degree or three of separation at play in this small, intimate state. (“We know our politicians, and particularly our governors, personally.”)
Let’s check the flow chart: Rockefeller served as director of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission for Faubus, who was a Highway Commissioner for McMath. David Pryor, who succeeded Dale Bumpers as governor and joined him in the U.S. Senate, spent a summer as Francis Cherry’s driver. Frank White directedthe AIDC under Pryor before ultimately switching parties and shocking Clinton in the 1980 election. Bumpers’ last star turn on the political stagewas in the service of Clinton, delivering what amounted to the closing statement in defense of the president in Clinton’s impeachment trial. And, Brown notes, Tucker and Clinton came of age as up-and-comers of the wellschooled, well-groomed set in the late 1970s and ’80s - long familiar but not to be mistaken for friends. “Each begrudgingly respected the other,” Brown writes, “but like two bulls pawing the ground and knowing that conflict was inevitable, each had been highly suspicious of the other.”
And that image of Clinton and Tucker pawing the ground like a couple of young bulls is good enough to steal.This writer certainly intends to. (Thanks, Your Honor.) Although, if Defining Moments goes viral in the oldfashioned way, as a textbook mainstay of Arkansas’ considerably fewer school districts - thanks, Gov. Huckabee - a whole generation might soon be stealing Brown’s lines.
Let’s hope so. We could all use the education - or refresher course.
Answers: a-4, b-1, c-2, d-3.
(Told you it was easy.)
Style, Pages 57 on 10/31/2010