I was too young to have had any dealings with Wilbur Mills during the years he served in Congress. But the recent release of Kay Goss’ book on Mills — Mr. Chairman: The Life and Legacy of Wilbur D. Mills — brought back memories of how the man from Kensett helped me almost a decade after he had left the House.

I didn’t want to move to Washington in 1986. At age 26, I was the No. 2 person in the sports department at the Arkansas Democrat and thoroughly enjoyed my job. If you work in a newspaper sports department, the chances are that you work on weekends. That’s when the action occurs. My days off were Monday and Tuesday.

I was sleeping late on a Monday morning when the phone in my Little Rock apartment rang. I was jolted awake by the voice of the newspaper’s mercurial managing editor, John Robert Starr. If Starr was calling me at home, I figured we must have made a huge mistake in that morning’s sports section. He asked why I had yet to apply for the soon-to-be-open position of Washington correspondent. I replied that I had no interest in moving to the nation’s capital.

“Well, you need to apply because I’ve already decided you’re going,” Starr said. If you worked for Bob Starr, you knew better than to question him. Within days, I was on a flight to Washington. I slept on the couch in my predecessor’s Capitol Hill apartment while looking for a place of my own.

A few days after my return to Little Rock, I packed my Oldsmobile Cutlass and headed out on the 1,100-mile trip to Washington. I was scared to death. The newspaper war between the Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette was heating up, and you weren’t supposed to get scooped on your beat. Starr wrote scathing daily critiques for the entire staff to read, identifying those reporters he felt had been outworked by the competition. I would be going up against a veteran Gazette Washington correspondent, Carol Matlack. Add to that the fact that I was coming from a sports department, not a government or political beat.

The big story in Washington at the time was the development of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. I figured that a natural angle for an Arkansas newspaper would be to talk to Mills, who had written much of the tax code in his years as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. I set up an appointment with him at his office at a K Street law firm. I vividly remember walking in and looking at the wooden nameplate on the front of his desk that simply said “Mr. Chairman.”

I began asking questions. Mills was cordial, but not overly friendly. One of the things I love about this small state is the fact that there is, at most, two degrees of separation in Arkansas. I decided to mention my maternal grandfather, who had died in 1980 at age 96. My grandfather had been the Prairie County judge at the time Mills had vaulted from the position of White County judge to Congress. White and Prairie are adjoining counties.

“Mr. Chairman, I believe you knew my grandfather,” I said.

“Who was your grandfather?” he asked.

“W.J. Caskey of Des Arc,” I said.

Mills began to smile. He said, “Good Lord, son, if it had not been for the votes that Will Caskey delivered me the first time I ran for Congress in 1938, I might not have been elected.”

I don’t know how much truth there was in that statement. He might have just been making a fellow native Arkansan feel good. I do know this: From then on, Mills treated me more like a long-lost relative than a newspaper reporter. Any time I had a question, he would take my call. He didn’t want to be quoted by name, but I could always attribute his background quotes to “someone close to the tax negotiations.” Little did my readers or the Gazette correspondent know that my source was one of the most powerful people to have ever served in Congress.

It was high time that someone wrote a book on Mills, and Goss was just the person to do it. She first met the congressman when she taught at the University of Arkansas. While completing her doctoral studies, she worked for Congressman Ray Thornton and watched Mills and his staff in action. She married his chief of staff, the late Gene Goss.

Former Sen. Dale Bumpers notes that Kay Goss doesn’t ignore Mills’ alcoholism and the personal scandals of his later years. Bumpers says, “The challenges Wilbur Mills faced as he slipped into the disease of alcoholism and resulting controversy are dealt with forthrightly here. … Unfortunately, Mills’ late-career difficulties dimmed the remembrance of some of his major achievements. Kay Goss has deftly weighed Mills’ character and shown the complexity that was Wilbur Mills. She lets his example show that no matter how high a person goes, how much he or she achieves, it is possible to fall and then to recover magnificently as Mills did when he went on to help others who suffer from addictions.”

Goss writes that when the words “Mr. Chairman” were uttered in Washington, “everyone from the president to the newest elevator operator knew the reference meant Wilbur Mills. He had a personal network of influence in the House.” But when asked about giving up that power, Mills later told The Daily Citizen at Searcy: “I enjoy life more now. It’s just great to be a human being. In the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, I was more of a machine than a man.”

Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 04/03/2013