This is scarcely the first nor the last time we have bid adieu to Counselor, Governor, Senator and all around Gray Eminence Dale Leon Bumpers, yet we keep looking for him at Cafe Bossa Nova, seated at his usual table, amiable as ever, but ever fading, fading, fading away. Yet however faded, by turns he's been the Governor Who Vetoed the Pine Bluff Road Bill, who spared the state from still more Faugress, and exploited every second of his careers military, civil, and otherwise in this state.
But through it all, Dale Bumpers was never anything but himself. He'd tell it with the bark off and make you like it. He was the only would-be Governor in the Old Confederacy who opposed Brown v. Board of Education--not the order to desegregate, you understand, but the "all deliberate speed" part of it that reduced it to meaninglessness. He knew that his support for racial integration was his greatest claim to a place in history. Talk about a loser: His trail of losses was as long and repeated as old Abe Lincoln's, and you can scarcely fall as long and often and as hard at that.
The man was not only sui generis, one of a kind, he was The Kind. Or as Billy Mo' Clark would say when he would look soulfully into your eyes and pat you on the knee: "There ain't but a few of us left." Dale Bumpers spared us Honest Joe Purcell, whatever his virtues, and never lost his ineradicable sense of humor. When asked, "Are you wishy-washy?" he responded within an eyeblink: "Maybe I am." If they make 'em like that any more, they don't.
The man actually got the state to raise taxes in exchange for basic reforms in K-8, producing a bumper crop of tax revenues, public kindergartens, and free textbooks, and managed to come up with higher pay for more and better teachers who could pass the state's ridiculously simple requirements during the nigh-everlasting tenure of Orval Eugene Faubus, supreme placeholder of so many in this state full of them.
Yes, he delivered one of the all-time great defenses of not just Bill Clinton but the Constitution of the United States, defending constitutional principle with his last breath. "You're here today," he told his fellow senators and jurors in that great test of principle, because the Constitution makes only High Crimes and Misdemeanors an impeachable offense and nothing else, thank you. He saved us from a Soviet-style era of "political offenses." Or as he put it during that celebrated trial, "the president suffered a terrible moral lapse, a marital infidelity. Not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society . . . It was a breach of his family trust. It is a sex scandal . . . Nobody has suggested that Bill Clinton committed a political crime against the state."
Dale Bumpers was supposed to be giving us just a smile and a shoeshine, but came through with never-failing charm, civility, and the treasured wit we all loved. To quote David Pryor, who remains surely the best-mannered and most lovable member of the U.S. Senate for years afterward:
"The thing about Dale Bumpers that will remain forever is how proud he made us feel as a state and as a people. We were proud in Arkansas to say that Dale Bumpers represented Arkansas and we were proud to say that we had a person like that in the governor's office and in the Senate who did not vote according to political polls. He voted his conscience and his conviction. And he, in my opinion, set a new standard for public service."
We would add only that Dale Bumpers made public service an honorable profession once again. So much for the all-too-well-known Arkansas inferiority complex. Or as Senator Pryor added, "I think Dale was in a league of his own." And so the man was.
"When he spoke on the Senate floor," said Mr. Pryor, "people listened, and he led in a very firm but fair way. What an honor it was for me to serve alongside him during those years, to follow him in the governor's office to begin with and serve with him those years."
From Asa Hutchinson to Mike Beebe, the politicians were lining up to pay tribute to Dale Bumpers, and well they should have, too. The man's watchword, as he once told Senator Pryor, was: "Just remember, it never hurts to be magnanimous." And was he ever faithful to it.
Editorial on 01/05/2016