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End The Nightmare
By Jackson Baker
FEBRUARY 1, 1999:
It was the summer of 1970, and I was living in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
working on a graduate degree and spending a lot of time talking
on the phone with a local lawyer who represented my then-estranged
first wife. That she and I would reconcile (for another decade,
as it turned out) was getting to be obvious, and in the middle
of one of our last conversations, the lawyer dropped his full-court
press long enough to ask, Who you for for Governor?
Honest to God, with all my preoccupations I hadnt even thought
about it. Id even forgot it was election day. The incumbent Republican
governor, Winthrop Rockefeller, was a decent if somewhat dissolute
man who was plainly wearing down. Seven or eight Democrats vied
in a primary for the honor of replacing him, including the odds-on
favorite, former Governor Orval Faubus, a villain from the old
days of segregation.
Dale Bumpers, I heard myself say. And I almost had to ask myself:
Whatd I say, who? I knew very little, after all, about Bumpers,
a youngish man whom Id seen doing some talking-head spots on
TV. Nobody had heard of him before that summer, and it turned
out that as recently as two years before, hed even lost a race
for his local school board in the northwest Arkansas hamlet of
Charleston. According to the pollsters, he started out dead last
in the field.
The Bumpers campaign was one of the first prodigies pulled off
by the late Memphis PR maven DeLoss Walker. What he saw in Bumpers
an odd amalgam of honesty, strength, compassion, and mental
clarity was what we got on TV, and my subconscious mind had
clearly succumbed. Nor was I alone, as the erstwhile lawyer for
the other side, in his sudden solidarity and enthusiasm, made
clear.
Well, get out there and vote, man! he said. First things first.
Bumpers the Unknown squeaked into a runoff with Faubus, then blew
him away. Rockefeller fell in his turn. Four years later, Bumpers
ran for the Senate and turned out J. William Fulbright, doing
it, moreover, by running to the left of the iconoclastic Fulbright,
guru to the anti-Vietnam movement.
The new Arkansas senator was an eloquent, eminently likeable man,
with a record of support for social legislation and civil rights
and civil liberties and a willingness, like that of the man hed
beat for the Senate, to go it alone if need be. In 1981, a deficit-conscious
Bumpers was one of only two senators to vote for Ronald Reagans
budget cuts but against his tax cuts. His was the only vote against
the confirmation of the egregious James Watt for Secretary of
the Interior. And he waged lonesome fights against the B-1 bomber,
the supercollider, the space station, and the Clinch River breeder
reactor in Tennessee.
By the early 80s, when I was working in Washington for a member
of the Arkansas congressional delegation, Bumpers was universally
admired among his fellow Arkies even, to a substantial degree,
across party lines. He was everybodys favorite to run for president
(the states ambitious young governor, name of Bill Clinton, was
a distant second), and when, in early, 1983, Bumpers took himself
out of the running, he broke a lot of hearts including not a
few among his colleagues in the Senate, where he was collegially
beloved in the same way that Republican Bob Dole was.
His wife Bettys chronic heart condition was, it became known,
the major reason why Bumpers had opted out for 1984, leaving the
Democratic field to the likes of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.
(In 1975, Bumpers had mused like another recent reform governor
from the South, one Jimmy Carter on an earlier presidential
run.)
Skip to last week when Dale Bumpers retired now, having chosen
not to run for reelection in 1998 was beseeched by an impeached
president to make the climactic speech on his behalf before the
U.S. Senate.
Speaking from the well of the body he had so recently been a member
of, Bumpers let Clinton have it: The presidents conduct had been
indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless, and a horrific
shame for his wife and child. But: We are none of us perfect.
Sure, you say, he should have thought it all out beforehand, and
indeed he should, just as Adam and Eve should have. Just as you
and you and you and you and millions of other people who have
been caught in similar circumstances should have thought of it
before.
Bumpers recalled how he and Clinton had worked together politically.
We tried to provide health care for the lesser among us, for
those who are well off enough they cant get on welfare but not
making enough to buy health insurance. We have fought above everything
else to improve the educational standards for a state that for
so many years was at the bottom of the list or near the bottom
of the list of income. And we have stood side by side to save
beautiful pristine areas in our state from environmental degradation.
But Bill Clinton the man, Bill Clinton the friend was not the
issue here, Bumpers told his former colleagues. It was the preservation
of the unique mix of democracy and republican government that
was ordained by the American Constitution the same Constitution
that Bumpers had undertaken to defend by being the point man in
every Senate debate about what he saw as frivolous or dangerous
attempts to amend it. Whether they came from the right or the
left, Bumpers had opposed them all.
Unlike all the other special pleaders on both sides, Bumpers cut
to the chase on one of the main issues of the impeachment drama.
[W]here did high crimes and misdemeanors come from? he asked
rhetorically, and then explained. It came from the English law,
and they [the framers of the Constitution] found it in English
law under a category which said distinctly political offences
against the State.
That, to Bumpers mind, clearly made the current prosecution inappropriate
and rendered it a political offence itself. Bumpers spoke of
a judicial system out of kilter and of the human element,
of the innocent people, innocent people, who have been financially
and mentally bankrupt because of the endless ongoing vendetta.
Javerts pursuit of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables pales by comparison,
he said of the events set in motion by independent counsel Kenneth
Starrs $50 million investigation and its partisan congressional
follow-up.
Though his remarks throughout were measured and civil, Bumpers
could not avoid scorn upon occasion, as when he cited the House
Judiciary Committees conclusion about a carved marble bear given
to Monica Lewinsky by the president. The only logical inference
is that the gifts, including the bear, symbolizing strength, were
a tacit reminder to Ms. Lewinsky that they would deny the relationship,
even in the face of a federal subpoena, he quoted, and the patent
absurdity of that spoke for itself.
Bumpers was hard on both the president and his critics for undermining
the presidency, but he quoted such foreign leaders as Vaclav Havel,
King Hussein, and Nelson Mandela to the effect that American prestige
and that of its president abroad had never been higher.
He put the oft-cited polls supporting Clinton in context: The
American people now and for some time have been asking to be allowed
a good nights sleep. Theyre asking for an end to this nightmare.
It is a legitimate request.
So dont, for Gods sakes, heighten
peoples alienation that is at an all-time high toward their government.
The people have a right, and they are calling on you to rise above
politics, rise above partisanship.
As for Clinton, if you vote to convict, in my opinion, youre
going to be creating more havoc than he could ever possibly create.
After all, hes only got two years left.
As mildly as he could, Bumpers had reproached those Republicans
specifically Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde who had drawn a
straight line from the service of American fighting men in past
wars to the need for convicting the current president. This was
wanting to win too badly, said Bumpers, who then cited the absent
Dole and such warrior heroes among his auditors as Senators Daniel
Inouye, Bob Kerrey, John McCain, and John Chafee.
Was the point of their sacrifices merely that one side or the
other might win the current political showdown? You dont have
to guess, said Bumpers, himself a Marine veteran of World War
II. Theyre with us, and theyre living. And they can tell you.
Betty Bumpers, the same Betty Bumpers whose health had been so
major a factor in her husbands decision not to run for the presidency
himself, had also figured importantly in his remarks, as when
he recalled himself as a young Marine-to-be, awaiting a pre-induction
bus to Little Rock, at 2 a.m. of a freezing winter morning: And
the bus came over the hill I was rather frightened anyway about
going, and I was quite sure I was going to be killed, only slightly
less frightened that Betty would find somebody else while I was
gone. And the bus came over School House Hill, and my parents
started crying.
Dale Bumpers wasnt killed, however, and Betty Bumpers didnt
find (presumably didnt look for) anyone better.
Nor did the Conventional Wisdom box in last weeks Newsweek,
which, after surveying the whole impeachment-saga field, gave
Bumpers one of its few up arrows, with the comment: Finally,
a politician the CW can truly admire. Naturally, hes retired.
If the actions of the U.S. Senate this week and next should result
in Bill Clintons political survival, he will surely have Dale
Bumpers to thank for coming unretired for a single day last week
before a jury of his and not the presidents peers. Cicero
himself couldnt have done any better.

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