Coughlin Fan Club Still Believes in Big Tom (Commentary)

I was having lunch with a friend recently when the topic of conversation turned to Tom Coughlin, the former Wal-Mart executive who is expected to plead guilty later this month to charges of wire fraud and tax evasion (see Wal-Mart’s Coughlin to Plead Guilty).

“That’s a shame,” my friend said. “He’s such a good guy.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. Coughlin has a fan club of sorts in Northwest Arkansas. Many of them believe he was just doing what Sam Walton said he could do — pocket some freebies to pay himself back for paying off union informants.

It’s a cloak-and-dagger scenario that’s hard to believe. Sam Walton was known for his ethics. Walton died in 1992. Coughlin’s alleged abuses of his expense account apparently didn’t begin until 1997, according to the lawsuit Wal-Mart filed against him. Either that, or Wal-Mart’s lawyers just decided not to go back any farther than 1997 to find evidence against Coughlin.

Several of Coughlin’s underlings also lost their jobs at Wal-Mart simply because they knew the illegal activity was going on and they did nothing to stop it.

At 6-foot, 4-inches tall, Coughlin was larger than life, and his people didn’t question him, even when they knew what he was doing was wrong.

In the late 1980s, I worked at Tulane University in New Orleans. I remember a coworker coming back somewhat shaken from a seminar at the business school there.

A student had asked the lecturer if it was O.K. to steal if you knew you wouldn’t get caught. The teacher said, yes, that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. How could it not hurt somebody, particularly the thief himself?

Greed was popular in the 1980s, but I had no idea how warped things had gotten. Any time a pendulum swings that far out of kilter, it’s going to come back and mow down a bunch of people.

The Coughlin fan club has me wondering about how well we really know people we meet in social situations. Bill Clinton was famous for working a room. He would give you a firm handshake and 15 seconds of undivided attention before being diverted to the next person. But after those 15 seconds, people knew Clinton was a good guy.

I met Sam Walton on two occasions, and he was a gentleman both times. He sent me a letter thanking me for some photographs I had given him. I still have it in a box along with a picture of him playing tennis with comedian Jonathan Winters.

I never met Tom Coughlin, but I tried. I had an interview scheduled with him one day in 2004 at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville. The PR people fed me cookies and told me to hang out. They said they would tell me when Coughlin left one meeting and headed for another, and I would be allowed to walk along beside him and interview him in the corridors of the world’s largest retailer.

After about eight hours, it became obvious that Coughlin wasn’t going to talk to me; either that or he had been in the same meeting all day. So I left Bentonville and drove back to my office in Fayetteville.

I knew Sam Walton wouldn’t have done that, even though he wasn’t particularly fond of the press either. If Walton had gotten too busy to talk, he would have sent word to the reporter that he wouldn’t have time for an interview that day.

But Sam Walton really was a good guy. I know he was because I looked him in the eye.

(Bill Bowden is editor of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal.)