Bumpers ?Laments? Not Running for President

The toughest decision Dale Bumpers ever made was not running for president of the United States.

When asked why he didn’t run after agonizing over it in 1983 and again in 1987, the former senator, who is known for his oratory skills, was almost at a loss for words.

“I don’t know,” he said, with a hint of emotion crimping his aristocratic Southern drawl. “I’ve never had a good answer for that. In hindsight, I’ve lamented deeply in the last two years that I didn’t make a run at it.”

Bumpers said he wasn’t prepared for the rigors of the campaign trail. He “made the tour” of pre-election speaking engagements in 1983, traveling to California, Iowa, New Hampshire and Georgia. But in the end, he decided not to run for the nation’s highest office.

“I concluded that I was probably not willing to do all the things you’re required to do to be president,” Bumpers said. “It’s really a pressure cooker … If you don’t suffer fools gladly, you shouldn’t run for president.”

In the meantime, another Arkansan ran for president and was elected twice. In retrospect, Bumpers said he didn’t have the “tenacity” of Bill Clinton.

Bumpers’ regret stems from an event that happened in 1938, when he was 12 years old.

Bumpers tells the story in the first chapter of his new book, “The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town,” which was published Feb. 18 by Random House.

The Bumpers family drove from their home in Charleston to Booneville to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a whistle-stop tour. Roosevelt had to have help walking and standing at the back of the train while he spoke to the crowd.

Dale Bumpers and his brother Carroll asked their father why the president couldn’t walk. William Rufus Bumpers explained that FDR had contracted polio and wore steel braces on his legs.

“If a man who can’t even walk and carries 12 pounds of steel on his legs can be president, you boys have good minds and good bodies, and there isn’t any reason you can’t be president,” Will Bumpers told his sons.

Those words stayed with Dale Bumpers for the past 65 years.

The Book

In a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office, Bumpers, now 77, said Random House approached him about writing a book.

During Bumpers’ career, he served as governor of Arkansas for four years and as a U.S. senator for 24 years. Along the way, he defeated some of the biggest names in the history of Arkansas politics: Orval Faubus, Winthrop Rockefeller and J. William Fulbright.

As governor, Bumpers revamped state government, creating a budget surplus that funded construction on college campuses and new prisons.

In the Senate, Bumpers was a hero to farmers in Arkansas and across the nation. He worked to bring more than $100 million to the University of Arkansas system for a variety of projects related to agricultural research. The UA board of trustees named the agriculture college in Fayetteville after him in 1996.

Rolling Stone magazine endorsed Bumpers for president in a 1983 article, saying he was the best man for the job despite “President Bumpers” sounding like something out of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip.

But Random House didn’t want to hear about all that.

Someone from the publishing house had heard Bumpers’ farewell speech to the Senate and was moved by stories about his childhood in Arkansas. (See story above.)

On Feb. 26, Bumpers began a speaking and signing tour to promote the book. The tour includes bookstores in Memphis, Blytheville, Fayetteville, Little Rock, Conway and Bentonville.

Tragedy

Bumpers enlisted in the Marines during World War II. He was discharged in 1946 and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas. After graduation, he attended law school at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Bumpers spent much of his free time in Chicago locked in a staring match with Bushman, a famous silverback gorilla at the Lincoln Park Zoo. To this day, when Bumpers goes to Chicago, he visits Bushman. The 7-foot-tall, 500-pound gorilla died in 1951, but his stuffed body is on a pedestal at the Field Museum in Chicago.

“I never go to Chicago without going by to have a silent, nostalgic conversation with him about our unforgettable Sunday afternoons,” Bumpers wrote.

While at Northwestern, Bumpers said he had two “haunting” ESP experiences, the only times in his life that he has had such premonitions. The first time, he asked a friend what would happen if an airplane hit the Empire State Building in New York City. At about the time he asked that question, one did, killing 13 people.

The second time, on March 22, 1949, Bumpers had a premonition about how horrible it would be to lose someone close to him. Two hours later, the telephone rang. His parents had been in a car crash in Oklahoma. Both of them died in the hospital in Fort Smith.

Politics

On July 24, 1954, Charleston became the first town in the 11 Confederate states to integrate its schools after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Bumpers had advised the board to integrate voluntarily and as soon as possible. That same night, Bumpers was elected to the school board.

Eight years later, Bumpers ran for the Arkansas House of Representatives and was defeated by Mike Womack, a 27-year-old county clerk. Bumpers got 42 percent of the vote.

By 1970, Bumpers was ready to give it another try. He felt that Arkansas was ready for a change.

In 1970, Winthrop Rockefeller, a Republican, was running for his third term as governor. A champion of civil rights, Rockefeller had moved from New York to Petit Jean Mountain near Morrilton. At a rally of African-Americans in 1966 on the steps of the state Capitol in Little Rock, Rockefeller joined the group, held hands and sang “We Shall Overcome” with them. He carried 90 percent of the black vote in a state where that group tended to vote Democrat.

But Rockefeller had a reputation for drinking too much and being absent from the Capitol for long periods of time. As Bumpers wrote: “The barbers were especially chagrined with his allegedly jetting to New York to get his hair cut.” Rockefeller began to appear as an inept leader, Bumpers wrote. And voters felt cheated because they had no other choice but Faubus.

Orval Faubus, a Democrat, was trying to stage a comeback after disgracing himself and the state in the Little Rock Central High crisis in 1957. Faubus had called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from integrating Central High. President Dwight Eisenhower countered by sending federal troops to Little Rock to assure that the students were admitted to the school.

In 1970, Bumpers was a country lawyer, cattle farmer and a member of the Charleston School Board.

“It seemed an ideal time for a progressive candidate with no skeletons in his closet, who spoke about the future of our children in a warm and believable way,” Bumpers wrote. “I wanted to prove to the nation that Arkansas was turning its back on the most insidious, shameful part of its past.”

“I ran for governor when it was a naive thing to do,” he said in our telephone conversation.

At the beginning of the campaign, Bumpers had 1 percent name recognition. Polls showed Faubus with 46 percent of the vote among the Democratic contenders.

During the campaign, Bumpers’ numbers steadily improved to 14 percent.

On election night in the Democratic primary, Bumpers moved into the No. 2 spot, which forced a runoff election with Faubus. Bumpers won with 58 percent of the vote.

“Faubus had been governor for 12 years,” Bumpers said. “He represented the past. He represented an awful lot of turmoil in Arkansas, and people were tired of it. They wanted to get rid of it.”

Rockefeller also represented the past, and Arkansans agreed with Bumpers that it was time for a change. Bumpers trounced Rockefeller in the 1970 election by a margin of 62 percent to 32 percent, setting a record for the number of votes received in an Arkansas governor’s race.

“It was not so much me,” Bumpers said. “They wanted something else. … There was nothing brilliant about that on my part. I was just in the right place at the right time.”

As governor from 1970 to 1974, Bumpers reorganized state government, made medical care more affordable, improved education at all levels, strengthened environmental protection, added and renovated state parks and made historic strides in prison reform.

In 1971, he raised taxes to get $26 million to raise pay for teachers. But the tax increase brought in $56 million instead.

“It brought in so much money, I had to call a special session to try to figure out how to spend the money,” Bumpers said.

The state’s economy grew during his two two terms as governor, and he left the biggest surplus ever in the state treasury. A major factor in the state’s prosperity of the early 1970s was an increase in the value of commodities produced by Arkansas farmers from slightly more than $1 billion in 1969 to $2.4 billion in 1973.

Agriculture

Since “The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town” is an effort to tell readers what they may not know about Dale Bumpers, he doesn’t get around to discussing his time in the U.S. Senate until Page 232. Most Arkansans know Bumpers from his 24 years in the Senate.

Once again, in 1974 this time, Bumpers took on an established Arkansas political figure. J. William Fulbright was author of the Fulbright Scholarship Program and an ardent opponent to the Vietnam War. After 32 years in the Senate, Fulbright had announced that he would seek his sixth term in office.

Fulbright, a former UA student and Razorback football player, had kicked the school’s winning field goal against Rice in 1929. He still used a photo of that kick in his campaign literature 45 years later.

Bumpers defeated Fulbright by a margin of 65 to 35 percent.

As chairman of the Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1988 through 1994, Bumpers worked to secure funding for agricultural projects across America and, particularly, in Arkansas.

“I was on the appropriations committee almost all of my 24 years,” Bumpers said. “Any senator who’s on the appropriations committee and doesn’t take advantage of it for his people doesn’t understand the legislative process.

“I took advantage of that in a lot of ways, but the [main] benefit to the state was in getting research funding.” (See chart.)

Bumpers said he took more abuse from the national press over legislation to fund catfish farming than anything else he tried to do for Arkansas farmers. The press called it pork-barrel politics, but it increased the catfish yield from about 1,000 catfish per acre to 4,300, he said.

Bumpers said farming is a “labor of love” now.

“It’s difficult to get into the farming business today unless you’re a corporation,” he said. “Farmers are in the toughest shape they’re in right now than they have been in years, since the Depression.”

To read more about Bumpers’ childhood click here.