Blair Is Holding His Own

Jim Blair is stark naked.

He’s smiling, healthy and happy in the photograph on the wall of his office lobby.

It was taken in Greece in 2001. Blair was 65 years old. He’s standing on a nude beach in a Charles Atlas pose, hand holding wrist in a strategic position to keep the photo from being X-rated. Visitors are often compelled to take a second look. Surely there’s a Speedo under there somewhere.

But no. Jim Blair has nothing to hide.

For the past quarter century, Blair, the former general counsel for Tyson Foods Inc., has been one of Arkansas’ most powerful and flamboyant lawyers.

It’s been a long, strange trip that has taken him around the world many times and ultimately 20 miles from his birthplace in Elkins to the renovated office building in Springdale that “looks like a Mexican hat.”

Blair was abandoned by his mother at the age of six months and raised by his grandparents in Fayetteville. Early on, it was obvious that he was a genius. He was an ordained Baptist minister at the age of 18, earned a degree from the University of Arkansas at 19 and finished law school there two years later.

Since then, he has been entangled in Whitewater, Espygate and Hillarygate. But he has come out of it all like a babe in the woods — naked and unashamed.

“I’m sure there are a lot of things I would have done differently,” Blair said, “but like the Willie Nelson song says, there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

College

In 1926, Rufus and Bessie Blair moved into the upstairs of a building near the intersection of School and Meadow streets in Fayetteville. Rufus ran Blair’s Grocery in the downstairs portion of the building, which still exists.

Jim Blair was born in Elkins on Oct. 27, 1935. Six months later, he was living above the grocery store with his grandparents. In 1948, Rufus Blair died. Bessie Blair realized her grandson had a freakish gift of the mind, so she figured school was the best thing for him. Plus, it would keep him out of trouble.

“She made me go to summer school to keep me off the street,” Blair said.

Blair also took college courses during high school instead of attending study hall. By the time his class started college, Blair already had 44 course hours at the UA, which amounts to about two years of college credit.

“I had a flair or a talent for taking tests,” Blair said. “It’s a good memory, but it’s not photographic. I always was the fastest reader in my class. I could cram the night before an exam and pretty much remember everything.”

As a seventh-grader, Blair made a perfect score on the Iowa Achievement Test.

“They called me down to the superintendent’s office and asked me where I got the answers,” he remembers.

Blair suspects they never did believe him, even though he had scored more than 160 on IQ tests and was a member of the Mensa society, which only admits people whose IQs are in the top 2 percent of the population.

“School was easy for me,” Blair said. “Taking tests was easy. Writing papers was harder.”

Despite that, aptitude tests indicated Blair’s main strength was in writing. Law was No. 2.

During college, Blair worked as a janitor at the UA’s Baptist Student Union, made milkshakes and malts at Jug Wheeler’s Drive-In and worked for Acme Typewriter Co. on Dickson Street.

Career

In January 1957, Blair graduated from the UA law school and opened a law office on Center Street.

“Older lawyers in town would send me cases they didn’t want,” Blair said. “I eventually starved out.”

Blair had turned down two jobs in New York City to stay in Northwest Arkansas. One of those jobs was with West Virginia Pulp & Paper.

“I turned it down because I didn’t want to work for a corporation,” Blair said.

Instead, Blair went to work in October 1957 for Courtney Crouch and Lewis Jones at their Springdale law firm. In 1959, the firm tried a defamation and slander case against Dun & Bradstreet Corp., a national company that provides credit reports. It was a David-and-Goliath match, but Crouch and Jones won.

“We actually changed the libel law in Arkansas in the Supreme Court in the appeal of that case,” Blair said.

Blair presented the closing arguments in the Dun & Bradstreet case and impressed Crouch and Jones enough that they began giving him his own cases to try.

Crouch and Jones represented the area poultry firms, banks and 80 percent of the businesses in Springdale, Blair said.

Blair remained with the same firm for 23 years while partners came and went. By 1979, the firm was known as Blair Cypert Waters & Roy.

“We were probably the biggest law firm [in Arkansas] this side of Little Rock,” Blair said.

“In 1979, I thought I had made a lot of money in commodities and thought I didn’t have to work any more,” he said. “I probably made the wrong decision.”

That year, Blair told Don Tyson, then CEO and now chairman of Tyson Foods, that he would work as the general counsel for the Springdale poultry company. He joined Tyson in 1980. Blair planned to spend one-third of his time working for Tyson Foods, one-third traveling and one-third doing charity work.

“It didn’t work out that way,” he said. “There were lots of times I had to work 100-hour weeks at Tyson … I never went on the company payroll. I worked on a retainer. It gave me a degree of independence where I think I could do my job a little better than I could on straight payment.”

Blair officially retired as general counsel of Tyson Foods in 2000 — the only person to hold that position with the poultry giant during the 20th century.

Blair helped choose his successor, Les Balage, whose 4-year-old daughter carefully studied the nude photo of Blair in his office while she was trick-or-treating last Halloween and asked, “Why’s he wearing a watch?”

Clintons

Inside the door of Blair’s sombrero-like office building, a three-foot tall statue of Ganesha greets visitors. He’s the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom, in this case draped with Mardi Gras beads.

The furniture is modern. The paintings are Greek and Cuban.

In the 1,250-gallon saltwater aquarium, clownfish and tang swim among coral imported from the Fiji Islands.

Blair’s white 2003 Mercedes SL500 convertible is parked by the door with the top down.

Fresh from a trip to Florida, Blair is tan and tall. He’s carrying a brown leather shoulder bag that fits snugly in his armpit.

The telephone rings. It’s Don Tyson calling from his house in England. Blair stops the interview for a minute to talk business with Tyson. He hangs up and leans back in his leather office chair and thinks back on his life and career.

Like Mick Jagger, Blair doesn’t always get what he wants. He really wanted a red SL500, but the white one was available and he just couldn’t wait any longer.

Blair said he met Bill Clinton in 1972 at the Democratic National Convention in Miami, where the Democrats nominated George McGovern as their presidential candidate. Blair, a lifelong Democrat, was a delegate from Arkansas. Clinton was working for McGovern.

A year later, Clinton moved to Fayetteville to teach law at the UA. Hillary Rodham arrived shortly afterwards.

Blair got a divorce from his first wife in 1974 and began seeing Diane Kincaid, a UA political science professor. By 1976, they were good friends with Bill and Hillary.

The Clintons got married in 1976. The Blairs waited until 1979. Both ceremonies took place in the home of Morris and Ann Henry in Fayetteville.

Bill Clinton performed the ceremony for the Blairs. Hillary stood by as “best person.” Diane Blair, a UA political science professor, died in 2000 at the age of 61.

During the Clinton administration, Jim Blair found himself scrutinized by The New York Times for helping Hillary Clinton turn a $1,000 investment in the commodities market into $100,000.

“I had 12 accounts I was looking after,” Blair said. “And all of them made money. Most of them made more money than Hillary’s, but the world will never believe how innocent that was. That wasn’t one trade. That was several trades over a nine-month period.”

Blair scoffs when asked about the Whitewater investigation. He said it was simply a matter of the Republicans trying to “destroy” Bill Clinton at any cost.

“There wasn’t anything there,” Blair said. “It was a Mickey Mouse deal that the Clintons lost money on … The fact that [the Republicans] spent all that time on Whitewater, and they could have taken any political figure in the country and there would have been more there than that on almost any of them.”

Courtroom

Blair said he wanted to try the case concerning Mike Espy, the former agriculture secretary. Tyson Foods eventually admitted giving Espy $12,000 worth of gifts, including trips to Dallas for a Cowboys football game and Russellville to Don and John Tyson’s birthday party. The company paid a $4 million fine and $2 million to cover the cost of the investigation.

“I didn’t want the company to settle,” Blair said. “They were trying to blackmail the company to settle.”

Blair said he’s still doing “a little” work for Tyson Foods. He’s on a declining retainer that runs out in 2005.

Blair won the vast majority of his cases. His most recent loss came a year ago when Tyson Foods was forced to go through with its acquisition of IBP. Suffering from a bit of indigestion, Tyson Foods had tried to back out of the $4.6 billion deal that ended up tripling Tyson’s revenue to $24 billion.

“I tried to win it,” Blair said. “I didn’t win it. But it’s good for the company I didn’t win it …

“I’ve probably won 95 percent of my cases, but all that means is you’re smart enough to settle the ones you’re going to lose.”

Looking back, though, Blair said he always thought he could have done a better job.

“I never walked out of a lawsuit — finished a lawsuit — without thinking there was something I could have done better in the course of the trial,” Blair said. “Preparation is probably the most important thing.”

Taking depositions has become so expensive that many people can’t afford to go to court, Blair said. Tyson Foods spent $20 million on expert testimony in a recent antitrust case, he said.

“You’ve got to have big money at stake, or you can’t afford to do it,” Blair said. “Increasingly, I think, we’re pricing justice out of the reach of the little guy.”

Although he’ll miss it, Blair said he’s ready to turn the courtroom floor over to younger lawyers.

“I really think it’s a young man’s game,” Blair said of being a trial lawyer. “It’s too hard work. I wouldn’t want to feel I had let my client down because my reflexes had slowed.”

Charity

Blair said he plans to spend the next three years doing a variety of charity work. Known a decade ago as an outspoken member of the UA board of trustees, Blair is now chairman of the steering committee for the UA’s Campaign for the 21st Century.

Through genealogical research, Blair recently became acquainted with a California woman who he believes is his sister. Blair said they had the same mother and may have had the same father. They visit each other frequently.

As Blair retires from one chapter of his life, another appears to be beginning. And in the beginning, all of God’s children were naked and unashamed.

To read about another side of Jim Blair, click here.