FAYETTEVILLE - Presidential aspirations and exasperations are evident in the papers of former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, which were opened to the public Wednesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Bumpers had twice considered running for president - in 1984 and 1988 - and is known for defending Bill Clinton in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor during Clinton’s presidential impeachment trial on Jan. 21, 1999.
The papers offer a glimpse at Bumpers’ life as he defended his friend and fellow Arkansan.
“The president’s conduct was indeed shameless, but not impeachable,” Bumpers, a Democrat, wrote 19 days later in a letter to Marcia Balonick, executive director of the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs. “The real danger is the precedent. Nobody believes B.C. would have been impeached for the same conduct had he been a Republican.”
Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, then was acquitted in the Senate on Feb. 12, 1999, three weeks after Bumpers’ speech.
Bumpers, age 73 at the time, had retired at the beginning of January after 24 years in the U.S. Senate. But the Clinton defense team pleaded with him to return to the Capitol and give a closing argument in the proceedings to bolster the president’s case.
The hour-long speech, televised live, generated national headlines and a stack of fan mail.
“It is interesting that probably the most important event of my public life occurred after I left the Senate,” Bumpers wrote in a note to Anne Bartley of San Francisco. “It all turned out better than I had anticipated, but the precedent was terrible. Surely we’ll quit talking about sex some day and get around to our real problems.”
Bumpers, 88, who lives in Little Rock with his wife,Betty, donated the papers to the university in 2000. They have since been archived and cataloged to make it easier for researchers to navigate the1,142 boxes of material, which contain everything from “presidential cigars” to size-12 saddle oxfords emblazoned with running Razorbacks.
The footwear had been displayed in Bumpers’ Capitol Hill office and made an impression on visitors.
“I’m still upset about your not selling me those wonderful red-and-white patent-leather Razorback shoes I’d try on in your reception area,” President Clinton wrote to Bumpers in an April 30, 1997, letter.
The Bumpers collection is the second-largest in the UA libraries next to the papers of former Sen. J. William Fulbright, which consists of more than 1,200 boxes.
During his career, Bumpers defeated some of the giants of Arkansas politics: Democrat Orval Faubus and Republican Winthrop Rockefeller for governor in 1970, and Fulbright for the Senate in 1974.
The Fayetteville archive doesn’t include Bumpers’ gubernatorial papers, which are held at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture.
Last week, only one news reporter was digging through the Bumpers Papers in the Special Collections section of the library in Fayetteville. Bumpers observed from a portrait sitting on a filing cabinet. Painted in 1988 by John Harris, the portrait is part of the “oversized items” section of the Bumpers Papers.
Last month, several national news reporters descended on the Special Collections section in the basement of the university’s Mullins Library to go through the papers of Diane Blair, a UA political science professor and friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton who died in 2000.
Blair would take notes after her conversations with Hillary Clinton during the years Bill Clinton was president. With Hillary Clinton considering a run for the presidency, Blair’s papers came under some scrutiny after an article about them appeared on the website of The Washington Free Beacon.
The Blair Papers included three boxes of correspondence with the Clintons. The Bumpers Papers, by contrast, has only one folder labeled “Bill and Hillary Clinton, Personal Correspondence.” It also includes the date, 1994-2007.
In that folder, there’s one letter from Hillary Clinton. In it, she thanks Bumpers for comments he made in a conference committee that day, which was July 31, 1979. Conference committees are temporary panels of House and Senate members convened to reconcile differences in legislation that has passed in both chambers.
What exactly Bumpers said during the meeting wasn’t clear from the letter. Hillary Clinton signed it, “In memory of Bushman, Hillary.”
She was referring to a silverback gorilla at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that Bumpers became fascinated with when he was in law school at Northwestern University. Hillary Clinton is from Chicago.
“Bushman and I were very close friends,” Bumpers wrote in his 2003 autobiography, The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town. “We would spend hours staring at each other on Sunday afternoons. … He would occasionally get up, amble over to an immense tractor tire, and turn it wrong side out. After a minute or two, he would resume a sitting position, and we would stare a while longer. I desperately wanted to know what he was thinking.”
Bushman apparently enjoyed the stare-offs with Bumpers. The 550-pound gorilla had a tendency to hurl food or dung at those he disliked, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune. In his book, Bumpers didn’t indicate having any such encounters.
Bushman died on New Year’s Day 1951, the year Bumpers graduated from law school. Bushman’s mounted remains are on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where Bumpers has continued to visit him, the autobiography states.
A few other folders in the Bumpers Papers contain letters from Bill Clinton, some dating back to 1980 when he was governor. They vary from birthday greetings to discussions of bills in the Arkansas Legislature.
The Bumpers collection includes biographical materials, correspondence, legislative and committee materials, personal and office records, speeches, photographs, audiovisual materials and collected items.
Included in that last category were 12 of Bumpers’ congressional license plates, a bust of Hubert H. Humphrey and two “vintage rotary dial” phones from Bumpers’ law office/hardware store in Charleston, Ark.
After law school, Bumpers returned to Charleston to manage his family’s hardware and furniture store, and to open a private law practice. He was elected Charleston city attorney in 1952 and served until 1970, when he was elected governor.
On Aug. 23, 1954, after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Bumpers advised the Charleston School Board to abide by the ruling. The board did, becoming the first district to integrate public schools in the South, according to a biographical note with the Bumpers Papers.
Several boxes in the collection concern the office of president, whether Bumpers was considering a run or defending an Arkansan who already had that job.
“If the Republicans win in ’88, I’ll be forced to leap from the Capitol dome,” Bumpers wrote on April Fool’s Day in 1987 to John Chrystal, an Iowa banker who had been an agricultural adviser to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Chrystal’s uncle was Roswell Garst, whose farm Nikita Khrushchev visited in 1959 as the Soviet leader took an unusual tour of the U.S.
It was in March of 1987 that Bumpers decided, for the second time, not to seek the office of president. He had also considered running in 1984, egged on by a variety of supporters including Rolling Stone magazine. Former Vice President Walter Mondale was the Democratic Party nominee that year. He lost to incumbent President Ronald Reagan.
If Bumpers didn’t run in 1988, one memorandum warned, he risked being labeled as a “windbag.”
“Everyone knows you have an exceptional opportunity to run for, and win, the presidency,” according to an unsigned March 17, 1987, document titled “Reasons to Run” in the Bumpers Papers.
“Given all your passion for the issues - the countless tub-thumping floor speeches you’ve given - the lifetime of public service preparation - if you now pass up the opportunity to reach for the job that would enable you to really do something about all these issues … You’ll be seen as a windbag - someone who talked a helluva good game - but when the whistle blew to start the game, you refused to walk (hobble) onto the field.”
Bumpers had knee surgery in February 1987 and was walking with a cane the following month. He cited the surgery as a factor in his decision not to run.
Bumpers told the Arkansas Gazette then that unless a presidential candidate is physically completely able to run, he “can’t ask others to put in 14- to 16-hour days.”
The document in the Bumpers Papers went on to cite the “weak field” of alternative candidates, from both parties.
In a Feb. 23, 1987, letter to every Democrat in the House of Representatives, U.S. Rep. Robert J. Mrazek, D-N.Y., urged his colleagues to support Bumpers for the presidency.
Mrazek cited Bumpers’ ability as a speaker, saying he has a “wonderful capacity to communicate” his vision.
“Dale Bumpers has the capacity to inspire the American people - and not just in New York or Texas,” wrote Mrazek. “From his common sense commitment on nuclear arms control to his life-long advocacy on civil rights issues, he is the candidate we’re proud to support for president of the United States.”
Two days later, Mrazek sent a four-page, confidential letter to Bumpers to tell him about the first batch of responses from House members. “Dale Bumpers would make a tremendous president,” it quoted U.S. Rep. (and 1976 presidential candidate) Morris Udall of Arizona saying. “I urged him to run four years ago.”
“I will be attempting to personally lobby every member of the House Democratic Caucus on your behalf in the next few weeks,” Mrazek wrote to Bumpers. “The results of my first conversations with approximately 20 members today are very encouraging.”
On March 5, Mrazek sent Bumpers another letter saying “overwhelmingly” the members of the caucus are undecided, but that made sense so early in the presidential election season.
In a March 4, 1987, letter to Mary Davis, Bumpers’ chief of staff, Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., was providing information about potential fundraisers for Bumpers’ presidential campaign.
“Rahm Emanuel has talked to me and told me he is eager to go to work for Dale, either in Iowa or in the Midwest, as a fundraiser,” wrote Simon. “Rahm is very aggressive and will produce. Tact is not necessarily his strong suit, but he overcomes that with his hard work.”
Emanuel eventually became a Clinton fundraiser and adviser, a congressman, and President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. He is now mayor of Chicago.
Bumpers made his decision not to run a few days after that flurry of letters from his supporters in the House.
As Bumpers answered letters, primarily from people who wanted him to run, it was obvious he was conflicted.
“There were times when I felt that I had a solemn obligation to seek the presidency, just as a good citizen if nothing else. Personal consideration finally won out, but I’m still suffering from pangs of conscience, regret and doubt,” he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Carl H. Dozier of Charleston on March 27, 1987. “The nation is obviously in for some troubled times, and is going to need good, strong leadership, together with a very persuasive voice.”
In another letter that same day to Harold Jinks of Piggott, Bumpers added, “If we elect a Republican in November of 1988, then the doubts and regrets that I’m suffering right now will just be exacerbated.”
In a letter three days later, Bumpers assured Otto Henry Zinke, a professor at the university in Fayetteville, that he hadn’t been willing to sacrifice his relative anonymity, whether in town or fishing, for the presidency of the United States: “I’m suffering some guilt, contrition and doubt, but each day is better. I can still walk in the drug store and browse through the magazines [without causing an uproar.]”
Simon ended up running for president in 1988, but Michael Dukakis won the Democratic nomination. Ultimately, Dukakis lost in Bumpers’ home state - and the nation - to President George H.W. Bush.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/23/2014