Huckabee

by Scott Lamb

  In spite of all the secrecy and subterfuge, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had threatened war in an April interview published in Newsweek.7 Perhaps he calculated that if he so openly stated his ideological commitment to destroy Israel, nobody would believe that he was making real-world plans to do that very thing. For her part, Israel felt confident that if there were to be another conflict, the Israeli Air Force would repel the enemy in the same crushing manner she had used during the Six-Day War of 1967.

  Egypt began the attack on October 6, which was the Jewish holy day Yom Kippur—hence the name of the war. This time, the conflict lasted a few weeks, but Egypt lost again. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had added extra intrigue to the conflict, as each side was the major supplier of arms for opposite sides.

  Israel has had no greater friend than the United States, and at least some of that support during the 1970s came from Protestant Christians motivated by an eschatological vision of Israel. Theologians argued, and still do, over the specifics, but most of the popular treatments in the 1970s—and certainly those read within Huckabee’s circles—viewed the 1948 formation of Israel as the fulfillment of events the Bible predicted would usher in the season of the end times. As historian Thomas Borstelmann wrote, “[F]undamentalist Christians began overcoming their historic anti-Semitism, in an era of rapidly diminishing discrimination against Jewish Americans, to identify increasingly with Israel as a pro-American and anticommunist society. The New Christian Right believed that Israel had a role of ultimate eschatological significance to play: it would be the site of God’s final battle and victory at Armageddon, the precursor to the Second Coming of Christ.”8

  Fresh off his trip to the Middle East, Huckabee began his freshman year of college. His first semester overlapped with the Yom Kippur War. Given the eschatological fervor present within evangelicalism, it was no surprise that the war seemed to be evidence that the world was in its last days. But whatever influence the eschatology may have had on Mike’s thinking as a teenager—and he does still believe the Rapture will come—his support for Israel grew to rest on a broader foundation than particular dates, charts, and timelines coming out of the popular dispensationalist point of view.

  Huckabee remembers what Israel was like back then as compared to now. “The nation was only twenty-five years old in 1973, a relatively new and struggling country. I saw a lot of communal living, where people lived on farms and shared everything together. The economy was primitive—a combination of tourism and agriculture—but nothing spectacular. Since that was pre–Yom Kippur War, many of the areas of Judea and Samaria were still under the control of the Arab countries and Israel itself was not as thoroughly defined,” he said. “But when you go back now, it’s truly the biblical fulfillment that ‘the desert has bloomed.’ Areas that were very barren—nothing but rock and sand—are now lush in vegetation. Their economy is one of the strongest in the world. Nobel Prize winners in science come from Israel. High tech comes and advanced medical technologies come from Israel. The dry bones have come to life, and the desert has bloomed—Israel is a miracle. Before my very eyes, I have seen it happen in the last forty-two years.”9

  Huckabee, along with most evangelicals, are often accused of an endgame anti-Semitism because of their belief in the exclusivity of Jesus Christ for eternal salvation. Huckabee deflects the criticism by pointing out that he worships a Jew, and without a Jewish faith, Christianity wouldn’t exist. In a speech to the Jewish Knesset, Huckabee said, “I promise you, you do not have a better friend on earth than Christians around the world, who know where we have come from and know who we must remain allies and friends with.”10

  Related to the general support for Israel during the 1970s, groups in America and across the globe also worked for an increase of attention given to the memory and meaning of the Holocaust of World War II. In 1980, Congress chartered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.11 Huckabee leads tour groups there, as well as to the memorials and museums in Israel and at the Auschwitz death camps near Krakow, Poland.

  When Huckabee’s daughter was eleven, he took her to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. He wondered how much of what she saw could even be processed by her young mind—what would be her response? “Why didn’t somebody do something?” she wrote in the museum’s guest book. Huckabee uses this anecdote in speeches: “Let it never be that some day in this wonderful country . . . that some father has to look over his daughter’s shoulder and watch her write words like that.” He exhorts his listeners to be “Somebodies,” and to commit to doing something to preserve this great American heritage.12

  CHAPTER 13

  OUACHITA

  Fall 1973–December 1975

  I’ve always been pretty intense. I’m not a person who sleeps eight hours a night. I sleep four or five and I’m good to go.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  IN THE 2007 RUN-UP TO THE GOP PRIMARIES, DAN BARTLETT, former counselor to President Bush, said that Huckabee was the “best candidate” and “the most articulate, visionary candidate of anybody in the field.” But when asked, “Can Huckabee win?” Bartlett responded, “He’s got the obvious problems—being from Hope, Arkansas, and, quite frankly, having the last name ‘Huckabee.’ I hate to be so light about it, but it is, it’s an issue. Politics can be fickle like that. I mean, you’re trying to get somebody’s attention for the first time. . . . ‘Huckabee? You’ve got to be kidding me! Hope, Arkansas? Here we go again.’ ”1

  Yet when it comes to talented men from the South with a native drawl, Huckabee is in good company.

  The 1973 World Series opened at Oakland’s Alameda County Coliseum on the thirteenth of October, featuring the hometown Athletics versus the New York Mets. Willie Mays, who had played twenty-one seasons for the San Francisco Giants just across the bridge, suited up for the Mets for his final two seasons. This Series would be his swan song.

  As game one prepared to get under way, the players walked onto the field one at a time. Long, bushy hair and mustaches were everywhere. By contemporary standards, the television announcers spoke with a mellow cadence, and the screen did not overstimulate viewers with a constant rotation of graphics. This was 1973, and Americans had not yet become concerned about baseball’s soporific qualities. On the other hand, batters mostly remained in the box between pitches, so a typical game was shorter than The Godfather (three hours), the hit movie from the previous year—and one of Huckabee’s personal favorites.

  Someone needed to sing the national anthem. Nowadays, Major League Baseball (MLB) invites popular groups to sing the anthem, to pull youngsters into watching the national pastime. In 1973, MLB might have chosen Bay-area favorites the Steve Miller Band to play their current hit, “The Joker.” Instead, they chose Jim Nabors (aka “Gomer Pyle” from The Andy Griffith Show) to do the honors. Most people recognize Nabors’s higher-pitched voice and Southern twang, all of which served to emphasize his character’s role as the naive hillbilly. However, Nabors was actually an accomplished singer with a rich baritone voice and operatic style. People often mock Huckabee by calling him “Gomer Pyle.” But in real life, both Nabors and Huckabee are more sophisticated than their “aw shucks” friendliness conveys.

  Huckabee entered Ouachita Baptist University (OBU) in the fall of 1973 and graduated magna cum laude five semesters later at the Christmas break in 1975. Between those two dates, he also pastored a church, DJ’d for a local radio station, worked as a custodian, got engaged, got married, and helped his newlywed wife defeat spinal cancer. And he also had a lot of fun pulling pranks and making lifelong friends—a real joker, as friends recall.

  OBU sits in the small city of Arkadelphia, fifty miles north of Hope and sixty-five miles southwest of Little Rock. Both cities serve as the seat for their respective counties and were settled in the 1800s; Arkade
lphia incorporated about twenty years earlier than Hope, in 1857. Arkadelphia differed from Hope chiefly in terms of higher education and geography. In contrast to Hempstead County, which had no opportunities for higher education in 1973, Arkadelphia served as the home for two universities: OBU and Henderson State, sitting adjacent to one another.

  Geographically, the town is situated in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains and intersects with the waters of the Ouachita River. The eighty-five-acre campus sits on the banks of the rivers, a “very beautiful campus,” Huckabee recalls.2 The name “Ouachita” means something like “good hunting grounds” and is named after the Native American tribe who formerly lived in that region.

  The Arkansas Baptist State Convention (ABSC) founded Ouachita Baptist College in 1886 (changed to “University” in 1965). Ouachita remains affiliated with the ABSC, along with Williams Baptist College. There have been other Baptist colleges in the state, but Ouachita has always held the place of prominence: a central location within the state, strong academics, a small teacher-student ratio, and the fact that one-fourth of Arkansas citizens claimed “Southern Baptist” as their denominational preference.

  That’s not to imply that Huckabee matriculated into OBU as a member of a Southern Baptist church. He didn’t. Garrett Memorial Baptist Church belonged to a different family of Baptists altogether.

  Beginning in the late 1800s, Baptists throughout the South began disputing and separating over differences in the doctrine of the nature of the church. The ever-increasing presence of the Southern Baptist denomination seemed to call out a response among those who had never been very keen on the idea of denominations in the first place. Local Baptist congregations took pride in their autonomous nature, even though they also had a connection on the associational level (county), as well as the state and national conventions. Of course, all these conventions cost money to operate, and the Southern Baptist Convention had not yet devised its “Cooperative Program” mechanism for collecting and distributing money from the churches.

  A theological answer to the perceived threat of denominationalism came in the form of Landmarkism—an ecclesiology (church doctrine) holding to the belief that Baptists could trace their lineage and legitimacy all the way back to the apostles. Therefore, as a corollary belief of Landmarkism, all non-Baptist churches lacked full validity. And practically speaking, Landmarkists railed against the “cooperative” efforts of denominations in the funding of missions. Men like James M. Pendleton and James R. Graves gave the movement much of its doctrinal shaping earlier in the 1800s, but the actual formation of a new group of Baptists came in Little Rock, Arkansas, under the leadership of Ben M. Bogard.

  In 1973, if you asked a journalist from a national newspaper to provide a taxonomy of “Christianity in America,” he or she would probably state two groups: “Roman Catholic” and “Protestant.” Depending on the reporter’s background, “Protestant” may have been subdivided into “mainline” and “fundamentalist” (or “evangelical”). But the fact that dozens of variant forms of “Baptist” exist would not be of interest—or maybe even known—to a journalist.

  The point of this exercise in Arkansas Baptist church history is that Mike Huckabee wasn’t a Southern Baptist until he entered the seminary in January 1976. He grew up at Garrett and then pastored a similar church while at Ouachita. He grew up in a church and a network of churches that held even tighter lines of orthodoxy and orthopraxy than the Southern Baptists did at the time, and do even now. In the battles for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, fought from the 1960s through the 1990s, it is safe to say that neither faction held to the rigid, sectarian lines of exclusivity characterized by the churches Huckabee was birthed into—and then leapt out of.

  Sexual liberation and the drug culture may have been causing a cultural revolution on university campuses throughout America, but not so much among the Ouachita student body—and not in the dormitories (which were definitely not coed). But in areas where neither the campus rule book nor the Bible drew a moral line, hijinks soon followed. “All of us on that whole first floor had such camaraderie together,” Randy Sims said. “We all still keep up with one another to this day.” He remembers late-night talks and late-night adventures. For example, “I got sick once—swelled up from eating some kind of nut—they had to rush me to the hospital.” Or as another example of “crazy stuff” they got into, Sims recalled, “staying up late” and “fighting over the last piece of ham for a sandwich.”3 Obviously, this wasn’t UC–Berkeley.

  Rick Caldwell roomed with Huckabee their freshman year. Now that their own children are through college, he is amazed at just how different the dorms are today. Caldwell said, “We had no microwave. We had no telephones, except a hall telephone. No toaster ovens. The only appliance you could have was a popcorn popper.” A hungry eighteen-year-old belly is the mother of invention, so these dorm mates learned how to make their own “donuts”—in a popcorn popper. “We’d put Wesson oil in there and get it hot,” he said, “then take a canned biscuit and pill bottles . . . make a hole in the biscuit. Deep-fry it. Put some powdered sugar and milk on top. We’d have our own Krispy Kreme delights right there with our popcorn popper.”4

  Caldwell enjoys telling these stories of high cuisine ingenuity. “We were all sitting around eating donuts late one night. Then a dorm mate brought in a squirrel that he’d killed. So we battered it, deep-fried it, and ate it too. Fried squirrel from our popcorn popper.” When Huckabee ran in 2007 and reporters started hitting up his old college pals, looking for the “wild-side” skeletons in the closet, all they came away with was this anecdote about Arkansas boys frying squirrel meat. Some of the stories even made it sound as though they threw an entire live squirrel into a vat of hot grease. “We didn’t think anything about it,” Caldwell said. “In Arkansas that was something we’d heard of when we were young. Today it sounds pretty ridiculous.”

  Caldwell had met Huckabee at Boys State and had hung out together during their senior year, and when they both decided on Ouachita, it only made sense to room together. “We were the original Felix and Oscar of the Odd Couple. He was very serious—get up early, stay up late and study, work hard. I didn’t quite have that kind of an attitude toward college. We endured each other. After our freshman year we jokingly decided we were so incompatible, it was time to get married.”

  And so they did. They both got married to their girlfriends and have each been married for more than forty years. “We drove each other to it,” Caldwell joked. “After living with each other, we could handle any adjustment that marriage offered.”

  According to Caldwell, Huckabee was an “overachiever” who consistently was the “smartest guy in the room.” Caldwell said that it wasn’t a show for Huckabee; he “wasn’t arrogant about it, but he just knew a lot about everything.” And his work ethic was incredible. Caldwell said that, by comparison, he barely made it to class.

  Huckabee deflects his friend’s remembrances of his being a whiz kid, setting his achievements more in a context of focus and determination. “I’ve always been pretty intense,” he said. “I’m not a person who sleeps eight hours a night. I sleep four or five and I’m good to go. I do have the ability to analyze things quickly. Give me a bunch of materials and I’ll digest it quickly and figure out what’s the basic core of it.”5

  Being the first Huckabee male in his line ever to go to college, he didn’t want to disappoint those who had invested in him. “I worked hard, but I worked very efficiently. I didn’t have time to waste, running my motor without getting anywhere. I had filled up my dance card; there was no time to piddle. Plus, I was a cheapskate and wanted to make sure I was getting my money’s worth.”6

  Huckabee focused more on the books than he had in high school, but he still found time to give student leadership. He served as a senator for his freshman class as chairman for SEL
F—the Student Entertainment and Lecture Fund. In that role, he brought Victor Marchetti to campus for a free lecture. Marchetti, a former CIA agent and author of the bestselling book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, said, “I cannot help wondering if my government is more concerned with defending our democratic system or more intent on imitating the methods of totalitarian regimes in order to maintain its already inordinate power over the American people.”7 Huckabee, deflecting potential criticism SELF might receive for inviting the controversial author, said matter-of-factly, “With the CIA in the news the best way to form personal opinions is to hear an expert discuss the facts from his first-hand experience. That’s why SELF is bringing Marchetti to Ouachita.”8

  Randy Sims does remember one strange thing about his dorm mate. Huckabee subscribed to not just one, but both of the daily newspapers—the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat. “He had them delivered to his room! I mean, nobody took the papers. We were interested in girls and intramurals and just passing our classes. But he took the papers and read them every morning—every day. He’d read them and then stack them around the walls of his room. All the way up to the ceiling; then he’d start another stack.”9 He had them organized and in a system so he could go back and look something up. In a day before instant online access to information, Huckabee created his own method for information retrieval. Everybody else just thought, What in the world is going on with this guy? Is he really that serious or what?

  During the spring 1974 semester, all the Arkansas newspapers were running articles about Bill Clinton, the young law professor in Fayetteville who was seeking to unseat incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt in the Third District—the one area of Arkansas where Republicans could be found in concentration.