by Scott Lamb
Clinton ran a spirited race, especially once Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas and began assisting his campaign. One news piece noted, “Clinton, strongly backed by the Democratic Party state organization and the state AFL-CIO, came up with surprisingly plentiful financing for a first-time candidate.”10 Another article noted that Clinton “outspent Hammerschmidt by better than three-to-one.”11 In the end, Clinton lost a close race, 51.8 to 48.2 percent.
When Hammerschmidt died in the spring of 2015, Huckabee took to Facebook for a eulogy:
[He was] one of the true pioneers of the Arkansas Republican Party. All of us who have ever been elected in Arkansas as Republicans owe this statesman our deepest respect. But John Paul Hammerschmidt was far more than a Republican leader. He was the purest of public servants, who created the template for serving his constituents and living his life with impeccable integrity and honor. He was the most unselfish and self-effacing person I’ve ever known in politics. If he had an ego, it was the best-kept secret in Washington where there are no secrets. In my first race, I was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Houston, the year that John Paul Hammerschmidt was retiring. Reporters came to him and asked his opinion of the news of the day. Knowing that I could use the publicity since I was a newcomer, he turned to me seated behind him and told the reporters they should ask me. Not before or since have I ever known of a political figure who would take himself off the stage to make room for someone else. When I was Governor, I called upon him many times for advice and counsel and he was the creator of the mechanism of our highway construction program. Arkansas has lost one of its most treasured senior statesmen. Janet and I will forever be grateful for the kindnesses that he and Ginny extended to us.12
At the end of the semester, Huckabee’s newspapers played a prop for his prankster side. Sims and his roommate both went home for the weekend, and when they came back, there was a surprise for them in their dorm room. Huckabee had gotten everyone else in the hallway to take his precious stack of newspapers and make an endless pile of newspaper balls to fill Sims’s room—one sheet of newspaper at a time. “Little wads of newspaper all fell out. The entire dorm room. I mean, under the bed, in the bathroom—everywhere,” Sims remembered. “Floor to ceiling was nothing but little balls of paper. It was stuffed full. Everyone came out and was just dying laughing.”
It got better. “We made everyone help us clean it up,” Sims recalled. “Everyone grabbed the balls of papers and headed outside where a huge Dumpster sat. We loaded the whole Dumpster up—full.” It wouldn’t all fit, so someone decided they’d have to burn the paper. Then somebody else threw gasoline on the pile. “The next thing we know,” Sims said, “flames three stories high were rolling up into the air. It wasn’t an explosion, but it was the biggest bonfire you ever saw.” The fire department came out—sirens going off everywhere—and Huckabee was nowhere to be found. “It took every bit of fast-talking to get out of trouble,” Sims said. “We just played dumb. Of course, everybody knew who did it.”13
Huckabee majored in religion and minored in speech. The “religion” name was a Baptist university’s way of dressing up their Bible degree in more sophisticated garb: Greek, Hebrew, preaching, evangelism, pastoral ministry, and so on. During the 1990s, many Baptist universities on the conservative side of the denomination changed their “religion” degree to “Christian Studies” or some other more forthright nomenclature.
OBU had a partnership with its neighboring university, Henderson, allowing students to take courses interchangeably. Huckabee picked up courses like criminology there, and studied broadcasting with the latest equipment available, rather than being limited to the lesser-funded OBU media labs. He clearly had his nose pointed down the vocational path of Christian broadcasting and soaked up every opportunity to hone his craft. “Nobody in the early 1970s saw Christian broadcasting becoming what it did,” Huckabee said. “I didn’t. I was sort of on the trailing edge of the Jesus movement, trying to figure out a better way to reach people. Instead, I thought the future impact would come through radios and TV sets—very media-focused. And, of course, we saw Christian rock being important too. But the days were gone when a church could just say, ‘Here’s a nice brick church building, so come down here on Sunday.’ ”14
Mike began pastoring a church his freshman year. He was eighteen. He preached to the tiny congregation—just forty members—on Sundays, and he also made hospital visits and performed other pastoring duties as necessary. He was in Arkadelphia, just ten minutes from the dorms, so it fit well into his schedule. When he thinks back and reflects on just how young he was, Huckabee said that he is amazed anyone would have turned anything over to him.15
It all worked out though, and the church experienced a sudden sense of interest from OBU students. Sims remembers going with Huckabee, especially on Sunday nights. “Ladies in the church would fix food for college kids. It was ‘college night’—every Sunday night.” The dorm mates couldn’t have forgotten to go because “Huckabee would go up and down that hallway and make us all go. He’d say ‘Come on! Y’all are going to church! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ And so we went. We’d all be at church on a Sunday night, to hear our hall mate preach and get a free supper too.”16
“He snookered me into attending his church,” Caldwell said. “Here I am, my freshman year of college, when most guys experience a time of rebellion.” There’d be no wild weekend partying for Caldwell though. “My roommate was my pastor. I couldn’t even backslide. I had to behave all the time,” he said with a smile.17
Many students would show up at the church. “It was kind of a novelty for them to be able to go to a real church and see one of their peers actually in charge,” Caldwell remembers. The thing is, they’d also hear him during afternoons as the disc jockey for the local radio station. “You had to have real political capability when, at the same time, you could be a rock-and-roll disc jockey and pastor a Baptist church—on the same day even! To get away with that, you’ve got some real diplomacy skills.”18
Caldwell, who also went into the pastoral ministry, remembers well one late-night conversation he and Huckabee had that year. “We were sitting on the floor, talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up. And I remember him saying, ‘You know, I just don’t feel like I’m cut out to be a normal pastor. You know, I like helping people and I like teaching and I like communicating. But I see me somehow getting involved in a movement—to help good people step up and make government and our nation better.’ He said those words more than forty years ago. It was very prophetic.”19
CHAPTER 14
I WALK THE LINE
1973–1975
If Mike was ever going to leave me, that was his prime opportunity.
—JANET HUCKABEE
WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE SAID, “MY MOST BRILLIANT achievement was to persuade my wife to marry me.”1 Even a scant knowledge of Churchill’s biography reveals just how much he was telling the truth. The stability and joy that Clementine “Clemmie” Hozier brought to the private life of her husband made it possible for Winston to lead his nation to victory in World War II. Though more than ten years apart in age, the couple formed a union of loyalty and love, remaining together for fifty-six years.
When Winston Churchill died in 1965, Mike Huckabee and Janet McCain were attending elementary school in Hope. Then they shared junior high and high school classes—always friends but never more. But halfway through their senior year, mutual participation in basketball brought them together. Was he a star player and Janet a cheerleader? Hardly. Janet was the famous athlete, an all-time leading scorer on the girls varsity team, while Huckabee called the radio play-by-play of the games for his beloved KXAR. The girls team played the half-court style of three on three, where you played either offense or defense exclusively. When a defensive rebound was made, the player would run the ball out to the h
alf-court line and pass it off to her teammates on offense. McCain was a scoring machine.
On January 29, 1973, the Hope Ladycats won their game against Ashdown High School, 64 to 51. After the game, Mike and Janet looked for somewhere to go to get something to eat, but there weren’t a lot of late-night options in Hope. So they headed over to the Fulton Truck Stop to eat at the Red Oak Café, a late-night diner. This was their first date. The next day’s Hope Star put a large picture of Janet McCain on the front page, not because she went on a date with Huckabee, but because of her basketball prowess the night before. Still, how many couples can say that the morning after their first date, one of them had made the front page?
“After several postgame trips to the eatery, you could tell Mike and Janet were becoming more than friends,” Sitzes recalled. “The truth is, they always had been really good friends with one another, so romance made perfect sense. Janet won his mind and heart—he really enjoyed being with her.”2
When asked if she remembers when they were “steady,” Janet said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know that we ever went steady. We just dated. We got engaged. And now we’re here.”3
Sitzes and McCain went to church together at the First Baptist Church of Hope, a prominent congregation with impressive facilities and a faith-building youth program. Sitzes remembers mission trips, choir tours, and a strong discipleship program. He also remembers getting jabbed by the kind of Baptists Huckabee went to church with: “Southern Baptists aren’t true Baptists!” In contrast, FBC offered a less strident version of Christianity.
Though Huckabee grew up poor, the McCains were poorer still. Janet’s father abandoned the family when she was a young girl, leaving her mom to raise and support the five children. They were too poor to travel or go on vacations, but Janet does remember a time when they got to go to Six Flags down in Arlington, Texas. “At the grocery store, every time you bought something, you could get entered to win tickets. Someone—we don’t know who—entered my family in the hat. Somehow or other we won, so my mother took all of us. But my mom was so afraid the whole way down, thinking that maybe Six Flags wouldn’t honor the coupons.”4
For much of Janet’s childhood, her mom served as the clerk of Hempstead County, an elected position. So not only did her mom oversee the results of county elections; she also campaigned—though the clerk’s position did not warrant the full-scale electioneering hoopla of other public offices. “As a result of her mom’s job,” Huckabee said, “Janet has always had this real sense that people ought to run for office and they ought to vote. That’s just part of life.”5
He and Janet dated solidly through the spring and summer before college, and then entered Ouachita Baptist College together. “Dating is one more blast,” Huckabee wrote in his RAPture Express article that fall. “And when you find a Christian dating partner that loves Jesus as much as you do, then you’ve really got something. I’m saying it because I know the difference that Christ can make in a dating relationship, and I want you to experience the same happiness that I’ve found in a Jesus-loving mate.”6
Though they were not engaged yet, they were definitely committed. No other guy at OBU had a chance with Janet, because “on campus, you always saw Mike with Janet, hand in hand,” Caldwell said. He remembers Janet initially being “kind of shy in college,” but “she sure broke out of that right away.”7 Janet enrolled in a full load of courses while also playing basketball for her college. Even with all her high school accolades on the basketball court, however, she was not on a scholarship. “They gave out only a few scholarships for the girls program, and I wasn’t on that list.” Her academic plan was to become a physical education teacher, combining her giftedness in athletics with her desire to impact the next generation. “No one knows for sure what I might have done,” she said, “but it’s fun to think about.”8
The couple announced their engagement during Christmas break, intending to marry in May, when school let out for the summer. They were not quite nineteen. Why get married so young? Well, hormones and the affections of the heart will lead any young couple to desire intimacy, but Christian sexual ethics will direct them into lifelong marital commitment—before partaking of the pleasures of marriage. Because of their desire to obey the scripture’s teaching that “your bodies are members of Christ” (1 Cor. 6:15) and the command to “honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:20), Mike and Janet never considered cohabitation. Once, when asked by a reporter to describe his best friend’s marriage, Sitzes offered this golden quote: “Those two folks were virgins when they got married, I can tell you that.”9
For Janet and Mike, it also just made more financial sense to get married. Instead of paying for two dorm rooms, they’d just be paying rent on one apartment. Besides, they were in love, so why wait anyway?
Their wedding ceremony did not take elaborate planning or vast reserves of money; they married in the basement of Janet’s home on May 25, 1974. “I actually officiated the wedding,” Caldwell said. “ ‘Wow, what an honor you were given,’ people say, but I tell them, ‘No, you just don’t know how frugal Mike was. He knew he could get his roommate to do it for free.’ ”10 Sitzes served as best man. Vocal and guitar music came from a friend, Garry Hamvey, and Janet’s sister Patty House. According to the Hope Star, “The bride carried an old fashioned bouquet of white glamellia atop a silver-bound Bible from the Holy Land, a gift of the groom.”11
Years later, Huckabee wrote about how couples invest so much time and money into preparing for a wedding that lasts only minutes but spend next to no time preparing for the lifetime commitment of marriage.12 Nobody can accuse Huckabee of preaching one thing after doing something different himself. In addition to the ring, the most expensive cost for Huckabee was the tuxedo. Sitzes remembers going with Huckabee to pick out the suit. “That was his doing—that baby blue thing,” Sitzes said. “I had nothing to do with that suit. But, I’m sentimental enough that I still have the bow tie I wore. Maybe I’ll sell it on eBay if Mike becomes the president.”13
The newlyweds returned to Arkadelphia for Huckabee’s sophomore year of college, setting up house in an off-campus apartment. “When we got married we were flat broke,” he recalled. “Our first place we lived in was a forty-dollar-a-month duplex that was grossly overpriced at forty dollars per month.”14 Janet ceased her own studies in order to work, though two decades later she finished her degree at age forty-seven, completing it while raising a family and running for secretary of state of Arkansas. But in 1974, the newlyweds focused on frugality and living on love.
Meanwhile, a few hundred miles to the north, two Yale Law School graduates—Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham—moved in together and became faculty members at the University of Arkansas–Fayetteville. They wedded the following year, though not before Rodham struggled to decide whether marrying Clinton would enhance or destroy her own career potential. “I chose to follow my heart instead of my head,” she would later explain.15
In the Huckabees’ first year of marriage, Janet underwent medical tests for a slipped disk in her back—or so they thought. The diagnosis shocked them: cancer. Worse, the location of the malignant tumor, on her spine, meant that its surgical removal ran the risk of leaving Janet permanently paralyzed. And the postoperative radiation therapy could render her infertile.16 Finally, the bills for all these procedures would most likely weigh the young couple down under a mountain of debt.
“If we are a member of the human family, we will face extraordinary trials and testing,” Huckabee later wrote. “The only way a boat can be tested is to be placed in the water. The only way a rope can be tested is to be pulled.”17 The Huckabees were being tested early.
Friends and family gave support. Also, Huckabee recalled the ministry of “a bivocational pastor who had never even completed high school who put his arm on my shoulder and offered an understanding and comfort that surpassed any supe
rficial platitudes or ‘preacherisms.’ He wept with me. He hurt with me. He didn’t explain anything and he didn’t try to interpret anything. His unconditional love didn’t earn him any ‘hours’ of credit, but if it had, the grade would have been A+.”18
In October 1975, doctors in Little Rock removed the tumor without injuring Janet’s spine. Next it was time for radiation. Huckabee got up early in the mornings to drive Janet to Little Rock for her treatments before returning to Arkadelphia for classes and work—and still managed to shave three semesters off his baccalaureate degree, while graduating with highest honors, pastoring a church, and working as a DJ. And they were both just twenty.
Janet will joke and say, “If Mike was ever going to leave me, that was his prime opportunity.”19 But there was no chance of that. As Dorsey used to tell his son, “A poor man doesn’t have much, but at least he has his word.” Janet’s father may have abandoned his family, but after those early days together, Janet knew that she and Mike could make it through anything.
“They kept their faith and marriage, and found victory through all those trials,” Caldwell said. “They maintained their character and their winsome attitude toward life. Mike and Janet just kept moving.”20
CHAPTER 15
BORN TO RUN
January 1975–May 1976
When I finished college, it didn’t occur to me to do anything else. I thought, I’m out of school; let’s go. Let’s get to seminary.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
IN OCTOBER 1975, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN APPEARED ON THE covers of both Newsweek and Time—the “Boss” had arrived. It was Elvis Presley’s 1957 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that had launched the musical ambitions of Springsteen, then seven years old. By the late 1960s, he played at clubs and throughout his native New Jersey. A couple of albums in the early 1970s established his critical acclaim, although the commercial appeal was not yet there. In the spring of 1974, a reviewer wrote, “I saw rock and roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”1