by Ed Bethune
As it turned out, the tape incident worked to my advantage, primarily because it was fair to make Brandon explain what I thought were contradictory statements about a number of issues. It also signaled to my supporters that I was willing to fight and speak out on hot issues of importance to them. A burst of publicity that gets voters to arguing about the candidates is usually a good thing for the underdog. The story was front-page news and the intense coverage helped me to victory.
Good television ads are a rarity in politics, but Mangan, Rains, and Ginnaven made one in the last month of the campaign that set our people on fire. Lana and I were sitting with our kids at our kitchen table and I looked up into the camera and said, “I’m Ed Bethune and it was right here at this kitchen table that my family and I decided—we’ll run for Congress.” Then after touching on a couple of issues I ended the TV spot saying, “You see, I’m a strong believer in the family, and God, apple pie, and the American flag. If you feel as I do then I’d like to represent you in Congress.” The ad struck a nerve. Within minutes of its first appearance on TV, the workers in our campaign headquarters received hundreds of calls from people wanting to help us win. The ad also set off a flurry of helpful parodies. One supporter produced a batch of apple pie lapel pins. The ad and the parodies branded our campaign, in a good way.
Provincialism is a key factor in political campaigning. Lana and I developed a rule right after I announced that if we engaged in a conversation with a voter that lasted more than fifteen seconds, we would say, “Lana and I (or Ed and I) grew up and went to school in Little Rock.” We committed ourselves to say those words regardless of what the other person wanted to discuss. By working those words into every conversation, we would constantly build the case that we had roots in Pulaski County, Doug Brandon’s home and the largest county in the district. During the last week of the campaign, we ran a television ad that showed us, hand in hand, walking toward the camera with Little Rock Central High School in the background. I said, “Hi, I’m Ed Bethune. You know, Lana and I grew up and went to school in Little Rock, and I am concerned about what is happening in our country. If you feel as I do, then I’d like to represent you in Congress.”
In the last three days of the campaign, people began to say, “Hey Ed, you are going to carry Pulaski County—you and Lana grew up and went to school in Little Rock.” There is nothing to match the power of advertising and a disciplined message.
We won. We received 65,288 votes (51.2 %) to Brandon’s 62,140 (48.8 %). We won only three of the nine counties in the district, but our margins in Pulaski, White, and Cleburne counties were sufficient to provide a 3,148-vote win over Brandon.
I always say “we” won the race for Congress because I would never have won had it not been for Lana, everybody knows that. She is the best politician I ever met and she never meets a stranger. On top of that, she is a tireless campaigner and a good fundraiser.
Every campaign produces vignettes worth repeating. Early on, I made a promise that I would campaign in every corner of the Second District. Therefore, two weeks before the general election, I drove into Prim, Arkansas, the northernmost community of Cleburne County. There was not much there, just a crossroads and an old country store. I saw only one person, an old gentleman in his eighties. I had been going strong for almost eight months, and on that day I was particularly tired. I told the old man that I would really appreciate his vote. He studied me carefully and then allowed as how he would vote for me. I was glad to hear that, but then he said, “Now, young feller, when are you going to get started?” Two weeks to the election and I was unknown in Prim, not a good sign.
On election night, we used our headquarters for our watch party. We could not afford to rent a hotel meeting room, but it did not matter. When the pundits began to report that we had won the seat our supporters were jubilant. They had worked hard and we had made history. I was the first Republican to win election in the Second District in 104 years (and the last until 2010 when Tim Griffin won the seat).
I expected to see my photograph on the front page of the statewide newspapers, but the Arkansas Democrat sent a photographer to Mount Holly Cemetery to take a picture of the tombstone of the last man to hold the Second District seat as a Republican, in 1874. That picture, not mine, was on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat the day after I won the seat.
Our friends in Searcy arranged a welcome home rally at the White County Courthouse for the day after we won. Lana, Sam, Paige, and I headed for Searcy in the campaign car, and just as we got on the north side of Beebe, we ran out of gas. Within minutes, a man in a truck recognized us, stopped and took me to get a can of gas. We were about forty-five minutes late for the rally, but I had a great opening line, “We apologize for running late. Many people said our campaign would run out of gas, and it did. Fortunately, it was after the election and not before!”
My opponent, Doug Brandon, was so certain of victory that he had already been to Washington to look for housing. Our upset victory caused him to collapse at his headquarters the morning after Election Day. He was in the hospital for two days. He was exhausted, shocked, and depressed.
Doug was one of the first people to visit me in Washington after I took the oath of office. We were friends before and after the election. I think it said a lot about Doug that he was willing to lay aside the campaign rhetoric, the disappointment of defeat and make the effort to come calling. He died a few years later of cancer.
20
POST ELECTION FUNK, THANKS ABE
Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.
Christian Nestell Bovee
After winning you would think I would have been euphoric, and I was, at least for a day. I fielded calls from well-wishers, happy supporters, and colleagues-to-be. Within twenty-four hours of winning, we filled three big cardboard boxes with résumés from job seekers. It was an amazing swirl of events, but then a curious thing happened to me.
I became anxious. I realized I knew very little about how Congress works, much less how I would approach my new and awesome responsibilities. I was like the dog that caught the streetcar.
I went into an unexplainable funk, not the depressive kind that I was in after I lost to Jim Guy Tucker, but a funk nonethe less. I had reached a new level, but I had no sense of where life was taking me. More importantly, I did not have a clear sense of how I should conduct myself as a congressman for constituents who believed that I should take care of them. That thought was anathema to a disciple of the Vermilye worldview.
On the third day after winning, my funk intensified to the point where I told Lana I had to get away. I needed to be by myself. I needed to get my head together. When I was a little boy, suffering from one funk or another, I would hustle off to my thinking spot in Mama Lewallen’s hotel lobby to settle myself. There, I could enter the scene depicted in the lithograph, Custer’s Last Stand, rub the stuffed bobcat with the nick in its ear, and dream the endless dreams triggered by the pages of my Johnson Smith & Co. Catalog. I needed such a place, but Mama Lewallen was dead, and my childhood thinking spot was gone. Where could a grown man go to do some serious thinking?
I packed a small bag, got in my car and headed to Pocahontas, the site of my teenage salvation. I am not sure what I expected to find there, but along the way, I impulsively decided not to stop in Pocahontas. Drawn by a mysterious force I headed north to Springfield, Illinois to consider the life of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln memorials in Springfield, New Salem, and Sangamon County would be my thinking spots. There I would sort out the odd streams of thought running through my head.
I spent three days in the Land of Lincoln and did not miss a single place of interest. I was not thinking in a religious way, but studying and evaluating the life of Lincoln was the next best thing I could have done. My thinking then was largely secular, but I did notice how Lincoln drew on scripture to explain so many of his actions. I visited his home, his law office, and the state legislature where he served. And I read everything I could find ab
out the one term he served in the United States House of Representatives. Lincoln opposed the Mexican-American War when he was in the House. His stand was unpopular with his constituents and spoiled any chance he might have had to serve a second term. In the end, I decided that I should not worry about public opinion or try to figure out what might be popular with the people of the Second District of Arkansas. I would model myself after Lincoln. I would go to Congress, vote the way my heart and head told me to, and let the chips fall where they might. My time in Illinois was time well spent.
On the long drive home I began to look back. My Lincoln time was about looking forward and resolving how I should act as a congressman. My look back, on the other hand, led me to the inescapable conclusion that my strong will—the Vermilye worldview—was not the only thing at work in my life. Willpower is important and man cannot succeed in life without goals and a high degree of determination and perseverance, but man needs more than willpower and independence. Man needs faith in a higher power.
I was filling my need for something more through Lana. Simply put, I was leaning on her. I was getting the benefit of her way of thinking without giving up my own independence. We were a good team, but my reliance on her allowed me to paper over a fundamental issue. My Vermilye creed fostered self-centeredness and its natural corollary, worry. Anxiety is the flipside of the self-centered man because he focuses on life experiences and worldly things. He sees everything as being within his control or will. If things are not working out as planned, a self-centered man will be disappointed, anxious, and frequently angry. I was a better man for having Lana to lean on, but I was still a top-notch worrywart.
For me, life continued to be an ongoing struggle against any force I might encounter on the road to success. Lana had a leavening effect, but I could not find the inner joy that she and other Christians seemed to have. My mother and my father did not go to church, but in my youth my sister and I started going to Winfield Methodist Church. A few of our friends went there, and Winfield was the place of our baptism. When the Sunday school teachers talked about Heaven and the joy of being a Christian, I was sure there was a way for me to get there if I but had the will to live a good life and do a lot of good works.
21
CONGRESSMAN BETHUNE
One of the standing jokes of Congress is that the new
Congressman always spends the first week wondering
how he got there and the rest of the time
wondering how the other members got there.
Anonymous
Just before we moved to Washington, the public relations firm that handled all our advertising held a private celebration for us. Our television ads always ended with a picture of my signature writing itself in white on a blue field as Bob Ginnaven said in his double-bass voice, “Bethune! And, you’ve got it in writing!” As a memento of our victorious campaign, the firm gave me a bronze replica of our campaign bumper sticker. It was in script with the words “Ed Bethune for Congress.” We all had a good laugh, then Bob Ginnaven pulled out a second bronze plaque that said, “Lana Bethune for Congress.” We cracked up. Everyone in the room knew the indispensable role that Lana had played in our winning campaign.
We bought a house on 37th Street in Arlington, Virginia and arranged to rent our home in Searcy. Our new house was close to Yorktown High School, the school we wanted our kids to attend. We shipped our belongings from our house in Searcy, and Lana flew to Washington in late December, 1978, to get the new house ready for the movers.
We had two cars that we wanted to take with us: Lana’s Lincoln Town Car, and my 1974 BMW-2002. Paige was old enough to drive, but Sam was not, so I decided that we would go in tandem. I would drive the Lincoln and Paige would drive the BMW. We left early and everything went according to plan until we got into the hills of eastern Tennessee. Then two things happened that led to an encounter with a Tennessee state trooper. First, the heater in the Lincoln quit working, and it was cold, bitter cold. Second, it got dark, real dark. I was freezing. We had packed all my winter coats in the moving-truck, so I asked Sam to let me wear his Searcy Junior High School letter jacket. The sleeves were too short by four inches and I could not get it zipped up, but I was glad to have it. Because it was so dark, I told Paige to keep the BMW as close behind the Lincoln as she could, so that I would know if she and Sam were to have car trouble. Things went well for a couple of hours. I was smoking cigars at the time and I had a three-day growth of beard. Paige, following my instruction, was right on my tail when we passed the state trooper. He fell in behind us, turned on his lights and pulled Paige over to the side of the road. I saw the lights, so I stopped and went back to the trooper’s car as quickly as I could. It was so cold that the trooper stayed in his car and rolled the window down as I approached. I asked him why he stopped Paige. He said he stopped her because she was following me too closely.
At that moment, the state trooper was looking at a middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes and a three-day growth of beard who had a short cigar stub sticking out of his mouth. I was wearing a kid’s letter jacket that was too small and telling the trooper that I was a newly elected member of Congress from Arkansas. I explained to him that those were my kids in the BMW, and we were on our way to Washington, D. C., and that I had told my daughter to follow me as closely as she could.
The trooper was stunned. He looked at me as if I were crazy, a fully justified point of view considering my appearance. After a pregnant pause, the trooper told us to be on our way. He never even asked for identification. My story was so bizarre the trooper must have decided that it had to be true.
As soon as we moved into our new house, the Washington metropolitan area suffered the biggest snowstorm it had seen in years. The snow was so deep I could not get out of our driveway. It had banked to depths of three feet on our street. I was so eager to start work that I spent two days studying the Rules of the House of Representatives, the only official reading material available to me. I doubt if any other member of Congress has ever done that.
One of the best decisions I made as a congressman-elect was my first decision. I chose my old friend, Jerry Climer, to be my chief of staff. We were two of the Five for the Future candidates in 1972, and even though Jerry had taken a job in the Nixon administration, we had kept in touch through mutual friends. At the time of my election, Jerry was working for Congressman Tom Coleman of Missouri and knew his way around Capitol Hill. I wanted to focus on substantive issues and political matters at home and in Washington, and I wanted to have as much family time as possible. I did not want to deal with administrative or personnel issues, so I turned all that over to Jerry. I gave him the power to hire, fire, and set salaries—including his own. I, of course, retained the right to veto, but I never exercised it. Jerry stayed with me throughout my congressional career, and I never spent a moment worrying about the minutiae of office management.
Jerry’s first recommendation was that I should make an effort to be president of the new class of freshman Republican members. There were thirty-six of us in the new class, and we met for the first time at the Dulles Marriott hotel in early December after the election. Little did we know that the class would produce several congressional chairpersons, a governor, a speaker of the U. S. House, and a vice president of the United States.
In my speech to the new members, I said we Republicans had the right philosophy, but we needed to do a better job of explaining it to the voters. It was not an earthshaking revelation but it struck a chord. I won on the first ballot.
I was quite proud to be president of the freshman class, but Lana upstaged me. The spouses of all the newly elected members of the House—Democrats and Republicans—elected her president of their organization. Since that time, she has been a leader in other spousal groups such as the Congressional Club, and the Republican Congressional Spouses.
On the day of my election to the House of Representatives, two of my law school classmates also won federal offices. Beryl Anthony of El Dorado won t
he Fourth District congressional seat, and David Pryor of Camden won the U. S. Senate seat vacated by his appointee, Kaneaster Hodges, Jr. They also moved their families to Washington, and that proved to be a good thing, particularly for the children who became good friends and spent a lot of time together when we first got to Washington. They did not go to the same schools, but they got together as often as they could.
22
FIRST DAYS, FIRST ISSUES
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to
find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.
John F. Kennedy
On the day that I took the oath of office, my mother was in the gallery alongside Lana, Paige, and Sam. I wish my father could have been there, but I am sure he was beaming as he looked down from Heaven. I sat next to John Paul Hammerschmidt, on the second row from the front, in the seat by the center aisle that divides the House. We took the oath of office and then voted to select the speaker of the House. I voted for John Rhodes of Arizona, our nominee. We only had 176 members in our Republican caucus, so John lost to Tip O’Neil of Massachusetts. It was my first lesson on the importance of party control. The Democrats were in control of the House, and I was a member of the minority party. I could never chair a committee meeting until we, the Republicans, managed to elect at least 218 members out of the 435 members of the House. The Democrats would control the agenda. In the House of Representatives—unlike the Senate—there is no right to filibuster and the Rules Committee can limit the right to offer amendments. That makes it difficult to accomplish anything if you are a member of the minority party.