by Ed Bethune
The Reagan inaugural on January 20, 1981, was something to behold. The pageantry, orchestrated by Reagan’s public relations expert Michael Deaver, set a new standard for presidential inaugurals. The Reagan era was underway, and the new president got off to a fast start. Twenty minutes after he took the oath of office, Iran released fifty-two American hostages into U.S. custody (one was released earlier). They had spent 444 days in captivity.
28
SUPPORTING DEMOCRATS
FOR JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there
is no virtue or truth but on his own side.
Joseph Addison
George Proctor, a Democrat, was United States attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas when President Reagan came to office. Typically, all sitting U. S. attorneys will tender their resignations so that a new president can appoint members of his party to fill the positions.
Republicans in Arkansas expected me to recommend a Republican for the position, and I would have done so but for the fact that I wanted George Proctor to remain as United States attorney. George was a Democratic member of the Arkansas House of Representatives before he became United States attorney so there was no doubt that he was a member of the Democratic party. However, George was a friend and he had served as my deputy prosecuting attorney in Woodruff County in 1970. He was a good man who had done a good job as United States attorney, so I went to bat for him.
The Republican party leaders in Arkansas were furious with me, claiming I was hurting the effort to build the party by refusing to give patronage to loyal Republicans. I answered by saying that partisanship should not determine how we fill positions in our system of justice; we need to choose people based on their qualifications and their commitment to serve honorably without regard to political considerations. I had the high ground and I was determined to stand fast. The personnel people at the White House gave me a lot of static, and they sent Deputy Attorney General Rudy Giuliani over to talk to me. I gave him my line about choosing people based on qualifications, and I could tell he was not going to fight me. President Reagan reappointed George and he served with distinction for several more years.
A similar issue arose later on when Charles Gray sought to carry on as United States marshal for the Eastern District of Arkansas so that he could qualify for retirement benefits. Charles was married to the sister of Dale Bumpers, and many people thought I would oppose Charles because Dale had torpedoed my nomination to be a federal district judge in 1976. I must admit I was tempted to seek revenge, but Charles was a good U. S. marshal and he was a former FBI agent. I supported Charles, and once again, the leaders of the Arkansas Republican party gave me the business. Eventually the noise subsided and my fellow Republicans forgave me for my “odd ideas” about how to staff the justice system. Senator Dale Bumpers came to me later and told me that my support for Charles Gray was “magnanimous” given how he, Dale, had handled my nomination.
29
JACK KEMP, SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMICS
The supply-side claim is not a claim. It is empirically
true and historically convincing that with lower rates of
taxation on labor and capital, the factors of
production, you will get a bigger economy.
Jack Kemp
Jack Kemp was an all-star professional quarterback, and in 1965, he was the Most Valuable Player in the American Football League. He won a seat in Congress in 1972 representing the district in and around Buffalo, New York. I was a fan when he played football, but I did not meet him until I began my campaign for Congress in 1978 when I attended a candidate school sponsored by the National Republican Campaign Committee. Jack came to the candidate school to explain the Kemp-Roth tax cut, and I got my first exposure to supply-side economics. I was impressed with the research Jack had done, particularly his embrace of the Laffer Curve, a new economic theory explaining how marginal tax rates that are too high can depress, rather than increase revenue.
It was obvious to me that Kemp had not spent all his time studying football playbooks. I decided to study what I had learned about the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill.
The more I studied the more I liked it. Dr. Arthur Laffer, who appeared at the candidate school with Jack, maintained there are two points at which the government will collect no revenue:1) when the tax rate is one-hundred percent (no one will work), and 2) when the tax rate is zero percent. There is, obviously, a point on the high-end of the curve when the tax rate will produce diminishing returns for the government. Laffer and Kemp showed how President Kennedy actually increased revenues by reducing marginal tax rates in the early 1960s, and they offered other proof that lower rates generate work, savings, production, and investment. To my way of thinking, it was the quintessential American way to spur economic growth, create jobs, and reduce deficits. I endorsed the Kemp-Roth bill and made it the centerpiece of my 1978 campaign for Congress. I am convinced that Jack’s tax-cutting, pro-growth ideas helped me defeat Doug Brandon, a strong Democrat nominee. As a footnote, the Democrats always belittled the Laffer Curve by making fun of Dr. Laffer’s name. In retrospect, I wish his name had been Wiseman. It should have been.
When I got to Congress Jack and I became close friends. He was easy to like because he was quick to smile and never spoke ill of another man. Many politicians use ad hominem attacks to belittle an opponent, but Jack never did that. He debated substance, not politics or personalities. He had as many friends on the Democrat side of the aisle as he did on the Republican side. His wife, Joanne, befriended Lana as soon as we got to Washington and invited her to attend a weekly Bible study known as Joanne’s Friday Group.
Our friendship with the Kemps lasted beyond the time Jack and I served as colleagues in the House. We had a lot in common with them and always enjoyed their company. It was a sad day for us when Jack got sick with cancer. A few months before his death, Jack’s family started the Jack F. Kemp Institute of Political Economy to establish a public library for his papers and conduct public lectures and conferences promoting his ideas. Just days before his death, I was on a conference call with Jack and he spoke about what the institute meant to him. His voice was faint, raspier than usual, and he could only say a little, but it meant a lot to me to hear him. Jack died on May 2, 2009. His funeral service at the National Cathedral—attended by thousands of friends—was a fitting tribute for the man many of us called The Good Shepherd.
30
THE REAGAN AGENDA
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs,
even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor
souls who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live
in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Expectations were higher than usual when President Reagan and the Ninety-Seventh Congress got down to business. The 1980 election was a much-needed catharsis for the American people. President Carter’s claim in 1979 that the nation was in “malaise,” coupled with a poor economy and the Iranian hostage crisis had everyone down in the dumps. We needed a fresh start and that is the main reason Reagan won such a resounding victory. He made it clear that he intended to take on the Soviet Union, but first he needed to fix the economy. His prescription for that was a good dose of tax and spending cuts. Could he get his program through the Congress? The Republicans had a fifty-three to forty-six seat majority in the Senate but the Democrats still controlled the House of Representatives by a wide margin, 244-191.
When the president gave his first State of the Union speech, he directed a question to Democrats who had already indicated their unwillingness to support his plan for economic recovery. He said, “Have they an alternative? Are they suggesting we can continue on the present course without coming to a day of reckoning?”
As a new member of the House Budget Committee, I was squarely in the middle of the action. Our challenge was to make a budg
et that would hold every Republican vote and get the twenty-seven Democrat votes that we needed to win a vote on the floor of the House. It was a tortuous process, but we were confident that a large number of Southern Democrats, known as Boll Weevils, would vote with us. (Nowadays, those once known as Boll Weevils call themselves “Blue Dogs,” and they are few in number).
We got off to a fast start and momentum was clearly on our side. Then, on March 30, 1981, just two months after the State of the Union address, a deranged young man, John Hinkley, shot President Reagan as he was leaving the Washington Hilton hotel. The president survived the assassination attempt, but the country was at a standstill for several days. It was a close call; the bullet came within a hair of hitting the president’s seventy-year-old heart.
As it turned out, we were right to be confident. President Reagan came back from his near-death experience to campaign vigorously for his economic agenda. We had several strategy meetings with the president to figure out how we could build public support and get the Democrat votes we needed in the House of Representatives. One meeting in the cabinet room of the White House shortly before the vote revealed that we would actually do better if we made our package more conservative, less moderate. That was contrary to the opinions of the chattering class, the so-called sophisticates who write editorials and comments for the liberal media. They were flat wrong. We adjusted our package to make it more conservative. Public support grew and Democrat opposition crumbled. On August 4, 1981, we passed the Gramm-Latta budget and the Kemp-Roth tax cuts. We did not get all we wanted, but we got a lot. Our bill restrained the growth of spending, cut income tax rates by twenty-five percent over three years, slashed estate taxes and business taxes and indexed the rates against inflation. The indexing feature was important because inflation was pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets. We referred to that as “bracket-creep,” an unfair way to increase revenues without passing a bill to increase tax rates.
A final strategy session on the Reagan budget and tax cuts in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Summer, 1981. Clockwise from President Reagan: Del Latta (OH), Tommy Hartnett (SC), Me, Chief of Staff James Baker, OMB Director David Stockman, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, Olympia Snowe (ME), Frank Horton (NY), Bill Frenzel (MN), Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.
A large number of Democrats, several more than we needed, voted with us.
As soon as his economic package was in place, the president redoubled his effort to end the Cold War by defeating Soviet Marxism. He was not satisfied to contain communism. He intended to transcend it by showing it to be an anomaly of history. It was a monumental decision that would bear fruit a decade later when the USSR collapsed, as did the Berlin Wall, in 1989.
Throughout my time in Congress, the Democrats and liberal media attacked our supply side theory, the rationale for the Kemp-Roth tax cuts. They relentlessly claimed that our tax cuts increased the deficit and thus starved the government’s ability to fund social programs. We believed mightily in the power of supply side economics, and I believe history has proven that we were right to make the deep cuts in tax rates. Our plan incentivized work, production, savings, and investment. We knew that there might be increased deficits in the short term, but if such deficits materialized, it would at least keep pressure on the big spenders. It would, we reasoned, be better to live with an increased deficit in the short term than to take money from the American people and give it to the liberals, only to see them spend it.
It takes time for new policies to take effect in an economy as large and complicated as ours, so there was not much we could do when the country slipped into recession in 1982. The jobless rate increased and people began to question “Reaganomics,” the name Democrats gave to the policies we had passed in 1981. Eventually, our tax cutting produced growth and prosperity, but that did not help us in 1982. We wound up losing twenty-six Republican members of the House even though we maintained control of the United States Senate. I had an opponent, Charles George, who hammered me hard all throughout 1982. I was urging my constituents to stay the course and give our policies time to work. But Charles George was running TV commercials saying, “Hang in there say Ed Bethune and the Republicans.” His ridicule of Reaganomics was effective, but not enough to unseat me. I won re-election with fifty-four percent of the vote, a significant drop from my seventy-nine percent win in 1980, but a win nevertheless. The liberal media tried to say I barely won, but I countered by saying, “Why should I be morose? As a Republican, I just won re-election with fifty-four percent of the vote in a heavily Democrat district.” They gave up trying to make light of my victory.
31
RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS
All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
My experience with racial issues in Arkansas during the Rockefeller years, particularly the effort of the Old Guard Democrats to suppress voter turnout in the African American community, led me to support most of the civil rights legislation that came to the House.
In 1979, less than six months after I took the oath of office, I faced a hot issue. The opponents of busing schoolchildren to force the desegregation of public schools were trying to pass a bill proposing an amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would end court-ordered busing. The bill, H.R. 74, was stuck in the Judiciary Committee, held up by those who did not want to end court-ordered busing. The opponents of school busing were urging members to sign a Discharge Petition that would discharge H.R. 74 from the Judiciary Committee and bring it to the House floor for a vote. It takes 218 signatures to effect a discharge, any number less than that will not do the job. Typically, when the number of signatures gets close to 218, the speaker of the House will urge some who have signed the petition to remove their signatures thus frustrating the effort to discharge. The process was changed later to make it more difficult for members to play such games, but in 1979 the names of the signatories were not revealed unless and until the magic number of 218 had been reached.
On June 27, 1979, the opponents of school busing asked me to sign the Discharge Petition for H.R. 74. The opponents had gotten 210 signatures and needed only eight more to get the bill to the House floor. Their plan was for eight members to go simultaneously to the well of the House and sign the petition before the speaker could get some members to take their signatures off the petition. I was not in favor of the bill, but as a member of the minority party, I despised the idea that powerful leaders could bottle up bills they did not like. I was signature number 218. The bill would now come to the floor of the full House.
On July 24, 1979, the House debated H. R. 74. There was an intense lobbying campaign by the opponents of school busing, and I received thousands of letters and phone calls urging me to support the proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution. I voted against H. R. 74, mainly because I abhor the idea of amending the Constitution to fix problems that should be resolved in other ways. Additionally, the poorly worded proposed amendment would have caused more problems than it solved. It took me a year to put out the firestorm in my district. I had excellent reasons to oppose the proposed constitutional amendment, but it was a hard issue to explain. Many of my constituents were sick and tired of court-ordered school busing and they let me know it, using plain language.
In 1981, I made an early commitment to support a twenty-five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act. This was an easy decision for me. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to stop the kind of discrimination that African Americans had experienced in Arkansas under the Old Guard Democrats. During the administration of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller we put an end to the blatant effort to suppress black voter turnout in Arkansas but the problem continued in other states. On June 29, 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed the extension of the Voting Rights Act. The reauthorization made Section 2 of the act permanent. That section of the bill prohibited the violation of voting rights by any practices that discriminated based on race, regardless whether the practices had been adopted wit
h the intent to discriminate or not.
In 1983, a bill to create a Martin Luther King holiday came to the floor of the House of Representatives. The bill was explosively controversial, but I vowed to support it. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and a number of outside groups were attacking the bill arguing that confidential FBI records would show that Dr. King had communist ties. It was a specious claim, but it was politically effective. As a former FBI agent, I countered the contention. A number of news outlets mentioned my work on the bill and The New Republic used the speech I made on the House floor to wrap up a 1986 analysis of how and why the bill passed. Here is a portion of what I said, as it appears in the Congressional Record for August 2, 1983:
Mr. BETHUNE:
Mr. Speaker, as a Republican and as a former FBI agent, I rise in strong support of the Martin Luther King holiday bill.
In the 1960s we in Arkansas rallied around Winthrop Rockefeller. I was a Democrat at the time. I became a Republican because we wanted to break the stranglehold that Orval Faubus and machine politics had on our state for a long time which had suppressed not just black citizens but all citizens in our state, and we Republicans, in the finest tradition of Abraham Lincoln, brought blacks into government, and we Republicans, in the finest tradition of Abraham Lincoln, made changes in the election laws and opened up the political process for blacks in Arkansas.
And do you know what we learned out of all that? The great changes are not made here in the legislative chambers or in the judicial halls. The great changes in this world are made in the hearts and minds of men and women. Attitudes are so important.