On Labor Day, the traditional opening of the general election campaign, I went to Harry Truman・s hometown of Independence, Missouri, to rally working people to our cause. Truman・s outspo ...

On July 11, Hillary, Chelsea, and I flew to New York for the Democratic convention. We had had a good five weeks, while Bush and Perot fought with each other. For the first time, some polls showed me ...

TWENTY-SEVEN In politics, there・s nothing quite like a New York election. First, there are three geographically and psychologically distinct regions of the state: New York City with its five v ...

The principles and proposals I advocated could hardly be called Republican-lite or lacking in conviction. Instead, they helped to modernize the Democratic Party and later would be adopted by resurgent ...

I wound up the speech by citing the lesson I had learned in Professor Carroll Quigley・s Western Civilization class more than twenty-five years earlier, that the future can be better than the pa ...

TWENTY-FIVE While I was trying to decide whether to run again, the governor・s race was shaping up to be a real donnybrook, whether I ran or not. Years of pent-up ambitions were being unleashed ...

That night, I was introduced and walked out to strong music. As I began to speak, the lights were dimmed. It was all downhill after that. I wasn・t through three sentences before the lights came ...

I was excited with these new responsibilities. I was both a political animal and a policy wonk, always eager to meet new people and explore new ideas. I thought the work would enable me to be a better ...

At the end of the year, our family accepted an invitation from Phil and Linda Lader to attend their New Year・s weekend gathering in Hilton Head, South Carolina, called Renaissance Weekend. The ...

TWENTY-THREE On January 11, 1983, I took the oath of office for the second time, before the largest crowd ever to attend an inauguration in our state. The celebrants had brought me back from the poli ...

I resolved to stay away from public speaking for several months, with one exception. In February, I drove to Brinkley, about an hour east of Little Rock on the interstate, to speak at the Lions Club b ...

On May 7, the White House notified me that Fort Chaffee would be used to resettle some of the Cubans. I urged the White House to take strong security precautions and made a statement to the press sayi ...

TWENTY-ONE We started planning for my first term after the primary election in May and really got going after November, converting the headquarters into a transition office. Rudy Moore and Steve Smit ...

TWENTY For the last couple of months of 1976, I commuted to Little Rock to prepare for my new job. Paul Berry got me some office space on the eighteenth floor of the Union Bank building, where he wor ...

NINETEEN In January 1975, I went back to my teaching, the only full year I did it uninterrupted by politics. In the spring term, I taught Antitrust and held a seminar in White-Collar Crime; in summer ...

A few weeks later, I・d be tested like that again. I was in Clarksville in the Arkansas River valley with my twenty-two-year-old county leader, Ron Taylor, who was from a prominent political fam ...

The house did have a couple of drawbacks. Mice visited every night. When I realized I couldn・t get rid of them and they kept to themselves in the kitchen, I started leaving them bread crumbs. T ...

Apart from the Prize Trial, I poured my competitive instincts into the McGovern campaign. Early in the year, I cleaned out my bank account to open a headquarters near the campus. I had enough money, a ...

SEVENTEEN In July, I went to work in Washington for Project Pursestrings, a citizens・ lobby for the McGovern-Hatfield amendment, which called for a cutoff of funding for the Vietnam War by the ...

The day I flew out, our local paper carried the front-page news that Army Lieutenant Mike Thomas, who had defeated me for student council president in junior high school, had been killed in Vietnam. M ...