Two partnerships

There is word from Fayetteville of a new partnership. One half is the head football coach. The other half is the former head football coach. We’ll see how that works out. In the meantime, some recollections of another partnership, kind of; and a little Arkansas history.

Henry Kissinger, of whom you have heard and who died a few days ago at ag 100, is known to have visited Arkansas but once. It occurred in the spring of 1974, and it lasted about 90 minutes, as I recall. It was billed as a spontaneous drop-in, a briefing for the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright. Surely the two men discussed foreign affairs during their quick, closed-door huddle. But in reality Kissinger’s stopover was a political rescue mission.

The Arkansan was in the toughest political battle of his career; actually, the first and only true contest, though later it would be confirmed as a battle over before it began. In the 1950s Fulbright’s opposition to the rampages of the red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was thought to have left him vulnerable. Likewise, in the 1960s, his dissent from the Vietnam policies of his old (by then former) friend Lyndon Johnson. Across those years Fulbright won re-election three times, sometimes capturing two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote and racking up November margins (85 percent, in 1956) against token Republican opponents.

But 1974 was different. While Richard Nixon had easily won the state and the nation two years earlier, the Republican ascendency in Arkansas was barely in the fetal stage, and its control of the state’s politics at most every level was decades distant. More importantly, Nixon was now mired in the muck of the Watergate scandal and his departure from the White House by either impeachment or resignation was no longer unthinkable. The Washington establishment was in disrepute. That Arkansas’ senior U.S. senator, the veteran John McClellan, had barely escaped a runoff primary in 1972 was not lost on Dale L. Bumpers.

Nearing the end of the then-customary two two-year terms as governor, Bumpers considered seeking a third but was weary of executive responsibilities and saw greater potential for himself in Washington. Polling confirmed what anecdotal sampling had strongly suggested: After two years in the U.S. House and 30 in the Senate, Fulbright was, yes, a household name, a figure admired around the world, a source of pride for his home state — and a sitting duck.

Despite career-long votes in support of agriculture and economic development, and notwithstanding his votes against most civil rights legislation, Fulbright was perceived as too concerned with foreign policy, too detached from Arkansas’ concerns, from lunch bucket issues. Too establishment. Every poll reported the senator trailing the enormously popular Bumpers by roughly the margins he, Fulbright, had scored in the past.

The incumbent’s advisers saw no alternative but to grab the bull by the horns, to double down on his image as international statesman. So Fulbright’s television commercials emphasized his opposition to an unpopular war, his global prominence and his inclusion on Nixon’s bizarre “enemies list.”

Over lunch one day, a Fulbright aide looked teasingly at a reporter (this one) and wondered what the reaction would be if Henry Kissinger, the celebrity secretary of state, came to Arkansas. Sure enough, a couple months later, there was a flash announcement from Fulbright’s office: Kissinger, en route back to Washington from some diplomatic mission, was stopping off at Little Rock to “brief” and “consult” with the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

And there he was, Kissinger, about as famous as the president who appointed him, stepping from an Air Force executive jet and disappearing into a conference room with the senator with whom he had become friends (some say he had seduced Fulbright, playing to the latter’s vanity) and whose career he plainly was attempting to rescue. When I reported that Kissinger’s visit was anything but a surprise, that a Fulbright assistant had essentially predicted it, the senator was not upset but his team was furious and cut me off for a few days.

Within weeks, Arkansas voters, not furious but ready for a change, ended Fulbright’s tenure: Bumpers swamped him in the Democratic primary two-to-one. More frustrating to Fulbright than his defeat at the polls, wrote Daniel Yergin in the New York Times Magazine later that year, was the fact that at long last he had, in Kissinger, a secretary of state whose views were substantially in accord with his.

“He’s the ablest Secretary of State I’ve had contact with,” Fulbright told Yergin.

Fulbright, who remained in Washington as an eminence grise after departing the Senate, would continue his relationship with Kissinger, each enjoying the prestige of the other.

Now, about Bobby Petrino and Sam Pittman …