Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 29, 1993 TAG: 9303290006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID VON DREHLE THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's not simply that the nation has an Arkansan president, and the president has an Arkansan chief of staff, and the Arkansan in charge of White House personnel is busy installing Arkansans in agencies across the federal government.
No, it's much deeper than that. They're everywhere: Atop the nation's largest retailer and perhaps its hottest department store chain. Commanding a big chunk of prime time television. Controlling a huge interstate transport network. Wielding America's largest family fortune. Reigning, as owner and coach of the Super Bowl champions, over the National Football League.
Across the land, prizes of the American establishment lie crushed under the hooves of the rampaging razorbacks like sclerotic Russian dukes trampled by Bolsheviks. The very temple of golf, Augusta National, is now under Arkansan command.
"We are the new Trilateral Commission," said Bill Burton, a Washington lawyer from the Arkansas part of Texarkana. He was referring to a club of the super-powerful that is sometimes accused of covertly controlling the world.
Go ahead: Gasp with surprise. Arkansas has not, traditionally, gleamed with great promise in the public mind. Before President Clinton came along with his aw-shucks smile and raspy drawl, America's best-known Arkansan may well have been the cartoon hillbilly L'il Abner.
"If you talk to the average Arkansan, there's a little bit of defensive humor," said Burton. "Recently, I heard someone refer to `Arkansas culture' and I had to stop myself from saying, `There's an oxymoron.' When George Bush attacked Arkansas, he was just putting into words what a lot of people have thought."
All that must change now.
The most powerful man in the world, understand, is not simply an Arkansan. He is a fiercely proud and deeply loyal Arkansan. Old friends remember Clinton as a student at the elite Yale Law School, boasting of the size of the watermelons in his hometown. Some 20 years later, he now is filling the government with his trusted friends.
There's the First Lady, who was reared in Chicago but calls Arkansas home. White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty hails from the leading family in a place called Hope. Little Rock's Bruce Lindsey controls executive branch patronage from his post as director of the White House personnel office.
Arkansan Nancy Hernreich keeps the president's calendar, and Arkansan David Watkins is in charge of White House administration. Also at the White House: Carol Rasco, domestic policy adviser; Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel; Bill Kennedy, another Little Rocker in the counsel's office; Mark Middleton, McLarty's right hand.
And Arkansans are gradually being deployed at high levels in the agencies, where many career bureaucrats suspect that their main purpose is to be the president's moles. There's Webster L. Hubbell, longtime law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the Justice Department. Bob Nash and Miles Goggans at the Department of Agriculture. Herschel Gober at Veterans Affairs. Mike Gaulding at the Department of Energy. James Lee Witt at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Joycelyn Elders, the surgeon general-designee.
"Don't worry about leaving Arkansas," Clinton's old friend Skip Rutherford told the president-elect last fall. "From what I understand, the whole state's going with you."
Suddenly, it's chic to be Arkansan. Job seekers are going to absurd lengths to claim Arkansas roots.
Clinton is the acme of the amazing Arkansas ascent, the fruit of an impressive lineage of deft politicians going back to former Sens. John McClellan and J.W. Fulbright and the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills.
But many people feel the true foundation of the Arkansas conquest was a Bentonville drug store owner named Sam Walton. The late Mr. Sam built a chain of stores called Wal-Mart, which changed the face of small-town America, toppled Sears as the nation's biggest retailer and made Walton's heirs the richest family in the country.
"I think Sam Walton really showed all us Arkansans that we could be the best," said Walter Hussman, owner of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. "I'm sure a lot of Sam rubbed off on the Dillards."
The Dillards are the the family owners of a department store chain busy gobbling up its weaker counterparts in towns and cities from coast to coast. Grand old names like Gimble's and Macy's are dead or gasping, but Dillard's is lean, fit and muscular.
Where else are the Arkansans? Dominating the booming chicken business. No mere colonel commands the poultry game anymore. Arkansan Don Tyson is the chicken king. His $4 billion company does as much business as its three biggest competitors combined. Arkansas is also a dessert power, thanks to TCBY, the country's biggest chain of frozen yogurt stores. And a transport power, thanks to Johnnie Bryan Hunt's cutting-edge trucking empire.
In television, the sitcoms of Arkansan Harry Thomason and his nearly Arkansan wife Linda Bloodworth-Thomason have the run of the airwaves for a full 90 minutes of network prime time every week - more than Roseanne Arnold; her husband, Tom; and Bill Cosby put together.
And football. As owner and coach of the Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys, Arkansans Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson rule over the NFL. Even golf, that last refuge of the ancien regime: Little Rock investor Jack Stephens now presides over Augusta National, home of the Masters.
"Folks may have known all these individuals, but they never added it all up," said Rutherford of the Arkansas conquest. "The Clintons are the adding machine."
One could argue this sort of thing has happened before. Recall, for example, when Ronald Reagan came to Washington with his band of Californians. Their arrival culminated a period in which the Golden State was regnant in realms from wine to microelectronics. There was even an avocado craze.
Lyndon B. Johnson's Texas arose, dripping oil money and flaunting astronauts. Earlier still, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New York lorded it over the country in any number of ways: skyscrapers, high society, Babe Ruth.
But those are Big States. This is little ol' Arkansas.
It's hard to say precisely how they've managed it. Some theorize that Arkansas' perceived weaknesses are actually strengths. In a small state of unpretentious people, the theory goes, good ideas and hard work get rewarded. A person doesn't need to belong to the right country club to get a chance.
Others note the way Arkansans stick together. Key financing for Wal-Mart, Dillard's, Tyson and others came from Stephens and his late brother Whit, who built one of America's most important off-Wall Street investment houses in sleepy Little Rock. Wal-Mart's trade, in turn, helped Hunt build his trucking empire. Nearly everybody pitched in for the Clinton campaign.
Then there's the L'il Abner in them. Foes make the mistake of thinking these people are hillbillies, according to Hussman. Some keep thinking it, right up to the moment they get their brains beat out.
"I think people from the bigger cities tend to underestimate Arkansans because they think we're hicks," Hussman said. "I was saying back in July that George Bush was terribly underestimating Clinton."
by CNB