his wife, Margaret, had eight children. They
Michael Jackson paintings,wanted the kids to have their land. There was an old cemetery on it where people born in the 1700s were buried. Whenever anyone died destitute and alone in the county, Hilary paid for the burial in his cemetery. I supported protecting the river, but I thought the government should have let the old homesteaders keep their land under a scenic easement, which would have precluded any development or environmental degradation but
Decorative painting,allowed families to pass the land on from generation to generation. When I became President, my experience with the folks on the Buffalo gave me a better understanding than most Democrats of the resentments a lot of western ranchers had when environmental considerations clashed with what they saw as their prerogatives.Hilary Jones finally lost his fight with the government. It took a lot out of him, but it never killed his passion for politics; he moved into a new house and carried on. He spent a memorable night with Hillary and me in the White House. He almost
Group painting, cried when Hillary took him into the map room to show him the war map FDR was using when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1945. He worshipped FDR. Unlike Bo Forney, he spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. When he visited us in the White House, I kidded him about sleeping in Lincoln’s bed, which Bo Forney had turned down. Hilary said at least he had “slept on the side of the bed that was under Andrew Jackson’s picture.”From the day I met him until the day I flew home from the White House to speak at his funeral, Hilary Jones was my man in Newton County. He embodied the wild, beautiful spirit of a special place I had loved since I first saw it at sixteen.The county seat, Jasper, was a town of fewer than four hundred people. There were two cafés, one frequented by Republicans, the other
Abstract oil painting, by Democrats. The man I wanted to see, Walter Brasel, lived beneath the Democratic café, which his wife ran. I got there on a Sunday morning and he was still in bed. As I sat in the little living room, he got up and began to put his pants on with the door from the living room to the bedroom open. He wasn’t fully awake, slipped, and was rotund enough to literally roll over a couple of times until he was ten or fifteen feet out into the living room. I wanted his support, so I couldn’t laugh. But he did. He said he’d once been young, thin, and fast, the starting guard on the Coal Hill High School basketball team, which he had led to the state championship over Little Rock Central High in the 1930s; he’d gained all his weight in the years when he was the county bootlegger, and never lost it. After a while, he said he’d be for me, maybe just so he could go back to bed.Next, I drove out into the country to see Bill Fowler, who had a farm in Boxley. Bill had served as the Arkansas representative in the
Impressionism oil painting, Agricultural Soil and Conservation Service in the Johnson administration. As we stood on a hillside with a spectacular view of the mountains, he said he would support me, but he didn’t think Hammerschmidt would “have enough of Nixon’s crap on him to stink by election day.” He then offered this assessment of the President: “I hate to say this about a Republican, but Nixon could have been a wonderful President. He’s brilliant and he’s got a sackful of guts. But he’s just sorry, and he can’t help it.” I thought about what he said all the way back to Fayetteville.During the early weeks of the campaign, besides the retail politics I tried to work through the mechanics. As I’ve mentioned, Uncle Raymond and Gabe Crawford co-signed a note for $10,000 to get me started, and I began to raise money, at first mostly in the Fayetteville area, then across the district and eventually throughout the state. Several of my friends from Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale and the McGovern and Duffey campaigns sent small checks. My largest contributor was my friend Anne Bartley, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s158
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