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By Root 1786 0

twenty-seven. In his own AA self-portrait composed during his initial prosecution for bank fraud in 1990 (he penned the essay under the pseudonym “Bert,” his middle name inherited from his favorite uncle), McDougal would describe a young man who had started drinking at age fifteen. “The very first time I tried alcohol,” he wrote, “I drank until I went into a mental black-out.” By the time he was twenty-one, by his own account, he was “a chronic severe alcoholic who had flunked out of four universities and been hospitalized repeatedly for treatment of alcoholism.” By the age of twenty-four, now working in Washington, “the combination of pills and whiskey had rendered me unable to hold that or any other job.” For three years, “I was drunk daily, or in a treatment program sobering up so I could drink some more.” On his twenty-seventh birthday, McDougal was released from hospital care for the eighth time. It was then that he decided to supplement his intake of whiskey and vodka with a dose of Bible study and religion. After a three-week drinking binge, during which he became emaciated and broke, McDougal finally hit a brick wall. “Unshaven, dirty, wearing a torn shirt,” Jim McDougal wrote of himself, “I went to see an attorney friend and asked him to get me permanently committed to the state mental institution, so that I could stop hurting myself and all the people I loved.” That friend immediately sent McDougal to Alcoholics Anonymous. Here, McDougal turned himself around. By 1968, he had secured a job in Senator J. William Fulbright’s office, where he thrived as a senior aide to the distinguished senator from Arkansas.

Eventually, McDougal was running Fulbright’s Little Rock office. When Fulbright unexpectedly lost his reelection bid to Dale Bumpers in 1974, McDougal fell into a funk; yet, he rebounded quickly, finding a new vocation—dabbling in real estate. He also taught in the political science department at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia (even though he had not yet finished his own bachelor’s or master’s degrees) at the invitation of the department chairman—Bob Riley—the man who brought him together with Bill Clinton.

Riley was revered all over Arkansas for his integrity and grit. This decorated war hero wore a trademark black patch over his left eye, covering an empty socket that he had earned during the assault on Guam in World War II after he had thrown himself on a gun turret to protect his fellow marines. Still partially blind, Riley had surmounted a life’s worth of obstacles. He not only ran the political science department at this Baptist university—just across the football field from his home—but was also elected lieutenant governor in the early 1970s and then served a brief stint as acting governor in 1975, hiring McDougal as his executive secretary. Riley and his wife, Claudia, took McDougal under their wing and assured him that he could turn his own life around if he willed himself to do it.

In the summer of 1975, at age thirty-five, McDougal was ready to do that. Walking across the tiny Ouachita campus, he spotted a young student who was doing secretarial work in the political science department, and invited her to lunch. Susan Henley, a Latin scholarship student from the paper mill town of Camden, just south of Arkadelphia, was flattered by the interest. Even then, Susan was struck by the eccentric, charming qualities of this Southern gentleman fifteen years her senior. She remembered that he wore expensive Bally shoes. “I don’t think they even sold Bally shoes in Arkansas at that time,” she recalled. She also noted that the shoes had holes in the bottom. Jim McDougal would at times appear wearing a Ralph Lauren suit, “but it would have a torn lapel or something.” Susan explained with a distant smile, “And it interested me that a mind that would love these beautiful things but then would not care so much to keep it perfect. And, again, it was sort of like Jim, sort of the way he was.”

The Jim McDougal who courted the young coed was tall and thin, with a birdlike face that looked almost comical.