Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [28]
Hospital records would later confirm that McDougal began coming unglued just as Bill Clinton’s career in politics began soaring. Clinton was sworn in as governor in January 1979, beginning a string of electoral victories that would make him the longest-tenured chief executive in Arkansas history. Already, the Whitewater project was beginning to sink into a pool of red ink, although McDougal hid this fact from his fellow investors. To take his mind off the distressing state of his business affairs, McDougal accepted a position in Governor Clinton’s administration as an “economic advisor,” with a fancy title, an office in the capitol, but little pay.
The day Jim walked into the house and announced that he was going to work at the governor’s office was the moment Susan realized that her husband suffered from psychological problems far more serious than impulsiveness. Nearly a thousand people had purchased lots in their real estate ventures. People were “sending in their payments” and deadlines had to be met; “I mean, it was a legal business, it was an accounting business, it was a development business.” Despite the precarious state of his business operations that seemed to be blinking “danger!” in all directions, Jim dropped everything and went off to work in the capitol, leaving his wife to sort out the mess. Susan recalled: “I mean, if a man ever did not need to go to work at the governor’s office for almost no money and spend all of his time there when he had all this stuff going on and we had no staff, it was Jim McDougal.”
As Susan lay crying in bed, Jim’s response was simply “Don’t worry, baby.” He added, “I’ll always just be a phone call away.”
Jim soon began coming home and chastising his wife for being such a “downer.” Susan finally decided “what the hell,” throwing her own business cares to the wind. She got out of bed, “got dressed and started having fun,” dressing provocatively and looking the part of the young in-crowd that had taken over the governor’s office in Little Rock, typing correspondence for Jim and joining the orbit of those surrounding the young, handsome governor. Recalled Susan: “And we let the business go to hell, and that was the first manic phase. And everything went to hell pretty quickly. And then we bought the Bank of Kingston on top of that.”
No matter how topsy-turvy his life, Jim McDougal was always on the lookout for new conquests. As he and Susan were driving up Highway 23 to a Razorbacks football game in Fayetteville one dazzling fall weekend, Jim spotted an old bank for sale in Madison County. Instantly, he decided that a new business opportunity was beckoning him. Jim told Susan, “Poor people never get loans.” He waxed philosophical: “Money is controlled by people who never want to lend money to poor people. They only lend money to other rich people. So we can make a difference by getting this bank and loaning [money] to people with good ideas, and, you know, people who ordinarily are left out of the flow of things.” McDougal saw this old brick bank in Kingston as the realization of a lifelong dream. In his early twenties, he had made a failed effort to organize a bank in his hometown of Bradford, as a sort of “people’s movement.” Governor Orval Faubus had stood in the way of this enterprise. Now McDougal’s moment had arrived.
Already tired of the tedious work in the governor’s office and of Hillary Rodham’s “controlling” style whenever she appeared on the scene, McDougal ditched his job in the state capitol. He purchased 42 percent of the stock of the Kingston bank, becoming chairman of the board and renaming the seventy-year-old institution Madison Bank and Trust Co. of Kingston in honor of America’s fourth president, James Madison, because he, like McDougal himself, was a “man of the people.” Political rising star Jim Guy Tucker and former Senator Fulbright each invested a small piece of the $700,000 purchase price.