Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [30]
Senator Fulbright inquired by letter in early 1982:
Dear Jim:
How is business in Madison County? You may not have noticed, but we are having a depression in Washington. Bill Clinton tells me he is a candidate (again). How do you evaluate the situation?
All the best.
Fulbright added a handwritten postscript: “Give Susan a kiss for me.” Around this time, Jim hatched a plan to rescue his unstable financial empire by buying the Woodruff County Savings & Loan, which sat just across the river from his hometown of Bradford, and doubling his risk. “It’s gone bankrupt,” he told Susan in announcing the availability of the S&L, “and we could buy it for less than what you’d pay for a Buick.” In fact, the purchase price was considerably more than that. Yet McDougal was on a roll. Savings and loan associations had recently been deregulated by the federal government, meaning the rules for borrowing and lending were more flexible than ever. For someone who had a voracious appetite for speculative ventures, the S&L business was like a “candy store.”
An FBI report of an interview with Susan McDougal at the time of her husband’s first prosecution in 1989 commented on the McDougals’ business skills: “Neither she [n]or her husband was proficient at running a financial institution.” So the couple used the S&L as a clearing house, branching out into real estate ventures including resorts and condos, while saddling the federal government with the risk of loss. Jim McDougal rechristened the new enterprise Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, an entity that would quickly balloon in size, largely due to questionable dealings.
It was shortly after this move that he announced that he was running for Congress.
JIM McDougal’s brief foray into politics in 1982 represented the height of his willingness to roll the dice on multiple high-risk ventures. With Democrats nationally seeking to regain their toehold in Congress, McDougal decided to take a shot at unseating the longtime Republican incumbent, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, the same man who had beaten young Bill Clinton in 1974.
With hair slicked over his bald pate and wearing aviator glasses, button-down Izod shirt, and tie undone at the collar, the self-styled “country banker” plunged into the race. The Arkansas Gazette declared Jim McDougal the “unmistakable” choice among Democrats, and he swept to victory in the primary. Bill Clinton, now ostensibly practicing law at the firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in Little Rock, was fighting to regain the governor’s mansion. He had knocked out McDougal’s good friend Jim Guy Tucker in the primary. Now McDougal stumped for Clinton out on the hustings, loving every minute of it.
Candidate McDougal railed against President Ronald Reagan; he energized audiences by calling for pay increases for social security recipients; he extolled the virtues of New Deal liberalism. He delivered old FDR speeches verbatim, having memorized them from his LP records as a boy. He even tried to make up for his own lack of commercial appeal with down-home charm. He would poke fun at himself by saying that a handsome politician like Bill Clinton “could appear on television and win a thousand votes with a single smile.” But when he [McDougal] appeared on the tube, viewers complained, “Isn’t it time for The Dukes of Hazzard?”
In the previous year, Jim and Susan’s marriage had hit rock bottom. As the pressure from shaky business ventures mounted, they had drifted into voluntary separation and a non existent sex life. Now Susan found herself smitten anew by candidate McDougal. “I fell in love with him all over again,” she said softly.
McDougal’s collection of press clippings from the race, which he would leave behind in a mildewed box after he died, pictured him at the fourth annual rodeo parade in Ouachita County on July 30 with an array of sixteen-year-old “Rodeo Sweetheart” contestants posing beside