Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [66]
Johnson later admitted that he found Clinton to be “a charmer” from the first moment the two of them met. Yet he didn’t cotton to Democrats who supported the ultraliberal George McGovern in 1972 (as Clinton had), and he didn’t appreciate these younger Arkansas Democrats who were driving the old conservative guard out. As Justice Jim later explained, the die-hard “states’ rights” Democrats like him were the ones who had “recaptured the South” after the Civil War and attempted to restore whatever “dignity was left.” By the time Bill Clinton entered the scene in Arkansas politics during the late 1970s and 1980s, Johnson felt that the “left-wingers” had wrecked the party. Traitors like Clinton, he believed, had “put together their coalitions of the blacks and leftists and labor and other special interests,” and then tacked on “the gays and schoolteachers,” which “really stole our home base.”
Johnson would reflect years later, with both humor and anger punctuating his voice, that he—and other like-minded Southern Democrats—had been forced to take refuge in the Republican Party against their will. “It’s not that we are Republicans,” he said. “We just didn’t have anywhere else to go when the sons of bitches threw us out.”
And so Justice Jim Johnson was plenty happy to come to the assistance of his younger friend, David Hale, when Hale appeared at Johnson’s farm “absolutely terrified,” confiding that he was about to be indicted by the federal authorities. Johnson knew and liked Hale’s family. They were a “very sagacious political people” from Yell County. “They play a brand of politics up there that Tammany Hall could study for a while,” said Johnson with a chuckle. Hale’s older brother had helped Johnson in an early campaign. Johnson would confess, “I was very fond of him and their daddy and the whole family.”
David Hale was the consummate Little Rock wheeler and dealer. A short, anemic, hail-fellow-well-met, he loved rubbing elbows with the political and business elite of Arkansas. Hale was onetime national president of the Jaycees, a position that gave him a Rolodex full of contacts. He was a devout Baptist. He was part owner of the Dogpatch U.SA. amusement park in the Ozark Mountain town of Eureka Springs, before it went belly-up. He was a lawyer and a “judge” on the Little Rock small claims court that handled traffic tickets and other minor violations, giving him local political swat. Hale was also a financier who dispensed loans to small businesses while earning a handsome profit for himself. Now his life of skating on the edge had caught up with him.
Johnson’s farm, dubbed “White Haven” as a tribute to the glory days of segregationism, was not the sort of place a person visited by happenstance. As he recalled Hale’s unexpected visit, the ashen municipal judge drove up and confided that he was in trouble with the federal authorities. Johnson asked, “What are they indicting you for? What’s the charge?” Hale replied, “Conspiring to defraud the government.” Johnson asked, “Who else has been indicted in this conspiracy?” Hale replied, “Only me.” So Justice Jim immediately devised a legal theory: “Well … if you’re being indicted for conspiring to defraud, then you’ve got to have some conspirators.”
Hale squinted. This was an interesting point. Hale scratched his chin and said that “Clinton had leaned on him” in doing some of the illegal deals. Hale thought some more and told the judge that “Clinton and his gang was a part of it. Those that ran with him.” Justice Jim later noted: “And the boy [Hale] had no reason to try to bullshit me.”
For Johnson, any opportunity to