In the News - Full Article
The Boston Globe
A DOTING, DOWN-HOME PORTRAIT
BOOK REVIEW THE BEST LAWYER IN A ONE-LAWYER TOWN BY DALE BUMPERS
RANDOM HOUSE, 293 PP., ILLUSTRATED, $24.95
By Scott Alarik
If any modern political memoir is capable of being a great beach book, Dale Bumpers is the guy to write it. The former Arkansas governor and senator is legendary in Washington circles for his genial storytelling, country-lawyer wit, and cracker-barrel wisdom. Bill Clinton calls him "one of the most eloquent speakers ever to grace the United States Senate." And he ought to know: Bumpers helped save Clinton's presidency with a brilliant summation in his defense during his 1999 Senate impeachment trial.
That speech forms the climax of this amiable, ambling, country walk of a book. It remains a stunningly effective example of Southern speechifying, one that should be studied by anyone who hopes to change other people's hearts and minds with words alone. Bumpers begins with droll humor, leading to a softly damning, point-by-point destruction of the case against Clinton.
Bumpers chooses not to tell his tale as a celebrity-studded gossip-fest, but as a soft-edged portrait of the eras in which he lived, from the Great Depression through World War II and the Southern civil rights movement.
Politics is presented as it existed in the rural South of his boyhood, a vital though peripheral fact of daily life. Without preaching, Bumpers convincingly shows how government can help the lives of ordinary people.
He grew up in Charleston, Ark., a town so small, he cracks, "its whole power system was a Sears DieHard." Poverty was so commonplace that "there was no snob value in being poor." Slowly, he shows how government improved people's lives, bringing electricity, safe water, and paved roads - with new jobs providing all those things.
He dotes too much on his largely uneventful youth, sometimes seeming to care less about the reader and more about mentioning everyone he knew. He does, however, generously sprinkle his pages with classic rural jokes and eccentric anecdotes.
After Bumpers served in the Marines in World War II, the government again lifted his life. The GI Bill of Rights guaranteed college tuition to all veterans, allowing poor people to afford any university they were bright enough to attend. He graduated from Northwestern University Law School, and struggled to build a law practice while running the family store with devastating, though often amusing, ineffectiveness.
Bumpers's political journey began with the 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring racially segregated schools unconstitutional. As the only lawyer in town, he was consulted by the school board, and advised its members to desegregate before they were forced to. Charleston's school became the only one in the Old South to fully integrate in 1954, making Bumpers a local hero of integration.
In 1970, with a 1 percent recognition in state polls, he set out to destroy the comeback of arch-segregationist and former governor Orval Faubus by challenging him in the Democratic primary. When Faubus claimed during a debate that there were left-wing plots to kill him - just the kind of cheap trick that worked in the past - Bumpers rose to say, "I'm asking you, as his friends, to help me save Orval Faubus's life. Elect me your next governor." They did.
In 1974, Bumpers was elected to the Senate, at which point, oddly, the book begins to lose steam. He just doesn't seem very interested in talking about his moments on the world stage. But that, in the end, is this book's charm. He is clearly more enthralled by his simple, small-town life than the glitzy and gladiatorial ways of Washington. When he defended Clinton, it may have been the following little country joke that most effectively sucked the pious and self-serving venom from the Senate chamber. Bumpers spoke of a fiery evangelist who challenged his congregation: "Is there anybody in the audience who has ever known anybody who comes close to the perfection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?" Incredibly, a little man in the back raised his hand. Stunned and furious, the preacher screamed, "Are you saying you have known such a person?" The little man nodded sadly and answered quietly, "My wife's first husband."
