My dad said, “This is unacceptable. The law is clear. I’ll be taking over as governor today.” He set the receiver down and an Arkansas constitutional crisis began. Two men were claiming to be governor of the same state at the same time.
My dad acted quickly. He first called on friends of Governor Tucker’s in the heavily Democratic state legislature and implored them to go to Tucker and tell him to do the right thing and resign. To our surprise, many agreed. Bobby Hogue, the Speaker of the house—a longtime Tucker ally—pressured the governor to step down. “We told him a lot of us who have been very trusting supporters of his and had stayed with him through the hard times could not stay with him any longer today. In the history of the state of Arkansas, we certainly hope we never see another day like today.”
The halls of the capitol were pure chaos—hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were crammed into every opening around the building cheering, yelling, pushing to try and figure out what was happening. Our family was escorted from my dad’s office through the halls of the capitol to the House Chamber for a joint session to address the members of the legislature and I got lost in the shuffle. It was so loud no one could hear me crying out for help. They went ahead and I fell back. Thankfully since my dad had been lieutenant governor for a few years I knew my way around and had made friends with some of the ladies who cleaned the building. Ann Baker was a young African American woman with two young kids who worked hard, didn’t take any nonsense from anyone, and loved to talk. Ann knew everyone and everything going on in the capitol. We would sit on the benches in the lobby area of the women’s restrooms, and visit, and I’d usually bring her treats from the office supply. If you ever wanted to know anything about anyone, Ann was your source.
I spotted Ann and she grabbed me and pulled me aside. “What are you doing out here in this mess by yourself?” I told her what happened and she wasn’t having it. She told me to follow her and dragged me right through the middle of the crowd to state trooper Joel Mullins, who had come back to find me. Ann told me to stay with the group from now on, but if I needed her, I knew where to find her. It wasn’t long before Ann had a new job at the Governor’s Mansion and I got to see her more often. I made it to the chamber just in time for my dad’s speech to the members. Shortly after, he addressed the entire state.
My dad, calm in the midst of the crisis, delivered an unscripted, statewide-televised address calling on Governor Tucker to resign or be impeached. “This is not a time to draw sides. This is a time for us to draw together. We will show the people of America that in this state we still believe in some old-fashioned values of doing what’s right.”
More Democratic leaders started to fall in line behind my dad. The Democratic attorney general—and friend of Tucker’s—Winston Bryant announced he was filing a lawsuit to have Tucker removed as governor. Within an hour of my dad’s live address to the state, Governor Tucker surrendered. He sent a letter to the Democratic secretary of state Sharon Priest stating, “This is to inform you that I hereby resign the office of governor effective at 6:00 p.m., July 15, 1996—Governor Jim Guy Tucker.”
At approximately 7 that evening, much later than planned, my dad was officially sworn in as the 44th governor of Arkansas. After a day of uncertainty and chaos, my dad and the rule of law had prevailed. Our family would be moving into the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock after all, and our lives would never be the same.
The Arkansas Governor’s Mansion is a Georgian colonial home set on nine acres in the heart of the Quapaw Quarter historic district of downtown Little Rock. The neighborhood includes more than two hundred properties on the National Register of Historic Places. Although most of these homes were built in the mid-1800s, the Governor’s Mansion wasn’t completed until 1950. If you ever watched the sitcom Designing Women, you might recognize the mansion as one of the homes in the opening shot of the show. The Governor’s Mansion is beautiful and welcoming, but for any tenant, most of the home is part of the “public space,” meaning there are always people there. On more than one occasion I came downstairs to a group of strangers on a tour or there for an event in my PJs!
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When you walk in the front door to the mansion, you are met by a grand staircase that winds through all three floors. To the right is the formal dining room and the residential kitchen and to the left is the formal living room and East Conference Room (not to be confused with the West Conference Room, because there isn’t one—never figured that one out). Upstairs on the third floor is the private quarters for Arkansas’s First Family and straight out of the back door is the Janet Huckabee Grand Hall. The hall was named after my mom because she tirelessly raised all of the funds and managed the addition of the Grand Hall in 2003. The seven-thousand-plus-square-foot hall is the star of the home and not just because my mom made it happen. The hall can comfortably seat two hundred people and host receptions for closer to four hundred. There is a commercial-grade kitchen and multiple offices for the mansion staff. Each side of the hall has a huge fireplace and right in the center is my favorite part—the fifteen-foot Arkansas State Seal inlaid in the hardwood floor and carved from fifteen native woods from the state of Arkansas. Directly above the seal hangs the “Arkansas Chandelier,” which has twenty-five lights and twenty-five stars to signify Arkansas becoming the twenty-fifth state. The runner on the staircase into the hall has the name of every governor to live in the mansion in ascending order (my kids thought it was pretty cool to take a picture on the step with “Papa’s” name on it).
In total the house has just over thirty thousand square feet. The grounds are impeccable and the trustees do an amazing job maintaining them. P. Allen Smith, a world-renowned gardener from Arkansas, helped design the garden outside the Grand Hall. There is also a vegetable garden and an herb garden started by Betty Bumpers that the National Herb Society maintains. The Governor’s Mansion was doing farm-to-table long before it was the in thing to do!
I remember the first day I walked into the Governor’s Mansion, which would be our family’s home for the next decade (to this day, it’s the home I lived in longer than any other). It was overwhelming. Everything seemed bigger, grander, and more intimidating than any place I’d ever visited, much less called home.
When we first walked through the huge front door all the mansion staff, state police, and trustees had gathered in the formal dining room to greet us. The dining room was covered in gold, blue, and white hand-painted silk wallpaper and a table that seated twenty-four. On one wall was a large china cabinet that contained more than sixty pieces of silver service that was used on the USS Arkansas in both World War I and World War II. My favorite piece and one that was used often was a large silver punch bowl made from three thousand silver dollars donated from kids around the state. It had the Arkansas State Seal on the front of it. Over the table was an odd-looking chandelier that had a large teardrop-shaped hollow bowl in the middle of it. I later learned the story of that chandelier that I would tell on hundreds of tours I led through the mansion over the course of the next ten and a half years. The legend has it that former US senator Mark Pryor (whose dad was governor when he was a boy) and his brother were filling one of the upstairs bathtubs up as high as they could to float a toy boat. The bathroom happened to be above the dining room and when it flooded, the water seeped down into the dining room causing the chandelier bowl to fill up and eventually come crashing down.
But on my first day in the Governor’s Mansion I didn’t know any of these stories or the people standing in the room who would later share them with me. I was nervous and felt totally out of place.
My first week at school was rough. It was awkward enough being the new kid dropped off by an unmarked state trooper car. And it didn’t make it any less embarrassing that my mom rode along each morning in the front passenger seat to keep me company. But things eventually changed. Kids got to know me as Sarah instead of the governor’s daughter and I started making friends. Once we settled in life got better, if ne
ver quite normal.
I found that the state troopers were a lot of fun to be around. The guardhouse is where all of my dad’s security detail worked and I would often go over and see them and other staff working there. I perfected my spades game and learned to play a decent hand of blackjack hanging out in the guardhouse. The troopers even taught me how to drive (I don’t blame them for my lack of reversing skills, Lord knows they tried). Most importantly, they always made my family feel safe. They were good people and we spent so much time together they all became like an extension of our family. The troopers spent holidays and vacations with us as well as accompanying us on trips to the ER and everything in between.
The mansion staff took care of everything, from the grounds and meals, to scheduling and organizing hundreds of events each year. The chefs taught me how to cook and let me sit in the kitchen and taste the amazing dishes they prepared for guests.
The trustees were inmates in the state prison system, most of whom were serving life sentences. Arkansas has a program like a few other states that allows inmates to earn work opportunities for demonstrating good behavior. The most highly coveted jobs for trustees were at the Governor’s Mansion. The dozen or so trustees assigned to the mansion maintained the gardens, worked events, and helped me perfect my free throw. My mom was a high school basketball star and although I would never be a star, I loved to play. In the afternoons as they wrapped up their work and waited on the vans to take them back to “The Hill” they called home, we would play basketball together in the driveway.
I suspect most parents wouldn’t like the idea of their teenage daughter playing basketball with convicted murderers. But the men selected for this program had already served decades of their life sentences and consistently demonstrated good behavior and remorse for their crimes. Sadly, the best most of them could hope for in this life was to earn the right each day to continue in the trustee program. No trustee ever wanted to risk the alternative—returning to “normal” life in a maximum-security prison. Besides, there were always plenty of troopers around.
It would have been much easier for my parents to tell me to play it safe and stay away from the trustees, but I’m glad they didn’t. They wanted us to understand that God unconditionally loves and forgives us and that nobody is unworthy of our compassion or beyond the redemptive power of God’s grace.
It’s been said that God’s grace “is getting what we don’t deserve, and not getting what we do deserve.” Growing up around the trustees taught me a life-changing lesson about grace. I have since made it a point to focus on people’s good qualities, and not dwell too much on their flaws—we all have them.
My dad had a long list of his best moments and proudest achievements as governor, but the list of the worst parts of the job was short and never changed.
I still vividly remember the first death-row execution involving my dad when he was lieutenant governor. I was sitting in Miss Lowe’s seventh-grade biology class at North Heights Junior High in Texarkana, Arkansas, on April 19, 1995, when I was unexpectedly called to the office. I was happy for the excuse to get out of class, but when I got to the door the office assistant told me to go back and grab my backpack because I was being checked out for the day. At this I became concerned something bad must have happened to someone in my family. I quickly grabbed my things and returned to the office where a state trooper I didn’t recognize was waiting for me. When my brother David, two years older than me and in ninth grade at the same junior high, walked into the office my heart sank. I was sure someone in my family had been hurt. The trooper told us there was something going on and we needed to leave. I was about to walk out with him when David stepped in. Since we were kids David has always been a protective older brother. He may have teased me relentlessly, super-glued my hands together, and coaxed me to jump from our roof to see if I could fly as little kids, but if anyone else dared mess with me, he was the first to step in and stand up for me. No way was he getting into a car with someone we didn’t know or letting me do so either.
David told the trooper we weren’t leaving until we talked to our parents. About that time the chief of the Texarkana police department, who we knew and went to our church, came in and told us it was okay and that he would take us home.
When we pulled up to our house there were a few cars we didn’t recognize. I stayed next to David, holding on to him tight as we opened the door and walked inside. We found our parents and they apologized for scaring us and told us to get our things together because we needed to leave the house immediately. They weren’t sure how long but told us to pack for a week.
As we gathered our things, my dad explained that someone had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—168 people had been killed, including 19 children.
On that exact same day in Arkansas a man named Richard Wayne Snell, a white supremacist convicted of killing an African American state trooper as well as a gas station worker he assumed to be Jewish, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. Snell had attempted to bomb the same Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the 1980s, so authorities were now investigating whether the attack was linked to Snell’s execution.
My dad sat us down and said, “Sometimes in my job I have to make tough decisions, and sometimes the only decision is to do nothing, whether people like it or not.”
In Arkansas, the lieutenant governor fills in for the governor and carries out his duties when the governor is out of the state, which meant there were times my dad could have stayed Richard Wayne Snell’s execution, but didn’t.
Governor Tucker didn’t either, and Snell’s final words before his execution that day were a threat against Governor Tucker. “Look over your shoulder; justice is coming. I wouldn’t trade places with you or any of your cronies. Hell has victories. I am at peace.”
This execution would be the first our family experienced, but sadly not the last. My dad went on to oversee seventeen executions over the course of his governorship, more than any governor in the state’s history, mainly because the Supreme Court had lifted the prohibition of capital punishment and many of those backed-up cases fell on his desk. When I think back to those dark, painful days, I remember how each decision weighed so heavily on my dad. I was just a kid, and our home—the Governor’s Mansion—was put on lockdown as each death-row inmate was administered a lethal injection. My dad often said that executions were the hardest decisions he made as governor because it’s the one thing you do that you can never undo.
In January 1999, my mom was in Oklahoma doing an event with her close friend and Oklahoma first lady Cathy Keating. My dad was at a reception down the street from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. I remained in the main house alone and members of my dad’s state police detail were in their office next door. Earlier in the day I’d seen reports for bad weather, but didn’t really think much of it. My dad told me to keep an eye on it and he would be back in a few hours. My brothers were off to college so it was just me. A couple hours later Derek Flowers, a state trooper assigned to my dad, called me and said I needed to immediately go down to the basement and wait there until I heard back from him. I didn’t really want to but figured I could watch TV for a bit there and then go over to the guardhouse and see what the guys were up to.
As I sat in the basement, the lights flickered and then went out. The generator was getting ready to kick in, but it was scary sitting there all by myself in the dark, so I decided I’d walk over to the guardhouse. As I got to the top of the double-wide grand staircase that opens to the foyer and main entrance of the mansion, all the lights went off and alarms started blaring. The massive, oversized front door to the house ripped open, sending a huge round entry table with a vase and flowers crashing to the floor. A horrific banging noise echoed through the house and I could feel the wind on my face. I froze in fear. I was terrified. I knew I wasn’t safe in the entryway, so I started to run toward the door that led to the guardhouse. Instead I ran into Derek, who was on his way to me. He scoo
ped me up in his arms and ran me into the guardhouse and dumped me in the bathtub, and then used his body as a shield over mine, as a giant tornado roared through our neighborhood.
The crashing started to fade away and Derek stood up and helped me to my feet. Only after checking that I was okay did he then start to lecture me about listening when told to stay put somewhere. We came out of the guardhouse and the sky was eerily quiet except for a steady but light rainfall. The sky appeared as if nothing had just happened. Everything else around us told a different story. More than fifty huge trees were down all over the mansion grounds, completely uprooted, leaving deep holes in the earth where they once stood. One tree that was torn down had held the tree house that I occasionally played in, which had been built for Chelsea Clinton when her dad was governor. Several state police vehicles were destroyed, and one of our neighbors’ roofs was in our backyard.
I knew my dad was at an event just a few blocks away. I was so worried. I kept trying to call his cell phone but all the lines were down. Derek was trying to keep me calm and get in touch with the troopers who accompanied my dad. They were having some success with police radios but it was too hard to get a clear signal. I told Derek I was going to walk down there. He told me that I was not. Derek was a big guy, probably six-foot-six, and no way was I going to be able to force myself past him. I was scared and I wanted my dad. A few minutes later his large black Suburban came barreling up to the gate.
The generator was working but for some reason the electric gate was not. My dad and the trooper with him got out and I ran to the gate. My dad climbed over the gate and I fell into his arms. He told me it was going to be a long night as there was a lot of damage across the state and the storm wasn’t over.
It turned out that my cell phone was one of the few that worked and so I started helping track calls and requests for my dad. Because our own neighborhood had been hit so hard he wanted to go out now and check on people and see how he could help. He traded his suit jacket for a rain jacket and I asked if I could come with him. He said I could and off we went, house to house, helping pull tree branches off people’s cars and mostly making sure folks were okay.
Speaking for Myself Page 3
