Speaking for Myself

by Sarah Huckabee Sanders

  My dad gave everyone we met the number to his office to call if they needed anything. The neighborhood grocery store had been hit hard. We drove toward the store and you could see dozens of people gathered trying to figure out what was going on. The troopers with us connected with law enforcement running the rescue efforts. The store was completely demolished and several people were trapped inside. First responders were working hard trying to get everyone out. They worked while we waited and my dad fielded calls from his staff and reporters from my phone. The last person to be retrieved from the rubble was the sixty-seven-year-old pharmacist at the grocery store, who had serious injuries. He was rushed to the hospital and died the next day.

  The tornado that nearly made a direct hit on the Governor’s Mansion was an F3, and in addition to the pharmacist, killed two more Arkansans. A total of nine people were killed in the wake of that tornado.

  My dad spent the next couple of hours mobilizing people on his staff to start doing damage assessments and working through how to get the thousands of people without electricity back up and running as quickly as possible. He was always compassionate and focused on taking care of people. It was in moments like this when he showed why he was a great leader. He often told me that being a leader is not about handling all the things you know are coming, like healthcare or tax policy, but about stepping up in a crisis you can never plan for.

  There were unsettling days and difficult decisions, but also proud ones that inspired me and helped me understand what leadership really means.

  A five-minute drive from the Governor’s Mansion is Little Rock Central High School. On September 23, 1957, nine African American students—who later became known as the Little Rock Nine—attempted to enter the halls of Central High, following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 ruling against segregation in public schools.

  The Little Rock Nine—Elizabeth Eckford, Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Thelma Mothershed, Terrence Roberts, and the late Jefferson Thomas—faced a mob of thousands of angry white students and parents screaming at them. Governor Orval Faubus—a Democrat segregationist—called in Arkansas’s National Guard and stood in the doorway of the school alongside the Guard to prevent the students from entering. The nine brave students didn’t make it through the first day.

  Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, later said, “They moved closer and closer.… Somebody started yelling.… I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”

  The nine courageous students were violently assaulted—one girl even had acid thrown into her eyes. The hatred on display was pure evil and a horrific moment in our nation’s and state’s history.

  The fallout made national headlines, and President Eisenhower told Governor Faubus to stand down. Governor Faubus ignored the president’s request, so President Eisenhower ordered more than one thousand troops from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to intervene, and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard (about ten thousand troops), thereby stripping Governor Faubus of his power to keep the school segregated.

  America was in the midst of a defining struggle for civil rights and Little Rock’s Central High was at the center of it all.

  Of the nine students only Ernest Green graduated from Central—he was the first African American to graduate from a white high school in Arkansas. His perseverance that year earned him the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who attended his graduation with his family.

  Forty years later as a tenth-grade student at Central High, I stood on the front steps and cheered alongside thousands of students, parents, and dignitaries from around the world as President Bill Clinton and my dad, Governor Mike Huckabee, held open the doors of Central High for the Little Rock Nine—the same doors that had been previously closed to them because they were black.

  My dad addressed the crowd and said, “What happened here forty years ago was simply wrong. It was evil and we renounce it.… We come to confront the pain of the past, to celebrate the perseverance of some very courageous people.”

  Our student body president, Fatima Makendra, an African American girl, also spoke. I was blown away to watch her stand in front of the world and speak out for civil rights. It was a reminder to all of us there that day and to the millions watching on television how far America and Arkansas had come.

  The Little Rock Nine bravely advanced racial equality in America, and today Central High is one of the most racially diverse and high-achieving schools in the state. I loved my experience there. My time at Central exposed me to people with all different backgrounds, lifestyles, and viewpoints. While there were some difficult times (it was high school) and some very dark times in our school’s past, I am very proud to have graduated from Little Rock Central High.

  One of our great Central High traditions is for incoming seniors to do a citywide caravan to cement their place as the new senior class, while the outgoing seniors are taking their final exams. For our big day, we dressed in black and gold—as a rite of passage all the new senior girls wore gold lamé skirts (still not sure why that was the fabric of choice to show we were better than the underclassmen)—and decorated our cars in black and gold paint and streamers. From the War Memorial Stadium parking lot in midtown Little Rock, we launched our caravan, hundreds of cars deep, blaring music and driving past all of our rival high schools. Students from other schools launched water balloons at us as we passed by, hanging out of the windows or in our case the side of my best friend Jordan Jones Rhodes’s Jeep Wrangler. The caravan is supposed to wrap with one pass by Central, which is risky because you’re skipping school to participate in the parade. As you do a loop someone stops and puts a chain around the fence of the senior parking lot to lock the seniors in so they can’t get out. It rarely takes long for the seniors to break the chain and leave the lot, so we decided to do something to make it a little more challenging. A couple of my friends and I pooled money together and bought a broken-down station wagon for $250 from somebody in a neighborhood none of our parents would have approved of us being in, and had it towed to the home of our friend Nathaniel Wills, who also happened to be our class president. We then took a chainsaw to the roof and sawed it off to make it a station wagon convertible, and painted it black and gold. The hood was a solid shiny gold with big black lettering that read “LRCH Class of 2000.” We then towed the car to the meet-up parking lot and all of the class of 2000 signed the hood in black Sharpie, towed it along our caravan route, and finally parked it at the gate of the senior lot exit. They were furious and we were victorious. It was a strong start for the class of 2000!

  We had a great class—there were around six hundred of us, but it felt small. Our class was poised at the start of a new century and we wanted to show how far we had come. For the first day of school, classes ahead of us had held many different small senior breakfast events to kick off the school year. The class of 2000 decided we didn’t like all the cliques kicking off the year apart and so we held one massive breakfast and invited every member of the class of 2000. We worked it out that each student would pay a minimal amount to cover the cost of the food and opened up the Governor’s Mansion to our entire senior class wearing black and gold. We wanted our class to feel united as we faced our senior year. Only forty-two years earlier, the man who occupied the Governor’s Mansion had stood in the door at Central to prevent black students from entering, and now here we were—a majority of our classmates black—gathered in the place he used to call home, singing our alma mater. It was a moment I was proud to help make happen.

  The first test every incoming student takes at Central is to recite the alma mater, and I still remember it to this day. (Sadly my kids are not impressed when I sing it for them!)

  Hail To The Old Gold,

  Hail To The Black,

&nbs
p; Hail Alma Mater,

  Naught Does She Lack

  We Love No Other,

  So Let Our Motto Be,

  Victory, Little Rock Central High!!!!

  The Governor’s Mansion would later be the location for our senior homecoming dinner as well, and one of my friends there was Sarah Tucker, former governor Jim Guy Tucker’s daughter, whose room was now mine and who had become a friend and my running mate at Arkansas Girls State. Despite the bruising battles between our dads, who had once claimed to be governor at the same time, we had become friends in a sea of hundreds of students and didn’t let the politics get in the way. Something we could probably use a lot more of in America.

  That same room that both Sarah Tucker and I called ours was also the childhood bedroom of Chelsea Clinton. It’s wild to think that I got ready for prom in the same place Chelsea got ready for her dad’s announcement for the presidency at the Old State House just down the street!

  Leigh Scanlon Keener and Jordan Jones Rhodes, two of my oldest and closest friends I love and have always been able to count on, I met at Central. Now our kids are friends and are growing up together. I feel pride every time I drive by the school, see a kid wearing Central High clothing, or notice a post about the historic school on social media. Central High helped me to grow as a person, accept the differences of the people around me, and celebrate the fact we lived in a country where we could all succeed no matter how or where we started. There is still much work to do to close the racial divide in America. My faith teaches me that God created every human being to have dignity and purpose and to be loved. We need to be a country that values every human life and never tolerates racism or senseless violence. That starts by teaching our kids to love one another as God loves us, and remind them about the courage and the strength shown by those who have come before us, like the Little Rock Nine.

  Later in my senior year of high school I enrolled at the University of Arkansas, but at the last moment instead chose to go to my dad’s alma mater—Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia. At Ouachita Baptist I met Lauren Brown, who quickly became one of my best friends and college roommates. Lauren and I were both political science majors who cared more about the boys than the classes. She is a planner, type A and a perfectionist, and I’m spontaneous and rarely organized. It was a perfect balance. After Lauren and I finished our sophomore year at OBU, we moved to Little Rock for the summer to work on my dad’s reelection campaign for governor. We were field staffers responsible for traveling the state, recruiting volunteers, and advancing and staffing my dad at campaign events. We spent most of the summer crisscrossing the state together, attending every parade and festival Arkansas has to offer. In Arkansas, we celebrate everything from watermelons to pink tomatoes—even bricks—at festivals. We race chuck wagons, toads, turtles, and cardboard boats, to name just a few. And we hunt most everything, including raccoon—which you can and must eat in order to not offend your hosts at the Gillette Coon Supper.

  I spent most of my childhood on the Arkansas festival circuit campaigning with my dad and I loved it. It gave me a chance to see every part of the state, meet interesting people, and spend quality time with my family. Arkansas has a beautiful landscape of mountains, lakes, and rivers, and is an outdoorsman’s paradise. The Mississippi Delta in the eastern part of the state is the duck hunting capital of the world, and the Ozark and Ouachita mountains in the northwest offer world-class fly-fishing, kayaking, hiking, and mountain biking.

  Back then as a college student and seasoned campaign volunteer, my role had slightly progressed from envelope stuffing, and Lauren and I were organizing and executing a statewide RV tour for my dad. It was early one morning, several days into the multiweek tour, and we had just finished with the first event of the day in Mountain View, a small town nestled in the Ozark Mountains, famous for being the folk music capital of the world. Every weekend you can still find folk musicians gathered all around the town square playing live music for anybody who wants to hang out and listen. I was driving Lauren’s maroon 1998 Toyota Camry because we had discovered she was a better navigator than driver.

  It had been raining that morning and the curvy mountain roads were wet. Just as we came around the bend of one of the sharper turns the car started to hydroplane. I tightly gripped the wheel and nervously turned it to keep us on the road but overcorrected and sent us into a tailspin right off the side of the cliff. We flipped multiple times and crashed sideways into a tree jutting out the mountainside, crushing the roof of the car and shattering all the windows. It happened so fast. I hung sideways from my seatbelt and Lauren was pinned on the floor.

  We were stuck against a tree on the side of the cliff. We asked each other a dozen times if the other was okay, if we were hurt or bleeding. We were in shock, and had no idea what to do. We searched for our cell phones but naturally there was no service in our location deep in the Ozarks.

  We could not see the road, only rock and sky and valley below us. The realization was beginning to set in that no one might ever find us here. At that moment we began to hear voices. At first I believed it must be angels who had come to take us to heaven because there was simply no way we had just survived that crash. But neither of us appeared to be injured. We again heard voices—not the voices of heavenly angels—but two good ol’ boys in a pickup truck. The driver of the truck had happened to look in his rearview mirror at the moment we’d gone off the edge, and had turned his truck around to search for any survivors of the crash.

  The men shouted down to us and in desperation we shouted back for help. They climbed down onto our sideways car and peered in at us through the shattered window. Hanging sideways by my seatbelt off the side of the cliff I can safely say I’d never been so happy to see a stranger in all my life. They pulled Lauren out first. I waited for a few minutes but for what felt like hours until they came back to rescue me.

  The men pulled me out of the wreckage and back onto the road, where I was reunited with Lauren. We were banged up, but miraculously we had survived.

  The Highway Patrol arrived not long after and radioed the state troopers with my dad not far away. They made it there quickly and the moment I saw my dad I fell apart.

  We found out later that another car had gone off the cliff at nearly the exact location as we did and all the passengers had been killed. The tree on the side of the mountain had saved us, but we were also told that if our car had hit that tree six inches in the other direction we would have been killed on impact.

  A few years later my friend, college roommate, and fellow survivor Lauren married my brother David. Our kids are now in the same grade at the same school in Little Rock and they’re best friends. None of us would be here if we hadn’t survived that wreck thanks to God and two angels in a pickup truck. I often look back on that day in the Ozarks. For me it is a reaffirmation of God’s grace, and a reminder to try harder every day to live a life worthy of having been saved.

  3

  Winning

  After graduating from Ouachita Baptist University in 2004, I accepted a job in the Bush administration. Like most recent college grads new to Washington, DC, I moved there ready to change the world. I quickly found out the most I’d be changing in my early days at the Department of Education were coffee filters and other people’s schedules, but I loved it anyway. I lived with my brother John Mark, who worked for Arkansas’s only Republican congressman, John Boozman, and managed to scrape by on a low income in one of America’s most expensive cities, thanks in part to my dad regularly buying my dinner when he was in town as chairman of the National Governors Association.

  Midway through President George W. Bush’s second term I called my dad. He was considering making a run for president and I told him he should let me run his political operation. The Republican nomination in 2008 was wide open, but the field included some well-known and well-funded potential candidates: Senator John McCain (AZ), former governor Mitt Romney (MA), former mayor Rudy Giuliani (NY), Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist (TN), and Senator George Allen (VA), to name a few. In 2006, my dad had been governor for a decade, but had very little name recognition or a fund-raising base outside of Arkansas. I didn’t care. I knew my dad would make a better candidate and better president than anybody else and I believed I could help him win. After two years in Washington, I returned home to Arkansas.

  It was tough going at first. We focused on Arkansas donors we had long-standing relationships with to give to my dad’s political action committee (PAC) and fund his travel—mostly to Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state. In those early days in 2006, I was the only full-time staffer for the PAC. I was twenty-four years old, but I was my dad’s scheduler, driver, advance team, digital director, press secretary, political director, and of course, his daughter. I was working more hours in a day than I ever had, but having the time of my life. After several months we raised enough funds to start hiring a staff. One of our first hires was Chip Saltsman to be the campaign manager. Chip was the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s political consultant, until Frist unexpectedly decided not to run for president. Chip was nothing like my dad. He was a hard-charging, foul-mouthed, dip-chewing, blue-blooded southerner, but he turned out to be exactly what we needed. Chip pushed my dad when he didn’t want to be pushed, said no when others around him were afraid to, but ultimately and most importantly let my dad be himself. Chip rubbed some people the wrong way. They didn’t like his direct and often abrasive approach, but he and I worked well together, and he was a strong leader for our team.