The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  For challenging orthodoxy in Mississippi, Harkey was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. But he received few honors in Pascagoula. After he was effectively driven from town by boycotts and social shunning, he wrote that he had been left with only one ally: Claude Ramsay, a union organizer at Ingalls who then served as state president of the AFL-CIO. Ramsay, said Harkey, “was the only one of Jackson County’s 54,317 persons who came publicly to The Chronicle’s defense.”

  The beachfront set in Pascagoula had other priorities.

  To ensure that her son did not fall in with undesirable companions during his impressionable years—Pascagoula had its share of youthful rogues—Helen Scruggs managed to scrimp and save enough from her family budget to send her only child to Georgia Military Academy for his final two years of high school. Troubled that his grades had fallen and unsure of the fatherless home, she was willing to sacrifice personal comforts in order to find a better educational environment for her son. At the academy, Dickie competed on the swim team and found that his studious classmates nourished his own determination to go on to college.

  In the autumn of 1965, three years after the campus had been rocked by the desegregation crisis, Scruggs enrolled at Ole Miss. Despite the upheaval, the school had a pull on young people in Mississippi. It was the oldest educational institution in the state and, at that time, the only university offering a strong liberal arts curriculum and a law school. For anyone interested in building connections, Ole Miss served as a valuable starting place. To those attracted to politics or the law, the school seemed essential to their curriculum vitae. Virtually every member of the state’s political and social leadership had ties to the school.

  Although Ole Miss was nestled in Oxford, a remote North Mississippi town served by no interstate highway, it drew many high school graduates from the Gulf Coast, three hundred miles away. It was a natural destination for Dickie Scruggs.

  As a freshman, he plunged into the social life of Ole Miss. He pledged SAE, a popular fraternity, where bonds were formed that would last a lifetime. The SAEs were more noted for rowdy parties than high scholarship. (The janitor doubled as the most notorious bootlegger on campus.) But the fraternity, like several other social groups at the school, generated an interlocking network throughout the state. The governor at the time, Paul B. Johnson, Jr., had been an SAE. Though William Faulkner would have been horrified to hear his name invoked during rush, he, too, had been an SAE at Ole Miss.

  One of Scruggs’s pledge brothers was a classmate from Yazoo City, a witty, folksy fellow named Haley Barbour. In keeping with the tradition of assigning nicknames, the portly Barbour was called Whale. Decades later, Scruggs and Barbour would be antagonists in opposing camps. Scruggs would lead a national assault on Big Tobacco while Barbour would act as tobacco’s chief lobbyist in Washington; later, Scruggs would be locked in political battles with Barbour, a Republican governor of Mississippi. But the friendship formed at the SAE house, a columned version of an antebellum mansion, enabled them to keep their relationship civil through all the years.

  In fact, all of Ole Miss, which was then a small school with an enrollment of a few more than five thousand students, served as a kind of fraternal organization. Ole Miss was seen by its detractors from rival colleges in the state as a country club, a finishing school for the sons and daughters of the old planter class, a refuge for aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats. The criticism was a bit false, for Ole Miss was merely the mother school in a poor state; nevertheless, the place exuded a sense of elitism. The school and its progeny embraced each other, long after graduation, and its alumni association included those in the top ranks of every business and profession in the state.

  To begin his own climb to prominence, Dick Scruggs chose a track different from that of most students: Navy ROTC. A military affiliation never hurt in the South, where the armed services were honored. Even though students on campuses elsewhere in the country were beginning to turn away from the Vietnam War, the military was respectable at Ole Miss. But Navy ROTC? When Scruggs revealed that he had signed up with the navy, his fraternity pals thought him a bit weird. He was told that Navy ROTC was a course taken only by Yankees, a description for anyone from outside the South, or by those defective in judgment. ROTC was mandatory for every male student during his first two years at any public land-grant university during this period, but most of the freshmen chose the more conventional army or the air force.

  There were few navy guys at the SAE house; to take that route seemed like joining a rival fraternity. Scruggs roomed with Johnny Morgan, who was annoyed by some of the navy routine. On weekday mornings Morgan and Scruggs were sometimes awakened by Ray Mabus, a serious student and navy cadet, shouting, “Commander Scruggs! Are you ready to report for duty?”

  (Two decades later, Mabus would be elected governor of Mississippi. After an interval of another twenty years, he would become President Barack Obama’s secretary of the navy. Morgan was a nephew of Ira “Shine” Morgan, an Oxford businessman whose political ties to the infamous senator Theodore G. Bilbo led him to alliances with conservatives across the state. Scruggs’s roommate went on to become president of the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors. The poor boy from Pascagoula had an uncanny way of gravitating toward political power.)

  The navy beckoned Scruggs because of the opportunity for flying lessons. From his high school days he had a romantic concept that grew out of his exposure to pilots based at a Gulf Coast naval air station. In Scruggs’s mind, navy pilots invariably attracted beautiful girls. Moreover, he liked the idea of flying, of soaring away from earthly problems, of being in control of his own fate in the skies. There was an element of daring in flight, and Scruggs tended to be bold. His classmates’ idea of risk might involve a chance to draw an inside straight in poker. Scruggs took a different approach. He would eventually fly perilous military missions and, without qualm, negotiate his way past dangerous thunderstorms as a civilian pilot. (Later, when he could afford it, he took up deep sea diving at a time when most of his contemporaries were slowing to more sedentary pursuits.) He learned to fly, at navy expense, at the little Oxford airport. As his junior year approached at Ole Miss, he signed on for two more years in advanced ROTC. It appeared to be a decent option for him. With the war in Vietnam demanding more and more manpower, the draft loomed after graduation. This way he could earn forty dollars a month in the meantime and continue flying.

  In the summer of 1968, that tumultuous moment in America history that followed summers of free love and free speech in California, Scruggs was sent to San Diego for a training cruise on an aircraft carrier. The experience transformed him. The son of conservative Mississippi collided with the libertine culture of Southern California. More significantly, the pilots he had only watched from a distance on the Gulf Coast became his running mates, his role models. They had swagger and savoir faire. Many of them were between assignments in Vietnam, veterans of combat missions and imbued with courage. He saw firsthand the magnetism of a navy lieutenant with wings. The pilots, Scruggs thought, were like omnipotent gods to women; even more alluring than Greek gods.

  The boys at the SAE house might think Navy ROTC a joke, but to Scruggs it became a religious calling. After graduation in 1969 he won his commission, another step toward becoming a full-fledged navy pilot.

  Scruggs returned to Pascagoula that summer, on leave from flight training at a navy installation in nearby Pensacola. For the first time he felt comfortable with his standing in the community. He had an Ole Miss degree, a set of college friends who held the promise of influence in towns across the state, and, finally, a navy officer’s self-confidence. No one would ever have described Dickie Scruggs as shy, but as a boy he had understood the limitations of his middle-class background. His gracious table manners, his infectious smile, his native intelligence—all had assured him some acceptability by the kids with homes on the beach. Still, he had known he didn’t completely belong there. Yet.

  And he had always considered Diane Tho
mpson unapproachable. Until now. Scruggs encountered her at the post office in Pascagoula. They had a brief conversation. He was mailing a letter to a former girlfriend; he discovered Diane was in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend. Emboldened, he asked for a date. She said no, but did so politely. She thought he was attractive, but in high school he had run around with a crowd different from her own, and they had gone separate ways to college.

  Diane attended the University of Southern Mississippi in nearby Hattiesburg. It was not Ole Miss, but for many young people in South Mississippi, it was the school of choice. She continued to occupy a place in the proper circles of Pascagoula. The Thompsons were members at the Longfellow House, a private club with swimming facilities and a golf course along the waterfront, and the estate was considered tonier than the local country club.

  A few years earlier, Scruggs would never have been tempted to ask her out, and certainly not to try again if rebuffed. But he followed up with a telephone call. Diane’s rejection was so pleasant this time that Scruggs bantered with her. “If I get the same response the third time I ask you, I won’t call again,” he said. The third time, she broke a date to accept.

  The relationship became so serious that a year later Dick—she always called him Dick—and Diane contemplated eloping to Matamoros, Mexico. He was stationed in Texas, near the border, where they could easily slip away and make their union official. It would qualify Scruggs, as a married man with a dependent, for more pay. Later, they could have a formal wedding ceremony back home in Pascagoula, for appearance’s sake. Diane considered the proposal, but decided against it.

  The next year, Lieutenant (junior grade) Scruggs married Diane Thompson in a ceremony at the Presbyterian Church in Pascagoula. He also acquired a brother-in-law, Trent Lott, who was married to Diane’s sister, Tricia, and just beginning to establish his political career.

  Scruggs flew an A-6, a medium-range attack jet that carried an imposing load: twenty five-hundred-pound bombs. There were two men in the crew: the pilot and a bombardier-navigator. As the war in Southeast Asia wound down, Scruggs was transferred to Virginia Beach. Then his squadron went to sea, joining other navy units on the USS Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier serving as a base for bombing practice over forlorn islands in the Caribbean.

  The assignment resulted in a reunion. One of the pilots from another squadron was Charlie Nelson, a fraternity brother from Ole Miss who’d grown up in a small South Mississippi town near Brookhaven. Like Scruggs, Nelson had disregarded the wisdom of other SAEs and become a navy pilot, flying an F-8 Crusader. In their spare moments, the two men reminisced about the “old days” at Ole Miss, which were not so old but seemed so far away. It was good to see someone from home. For fun, they punctuated their conversations with frat boy expressions such as “Phi Alpha!” (the SAE war cry) or “Hotty Toddy!” (the opening line of the Ole Miss cheer).

  In the air, Scruggs loved the sensation of shrieking through Caribbean skies as bright as lapis lazuli. And the catapult off the flight deck, hurtling forward at blinding speed, was far more thrilling than a carnival ride. Life was daring and good.

  Then the adventure darkened. One day, as Scruggs circled above the Roosevelt, waiting for permission to land, he heard a commotion over the radio in his cockpit. Disembodied voices shouting, “Eject! Eject!” Followed by more cries. “Plane in the water!” Scruggs continued to circle, avoiding the mishap below. Peering down, he could make out a disturbance in the water off the carrier. After landing, he learned that Charlie Nelson’s Crusader had malfunctioned on takeoff. As it pitched into the sea, Nelson was able to eject himself from the cockpit but was killed on impact with the water. Divers quickly recovered his body, and preparations were made to send it back to Mississippi.

  The next day, Scruggs waited in his A-6, in line for launching, when another plane veered out of control on takeoff and disappeared into the Caribbean. This time, the pilot failed to escape the aircraft. The Roosevelt maintained its march through the sea; maneuvers would continue, without a break. In a conversation between Scruggs and his bombardier, seated next to him, the men expressed fear that they might be the next victims of a faulty catapult. Through the layers of his flight suit, Scruggs could feel a chill. But he had a mission to complete, and he carried out the takeoff.

  Over the course of his assignment on the Roosevelt, Scruggs would see the carrier lose seven more planes. Two other pilots would die. By the autumn of 1973, the Roosevelt joined a U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean. Its presence in Middle Eastern waters coincided with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab enemies, Egypt and Syria. For a few days, it appeared that the Jewish state, America’s close ally, might be overrun. The Roosevelt’s jets were deployed to fly reconnaissance missions over the Holy Land. As the United States rushed supplies to Israel, Scruggs flew escorts for heavier aircraft. When it seemed that the world’s superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, might be drawn into the conflict, the Roosevelt moved toward Turkey. Flight plans included targets in Eastern Europe and the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons.

  At the end of October, tensions eased. But “Zeus” Scruggs, at the age of twenty-seven, no longer felt the invincibility of the gods. For the first time in his life, he had been seriously confronted by mortality.

  CHAPTER 3

  After flying a navy jet, the practice of law seemed tame. Yet Scruggs enrolled in law school after the service, completed his studies in the requisite three years, and embarked on a career path similar to that of many of his contemporaries. An argument could be made that law attracted too many talented young Mississippians. Instead of expending their ideas on entrepreneurial projects or investing in businesses that might create jobs and wealth in an impoverished state, the best minds of each generation invariably chose a traditional course of law. But Scruggs had no interest in anything routine; if he played the profession for all it was worth, he believed, life would become glamorous and riches would eventually accrue to him.

  To his delight, the freshly minted attorney was recruited by one of his childhood political heroes, William Winter, to join a Jackson law firm featuring some prominent names in the profession: Watkins, Pyle, Ludlam, Winter, and Stennis. Since his election to the legislature in the post–World War II period, Winter, fifty-four, had been a leader of an outnumbered “moderate” faction in the state Democratic Party. Scruggs remembered, as a boy in Brookhaven, attending an old-fashioned political rally where Winter, alone among all of the candidates for public office, spoke with clarity and common sense while others babbled of the dangers inherent in Brown v. Board of Education. That year Winter won election as state tax collector, campaigned to abolish his own office on the grounds that it was unnecessary, then was elected state treasurer. By the 1960s, he had developed a following among Mississippians who recognized that segregation not only was doomed but represented a hindrance to economic progress. This was not yet enough to get him elected governor—he lost in bitter campaigns in 1967 and 1975—but he retained his role as the leading white spokesman for racial equity in Mississippi, and Scruggs had long considered himself one of Winter’s political followers.

  While serving as lieutenant governor and preparing for another campaign for governor, the candidate got to know Scruggs at the Ole Miss law school, where Winter was an active alumnus. Scruggs worked on a couple of Winter’s projects and impressed the older man with his outgoing personality and his commitment to changing the status quo.

  After graduation, Scruggs signed on with Winter’s firm and moved his wife and their two-year-old son, Zach, to Jackson. But the practice of humdrum bankruptcy hearings and pedestrian civil disputes soon had him chafing at the bit for more action. Meanwhile, Winter reduced his own stake in the firm as he mobilized for a third race for governor, leaving Scruggs at the mercy of the firm’s managing partner, an easily irritated former judge named Arnold Pyle, whose nickname, Red, matched his temperament. After a meeting with some of the firm’s clients in whi
ch Pyle belittled Scruggs’s work on their behalf, Scruggs followed his boss into his office, grabbed his shirt, and told Pyle he would “whip his ass” if he ever talked that way again. One of Scruggs’s best friends, his colleague Bill Reed, was shocked by his behavior, which Reed considered out of character—until he remembered that Scruggs was only a few years from a flight deck. Scruggs was fired that afternoon.

  He would be vindicated later when other young lawyers in the firm mutinied against Pyle and forced his ouster as their boss. But by that time, Scruggs had made a lateral move to another well-known Jackson firm with a shorthand name, Watkins, Eager, which was often confused with Watkins, Pyle, Ludlam. Yet his duties there were no more rewarding. Watkins, Eager was a conservative firm with a list of blue-chip clients that included banks and insurance companies. Scruggs was not inspired.

  The firm entrusted Scruggs with one case that left him bittersweet memories. He was dispatched to rural Holmes County to defend a power company that had been sued by a customer whose home had burned down after an electrical malfunction. Scruggs felt he had the facts on his side: the plaintiff had had several appliances drawing power from a single extension cord when the fire broke out. But Scruggs failed to reckon with the caprices of a backcountry jury and the persuasive powers of a local lawyer, Don Barrett, representing the single mother whose family had lived in the home. The plaintiff was black, and so were most of the members of the jury. They responded to Barrett’s oratory with approving murmurs, as though they were members of a congregation stirred by a fevered sermon. The jury awarded the plaintiff $15,000 in compensation for her loss and added another $50,000 in punitive damages for good measure. Out of his element, Scruggs felt he had been rolled, an experience he likened to a mugging, and he called his drive home to Jackson that day “the longest sixty-mile ride of my life.” But he felt a grudging admiration for Barrett, his courtroom rival. There had been something winning about Barrett’s populist assault on the utility company.