The Giant Killer

He was the antithesis of Arkansas' self-image. The state's symbol is a raging razorback, and J. William Fulbright is an owl in gabardine. Though they did not profess to understand him very well or to endorse many of his views, the voters of Arkansas had for 30 years been sending Bill Fulbright to Washington. Like fond, if slightly baffled parents, they took pride in the national and global attention he won as the Senate's foremost authority on foreign affairs.

But last week Arkansas turned on its most famous son and emphatically denied him a chance to gain a sixth term in the Senate. By the humiliating margin of 65.2% to 34.8%, Fulbright, 69, lost the Democratic primary to Governor Dale Bumpers, 48, who was still a country lawyer in Charleston (pop. 1,497) four years ago when the Senator was leading his devastating attack on U.S. policy in Viet Nam.

The man who knocked Fulbright out of the Senate is a handsome, affable six-footer with a smile that makes voters grin back. Son of a Charleston merchant, Bumpers was always ambitious, but until 1970 he had achieved, besides a country law practice, only a seat on the local school board and the post of town attorney. The latter job came easily; he was Charleston's only lawyer.

Bumpers has been a rising political star from the moment 41/2 years ago when he stepped in front of a television camera in 1970 to challenge Orval Faubus in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Faubus went down to defeat, although he had served as Governor for six terms, and Bumpers had so little money that he had to sell his dairy herd for $95,000 to pay campaign and family expenses. Then it was the turn of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the Republican incumbent. In the November election, Rockefeller called Bumpers "a vaguely pleasant fellow with one speech, a shoeshine and a smile." The pleasant fellow attacked Rockefeller for his frequent absences from the state and won going away.

A populist, Bumpers has compiled a respectable record as Governor. With a series of reforms, including the reorganization of the state's government into efficient, Cabinet-type units, Bumpers put Arkansas solidly in the black. Simultaneously, he managed to boost teachers' salaries by an average of $2,000, to expand the state's systems of public kindergartens and colleges, and to increase from 20 to 85 the number of community care centers for the mentally retarded. He also raised the percentage of blacks among the state's employees from less than 10% to 19%, roughly the same figure as in the state as a whole.

Yet for all his accomplishments, and Fulbright's long and controversial record (see box), Bumpers refused to argue specific issues with the Senator during the campaign. "We're not issue-oriented," Bumpers explained. "You develop too many issues and you get locked into positions." Instead, Bumpers relied mainly upon his personal appeal, which was as folksy as Fulbright's was cerebral. Bumpers assiduously cultivated his image as the candidate of the common man, the same fellow who had gone on camp-outs with the Boy Scouts, served on the school board and, with his mellifluous baritone, led the Methodist Church choir back home in Charleston.

Early in the campaign, Bumpers promised that he would accept no contributions larger than $1,000, although his salary of $10,000 a year--the lowest of any Governor in the nation--leaves him so strapped that he has had to borrow from relatives to support his wife Betty and their three children. At a rally, Bumpers is an expert at the fine political art of handshaking and chatting his way through a crowd, catching and using every name.

Even Fulbright admired Bumpers' charm: "He's a very attractive, amiable personality. He's the kind of fellow you'd like to go have a beer with." Faced with this kind of soft-sell opposition, Fulbright did his best. He put on his Arkansas red tie emblazoned with razorbacks and tried to loosen up, but he looked and sounded like a professor talking down to his audience. Desperate to land a knockout blow, Fulbright challenged Bumpers to three one-hour TV debates, but the Governor agreed to only one half-hour joint appearance on an interview show--a mere sprint for the Senator--that turned out to be indecisive.

Clear Whistle. In the end, Fulbright was hurt by his years ("He's from another age," said one voter), his anti-Viet Nam stand, his preoccupation with foreign affairs and, ironically, by one of his greatest strengths: his 30 years of experience in Washington. After all, Washington is the city of Watergate, and spotless as Fulbright's own record might be, Bumpers subtly played on the theme. He preached one basic doctrine: "New leadership and a new spirit is essential to the revitalization of faith in ourselves as a nation."

When the voting was done, one of Fulbright's friends and supporters for 50 years declared: "I think the thing that hurt Bill the most is that he was an incumbent. Bill is as clean as a whistle, but he is there and that's enough." Perhaps wishfully, Fulbright agreed: "This is somewhat a reflection of 'throw everybody out' that's in Washington." Fulbright did not even carry his home town of Fayetteville.

Bumpers had barely made his victory speech when the pundits were suggesting that his was just the bright new face to freshen up the Democratic ticket hi 1976 if he were to run as somebody's vice-presidential candidate. Bumpers is liberal but not too liberal, from the South but not too far south. For all his unassuming grin, Bumpers was careful not to scoff at the prospect of a hill-country lawyer rising from obscurity to a spot on his party's national ticket in just six years. Said Bumpers, who is sure to be elected to the Senate in November: "There's no reason to think about that for at least two years anyway."

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