Jim Guy Tucker obit

Former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker dies at age 81

 

He was not on the list.

Jim Guy Tucker, whose tumultuous 30-year career in politics included terms as a prosecuting attorney, attorney general, congressman and Arkansas’s 43rd governor, died Thursday in Little Rock. He was 81. Plagued almost from birth by chronic health conditions that frequently interrupted and complicated his career, he entered hospice care in late January.

Tucker was part of a cadre of charismatic, handsome and liberal politicians — along with Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, Bill Clinton and Sheffield Nelson — who dominated Arkansas public affairs and elections from the 1970s through the 1990s. All Democrats (although Nelson later became a Republican), they were sometimes friends and allies but also frequent adversaries. Tucker would lose to Pryor in a race for the U.S. Senate in 1978 and to Clinton in a race for governor in 1982 but defeat Nelson in both men’s last races for governor, in 1994.

It was Tucker’s alternating friendship and rivalry with Clinton and Nelson that ended his career in disgrace, and nearly ended his life. Indictments and convictions during the Whitewater investigation by the Republican special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr sought to undermine Clinton’s presidency by pressuring the president’s and first lady’s friends, partners and adversaries to provide evidence of Clinton misdeeds. Tucker had no evidence to give Starr when confronted with the threat of prosecution for his transactions as a businessman in the 1980s. In pain from the last stages of liver disease when Starr prosecuted him in federal district court, Tucker finally was convicted, along with two associates, on two counts of fraud connected with loans from a small-business lending company. And then, after a life-saving liver transplant, Tucker pleaded guilty to a bizarre charge of tax fraud to avoid going to prison. He resigned as governor after the convictions on the business loans and soon went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for the transplant of a liver from a young man who had died.

The transplant saved his life, but not his career or his happiness. The Justice Department and the IRS eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of the transaction in question. The tax fraud of which Tucker was accused allegedly occurred in the purchase and resale of a cable TV system in Plantation, Florida. The IRS had twice audited and approved the transaction, but Starr pursued the criminal charges anyway. The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.

An appellate judge held that no matter if the government had tricked him into pleading guilty to a crime that he had not committed, once he had confessed to it he was guilty forever. As for the other charges, that as a businessman in the 1980s Tucker had obtained a small-business loan for which he might not have been eligible, the charge and conviction depended upon the unsupported claims of a lawyer who was convicted of multiple frauds in operating the lending agency.

His political and legal careers over because of the convictions, Tucker brooded about the episode and the loss of dignity and reputation and sought pardons. Clinton purportedly regretted not pardoning his old political enemy when he left office, since he himself had been the real object of the investigations and trials. Tucker filed a petition for a presidential pardon in the summer of 2024, but President Joe Biden did not grant it before he left office last month.

Tucker’s application said a pardon normally is intended to be “a sign of forgiveness, not vindication,” but he was asking for a pardon for the latter purpose. He said the charges related to his business career in the 1980s when he had given up a political career, not to his public performance as a prosecutor, attorney general, congressman or governor. He insisted that he had committed no crime and did not deserve the opprobrium that followed his conviction and removal from the governor’s office in the middle of his term in 1996.

Daredevil legacy

James Guy Tucker was born June 13, 1943, in Oklahoma City, where his father operated the Social Security office. His mother was the former Willie Maude White. The family soon moved to Little Rock, where they had family connections. 

Jim Guy Tucker’s roots, as he would always acknowledge, were in Union County. His swashbuckling grandfather was the El Dorado city marshal, from whom Jim Guy seemed to have inherited a certain audaciousness and bravado that he would exhibit all his life. His grandfather’s fame spread from the Tucker-Parnell feud, a colorful account of which can be found in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. The Tucker and Parnell clans, leaders in El Dorado and the community of Champagnolle on the Ouachita River, often clashed around the turn of the century in the streets of El Dorado and at the courthouse, usually with guns involved. There were multiple killings and maimings. Marshal Guy Tucker, grandfather of the future governor, was charged with first-degree murder for shooting John Parnell, but was acquitted. Guy Tucker was once shot six times in a courthouse brawl. One arm was amputated, but he survived. He eventually moved his family to Little Rock to escape more street fights, shootings and plots.

In 1993, that feuding marshal’s grandson visited El Dorado as the governor of Arkansas, and  had a cordial meeting with a Parnell daughter who was among the few Parnells and Tuckers who had stayed in the county.

A whiff of Union County daredevil stayed with Jim Guy Tucker throughout his career, and there were always incidents that found their way into the news. As Arkansas’s attorney general, he trained to fly airplanes, got his pilot’s license and sometimes flew his single-engine plane to political events, carrying a terrified newsman or aide onto sandy, wind-whipped mountain airstrips. In October 1973, the young attorney general led a bevy of young Democratic officials from several states on a canoe adventure down the Rio Grande river separating the U.S. from Mexico. He rented a Beechcraft Bonanza from Central Flying Service and flew five buddies, including the assistant mayor of Boston, to south Texas to join others on the Rio Grande adventure. Landing on a crude dirt strip, the plane bounced into the air, hit a ditch across the sod runway and flipped. Everyone climbed out of the plane. Tucker had a big gash and bruises on his face. Tucker speculated to a reporter who got word of the crash that the plane had only minor damage, but Central Flying Service said it was totaled.

A colorful career

Jim Guy Tucker attended public schools in Little Rock, graduating from Hall High School in 1961. He was a boxer and a football player although he was continually plagued by medical conditions that often interfered with his exploits. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in government, but he also was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), expecting at least some real military service and warfare — not just the honor of wearing a commissioned Marine’s uniform for a while. America’s role in Vietnam was growing in 1965 and 1966 but Tucker twice failed the Marine Corps medical exam, owing to chronic ulcers. When he failed to reverse his discharge from the Marine Corps after two appeals, he went to Vietnam as a civilian correspondent where he decked out with fighting fatigues and a weapon and sought out soldiers from Arkansas. He told their stories in a book, Arkansas Men at War, published in 1968.

After his time in Vietnam,  he enrolled at the University of Arkansas School of Law at Fayetteville and determined that he would have a political career.

As a young lawyer at what is now the Rose Law Firm in 1968, when corruption and brutality in the Arkansas prisons were an international scandal, Tucker was approached by a law partner and friend, John Haley (appointed by Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller to the prison board), to go down to a prison unit to investigate conditions from inside. Tucker arranged to have himself committed to the prison for a nonexistent crime so he could observe the brutality and bribery up close. He was assigned to cutting up poultry in the prison kitchen. Haley told Rockefeller about it and the governor erupted. “Get that kid out of there immediately,” Rockefeller reportedly said, worried fellow inmates would catch on and that Jim Guy Tucker’s life would be in danger. The incident made the news and Haley sort of apologized for sneaking the young man into prison, although the stunt revealed some illegal activity by prison officials and trusties.

In 1970, Tucker ran for prosecuting attorney in the Sixth Judicial District and won. Weeks into the job, he joined the police in capturing a hiding fugitive. When the police approached the locked door, Tucker brushed the cops aside, kicked the door down and stuck his revolver in the con’s face. It was what his grandfather Guy would have done, but late in life he regretted it as the excessive bravado of youth.

He ran for attorney general in 1974, when Ray Thornton, who had been elected in 1970, was elected congressman from the Fourth District. Tucker’s two terms were notable for his opposition to the licensing of giant coal and nuclear power plants planned by Arkansas Power and Light Company that he thought would cause excessive environmental damage. In 1975, he married Betty Allen Alworth of Brookhaven, Mississippi, and Little Rock, who had two children by a previous marriage. They had two more children.

In 1976, after U.S. Rep. Wilbur D. Mills retired owing to a scandal involving a Washington, D.C., stripper nicknamed Fanne Fox, Tucker ran for his seat and won, first in a large field of hopeful Democratic stars, and then against unknown Republican James J. Kelly. He was assigned to the powerful Ways and Means Committee, chaired for many years by Mills, and helped produce legislation modernizing Medicare. He became a close friend of President Jimmy Carter, who in 1978 appointed the young congressman chairman of the White House Conference on Families.

The appointment proved highly controversial. Conservative protesters accused Carter of appointing only liberals who would do nothing to stop abortions. Tucker, who introduced the conference, talked about several ways that government policies harmed families, including forcing poor families to break up before qualifying for welfare assistance, the marriage penalty in income-tax laws, and the loss of Social Security benefits for many women who were divorced.

“If we can do so much for the snail darter,” Tucker said, referring to the halted construction of a dam because it would kill schools of the tiny fish, “we can do a bit for the family, too.”

The 1978 edition of the Almanac of American Politics predicted a great future for the charismatic lawyer unless he ran that year for the Senate seat of John L. McClellan, who had died in November 1977, in which case his future would not look so bright. Tucker did run for the seat, against two luminaries, Gov. David Pryor and Congressman Thornton, and a relatively unknown Texarkana businessman, A. C. Grigson. The first primary produced a nearly three-way tie: Pryor 34.3%, Tucker 32.5% and Thornton 31.9%.

The two-week runoff produced one overriding issue, the accusation that Jack Williams of Texarkana, Pryor’s campaign treasurer and old friend, had approached another old friend, a Hendrix College economics professor who had been best man at Williams’s wedding and whom Pryor had appointed to the state Public Service Commission, about approving a rate increase for a west Arkansas natural gas company.  This was, presumably, in the hope that the owners of the gas company — Ray Thornton’s uncles Witt and Jack Stephens — would throw their support from Thornton to Pryor in the runoff with Tucker. Williams insisted that he was not trying to get the Stephens millionaires to support Pryor in the runoff election. It dominated the news the last week of the election, but Pryor won the runoff with 54.9% of the votes. Tucker later said that it was clear that few voters would believe that David Pryor would ever do anything even slightly unethical. (Pryor and his son, former U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, as well as former U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, wrote letters early in 2024 to the U.S. pardon attorney in Washington recommending a pardon for Tucker.)

After his defeat, Tucker returned to law practice in 1979. But after Gov. Clinton’s defeat in 1980 at the hands of Frank White, he decided to run for governor in 1982. So did former Attorney General Joe Purcell, a low-key but popular politician. (Arkansas Gazette reporter Doug Smith wrote that people had been known to fall asleep shaking Purcell’s hand.) When Clinton decided to revive his career and run for governor again, financial support for both Tucker and Purcell collapsed, but they stayed in the race. The primary campaign centered on daily charges back and forth between Tucker and Clinton. Gazette political cartoonist George Fisher depicted Tucker in military fatigues carrying a rifle and Clinton in penitent robes whipping himself with a strap to illustrate his perpetual apologies for mistakes he had made in his first term. Purcell edged out Tucker for second place behind Clinton in the preferential primary but lost to Clinton in the runoff. Clinton then defeated Gov. Frank White, who had unseated him two years earlier.

Tucker returned to his law practice again, but he and his wife started a company to extend cable television to suburban and rural communities, first in Central Arkansas but eventually to unserved areas in Texas and Florida — and years later to southeast Asia. It would be their entanglement with a cable operator in Texas that led to his ruin when Sheffield Nelson brought it to the attention of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special counsel.

The Clinton rivalry

Meanwhile, Tucker and Clinton had resumed their rivalry. Tucker first decided to run for governor in 1990 because it seemed that Clinton would not run again and would instead prepare for a race for president in 1992. But Clinton did run again, so Tucker backed out of the race and ran for lieutenant governor. Both men won their races, but they were not a team in office. Lt. Gov. Tucker presided over the Senate, the lieutenant governor’s only constitutional duty except to be governor for a day or two when the governor was out of state. There was friction even there.

When Clinton launched his bid for the presidency and expected to spend most of his time out of state, he had to find a way to stymie Tucker, who he was sure would go to the Capitol every day and act like he was the real governor. Clinton appointed William H. Bowen, a legendary attorney and banker whose name now adorns the law school at Little Rock, as an executive assistant to the governor. Bowen was a strong man who would resist Tucker’s initiatives. But Tucker became the effective governor, disregarding tension with Bowen and Clinton’s office staff. He fired one of them, and when Clinton said he was going to rehire the person when he got back to Little Rock, Tucker told him he’d  fire her again when Clinton left the state again. Tucker wanted to impose a sales tax on soft drinks, when the national recession left the state short of state matching funds for Medicaid health services for the poor. When Clinton was elected president and resigned as governor to prepare for the presidency, Tucker called the Legislature into special session and enacted the soft drinks tax.

As governor, Tucker pushed bold proposals that were sure to go beyond the political will of legislators and perhaps a conservative public: a big increase in motor-fuel taxes and a massive bond issue to fund four-lane highways and bridges across the state (rejected by the voters in a special election), and a reformed state constitution (also rejected by the voters). Those proposals and defeats came during Starr’s prosecutions of Tucker, which undoubtedly contributed to voters’ negativity.

Public school financing was the biggest issue of the decade, reaching the state Supreme Court numerous times. Tucker worked up a constitutional amendment (Amendment 74 of 1996) that enabled the state to share some of the property-tax receipts in rich school districts with property-poor districts to bring the state into compliance with a constitutional mandate to provide a suitable and equal education to every child in the state. Voters narrowly ratified the amendment a few months after Tucker’s resignation.

Clinton survived the Whitewater ordeal and maintained high national popularity until he left office in January 2001. The real victims were Tucker and his friends and business partners Jim and Susan McDougal.

When Starr filed indictments against Tucker and the McDougals for misusing loan funds, they landed in the court of U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, who always maintained a speedy docket. He soon dismissed the charges because they were outside the jurisdiction of the special counsel. Starr’s only mission, he pointed out, was to investigate wrongdoing by the Clintons. A panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Woods and assigned the cases to another judge. At the trial in 1996, Jim McDougal insisted on testifying against the advice of his own attorney. A boasting and stumbling McDougal got caught in obvious untruths and when the case went to the jury, according to one juror’s explanation afterward, the jurors thought the three must have done something wrong. They convicted the three on a couple of counts and found them innocent on others.

The only thing wrong in the transactions was that the loan came from banker David Hale’s small-business lending company, which had obligations to give at least half their loans to companies where owners were disadvantaged in some way. But Hale never told any of his borrowers of this requirement, and few, if any, of them would have qualified. Many were loans to Hale’s Republican friends, including the state chairman, but none of them was indicted. Tucker’s company, which was set up to provide water and sewer services for a housing development between Little Rock and Sheridan, had repaid the loan. Tucker and the McDougals learned of Hale’s special requirement for borrowers at the trial. Jim and Susan McDougal went to prison, where Jim McDougal died in solitary confinement.

Tucker had wanted to testify but he was sick, in pain from liver cancer and other ailments and so incontinent that he could not get to the restroom. After the guilty verdict, Tucker announced his resignation to take effect on July 15, when Lt. Gov. Mike Huckabee would be sworn in. But Tucker changed his mind that day and said he intended to stay in office while he appealed his convictions. A tumult followed and Huckabee denounced the move. Democratic leaders, including the state chairman of the Democratic Party, went to the Capitol and urged Tucker to surrender the office. He said Tucker would have little public support for reversing his resignation. Tucker relented and Huckabee was sworn in.

In preparation for the 1997 legislative session, before his trial, Tucker had prepared a bill eliminating or reducing income taxes for the poor and elderly, including indexing tax rates to the consumer price index, doubling the child-care tax credit and the standard deduction—all carrying out his and President Carter’s program for families. Every Democrat in the Senate and House of Representatives and no Republican signed the bill as sponsors in January, and it passed unanimously. When he ran for president in 2008, Gov. Huckabee claimed it as his bill.

Later years

His public and governmental career obviously over — Tucker could never again even vote or practice law — Tucker turned again to business and several commercial and consulting ventures. He joined with James Lee Witt, President Clinton’s director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in a national consulting firm, Witt Global Partners; with his wife he started Broadband Systems LLC, a consulting firm; he was a part owner of Navigator Telecommunications Inc, a small telephone company; he and his wife were founders of Pacific Genetech Ltd., a British Virgin Islands company, which developed and commercialized vaccine technologies; he was part owner of Collinear Networks Inc., which provided wireless high-speed data transmission for companies; and worked for Broadband Systems Inc., owned by his wife, which consulted with cable television companies in Indonesia.

From 2000 through 2005, the Tuckers spent much of their time in Hong Kong, where they were involved in several philanthropic programs, including work with the Heifer Project in Little Rock and Heifer Hong Kong, of which the Tuckers were among the founders, along with the Community Church of Hong Kong, of which they were members.

He was a performer until the end. At the funeral in 2021 of Frank Newell, who had been Tucker’s boyhood friend, Hall High football teammate and deputy attorney general, Tucker went to the lectern when someone mentioned that he and Newell had taken tap-dancing lessons as youngsters. A feeble Tucker tap danced and told funny stories about his buddy.

Tucker is survived by his wife; a stepson, Lance Alworth Jr. of Washington, D.C.; three daughters, Anna Tucker Ashton and Sarah Allen Tucker, both of Little Rock, and Kelly Alworth Driscoll of San Diego; and a sister, Carol Tucker Foreman of Chevy Chase, Maryland, former executive director of the Consumer Federation of America. His oldest sister, Frances Kemp of Jonesboro, died in 2003.