Our efforts generated a firestorm of opposition from fundamentalists, who favored a “just say no” policy. It was bad enough in their eyes that Dr. Elders was pro-choice. Now they claimed that our efforts to set up school-based clinics would lead to sexual encounters by hordes of young people who would never even have considered doing such a thing if Joycelyn hadn’t promoted the clinics. I doubted that Dr. Elders and her ideas even occurred to overheated teenagers in the backseats of their cars. It was a fight worth making.
When I became President, I appointed Joycelyn Elders surgeon general, and she was very popular with the public-health community for her continued willingness to stick her neck out for sound, if controversial, health policies. In December 1994, after we had suffered staggering losses in the midterm congressional elections to the Republican right, Dr. Elders made headlines again for suggesting that teaching children to masturbate might be a good way to reduce the likelihood of teen pregnancy. At the time, I had all I could handle to maintain the support of skittish congressional Democrats, and I was determined to fight the Republicans on their radical proposals to cut education, health care, and environmental protection. Now I faced the prospect that Gingrich and company could divert the attention of the press and the public away from their budget cuts by pillorying us. At any other time, we probably could have faced the heat, but I had already loaded the Democrats down with my controversial budget, NAFTA, the failed health-care effort, and the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, which the National Rifle Association had used to beat about a dozen of our House members. I decided I had to ask for her resignation. I hated to, because she was honest, able, and brave, but we had already shown enough political tone-deafness to last through several presidential terms. I hope someday she’ll forgive me. She did a lot of good with the two appointments I gave her.
The biggest staff loss I sustained in 1989 was Betsey Wright. In early August she announced that she was taking a leave of absence for several weeks. I asked Jim Pledger to do double duty at Finance and Administration and as her temporary replacement. Betsey’s announcement caused a lot of gossip and speculation, because everyone knew she ran a tight ship in the governor’s office and kept a close eye on everything that was going on in state government. John Brummett, the acerbic columnist for the Arkansas Gazette, wrote a column wondering whether our trial separation might end in divorce. He thought not, because we were too important to each other. That we were, but Betsey needed to get away. She had been working herself to death since my defeat in 1980, and it was taking its toll. We were both workaholics who got more irritable when we were exhausted. In 1989, we were trying to do a lot in a difficult climate, and we too often took our frustrations out on each other. At the end of the year, Betsey formally resigned as chief of staff after a decade of selfless service. In early 1990, I named Henry Oliver, a retired FBI agent and former chief of police in Fort Smith, as Betsey’s successor. Henry didn’t really want to do it, but he was my friend and believed in what we were trying to do, so he gave me a good year.
Betsey came back in the ’92 campaign to help defend me against attacks on my record and my personal life. Then, after a stint in Washington with Anne Wexler’s lobbying firm early in my presidency, she went home to Arkansas to live in the Ozarks. Most Arkansans will never know the large role she played in giving them better schools, more jobs, and an honest, effective state government, but they should. I couldn’t have accomplished much of what I did as governor without her. And without her, I never would have survived the Arkansas political wars to become President.
At the beginning of August, President Bush announced that he was inviting the nation’s governors to an education summit the following month. We met September 27 and 28 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Many of the Democrats were skeptical of the meeting, because the President and his secretary of education, Lauro Cavazos, made it clear the meeting was not a prelude to a large increase in federal support for education. I shared their concern, but was I excited by the prospect that the summit could produce a road map for the next steps in education reform, just as the Nation at Risk report had done in 1983. I believed the President’s interest in education reform was genuine, and agreed with him that there were important things we could do without new federal money. For example, the administration supported giving parents and students the right to choose a public school other than the one to which they were assigned. Arkansas had just become the second state after Minnesota to adopt the proposal, and I wanted the other forty-eight states to follow suit. I also believed that, if the summit produced the right kind of report, governors could use it to build public support for more investment in education. If people knew what they would get for their money, their aversion to new taxes might lessen. As the co-chairman of the Governors’ Task Force on Education, along with Governor Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, I wanted to build a consensus among the Democrats, then to work with the Republicans on a statement reflecting the outcome of the summit.
President Bush opened the meeting with a brief but eloquent speech. Afterward, we all took a stroll around the central lawn to give the photographers something for the evening news and morning papers, then went to work. The President and Mrs. Bush hosted a dinner that night. Hillary sat at the President’s table and got into a debate with him about how bad America’s infant-mortality rate was. The President couldn’t believe it when she said eighteen countries did a better job than we did in keeping babies alive until the age of two. When she offered to get him the evidence, he said he would find it himself. He did, and the next day he gave me a note for Hillary saying she was right. It was a gracious gesture that reminded me of the day in Kennebunkport six years earlier when he had personally escorted three-yearold Chelsea to the bathroom. When Carroll Campbell was called home to deal with an emergency, I was left to work out the details of a summit statement with the NGA chairman, Republican governor Terry Branstad of Iowa; the association’s education staffer, Mike Cohen; and my aide, Representative Gloria Cabe. Laboring until well after midnight, several of us hammered out a statement committing the governors and the White House to development of a set of specific education goals to be achieved by the year 2000. Unlike the standards movement of the last decade, these goals would be focused on outputs, not inputs, obligating all of us to achieve certain results. I argued that we would look foolish unless we came out of Charlottesville with a bold commitment that would put new energy into education reform. From the start, most of the governors were behind the cause and supported the idea of making the summit the start of something big. Some of the President’s people weren’t so sure. They were afraid of committing him to a big idea that could get him into trouble by raising expectations of new federal funding. Because of the deficit and the President’s “no new taxes” pledge, that wasn’t in the cards. In the end, the White House came around, thanks to John Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff. Sununu convinced his White House colleagues that the governors couldn’t go home emptyhanded, and I promised to minimize public pressure from the governors for more federal money. The final summit declaration said, “The time has come, for the first time in U.S. history, to establish clear national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.”