Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1997 by Gene Lyons

It is in the nature of things that this review must begin with a disclaimer. As the world now knows, it is exceedingly difficult in a small state like Arkansas for a public figure like, say, the governor, to do business public or private with a banker with whom he is not personally acquainted. Writers being rather less common than bankers in these latitudes, it is virtually impossible for one Arkansas author to comment upon the work of another to whom he is a stranger. I first met Roy Reed when he returned to Arkansas from a successful career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times to piddle with cattle at his farm in Hogeye and teach journalism at the University of Arkansas. We shared an office there one semester 16 years ago and have enjoyed several evenings together over the years.

More importantly, when his old paper printed a hostile, dismissive review of my book Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, Reed wrote a letter to the editor of the Book Review saying how much it pained him to say that the Times had gotten both Whitewater and my book wrong. Such is his reputation among his former colleagues that the newspaper felt compelled to print it. Please forgive the indulgence. As I've been very scornful of the buddy system of book reviewing during my career as a literary journalist, there's simply no way I could write about Reed's book without making what politicians call "full disclosure" up front.

Then there's the matter of Arkansas itself. The story of the life and times of Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus is above all an Arkansas story, and it's also in the nature of things that those of us who call this screwy little place home tend to feel very emotional about it. Exactly why local patriotism runs so strong here is hard to say. The state's physical beauty has something to do with it. But so does its tumultuous social history; also the very intimacy I spoke of earlier. Living here is a bit like living in a small country. Even during the Clinton era, the state remains as strongly flavored and provincial as it's possible for an American place to be. Arkansans are proud and touchy, highly resentful of condescending outsiders, yet bitterly self-critical and riven by old wounds that haven't quite healed over.

Reed's biography of Faubus partakes of that same passionate ambivalence. Besides the lyrical clarity of his prose, it's one of the book's best qualities. Orval Faubus' futile defiance of the federal government during the 1957 Little Rock Central High integration crisis shamed his native state before the nation and the world. It also succeeded in winning for Faubus himself near-dictatorial powers which he used ruthlessly to suppress dissent, punish his political enemies and line his own pockets. If ever the state of Arkansas deserved the accusations of backwardness and corruption thrown at it by Bill Clinton's enemies, it was during the last five of Faubus' six terms as governor. (Even though some of Clinton's bitterest Arkansas detractors were among Faubus' strongest allies, a fact that has escaped the national media almost entirely.) Yet even so, Reed cannot bring himself to treat the man with unreserved scorn.

"A biographer," he writes,"ought to be able to say with some conviction that he has found out what makes his subject run. This biographer spent hundreds of hours listening to his subject and looking him in the eye and is forced to admit that Orval Eugene Faubus is more mysterious now than when the process began.... It is not just that he was opaque. He appears still in my mind, even after his death, as an insoluble mixture of cynicism and compassion, of guile and grace, of wickedness and goodness. I have observed his life off and on for forty years, and I still don't know whether he was good or evil, or even whether those are the choices. There was a time when I knew. But that was long ago, and I was young"

Out of the Ozarks

Back at the beginning, Orval Faubus seemed just about the least likely Arkansas politician to lead the state into a racially charged confrontation with the federal government. He grew up in poverty in remote Madison County, deep in the Ozark Mountains near the Missouri border. Slaveholding there, as in much of the upland South, was virtually unknown. More of Faubus' ancestors had supported the Union than the Confederacy during the Civil War. Reed's evocation of Faubus' backwoods hillbilly childhood--his perilous log cabin birth, the rows of tiny infant graves in the cemetery at Combs where his people are buried, the omnipresence of death and disease in an area that resembled a Third World country at least up to World War II--rings with eloquent authenticity. Orval Faubus weighed two-and-a-half pounds at birth; his mother later told people he could have fit into a quart jar with the lid screwed down.

It wasn't keeping blacks down that preoccupied Ozark country folk during the hard-scrabble years of Faubus' childhood. It was staying alive and praising Jesus (although Faubus' own religious beliefs appear to have been largely expedient). Such racial bigotry as existed wasn't a great deal more passionate than generalized suspicion of all outsiders. Indeed Faubus' father Sam was a lifelong Socialist and follower of Eugene V. Debs--hence the son's middle name. He preached racial tolerance and the brotherhood of the working man, and there's no evidence that Orval disagreed. Black leaders who became Faubus' antagonists during and after the Central High crisis said they never felt he bore them any personal animosity. His actions were purely opportunistic. Does that make them better or worse?