An Arkansas institution
David Pryor’s career began a few years before mine, but a very few. By the early 1960s he was dedicated to the political arena while I was doomed to its edges, an observer. Over most of seven consecutive decades our respective professional lives were in imperfect parallel, intersecting frequently, sometimes daily, his trajectory rather higher and farther than mine.
The long association, chilled only rarely by the tension that unavoidably flares between politician and journalist, came to an end last Saturday. David Pryor was 89. He was, in turn, a newspaper publisher, attorney, state representative, U.S. congressman, governor, U.S. senator, presidential confidant, educator, Arkansas Democratic Party chair, benefactor and University of Arkansas trustee. Not bad. Twice his angels interceded: Paramedics were nearby when a major heart attack almost claimed him 33 years ago, and the immediate intervention of specially-trained surgeons spared him from a stroke in 2016. At the end, it was “simple old age,” as son Mark described it, that carried his father away.
More thorough assessments, and innumerable eloquent appreciations, have been posted elsewhere by others. In this space, now, some recollections, some memories. A few of many.
• A 1970 telephone interview from his Washington office, Pryor, rebuffed by the congressional leadership in his attempt to create a committee on elderly abuse, announcing that his ad-hoc “House Trailer Committee on Aging” had established its “office” at Joe’s Capitol View Gulf Station. “How’s that?” he chuckled. A couple hundred yards away, Sen. John McClellan was unamused.
• Coffee at an all-night diner in 1972, Pryor having decided to challenge McClellan but his formal declaration weeks distant. Was it the right thing to do? he asked, looking at me, possibly an attempt at flattery. Just as likely he was seeking reassurance.
• The two-year interregnum between that failed Senate campaign and a winning run for governor: Easing back into the spotlight, restoring his Rolodex, reaffirming alliances, repairing some relationships bruised in the battle with Ol’ Jawn.
• His frown when I reported widespread opposition to his “Arkansas Plan” for taxation; his scowl at my similar finding regarding his program for state constitutional reform. He swallowed his ire after both initiatives tanked.
• The undisguised pain that he bore during the two-year separation that he and Barbara Pryor endured during his time as governor, and then the satisfaction, the deepened devotion, that they demonstrated when they reunited.
• His sheer delight in those first days as a U.S. Senator, his dream realized. And, over the subsequent years, his growing disillusionment. He declined to accept the larger suite of offices that his increasing seniority permitted: He relished the rooms that once were occupied by a senator from Missouri named Harry Truman.
• Campaigning for his fellow Arkansan in New Hampshire’s presidential primary only months after that severe heart attack, Pryor was so ashen and his breathing so labored that his collapse seemed imminent; the symptoms essentially screamed for the bypass surgery he underwent later that year.
• His exultation, measured and polite, at Clinton’s victory. The day before the inaugural I asked Pryor how he would advise his friend. “Be bold,” he replied. He stuck with Clinton when the latter should have been less bold.
• Failing to recognize the tip Pryor gave me when he bummed a ride to his office following a speech in early 1995. We were discussing the Senate agenda. “This isn’t fun anymore,” Pryor sighed. A few weeks later he announced he would not seek a fourth term, citing the Senate’s increasingly poisonous partisanship. The chamber’s once-storied civility, its collegiality, was eroding. He was done.
• Well, almost: He put his shoulder to the wheel to help the son capture the seat that the father surrendered six years earlier. Oozing paternal pride in 2002, despairing a dozen years later at the son’s crushing defeat in Obama-altered Arkansas.
• He enjoyed lunching with the crowd of his working lifetime, to include a reporter or two. The phone would ring and an aide, or sometimes Pryor himself, would bid you join him and maybe a handful or so others – judges, lawyers, lobbyists, random politicos – at his home or office. Salad, sandwiches and conversation that was implicitly off-the-record, invariably enlightening and always entertaining.
• There were fewer such gatherings in recent years; the brain bleed hampered his mobility and slowed his speech, the latter impairment never as profound as he imagined it to be. En route to his home late last year after a noon outing, he allowed that he had left the Senate at “the right time” for him, that he could scarcely have tolerated another day, but that Mark’s tenure was unjustly abbreviated by the “toxic” nature of contemporary politics. At mention of the immediate past U.S. president, Pryor would turn away, wordlessly – an unmistakable expression of absolute contempt.
He was often described as “beloved” by Arkansas voters, David Pryor, perhaps because he believed in, and practiced, basic decency. That he could not be elected today is our collective shame.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)