Into the sunset

Editor’s note: This column originally ran online only on Wednesday.

Inside a patio home in Little Rock on a recent Wednesday, as the Secret Service patrolled the passing street, two men hugged.

Today’s column is intended to record that moment for history, theirs and ours.

These were no ordinary men. This visit was no everyday occurrence.

—————— One of the men is widely deemed the greatest politician of our time. The other was widely deemed the finest orator in the U.S. Senate over the 24 years he spent there.

One became president of the United States. The other might have done that even earlier, but was a little too sane to pull the trigger to run.

Instead he gave a stirring and widely acclaimed closing argument in defense of the other on the occasion of the other’s impeachment.

When they say it’s not about sex … it’s about sex. Now that is what you call a summation.

One is deemed by historians to be the best governor in the state’s history. The other surely will concede as much, consoling himself with being a world statesman, a president much of the country would love to have back and maybe the future first First Husband in American history.

One had heart surgery and seems less robust than before, though his political motor still runs full out. The other is 89 and losing hearing and, steadily, the cognitive skill with which he once was so abundantly blessed.

Bill Clinton was in the state for three days, mostly to make public appearances to try to save Arkansas Democrats in the looming election.

While here, he heard from at least two people—Mike Beebe and David Pryor—that Dale Bumpers was in decline from the toll advanced age can take. The former president was advised to try to get by and see the former senator.

The Secret Service hadn’t cleared the path. Clinton’s staff said the schedule was too tight. So of course Clinton went by. On the way to the airport to get out of town that Wednesday, the former president’s motorcade and entourage dropped by Bumpers’ home. But only Clinton went inside, where he stayed for about an hour.

The particulars had been arranged with Bumpers’ son, Brent, who joined his dad and mom Betty for the hour’s visit.

I know about this private affair only because Brent told me about it days later. I’m telling you about it only because I prevailed on Brent and his family to let me.

“I think [the former president] mainly just wanted to hug him and tell him he loved him, which he did,” Brent wrote to me by email. “It was emotional, to me, but only in hindsight upon realizing it was not just another routine visit, but, because of the circumstances, likely a momentous occasion.”

Brent said there was “virtually none of the great two-way banter anymore.” He said the former president “just held forth as he can like no one else, with me providing the smiles, nods and feedback … .

“Dad advised after the fact to others that, yep, Clinton was here and he never heard him so eloquent.”

The relationship of these talented and ego-powered liberals has been a real one, thoroughly political and thoroughly human.

Clinton once thought of running against Bumpers, in 1986.

The next year they flew together on a small airplane on an icy January night to the Gillett Coon Supper. Betty Bumpers told them they needed saliva tests for embarking under such conditions. Sure enough, their plane skidded to a crash landing. As they ran from the wreckage, Clinton shouted to Bumpers that surely neither would ever lose Arkansas County now.

When U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa suggested Bumpers as the impeachment trial closer in 1999, Clinton first resisted, fearing the look of Arkansas provincialism. And Clinton grimaced a bit, we’ve been told, over a couple of Bumpers’ more candid summarizing points.

But, through it all, one man relied on the other, and one fought for the other, and each rivaled the other, and one told his staff to cool its heels so he could say he loved the other.

Thousands of Arkansas stories were wrapped in that embrace. There is mine, for example: A 16-year-old kid engrossed in politics in 1970 goes to Bumpers’ campaign headquarters to get a supply of signs and bumper stickers in support of that insurgent campaign; a dozen years later, the kid is a cub reporter sitting on a little airplane knee-to-knee with Clinton covering a future president’s comeback campaign for governor.

Wrapped in that Clinton-Bumpers embrace was merely the essence of modern Arkansas political history.

Wrapped in it was an Arkansas era that now eases toward what all eras inevitably face, which is sunset.