Coup

Lamar Alexander, Keel Hunt

Description

Coup is the behind-the-scenes story of an abrupt political transition, unprecedented in US history. Based on 163 interviews, Hunt describes how collaborators came together from opposite sides of the political aisle and, in an extraordinary few hours, reached agreement that the corruption and madness of the sitting Governor of Tennessee, Ray Blanton, must be stopped. The sudden transfer of power that caught Blanton unawares was deemed necessary because of what one FBI agent called "the state's most heinous political crime in half a century"—a scheme of selling pardons for cash.

On January 17, 1979, driven by new information that some of the worst criminals in the state's penitentiaries were about to be released (and fears that James Earl Ray might be one of them), a small bipartisan group chose to take charge. Senior Democratic leaders, friends of the sitting governor, together with the Republican governor-elect Lamar Alexander (now US Senator from Tennessee), agreed to oust Blanton from office before another night fell. It was a maneuver unique in American political history.

Expanded edition, with a newly discovered account of the events by Senator Lamar Alexander:

"In December 2015 something unexpected happened. Keel [Hunt] delivered to my Nashville office a brown three-ring binder. He had only recently discovered it in a box that had been in storage for thirty years." —Senator Lamar Alexander

This binder contained the forgotten typescript, written in 1985, of Alexander's recollections of the events leading up to his early inauguration on January 17, 1979. In this expanded edition of Coup, the Senator's 22,000-word text has been added as a lost footnote to Hunt's definitive account.

From the foreword by John L. Seigenthaler:

"The individual stories of those government officials involved in the coup—each account unique, but all of them intersecting—were scattered like disconnected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table of history until the author conceived this book. Perhaps because it happened so quickly, and without major disagreement, protest, or dissent, this truly historic moment has been buried in the public mind. In unearthing the drama in gripping detail, Keel Hunt assures that the 'dark day' will be remembered as a bright one in which conflicted politicians came together in the public interest."

Sujets

• Elections
• Campaigns
• Political Process
• Political Science
• Ray Blanton
• History of the United States
• Region
• Politics
• Regional
• History
• Lamar Alexander
• Tennessee

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 07 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9780826521866
• Langue: English

Extrait

COUP
What is most important of this grand experiment, the United States? Not the election of the first president, but the election of its second president. The peaceful transition of power is what will separate this country from every other country in the world .
—George Washington
COUP
The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor, Put Republican Lamar Alexander in Office Early, and Stopped a Pardon Scandal
Keel Hunt
EXPANDED EDITION
with a newly discovered account of the events by
Lamar Alexander
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
© 2013, 2017 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2013
Expanded edition 1st printing 2017
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Photo credits: All photos courtesy of Senator Lamar Alexander; Sandy Campbell; Hal Hardin; Mike McWherter and Ned McWherter, Weakley County Library, Dresden, Tennessee; the Nashville Public Library, Nashville Room, Special Collections— Nashville Banner Archives; Tennessee Technological University Eagle yearbook, 1956; the Tennessean Photo Library and John L. Seigenthaler, Chairman Emeritus; and David Wilder.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2017033922
LC classification number F440 .H86 2017
Dewey classification number 976.8/053—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017033922
ISBN 978-0-8265-2184-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2186-6 (ebook)
For Marsha ,
who gave me Shannon and Zach ,
who gave us Olivia, Henry, and Harper
CONTENTS
Author’s Preface to the Expanded Edition
Foreword by John L. Seigenthaler
1. The Stranger
2. The Sharecropper’s Son and Nixon’s Choirboy
3. The Red-and-Black Plaid Shirt
4. The Murders
5. The Madness
6. A Man of Great Promise
7. The Dominion of the Editor-in-Chief
8. The Attorney General and the Rule of Law
Illustration Gallery
9. The New List and the Ticking Clock
10. The Turmoil
11. The Call
12. The Rise of the Speaker
13. The Cosmos of the Lieutenant Governor
14. The Dance
15. The Decision
Illustration Gallery
16. The Yellow-Dog Chief Justice
17. The Arrival
18. The Oath
19. The Scramble
20. The Long Night
21. The White Morning
Epilogue: What Became of Them
Timeline
Postscript: A Note on Sources
The Interviews
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Lost Manuscript Found: My View of the Coup from the Eye of the Storm
by Lamar Alexander
Index
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE EXPANDED EDITION
I COULD HARDLY BELIEVE what I held in my hands, that Saturday afternoon in January 2016.
The musty brown three-ring binder, stuffed with yellowing pages, was hidden in the bottom of a box, long forgotten, sleeping in storage for thirty years. Not since July 1986—the summer I packed up and left my first-floor office at the Tennessee state capitol, six months before Governor Lamar Alexander himself left office—had I seen this artifact. I was searching in this one last container, examining a stack of my old legal pads for any notes relevant to a new book I had in progress. Underneath all those notepads was this unfamiliar binder, and between its covers was a manuscript with a title page that bore the single word “Inauguration.”
By the time of this discovery, the first edition of my book Coup had been out for more than two years. I had labored over Coup for twice that long, digging into records and conducting 163 interviews. As I read now through these older pages, I realized they contained a detailed recounting by Alexander himself of what he experienced at the center of the storm in the days leading up to the Blanton crisis of January 1979. A personal narrative long unmentioned by him, and certainly unremembered by me.
The questions tumbled in my mind: What is this? Why do I have this? When did it come to me, and why? Could someone have placed it in my box by mistake? And, of course, I also wondered: Had this come to light just three years sooner, might these pages have saved me hundreds of hours of research in writing my own book?
I sent a quick email to (now US Senator) Alexander: “ Are you in Nashville this weekend? Can I bring something over? ” This began a series of phone calls and email correspondence that helped us both understand what I had discovered. At the end of this new edition of Coup , you will read in Lamar’s own preface to this “lost footnote” how these found pages came to be written back in 1985—and the triple meaning that the word “inauguration” has held for him over many years.
And, by the way, I am not sorry after all that I was oblivious to this treasure when I began my work on Coup . Not having it, I proba bly dug deeper and probed farther than I might have. And this “new” material from the former governor’s own hand—from the time when his memories of the extraordinary ouster of his predecessor were still fresh—should be of interest and benefit to scholars and us all for years to come.
Keel Hunt
Nashville, 2017
FOREWORD
The date: May 19, 1790. The New England sky, from Maine south to New Jersey’s border, gradually darkened and by noon was like midnight—blanketed with a menacing ceiling of swirling, low-hanging, black clouds. The sun, through the thick overcast, appeared blood red. Rivers ran silted with a flakey, pitch-like sediment.
People in the streets panicked. Many, fearful that the end of the world was at hand, left their work to rush home to loved ones. Others fell to their knees in prayer. In the Connecticut legislature, there was near bedlam. Members cried out for immediate adjournment. In the midst of it, Colonel Abraham Davenport stood, demanding silence.
“I am against adjournment,” he shouted, and the tumult died. “The day of judgment,” he declared “is either approaching—or it is not.”
“If it is,” he said, “I choose to be found here, doing my duty.” He called for lighted candles, and the business of the government went forward.
AS I READ AND REREAD the manuscript of Coup , by Keel Hunt, I was reminded, more than once, of the anecdote about Colonel Davenport, often recited by John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign. The point of the future president’s story was that in times of crisis, leaders must stand with vision and courage against the clamor of the crowd.
It was 189 years and a thousand miles from that day in Hartford to a dark day in Tennessee history when leaders in the state legislature faced a different sort of crisis, but one requiring the same vision and courage exemplified by Colonel Davenport so long before.
The date: January 17, 1979, a morning when the weather was markedly unlike that frantic day the New Englanders’ world went black. (For a time it was believed that an eclipse of the sun was responsible for that “dark day” in Connecticut. More recently scientists have argued that a massive forest fire in Canada was the cause of the furor.) The sun, this morning in Nashville, peeked briefly from an overcast sky, then vanished as chilled rain began to fall. All the while, the Cumberland River ran its choppy, brindle flow, uncolored by the dusting of snow that fell about nightfall.
Tennesseans hoped the weather would warm by Saturday, when Lamar Alexander, a Republican, was scheduled to be sworn in as the state’s forty-fifth governor, succeeding Ray Blanton, a Democrat.
Then, suddenly, at mid-morning on that damp, brisk Wednesday, a cloud of political corruption, invisible but palpable, enveloped the state capitol, threatening to spoil Alexander’s carefully arranged inaugural plans.
For state officials at the highest level, it was a single, hellish “dark day” that must have seemed endless until, finally, it climaxed with what Keel Hunt calls the “coup.” Honey Alexander, within hours of being Tennessee’s first lady, remembers it as “the worst day of my life.”
The individual stories of those government officials involved in the coup—each account unique, but all of them intersecting—were scattered like disconnected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table of history until the author conceived this book. Perhaps because it happened so quickly, and without major disagreement, protest, or dissent, this truly historic moment has been buried in the public mind. In unearthing the drama in gripping detail, Keel Hunt assures that the “dark day” will be remembered as a bright one in which conflicted politicians came together in the public interest.
For weeks before that day, there had been a flow of news reports and political rumors about dishonesty at the core of the incumbent Blanton administration. Journalists had been referring to it as the pay-for-pardons scandal, in which cash changed hands to win executive clemency for convicts, some of them murderers and rapists.
In December, there had been the shocking spectacle of the governor’s legal counsel and two other close Blanton aides caught in an FBI sting linked to the corruption. There had been video-taped evidence that marked money had been paid to Blanton’s legal counsel in return for the release of a notorious criminal. Federal agents arrested the governor’s lawyer in his office in the capitol building, after finding some of the marked bills in his pocket.
Then on Monday night, January 15, five days before the scheduled end of his term, Blanton publicly acknowledged that he had, indeed, signed pardons and clemency documents that would free fifty-two inmates, some of them sentenced to long terms for violent crimes.
The governor denied that he had taken