Huckabee Read online

  Huckabee was no athlete. And his grade point average, though good, was not the highest in the class. “We had a good time in high school, then buckled down in college,” lifelong friend Lester Sitzes said. “Mike spent a lot of time and energy in positions of leadership, speech, debate, and drama—not just in the library with a pile of books.”5

  According to his high school classmates and teachers, the things that set Huckabee apart were his abilities in leadership and communications. Sitzes remembers how in drama class they were required to get up once a week and give an animated summary of an article from the newspaper, pushing the students to individualize the content and overcome stage shyness. The joke among the students, however, was that every time Huckabee got up, he used the same newspaper. Why? “Because he was just making up news off the top of his head anyway,” Sitzes recalled. “He was so creative and had such a quick mind and speaking abilities that he could ‘read the news’ better, without the crutch of the newspaper, than the rest of us could do so with it.”6

  Alex Strawn, drama and speech teacher and the coach of the extracurricular debate team, said Huckabee was already gifted before he arrived in the class. “I helped him with the format of the debate itself, but he was already so good at using logic and reasoning.” When Strawn watched the 2008 presidential debates, he noted how often the moderators would ask Huckabee the first question. “But he was always on his game and had a good reply. I was proud of him during all those public appearances.”7

  Strawn taught his students the difference between having genuine content in a speech or debate versus sophistry and empty rhetoric. “A lot of people are good at rhetoric, and people fall for that instead of actually looking at what the issues are and discussing them on their merits. It’s just, ‘Take my word for it.’ Mike had a good delivery, but there was also meat behind the delivery. He wouldn’t speak on an issue unless he understood the facts. And he’s honest enough—if he doesn’t know, he’ll tell you he doesn’t know.”8 Friends recall Huckabee only losing one debate ever, and nobody seemed to think he actually lost that one either.

  Huckabee also excelled in drama. The class would put on productions for the elementary school. Strawn said Huckabee contributed ideas for making things more entertaining—never just sitting back and putting in the bare minimum of effort. He instinctively knew about what went into good staging and performance, and what kinds of approaches would lead an audience in a desired direction of thought and feeling.

  Huckabee moved audiences to tears of laughter with his portrayal of Dr. Seuss in the drama club’s production of Horton Hatches the Egg. His performance also gave them a reason to reflect on the deeper message: keeping one’s word no matter the cost. “Mike playing Dr. Seuss was like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow,” recalled Sitzes to a reporter three decades later. “He was so good we won a state championship on the strength of that performance. If you’re around Mike now, you’ll hear him say, ‘I say what I mean and I mean what I say.’ Well, I hear that and think, That’s Horton!”9

  Huckabee had a knack for thinking of new ways to bond groups and teams together. When the speech team prepared to head out for the statewide competition, he figured out an easy way to create identity and cohesion. “Mike talked the school principal into letting the speech team wear the football team’s ‘traveling jackets’ emblazoned with school colors and insignia,” Strawn said. “The team walked in the door looking real sharp and ready to unite for the win—something so simple, yet effective.”10 And they won.

  Strawn also served as a faculty sponsor of the student council and remembers Huckabee’s kindness-driven leadership. “Mike always exhibited a care and concern, especially if someone was having difficulties or problems. He wanted to know if there was some way he could help. He led by bringing individuals together for the common good.”11

  On the twenty-ninth of May, approximately two hundred seniors lined up in the Jones Field House of Hope High School to receive their diplomas. They were Hope’s first graduating class to have gone all four years in an integrated high school, and Huckabee had played a key role of student leadership in uniting the class. Accordingly, he received the Beryl Henry Award, given by vote of the school faculty to the “most outstanding senior.”12 “Any task that we set for him, he did 100 percent,” Strawn said. “He had an enthusiasm for what he did, and that made all the difference.”13

  Graduation accolades served to remind Huckabee that graduation night was not the end of the race, but only the sound of the starting gun. He later wrote about the dangers of resting on one’s laurels and becoming too self-satisfied with compliments from others: “I’ve watched sadly as gifted young people froze their talents at age nineteen because they believed they were as good as their admirers claimed.”14 Huckabee had no intention of doing that.

  The summer after graduation, Huckabee continued accelerating his entrance into adulthood by leading “youth revival services” at local churches.15 He was still only seventeen, but church members had no second thoughts about putting him in charge of preaching and leading special activities for the teens, though he was barely older than the youth. He carried himself with maturity beyond his years and was especially noted for his absolute dependability—character inherited from Dorsey and Mae.

  Also that summer, the editors of the Trumpet, the state newspaper for the Baptist Missionary Association (the Baptist denomination of which Huckabee was a member), asked him to contribute an ongoing opinion piece. Huckabee accepted the task and called his column “The RAPture Express”—a reference to the Christian doctrine of the Rapture, wherein Jesus returns to lead his followers (both alive and deceased) into eternity. From the title alone, he used the column to remind readers that Jesus’ return was imminent and that personal preparation in godliness was the best course of action to take. He wrote about an assortment of issues he felt Christian young people “under the age of 25” would find compelling: dating, dancing, smoking, evangelism, the “Jesus People,” soap operas, and driving beyond the speed limit.

  He acknowledged up front that not everybody would agree with him on everything, and in trademark Huckabee style, he used self-deprecation to soften his voice and gain a hearing: “Since I’m not the least bit spectacular as a writer, RAPture Express will probably be written in a very simple way. I hope that it will be conversational, instead of mere printed words about youth.”16

  He continually asked for and received letters of response, providing him with immediate feedback, both positive and negative. One of the sharpest critics responded after he quoted from the Living Bible, a modern translation recently published in 1971. Sitzes recalled that the woman admonished, “Don’t you ever quote from that paraffin-coated tongue of the devil. If it’s not King James, it’s not fit to print.” Sitzes was pretty sure Huckabee never used the Living Bible for that newspaper again, though he added that “nobody was exactly sure what a ‘paraffin-coated tongue’ meant.”17

  In 2015, the website BuzzFeed.com rediscovered the RAPture Express and published a dozen or so examples of the column. They pointed out what they considered to be damning evidence of Huckabee’s lifelong goofiness. Of course, the columns had already been available online to anyone who dug into his background, but they had not been of any notice before this. Had Huckabee never talked about running for president again, this type of material would be of little interest to anyone. Such is the nature of being deeply vetted for the office of president.

  Critics tweeted endless barbs about Huckabee’s 1973 opinions. On dancing, he had written: “I strongly recommend that Christian teens stay away from dancing, mainly because some people would just not be able to respect a person who dances.”18 On smoking: It could “ruin your witness.”19 On picking a date: “If physical beauty is the quality you look for first in a date, then you have no business dating in the first place. The beauty of a person lies in
their character and personality, not their body.”20

  A fair reading of the columns shows Huckabee could hardly be characterized as a legalistic prig. Even though he had the denomination’s support for laying down the law—straightforward and strident—he’d go to great lengths to admit the merits of both sides of each argument. In other words, he didn’t write to persuade only those who were already persuaded. Further, he admitted that many of these issues were best left to the individual conscience. For example, with dancing: “Most of the articles that I have read on dancing are written by people who know very little, if anything about what really goes on at a dance. Several years ago, I thought it to be perfectly all right to attend dances in high school, and I went. Since then, my beliefs have shifted somewhat, but at least I know the actual truth about some of the things that go on. Let’s clear something up. Everyone does not go to dances to get drunk, or to get his date sexually aroused, or to participate in wild activities.” So what was Huckabee’s directive for Christians regarding dancing? “I personally don’t see that much wrong with dances, but at the same time, I can’t find a whole lot of good with them either. I strongly recommend that Christian teens stay away from dancing, mainly because some people would just not be able to respect a person who attended dances.”21

  If that answer sounds like fence straddling, that is precisely the charge laid against him in letters to the editor. His response to the critics: “I felt as though I approached this subject head-on. I admit that I tried to look at both sides of the coin, but you won’t get an apology for that.” And to clarify his earlier point, Huckabee wrote, “I don’t want other young people to stay away from dances just because I do.”22

  The truth is, moral guidance in the particulars of life does change over the span of forty-two years. What may have been a topic of interest to teens in 1931 (or 1973) would sound archaic and old-fashioned in 1973 (or 2015). But this is true even for the “Dear Abby” columns of the world. The remarkable thing, given his regimented, religious upbringing, isn’t that Huckabee would warn about dancing and drinking, but that he would frame his exhortation within the language of “live and let live.” Even Southern Baptist pastors of the time, considered to be namby-pamby by his Baptist Missionary Association denomination, would preach Moses lines like “A dancing foot and a praying knee don’t belong on the same leg.”

  After BuzzFeed had published the columns, Huckabee responded with incredulity that they were newsworthy. “I read this and I laughed out loud. While other candidates are being outed for their teenage drug use, their teenage alcohol use, their teenage partying hard, doing all sorts of destructive things like painting graffiti on bridges—the scandal with me is that I wrote a column at age seventeen telling Christian young people to live a godly life. So, I mean, I just have to say—‘Is this really controversial?’ ”23

  As Huckabee prepared to enter his final semester of high school, two historic events happened within a week of each other.

  First, beginning with the news item that had the most immediate impact, on January 27, 1973, the Nixon administration and the Selective Service of the United States ended the draft. The war would be over, and the young men of the country would no longer be subject to forced military service. Therefore, the vast majority of candidates for the 2016 presidential election never could have been drafted—beginning with Huckabee himself, if only by a few months. Of course, one could argue that Huckabee would not have been drafted anyway, given his extremely flat feet. But that’s an entirely different discussion. Vietnam would still have been an issue for him, as his classmates would have been sent, and maybe have even died.

  Thus far, Barack Obama, born in 1961, is the only post-draft president our nation has had. The “draft-dodging” issue has been a part of presidential campaigns since at least 1988 (Dan Quayle), but that may end with the 2016 election. A political pundit summed up the 2016 “presidential age game” like this: “In a very real way American voters may ultimately decide whether they want to move again to a younger leader or give the Vietnam Era Baby Boom generation one last chance in the White House.”24 The question remains, however: If a candidate could not have been drafted, is he really part of the “Vietnam Era Baby Boom generation” in terms of all the reaction and counterreaction involved in that era?

  Second, on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court handed down the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, announcing that abortion was a fundamental right under the Constitution. Since that decision, more than 50 million abortions have been performed in the United States.25 Though abortion is always more than a political issue, it goes without saying that there is an immense political element to the battle. By 1980, candidates were aligning themselves one way or the other, and by the end of the eighties, the polarization of the parties was nearly complete. Newly minted eighteen-year-old voters in 2016 will have lived their entire lives in a world where, for all intents and purposes, there is no valid option for being a “pro-life Democrat” or “pro-choice Republican”—notwithstanding tiny groups that attempt such projects.

  Historians debate about how active the antiabortion movement was among religious conservatives from 1973 to 1980. Was it a leading cause of the formation of the religious Christian right? Some say yes, while others give compelling evidence that it was the religious liberty and school segregation issue that brought Christian conservatives into the political realm. This biography cannot answer that question. Suffice it to say, without the issue of abortion, it is possible that Ronald Reagan would not have been elected president in 1980, and the Moral Majority may never have existed.

  Every national election from the 1980s onward has been at least partially shaped by that fateful decision in January 1973. While most of the student protest politics existing during Huckabee’s childhood centered on Vietnam, much of the politics for the next forty years—including every national election from the 1980s onward—was shaped by the issue of abortion. Unlike he had done in his columns for the Trumpet, on this issue Huckabee would have to take a definitive stand.

  CHAPTER 12

  I WISH WE’D ALL BEEN READY

  1973

  Prior to [college], I didn’t even have a passport. Why get one? I never thought I’d leave the country.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  ESCHATOLOGY, THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES ABOUT THE end times, went viral during the 1970s—and not just within the church, but throughout all of American culture. The particular elements of these doctrines differed among groups, but most Baptists in the 1970s held that an event called the Rapture would occur in conjunction with the second coming of Christ. All non-Christians would be left on the earth during the calamitous days that would follow.

  These teachings were popularized through books, movies, and song. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, became one of the bestselling volumes of the decade—and Huckabee had a copy of his own.1 Lindsey, a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and a staffer for Campus Crusade until the 1960s, would influence much of the evangelical world into which young Huckabee was entering.

  Eschatology came to the big screen in 1972 with the release of A Thief in the Night. The plot revolves around a woman who considered herself a Christian but who awoke one day to find millions of people had disappeared, even her husband. The Rapture had taken place and she had been left behind. The success of this film helped inaugurate the current era of evangelical film production. Some estimate A Thief in the Night has been seen by more than 300 million people—including a young moviegoer named Huckabee.2

  Of course, any good movie needed a memorable sound track. Enter Larry Norman, who wrote and sang “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” for his 1969 album Upon This Rock, which is considered “the first full-blown Christian rock album.”3 Huckabee vividly remembers listening to Norman on vinyl and live at Explo ’72. “He was a big influence on me,
” he said. “I still have some of his stuff on my iPod.”4

  NASA, Explo ’72, and Boys State: all three of these trips impacted the life trajectory of Mike Huckabee. But whereas each of these was a onetime experience, in the summer between high school and college, Huckabee went to Israel—the first of what has now become more than forty such trips to the Holy Land during his lifetime.

  Rick Caldwell, his friend from Boys State and future OBU roommate, called and asked Huckabee if he wanted to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to see Israel. Caldwell’s father, Harley, was an oilman and a cattle rancher in Arkansas and a generous Christian gentleman. Rick wanted to go see the land of the Bible with his own eyes and asked his dad for permission. “Son, I’m not going to let you go there by yourself,” his father responded. “ ‘I’ll tell you what—if Mike Huckabee will go with you, then I’ll pay his way. If he goes with you, I’ll let you go.’ And that is how I went on this incredible, life-changing trip,” said Huckabee. “Prior to that, I didn’t even have a passport. Why get one? I never thought I’d leave the country.”5

  The boys spent two weeks on the trip. They took some of the official tourist jaunts, but that industry was not yet as developed in Israel as it is now. “We were on a ship each night, and we got off each day at a different spot: Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Greece, the Island of Patmos. And this was just two months before the Yom Kippur War. Looking back now . . . that trip was nuts.”6

  Indeed, given the situation in the Middle East, this trip was nuts.

  In May 1973, the Egyptian Army rattled her saber by conducting military exercises close to the Israeli border. Israel responded by mobilizing her army for war, but there was no conflict at that time. Egypt repeated the action in August; once more, Israel mobilized, but again there was no war. Egypt was attempting to trick Israel into ignoring the genuine war preparations being made.