Huckabee Page 8
“I always thought those pep rallies were what really pulled Hope High School together,” Routon wrote. “Many of us wondered how hard it had to be for the Yerger kids, losing the identity of what had been their school. But at those pep rallies, everyone was united. We all knew something else. Hope wasn’t winning championships before full integration, and neither was Yerger. But together, they could win. And together, they could make Hope a role model for other schools and communities making so many difficult adjustments.”30
Huckabee remembers working hard with other students, black and white, to get to know one another in the summer before integration. “We introduced each other to the other kids and within the student council,” he said. “We worked toward having a real plan for creating a friendly and cordial environment and building trust. And so if there was tension or a fight that broke out, my friend Donald Ogden and I would run to the middle of it. I would go talk to the white guys. He’d go talk to the black guys. We’d tell them to stop the nonsense. Pretty soon, classmates and parents stepped up and said, ‘We’ve got to make this work.’ And we did.”31
Following the lead of Haskell Jones, Huckabee became active in public service and leadership. At the close of his junior high career, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution awarded him with their Good Citizenship Medal for 1969. “Mike, an eighth grader, was chosen because of his high grades in history and his good citizenship. He is a member of the junior high student council, science club and is a junior fire marshal.”32
Taking a full measure of leadership in public high school would require Huckabee to earn a spot on the student council, which he promptly did for the freshman year. His classmates, the first desegregated freshman class in the history of Hempstead County, voted for him to be their class president for the coming year.33
All this news was duly reported in the local paper. And directly adjacent to the news announcing Mike’s election to the student council, the Hope Star reported on Judge Harry A. Blackmun’s 94–0 confirmation to the Supreme Court by the U.S. Senate: “Blackmun Likely Bends U.S. Court a Little More to the Right.” The article said that Nixon and chief justice Warren Burger wanted to find a justice who would “slow down the court’s drive for social reform.” Burger stated, “The law is not geared for giant leaps forward” and added that the high court is “hardly the body to be entrusted with the destinies of a free people. . . . Judges should not confuse their jobs with those of legislators.” During his confirmation, Blackmun assured the senators he would try to keep his personal ideas and philosophies out of his decisions. The story closed with this bit of prophecy: “Unless Blackmun changes radically, however, this adds up, overall, to a hesitant, but decided conservatism.”34
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth of what actually happened. Fewer than a thousand days later, Blackmun wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. He would go on to become one of the most liberal and activist judges on the bench—and intensified his support for abortion rights with every decision he made throughout his twenty-four years on the Court. Given Huckabee’s public disdain for judicial activism, it is ironic that he and Blackmun shared newspaper space announcing their arrivals on the scene.
Two examples of Huckabee’s activity on the student council during this time period will serve to illustrate the manner and mission of his leadership.
First, he created, planned, and executed “Operation Goodwill”—a Christmas event that benefited needy children by supplying them with presents and personal attention. Around eighty-five children participated in the event, held two days before Christmas. Each child received toys and a stocking stuffed with fruit and candy. A member of the student council handmade the stockings, and the Hope Lions Club donated four hundred dollars to the cause.
To read Huckabee’s quotes in the newspaper regarding the event is to catch a glimpse of the style and substance of the future governor: “This unprecedented project was a huge success and reached its goal of spreading happiness to as many deserving children as possible.”35 That language—“unprecedented project”—is at the same time both true to the events of that day, but also attention grabbing. In other words, Mike already knew how to both tell the truth and captivate the imagination.
When asked whether the event had the potential to become an annual event, Huckabee responded, “Yes, I’m sure it will. The involvement and morale of the many students was almost enough to carry out the project again next year, but the thing that really decided its future was the satisfied grins on the small children’s faces as they received their gifts from Santa himself. That alone was worth every bit of work and effort put into this project.”36 In now-typical Huckabee fashion, he spoke with polish and exuberance, but, more important, he painted a picture of the humanity of the event (note the “satisfied grins on the small children’s faces”), which answered the cost-benefit question.
Looking back years later, he said, “That project was one of the things I think I was most proud of. The way we got all the students involved, each class in competition with one another to raise money—car washes, bake sales, mowing lawns. We had scores of kids in every class actually participating to help do something for underprivileged kids. It was remarkable.”37 Lester Sitzes added, “Operation Goodwill was his baby—all the way.”38
In response to Huckabee’s leadership of the event, high school principal Bobby Whitmarsh awarded him the “Joe Amour Award,” given out quarterly to the student who “has done the most to serve his school.” Huckabee’s principal took note of his age: “Mike is one of the very few underclassmen to receive this high award. . . . He is also a sports announcer for KXAR this year, following the football and basketball teams. His dad is his constant companion on these trips since Mike is not yet a qualified driver.”39
Second, pulling off the logistics for the Christmas event was a small affair compared to the “May Day Festival in Fair Park,” which Huckabee helped coordinate. Though this event had dozens more people helping, his responsibility was substantial, as he was to “acquire the music and the preparation of the fairgrounds.” This community-wide event, described as “the most unique, new, and original project to be undertaken by a local group,” would offer food, music, and a slate of big-name speakers who would take part in a forum on drug abuse.40 In organizing the music, Huckabee sought to please fans of both country and rock. He pulled in groups from six cities and intermingled the styles back and forth to keep everyone on the fairgrounds until that evening’s events.
Twenty-two-year-old Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw served as the main attraction that night. Bradshaw grew up just one hundred miles away and had played close by at Louisiana Tech before heading to the Pittsburgh Steelers the year before as the first overall draft pick. What is amazing about Bradshaw’s story is that he was the second-string quarterback for a time, behind Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson. It was only after Robertson gave up a final year of eligibility and left school in order to get back to his first love—duck hunting—that Bradshaw began starting. “The quarterback playing ahead of me, Phil Robertson, loved hunting more than he loved football,” Bradshaw wrote in his autobiography, It’s Only a Game. “He’d come to practice directly from the woods, squirrel tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes.”41 Robertson later clarified the story about the contents of his pockets—it was squirrel guts, not tails.42 In 2013, Huckabee would come to Robertson’s defense after he was benched from his own reality TV show because of comments he’d made in an interview with GQ.
The point here is that Huckabee, even as a young man, knew how to pull off the logistics for big events and worked hard to do so in service to the public. The people of Hope had a good time together; they experienced community and civic pride, and money was raised for charity. It took a lot of brains and legs, and Huckabee led the way in getting the job done.
&n
bsp; The final “bridge over troubled water” for young Mike Huckabee—and arguably the one with the greatest long-term impact—came in the form of Bible studies he attended in the home of some everyday folks. Here he found a deeper and more internalized spirituality, impacting his vision of Christianity and providing him with a deep spiritual foundation for the civic activism to which he was becoming committed.
As we saw earlier, Huckabee had a Christian conversion experience as a ten-year-old. That basic commitment never wavered, but five years more of intellectual maturing had made him ask questions. He poked at the foundations of the external moralisms prevalent in his community of faith, and he refused to accept “Because I said so” as an answer. “I grew up in a culture where everybody went to church, but nobody took it that seriously,” Huckabee said. “People would say boys and girls shouldn’t go to R-rated movies, or that they shouldn’t swim together.”43
Moralism pricked at Huckabee. It’s one thing to avoid the bad, but that still left a desire for putting your life to work doing something positive. And the idea of simply chasing material prosperity didn’t appeal to him any more than the “sex and drugs” culture did. He wanted his life to have significance, to do something that was going to have an impact on other people.44
This vision for a “purpose driven life”45 took a distinctively Christian focus through the Wednesday night Bible studies offered by Burgess and Loretta Garrett. The couple opened their home to a group of teenagers, Huckabee among them, and talked to them about the practical matters of faith. He was impressed that their belief didn’t start and end on Sundays; they were believers full-time.46
“For them, Christianity was not a cultural expression—it was a personal relationship with God,” Huckabee said. This encounter in the Garrett home helped shift Huckabee’s vision of Christianity away from fundamentalism, which focuses on God’s judgment, and more in line with evangelicalism, which focuses on grace—“We’re all sinners, we’re all screwed up, we all need help, that’s why we keep Jesus.” With all the competing voices in the culture fighting for Huckabee’s attention, the Garretts’ Christian hospitality and discipleship came at just the right time. “Before some of these moments in my faith really took root, I think I could have gone a totally different way,” he said. “I think I could have become the hedonist because I had rejected what I had grown to believe was a completely superficial and inauthentic approach to life. I did not want to be a sheep.”47
Because so many people had invested in Huckabee—his parents, Haskell Jones, his teachers, and now the Garretts, just to name a few—he determined to turn these investments back around for the benefit of others. “To him who has been given much, much will be expected”—a paraphrase of Luke 12:48—became a theme verse, not in a legalistic fashion, but as an overflow of a heart of gratitude for what God had done in his life.
It was in this context that Huckabee went out and preached his first sermon. This is the South, after all, and if a young man expresses a desire to please Jesus and he is good with words, then preaching a sermon just seems like the thing to do. “I heard his very first sermon,” remembers Marynell Branch. “When we were in ninth grade, I went with him to hear him preach. He used props, and he just did a great job. He had a good command of speech and people and how to connect with an audience.”48
In addition to all the activities mentioned earlier, Huckabee also started the Christian Student Union. Modeling the on-campus discipleship group after what he saw in the Garretts’ home, he wanted to “encourage Christian behavior,” he said. “It was an ‘anything goes’ world at that time. And this was to offer an alternative to the alternative.”49 Even as Huckabee had been given adult friends who served as a “bridge over troubled waters,” he chose to become a bridge himself to his classmates.
CHAPTER 8
ROCKET MAN
Summer 1971
I’m a child of the Space Age and remember well, as a small child, John F. Kennedy’s vision to get us to the Moon. I remember sitting on my living room floor in July of 1969 when Neil Armstrong put his foot on the Moon. I believe that the space program has brought about far more benefits than simply the exploration of space.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
THERE’S A TRUISM THAT FLOATS AROUND IN VARIOUS FORMS, but this is the basic gist: “Five years from now, you’ll be the same person you are today, except for the books you read, the people you meet, and the places you go.” Beginning in the summer of 1971, Mike Huckabee had the good fortune of taking four trips, three of them outside of Arkansas, that would impact the trajectory of his life.
The first of these trips came when Huckabee applied and won the right to be Arkansas’s representative at the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Foundation (HOBY). Though a younger generation of readers may not recognize the O’Brian name, from 1955 to 1961 he starred as the ruggedly handsome lead in the ABC Western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. In 1958, O’Brian spent nine days in Africa alongside Christian theologian Albert Schweitzer, then came home and established HOBY to provide a vital leadership development opportunity for a select group of youth about to enter their junior year of high school. “The great majority of our youth are positive, but we only hear about the negative minority,” O’Brian said. “I figured it was time to pat the good guys and gals on the back and show them that there are rewards for being responsible members of the community.”1
As told in the last chapter, Huckabee filled his freshman and sophomore days with leadership characterized by service and creativity. Even as Operation Goodwill, his charity program, brought joy to needy children in Hope, it also brought recognition to him. The scripture “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much” (Luke 16:10) took on new meaning as the adults in his life began to nominate him for unique experiences and opportunities for growth. With Haskell Jones and other leading men of Hope writing letters of recommendation on his behalf, Huckabee soon felt the “pat on the back” from O’Brian’s foundation.
Huckabee became one of the seventy-one delegates to attend a space seminar in June, at Cape Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one boy from each state plus ten international delegates and eleven special guests. All the expenses were paid by the foundation, including his airfare from Little Rock to Orlando. This would be the first time he had ever flown on a plane, and his first time out of the region. He quickly discovered that not everyone shared his particular religious background or worldview. “I was shocked by how many of them had no belief in God at all,” Huckabee recalled to a journalist decades later.2 He remembers being labeled a “Jesus freak” by one of the participants, but rather than making him defensive, the comment caused him to take stock of how to engage with those who didn’t see the world the same as he did.
Patrick Air Force Base, near Cocoa Beach, Florida, housed the delegates. Each day began at 5:30 a.m.—reinforcing his early-morning habits—and lasted well into the night. The teens took part in space simulations and drills, and they heard from a panoply of speakers—including Hugh O’Brian himself.
The boys went up on the launchpads for the towering rockets, those man-made marvels of engineering standing two or three times as tall as any building Mike had ever seen in Hope, Arkansas. This trip came during the height of the Apollo program, which landed twelve men on the moon from 1969 to 1971. In fact, it was only the previous April when the failed-yet-famous Apollo 13 mission took place—now well-known because of the 1995 movie depicting the aborted mission. Huckabee soaked up the vision of this magnificent federal program, and he heard astronauts, engineers, and politicians explain how such big projects came together. The federal government could tackle problems that lone individuals, corporations, or even states would not have been able to achieve on their own.
From Haskell Jones, Huckabee had come to understand that with such power and purse came gre
at responsibility—even, perhaps, the responsibility to refrain from using the power and purse altogether. How does one decide on the legitimate use of government funding and the promotion of a particular vision for the future? Such are the questions that leaders must answer. The space program itself would not have existed in its 1971 form had it not been for President Kennedy’s incredible vision of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Though he did not live to see the reality of his dreams, the space center bears Kennedy’s name because of his forward-thinking leadership.
After Huckabee returned home, he received numerous invitations to speak about the trip. He told the Rotary club “the things he experienced made him proud to be an American.”3 He told the Lions Club how the NASA program led to technological advances impacting their everyday lives—electronics, food processing, propulsion, and weather study. “Last year’s cost of 3.3 billion dollars for space study and exploration has long been a topic of discussion as to its worth,” the Hope Star reported. “But Mike pointed out that this sum was only a part of the cost of the food stamp program and that only time would bring the answer and that the march of progress would have to be balanced against the cost.”4 Huckabee probably picked up that particular comparison to food stamps during his time at NASA, but this type of argument by metaphor and analogy is now a staple of Huckabee’s political rhetoric.
Decades later, while on the campaign trail in 2007, the topic of NASA came up. Someone asked Huckabee whether the space program should be reinvigorated by planning a fresh trip to the moon. After joking about sending Hillary Clinton, then the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Huckabee answered the question nearly word for word as he had in 1971 when he spoke to citizens of Hope. He said: