Bad boy to hero

LITTLE ROCK — A bad boy of one time, place and circumstance can become a towering hero of another time, place and circumstance.

It might well be that the man was the same all along. It might be that only his scenery—thus his opportunities and challenges—changed.

So it is that this is the hundredth anniversary of the birth on May 1, 1912, of Winthrop Rockefeller, the fourth and seemingly most free-spirited son of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

A series of commemorative activities will be held this year in Arkansas, the unlikely state that Rockefeller adopted and transformed. It all kicked off Thursday night with a wellattended reception at the Governor’s Mansion.

Rockefeller usually doesn’t rank at the top of historians’ compilations of our state’s greatest governors. Historians tend to extol instead Dale Bumpers and George Donaghey. Then they’ll likely add Bill Clinton, Sid McMath and Rockefeller to fill out the top five.

But you can make the argument that little of the progress that came about in Arkansas after Rockefeller—politically, economically, socially, culturally—would have happened unless it came after Rockefeller.

Gov. Mike Beebe said at this reception that Rockefeller was the “line of demarcation” in Arkansas between the old and new, even the bad and good.

It all reminds me of my general philosophy of life, which, I must admit, is drawn from Frank Capra’s Christmas film classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

It is that we all need to try to consider ourselves as George Bailey was forced to consider himself. It is that we need to ponder ourselves as if led around our life’s path by an angel showing us what the path would look like if we had never traveled it and if we had never met all the people who crossed it.

It is to try to contemplate our influence exponentially, meaning not only on the people we encounter directly, but through those people onto others. It is to endeavor as we go along to respect this influence and its exponential power. It is to respect that influence by trying to make it worthy.

Rockefeller befriended in the South Pacific during World War II a worldly and erudite young businessman from Little Rock named Frank Newell. Then he grew weary of the post-war restrictions of New York city life on the resident hard-drinking Rockefeller playboy. So, burdened by a failed short-term marriage, he wandered in the early 1950s in search of himself, first to Texas oil fields and then to these backwoods to visit Newell. He discovered and fell in love with Petit Jean Mountain.

Absent any of that, there might have been no one to lead an industrial modernization of the state in the late 1950s, then to stand up to Orval Faubus’ machine politics, then to finance opposition to that machine, then to provide that opposition directly, then to become a reforming Republican governor cleaning up Hot Springs and the prisons and commuting death sentences and easing racial tensions in part by singing along on “We Shall Overcome” on the state Capitol’s steps on the occasion of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Historians tend to say Bumpers qualifies as the state’s best governor. I defer to no one in admiration for what Bumpers represented in moderation, progressivism and integrity. But everyone, including Bumpers, admits readily that most of Bumpers’ program had gone fortuitously through the essential forerunning of Rockefeller.

Winthrop Rockefeller couldn’t pass any of it because he was politically clumsy and imported and alien. Bumpers could come right behind and pass all of it because he was charismatic and home-grown and ingratiating. And then there were those matters of time, place and circumstance.

If Rockefeller could walk today with an angel along the paths of Arkansas as if he had never traveled them, what kind of state would he find?

Bumpers might not have been possible without him, nor Clinton without Bumpers.

It is powerful enough merely to consider the racial climate of Arkansas had Faubus and Justice Jim Johnson not been inconvenienced, indeed defeated, by this wealthy transplant, this hard-drinking playboy with such a mighty moral core.

All of that is to declare the fully obvious, which is that the year 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of our state’s most towering giants.

You could argue that Winthrop Rockefeller was to Arkansas much the same as another progressive Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was to the nation.

Even if that comparison is overstated—and perhaps it badly is—these are worthy role models for Republicans today who ought not to wander quite so far from them.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.