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Postscript: A Note on Sources
- Vanderbilt University Press
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251 Postscript A Note on Sources The people we meet in our lives come to us at different moments, often by chance, and yet each unexpected one helps to shape the larger narrative. Had any of them not come along when they did, your own story and mine might have worked out very differently. Had we chosen to walk through that door and not this one, turned down this street and not that, the journey would surely have led to another place. If not for my father, Sherman McKeel Hunt Jr., who was an elected official in Nashville in my teen years, I may never have known the congressman Dick Fulton, the lawyer George Barrett, or the editor John Seigenthaler. It was later Seigenthaler who led me to Bill Willis, Bill Kovach, Larry Daughtrey, John Hemphill, and Tom Ingram—who connected me with Lamar Alexander—who then linked me to Lew Conner, Lewis Donelson, Ted Welch, Lewis Lavine, and Fred Thompson—and, in due course, to Ned McWherter and John Wilder and their circles. Had I not taken that summer job after high school, working in the 1966 Hooker campaign for governor (to the deep consternation of my father, a Clement man) I may never have met Hal Hardin, Larry Woods, Frank Woods, Charles Bone, and thence Sam Hatcher or J. Houston Gordon. It happens to us all, these small serendipities that in time become large. If Alexander had become a Rhodes Scholar in 1962, as he had hoped, and not gone instead to New York University law school, he surely would not have been in the registration line that day when he met a tall Georgetown graduate standing next to him named Paul Tagliabue. If Hal Hardin had not attended law school in Knoxville when he did, in 1966, he would not have had a housemate named Eddie Sisk. What if Tom Ingram had not climbed onto that Howard Baker campaign bus in 1968, the day he met Alexander? If Jim Free of Columbia had gone anywhere to college but Middle Tennessee State University, an hour up the road, would he ever have known Representative John Bragg of Murfreesboro and the political science professor David Grubbs? It was Grubbs who recom- 252 COUP mended that Free apply, with Bragg’s sponsorship, for a legislative internship in Nashville—and that’s where he met McWherter and, through him, would come to know Jimmy Carter. Had I not gone to work as a cub reporter at the Nashville Tennessean in 1967—learning about writing and politics under Seigenthaler’s editorship— I might not have covered the governor’s race three years later, nor the one four years after that. That’s how it happened, one evening in Memphis in 1974, that Ingram introduced me to Alexander for an interview. Later that same summer, had I not gone to graduate school in Washington—and, coincidentally , if Elaine Shannon had not left our bureau there to take a job with Newsweek—I could not have been my newspaper’s Washington correspondent that year. That’s when I met Senator Howard Baker and his staff members A. B. Culvahouse, Bill Hamby, and Ron McMahan. In even deeper time, what if Congressman “Fats” Everett had never met a young man named Ned McWherter and not hired him to be his driver? What if Ray Blanton had never known Jim Allen or Frank Humphreys, Roger ’s father? What if President Gerald Ford, when they asked him to pardon Nixon, had just said no? These alternate futures we cannot know. But I do know this: Had it not been for my ten years at the Tennessean— as reporter, editorial writer, Washington correspondent, city editor—I doubt I would have gotten that phone call from my friend Tom Ingram, on a summer afternoon in 1977, saying Alexander wanted to have dinner with me. He wanted to talk about joining his team for a new campaign the next year, and if it were OK by me he next would phone Seigenthaler and clear it with him. It was OK by me, and he did, and I went. Because of all this, there are places in the pages of this book where I cannot help but appear. There are uses of the expression “ . . . told me” in the text, because in those instances a participant made his or her observations in a personal interview with me. In many of these cases, I knew the interviewee as a colleague or friend during...