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59 Chapter 6 A Man of Great Promise The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone. —Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter The first US attorney to be posted in Nashville was Andrew Jackson. During his early career, in 1788, the future president was appointed solicitor of the Western District. Like Hal Hardin 190 years later, Jackson served at different times as the federal government’s attorney and also as a trial judge. Both men were tall and physically imposing, and both bore a visible facial scar on the right cheek, from their youth—Jackson’s from the sword of an angry British soldier , Hardin’s from an automobile accident when he was thrown through the windshield, requiring 188 stitches. Hardin’s great-great-grandfather, Obediah Hardin, served in Jackson’s army in the Battle of New Orleans. President Jackson is regarded as the founder of the Democratic Party. But for all his achievements and fame, his name has been forever controversial— as much so among Tennesseans as he has been across the nation—even to the present day. His war against the national bank stirred opposition, but the most persistent criticism of Jacksonian domestic policy, over generations and continuing today, has centered on his championing of Indian removal. Hardin, in fairness, counts himself among those critics. (Jackson’s fellow Tennessean, Congressman David Crockett, opposed the president on many issues and lost his own House seat in 1834 before meeting his fate with other Tennessee volunteers at the Alamo. “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas,” Crockett famously said, before heading west.) Hardin, too, was a life-long Democrat, and by 1977, when President Carter named him the US attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, he might have felt a debt of gratitude to Governor Ray Blanton. He had not been a Blanton supporter in the 1974 election but had nonetheless become the new governor’s first judicial appointee as a state circuit judge. Blanton had also appointed him to serve on the Tennessee Law Enforcement Commission. 60 COUP Yet, in the kind of irony that will happen in state and local politics, it was Hardin who in time would initiate the maneuver to oust Blanton from office. Hardin was the son of a tenant farmer near Old Hickory, Tennessee , a dozen miles northeast of Nashville. His mother wanted him to be a preacher, but Hardin insisted he wanted to work for the FBI. After finishing high school, in 1959, Hardin set out to travel across the country, both to begin working his way through college and also for the experience and the adventure. One of his jobs was on a commercial pea farm in Walla Walla, Washington, where he met another young man from Nashville named Frank Woods. Along the way on his western journey, Hardin attended five different colleges , and in fact he did take a job as a fingerprint technician in the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. He then joined the Peace Corps—all before finally earning his college degree at Middle Tennessee State University. (There are still tales told among some Nashville lawyers that Hardin, during his Peace Corps service, was in reality working for the Central Intelligence Agency. He denies this.) In the Peace Corps, in 1963, Hardin was assigned to duty in the jungles of Colombia near the Rio Magdalena and the town of Plato. In a 1965 interview for a profile in the Tennessean Magazine, Hardin told writer Max York that he had initially been cautious about the available food in the remote villages, thinking it was unhealthy. There was no refrigeration, so the local diets often included spoiled meat as well as contaminated water, so Hardin said he avoided them. A large man—six feet three inches tall—he lost forty-three pounds, down from 210, before putting his apprehension aside. “After a while I decided that wouldn’t do,” he recalled. “I couldn’t bond with the people if I was separating myself from them in that way. I thought ‘If these folks can eat it, so can I.’ After that, I stopped losing and gained back a few pounds.” Years later, he remembers being “forever changed by the experience” in the South American jungle. Hardin formed cooperatives, including tobacco and savings co-ops to eliminate middlemen, and community action groups that improved sanitation and nutrition for poverty-stricken local citizens. The teams he organized installed eight hundred...

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