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210 Chapter 20 The Long Night If he comes to the capitol tonight, I won’t let him in.­ —Lewis R. Donelson For the new governor, the day had been long, but the night was far from over. There would now be a round-trip to Jackson, Tennessee—a journey of 240 miles—before he slept. An unmarked highway patrol car was waiting at the curb outside, as Alexander stepped through the supreme court lobby, accompanied by Winstead , a plainclothes officer and former Marine MP. “I took all the cautions I could,” Winstead told me, recalling the crowded court building lobby. He remembered one tense moment when he used his blocking skills, learned in college basketball. “We walked outside together. We were almost holding arms. “This one guy with the media kept putting the camera right in my back, and I gave him a little elbow right in the ribs, and he went down to the floor,” Winstead said. “You know how, when you play basketball, you give somebody a little nudge with your elbow? That was the first time that night Alexander ever said anything directly to me, and he said to me, ‘Be easy with them, Herchel, be easy with them.’ He always wanted to be easy with the news media. I didn’t like them in the first place.” They got into an unmarked sedan with Ed Beckman, another trooper on the security detail. Beckman had first been posted at the Nashville airport, in the afternoon, assigned to wait at the state hangar for the governor-elect and then fly with him to Jackson. A reception had been scheduled at the home of Wade Thompson, who had remodeled his home for the occasion, and the larger public reception at the civic center downtown. But the foul weather had now disrupted this plan. Because of poor flying conditions, the new governor would have to travel by car, not plane. The private reception at the Thompson home had to be canceled. “I was waiting at the airport when they called me,” Beckman told me. “I drove down to the supreme court building.” Winstead reached for the radio The Long Night 211 transmitter and advised the highway patrol dispatcher that the trip to Jackson , its specific route already planned, was now underway. “We stopped one time—on Charlotte Avenue, at a Wendy’s, I think—and got him a cheeseburger and something to drink, and we went on, out I-40 west, to Jackson,” Winstead said. “He didn’t have much to say. I told him, ‘We’re fixing to take the bridle off of this car,’ and we turned it loose. We went down to Jackson pretty fast. We had the state already alerted that we were coming through, so we didn’t get stopped or anything.” Alexander remembers only the first few minutes of the ride. “Herchel and Ed drove me to Jackson, and I can still remember their big figures in the front seat, their shapes—two big men sitting in the front seat of the patrol car. I just laid down in the back seat and went to sleep, totally exhausted.” He slept in the rear seat for the remainder of the two-hour drive. Within minutes of the final question from reporters, word began circulating that further action was occurring up the hill, inside the capitol building. “As soon as it was over,” Travis said, “the network had me do a piece for Good Morning America. I moved to a window, to the right side of the courtroom , and used the curtains as a backdrop for my report. It was about that time we found out they were securing the capitol.” Moments before the reporters’ questions began, Koch had slipped out the door of the supreme court gallery and met Donelson and Ingram in the lobby, as they and Alexander had prearranged in the garage downstairs forty-five minutes earlier. In silence, these three now quickly exited the building through the double glass doors to the street. They walked the half block up Charlotte Avenue to the state capitol’s south steps, essentially reversing the route that the two speakers and the press corps had taken one hour before. They were now executing their first instructions from the new governor. Their­ assignment, from Alexander, was to “secure the capitol” and ensure that no essential documents relating to executive clemencies were taken away this night. All three said later they did not know at this moment...

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