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xi Foreword The date: May 19, 1790. The New England sky, from Maine south to New Jersey’s border, gradually darkened and by noon was like midnight—blanketed with a menacing ceiling of swirling, low-hanging, black clouds. The sun, through the thick overcast, appeared blood red. Rivers ran silted with a flakey, pitch-like sediment. People in the streets panicked. Many, fearful that the end of the world was at hand, left their work to rush home to loved ones. Others fell to their knees in prayer. In the Connecticut legislature, there was near bedlam. Members cried out for immediate adjournment. In the midst of it, Colonel Abraham Davenport stood, demanding silence. “I am against adjournment,” he shouted, and the tumult died. “The day of judgment,” he declared “is either approaching—or it is not.” “If it is,” he said, “I choose to be found here, doing my duty.” He called for lighted candles, and the business of the government went forward. As I read and reread the manuscript of Coup, by Keel Hunt, I was reminded , more than once, of the anecdote about Colonel Davenport, often recited by John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign. The point of the future president’s story was that in times of crisis, leaders must stand with vision and courage against the clamor of the crowd. It was 189 years and a thousand miles from that day in Hartford to a dark day in Tennessee history when leaders in the state legislature faced a different sort of crisis, but one requiring the same vision and courage exemplified by Colonel Davenport so long before. The date: January 17, 1979, a morning when the weather was markedly unlike that frantic day the New Englanders’ world went black. (For a time it was believed that an eclipse of the sun was responsible for that “dark day” in Connecticut. More recently scientists have argued that a massive forest fire in Canada was the cause of the furor.) The sun, this morning in Nashville, peeked briefly from an overcast sky, then vanished as chilled rain began to fall. All the while, the Cumberland River ran its choppy, brindle flow, un­ colored by the dusting of snow that fell about nightfall. xii COUP Tennesseans hoped the weather would warm by Saturday, when Lamar Alexander, a Republican, was scheduled to be sworn in as the state’s fortyfifth governor, succeeding Ray Blanton, a Democrat. Then, suddenly, at mid-morning on that damp, brisk Wednesday, a cloud of political corruption, invisible but palpable, enveloped the state capitol, threatening to spoil Alexander’s carefully arranged inaugural plans. For state officials at the highest level, it was a single, hellish “dark day” that must have seemed endless until, finally, it climaxed with what Keel Hunt calls the “coup.” Honey Alexander, within hours of being Tennessee’s first lady, remembers it as “the worst day of my life.” The individual stories of those government officials involved in the coup—each account unique, but all of them intersecting—were scattered like disconnected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table of history until the author conceived this book. Perhaps because it happened so quickly, and without major disagreement, protest, or dissent, this truly historic moment has been buried in the public mind. In unearthing the drama in gripping detail, Keel Hunt assures that the “dark day” will be remembered as a bright one in which conflicted politicians came together in the public interest. For weeks before that day, there had been a flow of news reports and political rumors about dishonesty at the core of the incumbent Blanton administration . Journalists had been referring to it as the pay-for-pardons scandal, in which cash changed hands to win executive clemency for convicts, some of them murderers and rapists. In December, there had been the shocking spectacle of the governor’s legal counsel and two other close Blanton aides caught in an FBI sting linked to the corruption. There had been video-taped evidence that marked money had been paid to Blanton’s legal counsel in return for the release of a notorious criminal. Federal agents arrested the governor’s lawyer in his office in the capitol building, after finding some of the marked bills in his pocket. Then on Monday night, January 15, five days before the scheduled end of his term, Blanton publicly acknowledged that he had, indeed, signed pardons and clemency documents that would free fifty-two inmates, some of them...

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