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43 Chapter 5 The Madness And there wasn’t any Democratic party. There was just Willie . . . —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men As sometimes happens with public scandals involving senior elected leaders, the larger portion of the Tennessee Democratic Party establishment remained utterly silent on the Humphreys case throughout 1978. There is no record of minor politicians anywhere in the state urging Blanton to reverse his position on the pardon issue. Why was this so? First, it was more convenient and painless for most of these party regulars to remain invisible, to be unheard from. Though the pardon issue was clearly building as a public embarrassment, threatening the party’s leaders and candidates, Blanton himself was known to react badly when criticized. He was considered mildly unstable owing to his alcohol consumption. It was much less risky, therefore, for any individual in the Blanton circle or in the broader party organization to simply keep one’s silence and nod agreeably when the governor pointed to the meddlesome FBI as the cause of anybody’s trouble. For any individual operative, to do otherwise could result in the termination of a career, or of one’s treasured access, at least for a good long while if not forever. It also would be too easy, with an ill-advised misstep, to run athwart the array of “Good Government Committees” (the five-member patronage review panels in every county), operating proudly if privately in their own small political fiefdoms. Any given local operative would expect that the committee in his own county could easily freeze him out of things, and probably would do so before the next weekend. Moreover, among minor elected officials, it was generally known and feared that if any legislator, mayor, county executive, or party chairman spoke up, he was likely to hear directly from either Shorty Freeland or Gene Blanton or some other enforcer in the governor’s inner circle, if not from Blanton himself. Who needed that 44 COUP kind of trouble? Better to lay low. Even among major Democratic leaders in the state, there was a general silence. One exception was Ned McWherter, a formidable politician who pushed back—because he could. McWherter was a fellow West Tennessean and a Democratic Party ally of Blanton’s in their early careers, and he was the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives throughout the period of Blanton’s term as governor. They did not clash in public; in most respects, McWherter was a constant supporter of the Blanton administration’s initiatives and priorities. Instead, the speaker was emerging as the dominant leader in a legislature that was now becoming more independent of the executive branch. Reflecting years later on their long association, McWherter said in an interview that the trouble with Blanton usually began when the governor started drinking. At first, it was the drinking in the afternoon. Later, it would start in the morning. “Ray Blanton was a good person,” McWherter said. “He got engaged personally, I think, in some things that caused him to ‘bend the elbow’ too much. When he got too much stimulation in his system, he would do crazy things.” McWherter’s biographer, Billy Stair, described Blanton’s administration as deeply marred by its governor’s drinking problem. “Plagued by alcoholism, Blanton was often detached from his duties and his staff, several of whom sought to use their offices for financial gain through the sale of pardons, liquor licenses and surplus state property,” Stair recalled in McWherter, his volume on McWherter’s career. “Many who worked with Blanton state that he acted responsibly in the mornings until he started drinking around lunch. The alcohol produced a crude personal style and an undisguised contempt for the press that made his term as Governor a period of constant controversy.” Bill Rawlins was a senior reporter and editor for the Associated Press for forty-five years and covered six Tennessee governors, including Blanton. In his 2001 memoir of the McWherter years, Rawlins described how the capitol hill press corps had downplayed its coverage of Blanton’s drinking while he was in office. “Blanton’s alcoholism was rarely, if ever, mentioned in print or on radio or television, possibly because there were so many other juicy things to write about. In hindsight, this was wrong. The governor’s problems with alcohol affected his ability to govern, if only because it impaired his ability to keep track of what was going on. . . . According to his intimates, Blanton...

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