David Pryor's career spanned seven decades, having tasted politics in his native Washtenaw County and as a page in Washington.

He would win campaigns for state representative, the U.S. House governor and the U.S. Senate.

He would teach at Harvard and Fayetteville.

Chair of the State Democratic Party.

Become a university trustee and with wife Barbara endow a center for Arkansas Oral and Visual history.

He would see his son Mark, succeed him in the Senate and watch as changing times changed Arkansas politics.

He believed in our mission, so he served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

He died last week at age 89.

David Pryor.

A memorial service will take place this weekend in 2008.

Mr. Pryor published a memoir and he sat with us to talk about his life and times.

We repeat that program now.

Hello, everyone, and thanks very much for joining us.

We intend our guest, the Honorable David Pryor, Absolutely no disrespect whatsoever if we make this the briefest of introductions simply because we have a lifetime to cover, which is encompassed in the senator's new autobiography, a prior commitment that may echo to some of you.

And of course, this is an uncorrected, advanced proof, which I'm holding.

But I think the official publication date is the 15th of September of mid-September.

Anyway, I state representative Well, first of all, up from journalism man to state representative and member of the bar and United States House of Representative, Governor of Arkansas, United States Senator as they say.

Oh, and presidential have been on the public, though, for a long time, is to ask when you're going to get a good job, when a good job comes available.

But it was a fascinating life.

I've had a great time in law.

People have been so good to me and good to my family.

And I just don't know many things I would have changed.

You grew up in a small town south Arkansas, Camden, Arkansas, which was the small towns of Arkansas.

Many of them had a vigor then that may have, owing to shifts in population, may not be quite so noticeable.

Now, no offense to Camden whatsoever, but the tempo was different.

The tempo was tough and the culture was different.

Most people in our so-called urban cities like Little Rock or Fort Smith or Available or now Rogers, Springdale, Bentonville, most of the people in our state.

I have a feeling I've not done a scientific survey or seen data on this.

Probably we either grew up in a small town or their parents grew up in a small town.

But there's a kinship of small town Arkansas, and small town America that I think helps to bind us together as a people, even more so than the Razorbacks.

But it helps to bind us together and gives us, I guess you say, a common interest, a commonality of culture and looking at things, sizing up people, identifying the characters of the town.

I know in Camden we would walk into a store or watch store or snow hardware or Morgan Hardware and we'd pick out what we need.

We just say, charge it and walk out the door.

We didn't have credit cards and and that's kind of the way the culture operated.

And that's the kind of the way we worked.

And if I don't know, it was a very, very close knit oh, really?

Kind of a nurturing existence that I grew up in, in Camden.

And you're your mom and dad both political figures in their own right, not always as candidates, but they were always central figures in that community, always engaged in the life of Camden.

Well, at one time someone labeled my father and he didn't like it a bit.

Got on the radio station K jammed and and referred to my father in one of the political campaigns as boss Pryor of Wash talking.

And he did not like that a bit.

And my mother really was probably in a really he was so gregarious and so good with people.

But my mother was probably probably more comfortable in politics than my dad because my mother had worked in the courthouse.

She had run for circuit clerk.

She was the first woman in our state, I think, to ever have her name on the ballot.

And her father and her grandfather were sheriffs of our county.

And my father in 1938 picked up the local newspaper and discovered that he was a candidate for sheriff of Washington County because there was a clean sweep movement to knock out everyone in who was in public office, in the courthouse.

And he was a part of that.

And they had little brooms fixed up in a world of bells.

He got dressed.

He he came in from Dallas County and Holly Springs, Arkansas, into Camden.

And my mother and my dad married three or four years later.

After that, after he moved there.

But she would she was probably in her own skin more comfortable with politics than he was at first.

But he he he really got to be good in politics and very good in business.

Was there can you look back and say there was a moment at a rally or wherever you were maybe at a dinner table conversation where it occurred to David Pryor, I kind of like this.

Maybe I could be maybe I could do this.

Well, my dad was a Chevrolet dealer.

He first started working at the Ford Place and Mister Word Doctor word that he worked for became ill. And he figured out some way to let my father, who didn't have to nickels to rub together to buy the day by the Ford Agency is during the Depression.

So it was you weren't many people trying to buy a car dealership during that time.

And my father was very, very poor and he bought the company and with the help of the the bank across the street and got in trouble, almost forfeited his his company, but ended up owning the Ford business and the Chevrolet business.

They made him dispose of one.

And so he kept Chevrolet and gave up Ford and but he he became very good with the Chevrolet place, as we called it, was right across from the courthouse.

And it became the center and the hubbub of sort of political activity.

And right across the alleyway, the Camden News is where every during the summers they would on election night, they would bring the election returns in category from the courthouse.

That always stopped there at the Camden News and they'd count out the ballots.

Who in some something like 31 townships, you know, Red Hill and Frio and chidester and beard and and and you know, all the little townships throughout the county and on those hot, steamy, sultry nights, July and August, that's when we had elections, them primaries.

We didn't have any Republicans really to speak of.

So we didn't worry about the general election so much.

But we had one Republican in town.

His name was Skidmore Willis.

That's another story.

But I loved being around all of that.

I loved seeing W.R. Chicken Hulman up there announce The Winners and Losers and Al Bromilow, I think had his guitar or his fox horn or something in winners or losers.

He would toot is fox horn, and it was sort of a party atmosphere here.

And when I was young, I would always love to go and stay at the Chevrolet place and hear my dad and all the candidates talk and then go across the street, watch the elections, returns come in, and whatever offices they may be for assessor or sheriff or governor or us senator.

I remember Bill Fulbright the first time I ever saw him.

He drove his only car, his own car, and parked it there in front of us.

Re drugstore walked over to the courthouse, made a speech.

I was ten years old, but I could point to this day exactly where he parked his car because I was always fascinated with him and with what he stood for.

His his great ability, his great world vision and and but I loved politics.

Ben Laney, the governor of Arkansas, he became governor.

We lived next door to there in Camden.

So we grew up in a political environment.

And and as Dr. J.B. Jamieson said, who brought me into this world, I'd say 74 years ago, he says.

David came out of his mother's womb asking the nurse for her vote.

And so that was probably I was just born into it.

And I always have loved it.

You and a young lady named Barbara were married and you created a newspaper there in Camden.

And but there came a moment when you said, I got to decide whether I'm going to run for something that was state representative.

And you decided that's that's when you took the big plunge, I guess.

Is that fair to say?

Barbour and I had been married probably two years, and I went to my friend Bill Andrews, William Miss Andrews, and I said, Bill, you're voting with Orval Faubus on every piece of legislation.

You're 100% for Faubus.

Now, you ought to break away a little bit.

I mean, this this has got to be a new day.

We've got to remove those shackles and we've got to move on as a state and as a people.

And you need to be more progressive.

And he sort of dismissed my complaints and my suggestions and and he said, well, I've got to get along and to go along.

I've got to go along with the powers that be.

And I'm a I'm will probably still vote for Faubus and help him in the legislature with his stuff.

And I said, well, Bill, I just want to serve notice on you if you continue doing that during the next legislative session, you're going to have an opponent in that opponent.

It's going to be me.

And I gave him notice.

And sure enough, he continued to vote for all of us on everything that Faubus proposed.

And surely enough.

One day I walked over to the courthouse and paid my $25 and ran an ad in the local newspaper and I was off and running.

Barbara had never been involved in politics at that time to to any extent, but she got involved.

Not only did she got involved, but man, she was really, really good at politics.

She could remember names that I'd forget all the time.

She could remember names and places.

She remembered things that I had long since forgotten.

She remember people that we do in college that we should call and get them to come to Camden to help us in our campaign.

She was really amazing.

She made a remarkable transition into the political world from Fayetteville.

Of course, she grew up in Fayetteville, and but all of a sudden, she was cast into that political world in south Arkansas.

And sometimes it was pretty cutthroat.

It was pretty rough sometimes.

But she performed beautifully.

But still, it was home.

And I think you've got some extra of the neck sort of, too, that you would share with.

Well, here's the book.

And Steve, I couldn't have done this book without Don, Harold, Don and I grew up in Camden, just a few blocks apart.

My mother and and Lee Harold and Don's father, Don Harold was the mayor and my father was the sheriff.

And and Don was on our staff when I was in the governor's office and when I was in Washington.

And and Don is a fabulous writer, and he's kept a journal for 30 years.

We relied on his journal a great deal.

I've kept little pieces of journals and scribbles of notes.

And we went to the University of Arkansas where my so-called quote papers, unquote, are in the special collections, thousands and thousands of and 4000 or 5000 pictures we sifted through, which is about 50 for the book.

And but I could not have done it without Don.

I make no pretense that I couldn't have gotten five pages of done.

He inspired me.

We worked mostly in Fayetteville, and then he lives in New York.

We would be on the phone every week, two or three times a week, talking about passages and trying to remember things.

But when my dad was the sheriff, we lived right almost downtown in a little White house, and my grandmother lived with us.

There were four children, my mother and dad, my grandmother, Nellie, as they call her, and but Mary, our cook, our wonderful cook, her name was Mary Elizabeth McFadden.

Cooper heard Wilburn and she came every day from the day I was born for almost 30 years to help my mother.

And they became fast, fast, inseparable friends.

But one of the things that I will always remember is that Mary would get up, get to our home so early and do all the cooking for the family.

And while she was good for the family, she also cooked for the prisoners in the jail, which were about four blocks down the street.

And I would just kind of read a paragraph every morning at 7:00, just about her Cardinal seven, a man from the jail whose name he's a trustee named Biggie.

Biggie Young Biggie seemed straight out of the Rialto movie.

He was a large black man with a gold crown front tooth.

He bore a huge forearm scar.

The result?

We were told, of a knife fight several years before.

I had never seen his muscles bulge like his.

He could hold his arm parallel to the ground, letting me swing from it.

Yet though, he always arrived in a crisp khaki shirt and pants and that seemed totally pressed.

He was always outwardly jovial, and yet I could see a sadness in eyes of Big John.

We became very good friends and he took the path from our kitchen back to the house, back to the house down Washington Street.

Then he turned left, walking three blocks to the county jail, and many mornings I would walk with them, separated from the court house by an alley, and sometimes big.

When he let me walk with him, he would take me to help to let me help him.

The prisoners in the jail, they had been prepared.

The food prepared at our home.

The jail was dark and dank.

Its well, it smelled of an awful stink.

And Biggie's belt held a ring with enormous iron keys.

The only way to open the huge steel doors of the Washington County jail.

And so those were wonderful memories that I had of that particular time on West Washington Street growing up.

Biggie coming by to pick up the breakfast for the prisoners, and later then our family would gather and eat the same foods.

That's one anecdote from a series, from a from a pattern of life that I think you acknowledge in the book shaped you, that there were powerful interracial friendship, deep and abiding, interracial friendships in those days.

But they would end at sundown.

The white folks would go one way and the blacks go.

This is maybe that's changed a little, but it was more this is sad, but it was so true.

We had segregated schools.

The African-American population basically went to Lincoln.

We went to Camden High School and Central Street and Cleveland Avenue schools.

And there was a separation, however, in this, I want to be very careful how I say all this, but I go back to that fabulous movie, Driving Miss Daisy, and that's the sort of relationship my mother in Mary probably had a very, very deep and abiding respect for one another, also a respect and a love for each other's cultures.

Mary Appreciating and honoring my mother's culture and her environment and mother honoring Mary's culture and her environment.

Even by going to Mary's church many, many times and teaching Sunday school to Mary's friends in in what we might call I hate to call it that the Black Presbyterian Church.

And but there was a wonderful relationship we had, but that was not true throughout.

That was a special relationship that was held together by years of bonding and understanding and sickness and deaths, deaths and births and everything that bonded our our people, our people together.

Sad to say, it was not true universally.

mid-Sixties Special Election for Congress.

The Honorable Lauren Harris steps aside, takes a federal judgeship.

You run and you win.

You arrive in Washington at a time of tumult that is rarely have we seen in this country.

I mean, you had civil rights.

Was there was civil rights, there was the war in Vietnam.

There was the environmental movement was getting its legs on her.

The women's movement was starting to get gain gain traction.

These were the days of Rolling Thunder, as I recall, in Vietnam.

And Lyndon Johnson besieged on the one side by his generals, on the other hand, the other side by his own party, some in his own party of duck initiation by fire.

This was a hard time for not only for this young congressman, this was a hard time for our country.

It was a hard time for our state.

Remember that our state in 1968 left the Democratic Party for the first time, voted for George Wallace, also for Winthrop Rockefeller and Bill Fulbright on the same day, which has baffled the political pundits for a long, many years after that.

But it was a hard time.

And and the racial riots in 68 and nine after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed.

And honestly, it was about as tough as I've known our country to go through.

I look back at that time with sometimes a sense of pride and sometimes a sense of frustration that I did not sense the reality of the moment significantly to come forward and show greater leadership.

I wish I had of I wish I had seen the importance of the civil rights movement more so than I had seen.

I also and I built up a lot of what you might call good political capital and what's the use of having good political capital if you don't use it?

And I could have used some of that political capital and I could have been a leader to some greater extent in the civil rights movement.

And I probably should have been more aggressive that in 1968 I did vote to seat and then it was very controversial and I voted to seat the integrated Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Committee.

I was on the credentials committee, and that was a tough, tough, hard vote to sit there.

My district board bordered the state of Mississippi.

I got back to the US House of Representatives shortly after that, a few weeks later after the convention and in the fall.

And none of the Mississippi delegation in the Congress would even speak to this traitor that they'd use David Pryor.

They had a lot of solitude.

They had a lot of power.

Bill Karma was chairman of the Rules Committee.

Jamie Whitten of the was incoming on the way to becoming chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

But I kind of made up over the years with most of those individuals, Sonny Montgomery and some of the rest kind of made up with them.

And after years of healing, I got to be pretty good friends.

Bill Calmer.

Congressman Calmer.

Never did care for me after that, though.

And ultimately he would get me back.

I may I tell you about that in the book.

But Jamie Whitten came around Sony.

Montgomery was a friend and and but I got along a little better with him.

But it took a lot of work and a lot of soothing and healing, I guess, to get to get back with him.

1972 approaches.

You call it the biggest political miscalculation of your life.

It was a miscalculation.

But looking back as to the appropriations, people said, okay, I'm on the Appropriations Committee.

I went on there as a freshman.

I've moved about two notches in seniority, up probably 45 people on the Appropriations Committee will likely be chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

So they did all kind of facts and figures and looked charts and death rates and who was what age.

And they said, well, around 2000, you know, something like, well, this was 1960.

I mean, 72.

So I came home and Bob and I started thinking about it and I said, Look, we've been doing this for six years.

I'm running back and forth, am absent from the boys and you so much.

I'm going back and forth almost every weekend from Washington to South Arkansas.

I hit the Little Rock Airport.

I take off from Pine Bluff and Dumas and Texarkana and wherever I'm going in the district.

And I said, if we're going to do this and if we're going to dedicate our lives to politics and government, let's do it in a way that is more meaningful.

And she said, What do you mean?

I said, Well, I'm thinking about running for the US Senate and she said, Well, is Senator McClelland not going to run as well?

I don't know.

Well, we started thinking about this.

The more we thought about it and the more the rumors spread that I was going to consider this race, the more people came and discouraged me from doing it.

Odd things happen to young people, especially stubborn young people, I guess you or maybe a false sense of pride.

I'm not sure which, but the more discouragement I got, the more I wanted the job, the more I said I can climb that mountain.

It may be the highest mountain around, but I think I can climb it.

And I had Barbour's blessing and her help.

She was at my side and we tried it.

And February the 19th, 1972, we went to Camden and announced at the White Sand High School, Middle Junior high school dining room packed with people, probably nearly a thousand people there.

And I was off and running and running against John L. McClellan in the primary.

Well, he was I'll tell you what, he was a tough, tough guy to run against.

He was he was going to be chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Alan Linder died just about during that campaign or right at the end of it.

And he he was the incoming chairman.

People fell out of the Appropriations Committee.

He had a lot of clout.

But in addition to his clout, he had something else.

A lot of politicians who have clout, but they don't know how to use it.

Jonathan McClellan You had a users and you knew how to press those buttons and those levers of power.

And then, boy, he was effective in and I know I got worried one time when I heard about during the campaign he was going up to Blanchard Springs.

He bought a new set of tennis shoes, a pair of tennis shoes.

And I said, Oh, he's getting younger.

And he's he was in his mid seventies, I guess, at that time, 76, 76.

Okay.

And he as I say, he got younger during the campaign and I got older, but I lost the race.

And it's a funny thing again about politics.

People really, they watch how I think they watch how you lose not necessarily not necessarily how you win, but they watch how you lose.

And the night that I lost June 13, 1972, at the hotel, when I made my concession speech to a couple of thousand people who were disappointed, crying and carrying on and weeping, had worked hard and had given everything they had.

Somehow.

I know that that concession speech they considered to be magnanimous and oh, people will say, Oh, if you had made that speech the whole time, you won that race.

But anyway, that's the way it goes.

But I wish I had that speech and that evening when I got licked, so to speak, as people in Arkansas will do, their young politicians and from time to time they will.

Bumpers was defeated for the school board.

The first one Bill Clinton defeated for Congress, his first run for when he ran for a second term as governor.

I was spanked by the people and said, It's not quite your time yet.

So I nursed my wounds and paid off my debt and hopefully would find a space some way to come back into politics, not knowing that I would ever have that opportunity because a, I truly feel that this was one of those times when I had lost a race that I should have won.

It was in my grasp to win.

I could.

I had consented to a debate which was unwise.

I misjudged him during that debate.

I was probably overly kind people just like watching a boxing match.

They want to see some blood on the floor.

And I was probably over.

Can he all of the jurors in this case, I don't ever forget, man.

He wore a white suit and white patent leather boots and I think a red tie.

And he came charging out after this young 37 year old challenger and and he finished me off, I guess you would say.

And it was a 5149 race.

It is one of the classic political races of Arkansas.

So I can look back now and say it was classic.

I didn't feel like it was classic that night when I accepted defeat.

But two years later, I was in.

I was back in the fray.

And as Willie Nelson said, back on the road again, in fact, two terms as governor, four years.

And that was followed by you made it to the Senate for 18 years.

And to our audience, fascinating 22 years extra in your political career and even some service after that.

And the book is a prior commitment.

You can read all about it in there.

David Pryor, thanks very much.

Thank you, Steve.