By John Brummett

We already knew it, well before he told us so Friday evening at his presidential library during an otherwise jovial and comedic reunion conversation by three former Democratic governors.

Bill Clinton always agonized about letting executions happen.

After a long court-ordered hiatus, the imposition of the death penalty returned to the state late in Clinton’s long governorship, in June 1990.

It turned out that the inmate to be killed, murderer John Edward Swindler, had been befriended by Clinton’s own good friend, Freddie Nixon, who was doing a prison ministry.

Nixon had worked on Clinton’s first gubernatorial staff. She was, and is, married to the Methodist minister, Vic Nixon, who had performed Bill and Hillary’s wedding.

In what I always thought was the most extraordinary anecdote of Clinton’s governorship, Freddie Nixon told me that Clinton had called her the night of Swindler’s execution. She said he told her he wished there were more people like her so that he wouldn’t have to do what he was having to do.

I thought he’d meant this: If only there were more death penalty opponents like you, Freddie, then I wouldn’t have to let a man die for political reasons. But she, who heard what he said and knew him better and has an infinitely better heart than I, said that wasn’t it at all. She said Clinton was referring to people who would never commit acts that warranted capital punishment.

I’ll never forget what a friend of mine said to me when he read that quote: When you have the power to stop a man’s killing, and don’t, you deserve no morality or compassion points for saying that you agonized about it.

But that’s precisely what Clinton said Friday night as he sat on a stage before 300 people and between two of his dear friends and predecessor Democratic governors, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor.

Bumpers and Pryor were mostly funny and endearing. Clinton was the one willing to use the occasion for sober and candid reflection.

The question to the three was to recall their most difficult decisions as governor. Bumpers and Pryor invoked relatively obscure vetoes. Clinton cited the death penalty and, in a tacit acknowledging of the indecisiveness I and others always accused him of, the difficulty of deciding sometimes whether the greater right is keeping a promise or breaking that promise if keeping the promise is wrong.

On the death penalty, he said he wondered if he could possibly let it go forward today “with all this DNA evidence,” so much of which has demonstrated the innocence of men assigned to Death Row.

There sat Mike Beebe down front. You wondered what he was thinking. Was his old pal Bill implicitly telling him not to allow executions anymore?

Clinton did not discuss — and it was just as well — his returning from the presidential campaign to sit at the Governor’s Mansion the night the state would take the life of a man named Rickey Ray Rector. The poor guy had such brain damage — from having part of his brain shot away — that he saved the dessert from his last meal to eat later.

As ever with Clinton, this lends itself to widely divergent interpretation. Was it ghoulish of a Southern Democratic governor, needing to prove to the nation his “new Democrat” bona fides, to make a show of returning for this killing? Or did Clinton come home that night out of a sense of duty to face his responsibility, as he had in all other cases?

So many questions about Clinton are difficult to answer. They’ll almost always be ones that put his political viability and his humanity in conflict.

That’s true as well of what he said about making and breaking promises.

Having been burned politically by pardons and commutations from his ill-fated first gubernatorial term, he vowed to grant none if allowed back in office. Then, he said, he found himself torn between the virtue of keeping that promise and the wrong he sensed from denying some of the requests.

So there you sat in the audience, asking yourself yet one more futile time whether this was an instinctively good man or a consummate political being, and whether this person or any person could possibly be both.

Sometimes it’s best for Dale Bumpers or David Pryor to break back in with a funny story.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.