Arkansas: Can Win Win?

If Democrat Orval Faubus had his way, he’d be Governor of Arkansas until the Ozarks turn into molehills. This year he set out after his sixth straight two-year term, certain that winning would be as easy as eating grits with a tablespoon. He was in for a surprise.

Running against Faubus is Republican Winthrop (or, as he now bills himself, “Win”) Rockefeller, 52, fourth of the five Rockefeller brothers, who moved eleven years ago from New York to the 34,000-acre Winrock Farms, 65 miles from Little Rock.

In 1955 Faubus, figuring a Rockefeller would be quite an attraction for new business, picked Win to be chairman of the newly created Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. It was probably the best move Faubus has made as Governor. Before Rockefeller’s resignation early this year, the A.I.D.C. had helped bring in 600 new plants, 90,000 new jobs, $270 million in new annual payroll income. Moreover, Rockefeller put hundreds of thousands of his own dollars into schools, scholarships and cultural facilities around his part of the state.

Spelled Backward. In his campaign for Governor, Rockefeller has spared neither himself nor his pocketbook. Overweight for years, he lost 40 lbs. before he began to run, is now a trim 6 ft. 3 in., 205 lbs. He owns four airplanes, one of them a jet, and each day he takes off from his personal airport at Winrock bound for a campaign destination. When he arrives, a just-plain-folks secondhand bus, driven there the night before, is waiting to carry him over back roads to tiny hamlets and home towns. The Rockefeller bus is plastered with “Win with Win” signs; on the placard in front, the words are lettered backward so they can be read in a motorist’s rear-view mirror.

When the bus stops in a town square, Rockefeller, wearing western boots and a cowman’s hat, lopes about shaking every hand in sight, even darts into stores to greet people who didn’t come out on the street to meet him. As he performs, a team of aides carrying Polaroid cameras snaps as many as 500 pictures a day. Ten seconds after a handshake, a pleased voter gets a keepsake picture of himself with Rockefeller.

Man with a Plan. Rockefeller’s speeches are short and always extemporaneous. He consistently cracks Faubus for low teachers’ salaries and for the “deplorable condition” of state roads. Speaking at a new plant-dedication ceremony in Forrest City, Ark., last summer, Rockefeller fractured Faubus by complaining that his campaign bus had been plagued by constant breakdowns—caused mostly by jouncing over so many miles of “Faubus Freeways.” Rockefeller also attacks the Governor as the boss of a massive political machine. “My opponent is also visiting all the counties,” cries Winthrop, “but he heads for the courthouse to a secret meeting where he oils the machine.” Says Rockefeller: “If you want a man with a plan instead of a man with a machine, vote for me.”

Faubus, plainly worried, has attacked Rockefeller as a carpetbagger, conjured up pitiful images of a poor little country boy running against the Rockefeller millions, seen to it that everyone has been reminded frequently of Rockefeller’s sensational 1954 divorce and the subsequent $6,000,000 settlement with his first wife, Bobo. Stooping to the ludicrous, the Faubus workers have even sent broadsides to Arkansas barbers, claiming that Rockefeller always hops into his jet and flies to New York to get his haircuts.

Against Rockefeller, a onetime trustee of the Urban League, Faubus has also returned to the all-out segregationist stands that made him a national figure in 1957. Last month he shouted about Negro demonstrators: “The first time they lie down in the streets to block traffic of a legitimate business, they’re going to get run over. And if no one else will do it, I’ll get in a truck and do it myself.”

Such talk still goes over well in Arkansas, and Faubus is favored over Rockefeller. Even so, there should be one benefit: Rockefeller has already pumped enormous new energy into the once defunct Arkansas Republican Party, has 10,000 workers out beating the precincts for votes, even managed to find 172 Republican candidates to run for local offices this year, compared with a measly seven who dared try in 1960. And Rockefeller has committed himself to run for Governor again in 1966. “Win or lose,” he says, “there’ll be a two-party system in Arkansas after Nov. 3.”