Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Sam Hutto was at home on the evening of September 18, 1980, with his pregnant wife and their one-year-old daughter. The baby was expected any day. Hutto’s father called at about half past seven and told him to get out of the house. There was another leak or something at the missile site. Sheriff Anglin had gone out there to see what was happening, bumped into an Air Force security officer near the fence, and asked him whether there was any need to evacuate. Nope, everything is under control, the security officer had said. The sheriff got on his radio and ordered an evacuation of all the homes within a mile of the launch complex. The Parishes lived the closest to the site, less than half a mile from the missile itself, and perhaps twenty-five other homes were within the evacuation zone, mainly on the east side of the highway. To the west of the complex, woods and open fields stretched for hundreds of acres. Sheriff’s deputies knocked on doors, and neighbors phoned one another to spread the word. Sam Hutto drove his family to his brother Tommy’s house in Damascus, helped them get settled, and then left.

It was a bad night to evacuate the farm. The heat cycles of the heifers had been synchronized, and about twenty were ready to give birth. They were grazing in a field right across the highway from 4–7. Hutto wanted to make sure the cows and their calves were all right. He knew the back roads of Damascus pretty damn well and felt confident that he could safely make his way to the farm.

THE ARKANSAS OFFICE of Emergency Services had been notified by the Air Force, at 6:47 P.M., that there was a fuel leak and possibly a fire at the Titan II complex outside Damascus. For the rest of the evening, however, the Air Force provided few additional details about what was happening and whether the leak could pose a threat to public safety. Despite repeated calls to Little Rock Air Force Base, the Office of Emergency Services was told only that the problem was being addressed — and that more information would soon be forthcoming. Spokesmen at SAC headquarters in Omaha were no more helpful, claiming that the Air Force didn’t know what had caused the fuel leak, the white cloud rising from the silo wasn’t toxic, and there was no danger of a nuclear incident.

State officials had good reason to be skeptical of reassuring words from the federal government. A few months earlier, when about fifty thousand gallons of radioactive water leaked at a nuclear power plant outside Russellville, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had waited five hours before telling the Office of Emergency Services about the accident. And then the NRC allowed radioactive gas to be vented from the reactor into the air above Pope County, ignoring objections by the Arkansas Department of Health.

The cultural differences between the Strategic Air Command and the Arkansas state government may have contributed to the feelings of mistrust. SAC’s devotion to order, discipline, secrecy, and checklists was at odds with the looser, more irreverent spirit that guided policy making in Little Rock. Steve Clark, the Arkansas attorney general, was thirty-three years old. Paul Revere, the secretary of state, was also thirty-three. And William Jefferson Clinton, at thirty-four, was the youngest governor in the United States.

Educated at Georgetown University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, Bill Clinton was an unlikely person for the Air Force to include in deliberations about the fate of a ballistic missile. He’d organized a demonstration against the Vietnam War, never served in the military, and supported the decriminalization of marijuana. During his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, the New York Times described Clinton as “tall, handsome, a populist-liberal with a style and speaking manner as smooth as Arkansas corn silk.” His landslide victory that year seemed to mark a generational shift — the rise to power of a brilliant, charismatic representative of the 1960s youth counterculture. Many conservatives were disgusted by the idea of Clinton and his young, idealistic friends running the state government. “He was a punk kid with long hair,” one Arkansas legislator said, “he had all those longhaired people working for him, and he was a liberal.”

Governor Clinton began his two-year term in office with an ambitious agenda for one of America’s most impoverished states. He gained passage of the largest spending increase for public education in Arkansas history. He created a Department of Energy to subsidize research on conservation, alternative fuels, and solar power. He proposed a rural health policy that would bring physicians and medical care to low-income communities. And he set out to fix the state’s badly deteriorated highway system, promising infrastructure investments to create jobs and improve the lives of ordinary Arkansans. A number of Clinton’s top aides and cabinet officers were recruited from out of state — sending a clear message that posts in his administration would be filled on the basis of merit, not as a reward for political favors. Instead of having a chief of staff, Clinton relied upon three close advisers who had long hair, beards, and an aversion to wearing jackets or ties. Nicknamed “the Three Beards,” they looked like junior faculty members at Berkeley. Among Democratic officials nationwide, Little Rock was now considered a cool place to be, and the young governor became a frequent guest at the Carter White House.

By the second year of the Clinton administration, most of the enthusiasm and idealism was gone. Personal differences, political disputes, and feelings of betrayal had led two of the Three Beards to quit. Industry groups worked hard to block or dilute many of Clinton’s reforms, and the governor’s willingness to compromise alienated many of his allies. Instead of subsidizing road construction with higher taxes on the use of heavy trucks — a move opposed by the state’s trucking companies and poultry firms — Clinton agreed to raise the taxes paid by the owners of old pickup trucks and cars. The lofty rhetoric and grand ambitions of the young governor lost much of their appeal, once people realized they’d have to pay more to renew their license plates. During the spring of 1980, a series of tornadoes struck Arkansas. During the summer, the state was hit by a heat wave and the worst drought in half a century. Hundreds of forest fires burned. Cuban refugees, detained by the federal government at an Army base in the state, started a riot. They tried to escape from the base and fought a brief skirmish with the Arkansas National Guard, terrifying residents in the nearby town of Barling. Each new day seemed to bring another crisis or a natural disaster.

Having gained almost two thirds of the popular vote in 1978, Bill Clinton now faced a tough campaign for reelection, confronting not only the anger and frustration in his own state but also the conservative tide rising across the United States. Frank White, the Republican candidate for governor, was strongly backed by the religious right and many of the industry groups that Clinton had antagonized. The White campaign embraced the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, attacked Clinton for having close ties to Jimmy Carter, ran ads that featured dark-skinned Cubans rioting on the road to Barling, raised questions about all the longhairs from out of state who seemed to be running Arkansas, and criticized the governor’s wife, Hillary Rodham, for being a feminist who refused to take her husband’s name.

While Lee Epperson, director of the Office of Emergency Services, tried to find out what was happening at the Titan II site in Damascus, Governor Clinton spent the evening in Hot Springs. The state’s Democratic convention was about to open there, and Vice President Walter Mondale would be arriving in the morning to attend it. Hillary Rodham remained in Little Rock, where she planned to spend the weekend at the governor’s mansion with their seven-month-old daughter, Chelsea.