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Gazette Project Interview with Ernest Dumas, Hogeye, Arkansas, 19 October 2001 Interviewer: Roy Reed Roy Reed: This is Roy Reed and Ernie Dumas at my house on October 19, 2001. This is one more in a series of interviews about the Arkansas Gazette, and I want to get Ernie to tell me how Jeff Gerth [reporter for The New York Times] came to town to gather material for his first Whitewater story in 1992. But fill in the background on that beforehand. Ernest Dumas:All right, there’s a lot of background to this, Roy. This goes back to 1978. In the senate race of that year, David Pryor, who was the governor, and Congressman Ray Thornton and Congressman Jim Guy Tucker were the candidates in the Democratic primary. It was not long after the filing had closed, and we had those three candidates. I was The New York Times’ stringer at that time, and I received a call from a guy named Jeff Gerth, G- E-R-T-H. He was a fairly new reporter at that time. I think he had been at the Village Voice and some other jobs, but he worked for the financial section of The New York Times, at that time, based in New York, I think. He said he wanted to come to Arkansas and do a story about the Stephenses, Jack and Witt Stephens, and he knew that I had written a series of articles about them the previous year, about their rise to power 1 and the financial and political empire they had built. He had a copy of my series, but he wanted me to do some research for him. I agreed to do it, and it involved simple leg work, like getting annual reports of Union Life Insurance Company, which was owned by Jack Stephens, and I’ve forgotten what else. He would be down in Little Rock shortly. So he called one day. This would have been, I guess, in the late spring of 1978, and he was at the Little Rock airport. He said he was on the way to the Capitol, and he wasn’t going to go to the hotel first. I asked him what to do with this material I had gotten for him, and he said, “Just take it down to the hotel and leave it for me at the desk,” and that he’d be in touch later. I did. This was maybe late morning, 11:00, because he’d flown from New York to Little Rock. So it was late in the afternoon, maybe about 4:30, 5:00 as I recall, he called and said, “Want to go have a beer with me?” and so I did. He told me, “I’ve gotten my story. I’ve been out to the Public Service Commission.” I don’t know whether he told me PSC, or he just said the Capitol, but it was the PSC where he had been all day. He went straight from the airport to the Public Service Commission, and, obviously, he knew exactly what he was going there to get. He wouldn’t tell me what the story was, but he said it was going to blow Ray Thornton out of the Senate race. It sounded like a good story, but he, obviously, did not want me to know what the story was because I might feel compelled to give it to the Gazette. But he said it was a blockbuster story. So he hung 2 around a couple of days and kept trying to reach the Stephenses. Obviously, it involved the Stephenses–Jack and Witt, who were Ray Thornton’s uncles–and he couldn’t reach them, or at least he couldn’t reach Jack Stephens anyway. He might have gotten a hold of Witt, and Witt just said, “My brother takes care of all of that, and you’ll have to talk to him.” That’s probably what happened. But he couldn’t reach Jack, so he was finally calling me to see whether I could help him. I said I couldn’t, that Jack Stephens wouldn’t talk to me. He [Jack Stephens] was furious at me for the series I did on the Stephenses, and that my interceding wouldn’t help him at all. He [Gerth] would call every day, and it would just get him more and more frustrated. He was hung up down here in Little Rock, and he couldn’t finish the story. He told me, “All I want is for him to say, ‘No comment.’ I don’t care whether he talks to me or not, but I have to give him a chance to respond to this material I have.” He asked for advice, and I would say, “Well, why don’t you call so-and-so?” I said, “Why don’t you just go down to the Stephens building about 7:00 in the morning. It’s a tiny place. Park across the street, and when Jack arrives at Stephens Inc., stop him on the parking lot and ask him. Then you’ve trapped him. You got it.” I don’t know whether he did that or not, but he finally headed back to New York. He was just frustrated. He was going to New York, and he’d try from up there. He did, and about once a week, he would call, more and more frustrated. As I 3 recall, once he said that Craig Campbell, who was Jack’s assistant, had told him that Jack would play golf with him. So my recollection is that Gerth flew to Little Rock to play golf with Jack and gets down here and finds out Jack is in Augusta, Georgia, and so he had to fly back to New York again frustrated. Now we’re moving right along and approaching the Democratic primary for Senate, and he wants this story in the paper before the election. He finally persuades The Times to run the story anyway, persuades the editors there that the Stephenses are dodging him, and they’re not ever going to talk to him. So they agreed to run the story, and they did. They run it, as I recall, on a Monday, and the story is confusing and arcane, as Gerth’s stories tend to be. Basically, it was an account of how the Stephenses were paying for their own gas produced through Stephens’ production company and their own wells, paying them a higher price for gas than they were paying other people who had gas, royalty owners, in the same field. They were paying themselves a higher price than other people who had royalty rights. But the story – I’ve forgotten whether it mentioned Ray Thornton at all, or if it did, it was way down at the bottom. Gerth thought Thornton ought to be up at the top because this was why he was writing [the story]. It was the Senate race. Nevertheless, the story appeared in The Times, and we jumped on it in Little Rock. I had alerted Bob Douglas that The New York Times has got this blockbuster story that is going to blow Ray Thornton out of the Senate 4 race. So when Gerth tells me it’s going to run tomorrow, I alert Bob, and we’re all excited about this big blockbuster story that’s going to change the course of the Senate race. The story moves, and it just dissipates. RR: Moving on the wire. ED: Yes, we get The New York Times wire, and it comes across the wire. Shelton gives it to me and says, “All right, you do our story for it.” And so I go out to the PSC, and I get the same material and do a story for us. We run it, I think, on the front page there at the bottom. It’s picked up and becomes a little issue in the Senate race over there in western Arkansas, that his uncles were making money off the ratepayers, I guess, in that little gas company. It’s Arkansas Oklahoma Gas Company, owned by Witt and Jack and serving Crawford and Sebastian counties. Well, they were convinced that story beat Ray Thornton because he was barely knocked out of the run-off by Jim Guy Tucker. He finished third in those counties, where he expected to be strong. So they’re convinced that’s what did him in, and they’re furious. Of course, they assume correctly, I think, that Gerth was tipped by Sheffield Nelson, their old arch enemy, who is by now the president of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company. RR: And who started his life as Witt’s protégé. ED: Witt had hired him and made him his personal aide at Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company and then had the board of directors name him as his replacement, as his successor, but they had since had a falling out and now there’s implacable hatred between the Stephenses, on one hand, and Nelson. So the assumption is that 5 Nelson is the one who somehow gets to know Gerth and tips him to come down here and do this story. They’re convinced of it, and I think that’s true. RR: Nelson, meanwhile, had become a bigwig in the Republican party. ED: He had not at that point. No, he was not a Republican. RR: Still a Democrat? ED: He’s still a Democrat. Nelson’s a Democrat until 1990. The other side of that story I got later from Wendell Rawls, who at that time was a New York Times reporter, and had won the Pulitzer Prize at the Philadelphia Inquirer and had recently become an investigative reporter at The New York Times.