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whom, falling heir to a deep and abiding tradition of military honor, isolationism was inscrutable—had never had much truck with Taftites like Manion. Their anti-Washington mood was a late development, in response to Brown. Whatever the ideological convergences of conservatives North and South now, there were too few abiding friendships, too few of those intimate bonds that make men willing to take risks together. And without risks from Southerners willing to bolt the Democrats, why should Wood risk bolting the Republicans? He closed his checkbook, and the committee made plans to dissolve. Manion was disconsolate.
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    He soon found hope in his mailbox in the form of a long missive on the letterhead of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
    Jim Johnson was a young lawyer who made a name for himself after Brown as the head of the Arkansas branch of the Citizens Council movement—the respectable segregationist outfits popularly known as the “uptown Klan”—traveling up and down the state proclaiming, “Don’t you know that the Communist plan for more than fifty years has been to destroy Southern civilization, one of the last patriotic and Christian strongholds, by mongrelization, and our Negroes are being exploited by them to effect their purposes?” He decided to challenge Orval Faubus because the incumbent governor—a native of the poor hill country in the northern part of the state where blacks were as rare as millionaires, and the son of a backcountry socialist who gave him the middle name Eugene, as in Debs—was a goddamned liberal who had proudly integrated the state Democratic Party. It seemed Johnson didn’t stand a chance—before, that is, the Massive Resistance movement spread so thick and fast over the region in the summer of 1956 that politics even in a moderate state like Arkansas had turned from day to darkest night. Now, by calling Faubus “a traitor to the Southern way of life,” Johnson had a chance to win. Manion, no fan of integration, had met Johnson while stumping in the state for Coleman Andrews and had gladly given some speeches to help him out. But Faubus’s instincts for political preservation proved much deeper than his liberalism. He added a line to his standard speech: “No school district will be forced to mix the races as long as I am governor of Arkansas.” By co-opting Johnson’s bigotry and dressing it up in uptown language, Faubus won the primary hands down. He never looked back. A segregationist leader was born.
    In the general election that year, Johnson both ran for a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court and led a ballot initiative to give the state legislature the right to nullify any federal law it wished—“damned near a declaration of war against the United States,” he later called it. The initiative passed with 56 percent of the vote, and Johnson won his Supreme Court seat. The next year,
Orval Faubus made the history books when he forced Eisenhower to send the Army to back up a federal court order to integrate Little Rock Central High. Faubus received 250,000 telegrams and letters of support for courageously standing up to Washington. A Gallup poll that spring listed the Arkansas governor as one of the ten most admired men in the world. Johnson slyly maneuvered himself into Faubus’s inner circle to become his liaison with the conservative forces around the country who were clamoring for the governor to seek higher office. And Johnson hadn’t forgotten his friend Clarence Manion.
    â€œWith the proper persuasion,” Johnson wrote Manion, “I am convinced that Governor Orval Faubus can be prevailed upon to lead a States’ Rights Party in the coming presidential election.” Manion immediately called a Southern friend, U.S. Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn of South Carolina. Dorn was a favorite politician of the textile manufacturers who had moved South from New England to escape