Coup by Keel Hunt

Knoxville News Sentinel
By Betty Bean

At noon on Jan. 17, 1979, the principal planners of the 1982 World’s Fair set up a fancy lunch at the Hyatt Hotel Nashville with key government officials in hopes of greasing the skids for a future funding request.

Guests included House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter, Lt. Gov. John Wilder and Attorney General Bill Leech. Not attending was Gov.-elect Lamar Alexander, who had other things to do, and whose presence wasn’t required, since he was already pretty much a cinch to support the event.

Bo Roberts, who remembered the luncheon as a high-dollar, prime rib and red wine affair, led the Knoxville group.

Then somebody got a phone call and, poof! Wilder, McWherter and Leech were gone.

“We all knew something was going on, but we had no clue what it was – until we found out later in the day. It was on the day of the coup. The day it was happening. Of course, we had no idea,” Roberts told Keel Hunt, author of “Coup,” a deeply-researched, highly engrossing, minute-by-minute account of the day a bunch of Democrats ousted their crooked governor and installed a Republican before his scheduled inauguration.

This central fact makes “Coup” more than a well-told yarn. The inescapable comparison of then and now is stark.

“Then” was an era when Democrats and Republicans sometimes put aside their differences to do what was right; “now” is an era when they don’t.

The felonious governor, of course, was Ray Blanton, whose major priority during his last days in office was selling pardons to a scary array of Group W-level felons with access to money.

The governor-elect was Lamar Alexander, who had deep misgivings about the propriety of allowing himself to take the oath of office early and relied heavily on the approval of the two speakers.

Other GOP players were Alexander’s Yodaesque advisor Lewis Donelson and pesky state Sen. Victor Ashe, whose habit of requesting attorney general’s opinions set the stage for the coup when he asked whether a governor-elect could be sworn in before inauguration day (the answer was yes).

And is any Tennessee political tale set during the last five decades complete without a mention of Mr. Ubiquitous, Tom Ingram?

Of course not. He’s all over this book like white on rice as Alexander’s chief campaign aide-de-camp. He may not, however, be thrilled with debunking the common wisdom that credits Ingram with the signature plaid shirt Alexander wore on the walk across the state. Hunt credits the candidate himself with suggesting the shirt because he thought he would look like a dope hoofing from Mountain City to Memphis in a blue suit.

Hunt also credits the candidate’s wife, Honey, with the concept of walking across the state, and treats it as an original idea without mentioningWalkin’ Lawton Chiles, who hiked more than 1,000 miles from Key West to Pensacola during his successful campaign for U.S. Senate in 1970.

Johnson City native Lee Smith, creator of the Tennessee Journal, long a must-read for political insiders, lit the fuse for the fire to come in September 1977 when he recognized the governor’s official photographer as his homeboy Roger Humphreys, a well-connected double murderer from the Tri-Cities who had been sent away for life after being convicted of blowing away his ex-wife and her lover. Smith’s mention of Humphreys’ cushy work release assignment sparked statewide outrage.

A couple of weeks later, tough questioning from TV reporter Carol Marin – who got her start at Channel 10 in Knoxville where she was known by her married name Carol Utley – set the stage for Blanton’s eventual demise when she frustrated him into blurting out a defiant pledge to pardon Humphreys.

Blanton’s fate was sealed when undercover agents decided to test the lengths to which he would go by throwing out the name of the worst of the worst – James Earl Ray. The Blanton security operative acting as a go-between mulled the request before turning it down, sort of. Ray was probably too hot to pardon, he said. But maybe an escape could be arranged.

Why now?

The timing and distribution of the book (and probably the subtext, which celebrates bipartisanship) have deeply irritated some who question the decision of Vanderbilt University Press to donate 2,000 free copies to schools and public libraries across the state.

Suspicions were compounded when the Tennessee State Museum announced a traveling exhibit called “Come on Along: Lamar Alexander’s Journey as Governor,” a condensed version of an exhibit assembled from material the Alexanders donated to Vanderbilt.

The tour was put on hold until 2015 after notes surfaced indicating that museum officials had consulted Ingram about the exhibit.

2014 is an election year.

Click here for the original story online.