Coup by Keel Hunt

Nashville Scene
By Chris Scott

In recent years, any hint of bipartisanship in a legislative body is announced with a fanfare equivalent to a breakthrough in the quest for peace in the Middle East. Democrats and Republicans seem to pick and gouge at one another gleefully in a contest to see who can claim the distinction of inflicting the most damage on the opposition. In such an environment, the well-being of the people can be forgotten and victory defined by ephemeral gains for the individual parties. In Coup: The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor, Put Republican Lamar Alexander in Office Early, and Stopped a Pardon Scandal, Nashville writer Keel Hunt remembers a day in 1979 that will long stand as a model of non-partisan self-sacrifice and defense of the people’s right to honest government.

The basic story of Coup is straightforward. Gov. Ray Blanton, a Democrat, was accused of selling pardons to criminals who posed genuine physical threats to the people of Tennessee. Governor-elect Alexander, a Republican, was told that more pardons were coming, and that it would be best to take office four days early. Speaker of the House Ned McWherter and Lt. Gov. John Wilder, both Democrats, agreed that Blanton had to go, and they bent over backward to make sure their political foe Alexander could take office with unanimous support.

The details of the story, as expected, are much more complex and involve a host of actors of various temperaments from both parties. Careers were on the line. Tennessee’s reputation was on the line. And only five years after Watergate, the people’s faith in government was on the line. This last fact may have played the greatest role. The ghost of the Nixon presidency sat in the corner, reminding the participants that their fellow citizens might long remember whether they had done the right thing.

The right thing took barely more than four hours, but those four hours of intensity and nerves had been years in the making. Blanton had begun his term as a popular and outgoing governor. “Deeper into his term,” writes Hunt, “Blanton’s behavior turned erratic, and his moods grew dark.” On Jan. 15, 1979, the governor did the unthinkable, signing clemencies for 52 prisoners, including 23 convicted murderers. Of the total number, only 36 had been recommended for parole.

The U.S. attorney for Middle Tennessee, Hal Hardin, knew that more clemencies were awaiting the governor’s signature. In Coup, Hunt portrays Hardin as a hero among heroes — the man who decided to make a phone call to Alexander, not as an officer of the United States government, but as a citizen of Tennessee, raising the alarm that something terrible was happening. There were fears, probably not well-founded but nonetheless real, that even Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray could be set free.

But what could legally be done? Tennessee Attorney General Bill Leech huddled with his senior staff in a hotel room to debate the constitutionality of putting Alexander in office earlier than planned. In the end, the ambiguity of the state constitution on the issue of inauguration of governors — ambiguity that has since been eliminated — served the attorneys well. They decided an early swearing-in was legal.

Just because a thing is legal, however, doesn’t make it right, and Alexander was reluctant to take the first step. The thought of usurping the existing governor filled him with dread. So a dance began among Alexander, Wilder, McWherter and other behind-the-scenes players, Hunt writes, who “were simply unaccustomed to working together, nor to speaking to each other at all, let alone collaborating in private about Governor Blanton and what seemed to be the rising velocity of madness.”

But dance they did — right into the chamber of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, where Alexander took the oath of office on what his wife, Honey, remembers as the worst day of her life. The coup was done, and an enraged Ray Blanton was told about it just a few short minutes before it happened.

Hunt, who campaigned for Lamar Alexander in 1978 and later worked as Alexander’s speechwriter, was not part of the action during those fateful final days of the Blanton administration. But being a political operative and a former reporter for The Tennessean gives Hunt the perfect platform from which to tell the story. He has interviewed the surviving participants and delved into the records to tell the complete history, elements of which even Alexander had not heard before.

It is a testament to the bipartisan nature of the events that Coup carries jacket blurbs from Phil Bredesen, Fred Thompson and Alexander. And in the forward to the book, John Seigenthaler, at the time editor-in-chief of The Tennessean, notes that Hunt’s “book enriches history and reminds us again that in a time of crisis, on a dark day in Tennessee, there were politicians who were willing to act with courage and vision, across party lines, in the public interest.” Here’s hoping that the memory lingers.

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