Henry Bellmon

Henry Bellmon

Lasalier: Welcome to this afternoon’s Oscar Rose Junior College political discussion. We have as our guest former U.S. Senator Henry Bellmon, who was reared in Oklahoma, graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1942, then he served with the United States Marines. Upon returning to civilian life he became a farmer and served in the Oklahoma state legislature from 1946 to ’48. He was chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party Committee and served as governor of Oklahoma between 1963 and 1967. He then ran for and won election as a United States Senator where he served for 12 years. Now, Senator Bellmon is back in the state of Oklahoma as a farmer, political commentator. Let’s start out by asking just exactly why did you enter politics, Senator Bellmon?

Bellmon: Well, professor, I had a rather unusual experience. Nobody in my family has ever been a politician. We’ve been working people all our lives, and it was my experiences in WWII that caused me to get interested in politics. I was in the 4^th Marine Division. We had our base came on Maui where we would go from Maui – we’d train there, then go out to these islands and capture them from the Japanese. Well, it was curious because on Maui most people were Japanese. And the Marines got to be very friendly with the Japanese there, so it was a very traumatic experience to have Japanese friends on Maui who were very nice people, very much like Americans, and, in fact, they were Americans, of course, and then get on a boat and travel for a couple of weeks and get off and try to kill all the Japanese. It didn’t make any sense at all. I came to realize that the problem wasn’t at the military level because obviously Marines didn’t have any great desire to be over there doing what we were doing and I’m fairly sure the Japanese soldiers would much rather have been home. The problem was at the government level. And I made up my mind if I ever got a chance, I’d get into government and see if I could contribute a little bit to reducing the tensions that can lead to an outbreak of hostilities such as we saw between the US and Japan. And so I did when I came back. I ran for the legislature and then later for these other offices that you’ve mentioned.

Lasalier: What do you rank as your greatest accomplishments for the state of Oklahoma while you were governor and United States Senator?

Bellmon: As governor, there were several things. First of all, when I went in there was about a three year waiting list for those who wanted to be admitted to schools for the mentally retarded. And they really weren’t schools. The same situation almost in this school – in the mental health institutions, where there were people being warehoused. We spent a lot of time trying to understand the problem and put together a new system which in effect abolished the waiting list and made treatment available to people, rather than just care. I think it’s been a major improvement for the way those problems are dealt with here in the state.

Also, as governor, I had a lot to do with changing the way our finances were handled. The previous administrations and the legislature had gotten in a policy of appropriating against what was called the unanticipated surplus. Now you can figure that one out – I never could tell what it meant. It meant they were spending money they didn’t have, which violated our constitution, and we had a court test and put an end to that foolishness. Had it have gone on, we could have gotten our state in the same shape the federal government’s now in with enormous deficits.

Also, we did a lot with the highway system, particularly turnpikes. We expanded the turnpike program a great deal. And set the stage, I think, by cleaning up our courts which up to that time had been somewhat corrupt. We set the stage for, I think, a major industrial expansion in Oklahoma, which has led to the creation of many, many thousands of jobs and, I think, helped lay the foundation for today’s prosperity. Now, I don’t want to take all the credit – I certainly can’t take but a very little bit of it. Dewey Bartlett did a lot. David Boren did a great deal. George Nigh has done a good job in helping to sell Oklahoma, so it’s been more or less a team effort over a period of many years. But I’m very proud of the fact that some of the policies we set in place back in the early 60s are bearing fruit even today.

Now, in the Senate the main thing I worked on was the farm program and I worked for the last six years as a ranking member of the Budget Committee where we helped get the budget process soundly in place. And I believe it’s been one of the biggest advances in the way federal finances are handled. Up to now it hasn’t had the results everybody hoped for, but I’m sure as time goes on it will have.

Lasalier: In light of Watergate and the Abscam scandals and the revelations of the county commissioner wrong-doings, would you want to enter politics today?

Bellmon: Yes, I got a great deal of satisfaction out of politics and, generally, enjoyed the experience. The fact that there are some bad apples in the barrel, and as matter of fact from those you mentioned, there are a good many bad apples in the barrel. Doesn’t mean that there’s not some good apples also. The county commissioner scandal is a tragic situation. It grew up over the course of many, many, many years, and a lot of people who should have known better fell into a trap or fell into policies that they should have known not to get into, but that doesn’t mean that we still don’t have a majority of honest people in county government and certainly at that state and federal level. Actually, the people I’ve met in government are, I think, some of our choice citizens. I would put them up against professors or bankers or preachers or about any others. Although, just like in any group, it’s the ones who get out of line who get all the attention and tend to give everyone in that profession a black eye. But by and large, the people I’ve known in government have been good people.

Lasalier: How about the pressures of lobby groups when you were in the United States Senate, for example?

Bellmon: You know, Harry Truman, I believe, coined the phrase “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” There’s no way a lobby group can put “pressure” on a politician who doesn’t want pressure. They can threaten to depose you the next time you run, which is their right, but I think people in politics shouldn’t have to have their job. They ought to be willing to take a little heat and take a chance on losing their job if things they do don’t meet with public favor always. So lobbyists have important and necessary role in the government process. A lobbyist is someone who knows everything there is – I’m talking about a good lobbyist – he or she will know everything there is to know about a very narrow specific part of government. And if you get into a problem, you can call on these people and they can tell you what the affect will be of the action you’re about to take. And I’m no critical of lobbyist. I think most of them do a good job and I believe we get better legislation as a result of it. But you have to be willing to face up to them when the demands they make or the causes they are espousing are not in the public interest.

Lasalier: You are known as being a farmer-senator. What do you see as being a major problem facing Oklahoma farmers and agriculture in general across the United States, and are the Regan Administration farm policies adequate to the need of farmers?

Bellmon: The farm program which was passed by Congress last year – now it wasn’t the Regan program – I think they forced it on Regan – but it’s really a pretty good program. It puts a floor under commodity prices at a level – it certainly doesn’t guarantee a profit, but it will provide enough cash flow so that most farmers are going to be able to survive for at least a period of time. It also includes this thing called the farmer-owned reserve so that we can move a lot of grain that’s surplus to the market at any given time into the reserve and keep it until there’s a drought or shortage in some part of the world where the grain will be needed, and it will help to stabilize market both in times when there’s a surplus and in times when there’s a shortage. The Regan Administration, to its credit, increased, even though they are cutting back in many areas, they increased funding for ag research, which I think is very far-sighted, because we’ve got to keep brining on new technology if we’re going to be able to feed the world.

So I think that farmers faired reasonably well under Regan. Our problems are that interest is high, so that farmers who owe money, and practically every farmer does, are having trouble now meeting their debt service. In addition to that, the embargoes which Nixon and Ford and then Carter put in place, for one reason or another, had interrupted our access to the world market. And since more than ½ of our farm products move in the world market, this has kept prices from reacting as they should have, and so we’re suffering on that account. Regan has now made a public statement that he won’t put on an embargo, and that, I think, will be a very healthy new attitude. So it’s a tough time for agriculture. I sometimes wonder why I came back and got into it. I might have been a lot better off to stay where I was. But I enjoy farming and I think most people are in it because they like it, but it’s also and essential business and sooner or later it has to be profitable or we’re going to run out of food.

Lasalier: As you well know, you’ve been called a politician by some, a statesman by others, and then some which we will forgo at this time primarily because of your stand on the Panama Canal, on bussing, and on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. I wonder if you might comment on those as far the perspective from a senator’s chair.

Bellmon: Well, it’s hard to cover those complex subjects in the brief time we have here on the air. First on Panama. I did a lot – a tremendous amount of homework on that subject trying to get to the facts as best I could. I’m convinced if we had not ratified the treaties that we would now have a guerilla war going on, not only in El Salvador and Nicaragua and Guatemala. We’d have a worse situation in Panama. The canal was not a valuable money-earning asset to the United States government. In fact, we lost money with the canal year after year. So what we gave away was something that didn’t actually produce any revenue for the U.S. Treasury. We owned it and we had certain pride of ownership and we can still take great pride in the fact that we built it. It was done by American management, primarily, and has been run successfully for 75 years by Americans. So we have that to look to with pride. But, the Panamanians had come to the place that they felt the treaties that the canal was being operated under weren’t fair and Trujillos was, I believe, ready to start violent action against us if we didn’t correct the situation in his view. And I believe we did the right thing in moving away with honor, rather than having gotten embroiled in a guerilla war and having to walk away after getting a lot of people hurt and spending a lot of money and getting a lot of property damage.

Also, on bussing, the real issue isn’t bussing. You’ll remember that states like Oklahoma once had a totally segregated school system. The Supreme Court back in 1954 ruled that that was unconstitutional, that “separate was not equal.” That we couldn’t have two separate systems because if you did that, obviously, one group was getting a better education than the other. So they said stop it. And in cities like Oklahoma City it was a real problem because you had large communities here where people live separately according to their color. And if you go in for what a lot of people like to call neighborhood schools, you’re still going to have segregated schools. And it became necessary to transport students from one part of town to the other in order to achieve the Supreme Court-mandated integration. And that’s what the whole scrap was about. It wasn’t necessarily – you move people by bus or helicopter or some other way – the question was “do you move them at all?” And bussing was the only viable alternative, and of course, I support integration because I think we’ve got to give every American an equal chance to succeed, and the way to help do that is through giving them equal education opportunities. It’s tough right now. We’re going through a time when we’re trying to catch up those young people that didn’t have a decent chance to get educated back when they were younger or moving through the system, and hopefully, those that come on and have had advantage of good education from the start will make the system work a lot better. But it is a traumatic time and I recognize that, but I still feel that we were right to start in the direction of following the court’s orders.

Lasalier: The state of Oklahoma is doing well economically at the present time, and it is anticipated that oil revenues will continue for another 20 to 30 to 40 years, possibly. But at some time in the future, that’s going to begin to dry up. Now what steps do you think Oklahoma should begin to take in 1982 to ensure that the state does not go broke?

Bellmon: That’s a very important question and it’s a question I hope our present governor and legislature are addressing carefully, because this is the time to begin making some sound investments for the future, so that when and if the oil and gas reserves are depleted we’ll have other sources of wealth. There’s some things that can happen. One is, right now, the state is prosperous, but agriculture is not prosperous. So if agriculture can begin to enjoy the kinds of income that their certainly entitled to – it doesn’t make any sense for farmers to have to subsidize people’s food supply. People ought to pay at least what it cost to produce the food, and when that starts to happen, as it must, then agriculture will be able to make much more of a contribution to the state’s wealth than we can at the present time. Also, our two major river systems, the Arkansas and the Red River, are heavily polluted with salt from natural sources. I’m not talking about salt that comes out of oil wells or from packing houses or anything like that. I’m talking about salt that these streams pick up in the natural courses they follow which go through big salt plains out in Alfalfa County and out by Freedom. And also the Red River gets about 7000 tons of salt a day from salt springs, that regurgitates salt water into the stream beds in Texas and in Southwestern Oklahoma. If we can stop this natural pollution of our rivers, that will make available some 35 million – now think of that – 35 million acre feet of water a year that presently is polluted and usually not usable. Most of it flows down the river into Arkansas and Louisiana where they don’t have any use for it. So if we can clean up that water and store it and begin to utilize it, it can become a tremendous source of wealth, which is renewable – it won’t run out the way oil and gas fields do. So we ought to be concentrating now on first cleaning up the river systems, and then providing the storage and the transportation system that will be needed to get the water from where it can be put to good use.

Lasalier: What are the political problems there, Senator? Why is it that the state legislature and the governor are not agreed upon that program?

Bellmon: Well, the program has to involve federal activity because these are rivers that cross state lines. There’s a role for the states. The problem, primarily, came from some land owners who got the attention of Congressman English, and more or less stopped us from getting action at the federal level. These programs are going to be expensive and it’s not easy to get federal spending when everybody’s working together. When you’ve got a congressman dragging his feet, you’ve sure got problems and so that’s what happened to us, particularly on the Arkansas. On the Red, progress is still going forward. It’s at a fairly slow rate. It will probably take – I’m not sure of the number – I shouldn’t even guess, but probably 10 or 15 years. But sooner or later, the salt will be contained and Texoma water will become very potable water for industrial and municipal purposes. We’re going to have to fight Texas to keep it because part of it – they’re going to want it, but we should be on our toes to make sure that we at least get our share. But the big problem is with the Arkansas. And with the fact that the great many communities which are short of water, as Shawnee is right now, have difficulty in getting voters to approve bonds to build the kinds of storage and distribution systems that are required. So some help from the state legislature to assist cities in solving those kinds of problems would certainly be timely.

Lasalier: Senator, it’s getting nearly time for politics again in the state of Oklahoma. Would you give us your evaluation of, say Governor Nigh and Tom Daxon and Jan Eric Cartwright and some of the leading names we see in newspapers at this time.

Bellmon: That’s hazardous business for even a has-been politician! You know, there was a time people used to talk with me about running for governor and I have to admit that I was a little bit tempted. That’s a great job and I thoroughly enjoyed the years I spent there. So I’ve looked at what George has done. George has been a – as far as I can tell – an honorable governor. His administration has been relatively free from scandal. I don’t think it’s quite fair to blame him for anything the county commissioners have been doing – they are not under his control, although he might have been able to blow the whistle on them a little sooner if he had concentrated on it. As far as I know, Tom Daxon’s done a good job as examiner and inspector, so you have two experienced state officials. And the same thing can be said of Neil McCaleb. He’s minority leader in the House now, so the voters are going to have a capable, maybe even a talented slate to choose from. And I would assume that the best man will win, whomever the voters may decide that is.

Lasalier: Do you think Jan Eric Cartwright might run for governor?

Bellmon: I wouldn’t think Cartwright would oppose an incumbent Democratic governor. He undoubtedly will run some day, but I assume it would be after Nigh’s terms are completed.

Lasalier: What are your impressions of Cleta Detheridge as a legislature?

Bellmon: Well, by coincidence, Cleta and one of my daughters are very good personal friends. They went to Classen together when we lived here in Oklahoma City. And I like Cleta. She’s a personable young woman, and obviously a talented person. She now is a powerful – in a powerful position as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee. That’s probably the number one job to have in the legislature, so I think she’s a very fine asset to the state.

Lasalier: Senator Bellmon, we appreciate you being with us this afternoon. Thank you.