In an introduction to a recently published book on political scandals in Tennessee, former Governor Bill Haslam opines: “Scandals can have a lot of results. I hope this book can be a reminder that good government matters and that good government starts with politicians who are more concerned about the people they serve than serving their own political ends.”
To be honest, one of the results of scandals is that they don’t just shock. They entertain. And that is certainly one of the reasons for reading Welcome to Capitol Hill: 50 Years of Scandal in Tennessee Politics by two veteran statehouse reporters, Joel Ebert and Erik Schelzig.
Ebert’s coverage was for The Tennessean newspaper of Nashville (he has since moved on to a post at the The University of Chicago Institute of Politics). Schelzig toiled for the Associated Press, and for the last several seasons he has been editor of the Tennessee Journal, a well-respected weekly newsletter about politics and government in the state.
Though Nashville-based for their journalism, the two authors pay considerable attention in their volume to political personalities from our own end of the state — several of whom, as perpetrators or as observers, had much to do with the various misfirings and misdeeds reported on in the book.
An early section of the book is a list of “Cast of Characters” to be encountered in the volume. I suppose I’m more pleased than otherwise to find my own name to be listed there — basically because my journalism over the years put me in contact with many of the people and events featured in the volume.
There is, for example, the following quote derived from an erstwhile interview I did with former state Senator John Ford of Memphis, who is the central figure in the authors’ chapter entitled “John Ford and the Tennessee Waltz.”
Said the senator regarding a piece of relatively mild ethics-reform legislation that had just been passed by the legislature: “There’s conflict of interest, and there’s illegal. These crazy-assed rules and everything? Shit, I won’t be able to make a living.”
It is a matter of record that Ford, known for a fast temper and faster driving, and for having a hand, for better and for worse, in beaucoup legislation, ended up doing time for having received upwards of $10,000 from FBI agents masquerading as lobbyists working for a computer firm that ostensibly needed an enabling bill passed. He and several other legislators from Memphis were netted in a sting code-named “Tennessee Waltz” by the feds.
That chapter and several other others remind one of the old saw about truth being stranger than fiction. Indeed, the book as a whole is fast-paced and novelistic.
Baby boomers will surely remember and be regaled by the authors’ account of the late Governor Ray Blanton, who was discovered to be, not so secretly, profiting from the outright sale of pardons to convicted murderers and other felons willing to pay for a “Get Out of Jail” card. Things got so ugly that other major figures in state government contrived to get Blanton’s elected successor, Lamar Alexander, installed earlier than his scheduled inauguration date.
Of more recent vintage — and adequately covered in the book — were such sagas as those of state Rep. Jeremy Durham of upscale Franklin, whose predatory womanzing resulted in his being expelled from the legislature, and of Shelby County’s own Brian Kelsey, whose illegal shuffling of campaign funds resulted in a federal indictment and conviction, and a prison sentence that the once-renowned “stunt-baby of Germantown” is still, even as we speak, trying, Trump-like, to get postponed to some future-tense time.
And there is, as they say in ad-speak, More, More, More. The book (296 pages, Vanderbilt University Press) can be snagged for $24.99 from Amazon, or $14.99 for a Kindle edition.