Jim Guy Tucker, a former governor of Arkansas who was caught up in the long-running investigation that unsuccessfully targeted his predecessor as governor, Bill Clinton, died on Thursday in Little Rock, Ark. He was 81.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of ulcerative colitis, said his daughter Anna Ashton.
The Whitewater investigation, which looked into purportedly fraudulent land deals in northwest Arkansas, was led by a Republican special prosecutor and consumed much of the Clinton presidency. But it wound up netting only secondary players on minor charges.
Mr. Tucker was one of them. He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.
But his conviction — like Whitewater itself, which the journalist and commentator Lars-Erik Nelson called “a travesty of a scandal investigation, a cargo-cult version of Watergate,” in The New York Review of Books in 1998 — was later questioned.
The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”
The Arkansas governor’s conviction nonetheless represented a kind of high-water mark for Mr. Starr’s pursuit of Mr. Clinton. Mr. Tucker was the highest-ranking official convicted during the investigation, and his conviction was thought to be a promising sign for Mr. Starr’s efforts. It turned out not to be.
Before his conviction, Mr. Tucker had pursued the kind of moderate-conservative agenda that Southern Democrats of that era were obliged to follow, as the last of them made it to the governor’s office. Thirty years later, these states are almost exclusively in the hands of Republicans.
He cut spending in some state agencies, like the Arkansas parks and tourism department, and gave the savings to public schools. In 1994, he pushed through bills targeting juvenile criminal offenders, a particular concern of the state’s conservative electorate. He was unable, though, to persuade voters to approve a $3.5 billion highway bond construction proposal.
Earlier in his political career, Mr. Tucker had served two two-year terms as Arkansas attorney general, from 1973 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to succeed the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur D. Mills, who had been forced to retire in a scandal involving the stripper Fanne Fox. He served one term in Congress and became close to President Jimmy Carter.
James Guy Tucker Jr. was born on June 13, 1943, in Oklahoma City, one of three children of James Guy Tucker Sr., who ran the local Social Security office, and Willie Maude (White) Tucker. The family moved back to Arkansas, where his father had been state auditor, when he was a child, and he attended public high schools in Little Rock.
He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in government in 1964 and enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was soon discharged for health reasons, but he went to Vietnam anyway — to work as a freelance correspondent, mostly for the Arkansas press.
He received a law degree from the University of Arkansas in 1968 and became an associate with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, later itself caught up in the Whitewater investigation as the employer of Hillary Clinton.
As Mr. Tucker rose in Arkansas politics — he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1978, after his stint in the House, and for the governorship in 1982 — Mr. Clinton began to regard him as “his main competition as the rising star of state Democratic politics,” David Maraniss wrote in his 1995 biography of Mr. Clinton, “First in His Class.”
During his time out of office, Mr. Tucker practiced law and developed a successful cable television business, expanding it from Arkansas to other parts of the United States.
He was elected lieutenant governor in 1990. When Mr. Clinton, as governor, began his presidential campaign the next year, he was forced to cede power, reluctantly, to his old rival. After Mr. Clinton was elected in 1992 and resigned as governor, Mr. Tucker succeeded him. He was elected to a full term in 1994, only to resign two years later.
At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”
In addition to his daughter Anna, Mr. Tucker is survived by his wife, Betty Allen (Alworth) Tucker; another daughter, Sarah Allen Tucker; a stepson, Lance Alworth Jr.; a stepdaughter, Kelly Driscoll; a sister, Carol Tucker Foreman; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Mr. Tucker once recalled, in an interview, the pressure Mr. Starr’s prosecutors had brought on him in an effort to reach Mr. Clinton:
“What they wanted me to do was to remember a conversation that I heard between Bill Clinton and David Hale, which I simply never heard. There was no such thing. But they were trying to assure that they could get Bill Clinton. That’s what those prosecutions were about, and I was not helpful to them, because he did not do anything that they wanted me to testify to.”
Steve Barnes contributed reporting from Little Rock.
