As I have indicated, both in print and otherwise, I shared the high regard commanded in his constituency by the late Bill Morris, who died Friday at the age of 92.
In 1994, the Democratic primary race for Tennessee governor featured a spirited contest between Morris, then Shelby County’s mayor, and Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen.
I covered that race and saw it as an intriguing showdown.
It was no secret that a sibling rivalry, then as now, existed between the cities of Memphis and Nashville — between the onetime home base of Boss Ed Crump, whose strong hand had for decades dominated Tennessee politics in general and state Democratic politics in particular, and the centralized state capital, an increasingly upscale (and perhaps to Memphians, upstart) metropolis.
Ironically, Tennessee’s Democratic officials in 1994 — retiring Governor Ned Ray McWherter, House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, and Senate Speaker/Lt. Governor John Wilder — were all West Tennesseans.
But the Democratic ideological core, party structure, and financial center were all Nashville-based, and Morris, vis-à-vis every one of those particulars, hailed from elsewhere.
Whatever the reason, the state’s Democratic establishment had clearly convinced itself that the party’s best bet in the 1994 governor’s race (to oppose another Memphian, Republican Congressman Don Sundquist) was not Morris but Nashville Mayor Bredesen.
Not long after the primary race began in earnest, a bombshell hit. Morris was indicted on a state charge of misconduct for having allegedly enlisted county penal farm inmates to serve at a Morris fundraiser. Not to excuse the offense, if indeed it occurred, but that sort of thing was (a) not the most heinous possible transgression and (b) probably not an unaccustomed practice in local (or state) politics.
In any case, the charges were dropped weeks later, but the Morris campaign, when it resumed, never regained its lost momentum.
Years later, while I was in Nashville during a legislative session, I was approached by a former state official, who shall go nameless here, who began nervously — shakily, even — insisting to me (who had never even written a word about him) that, widespread rumors notwithstanding, he had not been the one who had sicced the TBI (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation) on Morris’ trail. The upshot was that I was convinced he had been — and for strictly political reasons.
During his period of enforced inactivity before he was cleared, I had suggested to Morris, whom I had always liked and admired, that he might consider resuming his race on the theme that his indictment had somehow been engineered expressly to sabotage his gubernatorial campaign. And that he, like any number of other ordinary Tennesseans, was at the mercy of the powers that be. There had indeed been rumors, and something like that was in fact what I (and others) suspected, years before I had the fateful conversation in Nashville.
I didn’t blame Bredesen, who had expressed his belief in Morris’ innocence, though there was no doubt that the aforesaid ex-official with the apparent guilty conscience had been partial to the Nashville mayor’s campaign.
In due course, Bredesen became the nominee but lost the governor’s race to Sundquist, in one of the first indications that the days of Democratic domination of state politics were numbered.
Eight years later, Bredesen tried again, won, and served two four-year terms. To this day, he is the last Democrat to have won a major statewide office.
Bill Morris had served with recognized distinction for many years both as sheriff and as county mayor, and he continued to be a civic beacon in his retirement. I have often tried to imagine how his, the state’s, and the Democratic Party’s future might have developed had his gubernatorial campaign not been so egregiously derailed.