Zell Miller once told Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who irked him in an interview during a convention, he wished we were in a time of duels. He yelled at me in a downtown Atlanta restaurant for a column I wrote. When a New Jersey reporter wanted to do a story on Georgia’s HOPE scholarships he refused to talk to him unless I came along. I love the cranky dude who died today at 86.
“I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel,” Miller said to Hardball’s Matthews on live TV. Matthews told him, “Let’s be friends,” which Miller ignored, but later said, “That was terrible. I embarrassed myself. I’d rather it had not happened.” Despite it all, he was a Southern gentleman.
History will be kind. Miller wanted to be remembered for giving Georgia schoolteachers a 6 percent salary increase for four consecutive years, appointing the first African-American woman to the Georgia Supreme Court, and HOPE, the scholarship program that sends Georgia kids to any state college or trade school they can get into tuition-free if they maintain a B average. More than 1.8 million students have gone to college in Georgia on HOPE Scholarships paid for with lottery funds, and more than 1.6 million four-year olds have begun their education through Georgia’s Pre-K Program.
A lifelong Democrat, the maverick from the red clay hills of North Georgia, could drive other politicians nuts. One of his opponents in 1990 was civil rights leader, former U.N. Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor, Andy Young.
“Zell Miller changed my life because he beat the daylights out of me,” Young said. They had a pact not to criticize each other in a Democratic primary. Miller kept his word. “He was praising me,” said Young, “and taking my voters and making them love him.”
He politely put Dan Quayle in his place:
“I know what Dan Quayle means when he says it’s best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can’t all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that’s why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.’s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy’s rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn’t have to die poor. And I made it because a man with whom I served in the Georgia Senate, a man named Jimmy Carter, brought honesty and decency and integrity to public service.”
President Jimmy Carter said, “Growing up in the hills of north Georgia gave Zell a straight-talking approach to politics that left no one in doubt of his views on any subject, and his U.S. Marine background also gave him a patriotic love of both his state and his nation.”
Once a year I had a shrimp boil with him and his wife Shirley. Sat around in their kitchen and peeled shrimp and drank beer. A son of the Appalachian mountains that also are my ancestral home turf, he was down to earth, logical and real while being educated in the classics — and so politically astute. He could talk to a grade school dropout as easily as a president. He had that gung ho spirit of the Marine he was. He was a walking baseball history book. He liked opera and would go to New York for a week of getting in as many Broadway shows as he could. What a life well live. So long, my friend.
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