Agenda for Reform

About

When transplanted New Yorker Winthrop Rockefeller, grandson of John P., announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor of Arkansas in 1964, it signaled the beginning of the watershed era of Arkansas politics in the twentieth century. Rockefeller didn’t win in 1964, but when six term Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would not seek another term in 1966, Rockefeller ran again, was tumultuous political and social change in Arkansas.

In Agenda for Reform: Winthrop Rockefeller as Governor of Arkansas, 1967-71, Cathy Kunzinger Urwin examines Rockefeller’s tenure in the governor’s office, looking beyond his immediate successes and fsailur4es to the broader, dramatic changes in political attitudes and perceptions that marked the Rockefeller era. In his two short terms as governor, Rockefeller managed to use his name and his money to break up political machines that had controlled Arkansas politics for almost one hundred years, to make significant and lasting contributions in the areas of prison reform and civil rights, and to all but single-handedly oblige he Democratic party in Arkansas to find in Dale Bumpers a young, bright, attractive, progressive gubernatorial candidate to oppose him in 1970.

Agenda for Reform is an illuminating look at the quiet man, his tenure as governor of his adopted state, and the lasting changes that he brought about in Arkansas’s government and politics.

Author

Cathy Kunzinger Urwin received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. An adjunct instructor of history at the University of Central Arkansas, Urwin lives in Conway, Arkansas, with her husband Gregory, and their son.

Praise

“Winthrop Rockefeller’s governorship blurred traditional party distinctions, and with his inauguration came a new era in Arkansas politics. Ironically, as Cathy Kunzinger Urwin documents, it was the Democratic party which benefited most from Rockefeller’s Republican administration. Agenda for Reform is a thoughtful examination of his paradoxical period in the state’s history, and Urwin’s mastery of her subject asserts itself in this enlightening and highly readable work.”
—Governor Bill Clinton

“Cathy Urwin writes about the achievements and failures of this most influential Arkansas governor with an impressive combination of careful scholarship and political sensitivity.”
—Diane Blair