RCK Member David Winstrom, Managing Executive Producer at WVLT News, introduced his colleague from WVLT Anchor and Multimedia Journalist Brittany Tarwater. Dave spoke glowingly about Ms. Tarwater’s capabilities as a journalist and compared her quite favorably to several well-known national television personalities with whom he has worked over the years.
Ms. Tarwater spoke about a documentary that she wrote and produced involving an important occurrence in Tennessee history in the late 1970’s. The documentary is entitled “A Tennessee Waltz: Ray Blanton’s Last Dance” and looks in depth into a pay for pardon scandal in then Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton’s office that ultimately led to Blanton being removed from office and Lamar Alexander being sworn in as Governor of Tennessee two days early. She began with a video of several minutes from the beginning of the documentary as an introduction to her remarks.
Two of the key figures in the dramatic January 1979 events were Lamar Alexander, a Republican and then Governor-elect of Tennessee, and Hal Hardin, a Democrat, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee at the time. Alexander was then 39 years old and Hardin was 38. Both are interviewed extensively by Ms. Tarwater in the documentary, apparently talking in some detail about what happened for the first time. Part of Ms. Tarwater’s reason for doing the documentary was that she felt that the occurrences at the end of the Blanton administration and thereafter had not been talked and written about enough over the years.
Earlier, some folks involved in the Blanton administration had gone to prison for misdeeds involving the pardoning of prisoners. But that round of misdeeds did not draw a lot of attention until word began to circulate that Blanton intended to pardon Roger Humphreys from upper East Tennessee. Humphreys had recently been convicted and sentenced for murdering his ex-wife and her new boyfriend. Shortly after Humphreys was sent to prison, Blanton had him put in a work release program that got him out of prison from time to time. That got the attention of the FBI and a television journalist in Nashville, Carol Marin. Both started looking into the pardons being issued by Governor Blanton and Marin began reporting on them.
On Monday, January 15, 1979, four days before Blanton was scheduled to leave office, he signed pardon papers for 52 more prisoners, 26 of whom had been convicted of some degree of homicide or murder, including Roger Humphreys. And when asked, Blanton said that he intended to pardon more before he left office.
U.S. Attorney Hardin was well-aware of the FBI investigation involving Blanton’s office and following the Monday evening pardons felt strongly that something had to be done to keep Blanton from freeing others before he left office. He contacted governor-elect Alexander and a small handful of prominent Democrats in state government. After considerable hurried research and deliberation, the group decided that they had the constitutional power to remove Blanton and install Alexander early. On the evening of January 17, Alexander was sworn in as the Governor of the State of Tennessee by Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court Joe Henry. Alexander’s wife, Honey, and Ned Ray McWherter, Democrat Speaker of the Tennessee Senate, and Democrat John Wilder, Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives and Lieutenant Governor, were there with Alexander. The group then called Governor Blanton and told him that he had been removed from office.
Later the evening of January 17, after Blanton had been removed, the FBI went to his office at the Capitol. One of the lead FBI agents involved in the investigation called U.S. Attorney Hardin to report to him that the FBI had found a stack of unsigned commutation forms on Blanton’s office desk and records indicating payment of money had been involved with some of them, confirming that Blanton did, indeed, intend to pardon several dozen more prisoners.
Ms. Tarwater remarked that she titled the documentary “A Tennessee Waltz” because a waltz requires the cooperation of two distinctly different parties, a man and a woman. Removing Blanton and installing Alexander early required cooperation from Democrats and Republicans, particularly noteworthy in this instance because the Governor’s office and both the Senate and House of Representatives in the General Assembly were controlled by Democrats at the time.
Ms. Tarwater noted that during his four years in office, Blanton issued 650 pardons. By comparison, Bill Haslam in eight years as Governor issued 45 pardons, and his predecessor Phil Bredesen in eight years issued only 27.
A most interesting presentation. On a personal note, your scribe has watched “A Tennessee Waltz: Ray Blanton’s Last Dance” two or three times. It is well-worth watching and is accessible on the WVLT website. (I was less than three years out of law school in January of 1979, practicing here in Knoxville, when these events took place.)