Dale Bumpers was born in 1925 in Charleston, Arkansas, served in the Marine Corps in World War II, and earned a law degree at Northwestern, becoming an admirer of Adlai Stevenson. In 1949 his parents died five days apart after a car accident. Back home as city attorney, he advised the school board after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to comply immediately, making Charleston the first district in the 11 former Confederate states to fully integrate its public schools. With only a failed 1962 state House bid behind him, he entered the 1970 governor’s race, beat Orval Faubus in a primary runoff, and unseated Winthrop Rockefeller.

As governor from 1971 to 1975 he condensed 60 agencies into 13 cabinet departments, raised the top income tax rate to fund schools and teacher pay, and created state kindergartens and free high school textbooks, though legislators rejected the Equal Rights Amendment and a wilderness purchase. In 1974 he defeated J. William Fulbright for the Senate, where he chaired the Small Business Committee and refused to support any constitutional amendment. He survived William Clark’s 1980 challenge, turned down pressure to run for president in 1984 and 1988, and retired in 1999.

• Clark attacked his votes on the Panama Canal treaties and had once handed out candy bars bearing his own name.
• A key 1978 vote that killed a labor law reform bill angered organized labor.
• In his closing argument at Bill Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial he said the case was about private failings, not a crime against the state.
• He asked the senators to let the American people get a good night’s sleep.
• The NIH Vaccine Research Center is named for him and his wife Betty, and a 1970s Jeffrey Archer novel made a fictional Bumpers vice president.