This month marks 30 years since Mike Huckabee became governor on what the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette described as "the most chaotic day in Arkansas' political history." Paul Greenberg, the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor, set the scene better than anyone.

"The evening before the inauguration, a thunderstorm had swept down the Arkansas River valley," Greenberg wrote in his July 16, 1996, column. "If you drove down Cantrell Hill in Little Rock, you could see it coming once you cleared the trees and reached the river bank. The thunderhead, a dark blue mass high above the river, looked vaguely like a mushroom drawn by a small child whose large-muscle coordination hadn't come in yet. The light was changing fast, and soon the view would be drained of pastels. The dark cloud suffused the horizon with blue.

"The grass turned a green green. 'He who wraps himself in light as with a garment,' as the prayer book says, was changing the scenery, the lighting, the sound. The other side of the river was covered by a light mist, and then Fort Roots and North Little Rock disappeared. Not even an antique Japanese painting could have captured the mixed sense of isolation, force and serenity as the world outside was washed clean. Soon enough, the rains had passed and all was back in place. Under the cliffs, the river was flowing, once more to the sea, the waters back in their boundaries."

On May 28, 1996, the day a federal jury convicted Gov. Jim Guy Tucker on two felony counts, I was still the Democrat-Gazette's political editor. I directed the newspaper's coverage of the day's events. Later that Tuesday, Tucker announced that he would resign as governor on or before July 15. In the weeks that followed, I accepted Lt. Gov. Huckabee's offer to join his staff in the governor's office as communications and policy director.

I flew to Little Rock on the Sunday night described by Greenberg, following a previously scheduled trip to Washington, D.C. The next day was my first day of work in the governor's office. I met Huckabee at daylight at what was then the Excelsior Hotel in downtown Little Rock. The first inaugural day event on the public schedule was a prayer service.

"Monday was to........

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