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 everything head on, and he was not bashful about that. He had quite a wit about
 him, but he could be sarcastic at times, too, against the people who tried to go
 against him. I guess he probably received more publicity than any governor that I
 can ever remember in Florida. I am sure he enjoyed some of that from a
 personal standpoint. I am sure he thought that being able to outwit them just a
 little bit with humor was part of his character. He was impassioned. Pulling jokes
 on anybody he thought he could get away with.

B: Do you feel there is a way that a Republican, practically speaking, could be
 genuinely for civil rights and still maintain true to his conservative beliefs in
 curtailing government involvement? Do you think there is a way to reconcile
 those?

H: I am not an historian in one sense from all these political ideals, but I would hate to
 think that Republicans could not deal with that in a proper way. That would be hard
 for me. We are all equal, and they deserve to get exactly what any of the rest of us
 get. There are ways to deal with those things. I am conservative, fiscally at least, but
 I feel strongly that every minority and every race in America should get equal
 schooling, equal rights of every kind. Women should be treated just like men in the
 workplace. If Republicans cannot understand all those things, they will suffer in the
 long run because we are such a diversified nation now, with so many different
 views. I mean, look at Miami and Elian [Gonzalez, Cuban refugee boy]. We got
 citizens in the community clashing with each other up and down the streets,
 shouting at each other. But that is democracy in action, as long as they keep it
 under control. But I think all the people have a right to the same treatment. I can
 understand watching the Elian case, the law is the law, and that is what this nation
 is based upon. It may not be popular, the decisions that the Justice Department and
 others made. I was not too happy about some of them myself, but the law is the law
 and that is what this country needs to abide by, and all the people and all the races.
 All the parties certainly need to abide by that, where everybody is treated right and
 equal. This stuff of ultraconservative and ultraliberal, sometimes I have a hard time
 following that. I have seen issues that all of a sudden, oh, that ultraliberal, I am not
 sure what that really means. To one person, that might mean he is really in the
 center, but it does not come out that way. I hate those kind of tags all the time,
 ultraliberal and ultraconservative. Really, I do not think that necessarily covers a lot
 of people. They get tagged with those kinds of things, but I do not think it is
 necessarily so.

B: What significance do you think the Manatee County situation has for Florida
 history?

H: Other than the fact that, after all these years, that if you took a vote, I think they
 would say Claude Kirk was right in the forced bussing, other than that, I do not think
 it means a whole lot. People forget. You could go do a poll in the rest of the state,
 and nobody would hardly ever remember Manatee County. They just move on past