Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger said “I’ll be back,” Douglas MacArthur said “I shall return.” And he said it for real, not in a movie.
Recent hubbub over a state legislator who quoted Hitler at members of the opposing party — misquoted, actually — started us wondering about Arkansans who get quoted and misquoted. General MacArthur, who was born in Little Rock, has half a dozen entries in our old Bartlett’s. So does U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright. “We are handicapped by [foreign] policies based on old myths rather than current realities,” for example. That was pretty much it for Arkansans in the latest Bartlett’s we had access to, published in 1992. But we’ve learned that later editions of Bartlett’s quoted both Bill Clinton (from his 1993 inaugural address) and Hillary Clinton. They may be the only living Arkansans quoted in Bartlett’s. Hillary was an Arkansan only for a time, by marriage, but we still claim her.