Republican. Johnson then ran against incumbent J. William Fulbright in the 1968 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate but was again defeated, 132,038 (31.7%) to 220,684 (52.5%); a third candidate, Bobby K. Hayes, received the remaining 12.7%. Fulbright then defeated the Republican nominee, Charles T. Bernard, a farmer and businessman from Earle in Crittenden County in eastern Arkansas, who is believed to have drawn considerable support from Johnson's former primary voters. Johnson's then 40-year-old wife, Virginia, meanwhile, ran for the governorship in the same Democratic primary election, making her the first woman in Arkansas to run for governor. She lost the primary by a wide margin in a runoff with State Representative Marion H. Crank of rural Foreman in Little River County, who was in turn was narrowly defeated by Rockefeller in the general election. (Another candidate in the primary was former Arkansas Attorney General Bruce Bennett of El Dorado, who was first elected in 1956, the year that Johnson challenged Faubus. Bennett, at the time a segregationist, himself unsuccessfully opposed Faubus in the 1960 gubernatorial primary.) Johnson made three more bids for office, all unsuccessful. In 1976, he unsuccessfully challenged the re-election bid of Chief Justice Carleton Harris of the Arkansas Supreme Court, but lost with 44% of the vote. In 1980, expressing alarm that Pulaski County Circuit Judge Richard Adkisson, who Johnson considered too liberal, would succeed Harris as Chief Justice, Johnson mounted a petition drive to get on the ballot as an Independent, but fell short of the required signatures. Adkisson won the Democratic primary and was unopposed in the general election. After his son, Mark, was appointed to the cabinet of Governor Frank White (a Republican), Johnson hinted he would switch parties. In 1983 he did so and ran as the GOP nominee for Chief Justice in 1984, but lost by a 58-42% margin to Jack Holt, Jr., a nephew of Frank Holt, whom Johnson had defeated for the gubernatorial nomination in 1966. Later years The Johnsons resided in Conway until their deaths, three years apart. Virginia was Jim Johnson's legal secretary for his entire law career. She died of cancer in 2007, and Johnson himself was stricken with the same disease. (Their old intraparty rival, Faubus, also spent his last years in Conway.) In the 1980s, Jim and Virginia Johnson supported the re-election of Governor Frank D. White, Arkansas' second Republican governor since Reconstruction. White,