James Guy Tucker Jr. (June 13, 1943 – February 13, 2025) was an American politician, businessman, and attorney who served as the 43rd governor of Arkansas from 1992 until his resignation in 1996 after his conviction for fraud during the Whitewater affair.

[3] He had his first taste of politics when he ran for and was elected vice-president of Key Club International (the largest and oldest high school service organization in the United States).

In early 1965, Tucker found passage to southeast Asia by tramp steamer from San Francisco and entered South Vietnam as an accredited freelance war correspondent.

He won convictions in several cases considered by local observers as "impossible" successfully to prosecute, including one kidnapping.

Twelve "guest" judges were temporarily reassigned from other circuits by the state supreme court at Tucker's request to clear the docket.

However, the following year, a federal grand jury, building on Tucker's work, issued a scathing report which led to a shake-up of the department, and the resignation of the chief, senior detectives and complicit city officials.

He easily defeated the Republican nominee Edwin Bethune, then of Searcy in White County, and later Tucker's successor as the U.S. Representative from Arkansas's 2nd congressional district which is Little Rock–based.

Tucker also began intervening in utility rate cases before the Arkansas Public Service Commission and fought to require "scrubbers" on a large coal-fired generation plant.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Tucker the chairman of the White House Conference on Families, in which capacity he served until the end of the administration in January 1981.

[6] Tucker called a special session of the General Assembly that same week to solve a financial crisis for the state's Medicaid system.

At his urging, the legislature adopted a soft drink tax, proceeds of which were placed in a trust account for Medicaid matching purposes.

[9] Beginning in the early 1980s, while practicing law, Tucker and his wife Betty began building cable television and pay per view systems in Central Arkansas, and later in the Dallas–Fort Worth corridor north of DFW Airport and in southern Florida.

Tucker traveled to Indonesia in January 1999 and with the Riady family created a new company called Kabelvision, and built and expanded systems in greater Jakarta ('Jabotabek'), in Surabaya, and in Bali.

[10] Beginning during his college years at Harvard, Tucker suffered from an autoimmune disease, later diagnosed as Primary sclerosing cholangitis.

[11] Tucker began hospice care in January 2025, and died at a Little Rock hospital from complications of ulcerative colitis on February 13, 2025, at the age of 81.