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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0140, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford assesses the progressivism of North Carolina politics, arguing that though North Carolinians as a whole are not solidly progressive, they do tend to embrace progressive ideas. Sanford points to Chapel Hill as the beacon of North Carolina politics, where progressivism dominated the political discourse. He also discusses the potency of race in political campaigns, highlighting the 1950 Frank Graham-Willis Smith Senate race and his 1960 gubernatorial campaign against I. Beverly Lake. Sanford contends that racially charged campaigns often determined the direction and fate of politicians' careers. His work with established Democratic Party organizations taught him important lessons on how to divert the public's attention from racial matters to other campaign issues.
Sanford explains that North Carolina did not support machine politics, although the state was dominated by the Democratic Party for nearly a century. Bert Bennett's integral role as political campaigner helped ensure Democratic rule over the state. However, as the Republican Party began to challenge the Democratic Party, North Carolina's one-party system was abandoned. Sanford asserts that the realignment of political parties was able to occur because unfavorable public memories about Republicans faded and internal fighting among Democrats increased. With his 1972 presidential bid, Sanford realized that Republican use of conservative political ideology and rhetoric heavily influenced the future of North Carolina politics. Sanford contends that southern distinctiveness no longer divides the nation, as ideology replaced race as important campaign issues in the 1970s. Sanford finishes the interview by emphasizing the importance of ethics and credibility in political campaigns. He discusses how the increased use of television ads changes campaign strategies and how they impact the ethics of politicians.
Terry Sanford recalls his political career as a Democratic governor of North Carolina. He discusses the impact of race on southern politics and the realignment of political parties in the late twentieth century. Sanford attempts to reject the image of southern exceptionalism.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Governor, I want to read you a quote from V. O. Key about North Carolina. You've been active in North Carolina politics ever since Key wrote his book. And in there he said that "It has been the vogue to be progressive. Willingness to accept new ideas, sense of community responsibility toward the Negro, feeling of common purpose, and relative prosperity have given North Carolina a more sophisticated politics than exists in most southern states. The spirit of the state has not tolerated strident demagoguery. The spirit that has not feared to face community needs, and to levy taxes to meet them, has had no place for a Huey Long. The spirit that recognizes a responsibility to citizens who long were unable to participate in their government does not tolerate a Talmadge. The spirit that is unchained to a social and economic hierarchy of great tradition and authority has no place for a Byrd machine."
And my question is, does the 1956 defeat of Congressmen Chatham and Deane for failing to sign a Southern Manifesto, the rise of Dr. Lake to a position of some influence in deciding gubernatorial elections, the victory last year . . .
I think V. O. Key was . . .
. . . the victory last year of Senator Helms . . .
Well, I wouldn't put Helms in . . .
. . . of Governor Wallace . . .
Yes, but you'd have to take Helms out of that category.
And my real question is, was there a misreading of Key in
I don't think that he misread it at the time, and I don't think that that would be too far off right now. What you've got to remember, I'm sure Key was aware that North Carolina wasn't all one way, any more than Virginia was all one way for Byrd. Though at many times it looked like Virginia was. Many times we were just a few percentage points of going in that direction, if you'll look back at the turn of the century particularly. And it was just by luck that Aycock, who ran as a white supremist, and did certain things to make the party white supremist, nevertheless turned around and became a very liberal education governor, advocating the education of the blacks. Now, he could have taken a shorter range view. Had he taken a shorter range view he probably would have ended up in the United States Senate. He was trying, anyhow, when he died, but he wouldn't have been elected, most historians think. We've always had some Alabama and South Carolina and Virginia here, just as they've always had some North Carolina there, if you can use those terms in that way. We've just been luckier, because our slight majority fell on one side, whereas their majority fell on the other. And I take it that the other majority somehow feeds on itself, and the more you get, the more you get. The more popular it becomes. And then I think that's probably what happened here.
The first straight-out racist campaign that I remember was the 1950
election. The first election I remember in detail where I watched it,
took part in it, observed it, from a statewide point of view, although I
was in high school, was the 1936 campaign, which had all seeds for this
kind of campaign, and yet none of them sprouted. You had Hoey, the
conservative old hypocrite, that was the representative of the
manufacturing forces. If there was an establishment, it wasn't much of
an establishment in
Then Frank Graham was appointed, and that was the turning point, just as
it had been the turning point in the thirties to help Key write this. I
think you'd have to . . . I think you'll find that the influence of
Frank Graham and the University of North Carolina had a whole lot to do
with shaping the leadership of North Carolina. Now, not many people
would admit that, and not many, maybe, would observe it. But I think
it's true. You can just look at the leadership . . . you can look at the
legislative leadership, you can look at the governors. It was the
University of North Carolina and the Edward Keter Graham tradition
which
Now, Frank Graham was named to the Senate, and it scared a lot of people,
a lot of his friends. Now, how are we going to win? Well, interestingly
enough, the Tom Pearsalls, the Battles, the Coxes in Asheville, just
look around the state . . . all the substantial people that had been
leaders in the legislature and leaders in politics supported Frank
Graham. And he got 49.2% or 48.7 or something like that. And the spoiler
was Robert Reynolds. So into the second primary they went, Willis Smith,
virtual unknown . . . president of the American Bar Association, but
that doesn't cut much ice in eastern North Carolina . . . legislator two
or three terms. Kerr Scott had appointed him to some kind of state
committee. He was more on Kerr Scott's side than the old establishment
side. But they talked him into running against Frank Graham. At that
time he was chairman of the board of Duke, incidentally. In his first
speech, he talked about the socialist/communist influence. I think he
made the speech in Elizabeth City. And talked about the Anglo-Saxon
heritage. Well, that's . . . you know, if you were a little bit worried
anyhow, both of those rather innocuous phrases would cause you to wonder
and worry slightly as to just what he's up to . . . But he wasn't up
to
In the second primary, just all the fury and the hatred broke loose.
Jesse Helms now disclaims any part in that, but he and a young lawyer
named Daniel, or Daniels, from Wake County . . . I don't know what
ever's happened to him . . . led the way of making this the race issue.
Then it got to the nastiest campaign we'd ever had. That was the same
time Nixon was running against Helen Gahagan Douglas and Senator
McCarthy's man was running against Willard Tydings . . . forgotten that
man's name. Those three campaigns were just the ugliest in the whole
nation. And that was when people said, "You know, this race issue is
powerful medicine." And it did win. It had just swept this state like a
prairie fire. If I had the energy and the time and the . . . a little
bit of resources to do it, I would have done something like you're doing
around the state now, just to pick it up while it was still fresh.
Because I think today that it's unbelievable that passions ran so hot,
and it's . . . it was the . . . it was the lesson to those who would
heed it, that the race issue is a terrible weapon and can be used with
overwhelming effectiveness. Simply because there was no reason for
Willis Smith to beat Frank Graham. I happen to say and think that Willis
Smith was hardly involved in it. That it swept him up just as it swept
up everybody else. I always thought he was a very decent kind of a
person, but still the people around him saw this as winning more votes
and support every day, and building up a bitterness against the
opposition. And they used it and played it and threw more fuel on the
fire, until actually, it really consumed the state, in that
Well, Willis Smith died. I always thought there had something to do with it, that he himself was bothered and hurt by the fact that . . . he had been the victim also of this kind of campaign. Now, I could be wrong, but I simply don't think he sat down there and plotted that out and thought it out and saw what was happening, here, under the pressures of the second primary. He was caught up in it. I think that's . . . he was quite different from Beverly Lake, for example, who deliberately plotted his course. Beverly Lake, parenthetically, supported Frank Graham in that election with, among other things, a radio speech. So Frank Graham never got back in to my election, though I was considered a closer associate. The reason he did, he was mad with Willis Smith, because Willis Smith had blackballed him for membership in the American Bar Association. And he blackballed him in the American Bar Association because he . . . just . . . he thought he had done something dishonest in a law case that they had been involved in. It involved a mill in Wake Forest. I know nothing about the details except that Beverly Lake despised Willis Smith, and Willis Smith had him be . . . blackballed him. And so he took Frank Graham out of the 1960 election by making that radio speech. Now, so . . . 1950 was the turning point in what he said. This is where we swept over to the over side and the . . . if I may call them this . . . the baser elements won.
Can I interrupt for just a minute with a question? Did that come as a great surprise to people like you, who had supported Graham, that there was this much force involved in the race issue? That the politics of fear, in a sense, which was at that time relatively new, that that was a great factor that had come . . . ?
I was president of the Young Democrats and I'd gotten more
Do you recall some of those good points?
Well, I think basically . . . well, I had written a lot of statements
that could be used to justify being fair to people in an aggressive
No, thank you.
And I think it was. I think in a way, it was the first time, in the South, where an all-out racist attack from a reasonably popular candidate was defeated. With a counter-campaign. In the sense, the reconstruction.
You think that occurred in 1960?
I think we turned back from what we had done. I think we turned back the GOP statement of position in '60 from what we had turned in '50, though I think we were turning in the meantime.
Now, you were bringing us up from '50 on to '60 when I asked you that question.
Well, there was only one election in that period, oddly enough, and that
was the '54 election. There was, of course, the '52 election for
governor, but that was run between Umstead, who was just a totally
decent person, and Judge Olive, who was just as decent. And they ran it
on other issues. The race issue, to my knowledge, never entered that
campaign. I doubt if it entered in much other than the local level. In
the first place, neither man was vulnerable to that kind of an attack,
and they did as they've done in the past. They just
Then the next campaign, that our workers called the third primary—meaning Frank Graham had two primaries and this was the third one—was Kerr Scott's campaign for that seat, Mr. Willis Smith having died. Alton Lennon, having been appointed in what I judged to be a very clever move on Umstead's part. He picked a totally unknown person, more unknown than Tom Eagleton or Agnew, for that matter. Just totally unknown. He'd been an obscure state senator from Wilmington. He picked him so that the campaign would be Umstead versus Scott, which was not a bad move on his part. And it was almost successful. People were not voting for Lennon. They were voting for Governor Umstead, or Governor Scott. At that time, you've got to remember, Governor Scott was run out of office, fairly unpopular. At any rate, we got supporters that had never been supporters. I was the state campaign manager, which I think you know. We had supporters that had never been supporters. We got the Battles and the Winslows and the Coxes and the Frank Graham people. We got the Jaycees and the young American Legionnaires, primarily because of my own participation in drawing some of their leaders in. We got his own Branchhead Boys, who, in a way, were most likely to be appealed to by the Willis Smith type campaign.
The race issue stayed fairly well out of it, until the 1954 . . . the Brown decision. Was it the Brown
decision or the St. Louis . . . at any event, you can correct your
manuscript to make it the right one. It came right at the beginning of
the . . . oh, a few weeks before the election. We had a Byrd candidate
in there that was running as kind of an advanced Jesse Helms. He was
against everything. He was against the Post Office. He had a whole lot
more sense than most people thought. He was against the Post Office
being
And then they must have been concerned that if they could turn the
working man and the rural man—Scott's Branchhead
Boys—in part, that they could finally overwhelm Scott. And so
they decided . . . and I don't know who "they" were . . . but they
decided on a racist appeal. And I had been worried about it, and I had
Ben Roney, who is an extremely knowledgable person about eastern North
Carolina, about politics . . . we had everybody alerted, we had a
network all through the east, to immediately inform us if any . . . when
the race issue came, because we were expecting it, especially after that
Supreme Court decision. An ad appeared about Tuesday of the last week in
a Winston-Salem paper, with a picture of a black man that Kerr Scott had
named to the state Board of Education. Of course, it was very fine.
Signed by the Citizens for something or the other, thanking him for
putting a black man on the Board of Education. Our great governor, who
did this. Well, that was phony as it could be, and you knew it when you
saw it, but you didn't quite know what it meant. And we weren't the
least bit worried about Winston-Salem. And furthermore, with the
tremendous black vote in Winston-Salem, that would have been about
But then Thursday, we got a telephone call that the state purchasing agent had left a package in Charley Cohoun's service station in Columbia, North Carolina. And that it contained a reprint of this advertisement, and said it was a reprint of the advertisement in the Winston-Salem paper. And a great big package of leaflets. Well, we had them brought immediately to Raleigh. They were illegal, they weren't signed. And I got a friend of mine who is very skillful, a politician. Still is, but then he was much active. It's Leslie Atkins from Durham. Then, was the one person that knew mostly about the black leadership and the labor leadership in the state, and he'd been very helpful in several ways. He sent me a labor man, who I sent down to see Abie Upchurch, to get some leaflets to be distributed in Durham. Abie gave him a card, that he had wrote in his handwriting, to where to go get the . . . the print shop where he could go get them. He said, "Put these out on the porches of mill houses and the mailboxes of rural homes, and that's where we think they'll be most effective." This, now, would be coming up on to Friday, you see, and the election's Saturday.
So we had the greatest fun of any campaign I've ever been in, and it's
probably more detailed than you want, but it's fairly well outlined in
the papers. It was a terrific story, of course, for Friday morning
before the election, that we had caught them red-handed with this kind
of a thing. And we just made the most of it. We had . . . of course, we
took a picture of the leaflet, we reprinted what the leaflet said, and
just by a stroke of pure luck, we found out who was behind it.
So the race issue was tried, and failed, in '54. And furthermore, it
outraged so many people. We wired every Lennon manager and threatened
him with prosecution if he distributed them. And Lennon managers, on
Friday and Saturday, were making statements like, "I had nothing to do
with this." And they were saying locally they had nothing to do with it,
and where they did distribute them, we used a plane to drop our
counter-leaflets, becauseNews and Observer, this was
election day, had a headline, "F.B.I. Investigating Lennon Campaign
Headquarters." And they were, or should have been. They should have
prosecuted. We could not get the Justice Department, even with Kerr
Scott senator, to prosecute, though there were four or five obvious
violations. But I didn't really care about that, except I thought it
would teach people a lesson for the future if we could have prosecuted.
You know, we didn't want any retribution, but I thought it was good to
steady the pattern. This stuff would not be tolerated. Then there was no
more campaign. Umstead got into office in '56 without a substantial
campaign. I expect he had some nominal opposition, but no real
opposition. So the next campaign was '60.
But did race ever enter into a statewide contest since then, up until 1972?
Yes. Obviously it did with Lake running in
'72.
Yeah. Well, in '64 it was an issue for two reasons. Garvey was supporting
Moore and violently, publicly opposing the Open Accommodations Act. I
was trying to get around that issue by saying that other states may need
it, but North Carolina didn't. We were getting on with our business,
which was substantially true. The Chapel Hill thing, which John Ehle
wrote his book The Free Men about, was erupting, and
while they thought they were helping the cause, they of course were
destroying the cause. Because they elected Dan Moore and defeated . . .
or they contributed to the defeat . . . of Richardson Preyer. So it had
all the carryover. The resentment against me for
What was that, now? I'm just not familiar with that.
Oh, street demonstrations. They had . . .
Where was this?
Chapel Hill, of all places. They had three places. Brady's and some other drugstore downtown that hadn't integrated. Just three. And they put on the wildest, meanest, most damaging demonstration we had during my administration. Because everywhere else, it was possible to contain it. And there I . . . well, I virtually did, but in the meantime they got . . . they arrested all of them. I finally had to pardon a professor over here who'd been sentenced to jail from the Divinity School for demonstrating, and a bunch of students who have got to be so involved. But it was right in the middle of the last two months of the campaign. Couldn't . . . you know, if they had set out to figure something out as Nixon did, say, in Charlotte, they couldn't have gotten anything more damaging than that. Ehle wrote a book about it, and how we attempted to ride out the storm.
So it was a factor four years later, and the difference being, the racist
didn't win. The moderate won. Who, I've always thought, is a very decent
man. But he won because Lake was pulling votes on this issue. In fact,
if Lake had come in number two, I'm satisfied we would have beat him in
the runoff. But
How do you explain '72? Wasn't race an issue in at least one election and possibly two elections in '72?
Before you get to '72, the effect of race can be shown as steadily
increasing the
Well, if you will pardon my saying so, Gardiner had a hell of a lot
weaker opponent than Lake had, for one thing. I'm talking about
Right.
Because we never really bothered, prior to 1960, with what would happen in the general election. We were bothered in '60 because of the race issue and because of the Catholicism, which . . . and with the background of having voted for Al Smith in '28.
What's the context of the primaries, because essentially these are all intraparty plays. You really don't have any interparty plays until just recently.
So, for the moment, I would exclude Gardiner as being kind of a festering boil on the political skin here. He's gone, I hope. The truth of the matter is, Gardiner's not a mean, vicious person. But Gardiner, in my judgment, simply didn't have enough background to have any strong political principles, so Gardiner would do whatever it took to win. You know, then, it became the most important thing. I think, in a complimentary way, that Gardiner was a lot like Nixon. Winning became the central goal of political activity. He did use that issue to some extent, and he used it, I think, effectively. But again, he didn't win. You know, this . . . I've said, it's always been a narrow margin, and he did not win. Well, let's look at what else happened in '68 . . . why don't we leave this dirty table and go downstairs and talk, if you'll . . .
Well, I'm contending, except for a few bad years, that we still justify
Key's early appraisal. We were on '72, and we also skipped over the
Southern Manifesto, which had its
No, let's stay within the primaries first. I didn't detect any racial problems in the gubernatorial contest, but in the presidential, wasn't that a principal factor?
I think we ought to even skip the presidential, because North Carolina certainly was no more than part of the rest of the country.
All right. I don't think that proved anything. I regretted that I let the issue be drawn in a way that added to the evidence that North Carolina is that kind of state. But more than just that, there were some other factors that I think if you wanted to look at them, would have to be taken into consideration. One is that I myself made a couple of misjudgments that contributed to it. I concluded, and I think your polls would show that, if you touched on the issue, that in the beginning, he would have gotten about a third of the votes, Wallace. Well, I figured that I could live with that. I figured that that's what he'd get, because that's what's voted for Lake on this issue in the past. But I did . . .
There were three things that changed that picture, and we're talking
about percentages that voted, not percentages of North Carolina, anyhow.
And that's . . . if you'll look at the returns, a distinction in this
case. First of all, I assumed that Scott would come immediately and
support me. I figured he owed it to me. I figured that it made a lot of
sense for me to do this under the circumstances, and I figured he'd have
sense enough to see it. But . . . he may have had sense enough to see
it, but he was too stubborn to change. And I don't know that I quarrel
with him. As he said to me, "But you didn't tell me you were going to
run." Well, obviously I didn't, because I didn't know I was going to
run. But it wasNews
and Observer editorialized, simply trying to spoil a sure
thing, that Muskie had it sewed up, that we had gained harmony in the
party, and I was just a spoilsport. Well, that destroyed my credibility
in a great many places. "What is he after?" even my friends were saying.
Now, the other thing that I didn't count on, people had been associated
with me and I felt they were and still are very loyal to me, that I
thought would just spring forth to this campaign in a joyous way, were
all tied up with . . . Skipper had supported me, Hunt had supported me,
Taylor had supported me, Sowers had supported me, Margaret Harper had
supported me . . . who else is running for governor? Hawkins had
supported me. In any event, there was Wilbur Hobby, but that
What about . . .
There was no racial issue in the primary. The nearest thing
So, in the twenty-five years since Key wrote his book, there've been basically no racial politics except that one example you cited . . . ?
Right. '50 and '60.
'50 and '60?
Well, of course, Lake's campaign was really more vicious than Smith, because it was more deliberate and started earlier. And he had more going for him, of course. By that time we were beginning to feel the . . . we were having the sit-in demonstrations at the lunch counters during the campaign.
When you look back over that twenty-five years, can you characterize it in any way in terms of what happened politically in the state? When you move to this state, the first thing you hear about is the Sanford machine. Everybody that I've ever talked to about politics has been somehow involved in your campaign. And the notion in '72 that I've come across continually is that somewhere all in North Carolina there are these people involved since 1959 with you, and that you can just call a spring to action, at almost any time. It's like a Kennedy.
But you saw the difficulty I had. I think I could have. I think if I had
started that campaign before Christmas, it would have been a different
story. But if I'd started it before Christmas, it wouldn't have been the
true story, because obviously I started at the last minute, after the
trustees said, "Go ahead and do it." Which I would not have predicted
they would have said, and I wasn't even thinking about resigning to run.
I took it as a tremendous compliment that students initiated it, and I
thought it'd be good to say to the trustees, "Look what the students
think of one university president." You know, obviously, that wasn't
going to hurt me in the setting that I was operating in. I had . . . did
not anticipate, until a few days ahead of time, until Charlie Ryan
called me, that they would overwhelmingly insist that I run. Well, that
was just so late, and I still had a month's obligation that I couldn't
get out of, you know, that I had to ride on out. I made the mistake of
saying I'd campaign on the weekend, and that further damaged my
credibility. But the more important point, I would not take credit for
this, but
On the Helms thing, you say Helms didn't really use race as an issue, but when he was speaking of himself as being a conservative, wasn't that sort of perceived as a code word? Wasn't his position sort of . . .
No, I don't think that was. I think there was a . . .
. . . on race?
Well, I think there was a code word in that campaign, but it was busing.
But he was using . . .
The code word was busing.
Yeah.
That was . . .
That wasn't . . . wasn't that pretty much then, he was using race?
It was in such an indistinct way that you could hardly attribute his victory to that. I don't think he stirred anybody up that Galifianakis was going to do . . . integrate the nation. I just don't think it was an issue. Obviously . . .
Then to what do you attribute Helms' victory?
To the fact that more people in this state are conservative than are not,
and you've got to let the conservatives see that what you're talking
about is good for the state. And Helms was known by his listeners, who
were for him anyhow. The people that were not for him long ago quit
listening, very often. He wasn't that appealing and attractive. In fact,
I never listened to a Helms broadcast but once, and that was by his
special request. Supposed to be complimentary. I just have made a thing
of not listening to Helms, and enjoyed the joke very much with Mr.
Fletcher and him. Whole lot of people didn't listen to him. People in
Charlotte, you know, have
Well, if that's the case, do you see that continuing in the next, say, . . . throughout the '70s?
Well, I hope those that vote that way will move that way. I don't mean
all of them, because there's a great body of independents. Let's take
those on down. Take yourself some cream.
No, thank you.
Well, do neither one of you have a match?
I might have a match. I'm not sure. Let's see if I can get it.
Are there any other things we should look for in the last twenty-five years in North Carolina politics? And obviously the impact of the people you had in the administration and the campaign have been great. As you say, in '72 just about everybody running against each other was a part of your administration.
Or part of my campaign.
Or your campaign, yes.
And from my point of view, of course, that's a good thing. I think during that period of time, too, the Republican Party has been gaining. I don't know that I agree with what you are reported to have said, that that's the dominant party, but . . .
I didn't say that.
Well, good, because I don't agree with it. I think the Democratic Party
is still dominant. But I think there's been a very wholesome transfer of
party registration. I said the other day somewhere that I thought that
the two-party system was a wholesome development. And a couple of
Democrats challenged me and I said, "How can you be against the flag,
motherhood, and the two-party system?" The only thing we don't want to
allow, is we don't want to allow the other party to win very often. But
it obviously is wholesome from two points of view. From the broad,
objective point of view, the two parties contending with one another
will give us a better government. From the more narrow point of view in
North Carolina, it more clearly draws
There wasn't any Democratic party except in times of those organizations
coming together down to election time. In '60, Mr. Broughton had died,
Mr. Umstead had died, Mr. Scott had died, Governor Hodges didn't have
any organization. And we were operating without the usual structures
that made a political organization in this state, our one-party system.
And so the time was right for somebody to put together a new coalition
of people, and that fell to me because I came along at that time. And
that's what we see today. Not with any intense loyalty to Sanford, but
people that have more or less coalesced around the concept of the kind
of politics we worked at. And I take no particular credit for that,
except that I happened to be here at the time. Nor do I think all the
loyalty runs to me, because it was proved
But is there an organization other than just personal contact and informal contact?
The enduring thing about the machine, if that's the word you want to use,
is that we never really set out to have one, that we never based it on
what they could get out of it. And we never based it on the fact that we
had to win all the elections. And we might have solidified that
organization by the Richardson Preyer defeat. A little side note, that
carried over, as you know. All these candidates didn't
What is Bennett's role in North Carolina politics?
He's now . . . the reason for Hunt being lieutenant governor, and he's the reason for Hunt being a formidable candidate for governor.
Well, as for Bennett.
Well, I must say that he and I . . . he doesn't take orders from me and I don't attempt to give him orders or instructions. And we stay fairly well in touch with one another. But that's the size of it. We never conspire to do anything, and I didn't necessarily agree that he should put all the emphasis on Hunt. I simply agreed that he could if he wanted to.
Well, after campaigns are over and
A very tremendous role in my campaign . . . in my administration,
He was chairman for the first half of my administration, and then continued a very active role afterwards. He never wanted anything. He toyed with the idea of running for governor in '64, and in hindsight should have. I doubt . . . I think he fell out with Scott totally. I talked him into supporting Scott finally.
This was in '64?
Yeah.
Lieutenant governor's race, or in '68?
Well, in '64 . . . I don't know who pulled the string. Bennett did not .
. . was not particularly fond of Scott. Didn't want him to run. Scott
wanted to run for governor then, and, again, would have done better than
Preyer, because of his name. But he was so inexperienced. I remember
finally . . . and, of course, I kept putting my foot down on that
thought, of Scott running for governor in '64. I think it would have
been very bad. It would have been bad for him, even if he won. But I did
agree that he ought to run for lieutenant governor. I told Roney he was
working for me, that . . . and they was mostly concerned with Scott . .
. that it would be all right with me for him to run. Now, that they
would have run anyhow I don't know. Bennett didn't take part in that
particularly, and then he didn't want to support him four years later. I
think he might have supported Skipper at that time, because Skipper
could have won. But I didn't think Skipper could win in '68,
Can we talk a little bit about the '74 election? The . . .
. . . the noise level . . .
I guess we'll be able to decipher it out.
All we've got to do is move over here. Put it over on this coat.
Can I move this chair over here?
Yeah. We had a party in here the other night, three hundred surgical wives, the night before last, and they probably got hot in here and opened that up.
The piece I
But you had, in '72, in the primaries, the favored
candidates—so-called establishment candidates like Taylor,
Senator Jordan, even in the Republican Party for governor—
Well, I think it's good that the parties are competitive, and I think that would be as good a place to mark that turn as anywhere else, though obviously it's been developing. Outside that we almost had a two-party system when people grew old enough and there were enough young people that they couldn't remember secondhand tales of Sherman coming through the South. They had to be thirdhand tales, and Hoover carried the state. There were some other factors, but at least it was respectable to be a Republican for the first time. And then Hoover fixed it so as long as anybody could remember the Depression we wouldn't have a two-party system, and as they grew too old to . . . for enough people to remember that, they began to bring on the rise of the Republican Party. And that began in '60, really. Nixon got fifty-nine-plus percent of the vote, Gavin got forty-five percent of the vote. And it certainly has reached that point of fruition now that Holshouser and Helms being elected. And we'll continue to see it, so it's a very significant if not traumatic year.
What about within the parties themselves?
Of course, I don't think . . . I'm not sure that I agree entirely with
the upset theory, you know, because I don't think that was as big an
issue as you might think, and you might be able to demonstrate. From
The most party people with him?
The most party regulars. This would be hard to prove, and I just was
running through my mind a half or dozen or so counties as you said that.
I would say he had as many, and possibly more, but he got the . . . he
did . . . y'all got across the impression that the courthouse gang, of
which there is none, was with Taylor. And Taylor gave that impression
more, by his manner of speaking and everything else. But I don't think
you could really say it was the kind of establishment upset that
occurred in this state in '48, when Scott beat the man that was so
certain of election that he'd already ordered the new Cadillac with
special hubcaps. Who, incidentally, became one of my very strong
supporters, and that's another story. Scott upset the establishment,
tore it all to pieces, and it's never been the same since. Hodges was
not of the establishment. Hodges was despised by Umstead, who was the
last of the establishment governors. Literally despised. The only person
he despised worse, probably, was Scott. Then Hodges didn't have to take
sides, because he walked into the office. By the time I ran, the
establishment was John Larkins, who got a hundred thousand votes, or
fifteen percent. Seawell, who was Hodges' candidate, got fifteen
percent, or a hundred thousand votes. And the race was between the Scott
man, in a sense me, and a totally unrelated person, Dr. Lake, who got
twenty-eight or nine percent of the vote, almost twice as much as the
regulars. And if you'd put the two regulars together—
Was the '72 election a fluke?
No, I don't think it was a fluke, but I think there were two fairly equal
people running on fairly equal grounds with fairly equal backgrounds.
And I don't think, in truth, it was the overturning of the old order or
the establishment by any means. You've got Dick Phillips, a strong
Taylor supporter, who was just one of the strongest Frank Graham/Kerr
Scott/Sanford supporters in the state. You had Luther Hodges Jr., who
was in the same category from college days. He was more for me than he
was for his father, politically speaking. I mean, he was more . . .
that's not a fair statement, and I wouldn't want to read that in cold
print, but he was more attuned to my politics than
To what extent did these interparty fights in the Democratic primaries have an effect in the Republican victory in November?
You mentioned one other '72 primary, those two and . . . ?
Well, you had Jordan against Galifianakis . . .
Yeah, I've explained that once.
Taylor and Bowles, and then within the Republican Party there was Holshouser . . .
Yes. But the truth of the matter, and that doesn't really count, because
we aren't talking about long-standing establishments when
I think the party, in any state, has to get together in the fall, if you're going to have open primary elections. Because there's so much bitterness, even healthy bitterness developed in the primary, that you've got to heal those wounds. Galifianakis didn't have many wounds to heal, but he had been right vicious against Jordan. Jordan was an old line regular, that felt a sense of obligation to dutifully support the nominee. But he felt terribly offended at some of the things that he perceived that Galifianakis had gone and said. He was not an enthusiastic supporter, but he did, in a dutiful way, speak for the ticket. As did Sam Ervin. But we did not get the party together in the governor's race, and this was Bowles' fundamental mistake, it seems to me. I don't fully understand it, and I'll simply comment on it in response to your question. You have to get the party together. He failed to get the party together. Now, if he'd have won, who could have questioned him, but it'd been done. He'd done it his way, and he'd come out the governor with the absolute mandate. But he didn't have the sense of coalition that I thought was essential.
And I was worried from the first of the summer about it. I later asked
one of his very close associates, about Christmastime, and they'd had a
month and a half to think about it, if he thought Skipper was going to
run again. We might talk about some of the mistakes. Otherwise, let's
just forget about it and get on down to this Christmas oyster roast. He
said, "He didn't make any mistakes." After Skipper decided to tell
You . . . I'm sure you have some other views on it, and I'm not basing
mine on any studies or trends. I take it that in the past . . . in the
last two or three weeks that it began to break against Bowles, and not
until then. That he had . . . he was riding pretty much of a majority
until then. Again, I don't . . . I wasn't following any polls. But that
I could see resentment building up and I tried to communicate this. And
I even sent Bill Wright a couple of notes about it. Even I couldn't get
through to them much. And I'm saying the pressures of the campaign . . .
I'm not complaining about it. But when I say "even I," if I couldn't get
through to them, certainly some Taylor supporter in Gaston County
couldn't get through to them. They began to feel that they'd be better
off with Holshouser in there than Bowles. And I went back to '60s, a
whole lot of people were saying, "I think it'd be better to have a
Republican than to have Sanford. If we elect Sanford, he'll be
Well, you really didn't have a two-party system before.
I say, we never knew it before.
You didn't know it until . . .
One of the interesting . . .
I think Skipper was getting on dangerous ground and really didn't realize it, because there was no precedent.
One of the interesting statistics we've uncovered was that in 1960, of
the eleven states of the old Confederacy, North Carolina had the highest
rate of participation in the presidential election. In 1972, North
Carolina ranked ninth among the eleven states in participation of
eligible voters, and actually, only two of the eleven states had
declined. Everybody else was going up in the South. And we're trying
What was the figure, Jack? Thirty-nine per cent of the eligible voters over eighteen?
I think it was about forty-four or forty-five.
Well, the point is that even though you're getting more intraparty competition, which should stimulate more interest in the election, you've got voter participation going down.
I don't have an explanation for that except to say that we didn't put the party back together. That may not explain it.
Do you think there was a lot of stay-at-home voters in '72 because of the . . .
President.
. . . Scott people just saying, you know, to hell with the governor's race, and to hell with voting. And this presidential race wasn't stimulating a great deal of excitement anyway.
Well, it was stimulating alienation among Democrats, who just couldn't bring themselves to vote for McGovern or Nixon. I think it was a whole lot of that, more maybe than . . . I say, I have no real explanation for it.
But that would apply all over the nation and all over the South. A decline from '68.
North Carolina wasn't in the habit of voting Republican, and I think
given the choice between McGovern and Nixon, that more people stayed
home for that reason than lack of enthusiasm for Bowles. It would be
my
Can you talk a little bit about the role of the South in national politics, say, in the seventies. Or even looking back a little bit. Where do you see it? Do you think it's now possible for a southerner to run for something other than vice president?
I made a speech in Roxboro about 1955 or '6, and I don't know whether I've got a copy of that somewhere or not, I never have bothered to look, in which I contended that it was time to put away the regional inferiority complex. And I named a whole list of people that we could run for president. Some of them I could have justified, and some of them I simply had to include. That we had gone past the time when we had to think of ourselves as a deprived region where our candidates were not eligible for the top office, and that I thought we ought to start now to contend for the presidency and not consider ourselves as inferior. I remember having a conversation with Lou Harris and Jack Kennedy about that very thing in '60, because Catholicism and the South were two things that automatically excluded a person from being president. Catholics had to be vice president, if anything. Southerners had to be vice president, if anything. And it would be great if we could break both of those myths of the past. I don't know whether they were myths. Facts of the past, maybe.
So I, for a long time, contended that it's degrading to the region for a
person to contend for the vice presidency, or to seek it. That a
governor of a southern state is just as qualified as the governor of
Ohio or any other place. Or a senator from the South. And that we
What do you think of Jimmy Carter's suggestion for a southwide presidential primary? In part he said that this would give the South a real sense of power at the national convention.
I think it'd be totally disastrous.
Why?
Because I think primaries, generally, are utterly disastrous. And I think
a regional one would let all the base elements come out. I think it
would cast the South in a role of still being a region apart, which I've
been spending most of my life trying to make it either a leading region
or a region in a construction sense, and not a region of . . . apart
from the mainstream of the nation. And it's just contrary to my total
On that point, is the South really a region? Is it that much different than the rest of the country?
There's no question about it.
How is it different?
It's a difference in the sense of history, a difference because it's been the only oppressed "nation" ever to have to deal with the United States government. It's been the only enemy that the United States government has ever extracted tribute from after a military defeat. It's been the only nation that—and, again, in quotes—that, having been defeated, was not given a helping hand in rebuilding it by the national government. And obviously, in this, we were too close to home. Defeat had helped the Germans and the Japanese, but it was impossible to get rid of the bitterness than divided the North from the South. And it has been oppressed. There's no question about it. The Southern Governors' Conference was organized to fight the discriminatory freight rates that prevented industry from coming to the South. It's been . . . it had to, having had the slaves freed, it then had to carry almost the total burden of integrating and educating the freed slave into society, without any help. No federal funds for education. A little bit of foundation money temporarily for a period of several years, which of course was ineffective. So the South, out of its own exclusion and its own bitterness for fifty years, became a region apart. And they . . . that was thought as a region.
Do you think the South . . .
I think they're over that, I might say.
Do you think the South has shed its inferiority complex?
To a considerable extent, I think so. The Deep South still has the . . . a somewhat justifiable chip on its shoulder. But I think it's pretty well disappearing. I think you look at Louisiana now, and Mississippi, for that matter. I was down there not long ago to a Governor's Conference on Education. I think the South is beginning to look at itself as a region that just by, again, the chance and turn of history is in a position to lead the country in a constructive way. Again, I'm speaking partially from my bias, but I think that that's true. I think more and more people are seeing that we've got a freshness and an opportunity of growth, and many, many advantages. That we can be the brightest part of the nation now.
So you don't see these regional differences diminishing, but . . .
Yes, I see them diminishing as differences, because I think our problems
are the same problems that the rest of the nation has. I think as we
look at . . . I think any region can deal with some of its own problems
better than they can be dealt with as part of a national pattern. I
think particularly, just to take a narrow example, that New England can
deal with problems of transportation better than they can take a pattern
for nationwide transportation programs and make it fit them. I think we
can do it in terms of zoning and regional planning and land use and so
on, a better job in one region than we can do if we try to do it
nationwide. I think the Midwest has been able to do some things in
education better than they could be done nationwide. So I think there's
definitely a place for regional effort. But that's not necessarily
regional differences, and it's not necessarily that region
But I don't think a presidential primary is one of them. I think that
gets back . . . the premise of that is power
Based on what you said earlier, I sort of read into that a feeling that
if the South had a southwide presidential primary, that George Wallace
would likely run away with it. And Governor Carter took the position
that if a second candidate showed that he could make a strong showing
against Governor Wallace, even if he didn't win, that it would enhance
the South's position of coming up with a candidate . . .
The candidate in the South is going to have a hard time getting southern
support, if he's going to win the national nomination. Now, he's going
to have to have a respectable showing of support in the South, and he
would, I think, run away with the South in the general election. I think
the South then would rally to his cause and with a great sense of pride.
It would run in his favor the same way that the Catholic vote ran in
Kennedy's favor. A great deal of Catholic vote was and is again
Republican vote, of course. But there weren't too many Catholics that
voted for Nixon in 1960. I think the South would react that way in a
general election. But I think the candidate from the South is going to
have to understand in advance
In 1972 I believe you had a meeting with Senator Muskie in Florida before you announced for the North Carolina primary. Could you tell us what you discussed in that meeting, and what sort of understandings were reached?
We reached no understandings. I had said to Scott, "If I run, will you
support me?" He said, "I'm committed to Muskie. I will if Muskie will
release me." I said to Muskie, "Release him. You're going to make a very
bad showing in North Carolina." And he said, "That's nonsense. I'll
carry North Carolina overwhelmingly. The governor is supporting me." I
said, "Well, that's just not so." He said, "Well,
You, I think, received some criticism for staying in the presidential race after the North Carolina primary. What was that decision based on?
Well, it was based partly on the fact that I did not want to be
considered a regional candidate or a favorite son. That I had set out
Well, I couldn't see any reason for getting out at that point. We were
talking about another two months of energy and effort. It seemed to me
that I would have done an additional disservice to the South if I just
quit. And that furthermore I would have just proved everything people .
. .
Speaking of the future, are you thinking of a candidacy at all?
Yeah. I haven't made a decision on it, but I've kept it as an option. And
I honestly don't know whether I can generate the kind of desire that
you've got to have to do it. I've never really been consumed with being
president in the sense that Humphrey has been and, to an extent, Muskie
and to an extent . . . not to an extent . . . but McGovern, and many
other people. That may partially stem from the fact that nobody in his
right mind in the South in my period would have really conceived of the
possibility. And so I'm not consumed with it. I think I can look at the
whole thing in a more objective way than most anybody else in the
country that might be contending. But when I analyze it, I know very
well that I've got about as good a chance as anybody in the country to
get the nomination, except Kennedy. And Kennedy is such an uncertain
factor, that I'd do well not to read myself
So I . . . I'm doing exactly what I ought to be doing if I had determined to be a candidate, and I'm doing it in a way that serves that purpose as well as leaving that option open. So I'm not slowing myself up by putting off a decision, and because what I'm doing certainly helps me as much as anything else I could be doing. In fact, maybe more. I could be dashing around the country making speeches at political gatherings at the request of political leaders who could be encouraged to invite me if they thought I would come, in the way any other candidate would do. And I don't think that would be rewarding at all. You know, I just think it would be spinning wheels, for the most part, unless you were going to work full-time at it, as Nixon did. I'm not anywhere near prepared to do that. So I'm . . . I've got the option open. I think if I decided to move nationwide in an effort to get the nomination that I'm in a much better position than Jackson. A whole lot better position than Mondale. And who else is there? So, that's about where I . . .
So that you concluded that a southerner indeed can run for the
nomination. That's really a change in perspective for you in the
I thought it was possible, but I thought it was . . . before it arrived, that I'd be too old to run. Well, I think it may very well have arrived at about the same time I've arrived at a position of being able to . . . I would've thought that, if you'd asked me ten years ago, that this never would be. And I would never be in a position. But I think I am in a position. I think I've established a relationship with the Democratic leadership, and I think I've proven just by the reception I got in Montana, and Oregon, and California and Idaho, just to pick some, that I would be accepted on the merits, and the South itself would not drag me down.
You think . . .
Excuse me, Jack. Might it not be that in 1976, you could even make the argument that a southerner brings a lot of positive things that we've never thought about. Things have changed so rapidly in the course of the last eight or ten years . . .
I think somebody in my position, and I put the saving clause in that I don't want to contend at the moment that I'm the person, but I think somebody in my position now could run a winning campaign nationwide from the South. Nobody can attack my record on the race issue. You know, they might snipe at it, but my record on the race issue is better than—I say with some degree of vanity, maybe, a certain pride—that I faced the issue where it was the toughest in the country, at about the toughest time, and I handled it in a way that it can't be attacked. So on that issue alone, I've got . . . the burden, the historic burden of the South is not on my back.
Well, in the context of just that issue, you might argue that the South is doing so much better . . .
Exactly.
. . . on this whole problem, that any southerner, irrespective of who he is, might in '76 be the . . . in a better position than anyone in the country.
I think so, unless he personally has got a bad record. Now, Carter, of course, to some extent has got a blight he's got to erase in his campaign against Carl Sanders. Now, he quickly recovered in his inaugural speech, and I think he handled his administration. But there're some things he did in that campaign that smacked of racism. And he will not get Carl Sanders's support.
Do you think someone like Governor Bumpers or Askew would be in the same sort of position?
I think Askew could possibly, if Askew has that much substance to him, to
project as a national candidate on other issues. I don't know him that
well. I think Bumpers is a little too remote, and nationally his
reputation is not well enough established to be a serious candidate this
time. But what I was saying a minute ago, I think the Askews and the
Bumpers—and I use those words in the plural—would
have a distinct advantage from their own points of view in strongly
supporting a southern candidate at the convention level. Because they
are young enough to run in eight years from now. And it would be well
for somebody to break the ground for them. Whether they will see that or
not, I don't know, but I don't see either one of them at this moment
with quite the nationwide connections, if that's the word, to make a
serious run right now. It would just take a tremendous amount of
resources and energy on Askew's
Do you think that North Carolina . . . I mean, the leading economic interests of the state, I think, are normally considered to be tobacco, textiles, furniture manufacturing, banking, insurance, and power companies. Do these sources basically dominate decision making on the state government level?
They are influential, but I don't think they dominate it.
Can you think of any legislation of any substantive nature that has passed that they've opposed?
Tobacco tax.
But that . . . how about anything that all of them, or more than one single one opposed? Any other structural change in the tax system?
Most of those people were in favor of liquor by the drink. How's that for a political answer?
The problem with liquor by the drink was you didn't know what you were voting on. The advertising campaign was totally unrelated to the issue and what it was about.
Of course, there's no simple answer to politics.
I think South Carolina went through that to turn down liquor by the drink as an open-ended thing, but then it got to where you could have that big bottle and the little bottle would say this or this. It made a difference.
I think . . . I don't really think since Scott's time that . . . that
that vague group has been very conclusively influential. Robert Hanes
was head of Wachovia. He was the focal point of that establishment, that
is an establishment. He was the biggest banker. He was the most
political banker. He was the most skillful fundraiser, in or out of
banking. He could put together a sizable sum of money and make that
available to the candidate of their choice. Obviously not just his
choice. And as . . . certainly up until 1960, the pattern of campaigning
was that he got that big sum of money and he sent a few thousand dollars
to every county. Of course, you didn't have television then. And that
helped control it, that influenced the local politicians. It supplied
the money. Scott couldn't get that kind of money, and on a very modest
budget won anyhow. In 1960 we changed the pattern of fundraising in this
state by giving the quota to the county to send us money. And it worked
extremely well. And so that in itself . . . campaign money had a lot to
do with diminishing the influence of such a group. And, by and large,
that's not an extreme conservative group anyhow. There's . . . the
conservatives may be all in that group, but all the people in the group
aren't conservatives. So you could see in the primary election Charlie
Cannon supporting me, and at the same time Millard Barbee, who then was
head of the AFL-CIO, supporting me. The . . . a great many of the
tobacco people, Charlie Wade in particular, supported me. Now, the rest
of Reynolds didn't support me because I would not make a pledge on the
tobacco tax. The only thing I promised them was before I recommended it
I would give them a chance to argue me out of it. But I wouldn't pledge
not to propose it if I thought the
Who is the establishment in North Carolina?
Well, they organized the liquor by the drink campaign. C. C. Cameron, Charlie Wade. The textile people are sort of out of politics, interestingly enough. Charlie Cannon was the most astute politician in the group. It'd be hard to say. The people that support the North Carolina Symphony.
Is the . . .
It used to be the University of North Carolina and the Board of Trustees that you . . . you know, if you could pick out one group and say, "Let's take them and mobilize the establishment." Good and bad. Now, "establishment" is not necessarily a bad word. The people that can move to good decisions would be one definition. And we don't have an establishment in the sense that Virginia does.
I think of an establishment as a group that can exercise power, not that
they necessarily exercise power badly. They may exercise it
Yes, but you've also got to find the connecting links to make that an establishment, and I don't know where they are.
It's no longer the Board of Trustees?
Well, now, see, that's abolished.
Abolished.
And furthermore, it had been diminished in authority, anyhow, by the rise of State and the emergence of East Carolina and other institutions.
Well, do you think the power in North Carolina, political power, is more diffused than in Virginia?
Yes. Yes.
In other words, would you have answered this question much easier twenty-five years ago?
Oh, in 1948 I could have named names.
END OF INTERVIEW