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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-0328-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Terry Sanford begins the interview by describing early impressions of his hometown of Laurinburg, North Carolina, and his family background. He notes that his interest in politics was awakened early—both by his father's support of underdog and liberal candidates and by the 1928 Alfred Smith presidential campaign. Sanford describes the Democratic political dynasties and discusses how the Democratic Party maintained its political stronghold on North Carolina as a result of effective political organizations and the state's one-party politics. Sanford's political education began in earnest as a student at the University of North Carolina, where he became influenced by the progressive and liberal politics of UNC president Frank Porter Graham and sociology professor Howard Odum. UNC's law school also served as a political training ground for Democratic candidates, says Sanford; there, he learned organizing and campaigning strategies from the Chapel Hill-influenced political leadership. He ran as president of the Young Democrats, an established political training group. Sanford discusses the growing rift between the conservative and progressive factions within the Democratic Party, which ruled politics in North Carolina at the time. He recalls the 1950 race-baiting senatorial campaign against Frank Porter Graham and Willis Smith. Learning from this, Sanford vowed to defend his platform aggressively against his opponent's negative campaigning. Sanford explains his decision not to run for governor against Luther Hodges in 1956, due in large part to his relative lack of political experience. After his decision, Sanford gained more political experience through the established ranks of the Democratic Party and run successfully for governor in 1960 against segregationist candidate I. Beverly Lake. Toward the end of the interview, Sanford offers his thoughts on the administrations of his three gubernatorial successors: Dan Moore, Robert Scott, and James Holshouser.
Terry Sanford—former state senator, governor, president of Duke University, and member of the United States Senate—describes Democratic politics in North Carolina.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This little girl that finished at Duke and then worked on the paper downtown about the first year I got here, she came out to interview me and she was unusually nervous. She got through with the interview, and the machine hadn't worked at all.
Well, that has happened to me.
She hadn't remembered a thing because she was nervous. She later served as my press secretary briefly, so we got along fine. But she had to do it all over.
Well, I hope that you won't have to do it all . . . I know that you've been interviewed many times, and I was reading the transcripts of the interview that you did for the LBJ Library. I assume that was for the . . .
Yes.
And also you've done so much writing about your own career and reminiscing in the rough sketches you had done. I tried to organize this interview in a way that you approach some of these things, and at the same time, maybe go over some old ground in different ways, from different angles. I thought I would want to start by asking you a little bit about where you grew up and what you remember of Laurinburg, North Carolina.
Well, I grew up in Laurinburg, was born there on Church Street, as a
matter of fact. Then I lived there all my life until I went away to
college and legally lived there, I suppose, until through the war. And I
remember everything about it. I probably remember every
Why was that?
I just do. I spent so much time there selling Saturday
Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal and
delivering Postal telegraphs, later Western Union telegraphs. So I
remember very much about Laurinburg and the people and the then-dusty
roads and the gradual changes. Of course, Laurinburg has changed
dramatically. It was a dusty little farm trading town, at least it
appeared to me to be dusty always, maybe because I lived on a dirt road.
There weren't many paved roads. A sleepy little town, for the most part.
A town obviously without much opportunity for advancement, typical of
most towns in this part of the country then, in the 30's. But very great
people, a great tough kind of an individual, mostly of Scottish
heritage, and they all came through the Depression fairly well. It's a
town that was financially not dominated but at least most of the wealth
was in the hands of one family. They owned the bank, they owned most of
the farm land, much of which they acquired when all the farms went broke
during the Hoover depression. They owned the flour mill and the
cottonseed oil plant and textile mills. But they were a very unusual
kind of dominating force, not the "big daddy" type at all. They were,
and still are in the fourth or fifth generation now, carrying on their
businesses in a very modest way. But there was that one element
financially in the town that was not pervasive but nevertheless was
there.
What family would this be?
This would be the McNair family that now has various other
What are some of your strongest visual memories from Laurinburg, being that you can . . .
Well, most of it is childhood memories, the youthful memory of the Roper's Creek where we swam all through the summer in spite of the fact that today's standards would not only put it off limits for being polluted but probably build a barbed wire fence around it. It went on down below the railroad and through the mill village. It was in a swamp. It was later in the WPA days that they dug out all those swamps so they'd drain more rapidly. I suppose that was progress, but the swamps are gone.
The area of Newton, where I sold vegetables, which meant where most of
the black people lived in shacks, without indoor toilets, of course,
locally called "Nigger Town" as all such places, southern towns, maybe
all towns, but called Newtown in polite society. And that was a pretty
dreadful kind of existence. Even then you could tell that it was
dreadful although my chief memory of that place was that it was occupied
by relatively happy people in appearance, though I don't think they
could have been all that happy. But I think they had a way of making the
best of a very, very bad situation and, for the most part, being happy.
Now, I've also seen them hungry. I also, at that time, developed a very
deep concern for people that are left out of the system, though I'm sure
it wasn't conscious development of concern. But I never have forgotten
the plight that they found themselves in and obviously the plight that
many are still in today, mostly, as a matter of fact, out of the
South.
This is in the 30's, as late as the 30's?
Well, certainly the early 30's. I wouldn't want to take an affidavit as to when running water was put in, but I clearly remember the pumps. Of course, I also remember into the 20's, so it's somewhere along that period of time.
Had the exodus of black people to the North started up in your section of the state in the 20's?
I wasn't looking at it from the point of view where I could tell whether
there was an exodus or not. There were plenty left. I suppose
Where would you place your family within the Laurinburg hierarchy? What was your house like? What was your . . .
My family was relatively poor, certainly on the down side of average but, on the other hand, very well respected, which was a compensating factor. My father and grandfather had been in the hardware business since the turn of the century, which went broke in the late 20's, '29 or so. It was one of the early victims of what was building up to be a depression. It was an old-style hardware store, very few of which survived.
What was your grandfather's name?
He came there, incidentally, as a cabinetmaker with the
My father, then, did various things because there were just not any easy jobs. He worked on WPA for a while and sold insurance first, which was a hard game when you're selling insurance for a quarter a week or whatever industrial insurance then was. He sold it, obviously, to very low-income people.
You say industrial insurance. You mean people who were working in . . .
Well, that's a type of insurance that insurance people understand. They pay weekly premiums for the most part, or they did then. They had a little debit book, and the collector went around and picked up the quarter and probably made about $15 a week, which was not starvation wages but close to it. My mother went back to teaching school when I was in the fifth grade, which of course, was still in the Depression times—that would have been the early 30's. She'd come from Virginia as a schoolteacher from a fairly affluent family in her part of Virginia.
What family would that be?
Well, it was a fairly common name, so you can trace it. Her father was David Terry Martin in Salem. She had taught school a great many people that then were young businessmen. My father had taught them all in Sunday school, at least those that were Methodists. And so in terms of what I suppose might be called even in Laurinburg "social acceptability" wasn't any problem on that side. The trouble is, we didn't have any money to go with it.
Did you ever have the feeling of being left out or an outsider in Laurinburg's society as the blacks might have or the cotton mill people?
Not at all except there wasn't much to be in on. In any event, I wasn't outside of whatever it was.
What kind of influence did your parents have upon you? Is it possible to assess that?
I think they had a tremendous amount of influence. You never quite understand it or realize it at the time, but you look back at things over the years and there's a lot of luck involved in it too. Every parent wants to be a good influence, and sometimes it works out all right and sometimes it doesn't. I suppose if I'd been caught and paid the penalty of everything wrong I did, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you. That's true of almost anybody. But they were strict enough and, at the same time, lenient enough to allow us to roam around and do things that probably gave us some sense of initiative. I would hesitate before I'd let a twelve-year-old boy buy an automobile, but they let me buy one. Of course, I only paid a dollar for it, but it did run.
A dollar for a working automobile?
Yes. That was the price of a Ford, stripped-down automobile, depending on the conditions of the tires and whether or not it had a body on it or any piece of the body. It might run anywhere from a dollar or two to twenty-five dollars, depending on the working condition. A new car only cost a couple of hundred dollars. So you could buy a stripped-down Ford that maybe the mag meter was out of and didn't have tires for about a dollar. Then you could pick those up at a junkyard for about a quarter here and a quarter there. It never occurred to anybody to put a state license tag on it. I don't know what the attitude of the local officers was, but the best I can remember, nobody ever raised a question. For two or three summers, we had stripped-down Fords—the Beverly boys, the Blue boys, Jimmy Hollis. We had stripped-down Fords that we'd ride out to the swimming holes on, which was obviously extremely dangerous.
So your parents didn't restrict you from enjoying what would probably be called normal adventures.
They didn't seem to take a dim view of smoking rabbit tobacco, which I
suppose a parent of today would take a dim view of any ten or
twelve-year-old kid smoking anything. But that may be one reason I don't
smoke today. I was very active in the Boy Scouts, and that gave us a lot
of freedom because the Boy Scouts weren't quite as structured in those
days.
Your parents, were they active politically?
My father was always very much active politically and always for the more radical or more liberal candidate. He wanted to beat the old sheriff that he insisted was in league with the boot-leggers. He supported the challengers and finally when one of the challengers won, it was a great day. In fact, they were great friends until his death, until the sheriff's death. He supported Ralph McDonald in 1936 against the total establishment of the state—Ralph MacDonald, that is, was against the total establishment. He was a renegade professor from Salem College that was in the legislature one time and then ran against the lieutenant governor and the heir apparent of the machine, Clyde R. Hoey. Most people think that he beat him. In any event, shortly thereafter, they changed the absentee ballot laws because there were so many obvious abuses in the run-off between Hoey and McDonald that a good many people would say that they stole the election with absentee ballots. I doubt it. In any event, Hoey won. McDonald went on to be a college president in Ohio. He ran one more time for governor. But that was the radical, the person saying that we've got to shake things up in North Carolina.
Well, my father was supporting him.
When you say supportive, do you mean he didn't actually
Oh well, in those days I suppose there was somebody in Raleigh working for him, but most of the work was done by people stirring around in the counties. It was a much more spirited, person-to-person campaign. Of course you didn't have television, you didn't have much of radio. People really didn't use radio a great deal politically in those days. Some newspaper ads; certainly all the newspaper stories they could generate. But most of the campaigning was done in what we would call "ward heeling" now. In those days, it was all there was. Just a person-to-person campaign, and he was fairly vocal about it. Most of the up-towners, the more staid, established people would have been for first Sandy Graham, who was the popular politician or Clyde R. Hoey, who was the brother-in-law of Governor Max Gardner and was supposed to be governor.
That's probably the Shelby dynasty.
Well, they called it the Shelby dynasty. It amounted to two men. I never
did think it was a dynasty. But Clyde Hoey was not much of a governor in
terms of what he accomplished. He didn't do any harm, and by and large,
he really did some good. But the governors of North Carolina from the
turn of the century on were good governors. There's not a single bad
governor in the lot, which I think is remarkable. Not many of them were
great governors, not many of them were innovators, and not many of them
were too bold, but bold enough maybe for the times. Cameron Morrison
developed the first state-wide paved highway system in the country in
the early 20's, which was a radical move.
Then came Max Gardner, who was considered one of the better governors. He
didn't have too much of a chance to do too many things because he got
caught in the Depression. But he put the educational system in better
shape. He consolidated the university. He, in effect, picked Frank
Graham to be the president, which has to be, even if it wasn't planned
to be, one of the great contributions to North Carolina. He valued more
than anything else that he did, he said in his will, the creation of the
consolidated university. I think he did more substantial things than
that, and certainly he was a broad-based governor. But then he began to
dominate politics. He had lost to Cam Morrison in '20. He came back in
'28 to win without opposition to support Al Smith when nobody else
would, in spite of the fact I say nobody else, but when the so-called
political leader of the state, Senator Simmons, was voting for Hoover
and was defeated for his efforts two years later,
'32 through '36?
Yes. Well, he was elected in '32. You see, he took office January of '33 and went through '36 at which time he saved the public schools, he put them on a state-wide basis, he passed the sales tax to support them, to say nothing of drawing tighter consolidation of the highway system, the prison system so that we had a unified, statewide system in those three very expensive public endeavors. Therefore, we got a little financial edge on the rest of the troubled states, the truth of the matter, of all the rest of the states. At that time we saw New York and those states as being great, wealthy places that had no problems. Well, we could go on from there. So my point is that we really haven't had any bad governors, and every now and then a Ralph McDonald would come along to challenge the system and ultimately Kerr Scott challenged it and beat it. But up until that time the dynasty, so it was called, had picked its governor at least four years in advance, from Max Gardner on.
Were you following any of this at that time?
Oh yes, very much.
You were very interested in politics.
Very much.
At what point would you say your earliest recollection about your interest in politics was?
I remember very much discussions about the Calvin Coolidge election. Obviously, I was in about the first or second grade. I thought he was down at the courthouse running for something. I wasn't quite clear on that. I remember the Al Smith election very well. I took a very lively part in that. I think I was in the seventh grade, and we had little pencils with Al Smith's head on the top of it and all the other gimmicks and Al Smith buttons. Al Smith didn't carry North Carolina.
Right. I was going to say, was that the fashionable thing to . . .
It was in Laurinburg.
Why was that?
Well, anybody voting for Hoover was more or less a closet voter. It was
still popular to be a Democrat, but I always thought that Al Smith lost
because of his prohibition stand. I don't think it had a whole lot to do
with the fact that he was a Catholic, though that might have featured in
some. And it probably was enough, the two together in any event, nothing
else had anything to do with it. It was the traditional Democratic vote,
compelling people to vote the Democratic
Which family was this?
The McLean family, Carl McLean. Carl was in my class, young Carl. He was killed shortly after the war.
So then to be a Democrat . . .
You had to be a Republican to be the postmaster. Then he had a brother
there, and I never was sure if the brother was a Democrat or Republican,
the McLean brother. And that daughter was in my class. Well, people in
the church, the Baptist church and the Methodist church were worried
about the Pope. People were worried about liquor because the oldest
temperance society in the country was in Scotland County, so people were
worried about "demon rum" taking over again. And then he was kind of an
outrageous New Yorker in addition to all of that, wearing a derby. But a
great many people found him very appealing. Obviously, he did fairly
well. If you look at his record in New York state compared to the record
of governors over the span of this century, he has to come out in about
the top ten or twelve. The things that Roosevelt later carried on, Al
Smith started. You look at governors who
Right. At that point, it was still sort of an excitement or entertainment for you. I mean, you were twelve years old or something, or ten years old.
Well, Hand James was the chairman of the party there, and I always
admired him. He was what might very well have been called the "first
family" of the town. He was, for a while, the mayor, but his older
brother was briefly congressman. The family had been one of the early
settlers. They owned the First National and the Scotland Savings Bank,
both of which went broke and, at that point, so did all their fortunes.
Not that they had that big a fortune. But they were the only competing
family in the financial sense with the McNair family. And they were
wiped out virtually. They all stayed on, and they all kept on with their
endeavors and do to this day. The peculiar thing about people of that
time and that position, financial adversity didn't particularly shake
them. It just took away their money, but they still kept their positions
and standings in terms of the respect in the community and went right
on. In fact, the James brothers were tried
When was that, at that point?
Well, at that Depression period. A great many very prominent people in North Carolina went to jail because it was awfully easy to violate the banking laws without intending to. If you loaned people money on a farm and a mule and set the collateral at $500 and it turned out when you foreclosed it was worth $150, you violated the law. Now, that's an over-simplification but if you loaned money to your brother-in-law without a mortgage and he was worth $200,000 or $300,000 and you loaned him $10,000 and the Depression wiped him out, you'd violated the law by not taking collateral. And so there were so many cases where they tried people. Sentiment ran high because people had lost their money. There was no Federal Deposit Insurance of course, and the banker became the villain.
Well, Hinton James was in Congress at the time. He had announced he
wasn't running, and he was an interim congressman because the
congressman had died, as I recall. But they set right on up there, you
know, and walked right down Main Street with their heads high. I went to
two or three sessions of the court. I can't remember whether Don Philips
was the prosecutor or the defending attorney, but he later became a
distinguished judge. He was involved in it somehow, and he was
originally from Laurinburg, then living in Rockingham. And they were
acquitted. Now, the cashier of the savings bank disappeared and has
never been heard of since. I once wrote a short story in freshman
English about what happened to him, but I won't go into that at
Another question about these early political activities when you were beginning to become aware of politics. Was it true that you read about in many southern towns that the politics is one of the major topics of discussion, not just at election time but sort of a . . .
As recently as 1958 and '59 when I was running for governor and started moving around the state, I couldn't run into a counterman or a filling station operator or even a shoeshine boy in eastern North Carolina that didn't know that there was a governors race that was coming up. And if I went to the banking circles and the business circles in Charlotte, it was a subject very vague to them. That late. It is an entertaining thing, and probably is to this day. Who's going to run for the legislature, and who's going to run for sheriff, and probably fading some because communications will have changed that. But it was not a way of life, but it was about as interesting as anything going on.
How about down at the hardware store? Would you ever go down there and people would come in talk politics?
I was too young when that went broke to really remember anything about it. I was about ten years old probably when it went broke, ten or eleven years old. I vaguely remember the store. I remember going in it, I remember what it looked like . . .
Is it still there now?
No, no.
The building is not there?
The building's there. But I think it was used for a jewelry store, maybe a, for a while Mr. Greenberg moved to town with a clothing store. I think he occupied that building or the one next to it.
When you said that your father's support took a radical position, was being radical anything . . .
No, no. I just said a more radical position, given a choice of voting for the fellow in office or the fellow that was saying he was a scoundrel. He'd go along with the man that claimed the other one was a scoundrel. And he probably was right.
Did that have any kind of influence? Did you find yourself leaning in that direction?
Well, I always went with him on whatever he was for, so I sort of got in the habit of being for the challenger.
It seems that you've taken that role on many . . .
I happen to think that's the role that needs to be taken very often, not always. Sometimes we need stability. More often, we need improvement. But I didn't have any parental blocks in that respect. I had a pretty good example of a man that always thought he was right and seldom won. And that's a pretty good position to be in in politics. If you seldom win, you usually are right, since the decisions are usually so bad.
Was it unusual for a person of your background or your parents' financial
means at that point for you to go to college in the
I would have to say that probably not. My mother had gone to college. My father didn't go to college because at the turn of century that was an extremely difficult thing and not particularly important. He, however, had gone to Tennessee, to Nashville, to a business college for a brief while, and he was always a good accountant. Not a CPA, but very good with books and very well educated in terms of reading and an awareness of things in the world. He was not at all an uneducated man. They expected us to go to college.
That's what I wanted to know, if that was sort of implicit as you were growing up.
I'm not sure they were certain we were going to college, but they certainly expected us to go to college. And they intended to send the girls to college. I think they expected us to get there on our own. In fact, I think it would have been unthinkable that we not go to college, though certainly it crossed my mind several times that I wasn't going.
Why was that?
Well, you know, I'm off to make a million dollars, and why should I mess
with college? That happens to be too close to the truth, except that
making the million dollars is not the worthy goal. That if I had
intended to make one, I'd have been better off not going to college,
probably. I can remember when we drove to Salem, or at least on one
occasion, driving back by what must have been Trinity
Presbyterian Junior?
At Maxton, which is now combined into St. Andrews at Laurinburg. But I hitchhiked over there every day. I worked in the summer down there cutting grass and painting and washing windows. So I earned my keep, tuition or whatever.
You did quite a number of different odd jobs. Were you always working as a child?
I was always trying to avoid work.
But it seems like you ended up . . .
Yes, I got caught frequently. Well, if you didn't work, you didn't have any money. I never heard of an allowance.
Were you expected to share any of your earnings with the family, or was that for you to spend?
You probably in the Depression weren't expected to share but you did. If you had any money, you usually bought something, including sometimes some groceries. But that wasn't a habitual thing. In the first place, I didn't have that much money. But I bought some of my clothes. I bought the suitcase I went off to college with, but I didn't pay for it for a year. Every time I'd see Mr. Lonnie Hammond and Mr. Ed Monroe, they'd want to know when I was going to pay them for the suitcase.
What kind of influence did going to Chapel Hill have on you? Or did it have any as far as your later . . . Had you definitely decided you were going to be entering into politics Was that an early decision?
I would say that I probably would have followed a different path and probably been a different kind of person if I hadn't gone to Chapel Hill.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
The influence of Chapel Hill was the spirit of the place. The people that
were ranging across all kinds of new thoughts, new for me, and the
personality of Frank Porter Graham. I imagine Frank Porter Graham had as
much to do with influencing the generation that hein toto with every Frank Graham was for,
but the spirit of it carried over. I could certainly tell it in my own
period of involvement in state government. The people that were taking
part and solid were people that Frank Graham had influenced. There were
fortunately many others that hadn't gone to Chapel Hill. But in any
event, I think that was a tremendous influence. I think Frank Graham
woke people up to the fact that we could do something about some of our
problems. He woke them up to the fact that it wasn't so bad to champion
the cause of the sharecropper and the black and the working man that
wasn't unionized and was being pretty much treated as chattel. That is,
I would say, sponsorship of Howard Odum, though the Howard Odum people
might put it the other way around—that Howard Odum influenced Frank
Graham. I suspect that Frank Graham influenced, supported, encouraged.
In any event, it was a mutual thing. But Frank Graham was the president;
Howard Odum was the great sociologist. Howard Odum had a tremendous
impact. People never had heard his name. But that was again part of the
spirit then. I took a course under Howard Odum. To the best of my
memory, he had retired from active teaching when I got there. I suppose
he hadn't retired totally. In any event, I didn't take any courses under
him . . .
He didn't do very much undergraduate teaching at that point.
I just don't remember because he wasn't teaching me, and he was a force
that I knew about, and I occasionally served him a meal. The present
Director of Selective Service in North Carolina and I did most of
What kind of contact could you possibly have with Frank Porter Graham? Was there any direct, personal contact . . .
The same kind any student at Duke can have with me. They've got to show a little initiative, but I'm available. Frank Graham was available at his house every Sunday evening. I went over there maybe all total a dozen times, which is a right good many times. A whole lot of people went more. I didn't because I got fed up with a lot of little supercilious people who would go in on a regular basis. But it's always an exciting thing, and occasionally you have a house guest. They'd sit in there, and this was a regular thing with Frank Graham. Now, I can't do it here for two reasons. One, I'm not on campus, unfortunately. Something I never would have designed, but the house is too far away. Second, there are too many students. So we've substituted some other devices, and I don't fancy that I can influence people like Frank Graham, but they have the availability and that's a lesson I got from Frank Graham, that you've got to be available.
He also had a knack of knowing just about everybody. Now admittedly,
there were only 3,000 students in Chapel Hill. He had three campuses,
but he lived at Chapel Hill and it didn't take him long to put people in
focus. I doubt if he ever really knew me until I was in law school or
finishing up or taking part in his political campaigns. We became
Was he able to do this because it was a smaller system and there wasn't as big a pie to be . . .
Oh, it was a smaller pie. No, I think the genius of it was his own
generosity of spirit. He didn't think the university could exist alone.
And he saw it as his duty to champion the cause of all education. I've
attempted here to try to speak for public education
When you'd go back to Laurinburg, did people say, well, here you are coming from this hotbed of radicalism up there in Chapel Hill with Graham . . .
Well, I noted that one reason that we all got to be fairly enlightened in our political views is that we had to defend Frank Graham. To some extent, that's true.
Back home?
Back home. I remember Harvey Evans who just died and was one of the great
citizens of the town and a McNair grandchild. That indicates six
generations for the McNair family, as a matter of fact. He's got
grandchildren. He just recently died, an elderly man. But I remember his
picking me up somewhere when I was hitchhiking back and forth to Chapel
Hill and questioning me rather closely. I thought he was really
disputing it. I suspect he was just testing me. Now; I later suspected
that. But, you know, he wanted to know why about this Communist
influence? What about Erickson, who was apparently an avowed Communist
and an English teacher that Frank Graham stoutly defended? Of course,
Erickson would debate circles around our Democrat in residence, Mr.
Woodhouse, who was just a charming, delightful Connecticut gentleman who
taught the most popular political science courses. But Erickson was
sharper. He was operating from basically a false premise, but in
Did you come into contact with people like Coats or Couch or any of these people who were part of the whole Chapel Hill scene but weren't really professors?
Well, you had the great influence of Horace Williams, who was still there
when I was there. Now one thing that we had that I was glad they
quit—but I was wrong, and we don't have it now—and that was compulsory
chapel. Well, the compulsory chapel at Chapel Hill, and you had to be in
your place and they had monitors, and I don't remember what the penalty
was because I never over-extended my privileges. You had so many cuts.
As I recall, fairly lenient; maybe you had to go to every other one. But
here was Archibald Henderson on one occasion, and here was Horace
Williams on another occasion, and I never would have seen those men had
it not been for that. And Couch and Phillips Russell. I don't recall
Albert Coats being in at that stage of the game, though obviously later
Bob House, who at that time—well, I would have had other occasions to
see Bob House. In any event, all those great old figures
Where did you live? Did you stay in a dorm, or did you . . .
I lived just about everywhere. You didn't have all the formalities about getting into school then that you have now. You could almost walk in. I'm not quite sure when I applied, but I didn't have a dormitory assigned, and I'm not quite sure why, unless it cost more. And I'm not sure about that. But at any rate, I went up there with a boy that was transferring from Presbyterian Junior College, the day before school started I suppose, and found us a boarding room within a block of Main Street. I say boarding; actually a rooming house.
Would this be over on Rosemary?
Well, we first rented a room on Franklin Street. We got to looking around a little more, and I think we forfeited a two-dollar deposit or something, and moved into Rosemary Street, which about the same price and much, much nicer, with Mrs. Finch. Her house is still there, but it's an office building of some kind. And then the next year, I lived with John Bowles in the basement of Swain Hall (which was then the cafeteria) until the management decided that was very bad policy, and then I lived in a little single room around off of Rosemary Street, just around the corner—I've forgotten the name of it—for a semester. And from that time on until I was in law school, I lived in dormitories.
You went to law school for at least two years, didn't you, right after college?
Well, I went to law school until the war came on, which was less than three. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wasn't hell-bent to be a lawyer, though I had talked about it from the seventh grade on, occasionally. But if I'd have had a good offer, I would have probably gone and done something else.
In business or something?
I tried to get a job with Standard Oil Company in South America, for example, which, in retrospect, would have been a very foolish thing. But if they'd had offered it to me, I would have taken it. I don't think they took me seriously because I was still pretty much a country boy. I actually applied for a job as a Boy Scout executive and was somewhat irritated that I didn't get it. I thought I was entitled to it. In fact, I thought I'd be such a good one that I couldn't see why they'd turned me down.
This is right after college?
This is when I was in my senior year. Then we were running a boys' camp,
Bill McCachren and me, in western North Carolina. It seemed to me that
if we were going to run that camp, I'd be well advised to be doing
something in the wintertime. The more I looked at it, the more I thought
it should be law school. Now, that's not the first time I ever thought
about going to law school. I was building up toward it, but I might very
well have been diverted if something attractive had come along, though
it wasn't a last-minute thought. It was, essentially, a last-minute
entrance because you didn't have to go through the formalities you have
to go through now. If you looked like
Right, right. The classmates you had in Chapel Hill in law school, did you find that you ran into them very often in political circles later on?
Oh yes. Oh, there's no question that it was the foundation of whatever I did politically. Now, it's also true that I could never have won with that alone. And I greatly broadened the reach through my association with Kerr Scott; with my American Legion; Junior Chamber of Commerce; with getting to know people like Bill Staton, who was a Wake Forest graduate, and with him drawing his circle of friends; Bert Bennett, who was my campaign manager was not a classmate but he was a class or two behind me at Chapel Hill—that's where I knew him.
Even in terms of opposition, I mean, even in terms of just the whole make-up of state politics, it seems that at that point, the influence of Chapel Hill was quite great. People coming through there . . .
It was dominant because most of the leadership had come through Chapel
Hill. Therefore, it perpetuated itself. But as more and more people went
to school and more and more colleges developed, there was more scattered
influence. The second most influential college group at that time was
Wake Forest, probably because of the law school. Other institutions
really didn't figure very much in terms of any body of leadership.
Trinity, Duke's graduates mostly scattered to numerous
You say that was your first real political activity was running for the Young Democrats in North Carolina, running for the presidency? What led up to that?
That was the first state-wide thing I ever ran for.
Had you ever been involved in any kind of local political activity before that? That was '49 right?
No, I had just moved to Fayetteville in the spring of '48, and I had
tried to help Mayne Albright a little in the first
When you say purely by chance, just nothing you really sought or . . .
Well, I was up there with . . . I knew some of the old-timers in the
American Legion. In fact, they knew me very well because I had run Boys'
State for four or five times and run it before the war and after the
war. And Albert Coates was in charge of the Institute of Government, but
I was director of the Boys' State Program. So I knew all those
old-timers. They put me in chairman of the Resolutions Committee, and I
presented all these resolutions in a pretty good voice. So I therefore
was before the convention. I was with a fellow that had been very active
in the American Legion, Coy Brewer, now dead, was later a judge. I
remember his conversation very well because I've laughed about it since.
Coy sort of wanted to be judge advocate, so he was urging me to be. I
said, "No, Coy, you ought to be." He made his fatal error right then, if
that amounted to anything. He said, "No, you do it." And I said, "All
right." So as I recall, I didn't have any opposition. I ran
By that time?
Oh yes. I fully intended to run for governor the day I picked up and moved to Fayetteville. There wasn't any question in my mind I was going to run for governor. That's why I left Chapel Hill.
Well now, I didn't realize that that decision had been made that early. What brought that on? How did you know you were going to . . . at that point, you weren't even thirty years old.
I didn't know I was going to be governor. I knew I was going to run. I never changed that philosophy, and I never changed the feeling of satisfaction if I had run and not won. No, my obligation was to run.
I didn't mean to skip over your services in the FBI and the war. But I wanted to try to get at . . .
Well, you were talking. Really, I grasped you were talking about the
value of the
Scott was supporting Gordon.
Yes.
Did you ever talk with him about that later on?
I told them that if you let Scott dictate who's going to
That was part of your campaign?
Not much because Scott wasn't all that gung-ho. He sent a couple of his aides down there. One of them was the parole commissioner, an inept old gentleman, and one of them was his secretary, his administrative assistant, John Marshall. They came down there, but they realized they were getting Scott on the spot. They pretty well got Gordon out of it. Gordon never stood for election. Scott later said that the reason he was for Gene, that Gene's older brother was the only person in the textile business that had been for him when he ran for governor, and he was just obligated to be for Gene. Well, he wasn't obligated to get in it, I thought at the time, but on reflection, I later put my hand in it a little bit when I was governor. Except I wasn't so obvious about it.
What is the importance of the Young Democrats?
That's hard to say.
Is it a kind of breeding ground or training ground?
It rises and falls, and in some states it's important and in some states
it isn't. But here it's very important because it gave you a reach
across the state and, with one or two minor exceptions where maybe we
didn't much care, for fifteen years our group dominated the Young
Democrats. You can look at every president, with again one or two
exceptions, maybe, where we didn't particularly try. Our side elected
the president. The person that was elected right after me
Uh huh. Now when you say your side of the party, is that . . .
That's what I always call the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. In 1972, there wasn't anybody running for office that hadn't been in that wing, running against each other now, which is good.
Do you think that's one of things that's emerged in North Carolina politics, the emergence of that wing of the Democratic party?
Well, I can say it's emerged without particularly claiming any credit for it.
But it's been kind of a cumulative effect of the number of other people . . .
I think that considering the kind of race that we had in 1960 which, in a
way, was maybe the classic, or maybe historians will see it that way. We
ran against the old guard, and we ran against Hodges' wing, we ran
against the racist campaign, and we won against
In '72? Yes, that's right. He ran in '68 . . .
Robert Morgan, running for reelection as attorney general or running for attorney general, was an exception. But I had long since made up with him; in fact, he was one of my key people in the Scott campaign, so I counted him one of our crowd, in spite of the fact he was Lake's campaign manager. That was a diversion that grew out of the fact that he lived in Dr. Lake's house while he was going to law school. In any event, I think that wing of the party now is dominant. Now, it's breaking off, of course. But by and large, they're all forward-looking people people, and I think that's good.
The question in my mind is, did the roots of that wing start to form back in the late 40's or had that already been pretty well established?
That was the Ralph MacDonald crowd. They had never achieved any success. They broke through with Kerr Scott, or Kerr Scott broke them through, more accurately. He was the person that was going to be the mover and the shaker. Then we couldn't have existed on that base alone. It had to be broadened. It was too much anti-town and anti-city. He didn't intend it that way, but they intended it that way. The bitterness that grew out of the people that he had defeated . . .
In '48.
. . . in '48 narrowed his support considerably. In fact, we were lucky to win in '54. He had broadened his base somewhat by appointing Frank Graham, by bringing in a younger person like me—it could have been many people—but at least he had the sense to bring in a younger person that reached out for new people in addition to his old supporters. So all of that built up to what we did in '60, which brought it all together. You know, we brought the head of the labor union and Charlie Cannon both into our campaign. So we were beginning now to put North Carolina together. Then it got shattered by the racist thing that came on more or less unexpectedly. Had it not been for that, there would have been some considerable different story. On the other hand, that has to be a significant event in the history of the state because it's the first time that a racist campaign had ever been defeated. I'm talking about with a clean campaign, with a campaign that really didn't equivocate on the race issue. Now, it's true I wasn't standing up there saying we're going to put blacks in your living room, which Lake said I was, but I wasn't saying it. We held the banner where it ought to have been held, and we did defeat a racist campaign. We were free to move on with racial improvements because we had won on that issue, in effect.
And then I think it's had its ups and downs. Obviously, we had a setback
as I left office, partially because again of the bitterness that had
come out of the campaign. Whereas Scott reached back for a younger
person, I reached for a contemporary. I really ought to have
He did not come out of this Kerr Scott-Frank Graham-MacDonald wing?
He more was in the Charlie Johnson remnants of the old Max Gardner wing.
Charlie Johnson, incidentally, was one of my strongest supporters, in
spite of the fact I managed Kerr Scott's campaign. Charlie Johnson was
the assured governor that Scott beat. But he became a very dear friend
of mine until his death. So there aren't any hard lines. You weren't
registered in either wing, so you moved back and forth if you wanted to.
And we were moving more people back. The trouble is, I overplayed our
hand. I thought we had the problem of Kennedy, who really wasn't very
popular. People now seem to overlook that fact. We were carrying a
terrible burden by carrying
That's what I wanted to get at. Was it more or less this split of these two wings of the Democratic party philosophical or some power politics?
I think it was somewhat philosophical, and I think it was somewhat of a desire to get even with Scott and me.
Did the element of the competition of having lost once now you'd want to win, this kind of thing?
Well, you know, this is good for the state, this fellow's been too
radical, which in truth I hadn't been. Hardly anybody could prove
You thought you had it all lined up?
Well, not really. But you know with Hodges and with us, with Hodges taking at least part of that conservative group, after all, we had put Hodges in the Cabinet, and there's not any way he could have been in Kennedy's Cabinet without us, which he knew. And, I must say, he always appreciated. He became a very good friend of mine, though we started out kind of crossed up.
I was going to say, he wasn't really in this circle, this tradition . . .
No, he was a sport, as they say in genetics.
I just want to close out this side of the tape by asking you what made you pick Fayetteville as a place to start out your career? You were in the Institute of Government, and you had obviously been attracted to government work.
There was no question in my mind that I intended to be governor when I came back here right after the war. Now you'll find some people (no, you won't find them because you won't be looking for them), but you could run across people who'd say, "I remember Terry talking to me when we were freshmen about being governor." That's simply not true. While it crossed my mind, I never once mentioned it to one single soul. The first person I ever mentioned it to was my wife.
When was that, much later?
No, that was before the war. But that's the only person. And then I thought about this thing all during the war, and I had my ups and downs on it. I would sometimes be lying back over there in a valley in France, the shells going off in the distance, and I said the hell with it. I'm not getting into politics when I get back. It's not worth it. I, of course, had seen a great deal of it by then. Then I would think, well, that's what I want to do. I clearly was determined to do it when I came back. I didn't want to work at the Institute of Government. I'd worked there before, and Albert Coates insisted that I stay there. And he's a hard man to resist. So for the year and a half I was there, it was just a constant maneuver for me to get out and him to keep me. Not that he wanted to keep me as much as he just didn't want to be defeated on even a minor issue. So I fully intended to be governor. As I left the Institute of Government, I was looking for a proper base. I picked one that was even better than I anticipated.
It was better for a number of reasons. I wanted one in the eastern part
of the state, which is my part of the state, where I thought I could
operate, and where I thought I knew the people, and where I thought you
had to have strong support to win. I could take care of the Piedmont,
but I had to have the real political people in the state. Furthermore,
they were my people, and I was comfortable with them. I looked at
Greensboro, I looked at Charlotte. I probably looked at a couple of
other towns in passing. I looked at Sanford, which is a right intriguing
thought that I would practice law in Sanford, but didn't. Then I looked
at Fayetteville, and maybe the fact that my uncle was postmaster, Bill
Shaw,
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Going back to this decision to run for governor. It seems without any kind of base at all, this was not inculcated in you by your parents, obviously. They had a normal interest in politics that we talked about, but . . .
It seemed to me that the governor of North Carolina is so many things,
and that you couldn't do much without him. I think in one place in But What About The People as I recall the way I wrote
it, that I became determined to run for governor when I was in the
Senate. Now I'd already made up my mind when I wanted to, but you had to
vascillate somewhat. It really was so demanding and challenging and so
all-consuming. And that's the trouble with politics in a way. I never
did want to devote my life to politics. Still, I wanted to be governor.
I wanted to be governor because there were a lot of things I thought the
governor could
But I could see by the time I was ready to leave the Institute of
Government how I could put it together. I talked a great deal with my
very close friend, Paul Thompson, who then was at Chapel Hill taking a
master's degree and probably was my closest friend in life. He died,
now, seven or eight years ago. He sort of grubstaked me. He loaned me
$500 to go to Fayetteville. You couldn't save any money at the Institute
of Government. It sounded like a lot of money, but paying off my loans
at Chapel Hill and other things, I didn't have any money. And I needed
enough to pay my rent and live a few months. Five hundred dollars was a
lot of money. But I just decided that's what I wanted to do, that I
Not Senator, not . . .
No, I really didn't want those jobs for several reasons. The more I saw them, the less I wanted them because I didn't want a political career. And I might say I haven't had one. I spent more time practicing law than any other one thing. I'm on the way, maybe, if I don't get unlucky, to equalling that period of time at Duke. But I certainly never intended to have a political career. I just sort of happened into some of the later things. I never saw myself as a judge, except briefly. Then I really didn't like that relatively inactive posture that you had to assume. I didn't see myself as a Senator in Washington putting up with all the petty things you have to put up with. I wanted to be governor. I wouldn't have minded being governor twice, just because you can hardly get all done that you think needs to be done in one time. And so Fayetteville played a role in that, my going to Fayetteville. I was looking, among other places, where can I practice law, and also where can I build a base to run for governor. I also knew that you ran in this state not really with any organization, but with your own personal organization. The one-party system had dictated that. I could see that Broughton had his organization, Umstead had his organization, in spite of the sometimes melding of various organizations through Max Gardner's influence. But by that time, Max Gardner was dead. You had Kerr Scott's rag-tag, branchhead boy organization that was forceful but very much minority.
What do you mean by branchhead?
That was his word. The branchhead boys, meaning that the boys that lived not in the towns but back up the branches, at the head of the branch, and it became a favorite expression of his, his branchhead boys.
Did he include you in that?
Well, it's a rather loose designation. No, he was wise enough to know he had to have the other influence to win. The votes aren't at the branchhead. But what there were, he got them because he championed the rural telephones—of course, rural electrification was pretty well moving along by then but not telephones—and particularly rural roads. You see, he built more rural roads than had ever been built in one four-year period anywhere in the country.
Was the Graham campaign the first campaign you actively worked in?
I was president of the Young Democrats. Oh, I was active in another
organization that you wouldn't have thought was political but did me a
lot of good politically. That was the National Guard. I was Captain in
the National Guard company at Fayetteville and consequently associated
with the Thirtieth Division all over the state. So the reason that was
brought to mind with the Frank Graham campaign, we were at summer camp
when Willis Smith died, and Frank Graham was ultimately appointed. We
were at summer camp when the Korean War started, and we all were so
certain that we were going since the Thirtieth Division was clearly the
best National Guard division in the country. Or certainly one of the two
or three at that time. So many of our people even paid deposits on
apartments at Columbia where we were sure we were going to
This was 1950, the Graham campaign.
Yes, but this would have been '49, wouldn't it, with the Korean thing? I'd have to go back and think a minute about the dates. But all of this happened about the same time. He was probably appointed in '49.
Right.
Well, I was then, in the meantime, president of the Young Democrats. The Young Democrats really aren't supposed to take part in . . .
In campaigns?
I said Willis Smith died. It wasn't Willis Smith; it was Broughton.
Right. I was going to correct you along that line.
Yes, yes.
Smith died two years later, after he won, right?
Yes, that's correct. But at that time is when Little was appointed and Scott run against him. No, I just said Willis had inadvertently . . .
There was a sort of plague of deaths among North Carolina office holders in that period.
In any event, I wasn't supposed to take part. Willis
What are some of your memories of that campaign? That seems to be one of
the formative events for many politicians, even people
By the time he was appointed, I was beginning to run in the upper levels of the Democratic party. I was president of Young Democrats. Scott had quickly let me know that he was supportive of the Young Democrats. In fact, I had met him a couple of times, but he didn't remember that. I met him at a football game at the Planetarium. I introduced myself and told him who I was. He sort of chuckled in acknowledging the Gordon matter, and said, "Well, it does a man good to get knocked down every now and then." Then he put me on the Ports Authority. That was an interesting group of people. I went to a fundraising dinner in New York. Spencer Love bought the table. From Burlington Mills, Everett Jordan was one of the Democratic guests there. Jonathan Daniels was, as I recall, the national committeeman at that time. I suppose Everett was the chairman of the party; Scott, and me, and a couple of other people, I don't remember who they were.
This was a Democratic fund-raising dinner?
Yes, it was one of these $1,000 a table things. Spencer had bought the table and given us the tickets, apparently. Anyhow, I was invited to go up there on the governor's plane. We sat in a suite, Jonathan Daniels, the governor, and me, and not Everett Jordan but a couple of other people, and I recommended that they get an assistant campaign manager and start putting some things together. And I recommended Bill Staton.
This was for which campaign?
Frank Graham's. So see, I was involved really from the very first. I got Bill Staton in there, who was my close associate in the Young Democrats, and he stayed throughout that campaign. Of course, he became a very, very close friend. We later got Jeff Johnson to be the campaign manager. He'd been Broughton's campaign manager. It was an interesting story how later he got on the Supreme Court over Scott's opposition, in spite of Scott's obligation to him. But that was just one of Scott's bungles. He didn't intend to do it that way. And they ran a good campaign. They just got caught up in that vicious race campaign, primarily centered in the second primary. Well, I learned a great deal out of that.
I started keeping a notebook of how to deal with the racist campaign. In fact, I kept that notebook in a bureau in my bedroom and everytime I'd have a little thought about how to gig somebody and get around the issue, I'd make a note of it. When I got in mine, at the beginning of the second primary, I went back through that book very carefully. I may have had twenty-five or thirty pages of notes in there. But I learned one thing, and that is, don't ever let them off the defensive. Frank Graham let them get off the defensive, he was just so nice and sweet. Well, we didn't. We gave them blow for blow, except, you know, we'd get on something else. I accused him, accurately, of supporting the Republican party national ticket. Well, it took a week for him to explain that.
This is Lake.
Yes.
Right.
But you know, that kind of thing, that you've got him on the defensive. There's no way you can answer the race issue. You had to keep him bouncing on other subjects.
How about the Communist . . .
He accused me . . . That was minor.
In Graham's campaign?
Minor.
I mean, here it was mostly the race.
I don't think the Communist thing scared a soul. They might have thought he was a little too liberal, but nobody thought he was Communist. Or only a damn fool thought he was a Communist or even Communist influenced. Though that was the period of Joe McCarthy, of course. But we took issue. Joe McCarthy was coming on. He really was more of an issue when Scott was running. Well, I have meandered on, so I'll let you get it back on whatever topic you wanted.
I was interested in how that campaign, what kind of impact it had on you, and obviously . . .
Well, it left me very bitter because I thought it was a vicious, dirty
campaign. I might say that I never thought that Willis Smith personally
was responsible for it. And that was another lesson that I learned, and
that was to keep charge of your own campaign. I personally thought and
think that Willis Smith's a very decent individual. He got dragged,
sucked into this. He really wasn't all that experienced in politics,
though he'd been Speaker of the House and a Kerr Scott
This was the
Oh hell no. He would deny, has denied it today, but one of the principal architects of that was Jessie Helms. And another principal architect was a young fellow named Daniels from Angier. I believe he's dead now. Anyhow, he was one of my Legionaire buddies. But the racism, they saw it as a winning issue. And they took full advantage of it. Smathers was beating Pepper at the time on pretty much the same sort of an assault. More Communism than black in Florida, but the race issue in northern Florida was just as evil as it was here. The only thing I'm saying is that I learned a lesson from both sides. One, don't give them any quarter; and second, don't let somebody else drag you into something you don't want to do. You'd better keep charge of your own issues. I really do think that that shortened Willis Smith's life. I could be wrong. But I think he was embarrassed by having been victimized by winning in that way.
Did Graham ever talk about it after . . . did you ever talk with him about that campaign afterwards? He wasn't really a politician. He must have been a politician to have done what he did at the University, but . . .
Well, he was too gentle and too considerate of other people. He never
expressed an unkind thought about Willis Smith to me, and I
Could you say that you learned anything from Graham directly as far as politics were concerned?
Well, I learned the most important lesson of all, that it was the purpose, and the issue, and the reason for being there that were important, not getting there, which is a very valuable lesson. In fact, if it were not for that, then I'd say politics would not be for me if you didn't think that when you got there, you could do something worthwhile in that you ought to try to get there in a way, an honorable way. Now I didn't do anything differently much from what Frank Graham did in the second primary except I did it more forcefully. I did it in a way that he was too gentle to have done. I didn't mind fighting back when Lake accused me of getting all the block vote. That was then a code word, the block vote, meaning that the blacks were voting for you unanimously; therefore, you weren't to be trusted. And that was about the way it turned out. Well, they accused him of getting the block vote. And I was ready for them.
Well, I'll tell you another little story that I doubt has ever been out. And I maybe ought to, since I don't know what'll come of this, it won't hurt to leave the county out.
Whatever you say, you have control over.
I understand. But in any event, at that time, it was
Which Johnson is this now?
Jeff Johnson, the campaign manager for Frank Graham. "Do you want the black vote for Graham, or do you want to split it up so that it won't hurt in the second primary?" This, at that time, was the most obvious black block in the state. He meditated for a while, and he said, "Well, let's shoot the works. Let's try to win in the first primary." Well, you know, they almost did. They got something like forty-eight or forty-nine percent. It was very, very close. They did, indeed, turn the block vote on him. So Lake turned the block vote on me. He said, "I got all the block vote." I said, "Nothing of the kind." I had seen to it that Seawell got the Durham vote. He got it all. And I was reading polls. I didn't have to guess. I knew I couldn't win in the first primary. Seawell had a certain appeal to the black votes. He had a certain appeal to the Watts Hills here because of Hodges. I just saw to it. I not only didn't lift my finger, but I told this same person that asked Jeff Johnson, "See that Seawell gets that vote. I don't want them." But he got about eighty-nine percent of it, or something like that. I got it all in Raleigh, and I got it all in Wilmington, and I got it all in Fayetteville, and I got it all everywhere else.
How about Winston? Does Winston have a machine?
Oh yes. I got it all in Winston. There isn't any question I got the black vote in the first primary because I'd been the only one really speaking to their problems.
But not in Durham.
I didn't want it. I didn't get it in Asheville either for a peculiar kind of, not a peculiar reason, but up there the sheriff and the city manager ran it. I carried that Buncombe County, but I didn't get the black vote. That's about all they could take away from me. And they really did take it away from me. They'd bought it, and they had controlled it. I say bought it in a legal sense of it. You know, if you hire the workers, you get the vote. And that's the way it was. Then in Statesville, there's a man named Churchill who's car salesman, a car dealer, a right well-t-do fellow. I don't know; it seems to me like it was a used-car operation. But anyhow, I'd known him, and he was very friendly to me. But he's also a racist. He'd decided to be for Lake. I lost that county. I'm bound to have lost the black vote because Churchill had the reputation of owning it. I hope his name was Churchill. I'll do somebody disservice if it wasn't. In any rate, so when he accused me of having the black vote, I says, not so. I got what I could, but Seawell got it in Durham, Larkins got it in Asheville, and Dr. Lake got it in Iredell County. Well, then it took him ten days to deny that. You know, I kept saying, well, he got the block vote too. Well, Frank Graham wouldn't have done that. That wasn't dishonest. It might have been sneaky. I think it was just aggressive defense of the position. It was, of course, a dishonest issue from the start to finish to talk about a block vote. In any event, I learned from Frank Graham not to be that nice on that particular issue.
Where there any other kinds of blocks that people could
Well, the union was a real detriment to the politician in this state. But I'd always spoken very kindly of unions, not because I thought it was any political advantage, in fact, I knew it was a political detriment. The communication workers did a tremendous job with Scott, including when we wanted a telephone line for some statewide radio broadcast. Nobody in the top command had to bother about it, but the workers saw to it that we got the A-grade line. We got the quality because Scott had been good to them or decent to them, which nobody else had ever been. Hodges made them a whipping boy. He tried to break unions with the power of the governor's office. Well, I hadn't and I'd been good to them and if they looked across the field, they didn't have any friend but me. The communications workers are all right because they're very quiet about it. They just go on about putting up posters and probably taking down opponents' posters since they got all these people out with the telephone companies.
How about unorganized
Well, nobody can deliver them. Then Millard Barbee was president of
A.F.L.-C.I.O., and he just was absolutely chomping at the bit to endorse
me. And I was trying as best I could to tell him, don't do me any
favors. You know, don't say anything. He finally did endorse me. I'm
satisfied it cost me more votes than it got me. I had no problem with
giving labor, organized labor, its proper place. I felt that the
unionization had been good for the country, let alone for workers.
As you said, you had to work quite mightily in that Cumberland County/Creek Mill precinct just to turn that around in the 1950nd primary. So that wasn't a vote that you could count on. You had to work at it.
Of course, they're most easily upset on the race issue in the early '60's. Now, I don't think that's so today. I think that they're much more relaxed about it today. But it was a real threat, and you can understand how. Well, in the Cumberland Mill section, I not only went to every house—it wasn't all that big—but I spent $30 on a driver.
You learned what not to do from Graham, but it seems to me that there's also an element which might go back to something out of your parents of wedding a sort of moral approach to politics or a moral approach to your work and politics. That element was definitely in Graham's approach, wasn't it?
Well, moral in the broader, philosophical sense of it. I've never had
much confidence in somebody that paraded their religion in a political
setting. In fact, I've always tried to shy away from it
You talk about the notebook that you kept. Actually, from what I know, you used that notebook before 1960 and must have used it a little bit or what you learned in the 1950 campaign in the 1954 . . .
Well, I really didn't. I'm not sure I kept keeping that notebook and . . .
Well, what you learned . . .
But certainly what I learned, and one of the most exciting little
political activities was the leaflet in the Kerr Scott campaign. You
might go back and read the News and Observer for that
three or four-day period, because even today with everything else
Ben Roney had traveled all over the east for campaigning, but he also had
alerted a great many of our friends—"The first leaflet you see, don't
assume we know it's out. Call us." So about Wednesday, we got a call.
Now, it could have been Tuesday, it could have been Thursday. But it was
before Saturday's election. We got a call that there's a package of
leaflets left at Cahoon's service station down here for so and so, and
it was left by the state purchasing director. And it is an endorsement
of Kerr Scott, printed out of the Winston-Salem paper with a picture of
a black that he'd appointed to the state school board, thanking him for
being the great friend of the blacks. Well, that was a phony thing from
start to finish. But what we did to offset it had to save the election.
We only won by 25,000 votes. That thing could have
Himself?
Oh yes, himself personally. Of course the paper didn't want to admit it, but we forced them to admit it. We threatened suit even. But they weren't long in realizing that they had played hell in taking a phony ad. Here it was supposed to be by the Citizens Black Committee of Winston-Salem or something like that, and there Kurfoos could personally do anything. Well, that of course helped our case.
How long did it take you to track that down? I mean, you have three days to work.
About three hours. Then that same night, we sent a man from Durham who
was in the labor union and who had some financial problems and needed
some help on a note or something—I didn't know about those details—but I
asked my man in Durham, "Who have you got that we can send to the Lennon
headquarters to get some leaflets?" So we sent this boy over there. And
this is so interesting because some people might consider it was a
little bit shifty, but I didn't. I thought it was fair game, and I
thought it was brilliantly executed, if I do say so. We sent this fellow
over to Abie Upchurch, who was the campaign director—I don't think he
was the manager but he was running it, I think, maybe as publicity
director, but whatever it was, he was running it. And soNews and Observer. We held the presses. That's how, by that
time, the contact we had with the News and Observer,
Jonathan held a press at least an hour until we could put that together.
This was Thursday night. This had to go into Friday . . .
When did you find that out, that this fellow had been, this fellow from Durham had been . . .
Oh no. I just called my friend and I said, "Get somebody to go to Abie and ask him for some of "them leaflets."
Oh, ok.
So see, now what we did, we were so afraid then, we didn't want that part of the story told quite then. We didn't want to divert attention. So we put him up in a hotel suite with Duke Parris, who was from Alamance County and one of Kerr Scott's drivers and workers, later clerk of the court over there. We put Duke in there to entertain him; I always said Duke was his jailer, but we didn't want the press to talk to him. We'd gotten this material, we'd given the statement, and we really had to center in now in two days on exactly what we wanted to do. So we kept this old boy up there and . . .
Who was this fellow?
I can't remember his name.
This fellow from the labor union in Durham.
Well, we later did him some favors in a decent kind of a way and helped him get . . . he was out of a job, among other things. All he did was go get the package.
Right.
You know, the package with the Abie Upchurch cards spoke for itself. Then we . . .
Any instructions?
Oh yes. It was just so clear that there wasn't any denying it. Then we
wired every Lennon county manager, that we would prosecute them if they
distributed it. We took an airplane in every area where they had been
distributed, and leafletted it with the charge that these people were
going to jail. We had the Lennon campaign people calling me: "I'm not
going to distribute them. I tell you I've got them, but you can be sure
that I'm going to burn them." And they damn well did in most places.
Then we wired the FBI and of course released all this to the press,
insisted on prosecution. We wired the postal authorities, and why was
this a violation of the postal . . . ? Oh, in the mail boxes, and
insisted on an investigation. The FBI made the mistake of wiring me back
that they were investigating it. So Saturday morning, the day of the
election, the headline in eastern North Carolina, and I don't know about
the other papers: "FBI Investigating Lennon Headquarters," is the
headline on election day. Now on Friday afternoon, Phil Ellis, noted
radio commentator who later died, went on the air with a paid political
broadcast in the form of a news story. Of course, it had
God. That's a really dirty trick, which I'm sure dirty tricks go on all the time.
That was a twenty-four a day for about two or three days there. I think it was Thursday night, Wednesday or Thursday night, that we just stayed on top of that thing constantly.
I was going to ask, do you get any sleep during a like that?
You don't want any. You couldn't sleep if you lay down. I wasn't sleeping at 2:00 Sunday morning when they were still counting votes. You know, you didn't want any.
You just forget about that as a . . .
You don't forget about it. You never think about it.
How could you describe Kerr Scott and his influence on you? What did you
learn from him? It sounds like you had a much different
People gave me a great deal of credit for keeping Kerr Scott calm and
collected and made no outrageous statements during the whole campaign.
See, he was likely to blow off for some good cause, but nevertheless, in
a way that offended a great many people. We wanted to cool all of that.
So he agreed that he wouldn't say anything that we didn't write out. It
got a little dull, but that was all right. The object was to win, not to
entertain the public. We'd entertain them later. Now, I'm really not
entitled to that credit because Kerr Scott was a highly intelligent
person. When he decided what his strategy would be, he saw to it that it
was. Lennon released his income tax form, and it was a very damaging
thing. It showed he was practicing law and making about $4,000 a year.
All the lawyers said, "That dumb fellow is our Senator? He can't make
but $4,000 a year practicing law." Well I said no, we're not going to
release any income tax. Income tax people check that, and I'm not going
to get off on a side issue. But Scott was afraid I was. The pressure was
building up by the press. Of course, Lennon by that time was frantic to
get our income tax released because his had backfired so on him. Well, I
was determined we weren't going to do it. But he was not sure. He said,
"I just want to be sure that you don't open your mouth and say we're
going to do it because I'm not going to do it." I said, "Don't you worry
about that." It was not that I kept his mouth shut, he knew what he was
doing and he knew he had to cool it, and he did. He delivered all of his
speeches from
Yes, yes.
It might have ended up costing you.
It didn't cost anything.
Well, right. You'd gotten contributors.
He had several on his farm. There was something else that they had really assaulted us on. I said, "Redwine's written an answer to that." He said, "I thought we weren't answering anything." I said, "That's why I said put it in the bottom bureau drawer." But I at least ran it by him. I've forgotten what it was, but it was something that was certainly borderlines whether or not it ought to be answered. We figured that Scott had a good record, that we wouldn't let them get us into quibbling arguments . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
Are the things that you learned from someone like Graham or Scott mostly about running for office? How about politics itself? I'm trying to make a distinction between actual gaining of office, which is obviously a very time-consuming proposition and the actual . . .
I think that by the time I ran for governor, I knew pretty much what I
wanted to do as governor. I wasn't like, I think Holshouser, caught
unawares. I've said that in a kindly way, but Holshouser didn't expect
to be governor, and consequently, didn't know what to do when he got to
be governor. Now there have been differing degrees of that on the part
of other people. They get in there and start scrambling around for what
they're going to do. I pretty well knew what I was going to do. I knew
what I wanted to do. I'd spent a lot of time thinking about it for ten
years. I had written a number of statements by hand. I doubt if I ever
had a person write a position paper for me. Certainly I got some papers
sent in by people who were knowledgeable in water resources and things
to get their thinking. But I had reasonably well plotted out what I
thought this state ought to try to do and had defined pretty much what I
thought I could do about it. As I got into it and things developed, we
not only might have taken a different tack on achieving something, but
we thought of a great many other things we hadn't thought of before. In
fact, at the end of my first year, in the fall of my first year,
certainly in the winter of the second year, I began calling groups of
people in and saying in effect, "All right. We've just about done
every-thing we promised to do. We've got everything we were going to do
done. What are we going to do for the next three years? Let's start
thinking about it." And we did. And we did a lot of things, including
How about in terms of style? It seems that Graham and Scott were very opposite kind of people. Did you try to incorporate elements of both . . .
No, I really didn't. I never have tried to use anybody else's style.
Maybe I should have, but I've always just tried to be myself. I suppose
at times that's come across rather dull. But in any event, I never did
try to look like Kerr Scott or talk like Kerr Scott or speak in such
general terms as Frank Graham or mimic John Kennedy or Franklin
Roosevelt. You can't remember when politicians were mimicking
So no one considered you a protege of anyone else.
Well, I would think a good many people, especially Scott's friends, would have seen me as a protege of Scott. Other people, and I would to some extent, adhere to that. The point is that he died before I ran for governor, and consequently, that concept was somewhat muted for that reason. I wouldn't have minded being considered a protege of Scott or Frank Graham, and a good many people would think that I was a protege of Frank Graham's. To some extent, that's true except in neither case did they pick me out and run me. So if that's what a protege means . . .
Right, right. Going to your years at State Senate, that was a very conscious choice on your part in '53 to run for the State Senate as a . . .
Stepping stone, as they say.
You ran twice for State Senate.
Once.
Once—'53 through '55.
Very luckily.
Why?
You couldn't run but once at that time. A very peculiar arrangement that
came up in the 20's and they incorporated into the general statutes,
that a district, and there were perhaps let's
How did you know you were doing well? I mean, what kind of things did you get involved in there that were helpful to you?
I just made strong friendships. I got along extremely well. I attacked the governor's program two or three times, and I was always on solid ground. I always lost, but at least . . .
Which indicates that you were right.
Yes. But I made my points, and I became an independent person. I wasn't
anybody's boy. I was for the governor, against the governor, on the
basis of what I thought was correct. I voted against the total
appropriations bill because I thought they'd brought it in in a shoddy
way; and I accused the sub-committee chairman of doing so, Bill
Copeland, whom I later made my legislative assistant. I figured if he
could do that to me when I was senator, he could do it to them when I
was governor. No, he was a very skillful person, but they didn't intend
the Senate to debate the items of the bill. It would have been there
In any event, I felt that I'd come out of that with a good name and a good record, and I had appeared as an individual and not just as another name. I'd spoken on four or five principal things that I thought were worthy of my championing, and I hadn't hesitated to assert myself, which you have to do. So I was reasonably well satisfied that in terms of establishing myself at that level, I had about done all I was going to do anyhow.
What was your impression of the state government scene in Raleigh? Did your experience there change any of the impressions . . .
Not particularly because I had been fairly close in my observation of
that for a good while. I was stymied a little by the committee system,
though that was broken up somewhat. You may or may not
Did you come into contact with the influence of lobbyists in Raleigh?
Oh yes. Oh, of course.
What kind of influence did they have?
Well, kind of a cozy fellowship that didn't do a whole lot of harm except
sort of keep the handbrakes on all the time. The truckers worked closely
with the telephone lobbyists, and across the board they supported one
another. There wasn't a whole lot of special-interest legislation. The
chiropractors wanted some kind of recognition, and the optometrists
wanted something maybe. They had special people in there
pushing—probably should have had. They were probably pushing against the
older establishments. The truckers were the most blatant. But I don't
recall in that year any big issues that they were working on. They
entertained most lavishly. I didn't find it particularly evil, to sum it
all up. I never found the first suggestion of dishonesty. If
Did you you have any other kinds of, at this point—I don't know if you would have time for it, but beside your law firm and your political activity—any other kinds of activities in between elections, let's say, and in between . . .
Not particularly. I was a Commander of the National Guard, which took a fair amount of time. I was active in virtually every civic enterprise. I was president of the American Red Cross, I was the first chairman of the United Fund in Fayetteville, and I did my duty in all those kinds of things; the Salvation Army, the YMCA, I think there was nothing I didn't participate in.
No business, or anything like that.
No.
You didn't have time to go into anything like that.
How about the influence of the governor? Did it shape your impressions of what the governor could do after . . .
Just to convince me that the governor could do anything decent he wanted to do.
In that time as state senator?
Yes. Well, I already had that opinion.
Right. This did nothing to dissuade you.
I already had my opinion that the people of this state would follow the governor anytime he took them off in the right direction. That's the tragedy of wasting four years with Holshouser with the rather inadequate leadership of Scott. Not bad again, but not really up to the capacity of what he could have done. And the same of Moore. All of those governors were good governors. I don't hold Holshouser to be a bad governor, but none of them used the resources of that office as they could have used them.
That's interesting to hear you say that because the common impression of the North Carolina governship is one of a sort of transient kind of power.
Well, they say it's a weak governorship for three reasons, and one of
them's valid, and the other two don't amount to anything. He doesn't
have the veto. Well, I never needed it but once, and that was when the
Legislature during the closing days had passed the speaker ban bill with
totally illegal procedures. They passed it with suspension
Furthermore, the governor had tremendous influence on those people if he used it right, and I don't mean improper influence. But they all want something, and not for themselves, but they have the pressures on them to do the favors that are perfectly legitimate, just a kind of personal relationship. The same kind of relationship that I have with the alumni of this institution. I'm not doing anything unwarranted if I give special attention to an alumnus. Well, if a legislator is representing his county and feels very strongly that the Bethel Church ought to have its road to the graveyard paved, the governor's the only one that can do that easily; at least, if the governor wants to do it he can do it.
Does that build up a kind of loyalty?
Well, it's a sense of team. You know, it's good to be on the governor's team if there's a good governor.
You can't please everybody, but obviously you've got to make some . . .
Well, you sure can please most of them, you know, without doing any damage to the system. In fact, I think that kind of team play and the party leadership, I think that's one of Hodges' problems. He had a difficult time in treating the legislature and the party people as his co-workers. I think we got a lot of things in this state that never would have been done if we hadn't developed that kind of relationship. I've never thought the executive ought to cast himself in the role of the opponent of the legislature because it's not necessary.
You said there were three things that were considered limitations. Let's make sure we covered those. One was the . . .
Yes, what was the third?
After the veto power, the second was not being able to succeed yourself, and the third thing, I don't know if we went into that or not.
The fact that the Council of State is elected independently. Thus the Governor doesn't have much to do directly with agriculture, insurance, labor or the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Let me ask you one last question, and I think we should break. When you
finished your Senate term in '55, was there any thought of
Wait a minute; you'd better get your dates straight. I served in the 1953 session and managed Scott's senatorial campaign in 1955.
Now was there any thought . . . there was going to be a governors race coming up the next year. Was there any thought . . .
Oh yes. I certainly did think about it because Umstead had died, and
Hodges was in there.
What was the nature of this deal?
I don't know, I don't know.
That he would openly get their support?
Well, Henry agreed to withdraw as a candidate. He had not announced, but we'd been to rallies all over the state. I was putting the old Kerr Scott people together for him. That's what they'd asked me to do, and I was doing my best to do it. I wasn't all that fond of Hodges' philosophy, though again, I never doubted his character and his ability. So I came all around running against him after that. I was irritated with the Jordans. I suppose I thought I ought to have been in on the conversation since I'd been the most vocal person and I was, for all practical purposes, his unofficial campaign manager. I'd been putting the team together. I'm not sure that's what irritated me. It might have broader than that. Whatever it was, I was thinking about running against Hodges up to the filing date.
The point of the question, I guess, is that back whenever it was that you thought about being governor for the first time, did you ever have a timetable? Did you ever say, well, by this date, I should be
Oh yes. I would have figured '56 or '60; not that firm, but then when Hodges became governor, then you would talk about running against an incumbent, which is something different. I was backing off a little. I was fairly well convinced that he could be defeated. I gave some thought to running for lieutenant governor and that looked to me like kind of an empty gesture, and maybe more damaging than helpful. And I dismissed that. On the last day of filing, my law partner, Dick Phillips, who was later dean of the law school at Chapel Hill, and I drove up to Raleigh. We went by the Carolina Hotel, which was the place we'd had our Scott headquarters, cashed a check for, as I recall, $200, or whatever the filing fee was, and we were still debating whether to run against Hodges and the problems of it. I had some misgivings that I wasn't ready to be governor, that I wasn't quite ready . . .
You weren't even forty years old.
Well, I wasn't ready in terms of my grasp of the political situation as well as that, but I felt that Hodges probably ought to be defeated. Still I wasn't that determined. But I had the cash in my pocket and the closing hour was 12:00, and this is about 11:40. I just said, "Let's just talk about it on the way up there, and if we decide not to do it, we'll get us a hamburger and come back home. But in the meantime, if we're going to do it, let's be in a position to do it." And of course, the last-minute surprise would have been dramatic. I would have started off with a good momentum just by challenging an incumbent.
Had anyone declared . . .
Nobody of any importance. It seems to me like some
That's all right.
But anyhow, no one of any consequence.
So it would have been a dramatic . . .
I think it would have, especially for a relatively young Democrat. Kerr Scott, gosh, I can't remember. Kerr Scott was dead by then, wasn't he? Yes, of course he was. No, he wasn't. No, he died in '57. That's right, that's right. I'd been up there and talked to him about it. It seems to me that Ben Roney, and the governor, and others were sort of urging me to do it, and that they thought we could put it together. So that entered into it. That was of course '56.
By the governor, you mean Kerr Scott.
Yes, Scott.
Well, this is a kind of funny little turn because I was about decided we
shouldn't do it. I said, "Let's walk on over to the elections office,"
which was in the agriculture building, I believe. So we were parked over
there, and I said, "If the Lord doesn't intervene between the time I get
there, I'm going to file." Well, the Lord intervened because here came
the agent of the Lord around the corner, Dr. L. Stacy Weaver. And if the
Lord ever had an agent, it was L. Stacy Weaver. He had just become
president of Methodist College or was in the process of becoming where I
was the chairman. I was chief promoter of Stacy Weaver coming on, so he
delayed me until the 12:00 bell rang.
You mean just by chatting with Weaver, even with this on your mind, you decided to just let things happen as they . . . ?
Not really. It has become apocryphal because Dick and I told it so often, and it got a little firmer with each telling. As I said, I was so doubtful about running anyhow because it didn't seem quite right to me. I really didn't feel quite ready. I think Hodges might have been defeated because he didn't have any political force, and he'd been very arrogant in his dealings with a great many people. But he was right on the race issue, and that was another thing that bothered me, that I didn't want to run against him and upset that. You know, there were many, many things. I'd been thinking about this for a month. But I just said, "Now just so we won't be sitting down here in Fayetteville as 11:00 saying, ‘By golly, we ought to have taken the gamble,’" Dick being one of my closest advisors I said, "Let's just ride up there, talk about it, and then we'll do what needs to be done." Well, I didn't much think we were going to file, but since I had put it if the Lord doesn't intervene and Stacy walked around the corner, we always thought that was a good signal. But that didn't have anything to do with it. We would not have filed anyhow. I don't really believe in signs and omens.
Let's break here.
END OF INTERVIEW