<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition.

<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition. Changes in North Carolina Politics and Higher Education since 1960 Sanford, Terry, interviewee Interview conducted by Glass, Brent Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview. Text encoded by Mike Millner Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers Southern Folklife Collection First edition, 2006 292 Kb The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2006.

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Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History Program Collection (A-0328-2) Brent Glass 373 Mb Chapel Hill, N. C. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 20-21 August 1976 Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History Program Collection (A-0328-2) Terry Sanford 93 p. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 20-21 August 1976 Interview conducted on August 20 and 21, 1976, by Brent Glass; recorded in Durham, North Carolina. Transcribed by Joe Jaros. Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Series A. Southern Politics, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Original transcript on deposit at the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Library of Congress Subject Headings Documenting the American South Topics English Politics and Social Issues North Carolina 2006-00-00, Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition. 2006-12-31, Mike Millner finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing. Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Conducted by Brent Glass

Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library

Citation of this interview should be as follows: “Interview A-0328-2, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill”

Terry Sanford served as the governor of North Carolina from 1961 to 1965 and also as a Democratic U.S. Senator from 1986 to 1993. This interview is the second of two; it covers his political activities since 1960. It starts with his description of how he assembled a campaign team and raised funds to run for governor in 1960. He also explains how he made decisions as governor regarding food tax, tobacco tax, and civil rights. He continued to play a role in state politics after the end of his term, though he never wanted to be a career politician. Sanford participated in national Democratic politics before 1960, and he tells the story of his contributions to the National Democratic Convention in 1960, including his eventual support for John F. Kennedy's presidential nomination. Sanford decided to run for president in 1972 and 1976, but he did not succeed. Instead, he accepted the presidency of Duke University. While discussing that position, he describes changes in higher education in North Carolina since 1964. He also mentions how the role of media in politics has changed campaigns. He ends the interview by explaining why he believes that progress in North Carolina has failed since 1964.

Short Abstract

Terry Sanford was a North Carolina governor and Democratic U.S. Senator. This interview describes his political career since 1960, including his unsuccessful presidential run and his term as president of Duke University.

Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Interview Participants TERRY SANFORD, interviewee BRENT GLASS, interviewer [TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

BRENT GLASS:

The following is an interview with Terry Sanford conducted on August 20, 1976. The interviewer is Brent Glass. The interview takes place at Mr. Sanford's home on Pinecrest Road in Durham, North Carolina. The interview is on occasion, interrupted by visitors and telephone calls. I thought that by today, we had almost come up to the point where we had gotten you elected governor in 1960 and just one or two more questions about that campaign. First of all, how did you go about assembling a team to run the campaign?

TERRY SANFORD:

I didn't do it as well as Bert Bennett put together a team for Jim Hunt this time, because we didn't know as much as we know now. I had been gathering friends from around the state for a long period of time, not necessarily with any political purposes, but simply in various organizations and then when after the war, I pretty firmly determined that I would run, I began to try to keep an account of them in a more orderly way. So, the idea was, to some extent going back to our experience campaigning in Chapel Hill where we attempted to get a key person in each dormitory and then two or three key people around town. We called them that, "keys." I didn't get too heavily involved in politics at Chapel Hill but I was probably more engaged than the average student. So, in Scott's campaign, I attempted to develop that kind of a key, using primarily his people from the time when he was in the governor's office, but realizing also that one of the reasons he got me in the campaign was to bring in some younger and additional people that he hadn't been able to reach. So, again we used a key system of a dozen or so people who helped us in each county. But obviously, we couldn't count on them to get the people in each county, we had to get them, too. So, I would guess that my friends county by county, where we wanted a good organization in each county, were spreading out there into precincts. Theoretically, you would like to have a little committee in every precinct and in large precincts, you would like to have larger committees. So, my friends who helped in a campaign came from a number of sources. Basically, friends who were classmates or close-by classmates at Chapel Hill. Now, not all of them were for me. I can think of two or three notable exceptions that very much weren't for me, but most of them were for me. So, that would . . . for example, meaning Henry and Marie Colton in Buncombe County and then Bruce Elmore in Buncombe County would fall into a different category. He had been more active in politics whereas the Coltons had not at that time, but I had been in school with both of them. Bruce Elmore was more politically active and I had known him as a Young Democrat. I just use those two for example. In Charlotte, Paul Yountz, Colonel, later General Yountz, very active in the American Legion and that's where I knew him. He is a most powerful politician in Mecklenburg County and was largely responsible for my putting a very effective team together. Another person there was Senator Spencer Bell. Senator Spencer Bell had been one of the leaders of the North Carolina Bar and I got to know him when I supported the early efforts to reform the judicial system and I was active in that and he became interested in me and so when I started campaigning, he helped put together his part of the organization. He happened to also be an ally of Colonel Yountz. But out of the American Legion, out of such activities in the Bar, out of old school friends, out of Young Democrats that I have mentioned . . . now, in addition to that, I had been active in the National Guard and the National Guard is not a political organization but it contains to many people who have an active interest in politics. The general at that time, Claude Bowers, became my campaign manager in his county, just for example. In Wilmington, Colonel Hall, who had been a battalion commander in the North Carolina National Guard became one of my key people there. Sy Hall became my county manager in New Hanover County and he was a classmate of mine at Chapel Hill and law school as well as elsewhere. I had a number of people whom I had gotten to know because they were lawyers. I mentioned Spencer Bell because of a particular project, but there would be others who came to be friends just out of maybe practicing law occasionally. So, there might be several dozen of those around the state. Then, I was very active in the Jaycees. While I don't think the Jaycee organization is too good as a political base and it's not supposed to be, a great many of the leaders in the Jaycees aren't very good at politics, but I can think of a number of places where I picked up a supporter because of my association in the Junior Chamber of Commerce around the state. Then, I ran for president of the Young Democrats and I had all those connections. Now, take all of those people, many of whom I knew or had in the card index prior to Scott's campaign, then superimpose on that, or the other way around, the Scott organization, what he called "The Branch Head Boys." They were people, by and large, that I would not have been involved with. They were people that I might have had some difficulty in reaching. They particularly were valuable to have on my side when racism became a big thing in the campaign, because they were out in the rural areas where they, by being for me, would dispel a great many of those fears. Then, you've got to remember that I was in the legislature and while fellow legislators aren't very good in campaigning for you because they've got their own local races, still I can think of some notable exceptions where former legislators came very strongly to my support. So, just over a period of years, you accumulated a great many people and then putting them together in an organization that is political is another matter, but the hard thing is not that. The hard thing is acquiring them in the first place. You don't that accidentally and you don't really do it by design, because I don't think that I could have at all set out to have made those people friends purely for political reasons. I just made them friends over a period of time and then when I did decide finally to get into politics, so many of them joined with me.

BRENT GLASS:

In the process of just working on various problems?

TERRY SANFORD:

And in various organizations.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. Do you think that is still pretty much the formula for success in North Carolina? Do you think that's what Jim Hunt . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I think that Hunt has illustrated that. He didn't have anything like the wide range of activities that I did, for lots of reasons. For one, he's younger and he simply hasn't been engaged in that many organizations, but he's gone at it a little bit differently. He's gone at it now for the past six years and it's been campaigning for office and being in office, which gives him a kind of a political base that serves a good purpose but one that I didn't have. So, he was very diligently moving county by county and because Bert Bennett was his chief key operator, he got into a great many of the same people who had helped me and helped Richardson Preyor and had been in campaigns that we have been involved in and in addition to that, he of course, has developed a wide range of friends on his own. He went to North Carolina State where he was very active in politics, including incidentally, my campaign. He has been active in the Young Democrats and the Democratic Party, having a good deal to do with the reform rules of the Democratic Party, so again, he was ranging around. He, more than I, moved from a political base. I, more than he, moved from what might be called a civic enterprise base, but it all comes back to knowing people who in a crunch are ready to go to work in a political campaign.

BRENT GLASS:

How about fund raising? How do you address yourself to that? It doesn't seem to me that you really had much in the way of . . . well, what kinds of contacts did you have?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we didn't have any big money people and we really weren't trying to get any. I had a very good fund raiser, Paul Thompson from Fayetteville, who is now dead. He was a classmate of mine and probably my closest friend over a long period of years, certainly my closest friend in that period of time until he died. He just had a way of going out and seeing people in a community and getting an old friend. We hadn't seen Skipper Bowles for a long time, so Paul went to see Skipper's older brother, John, who was a former roommate of mine and John, Paul Thompson and I worked together in the dining hall and Skipper was the younger brother, although we knew him . . . but Paul called on Skipper and over a period of months, we would get people together and get a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there and maybe one or two, very few, thousand dollar contributions. So, by the time you put together a great many communities, you put together enough money to get going in the initial stages. Later on, we rather drastically changed the approach to fund raising that's been used effectively by every campaign since then. The old way of raising money was for somebody like Bob Haines, who was chairman of the board of Wachovia, to raise a substantial sum of money. Now, in those days, a substantial sum of money would be anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars. That wouldn't get a campaign doing much in this day of the media campaign, and then they would send a few thousand dollars to this county and a few hundred to that and they would hire local workers or spend that money locally. Well, I didn't like that for a number of reasons. I didn't like the idea of paid precinct workers. It seemed to me that if you spent so much money to carry a box, as the expression was, that that was a very potentially corrupting situation and I wanted to get away from it and we all but got away from it. We did not eliminate it entirely, but with a few exceptions, we could change the system . . .

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

BRENT GLASS:

When you say in the old days, how far back do you mean?

TERRY SANFORD:

I mean when I was watching politics in the thirties to when Luther Hodges ran, that span. So, what we did, after we picked the county managers, we said, "All right, you've got a quota. We've taken the $150,000 that we need statewide and we divided it on a formula based on per capital income and population . . . ", well, as a very rough rule of thumb, that totaled to about 250,000 probably, knowing that we wouldn't be 100%, and we said, "This is your quota. You've got to send it into state headquarters and you've got to get it up locally." Well, they received that approach very enthusiastically and that's the way that we raised most of our money.

BRENT GLASS:

You mean that you would match what they raised?

TERRY SANFORD:

Matched nothing. We got all our money from them. If they needed3,000 locally, and we had put the quota of 1500 on them, they had to raise 4500 locally. Now, the great advantage of that was that never did you have to appeal to the special interests. You didn't have then the same statutory limitations on a single contribution you have now, and it would have been possible to get 25,000 from somebody and you would have been heavily obligated. We weren't. Or it would have been possible that even if someone had gotten up $25,000 you would have been heavily obligated and we weren't. I have observed that most campaigns that have followed our quota approach since then, I think it's a very good change, so we are not sending any money out to be spent in the precincts.

BRENT GLASS:

I was planning to ask you to comment on this later, but I might as well as you now. When you were first getting started in politics in the late forties, V.O. Key's book, Southern Politics came out and among the things that he said about North Carolina was that, "industrialization has created a financial and business elite whose influence prevails in North Carolina's political and economic life. A sympathetic respect for the problems of corporate capital and of large employers permeates the state's politics and government. For half a century, an economic oligarchy has held sway." Was that true when you were . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, I think that was fairly accurate. I think that oligarchy opposed Kerr Scott for example, and he was probably the first one to beat that group. It's not that they always picked a candidate and backed him, but usually, of three or four candidates, the ones to emerge would be sympathetic towards that, which wasn't all bad. Key doesn't even suggest that it's all bad, but it could be all bad and I think we saw that breaking down from Scott on. Hodges just naturally . . . he didn't cater to that crowd, he was one of them. So, he had no problem with that group, but Hodges's problem was with the working politician who didn't feel that he understood and appreciated the person who worked in the political structure. I didn't have any trouble with those people but I didn't get any unusual support. It surprised a great many people when Charlie Cannon of Cannon Mills announced that he was for me, or I might say, when I announced that he was for me.

BRENT GLASS:

Did it surprise you?

TERRY SANFORD:

Not really. Well, it's an interesting thing. I never did know Mr. Cannon. I'm not even sure I'd ever met him. If I had, it was very casually. So, he sent for me maybe a year before our campaign started, although I was obviously moving around the state campaigning. Well, it wasn't that long before, but it was sometime before I announced. And as the head of one of the two major textile industries, the other being Burlington . . . Spencer Love, incidentally, was for me, not because of this so much as because we had worked together on some University of North Carolina matters and he was for me on personal reasons. If he gave us any substantial money, I'm not aware of it, but he gave us a kind word here and there. I went to see Mr. Cannon in his office in Kannapolis and he wanted to talk about three things. He was very much concerned about the level of health care in the state. For some reason, he had a great personal affection for the State Highway Patrol, and incidentally, I had started the first State Highway Patrol training school, which is not especially a political asset but it served some very helpful purposes from time to time to have all of those people in a particular generation having come through my training courses at the Institute of Government, but he knew about that and that impressed him. Then, he was concerned with the Workmen's Compensation Reserve, not that it be stacked one way or the other, but that it simply be kept fiscally sound. Well, I was somewhat surprised that these were the only three topics he chose to discuss and not only surprised, but impressed. The only thing that could even approach a special interest would be the Workmen's Compensation and he didn't approach that from how much was paid or anything except that it ought to be handled in a sound way fiscally, as some states were not doing. Some states were depleting the reserves and that was his point. Hardly a special interest but the closest thing to it. And Paul Thompson and I went back up there some months later thinking we would get some money and he did give Paul a little money and when we got out after a little while, we looked at it and it was five hundred dollars, which of course we duly reported. But that wasn't very much money. He probably thought it was a lot of money, which again was interesting.

BRENT GLASS:

Do you think that's the greatest extent he ever got involved in a campaign, to your knowledge?

TERRY SANFORD:

I have no way of knowing and he may very well in times past. He was always very much concerned with politics and government and in spite of some of the criticism of Nader and others that were heaped on him later, he was just a truly outstanding citizen. I came to know him later and of some of the things he did, including in effect financing the state during the depth of the Depression. Temporarily, when the state couldn't borrow money, he borrowed money for the state. So, I later reciprocated by making it possible for him to go in and out of the White House to talk to the President's domestic advisor almost at will. I don't know . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Who was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, I can't think of his name right this second, but he was the person assigned by Kennedy to handle the domestic affairs that the White House was concerned with . . . well, Mr. Cannon was very much concerned with the two-price cotton system and the lack of any kind of restraints on imports, a fairly complicated matter of the textile industry at that time and I don't know but what he did them more good than they did him. Because he certainly was speaking from fifty years of experience in the business. In any event, that's all he got out of help in me. Oh, he might have occasionally recommended someone for the Medical Care Commission or something, I don't know about that, but he never made any demands on me and in effect, I put him in the White House to help me, because the problem of the textile industry was mine as governor and I made that contact for him to confer with these people because I felt the need.

BRENT GLASS:

How about the tobacco industry?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I was given an opportunity by the then personnel director of R. J. Reynolds, who was a friend of mine, to meet with the chairman of the board and the president and the top flight people on the, as I recall, seventeenth floor of the RJR Building. They asked me if I would pledge to be against a tobacco tax, after asking me a lot of other questions that I had answered satisfactorily.

BRENT GLASS:

This is before the election?

TERRY SANFORD:

It was while I was campaigning. And I wouldn't make that promise. I told them that I was against all taxes but that if we were going to have the right kind of an educational system, we had to have a proper tax base and everybody knew that North Carolina didn't have a proper tax base and so I couldn't possibly get committed to be against any particular tax until we knew what the problems were, that I didn't know whether a tobacco tax would be appropriate. I certainly wouldn't promise to have one but neither would I promise not to have one and the only promise I would make was that before recommending a tobacco tax I would give them a chance to come and talk me out of it. I didn't get any support from them.

BRENT GLASS:

How do you react to the news this past spring, I guess it was, about Mr. Wade?

TERRY SANFORD:

I thought that was just a very shameful corporate performance, to try to make a whipping boy out of a person that obviously didn't make the basic decision and to protect the hierarchy, which is what they did. In the first place, that's a multi-billion dollar corporation that we are talking about and it was less than $100,000. They ought to simply have said, "we in the past, as others, had a slush fund and we are not going to do it anymore." As I tried to explain to some of the students that raised questions here, it's not really a question of being immoral as much as being technically illegal. It's technically legal, for example, in several states to make corporate contributions. In most states, it's not technically legal and so what they did was by a devious means to put money in a slush fund. How wrong that was, it obviously wasn't right, but to attempt to disgrace a person that had spent his whole life in the corporation because he was taking orders from the chairman of the board, struck me as being far more improper than the original sin of having a slush fund. I didn't get any of the slush fund, I might say, but a great many corporations operated that way then. It was the accepted practice to find a way within the law to give money away. Well, it turned out obviously that they got a little careless and it wasn't quite within the law in the sense that they might coerce corporate officials to make contributions to the slush fund or whatever device they used. Or maybe they gave them a bonus and let them put the bonus in the slush fund. In any event, it wasn't right, but most corporations, I think, said, "All right, we made that mistake." Some major corporations have been way up in the millions. I just thought they got on a kind of a moral high horse that wasn't justified, but that's not really a part of history.

BRENT GLASS:

Just to follow up on what Key had to say, and then we can leave the subject for other things, he's talking about the economic oligarchy and he said, "The effectiveness of the oligarchy's control has been achieved through the elevation to office of persons fundamentally in harmony with its viewpoint. It's interests, which are often the interests of the state are served without prompting." In your experience, has this . . . it sounds like this is sort of an implicit kind of thing, not an overt kind of . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

One thing, maybe now as historians look back, this country has let political rhetoric overwhelm good common sense. I think North Carolina did not do that and at times, North Carolina probably had the leadership that was too conservative or too pro-business or too anti-labor. I think in fairness to . . . well, I'll say first of all that I think Governor Hodges was one of the best governors that the state has had, but at the same time, he was anti-labor, I think, to a degree that didn't serve the state well. He attempted . . . well, he did bust the union at the Henderson Mills and it couldn't have been done without him and he took an extremely harsh view of things of that kind. He gave very broad support to the so-called Right to Work Law in this state. So, there are excesses in the support of business but after all, North Carolina needed the business and it needed sound business and it needed business that could create productive jobs. So, most governors have attempted to promote that, but I think they promoted it within reason.

BRENT GLASS:

How does the absence of a significant organized labor force in North Carolina effect politics?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, if you wanted to be half way fair, or certainly if you wanted to be fair to organized labor as such, it cost you politically. It cost me politically to be known as a person that thought labor unions were all right, let alone not being an advocate of it one way or the other. I just simply thought that the labor union movement in this country had been very beneficial to the whole economy and for North Carolina too, indirectly because of the assistance of labor unions. Even the Burlington and Cannon Mills people would admit that they were keeping ahead of the unions in what they were doing. So, we benefited from the union movement. I attempted to be fair and always was and have no regrets, but I don't doubt that it cost me votes, especially in the hosiery business and to some extent, the small furniture business in the High Point-Thomasville area. There happened to be a fellow over there that ran a regular crusade against me because I was pro-labor, he said, and he was in charge of the kind of strong arm effort to keep labor out of that area.

BRENT GLASS:

Who was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, I can't think of his name. It's a very peculiar name . . .

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

BRENT GLASS:

Once you won the election and you were sworn in as governor, do you remember your thoughts the day of the inauguration? What was running through your mind at that moment?

TERRY SANFORD:

[laughter]

BRENT GLASS:

The reason that I'm asking, you once commented about that or I once saw something that you wrote where you gestured to some thoughts that you had had on entering office and I was just wondering if you would want to follow up on that.

TERRY SANFORD:

No, I don't remember precisely. I remember that I had to think a great thought as the Chief Justice completed the oath of office and the great thought that came across my mind aimsly was that "now, Margaret Rose will get the governor's widow's pension," which I think, was two hundred dollars a month. I laughed, but I pretty well knew what I wanted to do. I pretty well was sure of winning after it got going. I wasn't surprised by the fact that I was being sworn in and I was reasonably well set to get on with what I thought needed to be done. So, I don't mean that I was not excited by the fact that had taken place, I was. I should have been and it was a great honor, whatever else it was. But at the same time, you know, I wasn't giggling.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. So, you were mentally prepared for that moment. I thought to talk a little bit about decision making during those years. The decision you had to make was to assemble a team of advisors, aides . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we came out of the campaign with a great many people that were tried and tested and true and you had a problem then of picking among them for whatever job you might want to ask them to do. Now, when I say "job," I'm talking about all these hundreds of unpaid state jobs before we had the so-called reorganization where the people who were more the decision makers in terms of policy than the bureaucracy. I'm afraid that reorganization has turned that around. But we needed to pick about sixteen or eighteen people for the Highway Commission, for example, about twelve or fifteen for the Board of Conservation and Development. About eight or ten for the State Ports Authority, all of those agencies were extremely influential in establishing and carrying out state policies, so you wanted to get the best possible people. Well, we knew the best possible people just from years of working. Not that we didn't come across some other good ones, Cloyd Philpott, the lieutenant governor, had one or two people that I didn't know particularly but that he wanted appointed to some of those positions and which I was delighted to do. We simply drew on his resources.

BRENT GLASS:

Now, he died in . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

He died in the first summer.

BRENT GLASS:

The first summer you were in office?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes. I never really had a lieutenant governor.

BRENT GLASS:

He was a fairly capable person, himself.

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, extremely capable. In fact, in my judgement, should without any question have easily been elected as my successor.

[Recorder is turned off and then back on.] BRENT GLASS:

Who were some of the people that you . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we had a relatively small group of people. Bert Bennett had been the campaign manager and then the party chairman. Paul Thompson had been my close friend and finance chairman and then was national committeeman Tom Lambeth had been my aide in the campaign and then later my administrative assistant. Hugh Cannon had been an aide in the campaign and later director of administration, mostly the people that had run the campaign continued to help select the people that we would put into these various things. Into my office for personal staff, I brought the press secretary that had been my campaign secretary. I brought Tom Lambeth, who in effect had been the administrative assistant to be the administrative assistant. I brought Hugh Cannon to be the counsel at that time, later I made him something else. Joel Fleishmann, who we later brought back as the counsel to the governor, went on . . . though he had worked some in the campaign, he went on to Yale and then when the legislature was over and Cannon went to the Director of Administration job, Fleishmann came back to that, but we would probably sit around and say, "All right, we've got to have a person from the Southeast for the Highway Commission." We would probably talk to two or three people in that area about it . . [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

BRENT GLASS:

We were talking about assembling a team of advisors. Did you feel obligated to bring on people who had been involved in other administrations or did you try to . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we made the decisions on the merits each time. Of course, until the legislature got out of town, you didn't make too many changes anyhow. You made some, but by and large, appointments ran, I think, usually from around July 1, which meant that you let the legislature get out of town before you got a new Highway Commission and the C&D Board would meet a couple of more times before the new governor's C&D people would come in and that gave you time to breathe. On the other hand, there were some changes that you needed to make. I needed to get Mel Broughton out of the chairmanship of the Highway Commission and Merrill Evans, who was going to be my chairman, in. So, I simply asked for his resignation and I asked in a gentle way and I got it. Of course, I'm sure that I could have fired him but I didn't want to do that and in fact, I had a party for him and we gave him a little present at the Governor's Mansion, which I didn't have any obligation to do, he didn't support me. But that's not why I got rid of him, we were ready to assemble the new team and on the other hand, the chief industry hunter was Bill Henderson. He was no political ally of mine, but he was doing a good job and I asked him to stay. Luther Hodges had brought him into the government. The head of the prison department was a man named George Randall. He had come to me in the middle of the campaign and said, "You know, I supporting you . . . " he was from Mooresville . . . "but Governor Hodges wants me to take over the prison department and I told him that I would if you approved," which was kind of surprising, but it showed his degree of independence. Hodges had brought him into government from a Mooresville cotton mill and made him, I think, personnel director and then something else, maybe purchasing director, and then offered him the opportunity to be Director of Prisons, which he knew nothing about, but it was a move of genius because he became the best in the country. Well, anyhow, I knew who I wanted to be head of the prison department and he was already head of it. There were others that we kept on. Cotrane was Director of Administration. Coltrane had been Scott's number one enemy but I saw no reason to make him my number enemy. He was a very valuable man and I kept him and when I moved him out of that job I put him in charge of something that really became the high mark of his entire life. We let him head the Good Neighbor Council. So, I wasn't anxious to fire people, I was anxious to use the best people available.

BRENT GLASS:

I had heard that there were a lot of the old Scott crowd who had expected to move in or had expected some key positions in the Sanford Administration. Did you find any resentment from . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, some of them got jobs. Ben Roney, who had been Scott's administrative assistant, was a great old friend of mine and still is, but I wasn't about to make him my administrative assistant, which I think he wanted to be. Because I didn't think that he would give the kind of style I wanted to project. So, I made him Director of Secondary Roads and he did an outstanding job. He knew a whole lot about secondary roads from Scott's Administration and he knew a lot about politics and a lot of secondary roads is a skillful handling of the political side. There is no fair way to do it. If you set up a scale, as Governor Hodges did, by the use and usage . . . for example, a church got so many points, a graveyard got so many points, a school house got so many points, the number of residents on the road got so many points, the traffic count got so many points, well, you simply at any minimal level had more roads than you could pave in twenty years that would qualify. So, it became a thing of handling it diplomatically and paving where you best felt it would serve most of the people without having any computerized way to make a decision. But Roney did a very, very good job and he was very helpful to me in the legislature, also. But I didn't give him the key position that he had in Bob Scott's Administration, as he had for his father and I think that one of Bob Scott's problems was Roney. Not that Roney is bad, but Roney simply . . . there was too much politics in Scott's office. I don't approve of people like Dukakis who wouldn't hire anybody in Massachusetts that had been in his campaign staff in government. I had more confidence in my campaign staff. They were good, honorable people and I had tried them. So, most all of them that wanted to work had some place. It might not have been quite the place that they wanted. I don't know what I would have done with the Commissioner of Revenue, who was an old classmate of mine, Jim Currie, but I didn't think that he had been particularly responsive to my campaign. I might have kept him because he was highly competent, but he got a job immediately with the Carolina Power and Light Company, so that opened up that. You had a certain number of people that were ready to jump in anticipation, maybe, so if they got a good offer, they went. The Adjutant General was Capus Waynick, who had been appointed amid considerable criticism from the National Guardsmen, because he had no real military experience, a good friend of mine, campaign manager for Scott in the first primary when . . . well, when he ran for governor and had been very helpful to Scott when I was managing his Senatorial campaign and furthermore, I liked and admired him. He's my kind of liberal. It turned out that he was so competent that he had really won their respect, but he came to me and said, "I don't want to stay, I'm not going to stay. I told the governor that I wouldn't stay beyond this time and I would just like to get out. I'm getting old." I later called him back to head my effort to have a liason with the blacks amid all the demonstrations and he did an outstanding job. But that opened that job up and I put in General Bowers, who became probably the most popular Adjutant General they've ever had. He, of course, knew the National Guard first hand. I didn't have much to do with the school people, they were all in place. I did reappoint the chairman and symbolically, I wanted to indicate where my policy was, so the first appointment I made was Dallas Herring reappointed as chairman of the State Board of Education.

BRENT GLASS:

What was the symbolism behind that?

TERRY SANFORD:

That we wanted to make education number one.

BRENT GLASS:

Let's go into that. There are a number of decisions that . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, to go on with appointments . . . we made some bad appointments, maybe. I think that I would have to search a long time to pick them out. Certainly, appointments at the higher level were very good. The two Council of State members that I had to appoint because of deaths, Ed Lanier became the Insurance Commissioner and has since retired. The industry didn't like him very much but the industry doesn't like any Insurance Commissioner. When they find one that they do like, you'd better watch out. I appointed Jim Graham Agriculture Commissioner and he still is.

BRENT GLASS:

As far as substantive decision making in office, we could go into a number of things, but I wanted to go into things in particular for this session. One was the issue of the food tax, which became an issue and still is trotted out in campaigns, depending on which side you are on, but as a campaign issue.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it's demogoguery. It's easy to talk about the food tax without knowing what you are talking about, but let's look at how you make that kind of a tough decision that you know is going to be damaging politically. In the first place, in my judgement, a man who wants to hold that kind of political office ought not to mind making an unpopular decision that hurts him politically if it helps the state. So, that never bothered me. I didn't set my life on a political career and if I had, I still would have made the same decisions. So, I had made no commitments except that we would have taxes if we needed them to support the schools. We would hope that the revenue would be good, but I was very careful to keep myself absolutely positioned as having almost advocated a tax while running. Certainly, I came right to the edge of saying that I will propose it if it is needed. I think that we already talked about that. So, I was positioned to do it and it became obvious that we needed it. It was pretty much obvious before except that you could sort of hope that the expanding economy would be good enough, but it wasn't. Furthermore, we didn't have a sound base. The sales tax that had been passed in the mid-thirties, including everything, including food but then riddled with exemptions, including food, which was the largest . . . it wasn't a question of a food tax, it was a question of a sales tax that was across the board. The enemies call it the food tax. I always called it the school tax. [laughter] All right, so I began calling people in. I first of all delivered the budget message and said, "But this is not enough. If we are going to have the kind of schools we want, I'll tell you right now that I am going to add these items of a hundred and ten million dollars to the school budget . . . " of which at that time, we were talking about vitually 10% of the budget. Now, it's gotten so out of hand that I don't know what a hundred million dollars would be, but then it was a sizeable amount of money . . . and "I'll be back with a special message on finance and I will tell you where I think the money can come from." I had promised to do that. I didn't say to them, "We are going to need it so you find it." I figured that I had better take the burden and take the leadership. I did not have in mind what it was going to be, because at the time I hadn't seen the estimates of revenue to know how much of that hundred and ten million we would need. So, I began to talk to the Commission of Revenue and I began to talk to legislative leaders and other people that I had confidence in who knew what we were talking about and we looked at everything. I also very carefully had every part of it researched so that I knew what every tax could be, what it would bring in, what it would add. We looked at the tobacco tax very carefully. From my point of view, that would have been the easiest thing politically. Now, we would have gotten some flack from the tobacco farmers, but still it would have gone through without much lasting flack because every other state but one had a tobacco tax. There were two considerations there. One, it was the state's principal business when you take the agricultural and manufacturing aspects of it and the argument of the tobacco people was that if North Carolina put the tax on, everybody else will just keep putting higher taxes on it. I don't know whether that's true or not but a great many people felt that was true and made out a pretty good case. But the main reason was that there was no way that we could tax tobacco to get more than about twenty million dollars then. I've forgotten precisely what the amount that would have been on the sales, but maybe five or six cents, which was more than you could put at one time realistically, and more than you should have perhaps . . . to jump from nothing one of the higher taxes then would have been bad. And it wouldn't have given us enough money if we had done it. We didn't need it in addition to removing the exemptions to the food tax coming from the sales tax. So, I looked at the increased income tax - nothing. Increased beer, whiskey and wine tax - nothing. We actually did increase those by something like 25% and brought in five or six million dollars. There just wasn't enough money on those things. So, you came back to the fact that the only real tax available to states anyhow was the consumer tax of some kind.

BRENT GLASS:

What about corporate tax?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, oh, of course. Without saying, corporate as well as personal income. Oh yes, that would have brought in ten or twelve million dollars and would have had the damaging effect at the time when we were trying to add to the industry. Now, if it had corrected our financial problems, that would have been one thing. If it just served as an irritant and didn't help the schools either, it would have been a very foolish decision. So, you weighed both of those things. Well, I obviously don't have before me the precise comparitive figures, but as we began to look, there was nothing that would do the job except increasing the sales tax from 3% to 4% or removing some forty exemptions. Well, all the tax people recommended removing the exemptions and leaving it at 3%, because it was so very difficult to administer. As a matter of fact, we got a windfall of maybe twenty million dollars. Again, I wouldn't want to have to prove this figure and somebody can research it in the future if it is of any importance. But we got a considerable windfall, because we now had a precise way to administer the sales tax, whereas before it would be necessary to send orders in, too look through invoices and see if you charged taxes on brooms when you weren't supposed to or vice-versa, or whatever the exemption was. Some poor little storekeeper might be assessed so much that he would be put out of business and it just wasn't a good tax administratively. So right now, to talk about taking off the food tax, they don't know what they are talking about. They can talk about taking off all the sales tax but they are simply going to get back into disorder with no real advantage to anyone if they remove just the tax on several items. Then of course next year, "why not take taxes off coffins," or whatever. You know, that's what happened before. They took it off of one and then they began taking it off of one thing and another until ultimately we had just a hodgepodge. [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

TERRY SANFORD:

. . . talking to a number of people in front of the fireplace and the study or what I call the library because I started a library at the mansion and put it in there, and asking them right around, "What do you think?" Now, these were people like General Bowers, long experience in government, the Adjutant General, "What do you think?" Bill Johnson, the Commissioner of Revenue, "What do you think?" And Bill, of course, was the best informed in terms of technical advice. Probably to Roney, "What do you think?" And I listened to all of them but it became absolutely obvious that if we wanted to get enough money to have a real dramatic push in the school system that there wasn't but one place to get it and that was the sales tax. And then you had the question of which sales tax is better, a 4% across the board on items then taxed or a removal of exemptions. Well, I think that just a logical decision was the removal of exemptions. Now, we did several things. We increased, among other things, welfare payments to more than offset a 3% tax on food and we worried about the people at the lower end, but on the other hand, when you started analyzing what each person paid in spite of the fact that theoretically and philosophically this is a regressive tax, when you think in terms of the actual amount of money that was involved in anybody's budget, it wasn't all that regressive. There was a certain amount of merit in everybody paying a little something in order to have an orderly tax base that would do the job, that would literally benefit people at that level of income more than people at higher levels of income. They send their children to private schools, anyhow, if public schools aren't good. So, I had no problems philosophically or politically in terms of good administration, it all began to come into focus that this was so obviously the best way that we said, "let's go with it." And I did. I didn't tell anybody, I might say, at all. I was so determined to keep the advantage on my side to get it past the legislature and not let the opponents get on me until I knew they knew what it was. I had it typed by a woman that had worked in my campaign that had gone on to get married and had not stayed in government. I had her come over and type it in the mansion. They didn't know about it until I was ready to go to the legislature. Nobody. Not even Tom Lambeth, not even the Commissioner of Revenue. I just didn't feel that I needed to burden any of them with that decision once I made it. But I was also sure that the consensus was that this was right. Some of them might have doubted that I had the guts to do it but they were still advising that I do it.

BRENT GLASS:

I have a couple of follow up questions on that. First of all, I have heard it said that you and your aides were mislead in some respects as far as anticipated revenue by the Treasurer's office?

TERRY SANFORD:

You are always mislead by the Treasurer's office, because by nature he has to be conservative. But on the other hand, if you looked at the revenues at the end of that year, while they were better than he had anticipated, they would not have been that good and would not have been good enough to cover the budget . . . as I recall, we had a twenty-five or thirty million dollar surplus. But we went into it with a twenty or twenty-five million dollar surplus. So, it wasn't all that far off. But the Treasurer is supposed to be conservative because we have to have a balanced budget. If he estimates 15 x for example as revenue, and it comes out to be thirteen and you appropriate it against fifteen, then you have got all kinds of drastic cutting. We cannot operate a balanced budget without operating to a surplus. You have to end with a surplus and start with a surplus and people that don't understand what that means think that you end up with a big surplus and therefore you didn't do it right. Well, they forget that you started with a surplus. You've got to end up with a surplus if you don't want to end up with a deficit. Now, how big that surplus is, is a matter of pure guess work. Obviously you've got facts and trends, but who could have guessed the downturn of the economy that would have hurt our state revenues as it has in the last few years. We didn't predict that properly and we had all kinds of trouble. So, I expect the Treasurer to be conservative and I was not bound by his figures. I projected my own figures in the Department of Revenue also. So, I didn't have to pay any attention to the Treasurer if I didn't want to. But I agreed with a conservative approach. You had to do that to be on a sound fiscal basis.

BRENT GLASS:

You don't think then that the governor's office traditionally in North Carolina has been too deferential to the State Treasurer?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it so happens that we have had a truly outstanding conservative, in the best sense of the word, as the Treasurer. I was probably the least deferential to him and he resented it. [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

TERRY SANFORD:

. . . told the newspapers that when I was a little kid and he was a lawyer in Laurinburg and his sisters taught me in school and I figured that he had dominated the Hodges Administration too much and that I would pay him proper respect but I wouldn't let him run the office. It wasn't any disrespect to Edwin Gill, I have the highest respect for him but I knew what I wanted to do. Luther Hodges came in without the deep background in state government that I had and I think that he let Edwin have more responsibility than he should have and he resented my cutting off some of it. But I did pay him proper respect and I did take seriously anything he had to say because he knew what he was talking about. But he didn't mislead me and furthermore if we had projected any other figures, I think any substantially different figures . . . we did project a little more liberal result than he did, but if we had, it would have been irresponsible. If you are going to operate a balanced budget, you have got to always have a cushion.

BRENT GLASS:

Did it hurt you politically, that decision?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, there is no question. But I knew that before I made it.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

BRENT GLASS:

This is an interview with Terry Sanford conducted on August 20, 1976 by Brent Glass. This is the second tape of the August 20th interview.

TERRY SANFORD:

. . . people think. It's very interesting that nobody, no governor has proposed repealing it except Holshouser attempted a sneaky little suggestion of repeal and I helped call his hand. I issued a statement that I thought it ought to be repealed, if we could repeal anything. Well obviously, we probably couldn't repeal anything. I suspect that we are spending more money now than we should be spending. It has just multiplied so many times in just the brief period since I was there, but the answer to that would be to reduce the overall tax to 2% if you were going to substantially reduce, because otherwise, you wouldn't have anything to administer. Now, no governor has suggested . . . and you may have noticed that George Wood at the last minute, obviously in honorable desperation, suggested it but he suggested it in a way that would give him some leeway. He was going to take off a penny a year or something like that. Well, when you got to looking at how you are going to administer three cents in some counties on food and four cents on other items and then the next year, two cents, it would have been so unworkable that you had to come to some other conclusion. But the people that thought they were going to win are not proposing it because the state cannot live without it. And . . . I'm not going to, but if I were to run another campaign, I would hit hard on "we need it and you've got to have the nerve to pay it." I watch the polls that we've taken from that point on. The opposition to this tax has always been in the neighborhood of twenty-five per cent and I . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Coming from where?

TERRY SANFORD:

North Carolina.

BRENT GLASS:

No, from what . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, I see what you mean, from who . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Within the political leadership.

TERRY SANFORD:

Conservative, Republicans and racists that were made with me for other reasons. It wasn't the tax, it was what they used. There aren't that many people that want to do away with that tax. Now politically, the labor unions have to say that they are against it, it's a "regressive" tax by definition. Any consumer tax is regressive.

BRENT GLASS:

That's what I meant by where the opposition was . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

It was purely political in my judgement. It had nothing to do with the merits. Not that a few people are not against it on the merits.

BRENT GLASS:

One other political decision within your administration, that on the race issue, which really hit a crucial point during your administration. Do you think there was any irony to that, the fact that the civil rights movement throughout the country was really reaching a climax during your administration when you had run a campaign in 1960 being somewhat on the defensive on race, feeling that you were somewhat fighting a racist campaign?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we had a racist campaign thrown against us, with the last minute. And as I think we pointed out the other day, with my experience in the Frank Graham campaign, I didn't have any question as to where I stood. I had the question of how to handle a delicate situation and keep it in balance, but I never did really consider how to make a decision on that. I always knew that we ought to do the decent thing and the question was how to translate the decent thing into action. There wasn't any question in my mind that we were going to let people conduct peaceful demonstrations. I didn't want to break that up, except under some unusual circumstances where I felt the law and order could be best preserved by a curfew or violence might be thwarted if we put a stop to it at a particular crucial point. But by and large, we let people demonstrate and the law enforcement officers in this state were trained not to break up demonstrations of young blacks, but to keep young blacks and their objectives apart and we pretty effectively did it. I didn't have to make a particular decision about that, I already knew that I wanted to do it. I didn't have to sit around and talk to anybody about whether I ought to do it or not.

BRENT GLASS:

So, this was not a conscious policy that came out of deliberation?

TERRY SANFORD:

No. I grew up, more or less, already having made that decision twenty-five years earlier. Now, the only decision that I finally did make was to have a television speech in which I said that the demonstrations had to stop, they were past the point of having any effective value in communicating what the problem is, so I wanted all these young blacks to meet with me. I brought Capus Waynick in and then later, we started the Good Neighbor Council. Well, all those were ideas of how to carry out an approach to fairness, but I didn't have to sit down and decide to be fair.

BRENT GLASS:

I was rereading that book that you gave me, North Carolina and the Negro and it seems like Chapel Hill was one of the major situations in which you . . . and I also read John Ehle's The Free Men, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at that recently . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, yes. Well John Ehle's book is a fair history of that. You ought not to overlook the fact that he reports rather casually that all of those people got out of jail and were rehabilitated, or put in a position where they sort of start without having this hanging over them. What was overlooked in John's book . . . I did all that, nobody else in the state had the power to do it but the governor. I cleaned all that up.

BRENT GLASS:

Commuting their sentences and . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

All of them. John helped place a great many of those people, but the only way that they could get out was with my judgement that they ought to be out. What bothered me about that was that all we had done was so vastly misunderstood by people who wanted to take advantage of it for their own benefit. Floyd McKissick was one of them and James Farmer was another one of them. Basically the good crusders but what they basically wanted to achieve was proper, but to come here in the middle of a hot campaign, where the old racist, Dr. Lake was running again and to deliberately plan to have a confrontation that couldn't help but elect Lake, or certainly defeat the more enlightened candidate. Certainly Moore was not unenlightened, but it had a great deal to do with defeating Preyer. At the same time, they were debating in the national Congress, with Sam Ervin leading the way, and Sam in his own time was a pretty good racist, too. He later reformed. At that time he was leading the fight against open accomodations laws. We were in the middle of a Democratic primary to elect a sucessor. I resented it, among other things. I also felt that I had been pushed around long enough and when Farmer and McKissick promised to shut down the government, I reminded them that they didn't have the power and I wasn't going to let them do it. I talked very tough to them and I should have talked tough to them. Lake's political comment in the campaign was that I was too slow in talking to them. That may or may not be true, but they stopped, of course. They didn't carry forward their threats and it's a damn good thing they didn't.

BRENT GLASS:

Had they provoked you in other ways?

TERRY SANFORD:

No. I had been very patient. I understood their problems and I understood their frustrations. I had been extremely patient with them and maybe, as Lake says, too patient. I don't think so. I think that you had to understand a century of being downtrodden and finally they were beginning to see some light and you could expect some excesses. We had to be careful that they didn't damage society and didn't damage someone else. We had to be understanding. We had to be patient and I intended to be patient. But here I saw them destroying the state and I think they set the state back. I think they defeated Richardson Preyer. I don't think that there is any question that the combination of racism kept Preyer out of the majority that he had to have. Now, other people might take a different view. Maybe Preyer wasn't as good a campaigner. I don't. If it hadn't been for the race issue, we would have breezed through and this simply further aggrevated what . . . now, you need to remember that Sam Ervin was openly supporting Dan Moore and so Dan Moore had all the benefit of Sam Ervin's anti-open accomodation speeches without ever opening his mouth. He was the beneficiary of all of it. We were on the losing edge of that because by implication, I was for open accomodations. I had been working for it in North Carolina. I wasn't stupid enough to go testify in Washington in favor of it, but I was identified with being for it and advocating it voluntarily. Lake, of course, was on the other side. Well, to add to those problems the problems of Chapel Hill, I had a right to be mad about it. John Ehle's book picks up only the tail end of what he helped us do in racial matters, too. John was one of the most valuable members of my administration. I'm not critical of that book. I'm simply saying that that took the tail end of it. He fairly reflected my view. He reflected what I had to say about the campaign, coming back from the campaign speech the day before the second primary. You know, there is nothing in there except that people think I was too harsh on them if they read just that book and don't realize that no other state came close to North Carolina in patience and understanding and working it out and opening it up at that stage of American life.

BRENT GLASS:

Reading that account, it seems like that was a point at which there was some division within your staff as to how to handle the Chapel Hill . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, Tom Lambeth and several people kept me from being as mean as I might have been, because I had felt that we had been betrayed. Not deliberately, they just didn't understand what they were doing.

BRENT GLASS:

Coming from the outside and . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it wasn't just . . . of course, there were insiders there. You know that there were local kids and people, but they were carried into this thing with a failure to understand what it was all about. You know, I didn't really fault them even for their ignorance.

BRENT GLASS:

Do you think that any of this goes back to the whole image of Chapel Hill as being sort of an outpost . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, that too was rather an unfortunate choice, to make Chapel Hill the symbol of this kind of resistence, to accentuate that kind of minor resistence, there were only two or three places and almost everybody else in Chapel Hill had tried on a voluntary basis . . . I say two or three, I really can't think of only two. There are bound to have been more than two, but there weren't many. Chapel Hill had already led the nation and the whole question wasn't so much these two places as much as it was that they wanted the city to pass what literally would have been an unconstitutional . . . well, I don't know whether it would have or not, because it hadn't been decided by a court, but most lawyers thought that the city didn't have the authority to pass an open accomodations law ordinance. But even if they had, Farmer and McKissick, by throwing down that kind of challenge had made it politically impossible for the council to pass it.

BRENT GLASS:

Yes, I was thinking about even politically statewide, Chapel Hill's image and . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well of course, it was in advance of everything else and still, they pick up the little resistence there and make it appear that Chapel Hill is an evil place when it was probably the most enlightened little town in the South at the time. That further added to my resentment. Well, I didn't lose my head. For that matter, we played it very properly but I told them exactly what I told the Ku Kluxers when they threatened to prevent the painting of a little Negro church in eastern North Carolina, when they said that they couldn't be responsible for law and order if these Presbyterians came to paint and I reminded them that they didn't need to be, I was. I staked it out the night before and caught two of them trying to burn it down and I put them in jail.

BRENT GLASS:

History is funny in many ways and now, the former mayor of Chapel Hill is the leading vote-getter for lieutenant governor, do you see this is as . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, a sign of the advances that North Carolina has made and the whole country has made and particularly, the South. It's fabulous. It's easy to dispair looking at what needs to be done, but when you see what has been done in fifteen years, it's remarkable. The mayor couldn't have gotten in a greasy Greek restaurant on main street fifteen years ago.

BRENT GLASS:

I bring up these two things, the food tax and civil rights, not to overlook some of the other decisions, but I was just wondering whether these were the most difficult decisions, to review the whole decision-making process of someone in office?

TERRY SANFORD:

I never really found the decision-making all that difficult.

BRENT GLASS:

Some were easier to make than others.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, but once you . . . no, I made the point that whether it's commuting a death sentence or deciding what kind of a tax program to have or what tie to wear in the morning, that all you need are the facts. You know, you've got to know what color the tie is and what color your shirt is and what color your suit is and then you go from there. Now, I don't mean to be frivolous about a serious decision affecting life and death, but really all you've got to know are the facts and getting the facts in an objective way is more difficult than making the decision. Once you do that, making the decision is not all that difficult. I had decisions to make in appointing a Commissioner of Agriculture, for example, and there really weren't many facts. "There's a good man, there's a good man, which one should I appoint?" To some extent, I suppose that personal sentiment entered that kind of a decision. In the death penalty, I decided that although I personally wasn't in favor of it, it wasn't up to me to change the law single-handedly, that wasn't why the Constitution gave the power of clemency to a governor. They gave it to the governor because under unusual circumstances, someone had to act and that was the proper person. But I decided that as a matter of policy that we would thoroughly investigate on our own outside of the regular law enforcement every capital case and if there were any changes, then we would take whatever action was appropriate. I permitted one person to go to the gas chamber and I would have permitted several others, except that they didn't get to them. It wasn't my job, the legislature chose to stick to that position. On the other hand, I commuted sentences that some governors wouldn't have commuted, because I got the facts that indicated they ought to be. The most complicated decision obviously had to be the tax decisions. But there were many, many other things. We wanted to risk doing something about people in poverty. Nobody else ever had. Would that be a political liability? Well, it turned out to be a great political asset, but we didn't know that at the time. Are you going to borrow money to build a phosphate loading center for the Ports Authority, how do you know the phosphate is going to go? Are you going to make a decision to come down on the side of the phosphate companies to go into eastern North Carolina or are you going to keep them out and if you are going to finally let them in, what kind of safeguards do you impose? We had a decision to build a ramp at the old blimp hangers, which in effect belonged to the state down at Weeksville out from Elizabeth City, in order that a company could come in there with a contract to repair all of the navy planes that patrolled the coast, they brought them up to date on the radar or whatever, and it was a tremendous contract and it meant a whole lot to the people of Pasquotank County, but can you legitimately get public funds to build a ramp of a hundred thousand dollars or so? Well obviously, just if you figured nothing but the income tax from the payroll, it more than paid the state back and then look at all the other benefits. Somebody said, "You can't do that, you can't use highway money to build a ramp." "Well legally, the Attorney General says that we can if we want to and if it improves business, we ought to." That's really about the only way that you could do it. Someone said, "Yeah, but suppose they don't get a renewal of the contract, what are you going to do with that ramp?" I said, "Well, we are going to take a chance." We built it and we more than got our money back before they didn't need it any longer. So, hardly a day passes that you don't have a decision that involves some risk of criticism. I took the position that the parole procedures in this state were far too restrictive, that we had people in jail that we ought not to have and continuing in prison that ought not to be in prison. Well, every one of those is a tremendous risk. Suppose he gets out and kills and rapes somebody and they can say, "Sanford let him out." Well, I put in this general rule that I wanted everybody reviewed sympathetically, not just those who had high-priced influential lawyers, and I don't mean review them on a routine basis, but as an advocate. You know, "What do we do about letting this fellow redeem his life?" I paroled more people than three or four other governors combined and I sweated it out for a few years, but nothing bad ever came of it. But you know, every one of those was a decision that could have backfired. Almost everyday, you had a decision that you could be timid or you could do what you thought best served the state. In this particular case, we had the first declining prison population in the country. Well, I say that's good, especially that it turned out good. Now, I'm not saying that everybody stayed out that we let out, but in any event, no great harm came of it that wouldn't have come otherwise. And it proved that the parole system was what it was supposed to be. Instead of letting people out when they finished their sentence without any supervision, let them out when they had some guidance and nobody has ever gone back and made a study, but I'll bet that more good than bad came of it.

BRENT GLASS:

Let me just ask one final question, I know that you have to wind up. Do you think that Preyer, as he was running, was carrying some unpopular decisions from your administration?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, there is no question about it.

BRENT GLASS:

Is that inevitable in this kind of line?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, apparently it is, but I made a mistake and Mrs. Sanford reminded me that I was making a mistake, but I didn't quite comprehend it. I let Preyer run his own campaign and I let Moore run against me and she kept saying, "Run Preyer's campaign out of the governor's office, like they do in Kentucky, and defend yourself." I went for three or four months without defending myself against really pretty bad and unjustified criticisms . . . now, Moore, I don't blame particularly. He had nothing else to commend him. He really had to run against me, but I ought not to have let him and I did let him. Of course, you can't go back and correct that and he didn't turn out to be a bad governor. He didn't turn out to be a very good governor, but he certainly didn't turn out to be a bad one. I have come to respect him. He's not my kind of governor, but he is the kind of governor who took the timid approach and didn't rock the boat and didn't upset anything and didn't take any gambles, but he wasn't a bad governor. He is a very decent person. So, it didn't turn out all that bad, but Preyer would have carried forward with some creative things that I think the state would have been much better off with had he been governor. But even if we could have gotten away with what we did if we didn't have to contend with the race issue, and all of that came back to me because it's hard for people to remember, but I was about the only person in the South at that time that was willing to commend the President for what he did in Mississippi, for example. There was terrible resentment that people couldn't get over easily. I'm sure that they are over it now, but it carried forward to '72 when Wallace and I were running and there is no question that that was what it was.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, I was going to ask, does it seem that they are over it now?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, if they're not, it doesn't make any difference, because they've got time to get over it and I don't need anything else.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, I'm thinking about the lieutenant governor?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, I would say that obviously, the changes that have come about have been dramatic, and it's awfully hard for people to think now, "Why would that make any difference in 1964?" Well, it just made all the difference in the world in '64, the bitterness, the resentment, the hatred, on both sides. A lot of that is dispelled now.

BRENT GLASS:

It will be interesting to see if this second primary doesn't have any of that in it.

TERRY SANFORD:

I don't think that he will have any of it, but I don't think that there is any way that he can win. He is only a thousand or so votes ahead and he needed to be ten percent ahead. I'm surprised that Green made that good a showing, but I see no way with any kind of effort or any kind of campaign, there are just not quite enough people ready to make that jump and he doesn't have enough margin to where he doesn't need all those votes.

BRENT GLASS:

So, it won't be overtly racist?

TERRY SANFORD:

I think that Green has been very, very careful not to charge that . . . you know, he said, "The only people that have talked about race are the newspapers, you sure haven't heard me talking about it." I think that's true. You know, I think Green knows that he would make a mistake to bring that up, that he is going to win anyhow and he might as well be decent and he's inclined to be decent. I'll be amazed if he brings it into it, but I don't know. He doesn't need to.

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]