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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-0328-2, 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 United States senator from 1986 to 1993. This interview is the second of two, covering 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 the food tax, the tobacco tax, and civil rights. He continued to play a role in state politics after the end of his term, though he says 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 was unsuccessful. Instead, he accepted the presidency at 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.
Terry Sanford was a North Carolina governor and Democratic United States senator. This interview describes his political career since 1960, including his unsuccessful presidential runs and his term as president of Duke University.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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?
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
In the process of just working on various problems?
And in various organizations.
Right. Do you think that is still pretty much the formula for success in North Carolina? Do you think that's what Jim Hunt . . .
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
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?
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
When you say in the old days, how far back do you mean?
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
You mean that you would match what they raised?
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.
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 . . .
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
Did it surprise you?
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
Do you think that's the greatest extent he ever got involved in a campaign, to your knowledge?
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
Who was that?
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.
How about the tobacco industry?
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.
This is before the election?
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
How do you react to the news this past spring, I guess it was, about Mr. Wade?
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
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 . . .
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
How does the absence of a significant organized labor force in North Carolina effect politics?
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.
Who was that?
Oh, I can't think of his name. It's a very peculiar name . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
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?
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.
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.
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 . . .
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
Now, he died in . . .
He died in the first summer.
The first summer you were in office?
Yes. I never really had a lieutenant governor.
He was a fairly capable person, himself.
Oh, extremely capable. In fact, in my judgement, should without any question have easily been elected as my successor.
Who were some of the people that you . . .
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
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 . . .
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
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 . . .
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
What was the symbolism behind that?
That we wanted to make education number one.
Let's go into that. There are a number of decisions that . . .
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.
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.
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
What about corporate tax?
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
. . . 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
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.
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?
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
You don't think then that the governor's office traditionally in North Carolina has been too deferential to the State Treasurer?
Well, it so happens that we have had a truly outstanding
. . . 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.
Did it hurt you politically, that decision?
Oh, there is no question. But I knew that before I made it.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
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.
. . . 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 . . .
Coming from where?
North Carolina.
No, from what . . .
Oh, I see what you mean, from who . . .
Within the political leadership.
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.
That's what I meant by where the opposition was . . .
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.
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?
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
So, this was not a conscious policy that came out of deliberation?
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.
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 . . .
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
Commuting their sentences and . . .
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
Had they provoked you in other ways?
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.
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 . . .
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.
Coming from the outside and . . .
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.
Do you think that any of this goes back to the whole image of Chapel Hill as being sort of an outpost . . .
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
Yes, I was thinking about even politically statewide, Chapel Hill's image and . . .
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.
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 . . .
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.
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?
I never really found the decision-making all that difficult.
Some were easier to make than others.
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
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?
Oh, there is no question about it.
Is that inevitable in this kind of line?
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
Well, I was going to ask, does it seem that they are over it now?
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.
Well, I'm thinking about the lieutenant governor?
Oh, I would say that obviously, the changes that have come
It will be interesting to see if this second primary doesn't have any of that in it.
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.
So, it won't be overtly racist?
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]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
I wanted to wind up a little bit with after Preyer's defeat in that primary, how did you conceive of your role in state politics after that, or at that point?
Well, I wasn't worried about my role in state politics. In the first place, the last thing in the world that I ever wanted to be was a political boss. My only interest in politics was that it was the only path to government, but I really didn't have much interest in the political machine, although obviously, since we were successful and they were talking about the "Sanford-Bennett Machine," but I just didn't much have any ambition to do that, I didn't want to be a dominant figure in naming everybody. What I did want to do was to bring a lot of people into government who would then give a new life to it and get away from some of these things that weren't all that evil but were not necessarily that progressive that V.O. Key was talking about. And interestingly, in '72, everybody running for major office had supported me.
Had worked in your campaign?
So, the old factions were gone, it was now mostly people who had come out of our new effort in what we called "The New Day."
Pat Taylor and Skipper Bowles had both been prominent in my campaign and were the two major candidates. The four candidates for lieutenant governor had all been for me, even Robert Morgan, although he had been Lake's campaign manager was originally one of my keys in Scott's campaign, although he didn't have any serious opposition. But everybody running, even Everrett Jordan, to a degree, although he . . .
He certainly came out of the textile . . .
Oh certainly, but he hadn't really been one of my people, but we weren't
. . . well, I don't count him, because Galifanakis, who was running, was
my supporter. No, I don't suppose that campaign was going on in '72,
but
How about after you left office? Did you project yourself politically in any way in the state? Did you see yourself serving any other kind of elective office, either statewide or in the Senate?
No, I had no desire to go to the Senate. I made one pass at it in '67, '68, when Sam Ervin was running for re-election and gave some more than serious thought to it, but it wasn't so much that I wanted to be in the Senate as that I thought this might be a good a way to teach a lesson to Sam Ervin.
In what way?
Well, Sam Ervin had been pretty much a conservative-reactionary, on the
conservative side of reactionary, I must say, and had been a
constitutional racist. I mean, he hadn't been a blatant crude racist,
but he was against all kinds of legislation to open up opportunities for
minorities and he did it on high constitutional justifications. I
thought that he ought to be defeated. But I also saw it as maybe letting
me emerge on the national scene, and while I never have been really
driven by that ambition or desire, it was lurking in my mind that it
could be done and that
Well, let's backtrack a little bit . . .
Well, I've led you a little bit astray, but I almost had to to answer your question.
Right.
But in '64, I was disappointed but not by any means crushed. It wasn't my defeat, although I did think that the state could have been better served by having Preyer as governor. And I still do, but that is not in any way to suggest that Moore was not a good governor.
Well, let's follow this through. Once the Duke job came along, the notion of running for governor was . . .
Oh, I just dismissed it and in fact, flatly promised Charlie Wade, the
chairman of the board here that I would not run for governor or the
Senate, that I was through with it. Now, with some emusement, I had to
later point out that I never did tell him that I wouldn't run for
President. Of course, I wasn't thinking about running for President.
Let's backtrack a little bit, it seems that almost immediately after winning the primary in '60 you were projected onto the national scene rather suddenly. Had you had any contact with national Democratic politicians before 1960?
I was one of the co-chairmen for Stevenson. I had been a delegate to two national conventions. I had been, as president of the Young Democrats, one of the few people working for Truman in '48, so I was personally acquainted with some of those people and I wasn't totally without some awareness of what went on at the national level. Then, as the nominee of the Democratic party and in the then recognized most liberal political state in the South, with the reputation of being somewhat on the liberal side, obviously my vote at the 1960 national convention was of some importance. It was important to Johnson, it was important to any candidate. We had four or five candidates, most of them faded, but Symington was in there strong . . .
Humphrey was . . .
Humphrey had faded before I got to that point. He quit after West Virginia and I was being very careful during the election not to indicate my own preferences. In fact, I wasn't sure that I knew what they were. But you did finally have Symington, Kennedy and Johnson. I think that all things being equal, I would have been for Symington, but all things were not equal and by the time that we got to the point of my being the nominee, Symington was an extremely dark horse. There would have had to be a bloody stalemate for Symington to come forward, but Symington's administrative assistant was an old friend of mine from Chapel Hill, so I had talked with him about it. I then got into one of the two or three bad flaps that I got into and I will not mention all of them at this time, but I allowed to be misinterpreted my meeting with Bobby Kennedy and it was just one of those careless blunders, but it turned out to be right costly.
When was that meeting?
It was about a week or two before the first primary. I didn't want to
meet with them, but Louis Harris, the pollster, a classmate of mine at
Chapel Hill and who continues to be a close personal friend, was close
to the Kennedy's. He wanted to bring Bobby to see me. I didn't have time
to fool with him, but on the other hand, you are inclined to do a favor
for a friend and it meant something to Lou to be able to bring Bobby
down here to talk to me. It looked like I was going to win and it looked
like if I did win, I was a pretty good prospect for them. It turned out
that they were right, but I didn't know they were right at that time. I
hadn't made up my mind. So, I agreed to meet them. We had dinner at the
College Inn . . . I think that's the name of it, a motel on the edge of
Raleigh. And
Well, in about three days, of course, they had all kinds of evidence
that I had talked to Bobby. I hadn't attempted to conceal it. We were
waited on by a waiter there, they were registered into the motel. I just
didn't think beyond that one question and my own personal irritation
with that particular reporter. So, I got in all kinds of trouble.
What I want to follow up on that with is, did it surprise people in the North Carolina delegation when you did announce for Kennedy?
Surprise is far too mild a word. It stunned and shocked them. That, of
course, was the effect that the Kennedys wanted. They didn't have
anybody from the South that they wanted to be for them. They had John
Patterson from Alabama, who was such a racist that they wouldn't even
let him announce that he was for Kennedy, but they wanted somebody and
they wanted me and the election was the last Saturday in June or the
fourth Saturday in June, probably the last, and the convention started
about the first week in July. There were only about ten days or so
inbetween there. I immediately went to a South Carolina beach and stayed
at a friend's house to rest up a little bit and I was in touch on the
phone with the Kennedy people, Bobby. And after talking with a number of
my close friends, Bennett agreed with me, as I was beginning to think,
"Absolutely. This is the future of the country, this is the way that it
is going. Why should we vote for Lyndon Johnson, who is all right in
many ways, maybe, but he's not going to
Kennedy probably would have won without me and Henry Hall Wilson was a strong advocate within our camp for Kennedy and later became an administrative assistant to President Kennedy. He argued strongly that I should move in that direction. Even Ben Roney, when he viewed the politics of it . . . I'm not sure that Roney didn't think that we had gotten some money from the Kennedys and owed them something, but . . .
Is that the way that he would view something like that?
Much more likely.
Did they hope that this would sway delegates their way or . . .
Oh, of course. You see, they credited it with breaking open New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I said, "Well, I'm going to announce this as soon as I get back to Raleigh." He said, "Oh, no. Don't do that. Wait until you get to Los Angeles." Well, I didn't realize the difficulty of communication from the West Coast to the East Coast newspapers, just the time difference, if nothing else, makes it almost impossible to tell your story. So, that was a blunder on my personal part. Now granted, it served Kennedy's purposes and as Bennett said, "If you are going to be for him, you might as well be for him in the way that they think helps him most." So, I predicted that the ticket would be Johnson-Kennedy or Kennedy-Johnson and that I would make my announcement after I got to Los Angeles. Now, conceiveably, if I had gotten to Los Angeles and the Kennedy campaign had crumbled, I could have changed my mind, because I wasn't trying to be a martyr. I was trying to move North Carolina into more of the main stream. So, I would have had the option of chancing that commitment under those circumstances, although it didn't turn out that way.
In any event, because I announced out there, whatever I said was greatly
distorted. I said that I wanted North Carolina to be with the winner,
not just have a vain vote. Well, that got interpreted that Sanford
simply wanted to be with the winner, he wasn't voting on principle and
our communication with the papers was just very, very bad.
Was the religion factor a big one in some of this reaction?
Religion and race. At any rate, the Methodist Church virtually excommunicated me. I never did fully forgive the preacher of my own church, who withdrew the invitation to be the Laymen's Day speaker. It so happened that that didn't bother me, but it irritated me that he felt he had to do that. And then, there is some day celebrated . . . every Sunday has got some name in the church, you know, and in October, there is something to do with breaking away from the Catholic Church and which has to do with the independence of religious thought, and he announced that he was going to preach an anti-Kennedy speech. So, I sent him word . . . I had been chairman of the board there for eight years . . .
This is in Fayetteville?
Yes. I sent him word that I was coming to church and if he preached that sermon, I was getting up in the middle and walking out and that I thought that would get some attention. I did not go and he did not preach it. In any event, it was very vicious. Now, by a coincidence, as I was leaving the Carolina Hotel to go to the airport to go to Los Angeles, I ran into Bishop Garver, the bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church. And he said whatever he said and I said, "You know, bishop, I might end up being for John Kennedy." He said, "Go to it, boy." Now, he was very supportive, he was a much more enlightened person than my particular preacher, who is now dead. So, it was a shocking thing to them.
I went out there with 90% of the delegates being my people. They had
worked in my
Were you chairman of the delegation?
No, I had very graciously made Luther Hodges the chairman. That had been
our custom in this state, to make the sitting governor the chairman and
he sent me word that he wanted very badly to be . . . he wanted to be
Vice-President under Adlai Stevenson. He was openly for Johnson and
secretly for Stevenson, feeling that if Stevenson was the nominee, he
would make a very good Vice-President, and that's true, he would have.
Well, anyhow, I was trying to heal the wounds and I didn't want to break
that precedent and especially in view of the fact that twelve years
earlier, '52, . . . eight years earlier, Scott had been the sitting
governor and because he was not for . . . not part of the Old Guard,
Luther Hodges was there as the nominee for lieutenant governor, they
denied Scott the privilige of being chairman and elected Cameron
Morrison. Well, I didn't want to do that, that created a lot of
bitterness and even though Hodges was a part of that, I felt that the
gracious thing to do was to let him be chairman. Now, I later regretted
that. I'll tell you that story if we get to it. But he was the chairman.
Leonard Lloyd, my friend, long-time close associate, from western North
Carolina . . . "No way, you've ruined us. I can't go home if I vote for
Kennedy." They all started saying that and where I had . . . I think
that we must have had 72 votes that year, it changes from year to year
and out of those 72, I probably had 60 of them. I finally got twelve for
Kennedy, counting mine. Twelve people. That's right, there were 72
people, 36 full votes, each of the 72 had a half vote. I got twelve,
After you had polled the delegation?
Polled them?
This was in the final vote?
This was in Los Angeles. Half of them came out of there with broken arms and cracked skulls that I had put on them . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
You want to stick with that a minute?
Yes.
Well, it's really not state government.
Well, I'm interested in the national picture, too.
Well, the day of the nomination, Drew Pearson, who was a big Johnson supporter honored me by making me the victim of his column and he reported that Kennedy relationship with Lou Harris and implied without saying so that I had taken a tremendous amount of money from the Kennedys for my campaign and consequently, that was why I supported Kennedy. It was an attempt to discount my support. So, the old chairman of the Greensboro, Guilford County party, who was a delegate, moved that they pass a resolution of censure of Drew Pearson for slandering their Democratic nominee for governor, me. Hodges was presiding. Hodges manouvered around and managed to get that tabled, which of course, was a vicious thing. He ought to have been very supportive of me. AFter all, I was nominee of the party and if I was discredited, the party would be discredited. Drew Pearson later retracted that, which is very unusual for Drew Pearson.
Why did Hodges do that?
Because he didn't want Kennedy to win. He didn't want Kennedy to win
because if Kennedy won there was nothing in it for him. If Kennedy
didn't win, he knew Johnson wouldn't win and he figured there would be a
stalemate and Stevenson not only was lurking, he was stirring. Well,
that was a most unfriendly thing. Anyhow, I went over to the hotel and
saw Kennedy shortly after that and I told Kennedy, I said, "If I ever
come to you recommending that you do something for Luther Hodges, I hope
that you'll kick me out of your office." I remember Kennedy so well
standing there, characteristically hand in left pocket, chewing
chewing-gum, I suppose to ease the tension. He said, "He is a bastard,
isn't he?" And later, parenthetically, I was in Georgetown saying,
"You've got to make him Secretary of Commerce," and we laughed about
that. But in the meantime, Hodges, with my approval to the Kennedys, he
was appointed the National Chairman of Businessmen for Kennedy, causing
Bennett to say that in the Lake campaign and now here, that "Luther
Hodges has always worked hard to get us out of the trouble that he got
us in." Hodges and I became very close friends before he died, but at
that particular moment, I shared Kennedy's designation. Well now, as
soon as I announced for Kennedy out there, it did make a considerable
stir, as they anticipated and immediately, Ervin and Jordan flew Bill
Cochrane to Los Angeles to make me change my mind. Bill Cochrane was a
close friend, a room-mate of mine. I had taken him to Washington with
Scott and he had stayed with Jordan and I came back in the hotel and
there was Cochrane standing there behind the bush. I said, "You ought to
have had more sense than to come all the way out here. You know that
Where's he from?
Goodness knows . . . South Carolina or somewhere. Where is he from?
Anyhow, he was the southern expert. So, he sat up there and argued with
me and they told me all kinds of lies that Bobby Baker and others had
told me earlier about Kennedy. Finally, I said, "Cochrane . . . " we had
been sitting there arguing and talking for two or three hours . . . I
said, "Tell Brawley that there is not any way under the sun that I'll
change my mind, that I don't operate that way." Cochrane said, "That's
right, Bill, let's close it up." I'll never forget this, because it was
so absolutely ludicrous, Brawley threw his hands down and said, "My God,
you've just denied Lyndon Johnson the Presidency of the United States."
Well, I laughed, of course, and that ended that. And the thing was
rather tense, because even my friends, who were not at all bitter about
what I had done, felt I had made a terrible political blunder and it
would probably cost me the governorship and they sat there and . . . it
was so unpleasant for me that I sat out in the orange juice tent most of
the time watching it on television. Somebody had a little press tent
outside. I would occasionally come in and I told Bobby again on the
floor that I simply wasn't going to second the nomination. He said, "You
really don't want to, do you?" I said, "Not only don't want to, not
going to." Well, he came back and Jack insisted that I do it and I
finally just had not much alternative. I, of course, now don't regret
How did you know him?
Because of when Scott was in the Senate, you see, and I was up there
about once every week or so, just sort of keeping tabs on . . . that
then, was the beginning of the political organization in North Carolina
that later elected me governor. I was just keeping in touch with that
office. Anyhow, I knew Lyndon. So, he came striding in there and the
first person he saw was me and he walked right on up to me and stuck out
his hand and he said, "Terry, you and I have got one thing in common . .
. " I thought that it
Do you think that if the convention had been held later in August, let's say, as it was in '64, or as the Republican Convention was this past week, it might have altered your . . .
Well, I think that I would have had to show my hand sooner and I would have showed it here and I could have explained it. You know, my point was that they were only getting a sentence or two back here as to why I had done what I had done. Now obviously, it would take a pretty stupid person today to think that I had made a mistake in doing that. But in the summer of '60, trying to explain it long distance, I didn't explain it very well.
Let's move on a little bit to your relationship with Kennedy during those years. It seems that Kennedy became more identified with the race issue after he was elected than before, so . . .
Well, I think that's true.
I don't think that Kennedy ever
Not Jack Kennedy, but maybe Bobby Kennedy did a little bit more.
Well, I don't know that Bobby understood it. Bobby saw the politics, the positive politics in it by that time, but I don't think they had any awareness. They didn't have any experience. You know, I gave Jack Kennedy about as good advice as he ever got on the race issue because I knew more about it. No, he had called Martin Luther King in jail and made a lot of points, but then of course, people in the South didn't like him. There is an interesting little 1956 story. At that time, it was Kefauver-Kennedy as far as the North Carolina delegation was concerned. Scott was there supporting Kefauver. Nobody in the Old Guard liked Kefauver because he had been a "traitor to the South" and he was fairly liberal on the race issue. So, Sam Ervin and the Old Guard supported Jack Kennedy for Vice-President, something that they never fully explained in 1960 when they were so bitterly opposed to him. So much for that.
Well, after you made the seconding speech, were you then sort of pressed onto the national scene as the southern spokesman?
I didn't want to be. I very carefully advoided that role. I didn't want
to be, I didn't have any interest in the national scene except as
another citizen. I was concerned with North Carolina and what I was
going to do.
I think that we were talking about your role as a spokesman for the South.
Well, I didn't think that the South needed a spokesman.
Well, a liberal spokesman.
Well, I didn't really want to put myself in a role that diminished what I
was doing in North Carolina, even to the extent that I instructed Henry
Wilson not to let my name get on any invitation lists for any of the
dinners at the White House. I got out of the governor's office in
Kennedy's second term. I didn't want the people of North Carolina
thinking that I had supported Kennedy because I was trying to play the
role of big shot and jet setter and the like and I didn't want it to
diminish anything that I was doing. Now, I met with Kennedy a number of
times in the White House about various things, most of which pertained
to North Carolina. I did go to one meeting of key people that he called
to talk about the race issue. I went several times to talk about several
things such as the Appalachian program we were trying to develop at the
time. I went to see him about . . . I really leaned on him to get the
environmental health center put here and so I went several times to see
him about that and leaned on him hard. That's what I turned my green
stamps in for. Anything else that I wanted for North Carolina, I simply
called Henry Wilson or Bobby Kennedy and didn't bother the President,
assuming that I could have gotten through. I assume that I could since
Evelyn Lincoln was very fond of me and always appreciated, probably more
than the rest of them, what we had done for him. But I never attempted
to play that, I never attempted to use it, when I was asked about
Jackson, Miss . . . we happened to have a Southern Governors Conference
as that was going on and Kennedy made his dramatic television speech,
nobody else would give it a favorable word except me. But other than
that, I didn't attempt to be a spokesman and didn't want to be. I felt
that it would take away from the extremely
Well, you said that you did talk with him from time to time or at least once about the time was right for a national southern figure.
He raised that question by simply saying that the bar to being a Catholic had broken down and he said, "Now, I think that the bar of being from the South can be broken." I dismissed it. I wasn't going to enter a serious conversation with him about how I ought to be the next candidate. I thought that it was presumptuous, I would have even thought that it was silly, but I think that obviously was what he was getting at and I said, rather jokingly, "You've got Lyndon Johnson."
He didn't consider Johnson a southerner?
Well, I don't know whether he did or not, I never asked him. But Johnson, of course, was a southerner, he was accepted in the South as a southerner.
Did any of your contacts with the Kennedys or with other national figures plant a seed in your mind as far as running for national office?
I don't know that I could ever say that a seed was planted. I said that thought was lurking around in my mind as a possiblity, it was a possibility that somebody from the South could move into the Presidency through the nominating process, not the way that Lyndon did, but I was beginning to be more and more convinced that that time in history had come. I didn't talk to anybody about it, I wasn't trying to develop that idea and I wasn't really focusing on it and I didn't really have the overwhelming desire to do it, in any event.
I know that you've been asked this several times, the possibility
Never discussed, unless you would count that other little passing comment to be an opening discussion, but it was never pursued. I don't have any idea that Kennedy had even started thinking about what he was going to do when he was killed. If he had asked me, I would have said to stick with Lyndon.
You weren't ready for that in '64?
Well, I thought that it would be damaging to him and I didn't have any desire to be it. Now, I happen to think that in the turn of history, it would have been far better if I had been because I would have handled the Vietnam War a lot better than Johnson did.
Well, eventually, you did decide to run for President. What changed your mind on that?
Well, I didn't change my mind, you know, it wasn't a question of changing my mind . . .
Well, that's eight years later.
It sort of drifted in that direction. It appeared in '72 that the
Democrats were about to go down the drain and if some fresh face came on
the scene, that that might very well be a proper time in history for it
to be done. The trouble is that I couldn't pull it off, I got in too
late and I didn't get taken seriously enough until it was too late. Even
Governor Scott wouldn't support me initially. He thought that I had lost
my mind. They later saw the wisdom of what I was trying to tell them,
but when they saw it, it was too late and we simply didn't pull it off.
So, I got into it more because the chance seemed to be so perfect,
rather than some
Right. I was going to ask you . . . of course, Carter has had a different approach in which he methodically for at least two years, maybe longer than that . . .
Well, I think that you could say eight.
Eight years. I wasn't aware that his thinking went back that far, he was a pretty young man to be thinking about that then, back when he ran for governor.
The second time. Well, I think that from his inaugural speech, it was obvious that he was thinking of it. He turned from the kind of campaign he had made and made a national speech. I didn't have any doubts at the time that he had that in mind, but then I had a particularly sensitive ear for that kind of thing.
Right. Well, this year, when you decided to run, you must have seen him and Wallace . . .
I felt that Wallace was dead politically, and of course, he was. A lot of
people didn't think he was, a lot of people here, but I thought that
history had passed him by and that particular issue that he traded on
was gone, so I never thought of Wallace as being very serious, nothing
but a kind of irritant. But obviously, I saw Carter as an extremely
serious
Do you think that his way of going about the nomination is really the only way you can do it?
Well, in the present system you've got to have an independent income and you've got to devote full time to it. Now, you've got to have some other things to go with that, but the other things are not enough alone. The records, qualifications, are not even looked at. It's the man that is going to spend thirty-five days in Iowa and thirty-five days in Florida and thirty-five days in New Hampshire altogether and devote full time to it that can get the nomination, and that's the kind of sacrifice that you've got to make. And not just the sacrifice, you've got to have an independent income. You can't live off the campaign. You've got to have enough money for your livelihood and I think that was a disadvantage with Udall. He couldn't devote full time to campaigning.
Do you think that your identification at this point with the establishment of the Democratic party hurt or helped you?
Well, I don't think that I even got to the point where that was . . . where anybody cared.
Well, let's project a little bit further as far as the national scene is concerned. On one hand, I've read a column recently which said that conspicuously absent on the platform at the Democratic convention was Fred Harris, Ted Kennedy and Terry Sanford. On the other hand, I've read another column that James Reston wrote where he said that Carter will be relying on key southern leaders like William Friday and Terry Sanford for advice during his administration, which . . .
And yesterday, you read a newsletter that said I might be the Secretary of State and all of that is about in the same category. I didn't go to the national convention because I wasn't invited to go to the national convention and I wasn't going up there and hanging around the stage door. It's that simple.
Well, do you see a role for yourself in the coming campaign or in the future in the Democratic party, a national role?
I think that I've done my duty by politics and American government and citizenship. I think that what I've done in the past has been more than most people have done and I'm not eager to do anything else. And I, under no circumstances, want to be involved in a government job.
Well then, that leaves the state. Do you . . .
No, it leaves a great many things. You don't have to be in politics to be living.
That's true.
I've been there. I don't know that I want to do anything else.
Well, it just seemed to me that since it had been so much of your life and so much of your background, that . . .
But you remember that I started out not to be a politician, so I'm perfectly content not to be one.
Right. But it seems that pretty early on you decided that you were going to run for governor. That's one decision that you were sure of.
That's right, but I didn't want to be a politician, I just wanted to be
governor and you had to be a politician in order to be governor.
Well, let me just ask one more question about that. After leaving office as governor, any other political office or appointment that might have come your way, you were more willing to let circumstances sort of unfold without really devoting, without it becoming an all-consuming enterprise on your part?
Well, that's exactly right.
That's a fair summary of things after '64?
Yes. Had the circumstances been such that I could have done something, I
might have even run for the Senate, although I didn't really have that
ambition and having seen the Senate with Governor Scott, I really didn't
much want to be a Senator. I didn't want to be a part of that up there,
voting on things that never really seem to sccomplish anything, dashing
back here speaking to all kinds of little special interest groups just
to keep yourself in power. It didn't appeal to me. But had there not
been an Everett
When you were getting your short campaign of '72 and '76 together, did you try to reassemble the same team that you had in '60?
Yes, it was right there. The trouble is, we didn't have time to touch
base with them. We had less than thirty days and the ones that we
touched base with came through in a wonderful way, although some of them
wrote me, "You must have lost your mind," we just never got it together.
Well, for two or three reasons. Most of them were already tied up in a
very tough campaign for governor, Taylor and Bowles were neck and neck
and all my friends were involved in that campaign or some other campaign
and it was very hard to get their attention. Somebody like Wallace Hyde,
a great friend of mine, did about all that he could do in Asheville, for
example But he was so tied into the Taylor campaign . . . I suppose it
was the Taylor
Well, how about this year? Did you try to reassemble some of it?
We had an extremely . . . the only really good organization that we had when I got out of the Presidential race was North Carolina. We had it tightly organized almost county by county, not just those, but we had brought a good many younger people in. Bill Whichard, who had assumed the managership in North Carolina, had done his job and North Carolina was ready. We didn't have a problem in North Carolina. It was the only place that we didn't have a problem. We had problems in Iowa and New Hampshire and if we had had the time to have done that the way that it should have been done, I think that we could have stayed in. About all that you had to do was to do those first three, but I wasn't in a position to do it, I didn't have any money, I really didn't have a good national campaign manager. I had made two passes at campaign managers and both of them flunked, for lots of reasons. Some of my major friends that could have done things didn't get to it, waiting until I got free, I suppose, which carries me back to "you can't run if you're not devoting full time to it." So, we were not ready anywhere but North Carolina.
Let's move over to your work at Duke, because I think that's important
and I want to have some time to talk about that. You came into office at
Duke at a pretty tense time. We talked about it a little bit before
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[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
You started as president of Duke in 1970, didn't you?
Well, '69. I was elected and actually became president on December 13, 1969. I was elected president December 13. I could not immediately come to work, I had too many things going and furthermore, I didn't want to come over here. They had an acting chancellor who was holding the fort very well and I thought if I dashed in here before I knew more about it, I might get in trouble. So, it served two purposes. I was president, but not on duty. I would come over here about once a week and talk with Dr. Woodhall, got myself pretty fully informed about everything. At the same time, I was cutting loose with the law practice and the business connections and things that I had, so that I didn't actually come on duty until April 2.
It was deliberate that I didn't come on duty April 1.
Why?
It was April Fool's Day.
Are you superstitious?
No, but I thought that was sort of fun, not to come to work on April Fool's Day. But I went on the payroll April 2. During that other period, when I was actually president, I wasn't being paid. Then of course, immediately within a month came Cambodia and Kent State, but I was ready for it. I knew what I was going to do under such circumstances. I did it and it worked.
What made you ready for it? You suspected something like this? You had seen it on other campuses?
First of all, I liked students. I wasn't afraid of students. I understood crowds and mobs and demonstrations from having been governor at the very toughest period of demonstrations and I knew the way to handle the students was to be one of them and that's the way we handled it. We got away from this remoteness that most college presidents had followed and the barricades that they gave their commands from behind. We simply moved among the students and that gave us the rapport that was necessary. It was tense, of course. But we didn't close down as some did, didn't miss a class to my knowledge, unless some professor decided that he didn't want to go. But it worked out very well and was extremely fortunate, as it turned out, for me because within six weeks of coming here I had totally established myself as being absolutely in charge of everything. It helped me with alumni, trustees, students and the faculty. Because it turned out, obviously, there was some luck in it, but it turned out very, very well.
Did you think of the parallels ten years earlier with the civil rights . . .
Well, of course. And I knew then that I need not be afraid of those
people. I knew then that I could walk into those demonstrations and I
wasn't . . . certainly, with the hostility that you would have expected
from young blacks and demonstrators of that kind. Compare that with the
hostility of students, it's bound to have been far greater. So, I wasn't
the least bit afraid of students. You wouldn't remember this, but when
all the black students and demonstrators in North Carolina descended on
the mansion, they were demonstrating against the system, not against me.
When I went out there and moved among them, I knew that I had them,
because I knew
But at the time that the war was starting up you were out of office, right?
Yes.
But you were able to make public . . .
I happened to be speaking at Harvard and I happened to be asked that question and it was the first public statement that I ever made on it. I said that I thought it was one of the most tragic errors that the United States had ever made. I might say that up until that point I hadn't made up my mind.
The question just popped up at you and you . . . this would be what, '65, '66?
Well, it was . . .
Later than that?
Lyndon Johnson took office in . . .
'64.
. . . '65.
'63, I mean.
No, as the elected president, in '65, and it was in the spring of that year that they committed the troops. That, of course, was the error.
This is sort of getting away from Duke, but I wanted to ask you, do you follow international affairs as closely as you do domestic affairs? As President, say, where would your expertise have been greatest?
Both. I thought.
I was just wondering, your experience was mostly in domestic.
Well, of course, nobody gets any experience in foreign affairs unless they are Secretary of State. But I was on a couple of United Nations things, I've run foreign study programs, I've taught in Austria. I've kept up as well as a person can keep up who is not actively engaged. Gerald Ford had no experience. Nixon had a little because he was Vice-President, but you know, I had been on more or less official missions to Russia, so I didn't feel the least bit uncomfortable about it. Not that I knew all the answers, but then nobody else does.
Did you fashion yourself a Cold Warrior? You were of that generation, certainly.
No, I was for the admission of China to the United Nations twenty-five years ago. Oh, I say twenty-five years ago, in the late forties I thought that General Marshall made a terrible mistake for Truman and they let the Cold War start under the pressure of McCarthy. I never did see any sense in excluding what they now call The People's Republic of China. No, I was never a Cold Warrior. I was a hot warrior in World War II, so I didn't have to apologize for that.
What kinds of things do you see for you to do at Duke, what kinds of things have you tried to do since you came here?
Well, we have a lot of things to do. Duke is certainly one of
Do you project another five years at Duke?
Well, I think so. With this reservation: I'm not going to outstay my welcome.
Are you one who . . . I forget which college president it was who said that no college president should stay for more than ten years . . .
That was Kingman Brewster and he said seven years because that happened
to be how long he had been there.
Could you reflect a little bit on the politics of higher education in this state? Because there is quite a bit of political infighting that goes on, I know. Are you involved in that with a private university, or do you follow it pretty closely?
I attempt to lead it, not follow it. Well, I think the higher education
situation . . . we haven't really talked much about the four years when
I was governor and what happened, but that was one reason that I wanted
you to have that little booklet. I think that we did a lot of things
that are worthy of mention because I set out to be the best governor
North Carolina ever had and history will have to determine how
successful I was. But I wasn't interested just in improving education.
We looked at everything government was doing and we were looking at
higher education. I immediately put together a commission to plot a
course for higher education in the state, which was in pretty good shape
but in some chaos. The previously designated teacher's colleges were
becoming liberal arts colleges. In one or two areas, we didn't have
adequate public education. In Asheville and Wilmington, we created four
year colleges out of rather inadequate junior colleges which had come
out of the GI bill. Charlotte,
In what way?
Leo Jenkins had ambitions far in excess of what was good for the total
system. Admittedly, what he wanted to do was good for East Carolina, so
you can't fault him totally. In fact, I admire his determination to do
something for his school. The trouble is that somebody needed to keep it
in the proper structure. That somebody had to be the governor. Governor
Moore didn't understand it. They then got into a political situation
that had to be dealt with. So, as Moore was governor, I suggested to
Bill Friday and Governor Moore through Watts Hill, who was head of the
Board of Higher Education, that if we followed a pattern that Minnesota
then had of having regional universities, we could satisfy some of the
things that Leo would like to do for Eastern North Carolina. Also, we
happened to have two other colleges that could be legitimate regional
universities, meaning that they had a regional responsibility and that
they would have the masters degree in several courses, but that we
wouldn't louse up the idea by trying to make East Carolina equal to
State and Chapel Hill. We didn't need to do that. Nor could we afford it
and have quality in the university system. John Henley was
Would you attribute this watering down to the political ambitions of various . . .
No, it is just the very nature of an institutional pride and ambition.
They all want to be a little bit better and they all want to do things
that Chapel Hill does, but we can't have sixteen Chapel Hills. We don't
have the resources, nor do we have the students and we don't have the
need. But that's about the way it is and Bill Friday is dedicated to
keeping Chapel Hill and State at the top in terms of national
performance. It is going to be a very difficult thing to do and one
reason that they've been able to do it, they've got a lot of private
funds. All right, so much for the state system and I suppose that it is
doing about the best that it can do, giving where it had to start over
again from. In fact, I was in favor of doing it this way. There wasn't
any other way out of it, unless you went back to what we had and nobody
would go back to that, of course.
So you are involved in discussing this with legislators?
I've been involved from the first day. I also am in the happy position of
having proposed this when I was governor and the only reason that we
didn't push it through was that the situation was not as critical then.
I could see it coming but it wasn't yet critical and I had put it in as
a supplemental proposal, meaning that we couldn't legally consider it
until we got the budget through. I had two or three other things that
were more important. This was about a three million dollar package at
the time. Among other things, I had a ten million dollar package for
retarded children and their education, which was far more important to
the
How do you deal with some of the criticisms of the concept of the community college system, where . . . I have heard people say or read it written that this is sort of interpreted as a feeder to the industrial base of the state at the taxpayer's expense.
There's nothing wrong with that. Well, for heaven's sake, who are we feeding with the engineers from North Carolina State? Who are we feeding with the lawyers from Chapel Hill or the doctors from Chapel Hill? Of course, you educate human beings to be productive but you are not going to have a productive society unless you do. Now, we were educating the elite and leaving everybody else out. I think that such a criticism of that is stupid.
I have just one or two other questions. One was that you said that one of the reasons that you did not pursue public office with the same intensity that you pursued the governor's office was that you wanted to have time to do other things. What are some of the other things that you like to do?
Well, there are thousands of things that you can do in life without getting so singlemindedly on a political track.
Do you have any particular hobbies or . . .
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[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
You say that you don't spend too much time relaxing?
Well, I could do a lot of other things if I was determined to do them. I sometimes think that I don't accomplish as much as I ought to be accomplishing, but on the other hand, I've ranged across a lot of different fields and doing a lot of interesting things and I hope that I am doing my basic job of running the university adequately. When you stop to think about it, being president of one of the great universities in the country ought to be satisfaction enough for anybody, even someone that didn't set out to pursue that career.
Yes, that would make me very happy, I think. I remember talking to you about various stages of your career and getting that sense of excitement when you're in a political campaign, the one that we talked about a couple of months ago.
Well, I think that I regret that I couldn't put the Presidential campaign
together for a lot of reasons. It's not just to have
Was it more irritating the fact that the nominee is a southerner?
Oh, no.
A southern liberal, or southern moderate?
No. It's none of my business, really. Who I would have supported if I had
been in a position of significant support, there's no need for me to
say. I'm supporting the nominee. I was in the process and I
Part of the strength of a public figure is the people who he surrounds himself with and we've talked about that when you became governor. Who are some of the national figures in the Democratic party that you would have surrounded yourself with? Who are some of the people on the national scene that you have been close with over the years? We talked about the Kennedys, but . . .
Well, I don't know if I could answer that question in the sense that I could pick a cabinet now that I would have picked. I couldn't, because you can see how they would develop. But I have been close to all the factions of the Democratic party, for a lot of reasons, and I never have been a part of any of them, maybe. I was reasonably close to the Kennedys, but I never was really a part of the Kennedy organization. I never wanted to be. I was close to Lyndon Johnson ultimately. He asked me to be his national campaign manager in 1968, before he withdrew. That's how close I had gotten to him in a period of time when I had never been his man and was never for his war. And he knew it. I was, of course, extremely close to Humphrey and his people. I was his national citizens chairman and I devoted all summer trying to help him get the nomination. He seldom took my advice on how to handle some of the more difficult things.
How about on the war?
Well, I wanted him to handle the war by resigning as Vice-President.
That's the only way that he could have disassociated himself from
Johnson, but he chose not to do that. But that's neither here nor
there.
I mean, because you established yourself as a member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party in North Carolina, I was just trying to see where you placed yourself in the national picture?
That's more difficult, because I never have been a knee-jerk liberal and I don't necessarily take a position that I think is going to be popular with the so-called liberals. I'm not in favor of breaking up the oil companies. Nothing could be more stupid if we want to develop the energy potential, but that's a knee-jerk liberal response. And in handling the economy, the knee-jerk liberal response is to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and be done with it, hire everybody that is out of work. Well, that's not the way to build a strong economy, that's a last ditch backup and most people are focusing on that as the end all of the problems of employment. I don't know where I fit. I would refuse to take a definition and a label.
I just get the impression that you have a kind of an aversion to some of the cosmetics of modern day politics and also the handling of the media. We haven't really discussed that. That didn't really enter into running for governor very much, did it?
The media was very much for me in 1960. I suppose that I had the
endorsement of every major paper and most of the minor ones. I could
count on one hand the papers that weren't supporting me and when I ended
office, I could count on one or two fingers the papers that weren't
supportingNews was not because the
Charlotte Observer was so strong for me that they felt
they had to take a contrary position. They weren't bitter, but they were
always sniping at me and likewise, the Raleigh Times
as distinguished from the News and Observer. I suppose
that Frank Graham and I were the only people that the News
and Observer ever supported with front page editorials. So, I
had a good working relationship with the working press and I felt that
most all of them were secretly for me and still trying to be objective.
I never had any problem with the press nationally or locally. I chided
the national press last year considerably for refusing to look at
qualifications and issues and being concerned with polls and
campaigning, but I never had any problems. When I got out of the race,
most of the people that commented, commented in extremely favorable
terms, which is about the first time that I got any attention. But I
never have had any complaints about the press. They've done their job as
best they can do it in the system. We probably leave to the national
media too much of the decision-making and shaping public opinion in
presidential campaigns and that's not good. But I don't know that there
is an easy answer to it. Among other things, I would endeavor to do away
with VHF, then you could have a dozen networks. You could have as many
television stations as you've got radio stations and I think that you
would take away the concentration of ability to influence even
inadvertantly. So, if there is
There's no guarantee, no check.
And who is going to be the next Walter Cronkite? So, I think that there are some evils in the system, but everybody has been perfectly decent to me. I don't have any personal complaints.
Well, I was thinking more in difficulty of projecting a record.
Oh, absolutely. You couldn't get their attention on those two things, on issues and record. They didn't look at the record of anybody running. Not yet have they done it. Maybe this campaign now will bring some of it out. Who knows anything about Mondale? Not two percent of the people in the country, outside of his home state and the Senate. But they will.
Hopefully in a campaign.
Well, that's the detriment of the system as far as the Democratic party is concerned. They've now built to where they are on organization and campaigning and we have yet to look at issues and records and personalities and capabilities. That's what happened when McGovern got the nomination.
Well, the national party, though, is a every four year kind of affair. You've been involved in the national party in off years, but how many people really do get involved?
I'm not talking about the national party in terms of its committee, I'm talking about the party all over the country.
Right.
The national committee has very little to do with the preliminary campaigns and where we are today. It had nothing much to do with it except to arrange the convention accomodations. But the Democratic party all over the country has fallen into the system of letting less than ten million people, perhaps, decide what the outcome is going to be and they are making the decision on very superficial evidence presented by the press and television.
It seems that it is very easy for someone outside the party, or someone who really hasn't been involved in the party machinery for very long, to capture the nomination. Jack Kennedy could even be cited as such an example, although he was more of an insider than Carter.
Well, Carter is very much an insider. Carter worked with the Democratic National Committee perhaps more than any candidate running. He was in charge of the '74 elections and at Democratic National Committee expense, went to every Congressional district in the country that had an election. You know, if anybody was part of the system, it was Carter. Now, the press might have overlooked this. You might find that most members of the press are not even aware of the fact that he was involved in that party exercise.
That was his first party assignment, though.
Well, that's right. You don't need many.
Right. One question I want to get to, we've talked a lot about
Well, I've been disappointed in the progress that North Carolina has made
since '64. That may be vain, but nevertheless, we had some good things
going that we let get away from us. We had more excitement in public
education than anywhere else in the country and we let such things as
the Advancement School, which was one of the truly experimental public
schools in the country, go down the drain, we let the Learning Institute
become just a mediocre research organization instead of what it was
contemplated to do to improve public education across the state. I don't
know how you measure the quality of education and probably if there was
an adequate way to measure it, North Carolina would be much better than
indicated by the measure of faculty salaries, for example, which is
about the usual way. You rank 32nd because of your salary scale and I
think that we ranked about 45th when I became governor and we ranked
about 30th when I left. I don't know where we rank today, but that's not
really the measure of the quality. I think that the quality has gone
down somewhat, but I think it has gone down all over the country with
our preoccupation with other social objectives of education and we've
overlooked the main thrust of educating the individual child. We are
getting back to that now and that's true all over the country.
Certainly, the schools of New York would rank far above North Carolina
in terms of faculty salaries, but nobody could say that the city school
system of New York was better overall than North Carolina
You weren't building on something from before and you didn't have to change something.
Well, they haven't had time to get in a rut. They will, if someone is not ever constantly alert to keeping it a fresh organization.
How about industrial wages?
It's a very interesting thing, Mrs. Van Alstyne did a study for us for
the North Carolina Fund, because that was a constant puzzle to me. I
looked at South Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. And
Arkansas. I couldn't understand why our industrial wage was always about
48th or 49th, somewhere in there. She analyzed it pretty thoroughly as
an economist. This is an oversimplification and maybe an
overrationalization, but part of it was that we had more jobs. A person
working on a farm part-time living in poverty is not counted in the
industrial wage. When we got in lots of little industries and marginal
regions that paid marginal wages but yet much more than anybody had
before, when the wife comes in and works at a shirt factory and the
husband is still doing part-time farming, they are much better off but
the average is much lower. When you put all of that into it.
So, the diversification of industry and agriculture is . . .
We are moving in those directions, not as vigorously as we might.
One final question . . . I've kept you longer than I was supposed to, but with the kind of public life that you have led and still lead, to a large extent, how much time have you found that . . . are you able to spend much time with your family?
I don't think that's been a detriment. Whether I've spent it as wisely as one should, you never know until you've been through once, but I think that any shortcomings that I've had have not been from lack of time spent with my family.
Well, what I mean is, has that been a source . . . well, in allotting your time, has that been . . .
I don't think so. I haven't been that much in the public eye. Admittedly, somebody named Terry Sanford, Jr. has certain handicaps to overcome, but there are also certain advantages and I hope it offsets it.
Well, I would like to thank you for giving me all the time that you have and perhaps we would want to get together for another session, but we'll read this over and see what it looks like.
Very good.
END OF INTERVIEW