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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 C-0038, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Terry Sanford, a Democratic politician who served as a state senator, governor, and U.S. senator in North Carolina and held the presidency at Duke University, reflects on his political career in this interview. He focuses on his goals for his upcoming Senate career, describing the positive campaign strategy that secured him a seat in the United States Senate in 1986. His emphasis on positivity complements his emphasis on unity, a trait he sought to restore to the Democratic Party with his incursions into national politics, including as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 and 1976. Sanford leaves unsaid what precisely Democratic politicians could do to restore unity, however—a thorny question complicated by the fact that the Democrats' disarray in Sanford's North Carolina was likely due to the party's support for civil rights for African Americans. His focus on unity was complemented by what he describes as a positive television ad push that emphasized his record, and his determination not to court certain voting blocs for fear of antagonizing them. This interview offers an interesting look at the way a moderate southern Democrat gained political influence, and won over southern voters, in the increasingly conservative 1970s and 1980s.
Terry Sanford, a Democratic politician who served as a state senator, governor, and U.S. senator in North Carolina and held the presidency at Duke University, reflects on his political career.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Today is December 16, 1986. The following is an interview with Senator Terry Sanford. The interview was conducted in Mr. Sanford's office in Durham, North Carolina. The interviewer is Brent Glass. I wanted to start out by asking you, did you ever think that you would serve fifteen years as president of Duke University? Were you surprised that you did?
Well, I found the time running on and the years piling up, almost imperceptively. I didn't come to a point and say, "Now, do I want to stay here another five years?" I had initially said that it would appear to me that five years would be about long enough to do this. Then I would get out and do something else. I've always had about eight or ten things out there that I wanted to do. Obviously, I haven't gotten to very many of them but I didn't have in mind staying there the rest of my active life. As it went on there were always new challenges rising out of the next year, the following year. So I just stayed on and on without ever quite making a conscious decision that well, I ought to be here a little longer.
In the last ten years were there ever any thoughts of leaving earlier than your retirement? Is there anything that came up that…
Oh well, I made a pass at running for President. Obviously, if I had pursued that and if I had gotten the nomination, I would have had to leave.
Sure. But since then, since '76.
I never set out and said it's time for me to go until I was reaching the age sixty-five, which was three years before I did retire. I said at that time, "I think I ought to go." The trustees, for various reasons, said at that time, "How about staying three more years?" So I did. I think maybe I'm wrong in the three years, maybe—when I told them I wanted to leave at 65, they said three more years. I'd have to calculate that. In any event I did stay an added period after I told them I was ready to leave. After they met for several months to decide what they wanted to do, [they] asked me if I'd stay a little bit longer and get a couple of other things in place to let them be in a better position to look for a new president.
How involved were you in the search for the new president?
Well, in a way, not at all and in another way, crucially. I had nothing
to do with the search committee. I wasn't even kept informed of what
they were doing, and that's a peculiarity, apparently, in the academic
world. Anywhere else the chief executive would be heavily involved. On
the other hand, by having chosen a chancellor three years earlier, at
the point when they asked me to stay, I realized that in all probability
I was picking the next president. Not because I would be deliberately
trying to decide what the trustees would do, but the very fact that we
had a good man in that position would make it very difficult for them to
pick somebody from the outside equally as good. So I indeed said at the
time to the trustees, "You are going this way because you didn't take my
In effect they'd be hiring a temporary chancellor.
No, they would be hiring, in effect, a president-elect who would serve in the chancellor's position until we were ready to make the transition, which might have been a year or two and probably would have suited everybody. The attractiveness of the Duke presidency was such that we could have gotten almost anybody in the country, we had otherwise wanted, to do it that way. But they thought not. So I said, "All right, then, the burden falls to me to pick a chancellor, and I can tell you that in all probability I'm picking the next president. I don't really prefer to do it this way." But we did it anyway. I think it's worked out very well.
So really it was up to the new chancellor to succeed as chancellor and then pretty much make his way as president.
Well, it would be very hard for them to get past him. Now they looked all
over the country. They looked at almost everybody before they came back
and looked at him,
Looking back, it's hard to distingish between the last ten years and the last fifteen years but what are one or two of the things that you're most proud of in terms of your accomplishments at Duke?
Well, I think we gave Duke a very high academic standing. Now, some people on the faculty were never quite sure of that but that obviously tremendously improved. It was always the ultimate goal of the things that I was doing, and I think we did. Of course, we gave Duke a reputation—and I say we—for excellence as a creative and exciting place, very attractive to students who came to one of the most sought-after schools in the country. It moved from a rather indefinite position of being a very good school to being one of the top half dozen in the country. There were a lot of elements that went into that.
Such as?
The academic excellence, which is fundamental. The difference between
Duke and one or two other highly ranked schools is that our academic
requirements and standards are impeccable and much, much better than
some other popular schools. Also, I think the students liked it not only
because they liked the academic quality, and students do appreciate the
discipline of that, but they also liked the excitement that was part of
Duke life. I'm not quite sure. That's an intangible thing but you did it
by letting students sense their own personal
When you say we, who were some of the key people who you came to rely on to accomplish some of these goals?
Well, I relied on everybody. My style was to give everybody their head, and to be supportive. That would have to do with the Dean of Students, later the vice-president. That would have to do with the business manager and all of the far flung enterprises. That would have to do with the Medical Center as well as the—not just the Chancellor for Health Affairs but the head of the hospital and the cancer center and various things—children's clinic—that wanted my support. They got it. The Fuqua School of Business, the head of the Student Union—you let all of those people feel that they could be creative. They could go ahead and get things done, and they would have complete support—it was up to them to bring their best talents to bear on the job. If you can get that kind of feeling in an institution, the institution is going to prosper. So I could name almost anybody that would fall in that category—the head of the Chapel, the head of Duke Choir, the head of Duke Security—all of these people did their own thing with the sense that I expected them to achieve a level of excellence which was Duke's standard, and that I would support them in everything that they were doing, and that I encouraged new ideas. Now some people we didn't get any new ideas from, but mostly you did.
Would you say to them, you come up with your goals, and rather than you say, these are the goals I want for your agency…
No, I didn't say that so much. I didn't pronouce that as much as to give them the feeling that that's right. I constantly tried to set goals. I talked about goals. I encouraged them to put together their own goals—let's say the Forestry School, or for that matter, the Medical Center, the hospital. We knew what the institutional goals were.
How personally involved would you get with some of these outstanding gifts that Duke has gotten—the Medical School growing the way it has, the Fuqua of School of Business as you mentioned, the liberal arts campaign? How personally involved did you—I'm trying to get at the role of the president in a growing, expanding university.
Well, I would never permit my role to be defined or even described as an
external one of raising money and doing things of that kind. I felt that
if I didn't portray myself as in charge of all the University, including
the academic standards and the academic departments and the academic
achievement, I wouldn't be a complete president and really wouldn't be
very good in raising money anyhow. But there wasn't any money raised
that I wasn't involved in, not that I initiated it all. The great gift
of, over a period of time, some eight million dollars that the Forestry
School got—the Dean of the Forestry School discovered an old alumnus,
old in the sense that he graduated
Do you recall the name?
Raymond E. Sullivan. He was very well-to-do and had a great deal of forestry land that it would—from a tax point of view and an inheritance point of view—pay to do it the way they did it with a deferred gift with special provisions. The University got the income for a number of years and the next generation, his grandchildren, got the property back. In the meantime we had the benefit of that eight million—well, my point is, without going into all the details, that he found that prospect. I went to Columbus, Georgia with him two or three times to develop it. I went to see him, and I kept in touch with it but I didn't initiate everything by any means. I didn't pursue to the final making of the gift everytime, but I was involved in virtually every gift of any size during that whole period of time because I saw that as a special contribution that I could make. People want to talk to the president if they are going to give any substantial amount of money.
Did anyone ever come with a gift that you just felt wasn't in keeping with the…
Oh yeah. We never took that money if they wanted money for a program
that—oh, and nobody ever came with any evil money. Oh, people came with
money that they had some special purpose that just didn't suit us. You
tried to be as diplomatic as possible in getting it directed to
something that we wanted to do. If we couldn't, we didn't take it. I
could cite four or
Can you cite one example of those things?
Well, I would but it would be misunderstood. It just didn't suit our purposes.
One of the issues that comes up and has come up recently, in terms of UNC with Glaxo, is the relationship of private research and university faculty.
Well, that's a very difficult—oh, yes. In fact, I was trying to define
that issue seven or eight years ago in the university world in two or
three speeches of how do you handle that relationship. It is a delicate
issue. It would damage pure research in the long run if everything took
that turn. On the other hand, there's a place for that kind of research.
It is in a limited area. But even there you've got to be very cautious
in the conflict between the academic world—wanting to get out the truth,
and to get it out as soon as possible, and get it cross checked by other
investigators—and the need for secrecy in the corporate world to develop
patentable ideas. So that has to be carefully resolved, and I would
assume that they are carefully resolving it. No good university is going
to sell out to commercial research alone. On the other hand, it's a
contribution they can make. Then there's that conflict between applied
research, that's a very broad term. The good aspects of
We were just talking about the issue of private research and the university. One former chancellor of one of the universities said to me that almost inevitably the university wins in the long run. If you total up the box score, so to speak, the benefits to the university always outweigh the benefits to the corporation. Has that been your observation?
Well, it depends on what you mean by benefits to the university. If you're doing someone else's research, something that is not of particular interest to anybody but a narrow commercial interest, the question [is] whether or not supporting a professor in that kind of research was necessarily a function of the university. So I think you have to look at it very carefully and know what the purposes of the university are. I would think that it's the kind of partnership that would be beneficial to both sides, and to the extent that it is not beneficial to both sides, then no partnership of any kind of an undertaking is worthwhile. So I think it can be done provided that everybody understands the limitations and the needs and the purposes of the two enterprises.
Would the decision making as far as accepting a contract or not accepting a contract be about the same as the criteria for accepting a gift? Did you turn down contracts? Were you involved, or would that be something that would be decided in the individual department of the university?
Oh no, we would not have allowed anything like that to have been decided at too low a level, a level where purely the investigators were involved. On the other hand, most research grants are generated by the investigator, that is the faculty member. He will write the proposal, sometimes with staff assistance, and he pretty well directs the kind of research that he wants to do. I think there is no question that sometimes their research objectives are distorted by what kind of money is available, and so they might alter it. Generally, that kind of research money is fairly free. That is, fairly free in the determination of which way the research goes. Certainly all support of pure research is pretty much free. So sometimes decisions might be made where an investigator, in order to keep his lab going, might be doing something that he didn't think was the best way he could spend his time, but he certainly didn't think it was useless, or he wouldn't have been doing it.
Did it ever come across your desk where you were genuinely shocked or outraged at the kind of research that was going on?
Oh no. I don't think so. We simply didn't go after some things that some universities went after. It might have been slightly different at some universities. I think we kept institutional integrity intact in all those kinds of dealings.
Inevitably, over fifteen years there's going to be some frustrations and disappointments as well as successes. What were one or two of your major disappointments as president?
Well, there really weren't very many because almost everything that we
tried to do was accomplished. Just to give you an indication of how few
we had and how lacking in great importance, one of the frustrations is
that I let get away from me a purchase of the Saturday
Review of the Literature which would have been a very good
deal. Today, the number one literary magazine, which since then has
virtually been destroyed, would be published by Duke University, and I
think at a profit. Well, I was on a little short sabbatical at that time
and let senior staff people nip that in the bud when I thought they were
following my instructions to pursue it. They, thinking they were wiser
than I, and that this would not be a good thing for the university,
killed it. By the time I discovered it, I would have had to fire
somebody of considerable importance to me to have done it, or I would
have had to have reprimanded him. It would have been so public in that
rather limited public arena that the embarrassment would have had
repercussions that I didn't want. But I think today, when I look at the
New York Times Book Review, that we could be doing
so much better. It's just a true university function. Well, that's a
minor frustration. That didn't change the university one whit. That's
about the only disappointment I have.
Well, you might say, "What about the Nixon Library?" Well, I did my duty
there. I thought that we were the ideal repository for those papers. I
thought it through and stood my ground, and the faculty finally agreed
with me by which time we had more or less poisoned the well as far as
the Nixon lawyers
Do you think the oppostion was a matter of philosophy or process?
Oh, it was absolutely a matter of blind prejudice against Nixon, though the process was an excuse.
Okay, that was what I wanted to …
Oh, no, that was simply something they could hang it on. The process was simply that the Academic Council process was not really a process of communication as I incorrectly assumed that it ought to be. So when I involved the chairman of the Academic Council, I mistakenly thought I was involving communications with the faculty, when in truth they didn't have any mechanism for communication. Because it was summer time, I had no other mechanism. In retrospect, if I had put it off until September, it might have been a different story. They at least wouldn't have had the excuse of process.
You know, I am familiar with a little bit of the story of the honorary
degree that was offered to Nixon and then
Oh well, there's no question. I called the head of the History Department, or the acting head and former head, and told him [about the library proposal]. He said, "Well, as a historian I suppose I should be for this but I can't stand that…" I think he used a profane word but since I'm not absolutely certain he did, I won't put it in this record. Obviously, he was saying my professional standards are in conflict with my personal emotions. He said that as a historian, "I suppose I should be for it." It turned out that he wasn't for it so the personal emotions overrode the professional judgment. He was the person that took credit for mobilizing the forces to kill the—as a young professor—to kill the Nixon honorary degree. He took great pride in telling of his part in that, as perhaps he should have. In any event, this was a different question though some of them saw it as a question of rehabilitating Nixon at our expense. I didn't see it that way.
Clearly you weren't political allies with Nixon…
Oh, well, it had nothing to do with politics on my part, or redeeming Nixon, or anything else because I was the only person on this campus who had participated nationally in two campaigns against him. But that's gone and past, and the University's no worse off. I think that the academic research world is worse off. The public, essentially, I suppose, benefits from that kind of research.
There's a certain irony that the most…
Well, the truth of the matter is that perhaps not having those papers readily available has permitted the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon to proceed with more dispatch.
With less scrutiny.
Well, I happen to think that the way it's come out with Mr. Nixon reestablishing his credibility is something that ought to be admired. You know, a great many people would have long since given up, committed suicide, died, or whatever but he stuck in there. He continued to do things, project things that improved his standing and image, and the truth of the matter was that he always was a highly intelligent and able person. He had those personal flaws of insecurity and whatever else went with it—a lack of judgment in some, what might be called moral issues. That is, a level of what was shady and what was not shady. Though he was by no means a crook as he said he wasn't, and he wasn't. But he exercised such very bad judgment, and he paid the penalty, and while we wouldn't have had anything to do with the rehabilitation, we would have those papers available. So yes, I would say that we should have done it, but it didn't hurt the University that we didn't.
A certain irony that some of the greatest opposition came from the department of history where the archives would have served many historians.
Oh, well, the center of the opposition was the History Department. I think it had more to do with the fact that these people happened to be there. They just as soon could have been in any other department.
Can you access the relationship…
Well, let me hasten to say, since this might fall to somebody else's eye someday, it wasn't just the History Department, of course. They got a rather long list of people to sign the petition saying they were opposed to it. It spread across the University. There were equally as many, and perhaps more, that thought we ought to have it.
Would you say that the relationship between private and public education, higher education, in North Carolina, is better, worse than ten years ago? In the last few years have you sensed the growing support or growing opposition to the arrangement that we have in North Carolina?
Oh, we've always had extremely strong political support and never have
been in serious trouble there. I think the private schools, even when I
had something to do with it, didn't press the case quite as hard as they
could have. They could have gotten more. But in any event, it's always
been rather overwhelming, the legislative support. The University of
North Carolina, particularly the president of the University of North
Carolina, was the principal opponent. I would have to guess, though I
haven't tested him out, that that's probably changed now. But in that
ten-year period or so, maybe a little longer, we established that
principle. While I had ten years earlier suggested it as Governor, it
wasn't a pressing issue then. The gap hadn't developed so, though it was
beginning, I had to make my choice between three big programs in that
last session. As I recall, one [was] for retarded children, very
What role, if any, have you played in national higher education over the last ten years that you feel that you'd like to talk about?
Well, I attempted to do my duty without spending too much time off
attending national meetings and doing things that I didn't think had any
particular relationship here. I was the chairman of the first National
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, that after a
period of two or three years went through a transition into what it is
today, but that was the forerunner of it. It gave me an opportunity to
speak out for the dual system of education and a continuing opportunity
to do so. I was, in my due time, president of the Association of
American Universities. I was very active always in that organization
because that was the organization that I could learn
We've talked before about role models and politics, political leadership, Kerr Scott and Frank Graham. Were there any role models in the presidency of a college—people that you admired around the country?
Well, there were people that I had an admiration for, at least in some of
the things that they were doing. I attempted to draw from them lessons
that might be useful to me at Duke. I'd say almost every person that I
met at the AAU and some outside were doing things that I wanted to
emulate. I think Kingman Brewster handled the [student] demonstrations
in a very good way compared to other presidents at the time and compared
to where he was—in a town of, among other things, working people, to say
nothing of a place where the more liberal dissenters had tended to
congregate and stay after finishing college. I think
What about relationships with the U. S. Department of Education itself? Did you discern the differences in policies from one administration to another that you had to respond to?
Well, the Department of Education, which became a department in '73 or
'74 or somewhere along there, nonetheless was represented either by a
commissioner or either by HEW at various stages. I always thought that
the Department of Education, or whatever it was called at the time, was
overstaffed. I always thought that they wasted a lot of energy and maybe
some money in doing things that had no useful purpose. I always felt
that the philosophy of education, the policy of education, should be
kept out of Washington. We higher education never did really need the
Department of Education then. But I supported its formation—for other
reasons. It also is true that it wasn't as oriented towards higher
education. Our concerns up there had more to do with the health sciences
and the National Science Foundation and the funding for things that were
relevant
Now Bennett was appointed…
A total misfit. Bennett is a total misfit. Wherever he ought to be, he ought not to be up there involved in trying to do something that the Department of Education is not supposed to do anyhow, and that's set educational policy.
Recently he has set his sights on higher education criticism. I don't know whether you follow that. It might be after you had left Duke.
Well, Bennett doesn't know what he's talking about. That goes almost across the board, and I don't think that Bennett is any serious threat to education because I don't think that many people pay attention to him.
Let's move on to…
I rather like Bill Bennett personally. I had known him at the [National] Humanities Center. I just think that he's doing things that he would have been the first to say, when he was on the outside looking in, that the Office ought not to get into. The great argument against it was that it would try to shape policy. He now has violated that more than anybody else.
You think that its just developed too much of an ideological base?
Well, of course, he's attempted to transfer his own ideological approaches to this.
Let's shift over to Duke and Durham for a little bit. In what way and why did you decide to become active in the development of Durham?
Well, because it needed to be done. Because Duke was the major employer, Duke was the major citizen, corporate citizen, of Durham. It's our town.
That was a major change because Duke had always been certainly at some distance from Durham.
Well, it's easy to be at some distance—easy for a corporation, the tobacco companies, American Tobacco Company, to be uninvolved. But certainly Duke ought to be involved, and certainly Duke students ought to be involved for their own education. So it was a thing that I started the day I got here, attempting to tie Duke in. One of the things I did the first day was go visit the City Council, and I think maybe the County Commissioners, if they were in session—if not, a day or two later.
What was the background of your involvement. It seemed to accelerate in the last few years.
Well, everything seemed stagnated. It occurred to me that by virtue of being at Duke I could be a catalyst, and that's what I tried to do. Now, there had to be a line between being a catalyst and being a political activist, and I tried not to cross that line. So once we got the downtown thing started with the Downtown Development Corporation—when the City Council decided to take it away from the corporation and handle it itself, you almost knew that it was doomed to fail and did. But neither was there a lot that you could do about it without appearing then to be trying to get Duke involved in telling them how to run the city.
What would you cite as some of the positive results of this involvement.
Oh, I don't think that there is any question that getting people together and getting them to talk and getting them to quit quibbling about their little differences was a good thing, and we carried it right on up to the time I left Duke. Some people thought I ought to continue it but it seemed to me that I couldn't very well do that.
You're talking about the (Durham) Progress Group, the breakfasts and the other activities.
Yes, we never did really give a name to it. We wanted it to be kind of a flowing committee that anybody could come join and just anybody that wanted to work with Durham could come have breakfast with us. It got called Durham Progress Group and two or three other things. I just said it was the people of Durham having breakfast together.
Do you think Durham is unique in that divisiveness that seems to exist in North Carolina? How knowledgable are you of other cities, and how would you compare getting things done in Durham as compared to other municipalities?
Durham has had a very difficult time getting its act together. It's just
evident. It's evident that we didn't get downtown shaped up right
compared to say Charlotte or Raleigh. We didn't pay enough attention to
the benefits that flowed from the Research Triangle Park, and let
Raleigh steal most of them, which they were perfectly justified in
doing. We ignored industrial development or didn't do a good job. We
most
Is this with the Chamber you mean?
Well, the Chamber's Industrial Development Department. So, Durham has lagged behind, and maybe now that that's happened that's to our benefit because we don't have to make all the same mistakes that others made. On the other hand, there is still an anti-development sentiment here. I'm totally in favor of proper planning and environmental controls but there's a group of people that transcend that to just being opposed to the moving of any stone or cutting of any tree. Well, we can't live in a wilderness since we don't live in a wilderness. We could if we chose, and individually moved to wildernesses. But if we're going to have a flourishing place that can support its downtown, that can support the arts, that can support the things that improve the quality of life, we've got to have jobs, and especially in this town that could have predicted that textile jobs and tobacco jobs were going to disappear. We were at least ten years slow in being aware of that and attempting to do something about it collectively. So there'll be a lag there but I think we can catch up.
How do you respond to the articles that you see where people fear the Research Triangle-Durham starting to resemble some of the northeastern metropolitan areas that are choked with traffic and have various—and there are indications, every once in a while you read about them in the paper…
Oh yeah, we get choked with traffic. I had three cars ahead of me at the stoplight today.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
We can escape some of that. Durham can't do it unless it understands that orderly development is the most legitimate purpose of the community, and that communities are developed areas in the country. They're not wild, wilderness areas. So the question is how do you develop them properly. You don't do it in a haphazard way as Durham has been inclined to do. Sometimes they'd make good decisions, sometimes bad decisions—never quite consistent rationale of how Durham ought to develop.
One banker in Durham said to me that the park is now downtown, and Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, and Durham are almost surburbs or boroughs within a much larger metropolitan area. Do you see that?
Well, I don't see the Research Park as being the center of it. I do think that the Triangle area is rapidly becoming one community.
How active have you been? What's been your role in shaping that development? You've been an education and business leader now in Durham. Can we talk about that a little bit?
Well, I've been involved with the Research Triangle from its beginning
almost. No question that the concept has been developed pretty much
according to plan. I haven't been as active in the Research Triangle
Park in the last five or six years as I had been before, primarily
because I had other things to do. I didn't see that I would do anything
unique by being more involved in the road problems, and the street sign
problems, and the other things that were concerning them, though I
remained
You know it just occured to me that in preparing for this that one of the
by-products of Duke becoming closer with Durham has been that a number
of former Duke students have stayed in the community and have become
politically active and now serve
Well, a great many Duke students have remained here to work and to be here. No, I think that's inevitable. I think you would expect students to find it attractive to stay here. If they stay here, they ought to get involved.
I might be wrong but I think in the past Duke was seen more as a sort of a stop in between high school and a career.
Well, I think from the 70's on you had a great many people that just didn't want to leave.
Who came up with the—how do you put together a project like Treyburn? Who comes up with the vision for what has to be, I guess, the second largest, or maybe even larger than the Research Triangle Park, development? How did that come together?
Well, a lot of people had something to do with it. I had been looking at
that property a long time, having had a good deal of experience at that
kind of thing in Fayetteville when I was practicing law—getting areas
together for development, knowing something about the problems. Though I
did it there mostly as a lawyer but I helped my clients initiate things.
Then I became governor and got out of all that. I had begun looking at
this property. In fact, I had bought a little piece of it several years
before, the Weaver farm that touches on Roxboro Road, and had taken an
option on about half of one of the other parcels, the Wright property or
Snowhill Farm. There were three parts of the old Cameron lands left that
had gone to different hands. The most recent one was the Fairntosh that
was
Then three years later it all became available by a series of events. The engineers [Army Corps] had taken too much of the farming land at Fairntosh to make it a good farm. Liggett had moved to New Jersey and wanted to sell their real estate. So all of it became available. Then Clay Hamner and Terry [Sanford, Jr.] came into the picture and began putting that together. I was involved with them then. Certainly to the extent that I assured them that we couldn't finance with borrowed money. That if we leveraged it too much, given the cycles of real estate, we'd ultimately stand to lose it. I'd seen this happen enough in my own experience because not only did I do this as a lawyer in Fayetteville, but I served on a real estate investment trust for First Union—Cameron Brown. I saw what happened to developers who were over leveraged. So Clay with his contacts found investors, and that's about how it got started.
Were you more involved in Treyburn than, let's say, Erwin Square or Brightleaf?
No, I wasn't involved in Brightleaf at all and, except as a passive investor, in Erwin Square—one of the minor investors.
So Treyburn is the first one.
Well, I didn't have time to devote to business. But in Treyburn, I intended to be very active. Of course, I intended to see that it was properly planned. For all the talk of the one or two very small groups, it's the best planned community in the state. The environment is the best protected of any place in the state. So all that will work out at the proper time. You know, Terry called me up. He'd come back here to build houses, been out of Chapel Hill for three or four years. He'd been off down in South Carolina learning how to build houses. Started off with a job at Raleigh. What's the name of that, in Cary, the Kildare?
Oh, McGregory Downs?
No, Kildare. Putting in sewer lines and roads. He majored in psychology.
So he called me in Florida and said that he had paid ten thousand
dollars down on the two Liggett warehouses. Did I want to be in on it
with him? I asked him where he got ten thousand dollars. He said, he had
saved it. So I said, "I'll be in on it if you lose. If you win, I don't
want any part of it. But I got a man here that you ought to talk with
and probably ought to be in it with you, and that's Clay Hamner," who
happened to be in Florida with me. So that's how they got
Let's talk about the senate race. Let's lead up to it and try to backtrack and ask you, how active in the last ten years have you been in state and national politics?
Not very active. But active enough to keep my hand in. Just before coming to Duke I had been the national chairman of the Citizens for Humphrey-Muskie which was pretty heavy involvement since you might say that that was the center of his campaign—might have been better if it had been the total center. We had the Democratic National Committee with Larry O'Brien still heavily influenced by the Kennedys, attempting to run the organizational side which didn't run too well. Not that Larry wasn't a good leader but there were problems there. In any event, I was pretty heavily involved. I made a tremendous number of contacts there, as you might guess, including young staff people like Sam Poole who now has become my campaign manager.
He was on the Humphrey-Muskie?
Oh, he worked for me as one of the people working with Young Democrats or
young people, mostly Young Democrats in the general election. I'd worked
all summer for Humphrey as a volunteer. Pretty much spent my time in
Washington and around the country, lining up his delegates. At the end
of that I had a tremendous number of contacts. Then I came to Duke, and
I really
Then the black candidate emerged and John Wheeler, who was the black leader in North Carolina, and whom I'd made nationally known. I'd done all kinds of things to elevate him and to use him as a consultant but he felt he had to stick with her.
Shirley Chisholm.
And you had Wallace coming in here—you know it's fatal to lose the black
vote. Well, at that time I ought to have gotten out if I'd have known
any decent way, graceful way to have done it. Then in addition to that
you had the Nixon people that were very much campaigning against me for
obvious reasons. You had the McGovern people who were campaigning
against me though he was for all practical purposes out of the North
Carolina race. It
Then at the end of that, in spite of the fact that I had been against
McGovern
Now there were at least, from my calculation, at least one, two, three opportunities to run for Senate prior to this one. You didn't choose to do that. Why?
I never had any great ambition to be in the Senate. It seemed to me—certainly I didn't have any ambition to spend my life in the Senate.
How involved were you then in state politics in the last ten years?
Well, I took the position that every citizen, regardless of whether he was working in a machine shop or was president of the university, ought to be involved in politics. I never hesitated to take sides. I always did it, I hope, with some taste and judgment. I never was by nature violently partisan but I supported the Democratic candidates always and always openly, and I supported Hunt. I had a big fund raiser here for Bob Morgan when he ran the last time unsuccessfully for the Senate. I had a statewide fund raiser for him, for which I sent out personal invitations. So I stayed pretty much involved.
Did you have a working relationship with Hunt?
Oh, close.
In his eight years as…
Well, you know, Hunt in a way saw himself as a protege. He started off campaigning with me. Then I supported Bob Jordan this last time for Lieutenant Governor. I supported several other people but he was the successful one. I supported Lauch Faircloth and then Rufus Edmisten and then Rufus Edmisten again in the general election. Of course I supported Hunt, and I stayed in politics which I think I should. I did it in a way that didn't upset any Republican trustees.
You characterized once the governors that have succeeded you as perhaps not being as activist or as—well activist will be the word I'll use. This was back in '76. Would you say that Hunt accelerated the course that you tried to set?
Well, Hunt approached the governorship with more like my approach.
What finally led you to decide to run for Senator?
Two things. One, I was out of work, needed something to do. I'd toyed
with it, struggled with it. I saw good reason for doing it and many,
many reasons for not doing it. All the reasons for not doing it were
personal, and all the reasons for doing it were, I might say, motivated
by public concerns. It was obvious that the Democratic Party was just
about to finish itself off. The last thing it needed was one more bloody
primary, and especially when you saw the Republicans rising with such a
respectable group of people. Broyhill, of course, is a very respectable
candidate, could be expected to beat almost anybody, including me. The
best chance of getting the Party together—for no other reason than
Faircloth and Blount who certainly were the only two, they were the two
candidates that were coming out of the first primary… Neither would run
if I ran, and the fact that I had ties to all parts of the Party, and
that I'd been out of it long enough not really to be seen as a partisan.
In any event over the passage of time almost everybody emerging in North
Carolina politics was associated with me in 1960 one way or another. So
I was the proper person to try to unite the party. Furthermore, I
thought that I could, and that I should. That was a big factor in
getting me to run but that wouldn't have been enough. The goal itself
had to be, is it worthwhile being in the Senate at this time? And the
answer was yes, especially at this time because there will be no
national
Would you care to describe the discussions you had with various leaders? Because you got into the game kind of late, didn't you? Everyone was saying if someone didn't get into it by October of '85 that was almost like the absolute cutoff date. You certainly wouldn't have run, for instance, if Hunt had decided to run, right?
Oh, no. Oh, I wouldn't have run. I tried to get Bill Friday to run. I
tried to get Wade Smith to run. I tried to get numerous people to run
that could have a unifying effect. The truth of the matter is that
Blount and Faircloth would not have made it. In the first place they
wouldn't have stood aside for each other. They would have stood aside
for some of these others. I offered to do all kinds of things to support
Bill Friday. I don't know how good a—nobody ever saw him as a
campaigner, but he would have been good if he had followed the same kind
of campaign strategy that I did. He would have been a good candidate, I
think. Whoever ran had to follow the strategy that I finally followed.
First unifying the party, and then running as hard as you could on the
issues. So, it was certainly Christmas before I even began to think
about it again. Probably not til the first week in January that I began
to say, "All right, let's talk." People were beginning to say then,
"Run, and
Did it hurt your relationship with the people who had already announced, Blount, Faircloth? There was speculation about that.
Oh yeah. I think Faircloth was caught by surprise that I ran although I told him I was. He just, in his own mind, thought that I wouldn't. He, in effect, told me to, but in his own mind, thought that I wouldn't do it. I think it did catch him by surprise and hurt his feelings.
Don't you think it's hard for someone who's never run for elective office to run for that high an office? Who's never been successful, I guess, seems that people—I thinking about Bill Friday more than Faircloth—it seems if no one has ever pulled the lever for that person.
Oh, I don't know. Bill Friday, of course, was well known and had a good reputation. Whether or not he could have exercised the independent approaches that you had to if you're not going to let these professionals take over your campaign and if we had let them do that, I think I would have lost.
By professionals, you mean …
Well, the television people, for instance. They ran Faircloth. They ran Hunt, in my opinion. I was determined I was going to run my campaign. If we'd have been with Friday, I think we'd have determined that we were going to help him run his campaign.
The first question I had was, "In your mind what was, did the election in '84 have any influence on your thinking and how you prepared for both the primary and the general election?"
Well, I think if the '84 election had been successful, I probably would have had less problems if indeed I had ended up being the candidate. I might also have had less incentive for running and would have ended up having somebody else to support. Certainly the Party would not have been in a divided condition. Certainly the danger of continuing division would not have been as deadly a threat as it turned out that it was. So the very fact that we lost that election had a fundamental effect on my campaign, or whether or not, indeed, there really would have been a campaign. I suppose that I didn't think about running until sometime after that campaign. That would have been in the fall of '84. So the spring of '85 as I was leaving Duke, certainly was the first time that it began to cross my mind that it might be something that I might want to try to do, maybe.
Not only the outcome but the conduct of the campaign, did that have an influence on you? Thinking, to run, not to run, or how you would conduct your campaign?
I hadn't any question about how I would run the campaign. I had had some
difference of opinion with the managers of the Hunt campaign. When I
would talk to Jim Hunt about it, he certainly seemed to be inclined to
be in agreement with me but stymied by the fact that all of this expert
advice and these
What kind of advice would they give you?
I never had operated with that kind of a battery of experts but I had pretty well made up my mind from having seen them in several campaigns. You just didn't do that when I ran for governor. You had an advertising agency. We had a pollster. We put it together, and we made the decision of what kind of a campaign to conduct and how to develop the issues. I felt the candidate always has ultimately to do that. Now, I don't think the candidate runs his own campaign because he can't. I think he has to call the shots and set the style and certainly decide how it's going to be run, especially in terms of issues. So I had observed all of that, and I don't know that had I observed it or not that I would have run any different campaign. Obviously, I, having been through that—the people of the state having been through it made it all the more imperative that I run the kind of campaign that I did. At least I thought so, and I suppose, coming out the way it did, I have to conclude I must have been not wrong. Maybe they…
Well, what would be the contrast?
Well, the contrast of course was that they constantly went after Helms.
That was the advice he was getting—absolutely contrary to the advice
that I wanted them to take—
Had you been running against a more free swinging candidate, let's say that Funderburk defeated Broyhill, I don't know, how would you handle that?
Well, I think that our campaign would have looked even better against
him. We would have let him run that stuff. We didn't answer the last
month's campaigns that attempted to say that I was the kind of big
spending liberal and ended up with a picture, a distorted picture, of
three people—one of whom was
You were saying that one major difference was the type of people, the type of team, that you assembled as opposed as to let's say, how the Hunt campaign was run.
No, it was virtually the same type of people. It wasn't the in-state people and the campaign manager and the people that got up money and the people organized to get out the vote. It was the outside consultants, really the television people, because, see, the campaign other than television was a superb campaign. The television campaign, ultimately, did him in, both the Helmes side and, in my opinion, to a considerable extent his own side because it took away from him—the bright, young, clean-cut Governor. It made him in the eyes of too many voters just another person like Helms, slapping out at the opposing candidate. He shouldn't have been on any of those spots when they felt it necessary to take on Helms. It should have been somebody else, not him.
That taunt, "Where do you stand, Jim?" just kept coming back and back.
Yeah. Well, you know he just kept on the attack of Helms, and that's what
they were advising him to do. When I would tell him, he would say, you
know, with complete perplexity, but "This is what they're telling me I
have to do," and they'd point out that back in the spring when he didn't
do that he got behind. Well, I think that probably was not the reason he
was getting behind. He was getting behind because of the big push Helms
was putting on. In my opinion we could have left that alone as we did
during the summer for Broyhill. They made that
Your principle team, could we describe who they were? Who were the people, obviously different people from 1960, but who were some of the new people? You mentioned Mr. Poole the other day.
Well, Sam Poole, whom I've already mentioned was the campaign manager and
did a spendid job. The campaign manager is in charge of everything. He's
in charge of picking the television consultant. He's in charge of
picking the pollster. He's in charge of picking the staff. He's in
charge of getting the counties organized. He's in charge of getting up
the money. He's in charge of everything. He's in charge of dealing with
the press. Well, obviously, one person can't do it all. Obviously, he
consults with the candidate on all those things. You have to let a
campaign manager make those decisions if you are going to hold him
responsible. Now, they certainly told me what they had in mind for the
television and the pollster. I could have said, "Don't do that." But
even if I had said don't do that, go somewhere else, when they went
somewhere else, it would be their decision. Those people who are
responsive to him, they didn't
We just decimated that law firm to put together our get out the vote. We had some other good people working, very good people but we had a fairly lean staff at the top. Really, you'd have to say Paul, and Bill Green, and Sam Poole were running the campaign.
Did you have any doubt about winning the first primary?
Well, I didn't because…
I mean winning with a fifty percent majority.
Well, I think we had to spend money to be sure we did because while the polls looked pretty good, still that many people running would worry you. You know, just almost accidentally nine people could get a whole lot of votes, and two or three of them were pretty good vot