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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-0328-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
When he was elected governor of North Carolina in 1972, James E. Holshouser Jr. was the first Republican chief executive of that state since 1896. He did not spend his young life striving to be a record-setting politician; though he grew up in a civically active family, his political aspirations at Davidson College and the University of North Carolina School of Law did not go beyond membership in the Young Republicans. As a lawyer, however, he felt that he was in a unique position to help his community, a sense that eventually motivated him to seek office when court reform, an issue that interested him, was slated to come before the legislature. In this, the first of four interviews with Holshouser in this collection, Holshouser remembers his early political career as a member of the struggling Republican minority in the state legislature and how that experience—one which demanded consensus-building, compromise, and party organization—helped him win the governorship. In addition to recalling his campaign for governor, Holshouser describes his philosophy as governor, including his sense of obligation to his public; the Republican Party in the 1960s and early 1970s; his thoughts on how money and media have changed politics; and his beliefs about the decline of party discipline. This interview will be useful for students and researchers interested not just in the political story behind a historic governorship, but also the office of governor in North Carolina and the rhythms of state politics.
James E. Holshouser Jr., the first Republican governor of North Carolina since 1896, reflects on his early political life, his gubernatorial campaign, and his governorship.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Governor, I am beginning with a series of questions on your personal political development and the political interests that you had in your very early stage. When did you begin thinking about a career in politics?
Actually Jack, I guess it was not really thinking about a career in
politics. I don't think I ever really thought I was going to
have a career in politics. I almost always considered myself sort of a
short-term visitor and it got a little stretched out. I grew up in
family where my father was involved, sometime another probably before I
could read. I think he ran for the legislature. He didn't
win. But he served on the local board of elections and went to party
meetings and served on the state board of elections and ended up being a
U.S. District Attorney during the Eisenhower administration. So I heard
politics sort of talk at the house, not in a serious vein, but just as a
casual part of life. It certainly didn't dominate the dinner
time conversation in our household growing up. At least there was sort
of a little public interest there. But at the time I went off to
college, I was not thinking about politics. I was trying to get an
education, find a good person to marry, have a good time. I was
interested in sports, served as sports editor of the newspaper and the
annual while I was at Davidson as I had in high school. I was seriously
thinking about being a sport's writer. In the fall of my
senior year in college I worked weekends with the Charlotte Observer
sport's department and slowly but surely decided I
He was the incumbent Republican?
He was the incumbent Republican senator, excuse me, Democrat senator.
They had a rotation agreement on the senate seats at that time. So he
rotated out of the senate seat and was running for the house on the
Democrat side and so that part was interesting too. Had a good time. It
was a good Republican year. So I did fairly well. When I got to the
legislature as it turned out they ended up setting up a judicial
commission, judicial reform commission, courts commission, I guess is
what it was called at the time. So the 1963 legislature
didn't do anything after all in terms of court reform. But I
got interested in the fact that school boards in most of the counties at
that time, particularly ours, were appointed by the legislator. The
Republican and Democrats would have primaries and they would nominate
folks and send the nominees to Raleigh. And the Democrats would always
be appointed no matter who got how many votes or anything. And I thought
that was pretty undemocratic. So I worked on some legislation that
helped changed that for the county. We were getting ready to have a bond
election for building a new consolidated school. That was at least part
of what was important in helping that bond issue pass, making sure that
both parties felt like they had a tie in and involvement with the public
schools. So what started off as an interest in court reform sort of got
broadened a little bit. Several issues came alone. I decided that I
would run again because it was obvious the courts commission would be
appointed and coming back at the 1965 legislature. It turned out 1964
was the Goldwater-Johnson Republican debacle and we lost half the seats
we had in the house. The guy who had been the minority leader
didn't run again. The guy who was the heir
Let's go back and talk about a few of the things in a little more detail that you have mentioned in that wonderful overview of your early political development. You grew up in Boone?
That is right.
In Boone when you were growing up, did you get any encouragement from the environment there, any particular aspects that were beyond your father, to be attentive to and maybe eventually interested in politics? Were there any other influences in the family or the organizations or church or any others that might have influenced your political awareness, if not a career.
I don't know. My mother was still a registered Democrat. She
didn't change her party registration until I ran in that
first primary. She had to change in order to vote for me in the primary.
Her father's name was Andrew Jackson Maybolt, which sort of
tells you sort of how that family background was. Although I have to say
she became a pretty avid Republican over time. But I had some teachers
in the public schools in Boone that nurtured me along the way. I
don't think necessarily toward government and public service
so much as just as a human being. I believe that it would be stretching
it to think that any of those folks when I was in high school thought I
was going to end up being governor. When I got back to Boone
That was after college, after Davidson?
Yes. One of my strongest teachers in high school was Margaret Wright who taught English. She was a neighbor up the street as well. Her husband Fred Wright had been Clerk of Superior Court for a long time and had taken a job in industry. He encouraged me. She told me one time after I got to be governor that he had told her back in the early 1960s that he thought I might end up being governor.
Was it something that you had done in high school, serving in an office or run for an office, something that might have caused that to be in her mind?
I tell you in high school as it was in those days you really didn't run. I ended up being Senior Class President but it was one of those things where we had an election and somebody nominated me and I won. Nobody ran then. I had been in charge of the junior senior prom for the junior class, which my mother did all the work and I think everybody knew that would be the case. But it came off very well. I was in a graduating class of 1956 as I recall anyway. Different kind of culture and atmosphere than you have today with the larger high schools and active campaigns for class officers and that sort of thing.
But even in a sense by being identified by somebody out there who felt that you could take charge of this responsibility. There might have been some hint of leadership.
Well what happens in a class that small is that some people end up doing
several different things. Whereas in a large class some people
don't get to do anything and very few people do more than one
thing. And I was involved in the band and in the chorus and
Was there any political event in those early years that remains in your mind as being sort of a early political awareness that sort of impressed you in a positive way, about public service?
Well I remember how down my dad and my Uncle Howard were when Dewey lost
the 1948 election. That is really the first election I remember much
about and I don't remember a lot about it. My dad was an
alternate to the national convention in I guess Chicago in 1952 that
nominated Eisenhower and that was sort of fascinating. There was a big
picture on the front page of the Charlotte Observer of the North
Carolina delegation meeting with Eisenhower at the convention. My dad
was standing right next to Eisenhower looking up at him. But he had been
a Taft man. So we gave him a pretty hard time about that when he got
home. But I suspect that Eisenhower/Stevenson election in 1952 was the
first one that I paid a lot, a fair amount of attention to. When I was
in college, in the fall of 1952, 1 believes the fall of my freshman
year, Charlie Jonas came and spoke to the Davidson chapel programs.
Chapel at that time was a required mandate for the whole student body.
Everybody was there so it wasn't like a small thing. And we
had a discussion in whatever class it was I had right after that about
how everybody perceived his talk and all. That was his first run for
Congress. But at the time of the 1956 election I really don't
remember very much about that happening. If I think back to 1956, I
graduated from college, I worked with the Marriott at the hot shops
outside Washington during the summer, came home and was ready to go to
law school and then picked up this problem with my kidneys. So I ended
up sitting out a year, actually lying out a year in
Regarding your family, you mentioned that your father had been involved in politics and you were sort of taken by some of his experiences.
Although I have to say I didn't know very much about most of that experience. Even when he ended up being named U.S. Attorney in 1958, 1 didn't know all the background. I was in law school at the time. But I read a book written by Kyle Hayes a lawyer from North Wilkesboro. He died a couple of years ago. His secretary sent me a book that he had written. It had an account of the pushing and shoving for the federal judgeship that Edwin Stanley ended up getting and then the nominations for U.S. Attorney. And it was sort of like opening up a whole new world that I had missed back there.
So that book sort of filled you in of some of the developments. I was leading to the question of how would you place your family in the social hierarchy of Boone. What kind of family did you see yourself as being a member of at that point?
Well my dad was a lawyer and my mother was very involved in a lot of different things, all volunteer stuff. She organized a mother's march on Raleigh about public schools in the 1950s I guess.
What was the issue that she was involved in?
I think it was teacher's salary probably.
I see.
I didn't remember about that. My sister was telling me about that and I think it must have been while I was in college and my sister was still at home. But my dad was the Clerk to the Session and elder in the Presbyterian Church, helped organize the Presbyterian Church in Boone. In looking back I would say we were part of what, our family would have been part of if you're trying to get a group together say that was the leadership of the town. We were probably in there. Although I never thought about it at the time and I don't think my father thought about that as any kind of thing to aspire to necessarily. Boone at that time wasn't and may still not be, I don't know, a very social minded town. I mean if you go into eastern North Carolina there is a whole different sense about social life and families. And I think part of that is because so many of those families go back to the revolutionary war and before. Whereas in the mountains everybody just sort of trucked up there you know. But I don't remember my family being very much involved in the social affairs to the extent that Boone had any. I always just thought that we were part of the town.
But there were, you would say as you mentioned, in the certain leadership cadre of the town as far as anybody might have thought about there being a leadership cadre of the town? They were active in the church and in the schools and in political circles.
Yes. That is right. That is right. If you were going to get a group together and talk about trying to help bring a new industry to the town, my dad would have been one of those usually involved. And I never did have the sense that he did a lot of business other than law business. You know a lot of lawyers do a lot of real estate development on the side. But he never did very much of that kind of thing.
Would that firm had been a prominent firm in Boone?
Well it was Holshouser and Trivette, but Gene Trivette was in North Wilkesboro. It was a partnership only to the extent that occasionally in significant criminal or civil trials the two of them would get together. Both of them ran their offices separately as a separate profit center and just kept what they made except when they worked together. And up until about the time I was in high school I guess, there was just two of them. Bill Mitchell joined the North Wilkesboro office not too long before Mr. Trivette had a heart attack and died. That was while I was in college. And at that point when Mr. Trivette died I think the firm dissolved and Bill Mitchell had his office in North Wilkesboro and dad had his and it was just a practice. There was not much firm about it.
I see.
Give you some example about how the bar was. At the time I went to the governor's office, there were only, I think, six lawyers in Boone.
Interesting.
And when I came back four years later, I think there were 48. And when I went to Boone from law school in 1960, there were four lawyers there and I made the fifth one and my dad came back from U.S. Attorney's office to make the sixth. There were no additions then until we brought in a partner in 1969 I believe.
So that was very good growth, particularly for a while. At college when you were at Davidson were there any political experiences there that you thought were particularly formative or impressed you?
Hardly any. It was an experience. It was a very good experience for me. I
met a lot of good people, had a lot of good professors. I think it
helped build on the value system I had coming out of the mountains and
my family and community. It helped sort of expand the scope of the
things that you are supposed to be interested in. At the same time I
know that I didn't apply myself as much as I could have. I
don't know if you want to make it a part of the public record
or not but I spoke
Were there young Republican or any kind of political organizations that you were aware of when you were at Davidson?
There may have been but I didn't pay much attention. Politics just really wasn't my thing at the time. I can't remember going to a single political event while I was in college. I contrast that with my daughter when she was here at Wake Forest. She helped organize a visit by Gerald Ford or George Bush or somebody, probably George Bush. Let me think about that, I think that was when Bush was running for Vice President in 1984 maybe. Of course Ginny had a very different growing up experience than I did. She had politics all around her from the time that she was nine until she was thirteen when we were living in the Governor's Mansion. We had pretty well kept here out of our political involvement up until that time. Pat did go to the legislature with me in 1963 and again in 1969 1 believe and stayed home the other two times. But those two times Ginny was along but she was still so young. Just five years old that last time I believe. So that didn't have much impact but obviously that period in the Governor's Mansion did.
So at Davidson you didn't find a whole lot of political stimulation so to speak. You were interested in other things. You then went to Carolina immediately, UNC Law School.
Right.
And you mentioned earlier this particular episode involving court reform that you think might have sparked an interest at that time.
I think that was a law interest as opposed to politics, that I thought that, everything I heard when we were discussing court reform and a need for it when I was in law school. The law professors talked about how much North Carolina needed to have its court structure overhauled.
The law professors brought that up?
Yes. I think that is what stimulated the interest in that issue. Not in
the legislature per se. But we watched Spencer Bell and Lindsay Warren.
Spencer Bell, a lot of interesting thing about that, Spencer Bell was a
very erudite guy from Charlotte who didn't get involved very
much in the good old boy network within the legislature in Raleigh.
Lindsay Warren was part of the traditional eastern group. They called
him the "Lion of Beaufort" as I recall and was very
much an orator. I never did know him. Never did get to meet him. But you
had the clear impression that Spencer Bell had the right, was on the
side of the angels and the other people were just being obstructionist.
The most fascinating thing to me in going to the legislature in 1963 and
1965 and watching these issue debated is that I had come there with the
impression that there were some people who were either idiots or
operating from totally bad motives if they were on the other side of
certain issues. And much to my dismay and
So it didn't produce in you any cynicism or turn you off from politics at all?
No.
Which could well have happened, couldn't it?
That is right. I was pretty naïve when I went to the legislature the first time and pretty young, was just twenty-eight and had a crew cut. The first day on the floor in the house one of the senior legislators asked me to take his bill up to the clerk. He thought I was a page. That was, that lets you down sort of hard.
I was going to say, in some stages that was a complement, but not at first, when you are first in the legislature. Well back to that experience at UNC Chapel Hill and the Law School and the Court Reform Commission. Why do you think you became interested in that particular issue at that time? Was it your anticipated career as a lawyer?
I think it was. I can still remember writing down the answer to a
question from the State Bar Examination Committee about why I wanted to
be a lawyer. And it was basically that I thought lawyers were in unique
positions to help make better communities to help people and
particularly in times when people got their lives and property entangled
and needed somebody to help get them straightened out. I believed that
then and I still believe that. I am not sure all the lawyers believe
that today, unfortunately. But by the time I had taken the bar exam or
was taking it, I was really viewing lawyering as sort of a public
service career itself.
Did you take any action at the time of this interest in the court commission? Did you for example go to Raleigh and speak on behalf of some side?
Didn't speak. We had a group of a half a dozen of us that went over to watch the Monday night session. You know the legislature met at noon, I think on the Tuesday to Thursday schedule of course that is why I couldn't go because of classes. But we usually tried to go on Monday nights as that session went on in the spring of 1959, I guess it was, and watched that debate.
So you were mainly an observer but you were paying attention to it. You didn't become active in any way other than going to hear the debates?
No and actually that was maybe a sign of the times in that I don't think it had occurred to us that we should do that. Although when I think back to some of the things that have happen within the university over time, it wasn't very long after that, and you had some before that, but it wasn't very long after that, that you did have students taking more active protest kind of roles, advocacy roles.
When you went back to law school did you talk about that subject with other students or with professors?
Yes, we did a lot and not to total neglect of all the other subjects you were suppose to be looking after, but it was something we should have been interested in as law students. And it was only a 45 minutes drive to Raleigh and even on old NC 54, which is pretty bad, going over in the evening wasn't that bad.
When you talked about it with other students, or with your professors at Chapel Hill, did you take a position or were you mainly in the mode of trying to explore this topic and trying to understand it?
I think the professors tended to come down fairly strongly on the side of the need for change and gave a little short shrift at the time to the arguments against it is sort of my memory about it. I may not be giving them enough credit. And if I look back at the concern the people had who were opposed to, they were afraid "Raleigh" was going to take over the whole judicial system of the state, which is sort of what has happen. But at the time we had such a mish mash of recorders courts, mayors courts, county courts and all sort of things, that you couldn't go from one county to the next and even know what kind of court you were going to be involved in. And there is no question that the justice of the peace system needed reforming. I think you are much more likely to get justice today under that system than you were in what we had in the 1950s and before.
So you still saw this primarily as the environment in which you saw yourself as a lawyer trying to understand that environment and maybe even improve that environment rather than just taking a political issue and running with it?
Exactly. Andy Jones was in the Attorney General's office when I was a freshman legislature and he drafted the bills that I introduced. We got to be friends and had a fair amount of conversation along the way. He ended up being revenue secretary under Governor Scott. But he said one time, "I just wouldn't be governor. You lose about a friend a day when you start making appointments and it's no a win situation." I often think about that
He said that while you were governor?
No he said that while I was a freshman legislator. And that was something I didn't forget and still haven't forgotten as a point that you have to take into consideration of how you approach the job as governor
Were there any other sort of public affairs experiences or political experiences before you were governor that made any lasting impressions or is that pretty much the most important experience that you had as a law student?
I think so, I think so. That clearly has always stood out in my mind as how I started getting involved because I never really intended to have a career or be involved. It just sort of happened, got out of hand.
You didn't become involved in political rallies or attend party meetings or I think you said earlier become a member of the Young Republicans at that time?
No I went to one Young Republican Convention.
I see.
Not a convention. It was a meeting being held in the law school of the law school Young Republicans. One of my classmates asked me to go and I went. It was in the spring of our senior year I think. I think Bill Cobb was the party chairman and I think he spoke that night. It was interesting.
It was your senior year in law school?
Right. But I don't remember that having a particular
impression. I think I remember it because it was only one. If I had been
to several others I probably wouldn't have paid much
attention, but. If you figured that your train of thought had moved from
being a sports writer to being a lawyer, it never really occurred to me
that I was going to end up being
Okay. Well let's talk some about your more obvious political activity. Let's talk a little about that legislative experience that you had. First of all you mentioned earlier that you decided in consultations with your father to consider running for the legislature. Why did that occur? Why did you have that thought?
I think it was strictly because I thought that court reform issue was going to pass at the referendum. The legislature had approved it in 1961 and it was going to be voted on in 1962. I was confident that it was going to pass and the 1963 legislature would start to implement it. And the legislator we had from our county then was a mixture. He was a lay preacher, a stone mason, a farmer, did several things. But there wasn't anything that I could see that said he was going to be a lot of help to the legislature and work in court reform. And it was because I was young and naive a little bit. I didn't think about how outlandish it might have seemed to some people that, you know, a year and a half out of law school you are filing for the legislature, given the fact that I had never been involved. Now you find people today who are running for local offices while they are still in college. And times have changed in that regard. So this is a different kind of time.
But you saw yourself as being interested in a particular issue, the court reform issue, knowing once again that this would affect your career. Whatever happened on court reform would affect your career and sort of in a sense that was your kind of meaning. I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth. Is that a fair statement that that was your motivation?
Yes and you know I probably didn't look of it at the time because I wasn't thinking about a political career. But if you think about odds, meaning the odds of my having a political career, coming out of a county of less than 25000 people, out of the mountains, Republican at that, and that just wasn't a background from which people got into political power positions.
Now, what made you think once you decided that you were involved in that important issue of court reform that you could in fact win that election or did you?
Well I didn't know. That is what my dad and I talked about and the party chairman Clyde Green, our guy in the hardware store, had been an active politician for a long time. He had been involved in the agricultural stabilization work under the Eisenhower administration. He had been a political appointee to it. A paying job so to speak. My dad told me to go and talk to him and see what he thought.
He was the Watauga County Party Chair for the Republican Party?
That is right. He didn't get publicly involved in that primary but I think he contacted some people and asked them to help me because a lot of people that I didn't even know welcomed me with open arms. I have to say that we talked about family and our role in the community. I think I got a lot of benefit over being my father's son and having the same last name.
Although he had run for the legislature you had mentioned and not succeeded.
Yes, in the 1930s. But I have to say and this doesn't need to
be part of this record but back in the
He was a Democrat.
Yes. He was under indictment at the time and I went, I heard about it and I went tearing downstairs to see my guy at the hardware store. He told me something that I have never forgotten. I said what am I going to do? I can't have this guy endorsing me. I ought to do something when he is under indictment. He said son, once they go into the ballot box they all look the same. But any rate, the SBIs opened the ballot box. The registration book and the poll book all disappeared between the primary date and the time the SBI was called in. They had been there about ten days hunting the ballot box among other things. I was standing down in front of the hardware store one morning and saw the SBI people going up Main Street in a pickup truck and they clearly had a ballot box in the back of it. They had found it out in a barn loft out near Foscoe and got up to the courthouse and opened it up and the ballots were for Roosevelt and Wilkie in the 1940 election. It had been there for 22 years at that point.
So was this sort of knowledge, not only that you had, but presumably had been publicized in the community, that there were problems in the conduct of elections a source of encouragement for you in thinking about running for the legislature?
Well I think that background and the stories that I had heard and what
happened in that particular spring primary did to me what it has done to
an awful lot of people from the
It made a big difference in your life didn't it, what happen there?
Yes it did.
Being in the legislature, can you tell a little bit about your experience. You were one of few Republicans.
That is right. I believe we had 21 the first year I was there. Then in 1965 it dropped down to 11 or 12 or 13, somewhere in there, just next to nothing. I really loved the legislature. It was really fun; the challenge of trying to persuade enough people to your point of view about something on the committees and even on the floor at times. I was one of those freshmen that probably talked more than I should have. Asked any question that came to mind. If I didn't understand something I would just ask it. I decided early on that you are never going to get the answers if you are afraid to embarrass yourself by admitting you are ignorant.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I would ask in the legislature and you were lucky if you got local bills
through particularly if they had some political nature. The Democrat
chairman from back in your home county would be down talking to people
saying we just don't need this or whatever.
Now is that something, the school board selection process, that had that been one of your platform planks when you were running or is that something that developed subsequent to your winning?
It was something that I had not been aware of until I got back home from law school and just listening to people talking. When I saw that process happening in 1962, seeing those people running for the school board and listening to my father talk about it. Didn't matter who won the Republican primary because the Democrats were getting nominated anyway. That kind of thing. My dad tended to have a pessimistic attitude which was just the result of all the years of trying and not getting accomplished some of these things. On the other hand I went to the legislature not paranoid and prepared to believe that I could get something done and I would just overwhelmed them by my persuasive personality or whatever. And it showed me looking back, that half the time believing that you can get something done is half the job. Start off believing and it can.
You mentioned that 1) you were part of a fairly small delegation, 2) Republican legislation didn't have much of a chance unless you could persuade some Democrats to support it, but you also mentioned that you loved the legislature.
Well I did. It was intellectually challenging and I enjoyed the give and take. And I enjoyed the company of the legislators. Sometimes you find out things later that disappoints you. Young Sam Ervin, the judge and son of the Senator, was a legislator there and we went down to see a lot of Davidson ballgames. That was when Fred Headsal was playing at Davidson and they ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated, number one team in the country preseason in '65. I found out later that some Democrats really got on Sam for going to the ball games with me because I was Republican. It was just not good for his career to be seen that much with a Republican.
This was other members of the legislature?
Yes, talking to him. And I don't know that they meant to be bad so to speak. I think they meant to be giving him good advice. That is just how Republicans were viewed at that point.
Well, were you able to accomplish whatever goals you had in the legislature sufficiently to your satisfaction?
Well, the goals were modest to start with. But what happened was I got on
the appropriations committee and ended up spending four terms on the
appropriations committee. So you got to see how the state was spending
its money and in what areas and what made sense and what
didn't. By the time I was running for governor, I knew a lot
about the state budget. I was one of the first Republicans, maybe the
first Republican, to have not only been in the
Have a chance to undo it the next time or something? Beyond budgeting and your extensive experience in that, were there other issues when you were in the legislature that you became importantly involved in and made a contribution from your perspective?
Well it is always hard to know about your contributions on things.
Redistricting became an issue while I was there. I don't
remember whether it was 1963 or 1965 when the Renn Drum law suit here
changed things for North Carolina for ever at least. Because at that
point you know you had one legislator for each county and you had twenty
legislators spread among the largest counties and senators districts?
And it was obvious that that was going to
You became a minority leader in what year?
In 1965.
And chairman in?
In 1966.
In 1966 so you had been in the legislature roughly three years.
Well you didn't serve in the even numbers.
Right, right.
You served in the odd number year and that was it at that stage and so I had had one year in the legislature and one term and then became a minority leader.
And then would that be considered a fast rise or just good luck. How did you become a minority leader?
Well I was elected secretary of the caucus my first time which could have just easily been somebody else and I still don't have any idea why and it didn't mean hill of beans. The secretary didn't do anything; it just made a nice article in the paper back home. And I think I probably wouldn't have been state chairman had I not got elected minority leader in 1965 and I wasn't scheduled to be minority leader at all. And I think that was just, I can't say it was lucky. It was a result of bad luck of the Republicans in the 1964 election.
I see you became one of the more experienced or
You can't say more experience because I had only one term.
That is what I was saying.
The people who had had more experience didn't want to do it.
Well as the minority leader did that put you in circles in the legislature that you would not have had the opportunity to participate in and therefore give you, say a fairly significant, significantly different experience from other Republicans?
Well what it probably meant looking back is that the speaker if he were going to do anything even in a minimal way to acknowledge the Republicans would have ended up with me doing it. And I was named vice chairman of a couple of committees. I was put on the special joint appropriations subcommittee that was the predecessor of the "gang of eight" kind of thing, much larger group, probably twenty at that point. And a tradition I am thinking has not been good for the state that we got away from. I think having the house and senate having joint committees and bringing in one budget to the floor of both houses during that process worked very well. I doubt we are going to go back to that. It didn't mean I got involved in any "leadership" conferences because Republicans were just never involved in it.
But did it put you among Republicans in a position of some notice and publicity?
Just barely. I got a little bit more notice that everybody else, but everybody else got noticed so little that that wasn't saying much.
Some of your experiences, you are suggesting that Republicans had difficulty getting legislation passed. There wasn't much of a critical mass to get much done. You didn't get much notice. Could have turned you off about participation in the legislature?
Some of the things that I had said earlier sort of kept me coming back
just out of sense of not quite moral outrage, but just sense of
indignation. At the same time I found that both in committee and on the
floor there were times when amendments got accepted simply because what
I was saying made some sense and you knew how to write it down in such a
way that it fits as opposed to having an idea but not being able to
quite get it into focus. Just the advantage of being a lawyer as much as
anything. I think being a lawyer in the legislature gives you a clear
advantage in that you are dealing with general statures that are the
nature of your business. And when I think about it in those terms I have
to say, I have to agree at times with those that say watching how the
general statutes are created is sort of like watching hot dogs. It is
not so pretty sometimes and you lose a certain amount of respect for the
general statutes that you had when you came out of law school that this
is the law because you see how sloppily and crazily sometimes these
things get done. But it is not for lack of effort. Most of the times it
is just because things get overlooked sometimes in the speed of things.
But I did find that there were things that I could get done. I always
went home with the sense of accomplishment even though I was frustrated
with things that I didn't get done. And in the 1971 session
by that time I had gotten to know all of the senior people real well.
Even if I was Republican and even though they disagreed with me on
things in the past, I think I reached a certain level of respect. And at
least recognition that I knew what I was doing sometimes. I think I
probably drew the 1971 redistricting plan for Congress. Simply because I
had played around with all the numbers and drawn the lines on 100 maps
and came up with one that was going to protect the key Democrats in such
a way that you could get all their house people supporting that. And I
showed it to one of the Democrat legislators on our house committee. We
were both on it. He took it and introduced
Keeping that on the road to the Board of Governors?
Yes, as oppose to anything that I did when I was governor.
You obviously picked up this new responsibility as party chair during the time that you were serving in the legislature as a minority leader. How did it come to be that you went in that direction as party chairmanship?
Well as minority leader I had been on the central committee as I had said
and I got to know the people there, the district chairmen as well as the
state chairman and other statewide officers. And as minority leader I
had been asked to go around and to speak to different Lincoln Day
dinners and that sort of thing during the previous year. Jim Gardner had
decided that he was going to run for Congress so he wasn't
going to seek reelection. I didn't really seek it. I had
people come to me and say we think you ought to do it. So I said okay
and then we ended up in a battle, a battle at the state convention with
Nab Armfield from here.
Were there factions or particular groups that you had to coalesce or that you couldn't get the support of during that battle or was it mainly personal organizations?
Well it was mostly the old guard versus the new guard kind of thing. The folks in the mountains and the people who had been involved in the party for a long time had asked me to run. Jim Gardner and the folks around him, the new Republicans so to speak, were the ones who were the ones who were encouraging and trying to help Nab. It was just sort of a prelude to the things that went on for another ten years or so I guess and maybe are still going on to a lesser extent.
Could you describe those, sort of the composition of what you see as those two groups, the old guard and the new guard? Were there any issue components or ideological components?
I think Goldwater's campaign in 1964 ignited a lot of interest
in the Republican Party all over the South. Even though he only carried
five states, I guess there were a lot of people who came into the
Republican party because of that campaign and who ended up as leaders,
congressmen, governors, state chairmen over the next decade in
particular. Because they hadn't had the background of the
past, there was just a different approach, may be a better way to say
it. A lot of times the issues, their positions on different issues,
weren't that different than
So you didn't see any clear ideological differences in the party at the time, even though the Goldwater experience was very recent.
I think it was more personalities. Now political scientist would argue with me about that perhaps and I can see some philosophical differences. But the lines weren't nearly as well drawn then, as it seems to me that they are today at times.
The lines within the Republican Party?
Right. Although, there are several different lines in the Republican Party. There is not just one. I believe that it was more over power and control than it was philosophy, personalities involved. There may have been those who thought that the old guard was more interested in post office politics and patronage when we won the presidency than they were in getting out and winning elections. Now that certainly wasn't the case for me. Life was too short, I thought, to be involved in things if you weren't going to win. I mean that may be for some people it just wasn't for me.
Were there beyond these ideological, or possible nascent ideological components, were there other groups beyond what you referred to earlier as the old guard and new guard that you had to be concerned about during that election and in fact while you were chairman of the party?
Well during the time that I was going to state conventions in the 1960s,
we had a fairly vocal group that would come to our convention who were
members of John Birch Society.
Publicly?
On the floor over the resolutions. Because they always stepped it out one more notch over issues that people weren't use to talking about for the most part. And I finally concluded though that resolutions adopted at a state convention didn't amount to anything more than at most a sub-headline in the next day's paper. After that they were forgotten. And I finally just said I wasn't going to worry about them. Let them introduce them at the tail end of the convention when the resolutions got looked at. If the convention adopted them, fine; if not, fine. I just wasn't going to worry about them. Made my sense about the convention much more comfortable.
Did that cause you any difficulties while being chairman or did it in fact garner you new friends or at least respect?
I think that people recognized from the early dealings with these
resolutions that I was not going to be supportive of the resolutions but
at the same time they started coming to the same conclusions that I did
because some of us talked about it that it wasn't worth
having all these fights about. I think it was part of a goal I had at
the convention of Republicans that we were too small to be fragmented.
That we needed to find that 90% of the ground that we could agree on and
just not worry about the 10% until we got to be a majority. And I think
looking back over time I have a real sense of not personal
accomplishment, but a real sense of having been part of an historical
evolvement of change within the state in terms of building the two party
We want to explore that some later. I would like to start talking to you now about your process of deciding to run for the governorship. Would you talk a little about when the idea began to take form, who were some of the important people who you talked to, how you went about making the decision?
Well I wouldn't recommend the way we did it to anybody. Part
of it was my own weaknesses, my own personality in that I tend to want
to think things to death. One of the things that I have learned along
the way in life and in politics is that there are some times when it is
better to make a decision one way or the other even if it is the second
or third choice. If it is implemented well it is better than nothing
being implemented at all. Nothing at all is not too good of English.
When we had the fight over the tobacco tax and I got some statewide
publicity about that in 1969, I started having people talk with me about
it some. But I have to say that I don't believe that I ever
viewed myself as a person who had gotten drafted for anything. That it
was always because I decided that I wanted to do something. Also I have
an awful hard time making up my mind. I knew we had never elected
anybody statewide in my lifetime anyway. At the same time it was obvious
from the numbers that we were coming closer and closer. It
wasn't going to be long, but you just didn't know.
I had looked at the possibility of running for Lt. Governor with Gardner
in 1968 and just decided not too. You didn't have people
encouraging in the sense that they think about these now days. Because
at that point, not many people really believed we could elect a
governor. I have had good friends tell me later how they had talked with
me during the campaign in 1972 and that I would leave and they would say
he's really a
Who were not running?
Yes, for a variety of reasons. But I also look back and see that for a period of about six years I was the main spokesman for the Republican Party because I was the state chairman and the minority leader, or the caucus leaders as the case might be in the legislature. So any time a reporter wanted to get a Republican Party response to anything I was the guy he was going to call. The first poll that we did in early 1972 showed that I had a recognition, name recognition of about 25%. You contrast that with Hugh Morton's name recognition of 3%. This is a guy who had been in business all of his life. He has had Grandfather Mountain and ties in Wilmington. A lot of people knew him. I saw his son, Hugh Jr., off and on as we crossed paths here in the early stage of the primary before they dropped out. He was telling me that they spent $50,000 which was good bit of money at that point, and did one of these campaigns where you go into every single county over a sixty day period and took another poll and his name recognition had gone to 5%. And that recognition is very hard to build absent a lot of money spent on television. We had the good fortune of starting with a fairly decent name recognition simply because that five or six years of involvement as the state chairman and minority leader. And I guess a fair amount of that came out of that tobacco fight.
Now you mentioned you were determined whenever you got into a battle you intended to win if at all possible.
I use to have a dream about waking up on election night and I had lost by five votes. I knew that I hadn't done everything I could and would always end up in a sweat.
That timing was important. Can you talk a little bit about timing? What it was about 1972 that made it, in your mind anyway, possible?
Well if you had looked at the pattern of voting, Bob Gavin in 1960 had
the first significant statewide campaign. You had other campaigns by
Chuck Seawell and Kyle Hayes prior to that time in which men had given a
lot of time and energy but the soil hadn't been cultivated
enough. We didn't have enough organization and we
didn't have enough money, didn't have enough
credibility, to have a chance. And you could see in the 1960s. Gavin
didn't do as well in the 1964 as he did in 1960. That said to
you that national tide tends to affect the state. You could see in the
1966 election, my first one as state chairman, in February it just
looked dismal but by the time the fall came along all the food store
prices were irritating consumers and Vietnam War was starting to
irritate consumers and people. We elected practically everybody we had
on the ballot and in places we could have elected some others if we had
more. So you knew that the national tide affected North
Carolina's local races and statewide races. I sort of found
that out early on in the 1964 election. I started getting calls from
people in some of the precincts, "You have got to come and see
Joe Jones. He says he just ain't going to go vote. He
can't vote a straight ticket and Goldwater is saying he is
going to take his social security away. You have got to talk to
him." And so I would go out there and say,
"Don't vote for Goldwater if you can't.
Did you know when you were making those trips around the state that a governor's campaign was a possibility?
No, wasn't thinking about that really. It was strictly a party building effort at the time and probably did it in a way that was less intelligent than I would do it today in looking back. But it made a lot of friends for me. I would have probably been more selective in the places I had gone and not drained myself as much as I did in trying.
But it probably did contribute to your name recognition being where it was at the time?
It did. It did
And also made you contacts in the party and probably friends and persons who might be indebted, so to speak to you.
Well you didn't think of it in those terms. I probably would today. I know people in Washington who come here to make a visit for somebody and expect them not to forget. I have always been naive and I never did figure that I was obligated when somebody did that. But I did get to know the county chairmen and a lot of precinct chairmen. In the key thirty counties that turned out half of the Republican vote, I knew almost all of them. That meant even though Jim Gardner started off as having been the party standard bearer in 1968 and had come close. I have always thought Gardner was one of the more charismatic guys on the stump that I had ever met. Still think that. We knew the organization people and I knew how many votes were going to get cast in the primary and how many we had to have and where they need to come from. We are sort of getting off track a little bit but I remember climbing literally over a mile right up the side of a mountain to see a lumber jack who had a saw mill going up to Wilkes County. The county chairman was right there with me. We saw him and we carried that precinct something like 135 to 12; no it was more than that because it was a big precinct. It was more like 175 to 30, or something, anyhow about 90% of the votes. That is the kind of thing we had to do.
And you mentioned timing. When I asked you the question about sort of elaborating on that, you mentioned primarily historical timing. But were there events or circumstances in 1972 that made that a year in which you felt it was possible to run successfully?
Well you always sort of roll the dice on timing. Because as I said if you
decided at the time of the filing deadline in 1966 what it looked like
for the fall of 1966 you might not have run. But if you had rolled the
dice and decided it was worth the gamble, it was a sweep year and you
were going to be there, even if you didn't really work very
hard in some cases. But you knew that Nixon was an incumbent president
who was going to be running for re-election and
So you could help somebody out but it didn't take you too much time or effort to do it.
Well what it meant was you got some clients you might not have had other
wise. People who were just looking for anybody. But what I started to
say is all I was doing is barely paying bills. I wasn't
building up any bank account at all. It was just clear that you could
just
So in making this decision in addition to talking to your wife were there other significant persons that you consulted?
Of course, Gene Anderson had been the Executive Director of the party since 1966. He was interested in my running. That was just because he would like to have, he would like to work for a governor instead of the state chairman. His ambitions for me were a natural part of all that encouragement. More than likely he encouraged me more than any body else. But I had some legislators encourage me to look at it too, friends who had helped fight some of those fights and I knew them probably better than anybody else.
Of course you ended up in a primary battle, in fact two primary battles with Jim Gardner which were very intense, highly publicized and in a sense might had reflected those divisions that you had talked about whenever you were elected party chair. Did those become an important obstacle?
Well a lot of people didn't think we would win the party primary. I mean that first poll we took showed we were down two to one.
Within the Republican party?
Yes and I was personally convinced that if you had taken a poll on
primary day it would show we were down 20 points probably. But you knew
that less that half of the Republicans were going to come to the polls
and you knew where those folks were going to be and where you needed to
go get them. I still have a pretty good memory about the primary night
of the first primary. We started off slightly ahead and it was very
obvious that as the whole
The expectation argument, so to speak?
That is right. So we announced early on the next morning that no matter who won we expected a run off and we looked forward to it or something no matter who came in first. It turned out I think we were about 1300 votes behind and the other two guys had about 2000 votes.
Did it continue to be what I referred to or I referred to earlier as sort of this nascent ideological division or was it something else that you think was at play here?
Well I think it was mostly personalities with some overlay of who could get elected. Because while Republicans didn't think we could win, they wanted to have the best chance we could. Gardner had come close. But a lot of people who supported him in 1968 in the primaries against Stickley had gotten a little bit disenchanted by the end of the election when he flirted around with Wallace people so much. 1968 were an awful hard time to run because of the Wallace factor primarily. That is another one of those timing things. I am awfully glad I wasn't a candidate in 1968.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I think probably we won that primary because we were able to persuade enough people that I had known personally, not just by letters or whatever, but I had been in their towns and I helped them organize their campaigns and I helped them recruit candidates. We had come in to speak for them during rallies. They knew what kind of person I was. And they just decided I was a known quantity that they thought would be a good candidate.
Were there any issue differences that you thought were important within the Republican Party that made a difference?
Well one of the things that we did here in the Spring campaign was to put out a sort of a tabloid size newspaper, I can't remember what it was called, something like the Victory or something, headline on it, "Nixon Trusted Him So Can You." And part of that idea was to play on the fact that Gardner had started off with Nixon in 1968 and then switched to Reagan and had the reputation by the time the election of having flirted with Wallace. We had a big picture of me shaking hands with Nixon in the Oval Office and played a lot on our ties because I had helped Nixon campaign a good bit in 1968. And talked about the accomplishments in the legislature, introduced the drug abuse legislation that I had worked on really hard. Again on the idea of trying to get it just right, we had waited too late to get it introduced. It never was seriously considered even if it would have been earlier which I doubt. But I think there were people in the West who thought Gardner had the best chance to win but there was a little bit of East/West thing, but there were people in the East who helped me and I think it was still more personalities than philosophy per se.
I have to mention for future listeners to this tape, Richard Nixon was very popular at this stage.
That is right.
And this is prior to the emergence of any of the Watergate matters related to Mr. Nixon.
As a matter of fact following the two primaries, we had a Republican executive committee meeting to replace Frank Rouse as the party chairman. He had resigned after the first primary to work with Gardner in the runoff. The day of that meeting was the same day as the Watergate break-in. Another one of those spooky things that you remember.
So that obviously it was to your benefit to say that Nixon trusted you or you hoped it was to your benefit.
That is right. And you know Nixon wasn't going to take a position personally in state campaigns. Just didn't do it. But he wasn't going to run me off either and we just played it to the hilt the best we could.
I remember during this time there was a lot of discussion about whether it was desirable to have in the Republican party an intensely fought primary like the one that you and Mr. Gardner did in fact experience. How would you assess that issue now?
Well it was very hard on the two candidates and it left some scares. At the same time, by the end of the second primary the next poll we did my personal name identification was 52%. So it more than doubled because of the primary.
The first primary.
By the time of the second primary. And we probably would not have won in
1972 had it had not been for the primary because almost all of the major
newspapers endorsed me in the primary. They viewed Gardner and Jesse
Helms as the right wing. We don't have a
In the fall election. Now, it could have caused serious wounds within the Republican Party.
Yes and I think it did.
Did it?
But at the same time, Jesse Helms had won the primary and that was three way primary as I recall. So you had, everybody had somebody to be for. There were a lot of joint rallies along the way and the party pulled together once that state executive committee was out of the way in June. The party pulled together for the fall campaign really well. We had a meeting every Sunday afternoon, the presidential campaign staff and the Helms campaign staff and the governor's campaign staff. Everybody merged the staffs for field people out there. So that the Helms and Holshouser people really sort of really piggy backed back on Nixon's campaign's surplus money which got them in all that trouble. But we benefited from that significantly, I think.
Was that unusual to have that kind of coordination, when those three do occur at the same time or even two of them, like a presidential and a gubernatorial campaign? Was that an unusual level of cooperation?
I think it was. You probably wouldn't have that much going on today. Of course before that time, we just never had an occasion when you had those three races up with viable campaigns going on at the same time. See North Carolina hadn't carried the state for president for the Republican since 1928, I believe.
Right, right. Now you mentioned that once you got past the two primaries and was in fact the nominee of the party that you began to coordinate with the presidential and the U.S. senatorial campaign of Senator Helms. But you also mentioned that in a sense Senator Helms was representative of the faction or component of the party that you had just defeated in the sense that, if I am understanding this correctly, it was a more conservative element of the party. Can you talk a little bit about that or did I misread?
And it tells you it is awfully easy to want to make that simplistic and want to make broad generalizations and it doesn't really hold because there was an awful lot of people that were for Helms and for me also in the primaries. Sim DeLapp and Charlie Jonas you recall had been the co-chairs of the Helms campaign and they both endorsed me in the runoff. If you looked around at the Helms' chairmen in the western part of the state in particular, there were an awful lot of those that were involved in our campaign in the primary.
In the primary?
So you can't really say that there were these two camps out there that were so well defined that there wasn't any overlap or cross breeding or whatever. It just wasn't so.
And yet you had taken in a sense from what you mentioned earlier and had developed a reputation as being sort of a moderate Republican, a person who was open to listening to other peoples' ideas and Jesse Helms had at that time I think still today, had to some extent of a reputation as being a more ideological candidate. Was that a source of difficulty in coordinating these campaigns?
Well it's sort of a funny thing. I don't keep up with all the votes in Congress but I have the impression that Senator Helms and I are a lot closer on 90% of the issues than most people would ever think. Our styles are just very different. I am not nearly as confrontational as he is. I always viewed myself as somebody who tried to build a consensus, which means some compromising along the way. I think Jesse has also over the time he's been in Washington has become a very skillful compromiser to get the key elements of things that he thinks are important. That wasn't as apparent early on and frankly it wasn't as viable a strategy because when you a minority trying to build a consensus is much more difficult than when you are majority.
Why is that?
Because you don't have the votes. And when you are a committee chairman it makes a lot of difference. And I think in my own experience one of the things that I have found as governor was that because I knew the legislature and the legislative people and as importantly they knew me. They knew that I would stand by what I said and I knew which ones would stand by what they said and which ones wouldn't. We knew how to build a consensus in the legislature even when we didn't have a Republican majority there. And I think that was very important in having some success in legislative programs.
When you devised this coordinated campaign or at least working together with the presidential and US Senatorial campaigns, what kind of message were you as a candidate or the Republican party trying to put across? What do you think were your major appeals?
Well let me simply say that the coordination of those three campaigns didn't have anything to do with what the president was going to be saying, or what Jesse was going to be saying, or what I was going to be saying. The candidates out on the stump were still doing their things? This was just coordinating to make sure that the field men were getting, were making sure that rallies that had to be done here were well prepared, that the candidates got in to the right number of counties and the right number of times and that again, looking at those numbers, where the votes had to come. That is a little bit tricky because Jesse's votes were going to come slightly different than mine. He had to carry some large Piedmont counties. But he was counting on a lot more votes east of Raleigh than I was because those history books just didn't lie about what kind of votes you could expect. We were counting on sizeble number of votes going down US 70 corridor from Raleigh to Morehead City, counting on the coastal thing around Wilmington and Brunswick counties and then here and there we had spots. But I knew if I was going to win it had to be mostly from Raleigh West building up the majority to overcome what we knew would be a minority vote overall east of Raleigh. Our people east of Raleigh just had to do their very best to minimize that shortfall we would have.
So you did not try to coordinate appeals or messages in the candidates' talks. Just looking at your own appeal, what were you trying to do, what were you saying that you thought would bring voters to your side?
You know it is sort of funny. Sometimes your recollection will play tricks on you because you always remember the things you want to remember I guess. I think, I think we, maybe without thinking about it, talked about things in such a way that people knew that if I got elected that the world wouldn't come to an end or state government wouldn't be turned upside down by incompetence or radicalism. But they didn't know what it would be like, but we wanted them to feel comfortable with their votes, and we wanted them to feel like it was time for a change. That the Democrats had been in too long. No matter what any particular Democrat candidate might be like, he was still ham strong by the fact that the whole structure of the state Democratic party and the state government were so intertwined that it would be hard to untangle for a Democrat. And in a sense, it was really saying elect me because I am a Republican.
Now you said that you wanted to make them comfortable with you and that you wanted to convince them if possible, that it was time for a change. And yet presumably Republican candidates prior to you may well have used a similar kind of appeal and no Republican candidate had ever been successful in the century prior to that time. What made you think that that was going to work this time?
Well all you can do is give it your best shot you know and hope that it
works. If I had to do it over again even knowing all of things that I
know right now I would still go about that same strategy. We
didn't know that Nixon was going to get about 70% of the
votes. But I told a lot of people that George McGovern was really the
best campaign issue I had without even knowing it. And when you are
carried in on a landslide, a lot of people get carried in that
aren't qualified. We saw that in the 1966, no the 1962,
elections. We got some people in the legislative delegation that
probably shouldn't have been there. It causes us problems.
But I have
A modest solace?
It is just honesty. But you could see the movement starting to close. Remember you had a Democrat convention; no it wasn't in '72, it wasn't Chicago nightmare, it was some place else.
1972 was McGovern convention.
That is right. He just didn't have much appeal and I still have memories that I can't understand. In Chapel Hill our headquarters was right next to the McGovern headquarters. Every time I came into our headquarters in Chapel Hill just to shake hands and give people encouragement. You'd walk down the street from wherever you parked the car and here are these cars with McGovern stickers and Holshouser's stickers and I have never to this day figured that out.
But you were grateful.
Every little bit helps. Just like my hardware store guy said, once they go into the ballot box they all look the same.
Now another thing that had happened during that year was that there was a very intense primary battle within the Democratic Party.
That is right.
And did that make a contribution toward your eventual success?
You know I said earlier that there were all sorts of things that you
could say that made the difference. We won by less than 40,000 votes out
of a million and a half approximately. Pat's getting out on a
separate campaign schedule and getting us some extra exposure made the
difference. The fact that the NCAE didn't endorse anybody
because they
Was there anything that you could do to contribute to that inability or did you just let it happen?
Well we didn't do it an organized way like we should have. We didn't know as much as we know today. If I had known then what I know now, I would have had every Pat Taylor campaign person on the list to get a phone call from me within a week after the election, of the primary. In some cases we knew who the Taylor leaders were in certain counties and I would always try to see them if I were in that county. I went to see Pat Taylor personally. I didn't expect him to come out and endorse me or anything.
But you had known him from the legislature.
Yes, right. And I think he was a good man, is a good man, would have made a good governor. Although he would not have been able to overcome that intertwining of the things that we have talked about. But I have been told that there was a big meeting between the Bowles' people and the Taylor people in the early summer after the second primary. They said that there was going to be room enough at the table for everybody. But everybody understands the Bowles' people will get the white meat. It just made the Taylor people mad as hell and a lot of people left and just never got on the bandwagon.
And even if they didn't vote for you, the fact that they didn't vote for him?
I think some of them voted for me and I know they sat on their hands where trying to help with the campaign was concerned. You could see that in some counties where Taylor had run really strong and where Bowles ran significantly behind the historical tradition in the fall.
So you had a divided Democratic party and a very strong presidential incumbent, a ticket in North Carolina that in a sense was broad on the Republican side, in addition to these other factors a lot of things had to come together to get those 40,000 or more votes.
That is right. And looking back I think our main job was not making any mistakes. Giving people a comfort level, by talking about the things about state government that I knew that I thought could be improved and I knew first hand from having been in the legislature. And I think that is what got us the endorsement of the Charlotte Observer and Winston-Salem Journal. Although there may have been a little Machiavellian madness running around in the newspaper. They were so scared of Jesse Helms that they were afraid that if I lost and Jesse won, that the Republican party would just take a gigantic swing to the right forever and that it would not be good for the state. So even there, I temper my appreciation for them by the fact that they were, and some of them said that it was important that this part of the Republican party is so strong.
Do you think that those endorsements are important?
Absolutely. Some people say that if you get the newspaper endorsement that you have done something wrong because they don't think the way that the average guy on the street thinks. But there are a certain number of people in every reading area or viewing area that are going to follow the lead of the paper or the station.
Let's explore one final thing about the campaign and then I
want to give us a chance to take a break. You talked a little bit about
the woman from South Carolina that she sent you $25.00 and the
fact that you had large numbers of very good ads that never saw the
light of
Well when we had the first meeting with this group that the Attorney General put together several months before to talk about finance reform, I hold them that I really didn't belong on that committee because our experience had been so bad in raising money that the problems that they were trying to address just weren't problems that I had ever had to face.
This is the "Better Campaign Commission" that you and the other governors worked on?
That is right. The fact is you know it again is just the fortunes of war
and the luck of the draw and the way things are. We finished that
campaign not being obligated to anybody. I mean nobody. I mean we raised
less than $200,000. By election day, we had spent less than
$400,000. We had to raise more after the election than we did
before the election. If I had lost I would have been ten years paying it
off at least. But as it was it was paid off by inauguration day. But I
also told our fundraisers; I said look we have gotten this far, we
don't need to become obligated now. We got the job so
don't take more than $1000 from anybody. As a result
I had the luxury of probably that nobody has in this day and time. Now I
think, I think things have changed but at the time I was running in the
early years of the pacs and this sort of thing, I always knew that you
were likely to get financial support from people who gave you that
support because you were representing the ideas that they believed in.
Our own experience in 1972 was that people gave us so little chance of
winning until George Little took over the finances and fund raising oh
about six weeks maybe two months before the election, I guess about six
weeks. I think he raised more money that last six weeks than we had up
to that time.
So your interpretation from what you said earlier about your belief that people gave money to persons that represented their ideas and the fact that you didn't get much money would be not that there weren't people out there who supported you but that they just didn't think you could win. They wondered whether you could win.
That is right. And some people gave the money even when they
weren't sure that you even had a chance just because they
were loyal or whatever. And we had people give us money that said they
couldn't publicly support us and some of them probably
didn't even vote for us. I don't know. I think
things have changed in terms of fund raising because I get the sense now
that too many people are trying to buy access and that it
shouldn't be necessary to have to buy access. It ought to be
there. And with presidents, you have only got so many hours in the day
and there are just not that many people you get a chance to see you. We
said to the black leadership, to union leadership, not leadership
really, people, that while there were issues that we wouldn't
agree on that I would always be open to listen to what they had to say.
That implied that they would have access to come in and talk and I
didn't view that as any big deal. I just thought that was
part of the job, listen to people with different points of view. I
didn't realize at the time I was campaigning, I think the one
surprise after inauguration day was how many
Related to your idea about campaigning and financing and the possibility that you might have lost because you didn't have adequate financing, there is a argument in the campaign finance debate that the current system does run that risk. That legitimate alternatives and legitimate views are not given the light of day because of the absence of funding.
Yes, I know and as much as I was a victim of that absence in a way, I
still have a hard time bringing myself around to a public financing
approach. I just sort of believe that campaign place is a little bit
like the market place that if you got a good product that it ought to
draw contributions. Now I grant that circumstances vary from place to
place and in our case we were sort of in an unusual situation because we
just hadn't elected anybody in 70 years, 72 years, 74 years.
But today a Republican and Democrat candidate probably start off even in
terms of fund raising. If they are good people to express themselves
well and have some vision about where the state ought to go they ought
to be able to draw money. At the presidential campaign level or the
congressional campaign, senatorial campaign level, that is the same
thing tends to apply. There are some states where you are going to have
a clear leg up if you are a Democrat nominee or a Republican nominee as
the case may be. But public financing in those cases probably
wouldn't make that much difference. I think there is probably
a more viable argument for public financing when it comes to
congressional elections because of the advantage of incumbency.
Doesn't have anything to do with party and that pacs in
particular are afraid not to give to incumbents. They have a clear
advantage of being in Washington, being able to have as
You mentioned that you did not or you told George Little not to take contributions greater thana $1000. I guess that was late in the campaign or after the campaign.
After the election.
You did not have that kind of limit prior to the election.
No and I am sure that we got some contributions of more than that. For instance Marvin Johnson down in Duplin County with the chicken poultry thing down there was one of our bigger contributors. It made it hard for me to send George of all people down to see him sometime in the first year or two to tell him if he didn't get his stuff cleaned up and quit dumping stuff in streams we were going to have to shut him down. At the same time part of it was that we decided early on I had seen the state chairman, I had seen some candidate get so involved in the mechanics of the campaign that they didn't do their job as a candidate. We decided early on that we were going to have to have some strategy meetings here and there, that I was going to be the candidate and Gene Anderson was going to sit in Raleigh and do the schedule for the staff and the schedule for me. And I went on the road six days a week and when and where they said to go and I would know if they were screwing up but we both knew what we needed to do. So I was just a candidate. I wasn't worried about fund raising except I knew we weren't getting any money in.
You weren't worried about it in one sense but did you have somebody working on it other than Gene Anderson?
Yes. Gene didn't work on it. Gene did the mechanics of trying to get campaign organizations set up in each county, having field staff go around and coordinate to make sure that the county coordinators were doing what they were suppose to do and when I was going to be in the county that they had the maximum impact from that visit that we could. We had three or four different guys that took on fund raising responsibilities over the year. And it was a struggle all the way through.
Now you said that you didn't become obligated to anybody at least in part because you had so little money. As you know that is a continual concern I am sure among public leaders as well as among the public generally about obligations and campaign finance. I guess my question is how do you avoid becoming obligated?
Well, I think you start from ground zero that the public has the best
chance of having an independent representative at whatever level they
are talking about from county commission up to the White House, if they
start with the right kind of person. And I think when they say and a lot
of people are saying right now, and this book is being written for
generations not for this month, that you can separate private character
from public character, I am not sure that you can do that at all. Your
overall characters is who you are. I found that in the legislature. We
didn't have any where near the kind of situations that you do
now. You went to a lot of dinners and receptions the first month and the
first six weeks that you were there and then they were over. Co ops
would do a thing, truckers had their thing. They had their room at the
Sir Walter the whole session they were there, then moved out to the
Velvet Cloak or the Hilton or
And I suppose in a sense the magnitude of the entire campaign finance situation has changed so much since you ran.
There is no question about that. When I ran for the legislature the last
time, I had run three times before, I had a primary twice, well the last
time I had a primary. So I had had two primaries and four general
elections, was unopposed in two primaries, was unopposed in one general
election. Only in that last race, that last year, did I spend more than
the filing fee plus gas money and maybe about $50.00. The first
campaign I got some little cards that I took around to put in country
stores and filling stations and that was the one thing that I spent
other than my
But as we know from the research and the publicity now we are talking about campaigns for the legislature that are hundred of thousands of dollars.
Our state senate campaign, two campaigns ago, at least one of the candidates spent about $175,000. In urban campaigns it is almost a given that you are going to have to raise that much money and I think in the Wake County races they raised close to $300,000. Of course what that does is that it lets them put a fair amount of advertising out on television or do a lot of direct mail. I personally have a lot of mixed emotions about the change that's happened. I always believe that campaigns have the ability to help the officer holder by getting out and listening to people. At the same time North Carolina has got a lot more people today than it had when I ran. If I saw and met a thousand people a day that's still only 350,000 people approximately in a year.
That's a lot of people in a day.
That is right and to do that every day. When you are just meeting them that is not really doing much more than letting them see you. You can reach them a lot more over the tube and it is with a lot less effort. There is not question about that. But I am not sure that you can adequately reach enough people on a personal way today without spending the money for television to get your ideas across.
And of course that is one of the major factors in the cost of campaigning today. The magnitude is a least in part a matter of inflation and is at least in part of matter of a greater variety of instruments for campaigning. But the major part is the television coverage.
And it is a catch 22 every way you turn it. The public you see all the
polls. We all know intellectually that you shouldn't be able
to buy an election by television. You shouldn't be able to
win a campaign by smearing the other guy. The public says they are not
going to vote for people who run negative ads but the history, you can
look at a poll and you can see your percentage here, and you can run
negative ads for three weeks and you will see your percentage going up.
It just says the polls they don't lie; just in a vacuum have
a feeling but when they get in the middle of it they do it anyway.
We've got you elected and I wanted to talk about several different roles that a governor plays, if you don't mind that word, as governor. And the first role that I want to talk about with you is your role as a public leader. I have in mind here the idea of a governor's relationship with the general public either directly or through the media. And what I would like to do is asked you to think about those situations where you want to find out what the people of the state want you to do as governor. How do you go about doing that?
Well I tell you Jack I have the feeling that most people who run for
governor run with their own ideas about what they want to do for the
state. I think that is what is going to be what drives them. If all of
us are honest, I think we will convince ourselves that if that is not
what the public really wants that's, because they just
don't know as much as we do. Now you can do polls and as I
told you we didn't have much money. We set up a very
jerry-rigged kind of
So you mentioned that you had a variety of, I guess sort of like focus groups, that you were using to try to determine what the public view was?
No, that was using the same mechanism that a private polling firm would use.
Oh I see excuse me.
They would have, except that ours were volunteers instead of paid. But you try to have the same, you try to have a composition of your polling universe that says that you are going to have 52% women and 48% men and a certain, probably 23% minority. There are some people in the polling business that think you don't have to do that any more.
They are representative samples?
They are representative samples. And so we had groups of people in each county that would do telephone surveys. Then they would make a note of the kind of person that they got on the phone which category they were in and they would feed all of that into the office in Raleigh the day after they did the polling. We had a couple of people who volunteered in the Raleigh office who took all that down and you are never going to get, you have to throw some out to make up the best sample. When that is through you should have a statewide sample.
It really was public opinion polling done on a volunteer basis and how frequently would you use that particular device.
About once a month the whole four years we were in Raleigh.
And did that turn out to be a satisfactory way of determining what the public attitudes were?
Pretty much. What you were looking for is how they were feeling generally how things were going. Governors like all public officials want to be universally loved at 100%. You know that it is not going to be that but you want to keep up with how people perceive you are doing the job and how they feel about particular issues. That is obviously going to vary with what is happening at the time.
When you said how people feel about the way you are doing your job, did you actually ask people about performance ratings?
Yes. We would talk to them about whether they think the schools are doing better than they did last year or how they viewed the economy in their areas as opposed to how it had been and that kind of thing.
So you were getting fairly regular feedback on what the major issues were and on how people were perceiving your performance. Did that cause you at any time to change what you had been planning to do on public policy?
Not a lot. Most of that time it just reflected the same view that I was having about how things were seeing the same things that I was. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if this was a problem it needed to be talked about. For instance when we had the energy crisis and we had the lines at the gas pumps and that sort of thing. That was an unexpected thing. We hadn't had it since World War II probably and in a different way then. And it became apparent that whatever solution we came up with that neither the press nor the people was going to accept it unless it included those things with the green flags where if you had an odd number of license plates you could get it on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and if you didn't you would go on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday which I thought was just insane. But any rate when we did the energy package things, we put that in there. Not because I thought it was a good idea because I didn't see that it could hurt. But it was obvious that people were going to feel like we hadn't done what we were suppose to if we didn't have that in there. And that's just a small thing; that is almost a blip on a graph in a way.
How do you explain in a sense why it is that the ideas that you had and presumably others in your administration had were essentially the same ideas that the public had?
Well I guess part of this is that as opposed to the presidency I think people have a little bit different view about the governorship. Now they think he ought to be in charge of the governmental operation. I think a large part of what I did had to do with that as opposed to being the speaker in the bully pulpit. I think there is a certain extent to which the governor has to try to help lift people's eyes and goal level some, and he has to lift their spirit. But I think for the most part, people view him as the CEO in charge of governing of the state. Now, not the state, the state government. There are things they expect. They expect that when you have a bad situation like with a storm like we did last week, they expect the governor would be up in his helicopter looking around. That kind of thing. It took me a while to figure that out. The first couple of those I didn't do that. I heard from people about why I hadn't showed up. And if there is some crisis that is effecting large numbers of people either statewide or in specific areas I think they expect a showing of the flag. I view that if you talk about the bully pulpit. I view that the governor is the chief cheerleader for the state's economic efforts, development efforts, for education on the broad scale and in a lot of other areas though. You do ribbon cuttings that don't amount to much except for the people that were there who are glad you came and did it. But if you are seeing to the extent that government is involved in these various issues that it is performing efficiently, that is what people expect you to do. And all the stuff over the last three months over the Department of Transportation is not because Governor Hunt has not been in the bully pulpit it is because people don't think the state government has been operating the way it should. And that is when they feel like you have let them down.
You say you had these sort of feeling the pulse kinds of groups. You also had some "people's days" that you organized. What was your purpose in that and did it achieve the purpose that you had in mind?
Well the idea was in sort of a populist thing. That if the governor is going to be spending his time addressing those big problems that we talked about and meeting with industry leaders and that sort of thing, there ought to be some way that the average person on the street who has a problem with the state or the government in some way or another ought to get the feeling that they never have a chance to see the governor. So we just set these things up. It wasn't the first. Some other governors had done it. A lot of plagiarism in these sort of things. But we did it once a month. Started in Raleigh and moved different places about the state. It was a fascinating diversity of people and motivations came to see us, we just took them first come first served. And to the best of my knowledge we never ran people away. I don't think we ever got to the place that at 4:00 in the afternoon they said we are only going to be here for another hour and that is only going to mean another twelve people, so the rest of you have got to go home. We just didn't do that. We stayed until the line ended.
Would these people tend to focus on particular problems, that were particular to them or would they talk to you about broader issues?
Almost invariably personal things which didn't make it
invalid. We had an ombudsmen staff that was geared when we got back to
Raleigh. They would take those notes and call an ombudsmen coordinator
in each department and say, "We got this problem. What can you
do." In a lot of cases people had already written somebody in
the state government and nothing had happened. The unfortunate thing is
that those of us who have been in government if
Very personal. Did you feel that you benefited any from these, from the standpoint of understanding people's policy or substantive concerns?
If I am honest about it, not as much as I would hope. A lot of these things were so personal, personally related, that what you were really doing was spending a day each month to give people to have just a chance to have their problems addressed even if it wasn't satisfactory. But you made sure somebody looked after it. Occasionally you would get a good idea. One guy came and talked about old abandoned cars that were left on the beaches out on the Outer Banks. He had an idea about how to go about that and we put that in a motion and it helped. That was sort of an exception rather than the rule. And invariably you would have a few campaign supporters who would come in just to say hello.
And you said you set up this system of ombudsman also, not only in the governor's office, but in the departments?
Yes and that office was in, they had charge of these monthly people's days we could call them. But that was where people got referred if they called in to the governor's office with a problem. They would send them to them rather than to try to send them on to department so that was a point of entry for criticism or questions about governmental operations.
Now a lot of this kind of thing that is done at the national level which is referred to in the literature as "case work" is done through the Congress.
That is right.
And presumably not as much through the legislature here.
There is more of that through the legislature now than it use to be, but still not very much compared to congressional operations.
So you were in a sense filling a void that, at least at that time, existed in the operation of the legislature. A third way in which we might think about you in trying to keep in touch with the public and learn something from them about their interests, at least what they think about what you're proposing, is though public appearances before various groups and governors do lots of those kinds of things. Did you find that a useful means of keeping your finger so to speak on the pulse of the people?
I probably didn't think so at the time. In a lot of these
cases somebody would call and wanted you to address their national or
annual convention or if they had a national group coming in particular
felt like the governor ought to show. I would have Jack Childs my press
guy call them up and say, "Well tell me the things that your
folks are interested in right now. What is on their front
burner?" He and I would talk about it and he would put a speech
together. And what it did was the fact that you were going to have to
make the appearance sort of forced you to
One of the things that I have noticed in looking at governors from Terry Sanford up through the fourth term or into the fourth term of Governor Hunt is that the number of these appearances has increased dramatically, so very substantially. During your period of time with those four years the average might have been fifty or sixty a year. Now we are talking about two to three hundred a year. And one of the things that I am wondering about is whether something has happen in the governorship or in the relationship between the governor and the public, that 1) maybe brings more requests for those kinds of particular things or 2) makes the governor feel that he or she or whoever, has to be responsive to those kinds of things? But you mentioned earlier that you were amazed at the numbers of people who wanted to see you and the little bit of time you had to respond to those.
Yes, because you have got a lot of things you have got to do just with meeting with budget peoples and during the time the legislature is in town you have got a lot of activity with that. The time that you have that you can actually see the people who are coming in from out of Raleigh to meet with you is pretty small. I know that I am sort of fascinated with what you say. I would be interested in having to go back and see whether there is any correlary between the governor's ability to be re-elected.
Well this is a question that I have in my mind. Because what is clear from the research that I have done is that the number of appearances increases as you approach the possibility of an election.
That is sort of my knee jerk reaction.
In your case the number of appearances actually decreased because you didn't have the possibility of a re-election.
Yes and I have to admit I was doing a lot more campaigning for Jerry Ford in 1976, that kind of thing.
Now this is based upon the schedules that are made public. Obviously I don't have access to anything more than the public record. But it is a fascinating thing. One of the things that interest me so much about this is that there is a theory in the presidency, the chief executive of the nation, that the president has become a much more public leader than what he or she was, lets say prior to probably 1960s or 1950s. I am wondering whether there is in fact something happening to the governorship where the expectation of direct access to a governor is increasing so dramatically, where a governor is becoming…. Of course your having been an earlier governor, some of the later governors will have a different perspective on this, but where the governor maybe feels more obligation or maybe…. As I say the number of requests has increased so much or whether there is something else going on out there that may cause governors to be more responsive. I am not suggesting you weren't responsive or responded to as many as you could, but to be more responsive and to commit more time to this kind of activity.
I tell you I don't I don't know if I have got a
good informed answer on that. I have the feeling that if you talk to
Phil Kirk that he would probably tell you that we turned down
But now for example there is a study by one of the governor's which I understand has not been made public so I won't refer to the governor. It says that the governor spent about one quarter of his time traveling around the state responding to these requests.
That could be and you know it is sort of an interesting thing. If you, I think this varies a lot from state to state. In talking with other governors around during the time that I was governor, I found that the people from the urban areas did a lot more traveling for public speaking, had a huge amount more security. Then when you went into some of the mountain states in the west they didn't have much security. There was one governor who used to take two weeks hunting trips in the mountains by himself. I always viewed North Carolina somewhere in the middle of that. But if you are going to spend too much time out of Raleigh it means that you have got to have a chief of staff in the governor's office and the cabinet people who are capable of running the ship if you are not there. I tell a lot of people right now that if I am out of town today, my law office just keeps functioning right a long. If my lead secretary is out of town I don't get anything done it seems like to me some days.
I understand.
And there is a certain amount of truth in that where state government is concerned. It doesn't require the governor to be in his office in order for things to keep happening, if you have got the right people.
And it could well be with extended service, that is the possibility of re-election, that governors are able to put people in place with greater experience to run the government in their absence?
I was just getting ready to say, when we went into office separate from just a serious disadvantage in that we didn't have any Republicans that had ever held office in the executive branch. I mean nobody. While we were able to pick up several legislators who had some experience with government at least, a lot of people came in just from the private sector and there is a learning curve involved with that the best you can do. And so you didn't feel as, you sort of felt like you had to be there on the job more than you would have probably in this day and time.
Another way in which the governors can try either to communicate with the public or in fact learn from the public is through the press. I wanted you to reflect a little bit if you would on how you felt or what contribution did the press made to your ability to govern? In addition how did they detract from your ability to govern?
Well the experience that I had was probably different than anybody else's lately in that it came during the middle of Watergate. But there are some other experiences too.
I found that during the campaign, both in the primary and in the general, I was the underdog all the way and I think we got every benefit of the doubt in the press all the way through.
Every bit of the doubt?
Every benefit of the doubt. I think they went out of their way to give us as much coverage as they could probably because they thought that we were trying hard and had some good ideas but didn't have any money. But they did what they have quit doing now which is to have one reporter assigned to you for the pool. He would file and the wire service and everybody else would get the story of what you did that day. They quit doing that and I think that is not good. As soon as I was elected I think the whole, their view of me changed in that all of a sudden I was the guy in charge and I had to be scrutinized to see if I was honest or intelligent or doing right. Even before the inauguration I had already made several mistakes as far as they were concerned which would never have been noticed before the campaign was over. I found that frustrating. But I also sort of recognized that is just how it is once you are in office. There is an arms' length relationship even with friends that has to be there. They have their job to do and if you believe in the first amendment for the most part at least you recognize that. I still do in spite of everything. I think it is abused at times pretty seriously. I found that if you are screwing up the press isn't going to be long letting you know that they think you have. If you will let yourself not be too defensive and be willing to admit you might have made a mistake, somewhere along the line they can be helpful.
Did you hold regular press conferences or regular opportunities for assess?
Not on a regular bases but pretty often. Now Bob Ray in Iowa told me that
when he was governor he had a hour every morning where he sat down with
any of the reporters that wanted to come in and just talk. So whatever
was on the front bumper right then he was there. I thought that was too
frequent. Jack Childs always had access to me even if it was by phone to
get answers if reporters called in with questions and they usually did
for whatever was on their
What an environment to have to contend with on a daily basis?
That's right. And it also reached the point where for instance the commander of the highway patrol got a speeding ticket, got stopped on the way back from Asheville. Everybody immediately wanted to know if I was going to fire him. And I will admit the highways are his responsibility and that was something that he shouldn't have done. At the same time I couldn't in my own mind see that anybody should even think that that should be grounds for firing.
Now as far as the ability of a governor to communicate to the public on whatever concerns like the energy crisis during your particular administration, as I recall you did go on state television to talk about the energy crisis. But more often than not, at least increasingly, governors have difficulty gaining assess to the media for those purposes.
I think that is true and I think the economic demands of operating
television stations these days probably have just changed, or greed. I
don't know enough about the profits in it, but for one reason
or another the state broadcasters haven't been nearly as
willing to give the
If you couldn't address the public directly, you obviously had to address them through the press. How about your assessment of how well the press communicated your ideas for you so to speak if you had a particular policy concern that you wanted to get out.
On the things that really mattered I thought they did okay, I thought they did pretty well. It wasn't nearly as bad then as it is now. But if you took these six things and said they were the major issues, I thought they did fine. If you took these four things that were the hot button Clinton sex scandal kind of things of the day, they didn't do too well but they did well compared to what is happening today. And I am just sort of appalled over what has happen in the last ten days with the President and with this thing with the intern. I am appalled that he got himself in that situation, but I am also appalled with how the press just has its, and everybody call it, feeding frenzy and just goes crazy. They are reporting things that aren't backed up by facts and two days later prove there were no basis at all.
But you felt by and large that you could use the press and I don't mean in any nefarious way. I just mean it was available to be used for you to get out ideas adequately to the public and so the absence of your ability to go on statewide television for example was not a serious problem as it could have been.
I don't believe I ever felt a problem with being able to get
out to the people what I wanted to say. The only time I had a mechanical
problem was when I wanted to do sort of a summation of the
administration and I wanted to do it before the election of 1976.
Everybody
I have read about that and it is actually a fairly unique experience among governors I believe, I mean in this state.
It was just mountaineer stubbornness.
But that was. One of the reasons I got very interested in this whole relationship issue is how conscientious governors have been to report to the people fairly frequently. I mean there is a nice set of summaries out there either in report form or television like you did in which governors, not every one of them but many of them, have gone through their administrations and have tried to account for what they did. And in a sense of course this whole relationship that we are talking about from the governor to the public is an accountability relationship.
That is right.
Because you wouldn't be there if it had not been for the people, presumably.
And in all these things you tend to give yourself the best of it when you talk about the things that have happen you have done well. You don't talk about the things that didn't do as well, I suspect.
But it is interesting in fact that it has occurred. What has been of some concern is that not all of them have been able to have direct access to the public like you did only because you were willing to take out the $10,000 or whatever it was.
$15,000
Of your pocket.
But I think that if I had asked for that the first of December I could have gotten it. Now I don't believe you could do that today from what I have heard.
Legally or politically.
Economically. I don't think the stations will give you the time. See because it is sort of a funny thing. Technology has changed too. Back then we had to take a reel of tape and hand carry it to each of the stations to get them to run it. We had to have duplicate tapes for all of the stations that were going to do it.
Well one of the interest that I have is whether there has in fact occurred any kind of change of a significant nature in the relationship between governors in the 1960s and 1970s to the governors in 1990s. That is, in a sense do governors feel an obligation to have greater contact with the public. But from what I can tell from you, you felt that obligation very strongly in 1970 and you devoted a lot of time to it. Maybe the mechanisms today are different.
Easier and better.
Easier and better because of technology.
I am sort of inclined to think that the period from 1965 to 1975 maybe
has changed forever and for the worst for the most part the relationship
between the office holders and the press. I saw, the press, the media,
prints stuff. It seems like to me that the combination of the Vietnam
War and the disillusionment that a lot of people had with the government
and then the Watergate era just right after that has left forever the
willingness of the media to not give the benefit of the doubt to but to
have a certain regard for people in public office. Now Newsweek sort of
departed from that a little bit on this latest thing in that they
didn't go to the press when they could have with this first
story. And there may have been some stories that have
Another argument that is given on this whole issue of public leaders having to be more accessible and responsive to the public, at least superficially if not in fact, is that political parties have broken down rather significantly.
No question.
So that there is not the discipline, there is not the loyalty, there is not even the identification that existed during the time; that is, citizens' identification with political parties. That in a sense you don't have that intermediary institution that can provide you with those means of access and rallying support and that kind of things. Did you feel that when you were governor that you did in fact have that sort of network out there in the party?
Well again I was sort of special case. I had been the state chairman for
five years and I knew all those people. I wasn't like a
candidate who comes along with a million bucks of his own money and
wants to spew it out there on the tube, bypass the organization, and
just go right directly to the voters and get elected or get nominated as
the case may be. And because I had a state party chairmanship I also had
a sense of what my obligation to the party was in terms of building the
Republican Party. Every particular situation depends on where it fits in
the over all scheme for example. As the first one you had a different
obligation than later ones do. A
Right.
But there is no question that the party thing has broken down. That started changing when the seniority system in the Congress went by the boards and that was the McGovern commission. Now the McGovern Commission changed the nomination process in which you no longer had to get the approval of the smoke-filled room leadership. You could go directly to the primary.
But the breakdown of seniority did occur in '74 which was just right after the McGovern Commission.
And David Broder has written a lot about the parties and their role and how it has changed. Right now the parties seem to me almost no more than the vehicle through which soft money sometimes flows. That may be because I am not nearly as close to it as I was for a long time. I just haven't been that much involved. I don't go to the executive committee meetings and the central committee meetings to see what is happening and how much time people are putting in. But I have the feeling that people have a lot more direct sense of relationship and are tuned in more with their own legislators and congressmen and all than they are with the state headquarters.
That possibility for access is also greater as you say today not only because of the technological developments which have occurred but probably also because of people being seen more on television, seeing them as individuals, when often in the past they were just names.
And the overall bad part of this, and there are some good parts, but the bad part of this is that you don't have any serious party discipline left in the legislative bodies. Now that is not quite as true in Raleigh as it is in Washington. But in Washington it seems to me that there are some many cases for so many different causes that trying to exercise discipline to get the votes together is difficult…...
END OF INTERVIEW