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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-0336-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Governor Robert W. (Bob) Scott, although he grew up the son of Governor W. Kerr Scott, describes himself as something of an outsider—"a farmer . . . a graduate of N. C. State"—and insists that he never intended on a political career. When his name surfaced in a newspaper item speculating about a run for the governorship, however, his political career began. Scott ran for lieutenant governor and won the seat, and while he downplays his political acumen and ambitions, he soon thereafter began to position himself for a gubernatorial campaign. After four years as lieutenant governor, he took his understated political posture to the governor's office, becoming the first sitting lieutenant governor to take the state house, where he served from 1969 to 1973. In this rich interview, Scott describes his early life and how he backed into a political career; his modest approach to the lieutenant governorship and his relationship with state legislators; his successful campaign for the governorship, which he won by reaching out to a diverse constituency, from African Americans to white conservatives; and his goals for statewide leadership. As he discusses these topics, he reveals a layered political life and shows, or cultivates, an image as a laid-back person with big goals but limited political ambitions. Modest and self-effacing, Scott presents a detailed political portrait and provides a look into the workings of North Carolina's political processes in the 1960s and 1970s.
Former North Carolina Governor Robert W. (Bob) Scott recalls his early life and describes his ascent from the lieutenant governorship to the governor's mansion.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
An interview with Governor Robert W. Scott of North Carolina, for Wake
Forest University and the Southern Oral History Program at Chapel Hill,
as part of a series of interviews with North Carolina's
living former governors. The interview was conducted February 4, 1998,
at the home of Governor Scott in Haw River, North Carolina. The
interviewer is Dr. Jack D. Fleer, Department of Politics, Wake Forest
University. Tape number 2-4-98-RWS.
Governor Scott, I want to begin with some questions about your early political interest and development. When did you begin thinking about a career in politics?
I don't know that I ever thought about a career in politics; it just happened. At this point of time when we are discussing, I'm approaching my sixty-ninth birthday, and in reflection I've actually had four careers. The one that I was formally trained for at NC State University, in animal science—I grew up on the farm and returned to the farm, and my job was to manage the farm. My father, who was living at the time, made the comment to me that one politician in the family was enough and he would take care of that and my job was to run the family business, and what that meant in those days was farming.
So the career in agriculture, and then the career in politics. We can talk about that a little later. And then, of course, like most folks, I had a period of time in the military, but that wasn't a career—I considered that, at one time. Then the career I guess on the periphery of politics—that is to say not running for and holding public office but being involved in governmental work. In this particular case it was the Department of Community Colleges, the community college system, where I worked for twelve years. I guess that was a career of education and administration. And then the fourth career I guess I'm in now, which is doing a little bit of everything and just trying to enjoy life and make some contribution and get at a less pace.
So, I mean, I never set out with the goal of having a career in politics, or to hold public office, or any of that stuff. I was always active in a political sense, even in high school and in college, being involved in student government activities, whatever's going on. But not with the idea of having a career track of any sort.
I grew up, of course, in a rural community that was very typical of
Piedmont North Carolina. My mother and father—my father was
acting politically, my mother was his helpmate, she was a very quiet,
diminutive type of woman, very supportive of my father, but really
didn't care for the public eye that much. So I grew up in a
rural environment, agriculturally oriented. I'm a
Presbyterian by faith—I didn't know there was any
other denomination until I was old enough
What is it about the values of this sort of rural environment and rural community that you think appealed to you, that caused you to want to stay there initially and in fact for the rest of your life?
Well, the values—there's no question about it, the
rural environment here and the influence of the church and the rural
community school where everybody knew everybody—that had some
intricate impact upon me and my decision-making in later years in public
office. As I said in my inaugural address, in
So it did have a great influence on me and I can talk at length about my church activities growing up and the rural community school and the closeness we had. Even when I entered the first grade, when we moved to the so-called consolidated school, known as Alexander Wilson School, located on Highway 54—it's still there, although it's only an elementary school now. There were only twenty-nine in our graduating class, and there were twenty girls and nine boys, and we boys loved that. Practically all of us—having only nine boys who were seniors, and old enough to drive a school bus, we all were driving school buses. If we had any kind of athletic team at all, everybody got to play, because we just didn't have that many people. Everybody was in the school play.
So it was a close-knit community of people, and that, too, had its impact
on me. I think the community of Hawfields, white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant—yes, we had minorities, African-Americans working
here, obviously we had them in our farm here, The Church in the Gold Fields, written by Dr. Herbert
Turner, who was a son of this church and this
community—he's dead now, of course—and
he was a professor of history and philosophy at Mary Baldwin College.
But he wrote a book about this community, and I think it captures many
of the—one can sense the elements there that came into
influencing my makeup, as well my parents, because they, too, grew up
here. They were just a couple of miles down the road from each other.
They were childhood sweethearts, they went to the school closings
together and all of that. And I met my wife here in the consolidation of
that school in the first years.
So you attended school together?
She moved into the community in the third grade. Her mother died when she
was very young, she was raised by her older sister. She was actually
born down in a little community called Messy Hill, which is now part of
Fayetteville. And all of her people were textile folks. They worked in
the mills, and the mills were on strike down there during the
Depression, and many of the families moved up into Piedmont North
Carolina because the mills up here were still operating. So they got
jobs up here, and her older sister raised her in the little community of
Swepsonville, which is one of the communities that came into the
consolidation of our school. So we've been holding hands ever
since the third grade. And she dated other boys, I dated other
My wife came from very poor circumstances. She was the youngest of seven children, and the only one to finish high school, let alone go to college. And our teachers got her a fifty dollar per semester scholarship at what is now UNC-Greensboro. Back then it was a women's college. And she worked in the company store in the mill there for every summer and whenever she could to earn money. She was determined that she was going to get an education. It was very difficult for her. As a little side story—She has this thing today, and I kid her about it, of buying a chair. She'll go to a yard sale or something, she'll buy a chair. You can see all these chairs around here—a lot of them don't match, they don't fit in with anything. But the reason is that she, as a child—as the youngest child, there were not enough chairs for everybody to sit down. She always had to sit on the floor or on the bed. And she said, "If I ever get any money, I'm going to have a chair of my own." To this day she'll buy a chair.
Isn't that nice.
And the same thing—she talked about having to sleep four in a
bed. So I don't say that in disdain of her, but she
Now, would her circumstances have been different from yours in that regard?
Yes, they were. The people who grew up in the mill community of
Swepsonville, all of them worked at the mill, a typical southern textile
mill. The Hawfields community, the adjoining community, was a farming
community, and they kind of looked upon us as the landed gentry. And she
said it took her years after we got married to realize I
didn't have any money.
A little late, huh?
As a matter of fact, another story that I'm very proud of, for
her. I was a student at NC State. I went to Duke for two
years—if you remind me, I'll come back to that. I
was going to be a country doctor. But anyway, I graduated from NC State.
Well, we knew, my wife Jessie Rae and I, that we were probably going to
get married. And during the last year, when it became time for her last
semester, she said, "I just don't have the money to
go back." She worked in the dining hall for four years, the
four years she was in school, and she worked every semester in the
dining hall to earn money to help get her through school. And she said,
"I'm going to have to drop out until I can make
enough money to finish." And I said, "If you ever do
that you'll never go back." Well, knowing that we
were going to get married, and thinking that we would—I had a
part time job at NC State and I had been squirreling away a little money
for our
So does this explain the story that I've heard that you are the only governor to have proposed to your wife in the governor's mansion twice?
That's exactly right, and that was the reason for it. I proposed to her in the spring, and you know, I was young and naive and full of ego and thought, this is no big deal, you know, and so I proposed to her, and for the reason I just explained, she turned me down, and then later that fall, that summer, she had paid off her note to me, and I proposed again and then everything was fine.
Now, you mentioned that you and your wife sat on the porch at your high
school graduation and talked about what you
Oh, no. Never entered it. I just assumed that I would come back here, and I did come back here, and be a farmer. But we talked about going on to college at that time, and we knew that there was a lot ahead of us before we would ever get married. We just talked about the things we wanted to do in life, and of course her goal, her burning ambition, was to graduate from college. And she majored in secretarial science, and came back as a teacher, when she got her teaching certificate, to the local high school we both graduated from, and taught business education to students who were there, and in fact they wanted to call her by her first name because it was just four years and there she was back teaching. They always wanted her to be the chaperone when they went on class trips to Raleigh or to Washington, because she was one of them.
Now, you mentioned that for your wife, going to college and completing college was—I think you said, first in her family to do that. But for you, was it expected that you would go to college, or was that an unusual situation for people in your circumstances?
It was pretty much expected of me. My father was a graduate of NC State,
as well as his brothers, and his sisters were all college graduates, so
yes, that was just expected and assumed. In high school, my mother took
me to Durham, to Duke, and I took one of these aptitude tests and so on,
so she wanted me to be a physician. There were several in the family.
And I
Also, I began to realize at that time that there was a fine opportunity for me here to come back and manage the farm and run the farm business. I had an older brother and sister—my brother's dead now as of this date, and my sister's still living in Ohio—but they were not interested in the farm, and although my dad never said anything to me about it, when I said I wanted to transfer to NC State, I think he was pleased, because there was nobody here to sort of take it over.
Now, during this time, when you were in high school and then
transitioning into college, your father was serving in public office as
commissioner of agriculture, and eventually as
No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I'm glad you asked that question, because it's probably something that I can comment on that I think maybe deflates a myth. I was not raised at my father's knee, in terms of politics. He was gone all the time, as commissioner of agriculture and as governor. I remember, as commissioner of agriculture, he would leave out in the mornings at about seven o'clock to drive to Raleigh. That was before interstates, of course, and he drove NC 54, a winding road into Chapel Hill and on to Raleigh. He would meet with the farm foremen and maybe his employees before he left. And then he would get in about six or six thirty in the evening, unless he had a meeting somewhere, which was rather frequent. My mother almost ran the farm; she kept the records and the payroll and all of that. But my dad was not there. Occasionally I would go with him on trips, particularly if he was going to one of the agricultural experiment stations where they would have field days, they would call them, I was free to run around and so forth, but I really didn't go with him much.
And we were not close, really, father and son. There was no animosity
there, but my mother was the one who was at home, she was the anchor
person, and so I was not raised at his knee. And even later, in college,
again, he was gone a lot, plus the fact that as a young college student
I really didn't want to be around my parents all that much. I
preferred living in the dorm. And even when he was governor, except for
a couple of summers—summer
From a career standpoint, do you think his expectations were merely related to this Hawfields community, the rural part?
That's conjecture on my part, but I would have to say yes. I think he envisioned me taking over the farm. Because his father was a farmer, he was master farmer in the days of Dr. Clarence Poe and the progressive farmer and all that. And farming was a tradition. My father had expanded our farm operation, and when I came back from the service I expanded it still further, in terms of what we were doing. And I was really into it. I thought that was the way I would go.
Around the dinner table, with your mother and your brother and sister, or with other members of the family, or even when your father was at home, was politics ever a subject of discussion of any consequence?
Not in the family. I'm sure it was with my mother and so
forth. But there's eight years' difference between
me and my sister, and nine years' difference at least with my
brother. So you might say they didn't want to fool with me as
a young kid
Politics was not discussed that much around the table, or else I
wasn't paying any attention to it—now, that could
very well be. Now, my father had lots of people who would come here, to
his home, where I was a child. There was a big oak tree out there, and
his friends used to say he held court under the oak tree. What he would
do, his friends would come on Sunday afternoon. Now, he took a nap after
church, after lunch on Sunday. That was one thing you did not do: you
did not wake him from a nap. Along about two-thirty or so,
he'd get up, and people would come, and if they came before
that, we'd just ask them to wait. They would sit out there
And among your own cohorts who were roughly your age, the fact that your father was involved in politics, was that noted or commented upon?
Not in the community. We were very democratic in this community, there
was no feeling of, what am I trying to say, favoritism or another tier.
We were all very much the same. My father was a populist, in a sense. He
would get out there and do whatever the other men in the church would do
in the community. One of the traditions of our community for years was
that, quote,
When I was in the governor's office, and I'm
jumping ahead here a little bit but it relates to this point, it was an
hour's drive from the state capital. We lived in the mansion.
My children were small. And most Sundays, we came home to worship in
this church. A lot of times we'd try to spend Saturday and
Sunday here. And I remember one of my children asking about it one time,
why did we come up here every Sunday? I said, "This is our home
and this is where my friends are. These people will be the ones that
will come to our funeral. They are our friends now, they have been our
friends in the past, and they will be our friends in the future. There
are friends that we have, a lot of them in Raleigh, when we are out of
office, they are no longer your friends; they'll be
acquaintances." And I've tried to instill that in my
children, that this is where your roots are, don't ever
forget it, don't ever get, quote, above your raisings, end
quote. And I think
So they continue to live in the community, so to speak.
They are all within sight, here.
Isn't that wonderful.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I take that back. My youngest daughter's in Durham, and she has a condominium, and she's not married but she longs very much to have her home here.
You mentioned that your father was a populist and there are some people who characterize you as having some populist values. I don't know whether you subscribe to that assessment of your own—
Not really sure I'm populist. But in my way of thinking, my father was, maybe I am. But if your question is, Why?—
Yes, that's it.
—I think it is the influence of my father. Not by his talking with me, but by observing what he did and said and his focus on his programs. And also the community itself. This community is—well, today, it's radically changed, it's urbanizing. But up until twenty years ago, the values stayed pretty much the same, the people were the same, and it was not a poor community, but it was not a wealthy community. It's what one would call, I guess, middle America. So I think all of this environment that I grew up in—isn't that true with everyone? It shapes your. There's no way you can—
Now, you mention at least two kinds of values that I can identify. One of
them is this sense of community, and the
Well, if I understand your question right, I think there was instilled a work ethic. My father was a prodigious worker. I mean, you got your job done, regardless of the hours or the difficulty, and you didn't quit as long as you were able to function. So the work ethic, and then—honesty. A person's word is his bond. That's very important to me. The ability to try—whatever your talents may be, the ability to try. And for those who had leadership traits, they have a responsibility to utilize those traits, not to enhance themselves so much, but to move along the community in a progressive way. That leadership has a responsibility. Part of my thinking was that I was to—I think I subconsciously realized that I had a responsibility, because of the family's history of leadership in various areas, whether it was in farming or medicine or in government.
Did you, as a high school student or in your college experience, demonstrate leadership in any kinds of organizations, agricultural organizations or whatever?
Well, I cannot state that without sounding like I'm bragging,
but—I've always had a sense of competitiveness. If
I was on a basketball team, I wanted to win. If I was on a debating
team, I wanted to win. And so on. I wasn't necessarily
OK, then, in student government activities—we didn't have any student government to speak of in high school, I don't recall being involved with that. But I tend to be a joiner, as it were. When I went to school at Duke, I joined the Glee Club, and I wanted to be in what they called the Men's Triple Quartet in the Glee Club, but that was only for juniors and seniors. So my role then was to try to be good enough that when I got to be a junior, I would be in the quartet. Because they got to travel all over the East Coast and perform. Well, I didn't stay at the school that long. But I joined the YMCA and I had some office in that, I just don't remember—it was minor.
When I came to NC State, though, I was older and I began to get involved in campus politics. I was secretary of the student government. I worked on the Greater University Council, the student council, that is NC State-UNC Chapel Hill. And got involved in the Ag Club, my departmental club. Ran for office, those kinds of things. Without any—I just enjoyed it. And I guess I had that trait.
Now, were those positions that you felt came easily to you, or did you have to compete for them, or did you have to—?
I had to compete, oh, yeah, and I would win some, lose some. I learned to
lose. It's not handed to you with a silver spoon. I would do
the things that any student would do to try to get elected to whatever
office it might be, you know, put out posters, get friends to help you,
all that kind of stuff. But
But in contrast with many of your cohorts in, say, Duke or NC State, presumably because your father was in the public realm, your name was known by maybe more people than the names of some of your cohorts. Did the fact that your father was in public office, and in a sense your family had that history of public service, benefit you, or was it a hindrance in any way?
I really don't think it, either—I'm sincere in that. I've thought about that some in later years. He let me alone, and I didn't trade on his name or position. I think I would have been put in my place pretty quickly if I had tried to, particularly by those I ran with. One of the favorite little things that my roommate would do, and others who did know of this connection, they would get some guy who didn't know about that and they would get him—we'd be in the room, sitting around in the dorm room talking, and they might get off on politics or something, and they'd try to lead him into a trap, you know, because that guy would not know of my relationship.
The story that is told about our stealing a watermelon from the
governor's mansion involved a boy from Pennsylvania, who was
killed in the Korean War. But he was one that didn't know,
and we were sitting around the dorm one evening in the summer time. It
was rather warm and so on and we were talking about how great it would
be to have a good cold watermelon. Well, this guy—his
So they got Cliff to drive the car. And we made a big deal out of it, we drove it down, four or five of us, and we circled the mansion and waited until it got dark. Back then they did not have a wall around the mansion. And so I said, "OK, you pull up here in the driveway, and park over here in the shadows; I'm going in and getting one of those watermelons. They put them out there on the back porch." And so he did, he parked out there in the shadows, where the light wasn't shining, and I just went on in. I acted like I was slipping in, but I just went on in and told them I wanted one of those watermelons. And I did, but when I came out, I came out running. And I had told them to leave the door to the car open, and I came out running and I yelled, and I said, "Get going, they saw me." And I threw the watermelon in the back seat of the car.
Well, it was like Keystone Cops—he took off, he got scared and
he took off, and I wasn't in the car. And I started running
next to him, and one of the other fellows says, "Wait, wait,
you're leaving him." So he slammed on the brakes and
I ran into the door of the car, nearly knocked myself out, and then
hopped
I stayed on the campus, I had a part-time job out at the university dairy farm to earn some money. My father would pay my tuition, books, all that, any necessary expenses, but my spending money I had to come up with myself. He could have done that, but he just disciplined me to—you know, if I earned it, then that was mine and I could spend it the way I wanted to. So that was what I was doing, I was earning money for the day we got married, my wife and I.
Now, we've talked a lot about your early days. I have been exploring, as you can see, any roots of a political career here, and virtually few, maybe almost none, have been revealed. When did you begin thinking about politics as a possible, not necessarily career, but activity?
Well, it came much later. I'll preface that, my accounting for
the turn, by saying that my activities in college and student government
and other organizations was not geared toward basic training for a
political career. It just didn't occur to me that that would
be the route that I would take. And also, even after I graduated, came
home, and began farming, and I began to work with farm
organizations—the North Carolina State Grange,
particularly—my father had been head of the state Grange in
his early years, and I became head of the state Grange. But again, this
was not—you had to be nominated for those offices.
So what got me going about this was that when my father was governor, he had, every year in the fall of the year, the opening of the duck hunting season. And he would invite friends to come to hunt.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
…Duck hunt. The opening day of dove season friends from over the state. And it got to be quite a big thing, they would hunt all day and then have a dinner or a late afternoon dinner. It grew to such large proportions that we eventually had to discontinue it. It was kind of dangerous, too—people out there in the fields shooting.
Was this held here?
It was held here, on the farm. And people came from all over the state. There were usually two or three political writers included in the group, and they always would write a little piece about it. After my father died, his brother, state senator Ralph Scott, continued the tradition for several years. My father died in 1958. Then Ralph Scott indicated that he—and did, and he hosted it over at his farm, which adjoins ours, for two or three years. The year following my father's death, or maybe two years after that—I'm not sure of the time, here—but this was the year that Richardson Pryor, Beverly Lake, and Dan Moore were running for governor. It was also—oh, the year prior to that. And the campaign was beginning to warm up. And everybody knew that the Democratic primary—that Richardson Pryor and Dan Moore and Beverly Lake Sr. were going to be the main Democratic candidates.
This is 1963 we're talking about.
OK, this would be 1963. Well, at the duck hunt, of course, political
gossip was going on around, and I didn't know anything about
this until later, because I was busy helping host
So apparently there was some discussion that who were the so-called
"Branch-head Boys", which was the term given to my
father's supporters, who were they going to support in the
Democratic primary for governor? And they weren't really that
happy with any of the candidates, although as it turned out most of them
leaned and did support Richardson Pryor, Judge Pryor. And somebody had
apparently talked about, "Well, what about Kerr's
son Bob?"—or Robert, they called me. And again, I
didn't know about all this at the time. Well, there was a
little item or two written in the paper about it, and the political
column of the News & Observer, known as
"Under the Dome", had some question raised about, what
about Kerr's young son Bob? Well, the Associated Press kicked
in, and it got about two or three column inches in two or three of the
newspapers around. As a result of that, and this would have been in the
early fall of 1963, I got, maybe, two phone calls and maybe one letter,
and I thought that was a mandate. That's how naive and how
egotistical I was.
So I jumped in the car and started driving over this
But in the meantime, of course, the newspapers knew that I was doing
this,
I came to the conclusion, though, that it was not due for me to run for
that office at that time, because, one, so many people had already
committed to the other candidates, I didn't have any money
ways to run a campaign, and there was some hesitancy out there for it.
There was all that, "Well, yeah, you know, that's
good. But…" And there was always the caveat, there.
So I
And I called a press conference. Shortest press conference I ever held in
my life. And everybody was interested to know what I was going to say
about the governor's race. So I told the press conference,
"I have reached a decision that I will not be a candidate for
the office of governor of North Carolina. To those who have expressed
interest in my campaign and offers of support, I'm here to
say, Keep the faith." And I walked out of the room. Well, the
reporters just clamored, raising Cain. It was a two-sentence news
conference, and I walked out, and went down the hall to where a handful
of the people that I, my political advisors and so forth, were sitting.
Included in that group was the late Ben Rooney. He was my
father's administrative assistant and mentor. And he was,
later on in life, administration for Rocky Mount. And Roy Wilder, Jr.,
who had served on my father's death in the U.S. Senate in
Washington. Betsy Henton, who was from Clayton, and she had been in the
office of Terry Sanford, who was governor, as a secretary, and was
working with me and my efforts at that time. Anyway, we talked about it,
and I said, "Well, there's support out there for me,
but not for this race at this time. So what are the options?"
Well, we talked about my running for Congress. I didn't
really want to run for Congress, I didn't—it just
didn't appeal to me. What about commissioner of agriculture?
My father was commissioner of agriculture. Well, that didn't
really appeal to me either, because the nature
Then something was said about lieutenant governor. And I'll never forget what Ben Rooney said. He said, "Aw, who cares anything about being lieutenant governor? That's just a place where you're put out for pasture after you've served long and well in the general assembly. Four years and that's the end of it." So we talked on a little further, and we agreed, we adjourned and agreed that we would come back in one week, which we did. And Ben Rooney said, "You know, I've been thinking about the office of lieutenant governor. I believe that might be a sleeper. Nobody cares anything about that office, they don't pay any attention to it, and you might just be able to win it."
But two of my close friends were already running—Clifton Blue, from Aberdeen, who was a former speaker of the house, and John Jordan, Jr., an attorney from Raleigh. Both good friends of mine, and they were already announced candidates and already running. We talked further about it, in that little meeting we had there at the Carolina Hotel, and following that I made the announcement that I'd be a candidate for lieutenant governor. Well, that just came out of the blue. Now, that was my first interest into politics.
Going back to the time that they had the dove hunt, and with the
subsequent article in the newspaper which generated the couple of phone
calls and the letter or two—if anybody had told me at that
point that I'd be a candidate for a statewide office, I would
have laughed in their face. And a year later, when I
But in those discussions that you had with Mr. Rooney, for example, he made the comment, which you found comical, that you sort of are forgotten after you're lieutenant governor, and that at least initially that was something that you didn't want to get into, because you might be forgotten. So it sounds like there was, in those discussions, some idea that, "How can I not just be lieutenant governor or commissioner of agriculture, but how can I have a longer life?"
That was not discussed and in my mind even thought of at that particular point. Now, it may have been in Ben Rooney's mind. Ben was not the one that really communicated his thoughts very much. He may have had the bigger picture in mind. But that seemed to be—at that time, the office of lieutenant governor was more influential than it is now, although obviously it wasn't the office that most people focussed on. It was an opportunity to, I guess, test the waters, though again I didn't think of it as that. I focussed on that job, and I guess out of that then, once I got into office, one began to think, "OK, what am I going to do four years from now?"
But it wasn't certainly historically a launching pad for a political career.
No. No, even today—I got to take that out of there because
it's superfluous, really. In the biographical
It's a fascinating thing. I have made a list, for each of the governors, what I refer to as distinctions, in terms of being in the office of the governor, and I of course have for you both those things that you just mentioned, the being elected from the post of lieutenant governor and being elected with the son—that's two sons of former governor and lieutenant governor. Let me explore a little bit—
And also the fact that when I ran for governor, you know, I ran against the son of another governor—
Oh, yes, I have that in here also. I also have the two proposals in the governor's mansion! But let me go back to this discussion.
When you got these couple of telephone calls and this letter or two, however it was, that you saw as a mandate, and you decided to go around the state, there must have been in your mind at that time some idea that at least politics and public service was a career, something that you might enjoy and do. Is that a fair assessment of that statement, or—what caused you to get in that car and go around the state and talk to these people?
Ego.
Ego?
No doubt, ego. No, I don't know. I really—Again, we come back to this business of was this a planned career or something like that, and I can honestly say that it was not. I'm the kind a person that's interested in a lot of things. Sometimes I regret the fact that I'm a generalist. I wish sometimes I could focus on one thing as a career. I had great admiration for a scientist who can stay in the lab and try to find a gene or something like that, spend their entire life doing that one thing. Or someone like you who has got a career, and you stick with—you write books about it and you're known in your field and respected and all that. Yeah, I'm out here, you know, I can carry on a conversation about a lot of things, but not in depth about very many things. That's kind of worried me in the back of my mind.
So, going back to your question about—I guess it was the challenge, and it was there. Why do you climb a mountain? Because it's there. Why do you run for lieutenant governor? Well, it's there, you know. And there might have been a feeling, unconscious feeling, that this is family tradition again…
Now, when you did get in the car and you did go out to visit people across the state, who were the people that you went to see? I don't mean names, but can you sort of characterize the type—?
Mostly people that—Two or three groups. People that I knew
that were friends of my father's and had supported him
He had paved many roads.
He had paved many roads. What most people didn't realize, though, that in my work with the Grange and other farming groups, the dairy groups, there were an awful lot of communities in this state that I had been into in connection with the agricultural organization and the community development work, and I'd eaten church suppers in the basement of Baptists churches in the mountains and out on the coast and in community buildings and so on, and I knew a lot of these people. They knew me. I got a large vote from the Republicans, because they knew me and they knew my dad and so on. A lot of people didn't realize that—I had already been out there and I knew what the people of Plumtree and Haywood County were thinking.
Had you known of other persons who were active in the Grange, other than your father, who had sort of told you about that community and those contacts and the possibility that that would rebound to your benefit politically?
No—
There were no models—
The Grange was really Republican. I gather 75 percent of the Grange was Republican. Real conservative people. My filing fee, by the way, for governor, was paid by a Republican here in this community. A man that never said anything much to anybody, very quiet, and he asked me in church one day, he said, "Are you really going to run for governor?" And I said, "Yes, sir, I plan to do that." And he said, "How much does it cost to run—to file?" And I don't know, it was three hundred some dollars, it was one percent of the salary. Well, he already knew, or found out, and he reached in his coat pocket and handed me an envelope and said, "I'd like to pay your filing fee." He was a neighbor of mine.
Isn't that wonderful. That's a wonderful story.
He's dead now. Ready?
Yes.
Governor, when you decided to run for your first statewide office, as lieutenant governor, what did you have in mind as far as what kind of vision or objective you would want to achieve in that office as lieutenant governor?
I think my goal—in fact, I know my goal—I think I stated this in my campaign—that I wanted to make the office more productive, more active, and that I would serve full-time. An analysis of that office, a rather cursory analysis to be sure, but—the lieutenant governor had historically presided over the sessions of the senate in the legislature, but had largely gone home and continued to practice law or whatever their profession may have been, like other legislators. And occasionally he'd come to Raleigh perhaps, for functions that a lieutenant governor would normally be expected to attend. And of course the salary reflected that. The salary was minimal—I think something over two thousand something a year, beyond the normal pay per diem that all legislators receive.
So I knew that the lieutenant governor, by virtue of his office, received
a lot of invitations to attend functions, to participate in ceremonies,
etcetera. I also knew that the lieutenant governor wasn't the
first choice. People would call the governor or write the governor, to
ask that individual to come, and the governor says "No, I
can't, the schedule won't permit it," so
they go down the list, lieutenant governor's next. I also
knew, later on—I didn't think about it at the
particular time, but later on when I did decide that I was going to seek
the office of governor, that that gave—the lieutenant
governor had an excellent platform, if you will, a bully pulpit, to run,
because he could attend all these meetings and speak to these civic
clubs, etcetera, and attend political gatherings, and make
And that was another factor in my success in the race for governor, in addition to what I had mentioned sometime earlier about having been in so many rural communities in the course of my earlier work with farm organizations. The lieutenant governor had gone to Heaven only knows how many civic club lunches. We'd joke and say, "I can tell you within five percent how many green peas I'm going to have on my plate for lunch." And I could almost guarantee the menu, depending on what kind of function it is.
And I had a set of three speeches that I would give, they were canned
speeches which didn't say anything particularly, other than
to make people feel good. I didn't have a platform, as such;
the lieutenant governor doesn't run on a platform, other than
to try to be a good public servant. Because there's not that
much a lieutenant governor can do. It's
true, you talked about education, because the lieutenant governor was a
member of the board of education, and a few things like that, but you
didn't have to get too specific about anything.
So it turned out that it was an excellent office to hold if one was going to run for another public office, particularly the office of governor. Now, I'll repeat that I didn't have that in mind at all. Now, maybe my mentor, Ben Rooney, did, and simply didn't say that, but he saw that, perhaps.
Anyway, taking the office—at that time was considered a
part-time office. One of the things I did do was get the general
I've been in that building under those circumstances.
But that was one of the main things I wanted to do, to be a more active and visible lieutenant governor, and I really thought that the lieutenant governor could be of more service to the governor than had been in the past. But it turns out that that's not really the case unless the governor wants that individual to be more active and more involved.
I know that in some subsequent situations, subsequent to your period of service, governors have asked lieutenant governors to take on various projects. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with Governor Moore, who was in the position at the time that you were lieutenant governor?
Our relationship was friendly, not close. We came from different
political wings of the party. Dan Moore, as it turns out, most of his
people supported Mel Broughton in the campaign in 1968 against me. And
that was natural, that was the conservative wing of the party that
Governor Moore came from, having defeated Richardson Pryer, who with
most of the people
Were there any occasions where you were asked by him to do anything on behalf of his legislative program, as a member of the senate, so to speak—not a member, but being involved in the senate?
No, I don't really recall that he did. At that time, the governor kept a little office down there in the legislative building, and it was a place where they kept coffee and doughnuts and everything, and the legislators would come by. They kept the governor's liaison down there, he stayed and worked down there. I did the same thing when I was governor. I don't recall that he would call me and ask me, would I help move a bill along, anything like that. There may have been, at times, but I just don't recall—
It wasn't a prominent part—
—It wasn't a prominent part, certainly. Once the
committees were appointed, then that pretty well set the pace.
Was there any time during your service as lieutenant governor where you felt the desire, or maybe even the compulsion, to make any proposals of how to deal with public problems, where in a sense you took the initiative? Or was that just a forbidden option?
Well, I don't think I took any highly-visible role or leadership role in anything particularly. I was very conscious of the fact that, even though I was president of the senate and involved, I was not a senator. Jim Hunt made that mistake, early on when he was lieutenant governor. He went in there and started acting like he was the president pro tem, and they quickly put him back in his place. I was aware of that to begin with, and so I didn't try to go to committee meetings, I didn't put a heavy hand out there, as it were. I saw my role as trying to keep things moving, the process going. I never tried to interfere.
One thing I did do—we had a special session on redistricting,
and I sat in on a couple of those meetings, because sometimes the
committees would meet at night, you know, and they'd just be
drawing all kinds of lines and so on. I remember once we were sitting in
there, and I was really more just curious to know what they were doing,
and it wasn't even a real formal meeting of the committee,
they were just trying to come up with some solution. This is when the
"one man, one vote"
But you wouldn't propose any legislation or take any initiative in public policy?
No. I did not have an agenda and I wasn't running for
anything. One of the things that was interesting to me: it was during
this period of time that the legislature set up its own retirement
system. And of course—
Now, this was the staff of your office, as lieutenant governor, or the staff of the legislators?
The staff of the legislators. I only had a staff of one, and that was the secretary. Now, later on, someone asked me once, "If you had had the veto power when you were governor, would there have been anything that you would veto?" And I said, "Well, I don't know but one thing for sure—now, there may have been some other things, but since I didn't have it, I didn't worry about it. But I would have vetoed the legislation creating the retirement system for legislators." Because I thought it was grossly unfair. They set up a retirement system for themselves far better than that for state employees or teachers. Much better. And I just didn't think that was right. I would have vetoed that. Not that I was against a retirement system, but the way they set it up.
Well, given that particular fact about your concern on that system, how do you assess the relationship between you as lieutenant governor and the legislature? What did you see your relationship as being? What were you expected to do, from the legislative standpoint?
Well, from the legislative standpoint, I was expected to stay out of it,
pretty much. But our relationships, I think, were much more cordial then
than it is today. First of all, the house and the senate were both
heavily Democratic, so we were the
And we would have frequent conferences between the presiding offices of the two bodies; our legislative staffs worked more closely together, I think—in fact, I'm sure they did. And, you know, when the sessions were over, we'd have a traditional love-feast, you know, and gifts. That silver service set sitting right over there, I think that's the one that was a gift from the members of the Senate to me and my wife.
They don't do that kind of thing anymore, and one could say
the "good old boy" atmosphere—well, maybe
there was some truth in that, but the civility is not there anymore. And
the house and the senate, you know, they're just going for
each other's throats. And the same thing with the
governor's office. We didn't have a huge
staff-just a research staff, and all of that. We had some staff, but not
nearly as much as they have now. And so we relied on the governor and
the agencies of the state government for our information. But the
legislature's grown much more independent now. They act like
Congressmen, in Washington. During the time I was governor, and even as
lieutenant governor,
I have traced that growth. So, as a lieutenant governor, in your relationship with the legislature, you were basically there to preside?
Preside. And yet it was more than that. You know, sometimes they would come and ask me, the members of the senate—My feelings, I had so much camaraderie with the members of the senate that they would always keep me informed, and my close supporters in the senate would try to prevent their being a tie vote where I would have to go show my hand. Only a couple of times, I think, I had to break a tie vote; I don't even remember what the issues were.
I'm sure I can think of a number of reasons, but why did you think they didn't want you to have to show your hand?
Friendship, I guess, and I guess some of them said, Well, he may run for governor. And I would have one or two floor leaders, you know, and I'd say, "How's this vote going to turn out?" And they would move around and lean over and talk to this senator and then go around and talk to that one and then come back and say, "The vote's going to be thus and so", and they'd be pretty close to right.
Remember that, of course, during those days, the lieutenant governor had
the authority to appoint committees and to refer legislation, and that
made me much more involved as a part of the senate. So they wanted to be
in my good graces, the members of the senate, so that if they had a
bill, they could get me to
Was it felt at that time that it was appropriate for the governor or the governor's office to talk with you about those appointments or those legislative referrals, that was an acceptable thing to do?
Oh, yes. That was an acceptable thing to do. And you know, the governor in some cases had no feeling about it—say, the committee on agriculture and the committee on cities and towns, he didn't really care too much about that, you know. So they recognized the lieutenant governor's authorities and respected that, just as I would recognize the governor's authorities. There wasn't any pressure brought.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
The relationship between you and the governor and the possibility of the governor having some influence, say, on you, in making appointments to committees and making referral of legislation?
You know, there was no problem with communication. The governor's desires would be made known, if he had any in a particular situation, and I would take that into account. I guess in terms of appointing committees and committee chairs, the greatest interest in that came from the senators themselves. I know the late senator Julian Allsbrook, of Roanoke Rapids in Halifax County, took great pride in the fact that, ever since he'd been in the state senate, he'd always been chairman of the judiciary committee number one. And it was just beyond any possible understanding of his that he would have anything else. Judiciary committee number two would not suffice. That was the only thing he wanted in the way of appointments. Of course, the longevity or seniority wasn't really a factor, in the end, but sometimes you do kind of respect it, if a person has done a good job and you have no objection to it, like Senator Allsbrook. I could care less, in that situation.
So again, as you well understand, in the appointment of committees,
you're trying to get a certain balance geographically to the
state and to certain interests. You want to be certain
Where a lot of the influence tried to be placed—well, not pressure, but—came from the special interest groups, like the educators, the North Carolina Association of Educators. They were very interested in who was going to be on their subcommittees on appropriations.