[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

TERRY SANFORD:

This little girl that finished at Duke and then worked on the paper downtown about the first year I got here, she came out to interview me and she was unusually nervous. She got through with the interview, and the machine hadn't worked at all.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, that has happened to me.

TERRY SANFORD:

She hadn't remembered a thing because she was nervous. She later served as my press secretary briefly, so we got along fine. But she had to do it all over.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, I hope that you won't have to do it all . . . I know that you've been interviewed many times, and I was reading the transcripts of the interview that you did for the LBJ Library. I assume that was for the . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes.

BRENT GLASS:

And also you've done so much writing about your own career and reminiscing in the rough sketches you had done. I tried to organize this interview in a way that you approach some of these things, and at the same time, maybe go over some old ground in different ways, from different angles. I thought I would want to start by asking you a little bit about where you grew up and what you remember of Laurinburg, North Carolina.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I grew up in Laurinburg, was born there on Church Street, as a matter of fact. Then I lived there all my life until I went away to college and legally lived there, I suppose, until through the war. And I remember everything about it. I probably remember every

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house and everybody in every house.

BRENT GLASS:

Why was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

I just do. I spent so much time there selling Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal and delivering Postal telegraphs, later Western Union telegraphs. So I remember very much about Laurinburg and the people and the then-dusty roads and the gradual changes. Of course, Laurinburg has changed dramatically. It was a dusty little farm trading town, at least it appeared to me to be dusty always, maybe because I lived on a dirt road. There weren't many paved roads. A sleepy little town, for the most part. A town obviously without much opportunity for advancement, typical of most towns in this part of the country then, in the 30's. But very great people, a great tough kind of an individual, mostly of Scottish heritage, and they all came through the Depression fairly well. It's a town that was financially not dominated but at least most of the wealth was in the hands of one family. They owned the bank, they owned most of the farm land, much of which they acquired when all the farms went broke during the Hoover depression. They owned the flour mill and the cottonseed oil plant and textile mills. But they were a very unusual kind of dominating force, not the "big daddy" type at all. They were, and still are in the fourth or fifth generation now, carrying on their businesses in a very modest way. But there was that one element financially in the town that was not pervasive but nevertheless was there.

BRENT GLASS:

What family would this be?

TERRY SANFORD:

This would be the McNair family that now has various other

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names—Evans, Jones, McCoy.

BRENT GLASS:

What are some of your strongest visual memories from Laurinburg, being that you can . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, most of it is childhood memories, the youthful memory of the Roper's Creek where we swam all through the summer in spite of the fact that today's standards would not only put it off limits for being polluted but probably build a barbed wire fence around it. It went on down below the railroad and through the mill village. It was in a swamp. It was later in the WPA days that they dug out all those swamps so they'd drain more rapidly. I suppose that was progress, but the swamps are gone.

The area of Newton, where I sold vegetables, which meant where most of the black people lived in shacks, without indoor toilets, of course, locally called "Nigger Town" as all such places, southern towns, maybe all towns, but called Newtown in polite society. And that was a pretty dreadful kind of existence. Even then you could tell that it was dreadful although my chief memory of that place was that it was occupied by relatively happy people in appearance, though I don't think they could have been all that happy. But I think they had a way of making the best of a very, very bad situation and, for the most part, being happy. Now, I've also seen them hungry. I also, at that time, developed a very deep concern for people that are left out of the system, though I'm sure it wasn't conscious development of concern. But I never have forgotten the plight that they found themselves in and obviously the plight that many are still in today, mostly, as a matter of fact, out of the South.

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Certainly mostly in the cities when it would remind you of some of the places I've seen in Chicago and Harlem, the human waste in the streets and in the backyards, in this case, and probably in those cases, because there weren't any toilets. The outdoor johns sometimes were not only in disrepair, but I imagine awfully smelly places. But the living conditions in that little section were very, very bad. In the 30's everybody else was just keeping a stiff upper lip because there weren't many jobs and there wasn't much money. The people in the mill section, which was a category better than the Newtown but not much better, company houses again with outdoor toilets. For a good period of time, it changed later, both as to outdoor toilets and outdoor water. There wasn't any water running inside the houses. Originally there were pumps mid-point in each block, and later spigots when running water was put in. You'd see people walking with their bucket to the pump to get a bucket of water that they'd take back home, I suppose, to drink and bathe in and cook with or wash dishes . . .

BRENT GLASS:

This is in the 30's, as late as the 30's?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, certainly the early 30's. I wouldn't want to take an affidavit as to when running water was put in, but I clearly remember the pumps. Of course, I also remember into the 20's, so it's somewhere along that period of time.

BRENT GLASS:

Had the exodus of black people to the North started up in your section of the state in the 20's?

TERRY SANFORD:

I wasn't looking at it from the point of view where I could tell whether there was an exodus or not. There were plenty left. I suppose

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I was taking "Rural Sociology" in Chapel Hill before I knew about the exodus. But I remember a great many people. I actually remember more white people leaving to go to, as they called it, "De-troit" to get jobs in the automobile industry. And I don't remember a great many, but I remember one family of Coopers where one of the brothers went up there, then several others went. They seemed to do very well. They certainly had high-paying jobs compared to what they were getting working on the farm. This, as a matter of fact, was an old family of Revolutionary ties that just, like so many people in the farming business, had fallen on bad days. There was a great deal of mobility among the blacks that was visible, but I had the impression mostly they were moving from farm to farm instead of leaving the country entirely, though I really wouldn't have had much way to get a feedback on that. I don't know that there was much feedback. They probably went and disappeared.

BRENT GLASS:

Where would you place your family within the Laurinburg hierarchy? What was your house like? What was your . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

My family was relatively poor, certainly on the down side of average but, on the other hand, very well respected, which was a compensating factor. My father and grandfather had been in the hardware business since the turn of the century, which went broke in the late 20's, '29 or so. It was one of the early victims of what was building up to be a depression. It was an old-style hardware store, very few of which survived.

BRENT GLASS:

What was your grandfather's name?

TERRY SANFORD:

He came there, incidentally, as a cabinetmaker with the

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Seaboard Railroad. His father had been killed in the Civil War as a relatively young man, and he must have been about ten or eleven years old at the mid-point of the Civil War. In any event, he wasn't old enough to be a soldier. His name was James D. Sanford. He never again worked after the store failed. He was a fairly old man then. In fact, he died at the age of, as I recall, eighty-five. So he was a fairly old man at that time. I would have to check to get my precise figures, but he died when I was in college at the mid-80's.

My father, then, did various things because there were just not any easy jobs. He worked on WPA for a while and sold insurance first, which was a hard game when you're selling insurance for a quarter a week or whatever industrial insurance then was. He sold it, obviously, to very low-income people.

BRENT GLASS:

You say industrial insurance. You mean people who were working in . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, that's a type of insurance that insurance people understand. They pay weekly premiums for the most part, or they did then. They had a little debit book, and the collector went around and picked up the quarter and probably made about $15 a week, which was not starvation wages but close to it. My mother went back to teaching school when I was in the fifth grade, which of course, was still in the Depression times—that would have been the early 30's. She'd come from Virginia as a schoolteacher from a fairly affluent family in her part of Virginia.

BRENT GLASS:

What family would that be?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it was a fairly common name, so you can trace it. Her father was David Terry Martin in Salem. She had taught school a great many people that then were young businessmen. My father had taught them all in Sunday school, at least those that were Methodists. And so in terms of what I suppose might be called even in Laurinburg "social acceptability" wasn't any problem on that side. The trouble is, we didn't have any money to go with it.

BRENT GLASS:

Did you ever have the feeling of being left out or an outsider in Laurinburg's society as the blacks might have or the cotton mill people?

TERRY SANFORD:

Not at all except there wasn't much to be in on. In any event, I wasn't outside of whatever it was.

BRENT GLASS:

What kind of influence did your parents have upon you? Is it possible to assess that?

TERRY SANFORD:

I think they had a tremendous amount of influence. You never quite understand it or realize it at the time, but you look back at things over the years and there's a lot of luck involved in it too. Every parent wants to be a good influence, and sometimes it works out all right and sometimes it doesn't. I suppose if I'd been caught and paid the penalty of everything wrong I did, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you. That's true of almost anybody. But they were strict enough and, at the same time, lenient enough to allow us to roam around and do things that probably gave us some sense of initiative. I would hesitate before I'd let a twelve-year-old boy buy an automobile, but they let me buy one. Of course, I only paid a dollar for it, but it did run.

BRENT GLASS:

A dollar for a working automobile?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes. That was the price of a Ford, stripped-down automobile, depending on the conditions of the tires and whether or not it had a body on it or any piece of the body. It might run anywhere from a dollar or two to twenty-five dollars, depending on the working condition. A new car only cost a couple of hundred dollars. So you could buy a stripped-down Ford that maybe the mag meter was out of and didn't have tires for about a dollar. Then you could pick those up at a junkyard for about a quarter here and a quarter there. It never occurred to anybody to put a state license tag on it. I don't know what the attitude of the local officers was, but the best I can remember, nobody ever raised a question. For two or three summers, we had stripped-down Fords—the Beverly boys, the Blue boys, Jimmy Hollis. We had stripped-down Fords that we'd ride out to the swimming holes on, which was obviously extremely dangerous.

BRENT GLASS:

So your parents didn't restrict you from enjoying what would probably be called normal adventures.

TERRY SANFORD:

They didn't seem to take a dim view of smoking rabbit tobacco, which I suppose a parent of today would take a dim view of any ten or twelve-year-old kid smoking anything. But that may be one reason I don't smoke today. I was very active in the Boy Scouts, and that gave us a lot of freedom because the Boy Scouts weren't quite as structured in those days. [unknown] anytime we wanted to without a whole lot of problem. In fact, we had a camping area down about two blocks off of South Main Street, which was

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a wooded grove that we adopted as our own. I think it might have belonged to Dr. Prince. In any event, there's a sub-division there now.

BRENT GLASS:

Your parents, were they active politically?

TERRY SANFORD:

My father was always very much active politically and always for the more radical or more liberal candidate. He wanted to beat the old sheriff that he insisted was in league with the boot-leggers. He supported the challengers and finally when one of the challengers won, it was a great day. In fact, they were great friends until his death, until the sheriff's death. He supported Ralph McDonald in 1936 against the total establishment of the state—Ralph MacDonald, that is, was against the total establishment. He was a renegade professor from Salem College that was in the legislature one time and then ran against the lieutenant governor and the heir apparent of the machine, Clyde R. Hoey. Most people think that he beat him. In any event, shortly thereafter, they changed the absentee ballot laws because there were so many obvious abuses in the run-off between Hoey and McDonald that a good many people would say that they stole the election with absentee ballots. I doubt it. In any event, Hoey won. McDonald went on to be a college president in Ohio. He ran one more time for governor. But that was the radical, the person saying that we've got to shake things up in North Carolina.

BRENT GLASS:

[unknown] your father?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, my father was supporting him.

BRENT GLASS:

When you say supportive, do you mean he didn't actually

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work for him.

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh well, in those days I suppose there was somebody in Raleigh working for him, but most of the work was done by people stirring around in the counties. It was a much more spirited, person-to-person campaign. Of course you didn't have television, you didn't have much of radio. People really didn't use radio a great deal politically in those days. Some newspaper ads; certainly all the newspaper stories they could generate. But most of the campaigning was done in what we would call "ward heeling" now. In those days, it was all there was. Just a person-to-person campaign, and he was fairly vocal about it. Most of the up-towners, the more staid, established people would have been for first Sandy Graham, who was the popular politician or Clyde R. Hoey, who was the brother-in-law of Governor Max Gardner and was supposed to be governor.

BRENT GLASS:

That's probably the Shelby dynasty.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, they called it the Shelby dynasty. It amounted to two men. I never did think it was a dynasty. But Clyde Hoey was not much of a governor in terms of what he accomplished. He didn't do any harm, and by and large, he really did some good. But the governors of North Carolina from the turn of the century on were good governors. There's not a single bad governor in the lot, which I think is remarkable. Not many of them were great governors, not many of them were innovators, and not many of them were too bold, but bold enough maybe for the times. Cameron Morrison developed the first state-wide paved highway system in the country in the early 20's, which was a radical move.

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He was followed by Governor McLean who created I think the first budget control act. At any rate, it became the model of virtually every other state in the union. This is where the fundamental principle is that the governor manages the budget. He cuts the budget, if necessary, to keep it in balance and deficits aren't allowed. Well that, obviously if you look back, has been one of the most substantial contributions to government. If it had been applied in New York City and New York, they wouldn't be in their problems today. But most states followed North Carolina including, most recently when I was governor, the state of Alaska. And you'll find most of the laws modeled after McLean's. law.

Then came Max Gardner, who was considered one of the better governors. He didn't have too much of a chance to do too many things because he got caught in the Depression. But he put the educational system in better shape. He consolidated the university. He, in effect, picked Frank Graham to be the president, which has to be, even if it wasn't planned to be, one of the great contributions to North Carolina. He valued more than anything else that he did, he said in his will, the creation of the consolidated university. I think he did more substantial things than that, and certainly he was a broad-based governor. But then he began to dominate politics. He had lost to Cam Morrison in '20. He came back in '28 to win without opposition to support Al Smith when nobody else would, in spite of the fact I say nobody else, but when the so-called political leader of the state, Senator Simmons, was voting for Hoover and was defeated for his efforts two years later,

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or three to four years later, Max Gardner went to be the undisputed political leader of the state, and that's where the Shelby dynasty business came in. He then picked an unknown man with an awkward name who was a solicitor in northeastern North Carolina, J. C. B. Ehringhaus. and elected him governor over substantial opposition and they were firmly established. But Ehringhaus then became, in my opinion, the most unappreciated governor for his substantial contributions. I would have to consider him the very finest in the history of the state because he caught the Depression head-on, he handled it like a man . . .

BRENT GLASS:

'32 through '36?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes. Well, he was elected in '32. You see, he took office January of '33 and went through '36 at which time he saved the public schools, he put them on a state-wide basis, he passed the sales tax to support them, to say nothing of drawing tighter consolidation of the highway system, the prison system so that we had a unified, statewide system in those three very expensive public endeavors. Therefore, we got a little financial edge on the rest of the troubled states, the truth of the matter, of all the rest of the states. At that time we saw New York and those states as being great, wealthy places that had no problems. Well, we could go on from there. So my point is that we really haven't had any bad governors, and every now and then a Ralph McDonald would come along to challenge the system and ultimately Kerr Scott challenged it and beat it. But up until that time the dynasty, so it was called, had picked its governor at least four years in advance, from Max Gardner on.

BRENT GLASS:

Were you following any of this at that time?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes, very much.

BRENT GLASS:

You were very interested in politics.

TERRY SANFORD:

Very much.

BRENT GLASS:

At what point would you say your earliest recollection about your interest in politics was?

TERRY SANFORD:

I remember very much discussions about the Calvin Coolidge election. Obviously, I was in about the first or second grade. I thought he was down at the courthouse running for something. I wasn't quite clear on that. I remember the Al Smith election very well. I took a very lively part in that. I think I was in the seventh grade, and we had little pencils with Al Smith's head on the top of it and all the other gimmicks and Al Smith buttons. Al Smith didn't carry North Carolina.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. I was going to say, was that the fashionable thing to . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

It was in Laurinburg.

BRENT GLASS:

Why was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, anybody voting for Hoover was more or less a closet voter. It was still popular to be a Democrat, but I always thought that Al Smith lost because of his prohibition stand. I don't think it had a whole lot to do with the fact that he was a Catholic, though that might have featured in some. And it probably was enough, the two together in any event, nothing else had anything to do with it. It was the traditional Democratic vote, compelling people to vote the Democratic

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party that had been the friend of the farmer and essential to the party of Reconstruction versus the Republicans. There were, to my knowledge, only two registered Republicans in town. There must have been more, but there weren't many more. One was Mr. Billy Cox, who was a lawyer, a kind of a recorder's court lawyer for the most part, and the postmaster, who had to be a Republican or he wouldn't have been the postmaster. His family lived close to us and very good friends of mine. The one's that are still living still are.

BRENT GLASS:

Which family was this?

TERRY SANFORD:

The McLean family, Carl McLean. Carl was in my class, young Carl. He was killed shortly after the war.

BRENT GLASS:

So then to be a Democrat . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

You had to be a Republican to be the postmaster. Then he had a brother there, and I never was sure if the brother was a Democrat or Republican, the McLean brother. And that daughter was in my class. Well, people in the church, the Baptist church and the Methodist church were worried about the Pope. People were worried about liquor because the oldest temperance society in the country was in Scotland County, so people were worried about "demon rum" taking over again. And then he was kind of an outrageous New Yorker in addition to all of that, wearing a derby. But a great many people found him very appealing. Obviously, he did fairly well. If you look at his record in New York state compared to the record of governors over the span of this century, he has to come out in about the top ten or twelve. The things that Roosevelt later carried on, Al Smith started. You look at governors who

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have made a real creative addition. So I think Al Smith would have probably been a very fine president. I didn't know it at the time, but I think in terms of coming into a period when we had to innovate and change and do things, he would have been an extremely good mechanic at that. How he would have inspired people's confidence, I don't know. I imagine fairly well. I think he would have made a very fine president. That's not why I was for him. I was for him because my father was for him, and I thought it was fun.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. At that point, it was still sort of an excitement or entertainment for you. I mean, you were twelve years old or something, or ten years old.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, Hand James was the chairman of the party there, and I always admired him. He was what might very well have been called the "first family" of the town. He was, for a while, the mayor, but his older brother was briefly congressman. The family had been one of the early settlers. They owned the First National and the Scotland Savings Bank, both of which went broke and, at that point, so did all their fortunes. Not that they had that big a fortune. But they were the only competing family in the financial sense with the McNair family. And they were wiped out virtually. They all stayed on, and they all kept on with their endeavors and do to this day. The peculiar thing about people of that time and that position, financial adversity didn't particularly shake them. It just took away their money, but they still kept their positions and standings in terms of the respect in the community and went right on. In fact, the James brothers were tried

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in federal court for bank violations and acquitted.

BRENT GLASS:

When was that, at that point?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, at that Depression period. A great many very prominent people in North Carolina went to jail because it was awfully easy to violate the banking laws without intending to. If you loaned people money on a farm and a mule and set the collateral at $500 and it turned out when you foreclosed it was worth $150, you violated the law. Now, that's an over-simplification but if you loaned money to your brother-in-law without a mortgage and he was worth $200,000 or $300,000 and you loaned him $10,000 and the Depression wiped him out, you'd violated the law by not taking collateral. And so there were so many cases where they tried people. Sentiment ran high because people had lost their money. There was no Federal Deposit Insurance of course, and the banker became the villain.

Well, Hinton James was in Congress at the time. He had announced he wasn't running, and he was an interim congressman because the congressman had died, as I recall. But they set right on up there, you know, and walked right down Main Street with their heads high. I went to two or three sessions of the court. I can't remember whether Don Philips was the prosecutor or the defending attorney, but he later became a distinguished judge. He was involved in it somehow, and he was originally from Laurinburg, then living in Rockingham. And they were acquitted. Now, the cashier of the savings bank disappeared and has never been heard of since. I once wrote a short story in freshman English about what happened to him, but I won't go into that at

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this late date. I hope that story has long since burned. I know I got an A on it.

BRENT GLASS:

Another question about these early political activities when you were beginning to become aware of politics. Was it true that you read about in many southern towns that the politics is one of the major topics of discussion, not just at election time but sort of a . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

As recently as 1958 and '59 when I was running for governor and started moving around the state, I couldn't run into a counterman or a filling station operator or even a shoeshine boy in eastern North Carolina that didn't know that there was a governors race that was coming up. And if I went to the banking circles and the business circles in Charlotte, it was a subject very vague to them. That late. It is an entertaining thing, and probably is to this day. Who's going to run for the legislature, and who's going to run for sheriff, and probably fading some because communications will have changed that. But it was not a way of life, but it was about as interesting as anything going on.

BRENT GLASS:

How about down at the hardware store? Would you ever go down there and people would come in talk politics?

TERRY SANFORD:

I was too young when that went broke to really remember anything about it. I was about ten years old probably when it went broke, ten or eleven years old. I vaguely remember the store. I remember going in it, I remember what it looked like . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Is it still there now?

TERRY SANFORD:

No, no.

BRENT GLASS:

The building is not there?

TERRY SANFORD:

The building's there. But I think it was used for a jewelry store, maybe a, for a while Mr. Greenberg moved to town with a clothing store. I think he occupied that building or the one next to it.

BRENT GLASS:

When you said that your father's support took a radical position, was being radical anything . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

No, no. I just said a more radical position, given a choice of voting for the fellow in office or the fellow that was saying he was a scoundrel. He'd go along with the man that claimed the other one was a scoundrel. And he probably was right.

BRENT GLASS:

Did that have any kind of influence? Did you find yourself leaning in that direction?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I always went with him on whatever he was for, so I sort of got in the habit of being for the challenger.

BRENT GLASS:

It seems that you've taken that role on many . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I happen to think that's the role that needs to be taken very often, not always. Sometimes we need stability. More often, we need improvement. But I didn't have any parental blocks in that respect. I had a pretty good example of a man that always thought he was right and seldom won. And that's a pretty good position to be in in politics. If you seldom win, you usually are right, since the decisions are usually so bad.

BRENT GLASS:

Was it unusual for a person of your background or your parents' financial means at that point for you to go to college in the

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mid-30's? Did that take any particular sacrifice on your part or your family's part?

TERRY SANFORD:

I would have to say that probably not. My mother had gone to college. My father didn't go to college because at the turn of century that was an extremely difficult thing and not particularly important. He, however, had gone to Tennessee, to Nashville, to a business college for a brief while, and he was always a good accountant. Not a CPA, but very good with books and very well educated in terms of reading and an awareness of things in the world. He was not at all an uneducated man. They expected us to go to college.

BRENT GLASS:

That's what I wanted to know, if that was sort of implicit as you were growing up.

TERRY SANFORD:

I'm not sure they were certain we were going to college, but they certainly expected us to go to college. And they intended to send the girls to college. I think they expected us to get there on our own. In fact, I think it would have been unthinkable that we not go to college, though certainly it crossed my mind several times that I wasn't going.

BRENT GLASS:

Why was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, you know, I'm off to make a million dollars, and why should I mess with college? That happens to be too close to the truth, except that making the million dollars is not the worthy goal. That if I had intended to make one, I'd have been better off not going to college, probably. I can remember when we drove to Salem, or at least on one occasion, driving back by what must have been Trinity

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in the old campus here and Chapel Hill. The only thing I remember at Chapel Hill was the fraternity houses. I vaguely remember the buildings, but I remember pointing at all these big, fancy houses, they said fraternity houses. Well, I didn't know what a fraternity was, and I suppose that's why it impressed me. But the DKE house and the SAE house that were still there when I finally went to college were about all I remembered about Chapel Hill, except the fact that we want you to see these schools because you probably will be coming to one of them. And then my father brought me up here to Duke a couple times after the new campus was built, which, of course, it was in building in the late 20's. And so he brought me up here. There was a Methodist meeting. I think he would like for me to have gone to Duke, except Duke's tuition of $200 or $300 was out of the question. In Chapel Hill, you could go free. That is, that was the word at home. If you wanted to go to Chapel Hill, they'd find a way to pay it. And I went to PJC the first semester after I finished high school.

BRENT GLASS:

Presbyterian Junior?

TERRY SANFORD:

At Maxton, which is now combined into St. Andrews at Laurinburg. But I hitchhiked over there every day. I worked in the summer down there cutting grass and painting and washing windows. So I earned my keep, tuition or whatever.

BRENT GLASS:

You did quite a number of different odd jobs. Were you always working as a child?

TERRY SANFORD:

I was always trying to avoid work.

BRENT GLASS:

But it seems like you ended up . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, I got caught frequently. Well, if you didn't work, you didn't have any money. I never heard of an allowance.

BRENT GLASS:

Were you expected to share any of your earnings with the family, or was that for you to spend?

TERRY SANFORD:

You probably in the Depression weren't expected to share but you did. If you had any money, you usually bought something, including sometimes some groceries. But that wasn't a habitual thing. In the first place, I didn't have that much money. But I bought some of my clothes. I bought the suitcase I went off to college with, but I didn't pay for it for a year. Every time I'd see Mr. Lonnie Hammond and Mr. Ed Monroe, they'd want to know when I was going to pay them for the suitcase.

BRENT GLASS:

What kind of influence did going to Chapel Hill have on you? Or did it have any as far as your later . . . Had you definitely decided you were going to be entering into politics Was that an early decision?

TERRY SANFORD:

I would say that I probably would have followed a different path and probably been a different kind of person if I hadn't gone to Chapel Hill.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

TERRY SANFORD:

The influence of Chapel Hill was the spirit of the place. The people that were ranging across all kinds of new thoughts, new for me, and the personality of Frank Porter Graham. I imagine Frank Porter Graham had as much to do with influencing the generation that he

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presided over as any other one voice in the state. Not that they all went along in toto with every Frank Graham was for, but the spirit of it carried over. I could certainly tell it in my own period of involvement in state government. The people that were taking part and solid were people that Frank Graham had influenced. There were fortunately many others that hadn't gone to Chapel Hill. But in any event, I think that was a tremendous influence. I think Frank Graham woke people up to the fact that we could do something about some of our problems. He woke them up to the fact that it wasn't so bad to champion the cause of the sharecropper and the black and the working man that wasn't unionized and was being pretty much treated as chattel. That is, I would say, sponsorship of Howard Odum, though the Howard Odum people might put it the other way around—that Howard Odum influenced Frank Graham. I suspect that Frank Graham influenced, supported, encouraged. In any event, it was a mutual thing. But Frank Graham was the president; Howard Odum was the great sociologist. Howard Odum had a tremendous impact. People never had heard his name. But that was again part of the spirit then. I took a course under Howard Odum. To the best of my memory, he had retired from active teaching when I got there. I suppose he hadn't retired totally. In any event, I didn't take any courses under him . . .

BRENT GLASS:

He didn't do very much undergraduate teaching at that point.

TERRY SANFORD:

I just don't remember because he wasn't teaching me, and he was a force that I knew about, and I occasionally served him a meal. The present Director of Selective Service in North Carolina and I did most of

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the banquet serving at Graham Memorial, which was about the only place they could have meals at that time except the Carolina Inn. We didn't have an inside on the Carolina Inn, but we did on the Graham Memorial service.

BRENT GLASS:

What kind of contact could you possibly have with Frank Porter Graham? Was there any direct, personal contact . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

The same kind any student at Duke can have with me. They've got to show a little initiative, but I'm available. Frank Graham was available at his house every Sunday evening. I went over there maybe all total a dozen times, which is a right good many times. A whole lot of people went more. I didn't because I got fed up with a lot of little supercilious people who would go in on a regular basis. But it's always an exciting thing, and occasionally you have a house guest. They'd sit in there, and this was a regular thing with Frank Graham. Now, I can't do it here for two reasons. One, I'm not on campus, unfortunately. Something I never would have designed, but the house is too far away. Second, there are too many students. So we've substituted some other devices, and I don't fancy that I can influence people like Frank Graham, but they have the availability and that's a lesson I got from Frank Graham, that you've got to be available.

He also had a knack of knowing just about everybody. Now admittedly, there were only 3,000 students in Chapel Hill. He had three campuses, but he lived at Chapel Hill and it didn't take him long to put people in focus. I doubt if he ever really knew me until I was in law school or finishing up or taking part in his political campaigns. We became

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very close friends. I would claim that he knew every student on campus, including me, but I doubt that that's true. But he knew who you were. [unknown] some people, you know, "I know your daddy," or "I knew your granddaddy and your aunt so and so." Well, he never hit me with that kind of geneology, but he was very available. You could barely miss a day without seeing him walk across the campus if you were walking across the campus. But it was more the exciting things that he would do, to confront the Gastonia textile people, and to make outlandish statements about the rights of black people, the kind of things that might get you thrown out of any public office. And the way he managed with all of that, to always get the money for the public schools and the university from the legislature, plus—and this is the thing that I think the recent heads of the university missed, a very important lesson—that he didn't champion just Chapel Hill or the consolidated university. He championed all of education, and there was never any competition that I can recall between funds for public education or the university system, or the technical institutes. He was for all of them. Therefore, he got all the university needed, and he never had many enemies.

BRENT GLASS:

Was he able to do this because it was a smaller system and there wasn't as big a pie to be . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh, it was a smaller pie. No, I think the genius of it was his own generosity of spirit. He didn't think the university could exist alone. And he saw it as his duty to champion the cause of all education. I've attempted here to try to speak for public education

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and to encourage it and to encourage appropriations, somewhat, sometimes maybe superficially to our disadvantage, such as this recent bond issue. But I don't think so. I think that was the Frank Graham philosophy which was extremely sound.

BRENT GLASS:

When you'd go back to Laurinburg, did people say, well, here you are coming from this hotbed of radicalism up there in Chapel Hill with Graham . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I noted that one reason that we all got to be fairly enlightened in our political views is that we had to defend Frank Graham. To some extent, that's true.

BRENT GLASS:

Back home?

TERRY SANFORD:

Back home. I remember Harvey Evans who just died and was one of the great citizens of the town and a McNair grandchild. That indicates six generations for the McNair family, as a matter of fact. He's got grandchildren. He just recently died, an elderly man. But I remember his picking me up somewhere when I was hitchhiking back and forth to Chapel Hill and questioning me rather closely. I thought he was really disputing it. I suspect he was just testing me. Now; I later suspected that. But, you know, he wanted to know why about this Communist influence? What about Erickson, who was apparently an avowed Communist and an English teacher that Frank Graham stoutly defended? Of course, Erickson would debate circles around our Democrat in residence, Mr. Woodhouse, who was just a charming, delightful Connecticut gentleman who taught the most popular political science courses. But Erickson was sharper. He was operating from basically a false premise, but in

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the late 30's, who knew that? At any rate, Erickson admitted having Communist leanings. I doubt if he admitted party membership, and I doubt if he held party membership. But the academic freedom aspect was that he was teaching English, and nobody could ever suggest that he ever taught politics in his English classes. And so Frank Graham properly defended him. He ultimately left, to the great delight of some of his tormenters and went to a small New England school; probably got tired of working so hard. But he's also apparently a good teacher. I never had a course under him. That type of thing had to be defended.

BRENT GLASS:

Did you come into contact with people like Coats or Couch or any of these people who were part of the whole Chapel Hill scene but weren't really professors?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, you had the great influence of Horace Williams, who was still there when I was there. Now one thing that we had that I was glad they quit—but I was wrong, and we don't have it now—and that was compulsory chapel. Well, the compulsory chapel at Chapel Hill, and you had to be in your place and they had monitors, and I don't remember what the penalty was because I never over-extended my privileges. You had so many cuts. As I recall, fairly lenient; maybe you had to go to every other one. But here was Archibald Henderson on one occasion, and here was Horace Williams on another occasion, and I never would have seen those men had it not been for that. And Couch and Phillips Russell. I don't recall Albert Coats being in at that stage of the game, though obviously later Bob House, who at that time—well, I would have had other occasions to see Bob House. In any event, all those great old figures

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of Chapel Hill paraded across that stage, and you got a feel of what they were about and what Chapel Hill was about in their eyes. And it was a unifying force. I wish I knew how to substitute for it now.

BRENT GLASS:

Where did you live? Did you stay in a dorm, or did you . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I lived just about everywhere. You didn't have all the formalities about getting into school then that you have now. You could almost walk in. I'm not quite sure when I applied, but I didn't have a dormitory assigned, and I'm not quite sure why, unless it cost more. And I'm not sure about that. But at any rate, I went up there with a boy that was transferring from Presbyterian Junior College, the day before school started I suppose, and found us a boarding room within a block of Main Street. I say boarding; actually a rooming house.

BRENT GLASS:

Would this be over on Rosemary?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we first rented a room on Franklin Street. We got to looking around a little more, and I think we forfeited a two-dollar deposit or something, and moved into Rosemary Street, which about the same price and much, much nicer, with Mrs. Finch. Her house is still there, but it's an office building of some kind. And then the next year, I lived with John Bowles in the basement of Swain Hall (which was then the cafeteria) until the management decided that was very bad policy, and then I lived in a little single room around off of Rosemary Street, just around the corner—I've forgotten the name of it—for a semester. And from that time on until I was in law school, I lived in dormitories.

BRENT GLASS:

You went to law school for at least two years, didn't you, right after college?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I went to law school until the war came on, which was less than three. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wasn't hell-bent to be a lawyer, though I had talked about it from the seventh grade on, occasionally. But if I'd have had a good offer, I would have probably gone and done something else.

BRENT GLASS:

In business or something?

TERRY SANFORD:

I tried to get a job with Standard Oil Company in South America, for example, which, in retrospect, would have been a very foolish thing. But if they'd had offered it to me, I would have taken it. I don't think they took me seriously because I was still pretty much a country boy. I actually applied for a job as a Boy Scout executive and was somewhat irritated that I didn't get it. I thought I was entitled to it. In fact, I thought I'd be such a good one that I couldn't see why they'd turned me down.

BRENT GLASS:

This is right after college?

TERRY SANFORD:

This is when I was in my senior year. Then we were running a boys' camp, Bill McCachren and me, in western North Carolina. It seemed to me that if we were going to run that camp, I'd be well advised to be doing something in the wintertime. The more I looked at it, the more I thought it should be law school. Now, that's not the first time I ever thought about going to law school. I was building up toward it, but I might very well have been diverted if something attractive had come along, though it wasn't a last-minute thought. It was, essentially, a last-minute entrance because you didn't have to go through the formalities you have to go through now. If you looked like

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a reasonably good bet and had a Chapel Hill degree, they'd more likely take you. I think. I don't think I ever heard of anybody being turned down. What they did was flunk them out after the first year.

BRENT GLASS:

Right, right. The classmates you had in Chapel Hill in law school, did you find that you ran into them very often in political circles later on?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. Oh, there's no question that it was the foundation of whatever I did politically. Now, it's also true that I could never have won with that alone. And I greatly broadened the reach through my association with Kerr Scott; with my American Legion; Junior Chamber of Commerce; with getting to know people like Bill Staton, who was a Wake Forest graduate, and with him drawing his circle of friends; Bert Bennett, who was my campaign manager was not a classmate but he was a class or two behind me at Chapel Hill—that's where I knew him.

BRENT GLASS:

Even in terms of opposition, I mean, even in terms of just the whole make-up of state politics, it seems that at that point, the influence of Chapel Hill was quite great. People coming through there . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

It was dominant because most of the leadership had come through Chapel Hill. Therefore, it perpetuated itself. But as more and more people went to school and more and more colleges developed, there was more scattered influence. The second most influential college group at that time was Wake Forest, probably because of the law school. Other institutions really didn't figure very much in terms of any body of leadership. Trinity, Duke's graduates mostly scattered to numerous

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states, came from numerous states, went to numerous states, and there never was, what I suppose would have been called, a critical mass of Duke people in any one community. We are correcting that now. We are asserting ourselves around the state. But at that time, it was simply not of any particular advantage to have been to Duke, politically. You might have had a good education, probably did, probably had a better one than you had elsewhere. Well, not politically. When I ran for the president of the Young Democrats, which is the first thing that I ran for, I began to put together people in the various counties because this was after the war and there wasn't much of an organization. So, how do you get a Young Democratic club organized, and then how do you get them to let turned out to where the convention was to vote. We just ranged across, for the most part, the people we'd known at Chapel Hill, and Bill Johnson down at Harnett, and Bruce Elmore up in the west. I say, by that time with the American Legion, Bill Staton, who was a Wake Forest man, became one of my early associates. Consequently, we were reaching into the Wake Forest people too.

BRENT GLASS:

You say that was your first real political activity was running for the Young Democrats in North Carolina, running for the presidency? What led up to that?

TERRY SANFORD:

That was the first state-wide thing I ever ran for.

BRENT GLASS:

Had you ever been involved in any kind of local political activity before that? That was '49 right?

TERRY SANFORD:

No, I had just moved to Fayetteville in the spring of '48, and I had tried to help Mayne Albright a little in the first

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primary. There wasn't much I could do for him. I tried to help him a little in Laurinburg. I hadn't gone to Fayetteville, but I went to Fayetteville, between the primaries. In the middle of the election, I moved to Fayetteville. He didn't need any help in Chapel Hill in particular. But I had gotten slightly involved in his campaign. Then I had gone to the first meeting of the American Legion with the postwar group organizing it and Joe Grier, a prominent lawyer in Charlotte, was elected commander. Purely by chance, I was elected judge advocate. I didn't know they had a judge advocate, I suppose.

BRENT GLASS:

When you say purely by chance, just nothing you really sought or . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I was up there with . . . I knew some of the old-timers in the American Legion. In fact, they knew me very well because I had run Boys' State for four or five times and run it before the war and after the war. And Albert Coates was in charge of the Institute of Government, but I was director of the Boys' State Program. So I knew all those old-timers. They put me in chairman of the Resolutions Committee, and I presented all these resolutions in a pretty good voice. So I therefore was before the convention. I was with a fellow that had been very active in the American Legion, Coy Brewer, now dead, was later a judge. I remember his conversation very well because I've laughed about it since. Coy sort of wanted to be judge advocate, so he was urging me to be. I said, "No, Coy, you ought to be." He made his fatal error right then, if that amounted to anything. He said, "No, you do it." And I said, "All right." So as I recall, I didn't have any opposition. I ran

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the next year and didn't have any opposition. Then I sort of lost interest; well, I didn't lose interest, but I just lost time to spend. That got right demanding. I had to go to the state meetings and wear a white cap and rule on all kinds of legal matters and participate in various things. It was a very rewarding experience because I made some very solid friends there that later became political allies. Mostly, you know, you've got a different group of people there, a different group of people in the state JC's. Well, I was elected president of the JC's, actually, the first election that I ever participated in in the JC's in Fayetteville, not because of any great merit as much as all of these things were reforming and newly formed and there really wasn't anybody in line to be president. I had joined in March of one year and about March of the next year, I got elected president of the club. That then made me a state director, and I got those additional contacts. So I'd say the American Legion, the JC's, Frank Grahams campaign, running for president of the Young Democrats prior to that, then running Kerr Scott's campaign in '54 after I'd been in the state Senate. About that time with those organizations with the state Senate I was beginning to get a grasp of this whole state. I fully intended to run for governor.

BRENT GLASS:

By that time?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. I fully intended to run for governor the day I picked up and moved to Fayetteville. There wasn't any question in my mind I was going to run for governor. That's why I left Chapel Hill.

BRENT GLASS:

Well now, I didn't realize that that decision had been made that early. What brought that on? How did you know you were going to . . . at that point, you weren't even thirty years old.

TERRY SANFORD:

I didn't know I was going to be governor. I knew I was going to run. I never changed that philosophy, and I never changed the feeling of satisfaction if I had run and not won. No, my obligation was to run.

BRENT GLASS:

I didn't mean to skip over your services in the FBI and the war. But I wanted to try to get at . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, you were talking. Really, I grasped you were talking about the value of the [unknown] and the YDC and running for president of the Young Democrats. That was about the first state-wide meeting I had ever attended. I think I attended one other. George Fountain, who had been very active and was the national committeeman, had it sewed up. Gene Gordon, who is now a federal judge and a very attractive young person, a Duke graduate, was running with Governor Scott's sponsorship, was running for president of the Young Democrats. I was running with my own organization from Chapel Hill, plus the Bill Statons, and the American Legion, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce people. So, this beat the hell out of them. It wasn't even close in the final analysis.

BRENT GLASS:

Scott was supporting Gordon.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes.

BRENT GLASS:

Did you ever talk with him about that later on?

TERRY SANFORD:

I told them that if you let Scott dictate who's going to

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be president of Young Democrats, the next thing he'll do is to tell you who's going to be president of the student body of Wake Forest.

BRENT GLASS:

That was part of your campaign?

TERRY SANFORD:

Not much because Scott wasn't all that gung-ho. He sent a couple of his aides down there. One of them was the parole commissioner, an inept old gentleman, and one of them was his secretary, his administrative assistant, John Marshall. They came down there, but they realized they were getting Scott on the spot. They pretty well got Gordon out of it. Gordon never stood for election. Scott later said that the reason he was for Gene, that Gene's older brother was the only person in the textile business that had been for him when he ran for governor, and he was just obligated to be for Gene. Well, he wasn't obligated to get in it, I thought at the time, but on reflection, I later put my hand in it a little bit when I was governor. Except I wasn't so obvious about it.

BRENT GLASS:

What is the importance of the Young Democrats?

TERRY SANFORD:

That's hard to say.

BRENT GLASS:

Is it a kind of breeding ground or training ground?

TERRY SANFORD:

It rises and falls, and in some states it's important and in some states it isn't. But here it's very important because it gave you a reach across the state and, with one or two minor exceptions where maybe we didn't much care, for fifteen years our group dominated the Young Democrats. You can look at every president, with again one or two exceptions, maybe, where we didn't particularly try. Our side elected the president. The person that was elected right after me

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was one of my Red Cross life-saving cronies at Chapel Hill, from Asheville, and Henry Hall Wilson was president, Jim Hunt, you know, just right down the line, Steve Nimocks. So it became a very important base for keeping in touch. You know, right now I'm starting to bringing into focus those names, but everyone of them, with maybe one exception, ended up in my governors campaign somewhere. Then while I was governor, it was still our organization, our side of the party.

BRENT GLASS:

Uh huh. Now when you say your side of the party, is that . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

That's what I always call the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. In 1972, there wasn't anybody running for office that hadn't been in that wing, running against each other now, which is good.

BRENT GLASS:

Do you think that's one of things that's emerged in North Carolina politics, the emergence of that wing of the Democratic party?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I can say it's emerged without particularly claiming any credit for it.

BRENT GLASS:

But it's been kind of a cumulative effect of the number of other people . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I think that considering the kind of race that we had in 1960 which, in a way, was maybe the classic, or maybe historians will see it that way. We ran against the old guard, and we ran against Hodges' wing, we ran against the racist campaign, and we won against

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all of them. In 1972, everybody running for principal office had been a helper in my campaign—Skipper Bowles, and Pat Taylor and Reginald Hawkins, for that matter. Wasn't Reginald running then? In '72?

BRENT GLASS:

In '72? Yes, that's right. He ran in '68 . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Robert Morgan, running for reelection as attorney general or running for attorney general, was an exception. But I had long since made up with him; in fact, he was one of my key people in the Scott campaign, so I counted him one of our crowd, in spite of the fact he was Lake's campaign manager. That was a diversion that grew out of the fact that he lived in Dr. Lake's house while he was going to law school. In any event, I think that wing of the party now is dominant. Now, it's breaking off, of course. But by and large, they're all forward-looking people people, and I think that's good.

BRENT GLASS:

The question in my mind is, did the roots of that wing start to form back in the late 40's or had that already been pretty well established?

TERRY SANFORD:

That was the Ralph MacDonald crowd. They had never achieved any success. They broke through with Kerr Scott, or Kerr Scott broke them through, more accurately. He was the person that was going to be the mover and the shaker. Then we couldn't have existed on that base alone. It had to be broadened. It was too much anti-town and anti-city. He didn't intend it that way, but they intended it that way. The bitterness that grew out of the people that he had defeated . . .

BRENT GLASS:

In '48.

TERRY SANFORD:

. . . in '48 narrowed his support considerably. In fact, we were lucky to win in '54. He had broadened his base somewhat by appointing Frank Graham, by bringing in a younger person like me—it could have been many people—but at least he had the sense to bring in a younger person that reached out for new people in addition to his old supporters. So all of that built up to what we did in '60, which brought it all together. You know, we brought the head of the labor union and Charlie Cannon both into our campaign. So we were beginning now to put North Carolina together. Then it got shattered by the racist thing that came on more or less unexpectedly. Had it not been for that, there would have been some considerable different story. On the other hand, that has to be a significant event in the history of the state because it's the first time that a racist campaign had ever been defeated. I'm talking about with a clean campaign, with a campaign that really didn't equivocate on the race issue. Now, it's true I wasn't standing up there saying we're going to put blacks in your living room, which Lake said I was, but I wasn't saying it. We held the banner where it ought to have been held, and we did defeat a racist campaign. We were free to move on with racial improvements because we had won on that issue, in effect.

And then I think it's had its ups and downs. Obviously, we had a setback as I left office, partially because again of the bitterness that had come out of the campaign. Whereas Scott reached back for a younger person, I reached for a contemporary. I really ought to have

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reached forward to somebody ten years or so older, fifteen years older than me. If we had, if we'd picked Tom Pearsall, for example, which, in a way, I wanted to, but I couldn't get anybody to go along with me, particularly Bennett, but if we had picked somebody like him, I think we would have carried that tradition forward. Now Dan Moore was not a bad governor, not at all. As a matter of fact, he was a pretty good governor. True, he was not a very energetic political person. He didn't start a lot of innovative things. He didn't really kill off much that I'd started, and he kept a couple going when he had to step out and take some positive action to do it. The School of Arts, the Advancement School, I think both would have never gotten going if it hadn't been for Dan Moore. This was a reversion to the old wing of the party, however.

BRENT GLASS:

He did not come out of this Kerr Scott-Frank Graham-MacDonald wing?

TERRY SANFORD:

He more was in the Charlie Johnson remnants of the old Max Gardner wing. Charlie Johnson, incidentally, was one of my strongest supporters, in spite of the fact I managed Kerr Scott's campaign. Charlie Johnson was the assured governor that Scott beat. But he became a very dear friend of mine until his death. So there aren't any hard lines. You weren't registered in either wing, so you moved back and forth if you wanted to. And we were moving more people back. The trouble is, I overplayed our hand. I thought we had the problem of Kennedy, who really wasn't very popular. People now seem to overlook that fact. We were carrying a terrible burden by carrying

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Kennedy in this state. Looking to the '64 election, we should have . . . We picked Richardson Pryer, a terrific fellow, would have made a brilliant governor, as he's making an outstanding Congressman. But we just overplayed it. We ought to have backed off just a little, been a little more conservative, but with somebody that would have fit in. Now the truth of the matter is, there wouldn't have really been any reason we couldn't have adopted Dan Moore, except I didn't know him. Had I, by some chance, put him on some board, gotten acquainted with him, we might very well have been looking there, why don't we get this man? It just never occured to me that Dan Moore would ever get up the energy to run for governor. I knew him and I'd heard he was talking about it. The truth of the matter, I don't think he did. I think Mrs. Moore did. She's a remarkable woman, and I really think—and I'm not taking anything away from him—I think she had the energy and the determination, and that's something of course that I didn't know. But I never saw him as an enemy. He ran against me kind of like Reagan is running against Ford.

BRENT GLASS:

That's what I wanted to get at. Was it more or less this split of these two wings of the Democratic party philosophical or some power politics?

TERRY SANFORD:

I think it was somewhat philosophical, and I think it was somewhat of a desire to get even with Scott and me.

BRENT GLASS:

Did the element of the competition of having lost once now you'd want to win, this kind of thing?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, you know, this is good for the state, this fellow's been too radical, which in truth I hadn't been. Hardly anybody could prove

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I had. As I said, we took on too much of a burden, and if we'd taken on just a little less, we would have probably won. But I was trying to play it to the fifty-one percent mark, which is where I think a leader ought to be. I think it's disgraceful when he's got seventy-five percent. He hadn't traded off enough for the good of all the people. But we played it too close. I've always thought, and I do no discredit to his memory now, I always thought Hodges let us down. Hodges, as a matter of fact, through Paul Johnson was the first person to urge Richardson Preyer to run. Then when Lt. Gov. Cloyd Philpott died, who was my candidate for governor, we were casting around for somebody. Bert Bennett didn't want to take on the chore, though in retrospect maybe he should have. He would have been a stronger candidate in some respects. But he didn't want to. We were casting around. Paul Johnson and Hodges suggested that we take Pryer. Then some of Hodges' close friends like Watts Hill turned out to be for Dan Moore. Hodges, I always thought, reneged on what was promised to support, promised to Pryor to support him. All it would have taken would have been Hodges supporting Pryor for Pryor to have won. That's how close it was. I showed him the polls about two weeks before, showed him how, with just taking two or three percent away from Moore, we put Lake in the second primary. And of course we would slaughter Lake in the second primary. But we couldn't possibly beat Moore in the second primary because we couldn't get the Lake votes. And he couldn't, in turn, get the Moore votes. Well, Hodges wouldn't do it, and Mrs. Hodges, I'm told, gave him hell about it, and should have. And I think Paul Johnson might have, though I haven't spoken with Paul and

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he may have a different memory of it. And it might be that we were betting on that when I say we overplayed our hand slightly. Maybe we thought we hadn't; maybe we thought we had the cards.

BRENT GLASS:

You thought you had it all lined up?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, not really. But you know with Hodges and with us, with Hodges taking at least part of that conservative group, after all, we had put Hodges in the Cabinet, and there's not any way he could have been in Kennedy's Cabinet without us, which he knew. And, I must say, he always appreciated. He became a very good friend of mine, though we started out kind of crossed up.

BRENT GLASS:

I was going to say, he wasn't really in this circle, this tradition . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

No, he was a sport, as they say in genetics.

BRENT GLASS:

I just want to close out this side of the tape by asking you what made you pick Fayetteville as a place to start out your career? You were in the Institute of Government, and you had obviously been attracted to government work.

TERRY SANFORD:

There was no question in my mind that I intended to be governor when I came back here right after the war. Now you'll find some people (no, you won't find them because you won't be looking for them), but you could run across people who'd say, "I remember Terry talking to me when we were freshmen about being governor." That's simply not true. While it crossed my mind, I never once mentioned it to one single soul. The first person I ever mentioned it to was my wife.

BRENT GLASS:

When was that, much later?

TERRY SANFORD:

No, that was before the war. But that's the only person. And then I thought about this thing all during the war, and I had my ups and downs on it. I would sometimes be lying back over there in a valley in France, the shells going off in the distance, and I said the hell with it. I'm not getting into politics when I get back. It's not worth it. I, of course, had seen a great deal of it by then. Then I would think, well, that's what I want to do. I clearly was determined to do it when I came back. I didn't want to work at the Institute of Government. I'd worked there before, and Albert Coates insisted that I stay there. And he's a hard man to resist. So for the year and a half I was there, it was just a constant maneuver for me to get out and him to keep me. Not that he wanted to keep me as much as he just didn't want to be defeated on even a minor issue. So I fully intended to be governor. As I left the Institute of Government, I was looking for a proper base. I picked one that was even better than I anticipated.

It was better for a number of reasons. I wanted one in the eastern part of the state, which is my part of the state, where I thought I could operate, and where I thought I knew the people, and where I thought you had to have strong support to win. I could take care of the Piedmont, but I had to have the real political people in the state. Furthermore, they were my people, and I was comfortable with them. I looked at Greensboro, I looked at Charlotte. I probably looked at a couple of other towns in passing. I looked at Sanford, which is a right intriguing thought that I would practice law in Sanford, but didn't. Then I looked at Fayetteville, and maybe the fact that my uncle was postmaster, Bill Shaw,

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who had married my mother's sister. Not because so much I thought he'd help me by being there, but because he was so enthusiastic about the young people that had come in and were taking over Fayetteville and were shaping it up, and were putting in a recreation department, and were doing all kinds of things to bring it new life. Fort Bragg was there, with the airborne, who were cronies of mine. I didn't really have any other connections. I finally rented me a third-floor office that was in a very unlikely place for a budding young lawyer. Fortunately, I never used it. I got me a better one. But I didn't really have any connections there, but it looked like a good place. I did not realize that all of the old political structure was gone, which enabled me . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

BRENT GLASS:

Going back to this decision to run for governor. It seems without any kind of base at all, this was not inculcated in you by your parents, obviously. They had a normal interest in politics that we talked about, but . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

It seemed to me that the governor of North Carolina is so many things, and that you couldn't do much without him. I think in one place in But What About The People as I recall the way I wrote it, that I became determined to run for governor when I was in the Senate. Now I'd already made up my mind when I wanted to, but you had to vascillate somewhat. It really was so demanding and challenging and so all-consuming. And that's the trouble with politics in a way. I never did want to devote my life to politics. Still, I wanted to be governor. I wanted to be governor because there were a lot of things I thought the governor could

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do. And I think in the Senate here I am on the education committee, and I don't have a thing to do with education, the governor does. And I said right then, all right I'm going to be governor and education's going to be my issue, or something like that. Well, that's not the first time, I don't think I suggested it the first time, that I thought about it. But it just reinforced my determination if you're going to do anything, you had to do it from the governor's office. That is, in a substantial way. I certainly wanted to be governor when I was an undergraduate at Chapel Hill. I'd say almost every freshman from North Carolina wanted to be governor, and many of them talked about it. None of those that I can remember talking about it ever got there. I was too shy to talk about it, probably, but later I got too smart to talk about it because I figured that was a good way to set people against you until you were ready to know what you could do and would do. And then at that time, it had to be pretty much a dream. You were just too far away from it.

But I could see by the time I was ready to leave the Institute of Government how I could put it together. I talked a great deal with my very close friend, Paul Thompson, who then was at Chapel Hill taking a master's degree and probably was my closest friend in life. He died, now, seven or eight years ago. He sort of grubstaked me. He loaned me $500 to go to Fayetteville. You couldn't save any money at the Institute of Government. It sounded like a lot of money, but paying off my loans at Chapel Hill and other things, I didn't have any money. And I needed enough to pay my rent and live a few months. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money. But I just decided that's what I wanted to do, that I

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was going to be governor. I was going to run for governor.

BRENT GLASS:

Not Senator, not . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

No, I really didn't want those jobs for several reasons. The more I saw them, the less I wanted them because I didn't want a political career. And I might say I haven't had one. I spent more time practicing law than any other one thing. I'm on the way, maybe, if I don't get unlucky, to equalling that period of time at Duke. But I certainly never intended to have a political career. I just sort of happened into some of the later things. I never saw myself as a judge, except briefly. Then I really didn't like that relatively inactive posture that you had to assume. I didn't see myself as a Senator in Washington putting up with all the petty things you have to put up with. I wanted to be governor. I wouldn't have minded being governor twice, just because you can hardly get all done that you think needs to be done in one time. And so Fayetteville played a role in that, my going to Fayetteville. I was looking, among other places, where can I practice law, and also where can I build a base to run for governor. I also knew that you ran in this state not really with any organization, but with your own personal organization. The one-party system had dictated that. I could see that Broughton had his organization, Umstead had his organization, in spite of the sometimes melding of various organizations through Max Gardner's influence. But by that time, Max Gardner was dead. You had Kerr Scott's rag-tag, branchhead boy organization that was forceful but very much minority.

BRENT GLASS:

What do you mean by branchhead?

TERRY SANFORD:

That was his word. The branchhead boys, meaning that the boys that lived not in the towns but back up the branches, at the head of the branch, and it became a favorite expression of his, his branchhead boys.

BRENT GLASS:

Did he include you in that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it's a rather loose designation. No, he was wise enough to know he had to have the other influence to win. The votes aren't at the branchhead. But what there were, he got them because he championed the rural telephones—of course, rural electrification was pretty well moving along by then but not telephones—and particularly rural roads. You see, he built more rural roads than had ever been built in one four-year period anywhere in the country.

BRENT GLASS:

Was the Graham campaign the first campaign you actively worked in?

TERRY SANFORD:

I was president of the Young Democrats. Oh, I was active in another organization that you wouldn't have thought was political but did me a lot of good politically. That was the National Guard. I was Captain in the National Guard company at Fayetteville and consequently associated with the Thirtieth Division all over the state. So the reason that was brought to mind with the Frank Graham campaign, we were at summer camp when Willis Smith died, and Frank Graham was ultimately appointed. We were at summer camp when the Korean War started, and we all were so certain that we were going since the Thirtieth Division was clearly the best National Guard division in the country. Or certainly one of the two or three at that time. So many of our people even paid deposits on apartments at Columbia where we were sure we were going to

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be sent. Now I didn't. I turned down at least one good law case because I said I can't get involved in anything that'll tie me up two or three months. Well, with all of that, here was Frank Graham coming on into a campaign . . .

BRENT GLASS:

This was 1950, the Graham campaign.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, but this would have been '49, wouldn't it, with the Korean thing? I'd have to go back and think a minute about the dates. But all of this happened about the same time. He was probably appointed in '49.

BRENT GLASS:

Right.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I was then, in the meantime, president of the Young Democrats. The Young Democrats really aren't supposed to take part in . . .

BRENT GLASS:

In campaigns?

TERRY SANFORD:

I said Willis Smith died. It wasn't Willis Smith; it was Broughton.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. I was going to correct you along that line.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, yes.

BRENT GLASS:

Smith died two years later, after he won, right?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, that's correct. But at that time is when Little was appointed and Scott run against him. No, I just said Willis had inadvertently . . .

BRENT GLASS:

There was a sort of plague of deaths among North Carolina office holders in that period.

TERRY SANFORD:

In any event, I wasn't supposed to take part. Willis

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Smith and young Willis came to Fayetteville, and I said to young Willis, I said, "Now, I suppose I ought to start my political career out on an honest level. I'm just not going to be for your father, though you know I've admired him a long time, and I worked in the American Bar Association, the Junior Bar Association when he was president of the bar and had dinner with him up there a couple times with the young lawyers getting things started. I'm just not going to be for him. I've got to be for Frank Graham." Well, he just huffed up. You know, he took it in a very bitter way, I thought. I was trying to be decent about it. So what? If you're not going to be for him, what difference does that make? You know, you can't get everybody, and I thought, well, I'll just give you a good, honest answer. He didn't take it that way. I got a little more active here and there, especially in the second primary. In fact, I worked very actively in Cumberland County. I did something that otherwise I wouldn't have done, and it was very valuable. I actually took charge of a mill precinct in the Frank Graham campaign that voted for Willis Smith in the first primary. And I changed it to Frank Graham in the second primary. Well, that's where Frank Graham was losing. All the mill people were getting scared on the race issue. I don't mean all of them, but that was a prime target for the Smith people. I took that Cumberland mill precinct away from Smith in a very minor, inconsequential accomplishment in the Graham campaign, but nevertheless, it proved to me what precinct organization could do.

BRENT GLASS:

What are some of your memories of that campaign? That seems to be one of the formative events for many politicians, even people

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who haven't been involved in politics. That particular campaign is particularly vivid in the memory of many people.

TERRY SANFORD:

By the time he was appointed, I was beginning to run in the upper levels of the Democratic party. I was president of Young Democrats. Scott had quickly let me know that he was supportive of the Young Democrats. In fact, I had met him a couple of times, but he didn't remember that. I met him at a football game at the Planetarium. I introduced myself and told him who I was. He sort of chuckled in acknowledging the Gordon matter, and said, "Well, it does a man good to get knocked down every now and then." Then he put me on the Ports Authority. That was an interesting group of people. I went to a fundraising dinner in New York. Spencer Love bought the table. From Burlington Mills, Everett Jordan was one of the Democratic guests there. Jonathan Daniels was, as I recall, the national committeeman at that time. I suppose Everett was the chairman of the party; Scott, and me, and a couple of other people, I don't remember who they were.

BRENT GLASS:

This was a Democratic fund-raising dinner?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, it was one of these $1,000 a table things. Spencer had bought the table and given us the tickets, apparently. Anyhow, I was invited to go up there on the governor's plane. We sat in a suite, Jonathan Daniels, the governor, and me, and not Everett Jordan but a couple of other people, and I recommended that they get an assistant campaign manager and start putting some things together. And I recommended Bill Staton.

BRENT GLASS:

This was for which campaign?

TERRY SANFORD:

Frank Graham's. So see, I was involved really from the very first. I got Bill Staton in there, who was my close associate in the Young Democrats, and he stayed throughout that campaign. Of course, he became a very, very close friend. We later got Jeff Johnson to be the campaign manager. He'd been Broughton's campaign manager. It was an interesting story how later he got on the Supreme Court over Scott's opposition, in spite of Scott's obligation to him. But that was just one of Scott's bungles. He didn't intend to do it that way. And they ran a good campaign. They just got caught up in that vicious race campaign, primarily centered in the second primary. Well, I learned a great deal out of that.

I started keeping a notebook of how to deal with the racist campaign. In fact, I kept that notebook in a bureau in my bedroom and everytime I'd have a little thought about how to gig somebody and get around the issue, I'd make a note of it. When I got in mine, at the beginning of the second primary, I went back through that book very carefully. I may have had twenty-five or thirty pages of notes in there. But I learned one thing, and that is, don't ever let them off the defensive. Frank Graham let them get off the defensive, he was just so nice and sweet. Well, we didn't. We gave them blow for blow, except, you know, we'd get on something else. I accused him, accurately, of supporting the Republican party national ticket. Well, it took a week for him to explain that.

BRENT GLASS:

This is Lake.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes.

BRENT GLASS:

Right.

TERRY SANFORD:

But you know, that kind of thing, that you've got him on the defensive. There's no way you can answer the race issue. You had to keep him bouncing on other subjects.

BRENT GLASS:

How about the Communist . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

He accused me . . . That was minor.

BRENT GLASS:

In Graham's campaign?

TERRY SANFORD:

Minor.

BRENT GLASS:

I mean, here it was mostly the race.

TERRY SANFORD:

I don't think the Communist thing scared a soul. They might have thought he was a little too liberal, but nobody thought he was Communist. Or only a damn fool thought he was a Communist or even Communist influenced. Though that was the period of Joe McCarthy, of course. But we took issue. Joe McCarthy was coming on. He really was more of an issue when Scott was running. Well, I have meandered on, so I'll let you get it back on whatever topic you wanted.

BRENT GLASS:

I was interested in how that campaign, what kind of impact it had on you, and obviously . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it left me very bitter because I thought it was a vicious, dirty campaign. I might say that I never thought that Willis Smith personally was responsible for it. And that was another lesson that I learned, and that was to keep charge of your own campaign. I personally thought and think that Willis Smith's a very decent individual. He got dragged, sucked into this. He really wasn't all that experienced in politics, though he'd been Speaker of the House and a Kerr Scott

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supporter, as a matter of fact. Not many lawyers were. But he got one step further and one step further, and the campaign got dirtier and dirtier, and he just got drawn into it. First thing you knew, forces that he couldn't stop were running that campaign.

BRENT GLASS:

This was the

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh hell no. He would deny, has denied it today, but one of the principal architects of that was Jessie Helms. And another principal architect was a young fellow named Daniels from Angier. I believe he's dead now. Anyhow, he was one of my Legionaire buddies. But the racism, they saw it as a winning issue. And they took full advantage of it. Smathers was beating Pepper at the time on pretty much the same sort of an assault. More Communism than black in Florida, but the race issue in northern Florida was just as evil as it was here. The only thing I'm saying is that I learned a lesson from both sides. One, don't give them any quarter; and second, don't let somebody else drag you into something you don't want to do. You'd better keep charge of your own issues. I really do think that that shortened Willis Smith's life. I could be wrong. But I think he was embarrassed by having been victimized by winning in that way.

BRENT GLASS:

Did Graham ever talk about it after . . . did you ever talk with him about that campaign afterwards? He wasn't really a politician. He must have been a politician to have done what he did at the University, but . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, he was too gentle and too considerate of other people. He never expressed an unkind thought about Willis Smith to me, and I

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expressed several at the time that, in retrospect, I'm certain were not correct. Well, it didn't take me long to feel they were not correct. But he never showed any bitterness. He probably never showed any bitterness about anything.

BRENT GLASS:

Could you say that you learned anything from Graham directly as far as politics were concerned?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I learned the most important lesson of all, that it was the purpose, and the issue, and the reason for being there that were important, not getting there, which is a very valuable lesson. In fact, if it were not for that, then I'd say politics would not be for me if you didn't think that when you got there, you could do something worthwhile in that you ought to try to get there in a way, an honorable way. Now I didn't do anything differently much from what Frank Graham did in the second primary except I did it more forcefully. I did it in a way that he was too gentle to have done. I didn't mind fighting back when Lake accused me of getting all the block vote. That was then a code word, the block vote, meaning that the blacks were voting for you unanimously; therefore, you weren't to be trusted. And that was about the way it turned out. Well, they accused him of getting the block vote. And I was ready for them.

Well, I'll tell you another little story that I doubt has ever been out. And I maybe ought to, since I don't know what'll come of this, it won't hurt to leave the county out.

BRENT GLASS:

Whatever you say, you have control over.

TERRY SANFORD:

I understand. But in any event, at that time, it was

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possible to control the black vote beyond maybe what they thought they could do. Johnson was asked, "Do you want the black vote in Durham?"

BRENT GLASS:

Which Johnson is this now?

TERRY SANFORD:

Jeff Johnson, the campaign manager for Frank Graham. "Do you want the black vote for Graham, or do you want to split it up so that it won't hurt in the second primary?" This, at that time, was the most obvious black block in the state. He meditated for a while, and he said, "Well, let's shoot the works. Let's try to win in the first primary." Well, you know, they almost did. They got something like forty-eight or forty-nine percent. It was very, very close. They did, indeed, turn the block vote on him. So Lake turned the block vote on me. He said, "I got all the block vote." I said, "Nothing of the kind." I had seen to it that Seawell got the Durham vote. He got it all. And I was reading polls. I didn't have to guess. I knew I couldn't win in the first primary. Seawell had a certain appeal to the black votes. He had a certain appeal to the Watts Hills here because of Hodges. I just saw to it. I not only didn't lift my finger, but I told this same person that asked Jeff Johnson, "See that Seawell gets that vote. I don't want them." But he got about eighty-nine percent of it, or something like that. I got it all in Raleigh, and I got it all in Wilmington, and I got it all in Fayetteville, and I got it all everywhere else.

BRENT GLASS:

How about Winston? Does Winston have a machine?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. I got it all in Winston. There isn't any question I got the black vote in the first primary because I'd been the only one really speaking to their problems.

BRENT GLASS:

But not in Durham.

TERRY SANFORD:

I didn't want it. I didn't get it in Asheville either for a peculiar kind of, not a peculiar reason, but up there the sheriff and the city manager ran it. I carried that Buncombe County, but I didn't get the black vote. That's about all they could take away from me. And they really did take it away from me. They'd bought it, and they had controlled it. I say bought it in a legal sense of it. You know, if you hire the workers, you get the vote. And that's the way it was. Then in Statesville, there's a man named Churchill who's car salesman, a car dealer, a right well-t-do fellow. I don't know; it seems to me like it was a used-car operation. But anyhow, I'd known him, and he was very friendly to me. But he's also a racist. He'd decided to be for Lake. I lost that county. I'm bound to have lost the black vote because Churchill had the reputation of owning it. I hope his name was Churchill. I'll do somebody disservice if it wasn't. In any rate, so when he accused me of having the black vote, I says, not so. I got what I could, but Seawell got it in Durham, Larkins got it in Asheville, and Dr. Lake got it in Iredell County. Well, then it took him ten days to deny that. You know, I kept saying, well, he got the block vote too. Well, Frank Graham wouldn't have done that. That wasn't dishonest. It might have been sneaky. I think it was just aggressive defense of the position. It was, of course, a dishonest issue from the start to finish to talk about a block vote. In any event, I learned from Frank Graham not to be that nice on that particular issue.

BRENT GLASS:

Where there any other kinds of blocks that people could

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feel they could deliver, like, let's say, industrial mill workers, or this kind of thing?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, the union was a real detriment to the politician in this state. But I'd always spoken very kindly of unions, not because I thought it was any political advantage, in fact, I knew it was a political detriment. The communication workers did a tremendous job with Scott, including when we wanted a telephone line for some statewide radio broadcast. Nobody in the top command had to bother about it, but the workers saw to it that we got the A-grade line. We got the quality because Scott had been good to them or decent to them, which nobody else had ever been. Hodges made them a whipping boy. He tried to break unions with the power of the governor's office. Well, I hadn't and I'd been good to them and if they looked across the field, they didn't have any friend but me. The communications workers are all right because they're very quiet about it. They just go on about putting up posters and probably taking down opponents' posters since they got all these people out with the telephone companies.

BRENT GLASS:

How about unorganized

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, nobody can deliver them. Then Millard Barbee was president of A.F.L.-C.I.O., and he just was absolutely chomping at the bit to endorse me. And I was trying as best I could to tell him, don't do me any favors. You know, don't say anything. He finally did endorse me. I'm satisfied it cost me more votes than it got me. I had no problem with giving labor, organized labor, its proper place. I felt that the unionization had been good for the country, let alone for workers.

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So, I hadn't had any problems with being friendly to labor and didn't later on. You know, that's still not a popular position in this state, the "Right to Work" law. But anyhow, no. Not only could they not deliver that vote; that vote, in spite of Millard Barbee's endorsement in the second primary, went to Lake, as you might guess. He was more likely to get that vote than I was, in spite of the union discipline or lack of discipline.

BRENT GLASS:

As you said, you had to work quite mightily in that Cumberland County/Creek Mill precinct just to turn that around in the 1950nd primary. So that wasn't a vote that you could count on. You had to work at it.

TERRY SANFORD:

Of course, they're most easily upset on the race issue in the early '60's. Now, I don't think that's so today. I think that they're much more relaxed about it today. But it was a real threat, and you can understand how. Well, in the Cumberland Mill section, I not only went to every house—it wasn't all that big—but I spent $30 on a driver.

BRENT GLASS:

You learned what not to do from Graham, but it seems to me that there's also an element which might go back to something out of your parents of wedding a sort of moral approach to politics or a moral approach to your work and politics. That element was definitely in Graham's approach, wasn't it?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, moral in the broader, philosophical sense of it. I've never had much confidence in somebody that paraded their religion in a political setting. In fact, I've always tried to shy away from it

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because I've seen too much of it that I thought was hypocritical. But if you use moral in the philosophical sense of what are the values in life, it ought not to apply just to a political campaign where surely it should apply, but it has to apply to the practice of lawyers. So many lawyers now have found out to their sorrow. It ought to have all along. We are beginning to talk about teaching courses in ethics, and morality in public affaris, and morality again in the philosophical sense. It certainly ought to apply to business. I have the feeling that businessmen, managers generally would like to have a higher ethical standard. They are somehow frequently diverted from that by the insistence that people won't buy the stock if they aren't making an adequate return on the price of the stock. I think they're finding ways to do both, to have a better social conscience and to do things based on a sense of morality in business, better than we've had in the past. Obviously, it's important in everything. Obviously, I did learn that from many sources. If I've learned it; I hope I have.

BRENT GLASS:

You talk about the notebook that you kept. Actually, from what I know, you used that notebook before 1960 and must have used it a little bit or what you learned in the 1950 campaign in the 1954 . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I really didn't. I'm not sure I kept keeping that notebook and . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Well, what you learned . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

But certainly what I learned, and one of the most exciting little political activities was the leaflet in the Kerr Scott campaign. You might go back and read the News and Observer for that three or four-day period, because even today with everything else

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that's happened in politics, it remains one of the most interesting little episodes. We had been geared for the race issue in the Kerr Scott camapign somehow. Now, you had the Sweat decision and the Brown decision. The Sweat decision came first, and that came in the beginning of the second primary in the Graham election, and the Brown decision came right toward the end. We were geared for that kind of thing. Well, we weren't going to stop that, but we were geared for dirty politics.

Ben Roney had traveled all over the east for campaigning, but he also had alerted a great many of our friends—"The first leaflet you see, don't assume we know it's out. Call us." So about Wednesday, we got a call. Now, it could have been Tuesday, it could have been Thursday. But it was before Saturday's election. We got a call that there's a package of leaflets left at Cahoon's service station down here for so and so, and it was left by the state purchasing director. And it is an endorsement of Kerr Scott, printed out of the Winston-Salem paper with a picture of a black that he'd appointed to the state school board, thanking him for being the great friend of the blacks. Well, that was a phony thing from start to finish. But what we did to offset it had to save the election. We only won by 25,000 votes. That thing could have

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just swept enough of eastern North Carolina to have turned it around. So what do you do with that? First of all, we cut loose everybody we could to find out how it happened in Winston, who put the ad in in the first place, pinned it neatly and directly on Mayor Kurfoos, who was stupid enough to go in there with the money and put the ad in.

BRENT GLASS:

Himself?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes, himself personally. Of course the paper didn't want to admit it, but we forced them to admit it. We threatened suit even. But they weren't long in realizing that they had played hell in taking a phony ad. Here it was supposed to be by the Citizens Black Committee of Winston-Salem or something like that, and there Kurfoos could personally do anything. Well, that of course helped our case.

BRENT GLASS:

How long did it take you to track that down? I mean, you have three days to work.

TERRY SANFORD:

About three hours. Then that same night, we sent a man from Durham who was in the labor union and who had some financial problems and needed some help on a note or something—I didn't know about those details—but I asked my man in Durham, "Who have you got that we can send to the Lennon headquarters to get some leaflets?" So we sent this boy over there. And this is so interesting because some people might consider it was a little bit shifty, but I didn't. I thought it was fair game, and I thought it was brilliantly executed, if I do say so. We sent this fellow over to Abie Upchurch, who was the campaign director—I don't think he was the manager but he was running it, I think, maybe as publicity director, but whatever it was, he was running it. And so

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he gave our boy his card with the name of the printer on the back of it and sent him down to get a package of the leaflets, and told him, "Don't put them out anywhere except on the porches of textile mill villages and in rural mailboxes. And that's the only place to put them." This fellow got his package and the card with Abie's scribbling on it, and the next morning we had pictures of that in the News and Observer. We held the presses. That's how, by that time, the contact we had with the News and Observer, Jonathan held a press at least an hour until we could put that together. This was Thursday night. This had to go into Friday . . .

BRENT GLASS:

When did you find that out, that this fellow had been, this fellow from Durham had been . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh no. I just called my friend and I said, "Get somebody to go to Abie and ask him for some of "them leaflets."

BRENT GLASS:

Oh, ok.

TERRY SANFORD:

So see, now what we did, we were so afraid then, we didn't want that part of the story told quite then. We didn't want to divert attention. So we put him up in a hotel suite with Duke Parris, who was from Alamance County and one of Kerr Scott's drivers and workers, later clerk of the court over there. We put Duke in there to entertain him; I always said Duke was his jailer, but we didn't want the press to talk to him. We'd gotten this material, we'd given the statement, and we really had to center in now in two days on exactly what we wanted to do. So we kept this old boy up there and . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Who was this fellow?

TERRY SANFORD:

I can't remember his name.

BRENT GLASS:

This fellow from the labor union in Durham.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, we later did him some favors in a decent kind of a way and helped him get . . . he was out of a job, among other things. All he did was go get the package.

BRENT GLASS:

Right.

TERRY SANFORD:

You know, the package with the Abie Upchurch cards spoke for itself. Then we . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Any instructions?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. It was just so clear that there wasn't any denying it. Then we wired every Lennon county manager, that we would prosecute them if they distributed it. We took an airplane in every area where they had been distributed, and leafletted it with the charge that these people were going to jail. We had the Lennon campaign people calling me: "I'm not going to distribute them. I tell you I've got them, but you can be sure that I'm going to burn them." And they damn well did in most places. Then we wired the FBI and of course released all this to the press, insisted on prosecution. We wired the postal authorities, and why was this a violation of the postal . . . ? Oh, in the mail boxes, and insisted on an investigation. The FBI made the mistake of wiring me back that they were investigating it. So Saturday morning, the day of the election, the headline in eastern North Carolina, and I don't know about the other papers: "FBI Investigating Lennon Headquarters," is the headline on election day. Now on Friday afternoon, Phil Ellis, noted radio commentator who later died, went on the air with a paid political broadcast in the form of a news story. Of course, it had

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the disclaimers before and after but it was very realistic. It told the whole story in thirty minutes how Abie had done this and how they had violated the law, playing on the racial things, and how the FBI was investigating them, and the postal authorities were investigating them, and all the campaign managers in the county that distributed them were going to be prosecuted. We put that prairie fire out. We might have gotten our hands a little burned doing it, but we damn well put it out in two days time. But everything broke just right. We got a confession from Kurfoos, and the following Sunday morning when they were still counting votes and it was just like that, he went to his Sunday school class and publicly apologized. [Laughter]

BRENT GLASS:

God. That's a really dirty trick, which I'm sure dirty tricks go on all the time.

TERRY SANFORD:

That was a twenty-four a day for about two or three days there. I think it was Thursday night, Wednesday or Thursday night, that we just stayed on top of that thing constantly.

BRENT GLASS:

I was going to ask, do you get any sleep during a like that?

TERRY SANFORD:

You don't want any. You couldn't sleep if you lay down. I wasn't sleeping at 2:00 Sunday morning when they were still counting votes. You know, you didn't want any.

BRENT GLASS:

You just forget about that as a . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

You don't forget about it. You never think about it.

BRENT GLASS:

How could you describe Kerr Scott and his influence on you? What did you learn from him? It sounds like you had a much different

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kind of style or approach to politics.

TERRY SANFORD:

People gave me a great deal of credit for keeping Kerr Scott calm and collected and made no outrageous statements during the whole campaign. See, he was likely to blow off for some good cause, but nevertheless, in a way that offended a great many people. We wanted to cool all of that. So he agreed that he wouldn't say anything that we didn't write out. It got a little dull, but that was all right. The object was to win, not to entertain the public. We'd entertain them later. Now, I'm really not entitled to that credit because Kerr Scott was a highly intelligent person. When he decided what his strategy would be, he saw to it that it was. Lennon released his income tax form, and it was a very damaging thing. It showed he was practicing law and making about $4,000 a year. All the lawyers said, "That dumb fellow is our Senator? He can't make but $4,000 a year practicing law." Well I said no, we're not going to release any income tax. Income tax people check that, and I'm not going to get off on a side issue. But Scott was afraid I was. The pressure was building up by the press. Of course, Lennon by that time was frantic to get our income tax released because his had backfired so on him. Well, I was determined we weren't going to do it. But he was not sure. He said, "I just want to be sure that you don't open your mouth and say we're going to do it because I'm not going to do it." I said, "Don't you worry about that." It was not that I kept his mouth shut, he knew what he was doing and he knew he had to cool it, and he did. He delivered all of his speeches from

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scripts. He occasionally would get off on something. He was down in eastern North Carolina talking and he said he walked from so-and-so to Hargett's Crossroads and said anybody else could do that, he'd give them a bull calf. Well, we had the great bull calf walk. We had about 150 people down there and 2,000 or 3,000 watching them while they walked from wherever he said to wherever. We gave them all a bull calf. But a bull calf's not worth much, you know. We got all of his friends around the state to contribute bull calves. Well, that kind of thing, he fortunately didn't follow the script. [Laughter] There are people today that'll show me a little card that they were a participant in the great bull calf walk.

BRENT GLASS:

[unknown] happened, that turned it around for a good public relations . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, yes.

BRENT GLASS:

It might have ended up costing you.

TERRY SANFORD:

It didn't cost anything.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, right. You'd gotten contributors.

TERRY SANFORD:

He had several on his farm. There was something else that they had really assaulted us on. I said, "Redwine's written an answer to that." He said, "I thought we weren't answering anything." I said, "That's why I said put it in the bottom bureau drawer." But I at least ran it by him. I've forgotten what it was, but it was something that was certainly borderlines whether or not it ought to be answered. We figured that Scott had a good record, that we wouldn't let them get us into quibbling arguments . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

BRENT GLASS:

Are the things that you learned from someone like Graham or Scott mostly about running for office? How about politics itself? I'm trying to make a distinction between actual gaining of office, which is obviously a very time-consuming proposition and the actual . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I think that by the time I ran for governor, I knew pretty much what I wanted to do as governor. I wasn't like, I think Holshouser, caught unawares. I've said that in a kindly way, but Holshouser didn't expect to be governor, and consequently, didn't know what to do when he got to be governor. Now there have been differing degrees of that on the part of other people. They get in there and start scrambling around for what they're going to do. I pretty well knew what I was going to do. I knew what I wanted to do. I'd spent a lot of time thinking about it for ten years. I had written a number of statements by hand. I doubt if I ever had a person write a position paper for me. Certainly I got some papers sent in by people who were knowledgeable in water resources and things to get their thinking. But I had reasonably well plotted out what I thought this state ought to try to do and had defined pretty much what I thought I could do about it. As I got into it and things developed, we not only might have taken a different tack on achieving something, but we thought of a great many other things we hadn't thought of before. In fact, at the end of my first year, in the fall of my first year, certainly in the winter of the second year, I began calling groups of people in and saying in effect, "All right. We've just about done every-thing we promised to do. We've got everything we were going to do done. What are we going to do for the next three years? Let's start thinking about it." And we did. And we did a lot of things, including

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I think the magnificent achievement of the community college system. I had vaguely supported the concept of community colleges with state support, but I didn't begin to realize the impact of the technical institute, which is within the community college itself. That's one thing that we came forward with, the whole idea of the creative things like the school of the arts. It hadn't occured to me. I knew we wanted to support the symphony, and I put more money in it the first thing. I knew we wanted to do something about retarded children, but I had no idea of the extent of what we could do about them. The poverty program was something that nobody had thought of, that John Ehle discovered through the gray area programs of Ford Foundation. We adapted it to a statewide approach. So we did a lot of things we hadn't intended to do, but at the same time, I pretty well knew what I wanted to do. Consequently, I could be devoted to running for office, and I could wear myself out to whatever extent was required in order to get there because I knew when I got there, at least in my own mind, it would have been worth the effort.

BRENT GLASS:

How about in terms of style? It seems that Graham and Scott were very opposite kind of people. Did you try to incorporate elements of both . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

No, I really didn't. I never have tried to use anybody else's style. Maybe I should have, but I've always just tried to be myself. I suppose at times that's come across rather dull. But in any event, I never did try to look like Kerr Scott or talk like Kerr Scott or speak in such general terms as Frank Graham or mimic John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt. You can't remember when politicians were mimicking

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Roosevelt like they now mimic Kennedy. I never have done any of that because it always struck me as being kind of a phony adaptation. I was what I was, so I didn't really . . .

BRENT GLASS:

So no one considered you a protege of anyone else.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I would think a good many people, especially Scott's friends, would have seen me as a protege of Scott. Other people, and I would to some extent, adhere to that. The point is that he died before I ran for governor, and consequently, that concept was somewhat muted for that reason. I wouldn't have minded being considered a protege of Scott or Frank Graham, and a good many people would think that I was a protege of Frank Graham's. To some extent, that's true except in neither case did they pick me out and run me. So if that's what a protege means . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Right, right. Going to your years at State Senate, that was a very conscious choice on your part in '53 to run for the State Senate as a . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Stepping stone, as they say.

BRENT GLASS:

You ran twice for State Senate.

TERRY SANFORD:

Once.

BRENT GLASS:

Once—'53 through '55.

TERRY SANFORD:

Very luckily.

BRENT GLASS:

Why?

TERRY SANFORD:

You couldn't run but once at that time. A very peculiar arrangement that came up in the 20's and they incorporated into the general statutes, that a district, and there were perhaps let's

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say thirty-five districts, maybe a few more, a few less. Some districts had one senator; some had two. I don't think any had more than that, but Wake County had one, and it was a district. There wasn't any real apportionment on population. It was kind of an historical development more or less equal maybe when they were first drawn, and maybe partially because of who had influence at the particular time. But Wake County had one, and so that senator could run for reelection every time. There was nothing in the statutes that barred it. The district that Jones County was in, which would have been as I recall, but it doesn't make any difference, but let's say, New Bern and Jones County, which a little town of Trenton, and Kinston maybe was a district. They had one senator, but they had no rotation agreement. So anybody could run from any county right on. Then they had a great many districts that had rotation agreements that were incorporated into the statutes. I was in, it seems to me like it was the tenth senatorial district. Brunswick County, Columbus County, Bladen County, and Cumberland County were in a district with two senators. So there was a rotation agreement that in the session when the governor came in, that the senator elected in that year would be from Cumberland and, it seems to me, like Bladen. I've forgotten now. But anyhow, one of the other little counties. Then in the next session, the rotation agreement, the Democratic nominee had to come one from this county, one from the other county. So that you couldn't run to succeed yourself unless you challenged what was clearly, in my opinion, an unconstitutional provision. I gave some serious thought to trying to break that, because I thought it was to my

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advantage to serve two or three terms in the Senate. But the more I looked at it, the more I figured that it would take me longer to break it than I could do anything with it. That I'd make enemies in Columbus and everywhere that would probably offset any other advantage. That I had had a pretty good flash in the Senate. I got a lot of attention and did some good things. [interruption] Well, in any event, it wasn't long before Scott asked me to be his campaign manager, and it became unimportant to run again. And I couldn't have anyhow. But I was very lucky. If I'd have gone back again, I probably wouldn't have done as well as I'd done the first time.

BRENT GLASS:

How did you know you were doing well? I mean, what kind of things did you get involved in there that were helpful to you?

TERRY SANFORD:

I just made strong friendships. I got along extremely well. I attacked the governor's program two or three times, and I was always on solid ground. I always lost, but at least . . .

BRENT GLASS:

Which indicates that you were right.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes. But I made my points, and I became an independent person. I wasn't anybody's boy. I was for the governor, against the governor, on the basis of what I thought was correct. I voted against the total appropriations bill because I thought they'd brought it in in a shoddy way; and I accused the sub-committee chairman of doing so, Bill Copeland, whom I later made my legislative assistant. I figured if he could do that to me when I was senator, he could do it to them when I was governor. No, he was a very skillful person, but they didn't intend the Senate to debate the items of the bill. It would have been there

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another month. That's all right, but it was wrong and I took issue with that. I took issue with the governor's reorganization of the highway commission. But I didn't do anything in an obnoxious way, and I ended up with some very solid friends that were on different issues with me, including the governor, and including the governor's legislative assistant, who was Mr. Frank Taylor. So I knew I'd done well. And that was contrary to Frank Franklin's advice to me, who was an old city council-type politician, wonderful fellow, one of my staunchest friends when I went to Fayetteville. He said, "Terry, I just don't know. I don't believe I'd run for the Senate." He said, "You can be governor, and if you run for the Senate, you might go up there and mess it all up." I said, "But how am I going to be governor if I don't take a chance on messing it up?" He said, "Well, I reckon you have to."

In any event, I felt that I'd come out of that with a good name and a good record, and I had appeared as an individual and not just as another name. I'd spoken on four or five principal things that I thought were worthy of my championing, and I hadn't hesitated to assert myself, which you have to do. So I was reasonably well satisfied that in terms of establishing myself at that level, I had about done all I was going to do anyhow.

BRENT GLASS:

What was your impression of the state government scene in Raleigh? Did your experience there change any of the impressions . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Not particularly because I had been fairly close in my observation of that for a good while. I was stymied a little by the committee system, though that was broken up somewhat. You may or may not

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remember that Hodges was the new Lieutenant Governor and presiding officer, and at that time, very friendly to me because a couple of his nephews were very close friends of mine. His sister-in-law, Mrs. Rose Parker in Albemarle, was a close friend of mine because her son had been a classmate and one of my camp counselors. So Hodges was very nice to me. He was also a very aloof, arrogant person at that stage of his life, and he made a lot of people in the Senate extremely uncomfortable. He was absolutely at odds with Governor Umstead, or vice versa. I learned enough about the legislative process that I never had any trouble with the legislature when I was governor.

BRENT GLASS:

Did you come into contact with the influence of lobbyists in Raleigh?

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. Oh, of course.

BRENT GLASS:

What kind of influence did they have?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, kind of a cozy fellowship that didn't do a whole lot of harm except sort of keep the handbrakes on all the time. The truckers worked closely with the telephone lobbyists, and across the board they supported one another. There wasn't a whole lot of special-interest legislation. The chiropractors wanted some kind of recognition, and the optometrists wanted something maybe. They had special people in there pushing—probably should have had. They were probably pushing against the older establishments. The truckers were the most blatant. But I don't recall in that year any big issues that they were working on. They entertained most lavishly. I didn't find it particularly evil, to sum it all up. I never found the first suggestion of dishonesty. If

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it was ever happened in the North Carolina legislature, both when I was there or when I was governor, I never knew about it and never heard any suggestion of it. The power companies retained some of the lawyers, which I thought was bordering on unethical conduct on the part of the lawyers, to say nothing of maybe the power company. But they would retain a lot of these lawyers around in small counties for a modest retainer of $1,000 a year, or something like that. And if they had a power company issue, those legislators who were lawyers retained were, in my opinion, disqualified for participation in that vote, though obviously they didn't disqualify themselves. That's the only thing that would border on it, and that was perfectly legal, except I would never accept a fee from anybody where I was going to vote on an issue. When I became governor, I severed my ties totally with the law firm and never assumed them again.

BRENT GLASS:

Did you you have any other kinds of, at this point—I don't know if you would have time for it, but beside your law firm and your political activity—any other kinds of activities in between elections, let's say, and in between . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Not particularly. I was a Commander of the National Guard, which took a fair amount of time. I was active in virtually every civic enterprise. I was president of the American Red Cross, I was the first chairman of the United Fund in Fayetteville, and I did my duty in all those kinds of things; the Salvation Army, the YMCA, I think there was nothing I didn't participate in.

BRENT GLASS:

No business, or anything like that.

TERRY SANFORD:

No.

BRENT GLASS:

You didn't have time to go into anything like that.

How about the influence of the governor? Did it shape your impressions of what the governor could do after . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Just to convince me that the governor could do anything decent he wanted to do.

BRENT GLASS:

In that time as state senator?

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes. Well, I already had that opinion.

BRENT GLASS:

Right. This did nothing to dissuade you.

TERRY SANFORD:

I already had my opinion that the people of this state would follow the governor anytime he took them off in the right direction. That's the tragedy of wasting four years with Holshouser with the rather inadequate leadership of Scott. Not bad again, but not really up to the capacity of what he could have done. And the same of Moore. All of those governors were good governors. I don't hold Holshouser to be a bad governor, but none of them used the resources of that office as they could have used them.

BRENT GLASS:

That's interesting to hear you say that because the common impression of the North Carolina governship is one of a sort of transient kind of power.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, they say it's a weak governorship for three reasons, and one of them's valid, and the other two don't amount to anything. He doesn't have the veto. Well, I never needed it but once, and that was when the Legislature during the closing days had passed the speaker ban bill with totally illegal procedures. They passed it with suspension

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of rules, with people yelling on the floor that they weren't agreeing to the suspension of rules. I needed the veto then because that was an emotional reaction that ought to have been calmly set aside and then there would have been no problem. But I never needed it otherwise. I might have used it on occasion, but I never really needed it. So that's not so. The other is that he can't succeed himself. That is valid. It's not that he's weakened in the last two years; I found myself just as strong in the second session, if not stronger, than in the first session. By that time, I knew all these people much better, I was communicating with them much better. I never had any problems as a lame duck. I was going strong. The only problem I had was electing my successor. The governor's appointive power at that time was tremendous and still is fairly good. This reorganization which I suggest is a very bad thing. As it turned out, it took so much of the citizen participation out. But you had hundreds and hundreds of citizens who you were appointing to non-paid tasks eagerly sought after. To be on the Board of Conservation and Development, to be on the Highway Commission was a tremendous honor. The Ports Authority was built by volunteer citizens. That gave the governor a tremendous amount of clout. In addition, he is the director of the budget, which means that he can absolutely shut off East Carolina if he'd wanted to. Leo Jenkins not only never gave me any trouble like he gave subsequent governors; he was a great supporter of mine. First, I think he and I were philosophically in tune. Second, he knew I knew the power of the governor's office. He probably pretty

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as tutely determined that Governor Moore didn't. He never attempted to take what later turned out to be unwarranted ambitions, it would seem to me, though I don't mean this to be critical of him. I mean to illustrate the power of the governor if he wants to use it. So the governor of North Carolina, as long as it was a Democratic governor anyhow, was expected to be the legislative leader. Now, I'm not sure that's so in any other state that I could pinpoint. The legislature wanted the governor to lead. That didn't mean they'd vote with him, but they wanted him to lead. They wanted him to come with the program. They wanted him to say how he stood on something. A great many legislators would vote for it just because the governor wanted it. They felt that was the best way to go.

Furthermore, the governor had tremendous influence on those people if he used it right, and I don't mean improper influence. But they all want something, and not for themselves, but they have the pressures on them to do the favors that are perfectly legitimate, just a kind of personal relationship. The same kind of relationship that I have with the alumni of this institution. I'm not doing anything unwarranted if I give special attention to an alumnus. Well, if a legislator is representing his county and feels very strongly that the Bethel Church ought to have its road to the graveyard paved, the governor's the only one that can do that easily; at least, if the governor wants to do it he can do it.

BRENT GLASS:

Does that build up a kind of loyalty?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, it's a sense of team. You know, it's good to be on the governor's team if there's a good governor.

BRENT GLASS:

You can't please everybody, but obviously you've got to make some . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, you sure can please most of them, you know, without doing any damage to the system. In fact, I think that kind of team play and the party leadership, I think that's one of Hodges' problems. He had a difficult time in treating the legislature and the party people as his co-workers. I think we got a lot of things in this state that never would have been done if we hadn't developed that kind of relationship. I've never thought the executive ought to cast himself in the role of the opponent of the legislature because it's not necessary.

BRENT GLASS:

You said there were three things that were considered limitations. Let's make sure we covered those. One was the . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, what was the third? [Laughter]

BRENT GLASS:

After the veto power, the second was not being able to succeed yourself, and the third thing, I don't know if we went into that or not.

TERRY SANFORD:

The fact that the Council of State is elected independently. Thus the Governor doesn't have much to do directly with agriculture, insurance, labor or the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

BRENT GLASS:

Let me ask you one last question, and I think we should break. When you finished your Senate term in '55, was there any thought of

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you running in '56 for the governor? Were you ready? I guess it should go back . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Wait a minute; you'd better get your dates straight. I served in the 1953 session and managed Scott's senatorial campaign in 1955.

BRENT GLASS:

Now was there any thought . . . there was going to be a governors race coming up the next year. Was there any thought . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. I certainly did think about it because Umstead had died, and Hodges was in there. [pause] The Pearsall Plan was coming on. The problems of all of that were bearing down. Hodges didn't look like he knew what government was all about. He told Mayne Albright it looked to him like we wouldn't have any problems with this massive school appropriation if we just charged every parent a mere $200. You know, which really was his awareness of some of the real problems when he in. Now, he's an extremely smart person. It didn't take him long to see a lot of his false impressions, including freeloaders. There just aren't many freeloaders in state government as he had thought, looking at it from a businessman's point of view. I thought about running against him because I thought he ought to be run against. I didn't like what he'd done in the 1955 session . . . He had knocked down the educational efforts. Then Henry Jordan wanted to

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run for governor. Everett, and Henry, and Scott asked me to come over there, and he was going to run for governor against Hodges. So I started traveling around the state with Henry. I hired him a publicity man. Fortunately, he put off his departure from his newspaper because Everett and Henry made a deal with Hodges and left me sitting out on a limb.

BRENT GLASS:

What was the nature of this deal?

TERRY SANFORD:

I don't know, I don't know.

BRENT GLASS:

That he would openly get their support?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, Henry agreed to withdraw as a candidate. He had not announced, but we'd been to rallies all over the state. I was putting the old Kerr Scott people together for him. That's what they'd asked me to do, and I was doing my best to do it. I wasn't all that fond of Hodges' philosophy, though again, I never doubted his character and his ability. So I came all around running against him after that. I was irritated with the Jordans. I suppose I thought I ought to have been in on the conversation since I'd been the most vocal person and I was, for all practical purposes, his unofficial campaign manager. I'd been putting the team together. I'm not sure that's what irritated me. It might have broader than that. Whatever it was, I was thinking about running against Hodges up to the filing date.

BRENT GLASS:

The point of the question, I guess, is that back whenever it was that you thought about being governor for the first time, did you ever have a timetable? Did you ever say, well, by this date, I should be

TERRY SANFORD:

Oh yes. I would have figured '56 or '60; not that firm, but then when Hodges became governor, then you would talk about running against an incumbent, which is something different. I was backing off a little. I was fairly well convinced that he could be defeated. I gave some thought to running for lieutenant governor and that looked to me like kind of an empty gesture, and maybe more damaging than helpful. And I dismissed that. On the last day of filing, my law partner, Dick Phillips, who was later dean of the law school at Chapel Hill, and I drove up to Raleigh. We went by the Carolina Hotel, which was the place we'd had our Scott headquarters, cashed a check for, as I recall, $200, or whatever the filing fee was, and we were still debating whether to run against Hodges and the problems of it. I had some misgivings that I wasn't ready to be governor, that I wasn't quite ready . . .

BRENT GLASS:

You weren't even forty years old.

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, I wasn't ready in terms of my grasp of the political situation as well as that, but I felt that Hodges probably ought to be defeated. Still I wasn't that determined. But I had the cash in my pocket and the closing hour was 12:00, and this is about 11:40. I just said, "Let's just talk about it on the way up there, and if we decide not to do it, we'll get us a hamburger and come back home. But in the meantime, if we're going to do it, let's be in a position to do it." And of course, the last-minute surprise would have been dramatic. I would have started off with a good momentum just by challenging an incumbent.

BRENT GLASS:

Had anyone declared . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

Nobody of any importance. It seems to me like some

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wholesale grocer somewhere had filed—a totally unknown name. My memory's vague on that.

BRENT GLASS:

That's all right.

TERRY SANFORD:

But anyhow, no one of any consequence.

BRENT GLASS:

So it would have been a dramatic . . .

TERRY SANFORD:

I think it would have, especially for a relatively young Democrat. Kerr Scott, gosh, I can't remember. Kerr Scott was dead by then, wasn't he? Yes, of course he was. No, he wasn't. No, he died in '57. That's right, that's right. I'd been up there and talked to him about it. It seems to me that Ben Roney, and the governor, and others were sort of urging me to do it, and that they thought we could put it together. So that entered into it. That was of course '56.

BRENT GLASS:

By the governor, you mean Kerr Scott.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yes, Scott. [interruption]

Well, this is a kind of funny little turn because I was about decided we shouldn't do it. I said, "Let's walk on over to the elections office," which was in the agriculture building, I believe. So we were parked over there, and I said, "If the Lord doesn't intervene between the time I get there, I'm going to file." Well, the Lord intervened because here came the agent of the Lord around the corner, Dr. L. Stacy Weaver. And if the Lord ever had an agent, it was L. Stacy Weaver. He had just become president of Methodist College or was in the process of becoming where I was the chairman. I was chief promoter of Stacy Weaver coming on, so he delayed me until the 12:00 bell rang.

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And I said to Dick, "Well, the Lord intervened. Let's go over and speak to Governor Hodges." So we walked on over to Governor Hodges's office. He welcomed us in. I was sitting there in his office when Makepeace came in and said, "Well, Governor, you got by without opposition." I never told him that story, of course.

BRENT GLASS:

You mean just by chatting with Weaver, even with this on your mind, you decided to just let things happen as they . . . ?

TERRY SANFORD:

Not really. It has become apocryphal because Dick and I told it so often, and it got a little firmer with each telling. As I said, I was so doubtful about running anyhow because it didn't seem quite right to me. I really didn't feel quite ready. I think Hodges might have been defeated because he didn't have any political force, and he'd been very arrogant in his dealings with a great many people. But he was right on the race issue, and that was another thing that bothered me, that I didn't want to run against him and upset that. You know, there were many, many things. I'd been thinking about this for a month. But I just said, "Now just so we won't be sitting down here in Fayetteville as 11:00 saying, ‘By golly, we ought to have taken the gamble,’" Dick being one of my closest advisors I said, "Let's just ride up there, talk about it, and then we'll do what needs to be done." Well, I didn't much think we were going to file, but since I had put it if the Lord doesn't intervene and Stacy walked around the corner, we always thought that was a good signal. But that didn't have anything to do with it. We would not have filed anyhow. I don't really believe in signs and omens.

BRENT GLASS:

Let's break here.