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Title: Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Electronic Edition.
Author: Sanford, Terry, interviewee
Interview conducted by Glass, Brent
Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.
Text encoded by Mike Millner
Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers Southern Folklife Collection
First edition, 2006
Size of electronic edition: 288 Kb
Publisher: The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2006.

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The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
Languages used in the text: English
Revision history:
2006-00-00, Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition.
2006-12-31, Mike Millner finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
Source(s):
Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History Program Collection (A-0328-2)
Author: Brent Glass
Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976. Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History Program Collection (A-0328-2)
Author: Terry Sanford
Description: 373 Mb
Description: 93 p.
Note: Interview conducted on August 20 and 21, 1976, by Brent Glass; recorded in Durham, North Carolina.
Note: Transcribed by Joe Jaros.
Note: Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Series A. Southern Politics, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Note: Original transcript on deposit at the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Interview with Terry Sanford, August 20 and 21, 1976.
Interview A-0328-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Sanford, Terry, interviewee


Interview Participants

    TERRY SANFORD, interviewee
    BRENT GLASS, interviewer

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]


Page 1
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
BRENT GLASS:
The following is an interview with Terry Sanford conducted on August 20, 1976. The interviewer is Brent Glass. The interview takes place at Mr. Sanford's home on Pinecrest Road in Durham, North Carolina. The interview is, on occasion, interrupted by visitors and telephone calls.
I thought that by today, we had almost come up to the point where we had gotten you elected governor in 1960 and just one or two more questions about that campaign. First of all, how did you go about assembling a team to run the campaign?
TERRY SANFORD:
I didn't do it as well as Bert Bennett put together a team for Jim Hunt this time, because we didn't know as much as we know now. I had been gathering friends from around the state for a long period of time, not necessarily with any political purposes, but simply in various organizations and then when after the war, I pretty firmly determined that I would run, I began to try to keep an account of them in a more orderly way. So, the idea was, to some extent going back to our experience campaigning in Chapel Hill where we attempted to get a key person in each dormitory and then two or three key people around town. We called them that, "keys." I didn't get too heavily involved in politics at Chapel Hill but I was probably more engaged than the average student. So, in Scott's campaign, I attempted to develop that kind of a key, using primarily his people from the time when he was in the governor's office, but realizing also that one of the reasons he got me in the campaign was to bring in some younger and additional people that he hadn't been able to reach. So, again we used a key system of a dozen

Page 2
or so people who helped us in each county. But obviously, we couldn't count on them to get the people in each county, we had to get them, too. So, I would guess that my friends county by county, where we wanted a good organization in each county, were spreading out there into precincts. Theoretically, you would like to have a little committee in every precinct and in large precincts, you would like to have larger committees. So, my friends who helped in a campaign came from a number of sources. Basically, friends who were classmates or close-by classmates at Chapel Hill. Now, not all of them were for me. I can think of two or three notable exceptions that very much weren't for me, but most of them were for me. So, that would . . . for example, meaning Henry and Marie Colton in Buncombe County and then Bruce Elmore in Buncombe County would fall into a different category. He had been more active in politics whereas the Coltons had not at that time, but I had been in school with both of them. Bruce Elmore was more politically active and I had known him as a Young Democrat. I just use those two for example. In Charlotte, Paul Yountz, Colonel, later General Yountz, very active in the American Legion and that's where I knew him. He is a most powerful politician in Mecklenburg County and was largely responsible for my putting a very effective team together. Another person there was Senator Spencer Bell. Senator Spencer Bell had been one of the leaders of the North Carolina Bar and I got to know him when I supported the early efforts to reform the judicial system and I was active in that and he became interested in me and so when I started campaigning, he helped put together his part of the organization. He happened to also be an ally of Colonel Yountz. But out of the American Legion, out of such activities in the Bar, out of old school friends, out of Young Democrats that I have

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mentioned . . . now, in addition to that, I had been active in the National Guard and the National Guard is not a political organization but it contains to many people who have an active interest in politics. The general at that time, Claude Bowers, became my campaign manager in his county, just for example. In Wilmington, Colonel Hall, who had been a battalion commander in the North Carolina National Guard became one of my key people there. Sy Hall became my county manager in New Hanover County and he was a classmate of mine at Chapel Hill and law school as well as elsewhere. I had a number of people whom I had gotten to know because they were lawyers. I mentioned Spencer Bell because of a particular project, but there would be others who came to be friends just out of maybe practicing law occasionally. So, there might be several dozen of those around the state. Then, I was very active in the Jaycees. While I don't think the Jaycee organization is too good as a political base and it's not supposed to be, a great many of the leaders in the Jaycees aren't very good at politics, but I can think of a number of places where I picked up a supporter because of my association in the Junior Chamber of Commerce around the state. Then, I ran for president of the Young Democrats and I had all those connections. Now, take all of those people, many of whom I knew or had in the card index prior to Scott's campaign, then superimpose on that, or the other way around, the Scott organization, what he called "The Branch Head Boys." They were people, by and large, that I would not have been involved with. They were people that I might have had some difficulty in reaching. They particularly were valuable to have on my side when racism became a big thing in the campaign, because they were out in the rural areas where they, by being for me, would

Page 4
dispel a great many of those fears. Then, you've got to remember that I was in the legislature and while fellow legislators aren't very good in campaigning for you because they've got their own local races, still I can think of some notable exceptions where former legislators came very strongly to my support. So, just over a period of years, you accumulated a great many people and then putting them together in an organization that is political is another matter, but the hard thing is not that. The hard thing is acquiring them in the first place. You don't that accidentally and you don't really do it by design, because I don't think that I could have at all set out to have made those people friends purely for political reasons. I just made them friends over a period of time and then when I did decide finally to get into politics, so many of them joined with me.
BRENT GLASS:
In the process of just working on various problems?
TERRY SANFORD:
And in various organizations.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. Do you think that is still pretty much the formula for success in North Carolina? Do you think that's what Jim Hunt . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
I think that Hunt has illustrated that. He didn't have anything like the wide range of activities that I did, for lots of reasons. For one, he's younger and he simply hasn't been engaged in that many organizations, but he's gone at it a little bit differently. He's gone at it now for the past six years and it's been campaigning for office and being in office, which gives him a kind of a political base that serves a good purpose but one that I didn't have. So, he was very diligently moving county by county and because Bert Bennett was his chief key operator, he got into a great many of the same people who had helped me and helped Richardson Preyor

Page 5
and had been in campaigns that we have been involved in and in addition to that, he of course, has developed a wide range of friends on his own. He went to North Carolina State where he was very active in politics, including incidentally, my campaign. He has been active in the Young Democrats and the Democratic Party, having a good deal to do with the reform rules of the Democratic Party, so again, he was ranging around. He, more than I, moved from a political base. I, more than he, moved from what might be called a civic enterprise base, but it all comes back to knowing people who in a crunch are ready to go to work in a political campaign.
BRENT GLASS:
How about fund raising? How do you address yourself to that? It doesn't seem to me that you really had much in the way of . . . well, what kinds of contacts did you have?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we didn't have any big money people and we really weren't trying to get any. I had a very good fund raiser, Paul Thompson from Fayetteville, who is now dead. He was a classmate of mine and probably my closest friend over a long period of years, certainly my closest friend in that period of time until he died. He just had a way of going out and seeing people in a community and getting an old friend. We hadn't seen Skipper Bowles for a long time, so Paul went to see Skipper's older brother, John, who was a former roommate of mine and John, Paul Thompson and I worked together in the dining hall and Skipper was the younger brother, although we knew him . . . but Paul called on Skipper and over a period of months, we would get people together and get a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there and maybe one or two, very few, thousand dollar contributions. So, by the time you put together a great many communities, you put together

Page 6
enough money to get going in the initial stages. Later on, we rather drastically changed the approach to fund raising that's been used effectively by every campaign since then. The old way of raising money was for somebody like Bob Haines, who was chairman of the board of Wachovia, to raise a substantial sum of money. Now, in those days, a substantial sum of money would be anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars. That wouldn't get a campaign doing much in this day of the media campaign, and then they would send a few thousand dollars to this county and a few hundred to that and they would hire local workers or spend that money locally. Well, I didn't like that for a number of reasons. I didn't like the idea of paid precinct workers. It seemed to me that if you spent so much money to carry a box, as the expression was, that that was a very potentially corrupting situation and I wanted to get away from it and we all but got away from it. We did not eliminate it entirely, but with a few exceptions, we could change the system . . .
[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
BRENT GLASS:
When you say in the old days, how far back do you mean?
TERRY SANFORD:
I mean when I was watching politics in the thirties to when Luther Hodges ran, that span. So, what we did, after we picked the county managers, we said, "All right, you've got a quota. We've taken the $150,000 that we need statewide and we divided it on a formula based on per capital income and population . . . ", well, as a very rough rule of thumb, that totaled to about 250,000 probably, knowing that we wouldn't be 100%, and we said, "This is your quota. You've got to send it into state headquarters and you've got to get it up locally." Well, they received that approach very

Page 7
enthusiastically and that's the way that we raised most of our money.
BRENT GLASS:
You mean that you would match what they raised?
TERRY SANFORD:
Matched nothing. We got all our money from them. If they needed3,000 locally, and we had put the quota of 1500 on them, they had to raise 4500 locally. Now, the great advantage of that was that never did you have to appeal to the special interests. You didn't have then the same statutory limitations on a single contribution you have now, and it would have been possible to get 25,000 from somebody and you would have been heavily obligated. We weren't. Or it would have been possible that even if someone had gotten up $25,000 you would have been heavily obligated and we weren't. I have observed that most campaigns that have followed our quota approach since then, I think it's a very good change, so we are not sending any money out to be spent in the precincts.
BRENT GLASS:
I was planning to ask you to comment on this later, but I might as well as you now. When you were first getting started in politics in the late forties, V.O. Key's book, Southern Politics came out and among the things that he said about North Carolina was that, "industrialization has created a financial and business elite whose influence prevails in North Carolina's political and economic life. A sympathetic respect for the problems of corporate capital and of large employers permeates the state's politics and government. For half a century, an economic oligarchy has held sway." Was that true when you were . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes, I think that was fairly accurate. I think that oligarchy opposed Kerr Scott for example, and he was probably the first one to beat that group. It's not that they always picked a candidate and backed him, but usually, of three or four candidates, the ones to emerge would be sympathetic towards

Page 8
that, which wasn't all bad. Key doesn't even suggest that it's all bad, but it could be all bad and I think we saw that breaking down from Scott on. Hodges just naturally . . . he didn't cater to that crowd, he was one of them. So, he had no problem with that group, but Hodges's problem was with the working politician who didn't feel that he understood and appreciated the person who worked in the political structure. I didn't have any trouble with those people but I didn't get any unusual support. It surprised a great many people when Charlie Cannon of Cannon Mills announced that he was for me, or I might say, when I announced that he was for me.
BRENT GLASS:
Did it surprise you?
TERRY SANFORD:
Not really. Well, it's an interesting thing. I never did know Mr. Cannon. I'm not even sure I'd ever met him. If I had, it was very casually. So, he sent for me maybe a year before our campaign started, although I was obviously moving around the state campaigning. Well, it wasn't that long before, but it was sometime before I announced. And as the head of one of the two major textile industries, the other being Burlington . . . Spencer Love, incidentally, was for me, not because of this so much as because we had worked together on some University of North Carolina matters and he was for me on personal reasons. If he gave us any substantial money, I'm not aware of it, but he gave us a kind word here and there. I went to see Mr. Cannon in his office in Kannapolis and he wanted to talk about three things. He was very much concerned about the level of health care in the state. For some reason, he had a great personal affection for the State Highway Patrol, and incidentally, I had started the first State Highway Patrol training school, which is not especially a political asset but it served some very helpful purposes from time

Page 9
to time to have all of those people in a particular generation having come through my training courses at the Institute of Government, but he knew about that and that impressed him. Then, he was concerned with the Workmen's Compensation Reserve, not that it be stacked one way or the other, but that it simply be kept fiscally sound. Well, I was somewhat surprised that these were the only three topics he chose to discuss and not only surprised, but impressed. The only thing that could even approach a special interest would be the Workmen's Compensation and he didn't approach that from how much was paid or anything except that it ought to be handled in a sound way fiscally, as some states were not doing. Some states were depleting the reserves and that was his point. Hardly a special interest but the closest thing to it. And Paul Thompson and I went back up there some months later thinking we would get some money and he did give Paul a little money and when we got out after a little while, we looked at it and it was five hundred dollars, which of course we duly reported. But that wasn't very much money. He probably thought it was a lot of money, which again was interesting.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you think that's the greatest extent he ever got involved in a campaign, to your knowledge?
TERRY SANFORD:
I have no way of knowing and he may very well in times past. He was always very much concerned with politics and government and in spite of some of the criticism of Nader and others that were heaped on him later, he was just a truly outstanding citizen. I came to know him later and of some of the things he did, including in effect financing the state during the depth of the Depression. Temporarily, when the state couldn't borrow money, he borrowed money for the state. So, I later reciprocated by making it possible for him to go in and out of the White House to talk to the President's

Page 10
domestic advisor almost at will. I don't know . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Who was that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, I can't think of his name right this second, but he was the person assigned by Kennedy to handle the domestic affairs that the White House was concerned with . . . well, Mr. Cannon was very much concerned with the two-price cotton system and the lack of any kind of restraints on imports, a fairly complicated matter of the textile industry at that time and I don't know but what he did them more good than they did him. Because he certainly was speaking from fifty years of experience in the business. In any event, that's all he got out of help in me. Oh, he might have occasionally recommended someone for the Medical Care Commission or something, I don't know about that, but he never made any demands on me and in effect, I put him in the White House to help me, because the problem of the textile industry was mine as governor and I made that contact for him to confer with these people because I felt the need.
BRENT GLASS:
How about the tobacco industry?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I was given an opportunity by the then personnel director of R. J. Reynolds, who was a friend of mine, to meet with the chairman of the board and the president and the top flight people on the, as I recall, seventeenth floor of the RJR Building. They asked me if I would pledge to be against a tobacco tax, after asking me a lot of other questions that I had answered satisfactorily.
BRENT GLASS:
This is before the election?
TERRY SANFORD:
It was while I was campaigning. And I wouldn't make that promise. I told them that I was against all taxes but that if we were going to have the right kind of an educational system, we had to have a proper tax

Page 11
base and everybody knew that North Carolina didn't have a proper tax base and so I couldn't possibly get committed to be against any particular tax until we knew what the problems were, that I didn't know whether a tobacco tax would be appropriate. I certainly wouldn't promise to have one but neither would I promise not to have one and the only promise I would make was that before recommending a tobacco tax I would give them a chance to come and talk me out of it. I didn't get any support from them.
BRENT GLASS:
How do you react to the news this past spring, I guess it was, about Mr. Wade?
TERRY SANFORD:
I thought that was just a very shameful corporate performance, to try to make a whipping boy out of a person that obviously didn't make the basic decision and to protect the hierarchy, which is what they did. In the first place, that's a multi-billion dollar corporation that we are talking about and it was less than $100,000. They ought to simply have said, "we in the past, as others, had a slush fund and we are not going to do it anymore." As I tried to explain to some of the students that raised questions here, it's not really a question of being immoral as much as being technically illegal. It's technically legal, for example, in several states to make corporate contributions. In most states, it's not technically legal and so what they did was by a devious means to put money in a slush fund. How wrong that was, it obviously wasn't right, but to attempt to disgrace a person that had spent his whole life in the corporation because he was taking orders from the chairman of the board, struck me as being far more improper than the original sin of having a slush fund. I didn't get any of the slush fund, I might say, but a great many corporations operated that way then. It was the

Page 12
accepted practice to find a way within the law to give money away. Well, it turned out obviously that they got a little careless and it wasn't quite within the law in the sense that they might coerce corporate officials to make contributions to the slush fund or whatever device they used. Or maybe they gave them a bonus and let them put the bonus in the slush fund. In any event, it wasn't right, but most corporations, I think, said, "All right, we made that mistake." Some major corporations have been way up in the millions. I just thought they got on a kind of a moral high horse that wasn't justified, but that's not really a part of history.
BRENT GLASS:
Just to follow up on what Key had to say, and then we can leave the subject for other things, he's talking about the economic oligarchy and he said, "The effectiveness of the oligarchy's control has been achieved through the elevation to office of persons fundamentally in harmony with its viewpoint. It's interests, which are often the interests of the state are served without prompting." In your experience, has this . . . it sounds like this is sort of an implicit kind of thing, not an overt kind of . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
One thing, maybe now as historians look back, this country has let political rhetoric overwhelm good common sense. I think North Carolina did not do that and at times, North Carolina probably had the leadership that was too conservative or too pro-business or too anti-labor. I think in fairness to . . . well, I'll say first of all that I think Governor Hodges was one of the best governors that the state has had, but at the same time, he was anti-labor, I think, to a degree that didn't serve the state well. He attempted . . . well, he did bust the union at the Henderson Mills and it couldn't have been done without him and he took an extremely harsh view of

Page 13
things of that kind. He gave very broad support to the so-called Right to Work Law in this state. So, there are excesses in the support of business but after all, North Carolina needed the business and it needed sound business and it needed business that could create productive jobs. So, most governors have attempted to promote that, but I think they promoted it within reason.
BRENT GLASS:
How does the absence of a significant organized labor force in North Carolina effect politics?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, if you wanted to be half way fair, or certainly if you wanted to be fair to organized labor as such, it cost you politically. It cost me politically to be known as a person that thought labor unions were all right, let alone not being an advocate of it one way or the other. I just simply thought that the labor union movement in this country had been very beneficial to the whole economy and for North Carolina too, indirectly because of the assistance of labor unions. Even the Burlington and Cannon Mills people would admit that they were keeping ahead of the unions in what they were doing. So, we benefited from the union movement. I attempted to be fair and always was and have no regrets, but I don't doubt that it cost me votes, especially in the hosiery business and to some extent, the small furniture business in the High Point-Thomasville area. There happened to be a fellow over there that ran a regular crusade against me because I was pro-labor, he said, and he was in charge of the kind of strong arm effort to keep labor out of that area.
BRENT GLASS:
Who was that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, I can't think of his name. It's a very peculiar name . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

Page 14
BRENT GLASS:
Once you won the election and you were sworn in as governor, do you remember your thoughts the day of the inauguration? What was running through your mind at that moment?
TERRY SANFORD:
[laughter]
BRENT GLASS:
The reason that I'm asking, you once commented about that or I once saw something that you wrote where you gestured to some thoughts that you had had on entering office and I was just wondering if you would want to follow up on that.
TERRY SANFORD:
No, I don't remember precisely. I remember that I had to think a great thought as the Chief Justice completed the oath of office and the great thought that came across my mind aimsly was that "now, Margaret Rose will get the governor's widow's pension," which I think, was two hundred dollars a month. I laughed, but I pretty well knew what I wanted to do. I pretty well was sure of winning after it got going. I wasn't surprised by the fact that I was being sworn in and I was reasonably well set to get on with what I thought needed to be done. So, I don't mean that I was not excited by the fact that had taken place, I was. I should have been and it was a great honor, whatever else it was. But at the same time, you know, I wasn't giggling.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. So, you were mentally prepared for that moment. I thought to talk a little bit about decision making during those years. The decision you had to make was to assemble a team of advisors, aides . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we came out of the campaign with a great many people that were tried and tested and true and you had a problem then of picking among them for whatever job you might want to ask them to do. Now, when I say "job," I'm talking about all these hundreds of unpaid state jobs before

Page 15
we had the so-called reorganization where the people who were more the decision makers in terms of policy than the bureaucracy. I'm afraid that reorganization has turned that around. But we needed to pick about sixteen or eighteen people for the Highway Commission, for example, about twelve or fifteen for the Board of Conservation and Development. About eight or ten for the State Ports Authority, all of those agencies were extremely influential in establishing and carrying out state policies, so you wanted to get the best possible people. Well, we knew the best possible people just from years of working. Not that we didn't come across some other good ones, Cloyd Philpott, the lieutenant governor, had one or two people that I didn't know particularly but that he wanted appointed to some of those positions and which I was delighted to do. We simply drew on his resources.
BRENT GLASS:
Now, he died in . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
He died in the first summer.
BRENT GLASS:
The first summer you were in office?
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes. I never really had a lieutenant governor.
BRENT GLASS:
He was a fairly capable person, himself.
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, extremely capable. In fact, in my judgement, should without any question have easily been elected as my successor.
[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
BRENT GLASS:
Who were some of the people that you . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we had a relatively small group of people. Bert Bennett had been the campaign manager and then the party chairman. Paul Thompson had been my close friend and finance chairman and then was national committeeman Tom Lambeth had been my aide in the campaign and then later my administrative

Page 16
assistant. Hugh Cannon had been an aide in the campaign and later director of administration, mostly the people that had run the campaign continued to help select the people that we would put into these various things. Into my office for personal staff, I brought the press secretary that had been my campaign secretary. I brought Tom Lambeth, who in effect had been the administrative assistant to be the administrative assistant. I brought Hugh Cannon to be the counsel at that time, later I made him something else. Joel Fleishmann, who we later brought back as the counsel to the governor, went on . . . though he had worked some in the campaign, he went on to Yale and then when the legislature was over and Cannon went to the Director of Administration job, Fleishmann came back to that, but we would probably sit around and say, "All right, we've got to have a person from the Southeast for the Highway Commission." We would probably talk to two or three people in that area about it . . [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
BRENT GLASS:
We were talking about assembling a team of advisors. Did you feel obligated to bring on people who had been involved in other administrations or did you try to . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we made the decisions on the merits each time. Of course, until the legislature got out of town, you didn't make too many changes anyhow. You made some, but by and large, appointments ran, I think, usually from around July 1, which meant that you let the legislature get out of town before you got a new Highway Commission and the C&D Board would meet a couple of more times before the new governor's C&D people would come in and that gave you time to breathe. On the other hand, there were some changes that you needed to make. I needed to get Mel Broughton out of the chairmanship of the

Page 17
Highway Commission and Merrill Evans, who was going to be my chairman, in. So, I simply asked for his resignation and I asked in a gentle way and I got it. Of course, I'm sure that I could have fired him but I didn't want to do that and in fact, I had a party for him and we gave him a little present at the Governor's Mansion, which I didn't have any obligation to do, he didn't support me. But that's not why I got rid of him, we were ready to assemble the new team and on the other hand, the chief industry hunter was Bill Henderson. He was no political ally of mine, but he was doing a good job and I asked him to stay. Luther Hodges had brought him into the government. The head of the prison department was a man named George Randall. He had come to me in the middle of the campaign and said, "You know, I supporting you . . . " he was from Mooresville . . . "but Governor Hodges wants me to take over the prison department and I told him that I would if you approved," which was kind of surprising, but it showed his degree of independence. Hodges had brought him into government from a Mooresville cotton mill and made him, I think, personnel director and then something else, maybe purchasing director, and then offered him the opportunity to be Director of Prisons, which he knew nothing about, but it was a move of genius because he became the best in the country. Well, anyhow, I knew who I wanted to be head of the prison department and he was already head of it. There were others that we kept on. Cotrane was Director of Administration. Coltrane had been Scott's number one enemy but I saw no reason to make him my number enemy. He was a very valuable man and I kept him and when I moved him out of that job I put him in charge of something that really became the high mark of his entire life. We let him head the Good Neighbor

Page 18
Council. So, I wasn't anxious to fire people, I was anxious to use the best people available.
BRENT GLASS:
I had heard that there were a lot of the old Scott crowd who had expected to move in or had expected some key positions in the Sanford Administration. Did you find any resentment from . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, some of them got jobs. Ben Roney, who had been Scott's administrative assistant, was a great old friend of mine and still is, but I wasn't about to make him my administrative assistant, which I think he wanted to be. Because I didn't think that he would give the kind of style I wanted to project. So, I made him Director of Secondary Roads and he did an outstanding job. He knew a whole lot about secondary roads from Scott's Administration and he knew a lot about politics and a lot of secondary roads is a skillful handling of the political side. There is no fair way to do it. If you set up a scale, as Governor Hodges did, by the use and usage . . . for example, a church got so many points, a graveyard got so many points, a school house got so many points, the number of residents on the road got so many points, the traffic count got so many points, well, you simply at any minimal level had more roads than you could pave in twenty years that would qualify. So, it became a thing of handling it diplomatically and paving where you best felt it would serve most of the people without having any computerized way to make a decision. But Roney did a very, very good job and he was very helpful to me in the legislature, also. But I didn't give him the key position that he had in Bob Scott's Administration, as he had for his father and I think that one of Bob Scott's problems was Roney. Not that Roney is bad, but Roney simply . . . there was too much

Page 19
politics in Scott's office. I don't approve of people like Dukakis who wouldn't hire anybody in Massachusetts that had been in his campaign staff in government. I had more confidence in my campaign staff. They were good, honorable people and I had tried them. So, most all of them that wanted to work had some place. It might not have been quite the place that they wanted. I don't know what I would have done with the Commissioner of Revenue, who was an old classmate of mine, Jim Currie, but I didn't think that he had been particularly responsive to my campaign. I might have kept him because he was highly competent, but he got a job immediately with the Carolina Power and Light Company, so that opened up that. You had a certain number of people that were ready to jump in anticipation, maybe, so if they got a good offer, they went. The Adjutant General was Capus Waynick, who had been appointed amid considerable criticism from the National Guardsmen, because he had no real military experience, a good friend of mine, campaign manager for Scott in the first primary when . . . well, when he ran for governor and had been very helpful to Scott when I was managing his Senatorial campaign and furthermore, I liked and admired him. He's my kind of liberal. It turned out that he was so competent that he had really won their respect, but he came to me and said, "I don't want to stay, I'm not going to stay. I told the governor that I wouldn't stay beyond this time and I would just like to get out. I'm getting old." I later called him back to head my effort to have a liason with the blacks amid all the demonstrations and he did an outstanding job. But that opened that job up and I put in General Bowers, who became probably the most popular Adjutant General they've ever had. He, of course, knew the National Guard first hand. I didn't have much to do with the school people, they were all

Page 20
in place. I did reappoint the chairman and symbolically, I wanted to indicate where my policy was, so the first appointment I made was Dallas Herring reappointed as chairman of the State Board of Education.
BRENT GLASS:
What was the symbolism behind that?
TERRY SANFORD:
That we wanted to make education number one.
BRENT GLASS:
Let's go into that. There are a number of decisions that . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, to go on with appointments . . . we made some bad appointments, maybe. I think that I would have to search a long time to pick them out. Certainly, appointments at the higher level were very good. The two Council of State members that I had to appoint because of deaths, Ed Lanier became the Insurance Commissioner and has since retired. The industry didn't like him very much but the industry doesn't like any Insurance Commissioner. When they find one that they do like, you'd better watch out. I appointed Jim Graham Agriculture Commissioner and he still is.
BRENT GLASS:
As far as substantive decision making in office, we could go into a number of things, but I wanted to go into things in particular for this session. One was the issue of the food tax, which became an issue and still is trotted out in campaigns, depending on which side you are on, but as a campaign issue.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, it's demogoguery. It's easy to talk about the food tax without knowing what you are talking about, but let's look at how you make that kind of a tough decision that you know is going to be damaging politically. In the first place, in my judgement, a man who wants to hold that kind of political office ought not to mind making an unpopular decision

Page 21
that hurts him politically if it helps the state. So, that never bothered me. I didn't set my life on a political career and if I had, I still would have made the same decisions. So, I had made no commitments except that we would have taxes if we needed them to support the schools. We would hope that the revenue would be good, but I was very careful to keep myself absolutely positioned as having almost advocated a tax while running. Certainly, I came right to the edge of saying that I will propose it if it is needed. I think that we already talked about that. So, I was positioned to do it and it became obvious that we needed it. It was pretty much obvious before except that you could sort of hope that the expanding economy would be good enough, but it wasn't. Furthermore, we didn't have a sound base. The sales tax that had been passed in the mid-thirties, including everything, including food but then riddled with exemptions, including food, which was the largest . . . it wasn't a question of a food tax, it was a question of a sales tax that was across the board. The enemies call it the food tax. I always called it the school tax. [laughter] All right, so I began calling people in. I first of all delivered the budget message and said, "But this is not enough. If we are going to have the kind of schools we want, I'll tell you right now that I am going to add these items of a hundred and ten million dollars to the school budget . . . " of which at that time, we were talking about vitually 10% of the budget. Now, it's gotten so out of hand that I don't know what a hundred million dollars would be, but then it was a sizeable amount of money . . . and "I'll be back with a special message on finance and I will tell you where I think the money can come from." I had promised to do that.

Page 22
I didn't say to them, "We are going to need it so you find it." I figured that I had better take the burden and take the leadership. I did not have in mind what it was going to be, because at the time I hadn't seen the estimates of revenue to know how much of that hundred and ten million we would need. So, I began to talk to the Commission of Revenue and I began to talk to legislative leaders and other people that I had confidence in who knew what we were talking about and we looked at everything. I also very carefully had every part of it researched so that I knew what every tax could be, what it would bring in, what it would add. We looked at the tobacco tax very carefully. From my point of view, that would have been the easiest thing politically. Now, we would have gotten some flack from the tobacco farmers, but still it would have gone through without much lasting flack because every other state but one had a tobacco tax. There were two considerations there. One, it was the state's principal business when you take the agricultural and manufacturing aspects of it and the argument of the tobacco people was that if North Carolina put the tax on, everybody else will just keep putting higher taxes on it. I don't know whether that's true or not but a great many people felt that was true and made out a pretty good case. But the main reason was that there was no way that we could tax tobacco to get more than about twenty million dollars then. I've forgotten precisely what the amount that would have been on the sales, but maybe five or six cents, which was more than you could put at one time realistically, and more than you should have perhaps . . . to jump from nothing one of the higher taxes then would have been bad. And it wouldn't have given us enough money if we had done it. We didn't need it in addition to removing the exemptions to the food tax coming from the sales tax. So, I

Page 23
looked at the increased income tax - nothing. Increased beer, whiskey and wine tax - nothing. We actually did increase those by something like 25% and brought in five or six million dollars. There just wasn't enough money on those things. So, you came back to the fact that the only real tax available to states anyhow was the consumer tax of some kind.
BRENT GLASS:
What about corporate tax?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, oh, of course. Without saying, corporate as well as personal income. Oh yes, that would have brought in ten or twelve million dollars and would have had the damaging effect at the time when we were trying to add to the industry. Now, if it had corrected our financial problems, that would have been one thing. If it just served as an irritant and didn't help the schools either, it would have been a very foolish decision. So, you weighed both of those things. Well, I obviously don't have before me the precise comparitive figures, but as we began to look, there was nothing that would do the job except increasing the sales tax from 3% to 4% or removing some forty exemptions. Well, all the tax people recommended removing the exemptions and leaving it at 3%, because it was so very difficult to administer. As a matter of fact, we got a windfall of maybe twenty million dollars. Again, I wouldn't want to have to prove this figure and somebody can research it in the future if it is of any importance. But we got a considerable windfall, because we now had a precise way to administer the sales tax, whereas before it would be necessary to send orders in, too look through invoices and see if you charged taxes on brooms when you weren't supposed to or vice-versa, or whatever the exemption was. Some poor little storekeeper might be assessed so much that

Page 24
he would be put out of business and it just wasn't a good tax administratively. So right now, to talk about taking off the food tax, they don't know what they are talking about. They can talk about taking off all the sales tax but they are simply going to get back into disorder with no real advantage to anyone if they remove just the tax on several items. Then of course next year, "why not take taxes off coffins," or whatever. You know, that's what happened before. They took it off of one and then they began taking it off of one thing and another until ultimately we had just a hodgepodge. [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
TERRY SANFORD:
. . . talking to a number of people in front of the fireplace and the study or what I call the library because I started a library at the mansion and put it in there, and asking them right around, "What do you think?" Now, these were people like General Bowers, long experience in government, the Adjutant General, "What do you think?" Bill Johnson, the Commissioner of Revenue, "What do you think?" And Bill, of course, was the best informed in terms of technical advice. Probably to Roney, "What do you think?" And I listened to all of them but it became absolutely obvious that if we wanted to get enough money to have a real dramatic push in the school system that there wasn't but one place to get it and that was the sales tax. And then you had the question of which sales tax is better, a 4% across the board on items then taxed or a removal of exemptions. Well, I think that just a logical decision was the removal of exemptions. Now, we did several things. We increased, among other things, welfare payments to more than offset a 3% tax on food and we worried about the people at the lower end, but on the other hand, when you started analyzing what each person paid in spite of the

Page 25
fact that theoretically and philosophically this is a regressive tax, when you think in terms of the actual amount of money that was involved in anybody's budget, it wasn't all that regressive. There was a certain amount of merit in everybody paying a little something in order to have an orderly tax base that would do the job, that would literally benefit people at that level of income more than people at higher levels of income.
They send their children to private schools, anyhow, if public schools aren't good. So, I had no problems philosophically or politically in terms of good administration, it all began to come into focus that this was so obviously the best way that we said, "let's go with it." And I did. I didn't tell anybody, I might say, at all. I was so determined to keep the advantage on my side to get it past the legislature and not let the opponents get on me until I knew they knew what it was. I had it typed by a woman that had worked in my campaign that had gone on to get married and had not stayed in government. I had her come over and type it in the mansion. They didn't know about it until I was ready to go to the legislature. Nobody. Not even Tom Lambeth, not even the Commissioner of Revenue. I just didn't feel that I needed to burden any of them with that decision once I made it. But I was also sure that the consensus was that this was right. Some of them might have doubted that I had the guts to do it but they were still advising that I do it.
BRENT GLASS:
I have a couple of follow up questions on that. First of all, I have heard it said that you and your aides were mislead in some respects as far as anticipated revenue by the Treasurer's office?
TERRY SANFORD:
You are always mislead by the Treasurer's office, because by nature he has to be conservative. But on the other hand, if you looked at

Page 26
the revenues at the end of that year, while they were better than he had anticipated, they would not have been that good and would not have been good enough to cover the budget . . . as I recall, we had a twenty-five or thirty million dollar surplus. But we went into it with a twenty or twenty-five million dollar surplus. So, it wasn't all that far off. But the Treasurer is supposed to be conservative because we have to have a balanced budget. If he estimates 15 x for example as revenue, and it comes out to be thirteen and you appropriate it against fifteen, then you have got all kinds of drastic cutting. We cannot operate a balanced budget without operating to a surplus. You have to end with a surplus and start with a surplus and people that don't understand what that means think that you end up with a big surplus and therefore you didn't do it right. Well, they forget that you started with a surplus. You've got to end up with a surplus if you don't want to end up with a deficit. Now, how big that surplus is, is a matter of pure guess work. Obviously you've got facts and trends, but who could have guessed the downturn of the economy that would have hurt our state revenues as it has in the last few years. We didn't predict that properly and we had all kinds of trouble. So, I expect the Treasurer to be conservative and I was not bound by his figures. I projected my own figures in the Department of Revenue also. So, I didn't have to pay any attention to the Treasurer if I didn't want to. But I agreed with a conservative approach. You had to do that to be on a sound fiscal basis.
BRENT GLASS:
You don't think then that the governor's office traditionally in North Carolina has been too deferential to the State Treasurer?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, it so happens that we have had a truly outstanding

Page 27
conservative, in the best sense of the word, as the Treasurer. I was probably the least deferential to him and he resented it. [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
TERRY SANFORD:
. . . told the newspapers that when I was a little kid and he was a lawyer in Laurinburg and his sisters taught me in school and I figured that he had dominated the Hodges Administration too much and that I would pay him proper respect but I wouldn't let him run the office. It wasn't any disrespect to Edwin Gill, I have the highest respect for him but I knew what I wanted to do. Luther Hodges came in without the deep background in state government that I had and I think that he let Edwin have more responsibility than he should have and he resented my cutting off some of it. But I did pay him proper respect and I did take seriously anything he had to say because he knew what he was talking about. But he didn't mislead me and furthermore if we had projected any other figures, I think any substantially different figures . . . we did project a little more liberal result than he did, but if we had, it would have been irresponsible. If you are going to operate a balanced budget, you have got to always have a cushion.
BRENT GLASS:
Did it hurt you politically, that decision?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, there is no question. But I knew that before I made it.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
BRENT GLASS:
This is an interview with Terry Sanford conducted on August 20, 1976 by Brent Glass. This is the second tape of the August 20th interview.

Page 28
TERRY SANFORD:
. . . people think. It's very interesting that nobody, no governor has proposed repealing it except Holshouser attempted a sneaky little suggestion of repeal and I helped call his hand. I issued a statement that I thought it ought to be repealed, if we could repeal anything. Well obviously, we probably couldn't repeal anything. I suspect that we are spending more money now than we should be spending. It has just multiplied so many times in just the brief period since I was there, but the answer to that would be to reduce the overall tax to 2% if you were going to substantially reduce, because otherwise, you wouldn't have anything to administer. Now, no governor has suggested . . . and you may have noticed that George Wood at the last minute, obviously in honorable desperation, suggested it but he suggested it in a way that would give him some leeway. He was going to take off a penny a year or something like that. Well, when you got to looking at how you are going to administer three cents in some counties on food and four cents on other items and then the next year, two cents, it would have been so unworkable that you had to come to some other conclusion. But the people that thought they were going to win are not proposing it because the state cannot live without it. And . . . I'm not going to, but if I were to run another campaign, I would hit hard on "we need it and you've got to have the nerve to pay it." I watch the polls that we've taken from that point on. The opposition to this tax has always been in the neighborhood of twenty-five per cent and I . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Coming from where?
TERRY SANFORD:
North Carolina.
BRENT GLASS:
No, from what . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, I see what you mean, from who . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Within the political leadership.

Page 29
TERRY SANFORD:
Conservative, Republicans and racists that were made with me for other reasons. It wasn't the tax, it was what they used. There aren't that many people that want to do away with that tax. Now politically, the labor unions have to say that they are against it, it's a "regressive" tax by definition. Any consumer tax is regressive.
BRENT GLASS:
That's what I meant by where the opposition was . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
It was purely political in my judgement. It had nothing to do with the merits. Not that a few people are not against it on the merits.
BRENT GLASS:
One other political decision within your administration, that on the race issue, which really hit a crucial point during your administration. Do you think there was any irony to that, the fact that the civil rights movement throughout the country was really reaching a climax during your administration when you had run a campaign in 1960 being somewhat on the defensive on race, feeling that you were somewhat fighting a racist campaign?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we had a racist campaign thrown against us, with the last minute. And as I think we pointed out the other day, with my experience in the Frank Graham campaign, I didn't have any question as to where I stood. I had the question of how to handle a delicate situation and keep it in balance, but I never did really consider how to make a decision on that. I always knew that we ought to do the decent thing and the question was how to translate the decent thing into action. There wasn't any question in my mind that we were going to let people conduct peaceful demonstrations. I didn't want to break that up, except under some unusual circumstances where I felt the law and order could be best preserved by a

Page 30
curfew or violence might be thwarted if we put a stop to it at a particular crucial point. But by and large, we let people demonstrate and the law enforcement officers in this state were trained not to break up demonstrations of young blacks, but to keep young blacks and their objectives apart and we pretty effectively did it. I didn't have to make a particular decision about that, I already knew that I wanted to do it. I didn't have to sit around and talk to anybody about whether I ought to do it or not.
BRENT GLASS:
So, this was not a conscious policy that came out of deliberation?
TERRY SANFORD:
No. I grew up, more or less, already having made that decision twenty-five years earlier. Now, the only decision that I finally did make was to have a television speech in which I said that the demonstrations had to stop, they were past the point of having any effective value in communicating what the problem is, so I wanted all these young blacks to meet with me. I brought Capus Waynick in and then later, we started the Good Neighbor Council. Well, all those were ideas of how to carry out an approach to fairness, but I didn't have to sit down and decide to be fair.
BRENT GLASS:
I was rereading that book that you gave me, North Carolina and the Negro and it seems like Chapel Hill was one of the major situations in which you . . . and I also read John Ehle's The Free Men, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at that recently . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, yes. Well John Ehle's book is a fair history of that. You ought not to overlook the fact that he reports rather casually that all of those people got out of jail and were rehabilitated, or put in

Page 31
a position where they sort of start without having this hanging over them. What was overlooked in John's book . . . I did all that, nobody else in the state had the power to do it but the governor. I cleaned all that up.
BRENT GLASS:
Commuting their sentences and . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
All of them. John helped place a great many of those people, but the only way that they could get out was with my judgement that they ought to be out. What bothered me about that was that all we had done was so vastly misunderstood by people who wanted to take advantage of it for their own benefit. Floyd McKissick was one of them and James Farmer was another one of them. Basically the good crusders but what they basically wanted to achieve was proper, but to come here in the middle of a hot campaign, where the old racist, Dr. Lake was running again and to deliberately plan to have a confrontation that couldn't help but elect Lake, or certainly defeat the more enlightened candidate. Certainly Moore was not unenlightened, but it had a great deal to do with defeating Preyer. At the same time, they were debating in the national Congress, with Sam Ervin leading the way, and Sam in his own time was a pretty good racist, too. He later reformed. At that time he was leading the fight against open accomodations laws. We were in the middle of a Democratic primary to elect a sucessor. I resented it, among other things. I also felt that I had been pushed around long enough and when Farmer and McKissick promised to shut down the government, I reminded them that they didn't have the power and I wasn't going to let them do it. I talked very tough to them and I should have talked tough to them. Lake's political comment in the

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campaign was that I was too slow in talking to them. That may or may not be true, but they stopped, of course. They didn't carry forward their threats and it's a damn good thing they didn't.
BRENT GLASS:
Had they provoked you in other ways?
TERRY SANFORD:
No. I had been very patient. I understood their problems and I understood their frustrations. I had been extremely patient with them and maybe, as Lake says, too patient. I don't think so. I think that you had to understand a century of being downtrodden and finally they were beginning to see some light and you could expect some excesses. We had to be careful that they didn't damage society and didn't damage someone else.
We had to be understanding. We had to be patient and I intended to be patient. But here I saw them destroying the state and I think they set the state back. I think they defeated Richardson Preyer. I don't think that there is any question that the combination of racism kept Preyer out of the majority that he had to have. Now, other people might take a different view. Maybe Preyer wasn't as good a campaigner. I don't. If it hadn't been for the race issue, we would have breezed through and this simply further aggrevated what . . . now, you need to remember that Sam Ervin was openly supporting Dan Moore and so Dan Moore had all the benefit of Sam Ervin's anti-open accomodation speeches without ever opening his mouth. He was the beneficiary of all of it. We were on the losing edge of that because by implication, I was for open accomodations. I had been working for it in North Carolina. I wasn't stupid enough to go testify in Washington in favor of it, but I was identified with being for it and advocating it voluntarily. Lake, of course, was on the other side.

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Well, to add to those problems the problems of Chapel Hill, I had a right to be mad about it. John Ehle's book picks up only the tail end of what he helped us do in racial matters, too. John was one of the most valuable members of my administration. I'm not critical of that book. I'm simply saying that that took the tail end of it. He fairly reflected my view. He reflected what I had to say about the campaign, coming back from the campaign speech the day before the second primary. You know, there is nothing in there except that people think I was too harsh on them if they read just that book and don't realize that no other state came close to North Carolina in patience and understanding and working it out and opening it up at that stage of American life.
BRENT GLASS:
Reading that account, it seems like that was a point at which there was some division within your staff as to how to handle the Chapel Hill . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, Tom Lambeth and several people kept me from being as mean as I might have been, because I had felt that we had been betrayed. Not deliberately, they just didn't understand what they were doing.
BRENT GLASS:
Coming from the outside and . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, it wasn't just . . . of course, there were insiders there. You know that there were local kids and people, but they were carried into this thing with a failure to understand what it was all about. You know, I didn't really fault them even for their ignorance.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you think that any of this goes back to the whole image of Chapel Hill as being sort of an outpost . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, that too was rather an unfortunate choice, to make Chapel Hill the symbol of this kind of resistence, to accentuate that kind of minor

Page 34
resistence, there were only two or three places and almost everybody else in Chapel Hill had tried on a voluntary basis . . . I say two or three, I really can't think of only two. There are bound to have been more than two, but there weren't many. Chapel Hill had already led the nation and the whole question wasn't so much these two places as much as it was that they wanted the city to pass what literally would have been an unconstitutional . . . well, I don't know whether it would have or not, because it hadn't been decided by a court, but most lawyers thought that the city didn't have the authority to pass an open accomodations law ordinance. But even if they had, Farmer and McKissick, by throwing down that kind of challenge had made it politically impossible for the council to pass it.
BRENT GLASS:
Yes, I was thinking about even politically statewide, Chapel Hill's image and . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well of course, it was in advance of everything else and still, they pick up the little resistence there and make it appear that Chapel Hill is an evil place when it was probably the most enlightened little town in the South at the time. That further added to my resentment. Well, I didn't lose my head. For that matter, we played it very properly but I told them exactly what I told the Ku Kluxers when they threatened to prevent the painting of a little Negro church in eastern North Carolina, when they said that they couldn't be responsible for law and order if these Presbyterians came to paint and I reminded them that they didn't need to be, I was. I staked it out the night before and caught two of them trying to burn it down and I put them in jail.

Page 35
BRENT GLASS:
History is funny in many ways and now, the former mayor of Chapel Hill is the leading vote-getter for lieutenant governor, do you see this is as . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, a sign of the advances that North Carolina has made and the whole country has made and particularly, the South. It's fabulous. It's easy to dispair looking at what needs to be done, but when you see what has been done in fifteen years, it's remarkable. The mayor couldn't have gotten in a greasy Greek restaurant on main street fifteen years ago.
BRENT GLASS:
I bring up these two things, the food tax and civil rights, not to overlook some of the other decisions, but I was just wondering whether these were the most difficult decisions, to review the whole decision-making process of someone in office?
TERRY SANFORD:
I never really found the decision-making all that difficult.
BRENT GLASS:
Some were easier to make than others.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, but once you . . . no, I made the point that whether it's commuting a death sentence or deciding what kind of a tax program to have or what tie to wear in the morning, that all you need are the facts. You know, you've got to know what color the tie is and what color your shirt is and what color your suit is and then you go from there. Now, I don't mean to be frivolous about a serious decision affecting life and death, but really all you've got to know are the facts and getting the facts in an objective way is more difficult than making the decision. Once you do that, making the decision is not all that difficult. I had decisions to make in appointing a Commissioner of Agriculture, for example, and there

Page 36
really weren't many facts. "There's a good man, there's a good man, which one should I appoint?" To some extent, I suppose that personal sentiment entered that kind of a decision. In the death penalty, I decided that although I personally wasn't in favor of it, it wasn't up to me to change the law single-handedly, that wasn't why the Constitution gave the power of clemency to a governor. They gave it to the governor because under unusual circumstances, someone had to act and that was the proper person. But I decided that as a matter of policy that we would thoroughly investigate on our own outside of the regular law enforcement every capital case and if there were any changes, then we would take whatever action was appropriate. I permitted one person to go to the gas chamber and I would have permitted several others, except that they didn't get to them. It wasn't my job, the legislature chose to stick to that position. On the other hand, I commuted sentences that some governors wouldn't have commuted, because I got the facts that indicated they ought to be. The most complicated decision obviously had to be the tax decisions. But there were many, many other things. We wanted to risk doing something about people in poverty. Nobody else ever had. Would that be a political liability? Well, it turned out to be a great political asset, but we didn't know that at the time. Are you going to borrow money to build a phosphate loading center for the Ports Authority, how do you know the phosphate is going to go? Are you going to make a decision to come down on the side of the phosphate companies to go into eastern North Carolina or are you going to keep them out and if you are going to finally let them in, what kind of safeguards do you impose? We had a decision to build a

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ramp at the old blimp hangers, which in effect belonged to the state down at Weeksville out from Elizabeth City, in order that a company could come in there with a contract to repair all of the navy planes that patrolled the coast, they brought them up to date on the radar or whatever, and it was a tremendous contract and it meant a whole lot to the people of Pasquotank County, but can you legitimately get public funds to build a ramp of a hundred thousand dollars or so? Well obviously, just if you figured nothing but the income tax from the payroll, it more than paid the state back and then look at all the other benefits. Somebody said, "You can't do that, you can't use highway money to build a ramp." "Well legally, the Attorney General says that we can if we want to and if it improves business, we ought to." That's really about the only way that you could do it. Someone said, "Yeah, but suppose they don't get a renewal of the contract, what are you going to do with that ramp?" I said, "Well, we are going to take a chance." We built it and we more than got our money back before they didn't need it any longer. So, hardly a day passes that you don't have a decision that involves some risk of criticism. I took the position that the parole procedures in this state were far too restrictive, that we had people in jail that we ought not to have and continuing in prison that ought not to be in prison. Well, every one of those is a tremendous risk. Suppose he gets out and kills and rapes somebody and they can say, "Sanford let him out." Well, I put in this general rule that I wanted everybody reviewed sympathetically, not just those who had high-priced influential lawyers, and I don't mean review them on a routine basis, but as an advocate. You know, "What do we do about

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letting this fellow redeem his life?" I paroled more people than three or four other governors combined and I sweated it out for a few years, but nothing bad ever came of it. But you know, every one of those was a decision that could have backfired. Almost everyday, you had a decision that you could be timid or you could do what you thought best served the state. In this particular case, we had the first declining prison population in the country. Well, I say that's good, especially that it turned out good. Now, I'm not saying that everybody stayed out that we let out, but in any event, no great harm came of it that wouldn't have come otherwise. And it proved that the parole system was what it was supposed to be. Instead of letting people out when they finished their sentence without any supervision, let them out when they had some guidance and nobody has ever gone back and made a study, but I'll bet that more good than bad came of it.
BRENT GLASS:
Let me just ask one final question, I know that you have to wind up. Do you think that Preyer, as he was running, was carrying some unpopular decisions from your administration?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, there is no question about it.
BRENT GLASS:
Is that inevitable in this kind of line?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, apparently it is, but I made a mistake and Mrs. Sanford reminded me that I was making a mistake, but I didn't quite comprehend it. I let Preyer run his own campaign and I let Moore run against me and she kept saying, "Run Preyer's campaign out of the governor's office, like they do in Kentucky, and defend yourself." I went for three or four months without defending myself against really pretty bad and unjustified

Page 39
criticisms . . . now, Moore, I don't blame particularly. He had nothing else to commend him. He really had to run against me, but I ought not to have let him and I did let him. Of course, you can't go back and correct that and he didn't turn out to be a bad governor. He didn't turn out to be a very good governor, but he certainly didn't turn out to be a bad one. I have come to respect him. He's not my kind of governor, but he is the kind of governor who took the timid approach and didn't rock the boat and didn't upset anything and didn't take any gambles, but he wasn't a bad governor. He is a very decent person. So, it didn't turn out all that bad, but Preyer would have carried forward with some creative things that I think the state would have been much better off with had he been governor. But even if we could have gotten away with what we did if we didn't have to contend with the race issue, and all of that came back to me because it's hard for people to remember, but I was about the only person in the South at that time that was willing to commend the President for what he did in Mississippi, for example. There was terrible resentment that people couldn't get over easily. I'm sure that they are over it now, but it carried forward to '72 when Wallace and I were running and there is no question that that was what it was.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, I was going to ask, does it seem that they are over it now?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, if they're not, it doesn't make any difference, because they've got time to get over it and I don't need anything else.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, I'm thinking about the lieutenant governor?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, I would say that obviously, the changes that have come

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about have been dramatic, and it's awfully hard for people to think now, "Why would that make any difference in 1964?" Well, it just made all the difference in the world in '64, the bitterness, the resentment, the hatred, on both sides. A lot of that is dispelled now.
BRENT GLASS:
It will be interesting to see if this second primary doesn't have any of that in it.
TERRY SANFORD:
I don't think that he will have any of it, but I don't think that there is any way that he can win. He is only a thousand or so votes ahead and he needed to be ten percent ahead. I'm surprised that Green made that good a showing, but I see no way with any kind of effort or any kind of campaign, there are just not quite enough people ready to make that jump and he doesn't have enough margin to where he doesn't need all those votes.
BRENT GLASS:
So, it won't be overtly racist?
TERRY SANFORD:
I think that Green has been very, very careful not to charge that . . . you know, he said, "The only people that have talked about race are the newspapers, you sure haven't heard me talking about it." I think that's true. You know, I think Green knows that he would make a mistake to bring that up, that he is going to win anyhow and he might as well be decent and he's inclined to be decent. I'll be amazed if he brings it into it, but I don't know. He doesn't need to.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
BRENT GLASS:
I wanted to wind up a little bit with after Preyer's defeat in that primary, how did you conceive of your role in state politics after that, or at that point?

Page 41
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I wasn't worried about my role in state politics. In the first place, the last thing in the world that I ever wanted to be was a political boss. My only interest in politics was that it was the only path to government, but I really didn't have much interest in the political machine, although obviously, since we were successful and they were talking about the "Sanford-Bennett Machine," but I just didn't much have any ambition to do that, I didn't want to be a dominant figure in naming everybody. What I did want to do was to bring a lot of people into government who would then give a new life to it and get away from some of these things that weren't all that evil but were not necessarily that progressive that V.O. Key was talking about. And interestingly, in '72, everybody running for major office had supported me.
BRENT GLASS:
Had worked in your campaign?
TERRY SANFORD:
So, the old factions were gone, it was now mostly people who had come out of our new effort in what we called "The New Day."
Pat Taylor and Skipper Bowles had both been prominent in my campaign and were the two major candidates. The four candidates for lieutenant governor had all been for me, even Robert Morgan, although he had been Lake's campaign manager was originally one of my keys in Scott's campaign, although he didn't have any serious opposition. But everybody running, even Everrett Jordan, to a degree, although he . . .
BRENT GLASS:
He certainly came out of the textile . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh certainly, but he hadn't really been one of my people, but we weren't . . . well, I don't count him, because Galifanakis, who was running, was my supporter. No, I don't suppose that campaign was going on in '72, but

Page 42
in any event, everybody running had come out of the Sanford side of the party, which was all I ever wanted to do. Now, I didn't want to go to the Senate and I didn't want a job in Washington. So, I wasn't really looking for any political influence. All I wanted to do was to be sure that the progress in North Carolina would continue. So, that wasn't what dismayed me. What dismayed me was that Dan Moore wouldn't carry anything on. Now, I was somewhat mistaken. He did his best, as I indicated earlier, and I came to have a right warm affection for him.
BRENT GLASS:
How about after you left office? Did you project yourself politically in any way in the state? Did you see yourself serving any other kind of elective office, either statewide or in the Senate?
TERRY SANFORD:
No, I had no desire to go to the Senate. I made one pass at it in '67, '68, when Sam Ervin was running for re-election and gave some more than serious thought to it, but it wasn't so much that I wanted to be in the Senate as that I thought this might be a good a way to teach a lesson to Sam Ervin.
BRENT GLASS:
In what way?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, Sam Ervin had been pretty much a conservative-reactionary, on the conservative side of reactionary, I must say, and had been a constitutional racist. I mean, he hadn't been a blatant crude racist, but he was against all kinds of legislation to open up opportunities for minorities and he did it on high constitutional justifications. I thought that he ought to be defeated. But I also saw it as maybe letting me emerge on the national scene, and while I never have been really driven by that ambition or desire, it was lurking in my mind that it could be done and that

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it was time to be done. In fact, I had had a conversation with Jack Kennedy about how the South could now move into national politics again, which of course, I began contending. That's what made me get into it in the Presidential race in '72 at the last minute, which of course, was so belated that it was a bad decision. But it could have been a good decision if we had had a few lucky breaks. But I had that lurking slightly in my mind by '68, it was four years later, but not so strong that I would make the sacrifice that you have to make in so many ways to be a national candidate. I just wasn't driven to it, but if I had any political notion, it would have been in that direction. Then, the fallback position that I gave some serious thought to, was running for governor again. Now, I didn't want to run in '68, because Bob Scott was running and Bob Scott's father and I had been very close. In fact, I don't think that Bob Scott would have been lieutenant governor if it hadn't been for me. I don't mean to take undue credit for it, he wouldn't have been lieutenant governor if it hadn't been for him, if it hadn't been for x, y, and z. But he certainly wouldn't have been lieutenant governor if it hadn't been for me. So, I felt a great deal of pride in him and considered him, still do, a close ally of mine. I knew that he was intending to run and in fact, I was intending that he would run. So, I wasn't caught up with that too much, but then I thought, "Why don't I run for governor in '72?" I didn't see anybody on the scene that I thought was really going to do it, or somebody that I thought would cause too many problems. I would say, although they might disagree with me and certainly at this late date might disagree with me, but I don't think that Pat Taylor or Skipper Bowles would have run if

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I had run. In fact, I vaguely recall that both of them told me. Whether they were just saying that . . . but I don't think that they would have and if they had, I think that I could have overcome them, because I still had a fairly good line of connections throughout the state. Be that as it may, you asked me if I was thinking about anything else, well, I was thinking about it and I was beginning to move in that direction in the summer of '68. I spent most of the summer of '68 working in Humphrey's campaign. Then that fall, I was the national chairman of Citizens for Humphrey-Muskie. So, I spent six months that year, probably, messing with Johnson and Humphrey, but I had the law practice going pretty well by then and I didn't have any financial problems and I could do that on an independent basis. I was giving serious thought when the Duke job came my way. My choice then was, "do I want to go to Duke, an unknown arena, or do I want to run for governor?" I decided that I wanted to do something that presented a new challenge.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, let's backtrack a little bit . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I've led you a little bit astray, but I almost had to to answer your question.
BRENT GLASS:
Right.
TERRY SANFORD:
But in '64, I was disappointed but not by any means crushed. It wasn't my defeat, although I did think that the state could have been better served by having Preyer as governor. And I still do, but that is not in any way to suggest that Moore was not a good governor.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, let's follow this through. Once the Duke job came along, the notion of running for governor was . . .

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TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, I just dismissed it and in fact, flatly promised Charlie Wade, the chairman of the board here that I would not run for governor or the Senate, that I was through with it. Now, with some emusement, I had to later point out that I never did tell him that I wouldn't run for President. Of course, I wasn't thinking about running for President. [laughter] It would have been somewhat presumptious of me to say, "Oh yeah, I won't run for President either." I just said, "I'm through with that. I've been governor and now I'll try to be president of the university." I think that's a very interesting turn in my life and it was.
BRENT GLASS:
Let's backtrack a little bit, it seems that almost immediately after winning the primary in '60 you were projected onto the national scene rather suddenly. Had you had any contact with national Democratic politicians before 1960?
TERRY SANFORD:
I was one of the co-chairmen for Stevenson. I had been a delegate to two national conventions. I had been, as president of the Young Democrats, one of the few people working for Truman in '48, so I was personally acquainted with some of those people and I wasn't totally without some awareness of what went on at the national level. Then, as the nominee of the Democratic party and in the then recognized most liberal political state in the South, with the reputation of being somewhat on the liberal side, obviously my vote at the 1960 national convention was of some importance. It was important to Johnson, it was important to any candidate. We had four or five candidates, most of them faded, but Symington was in there strong . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Humphrey was . . .

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TERRY SANFORD:
Humphrey had faded before I got to that point. He quit after West Virginia and I was being very careful during the election not to indicate my own preferences. In fact, I wasn't sure that I knew what they were. But you did finally have Symington, Kennedy and Johnson. I think that all things being equal, I would have been for Symington, but all things were not equal and by the time that we got to the point of my being the nominee, Symington was an extremely dark horse. There would have had to be a bloody stalemate for Symington to come forward, but Symington's administrative assistant was an old friend of mine from Chapel Hill, so I had talked with him about it. I then got into one of the two or three bad flaps that I got into and I will not mention all of them at this time, but I allowed to be misinterpreted my meeting with Bobby Kennedy and it was just one of those careless blunders, but it turned out to be right costly.
BRENT GLASS:
When was that meeting?
TERRY SANFORD:
It was about a week or two before the first primary. I didn't want to meet with them, but Louis Harris, the pollster, a classmate of mine at Chapel Hill and who continues to be a close personal friend, was close to the Kennedy's. He wanted to bring Bobby to see me. I didn't have time to fool with him, but on the other hand, you are inclined to do a favor for a friend and it meant something to Lou to be able to bring Bobby down here to talk to me. It looked like I was going to win and it looked like if I did win, I was a pretty good prospect for them. It turned out that they were right, but I didn't know they were right at that time. I hadn't made up my mind. So, I agreed to meet them. We had dinner at the College Inn . . . I think that's the name of it, a motel on the edge of Raleigh. And

Page 47
Hugh Cannon and I went out and had dinner with Lou and Bobby. I believe Bert Bennett was in some other part of the state, or he would have gone. Maybe he did go . . . he did, indeed. Bert went. About the only thing that I remember about Bobby Kennedy at the time was that he had forgotten his belt and he had to keep pulling up his britches. [laughter] He was sick at his stomach and couldn't eat anything but a bowl of clear soup and he knew everything about every state and precisely who was who everywhere. He just had a real grasp of the political situation, which was very impressive. But I didn't make any commitment to them. Then three or four days later, a UPI reporter asked me after the second primary started, if I saw Jack Kennedy when he was in Raleigh? Well, I knew what he meant, he meant Bobby Kennedy. He had already made me mad by asking me if I had conferred with Luther Hodges. Now, both of those questions in the emotion of a second primary, with Lake in there, and my view of the thing was that quite aside from my personal ambitions, I had a banner to carry for the honor of the South and the honor of North Carolina. We were trying to beat a racist campaign, and I thought that an enlightened newspaper reporter ought not to ask nasty questions that really weren't in point. Hodges hadn't been for me. He had been for Seawell and to try to connect me with Hodges . . . if I had said that yes, I had had a conversation with him, then they would immediately have said that Hodges was backing Sanford, which wasn't so. I'm sure that he voted for me and I'm sure that he was then telling his friends that you ought to be for him. I had indeed talked to him the Sunday after the Saturday election. I had already arranged with Mott Blair, his nephew and a close associate of mine, to set it up to be sure that we could get what

Page 48
we could out of it, mainly to get some of his key people and to get Seawell to endorse me. Seawell was kind of a poor loser and we had to really pressure him to get his endorsement, in spite of the fact that he was so opposite from Lake. So, I resented that question and I felt, "I'm tired, I'm worn out and we have three weeks to go . . . " Well, I had not seen Hodges after the second primary began. The second primary didn't begin until Lake called it. At that time, he hadn't called it. So, that was a slight distortion of the full truth. It was true that I hadn't seen Hodges, but again . . . he didn't know how to ask the question. So, I said no. Well, that just shows you that one transgression leads to another. Then he said, "Did you see Jack Kennedy?" I thought, "You little smart-aleck . . . " I said, "No, I didn't see him." Now fortunately, we had a recorder on, we recorded all of our press conferences, not for the rec ord, but they would take excerpts for radio sometimes. Anyway, we always recorded the press conferences. So, that indeed was his question. We played it back. Then I dashed out of that press conference, flew to Asheville, where I had a meeting. I knew before I got to the airport that I had made a mistake. I should have said, "No, you mean Bobby Kennedy. I talked to Bobby Kennedy just as I talked to other candidates and I didn't make any commitment to them. They all want to talk to me." That's what I should have said, but I didn't. I just said, "No."
Well, in about three days, of course, they had all kinds of evidence that I had talked to Bobby. I hadn't attempted to conceal it. We were waited on by a waiter there, they were registered into the motel. I just didn't think beyond that one question and my own personal irritation with that particular reporter. So, I got in all kinds of trouble.

Page 49
They accused me of taking half a million dollars from the Kennedys and that stuff persisted right on through the fall election and I had to answer it, Kennedy had to answer it. I never got any money from them. As a matter of fact, Bert Bennett and I personally signed a fifty thousand dollar note to contribute to their campaign after the convention, to put up the money until we could raise it for the party. We made the first contribution to the national election, the national campaign. So, it was the other way around, but I did get into trouble by saying what I did. Now, where did we start? Where do you want to go from here? I've led you now three months around.
BRENT GLASS:
What I want to follow up on that with is, did it surprise people in the North Carolina delegation when you did announce for Kennedy?
TERRY SANFORD:
Surprise is far too mild a word. It stunned and shocked them. That, of course, was the effect that the Kennedys wanted. They didn't have anybody from the South that they wanted to be for them. They had John Patterson from Alabama, who was such a racist that they wouldn't even let him announce that he was for Kennedy, but they wanted somebody and they wanted me and the election was the last Saturday in June or the fourth Saturday in June, probably the last, and the convention started about the first week in July. There were only about ten days or so inbetween there. I immediately went to a South Carolina beach and stayed at a friend's house to rest up a little bit and I was in touch on the phone with the Kennedy people, Bobby. And after talking with a number of my close friends, Bennett agreed with me, as I was beginning to think, "Absolutely. This is the future of the country, this is the way that it is going. Why should we vote for Lyndon Johnson, who is all right in many ways, maybe, but he's not going to

Page 50
get the nomination. It's just the old sop to the South, you voted for Richard Russell and then you voted for somebody and then you came back and supported the ticket and said, ‘But I didn't vote for that radical northern Democrat, but now he is the Democrat and I'm supporting him.’" Well, I didn't like the hypocrisy of that and I thought that there ought to be a new South. So, I began to lean toward him. The only thing that kept me from making an immediate decision, I was scared of the politics. I was just scared of the repercussions and you know, you don't want to sacrifice yourself needlessly.
Kennedy probably would have won without me and Henry Hall Wilson was a strong advocate within our camp for Kennedy and later became an administrative assistant to President Kennedy. He argued strongly that I should move in that direction. Even Ben Roney, when he viewed the politics of it . . . I'm not sure that Roney didn't think that we had gotten some money from the Kennedys and owed them something, but . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Is that the way that he would view something like that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Much more likely. [laughter] Well, not necessarily, but you see, he would have honored that obligation even if he felt that we had made a mistake, but I told him that we didn't and I'm not sure that he believed it, but he said, "Well, if he did, you've got to be for him. If you owe him something . . . " Now, he was my expert on eastern North Carolina and that's what I was worried about because that was where we had had some problems with racism more than anywhere else. But finally, we all decided that it would be the thing to do. So, I called from Myrtle Beach to Bobby and told him that I had decided to support Jack and he replied, as anybody who knew him would know he would, in his single word, "Terrific!" Then he called back and said that Jack wanted me to second his nomination.

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I said, "I don't want to do that. I appreciate it, appreciate the honor, but I'm doing enough this way, I just don't want that much visibility." He said, "Well, he really wants you to do it." Donald McCoy, my law partner then said, "Don't do that." I said, "I'm not." Well, anyhow . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Did they hope that this would sway delegates their way or . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, of course. You see, they credited it with breaking open New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I said, "Well, I'm going to announce this as soon as I get back to Raleigh." He said, "Oh, no. Don't do that. Wait until you get to Los Angeles." Well, I didn't realize the difficulty of communication from the West Coast to the East Coast newspapers, just the time difference, if nothing else, makes it almost impossible to tell your story. So, that was a blunder on my personal part. Now granted, it served Kennedy's purposes and as Bennett said, "If you are going to be for him, you might as well be for him in the way that they think helps him most." So, I predicted that the ticket would be Johnson-Kennedy or Kennedy-Johnson and that I would make my announcement after I got to Los Angeles. Now, conceiveably, if I had gotten to Los Angeles and the Kennedy campaign had crumbled, I could have changed my mind, because I wasn't trying to be a martyr. I was trying to move North Carolina into more of the main stream. So, I would have had the option of chancing that commitment under those circumstances, although it didn't turn out that way.
In any event, because I announced out there, whatever I said was greatly distorted. I said that I wanted North Carolina to be with the winner, not just have a vain vote. Well, that got interpreted that Sanford simply wanted to be with the winner, he wasn't voting on principle and our communication with the papers was just very, very bad.

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I got hundreds and hundreds of vicious telegrams, some abusive telegrams. Some would surprise you. They are all in Archives.
BRENT GLASS:
Was the religion factor a big one in some of this reaction?
TERRY SANFORD:
Religion and race. At any rate, the Methodist Church virtually excommunicated me. I never did fully forgive the preacher of my own church, who withdrew the invitation to be the Laymen's Day speaker. It so happened that that didn't bother me, but it irritated me that he felt he had to do that. And then, there is some day celebrated . . . every Sunday has got some name in the church, you know, and in October, there is something to do with breaking away from the Catholic Church and which has to do with the independence of religious thought, and he announced that he was going to preach an anti-Kennedy speech. So, I sent him word . . . I had been chairman of the board there for eight years . . .
BRENT GLASS:
This is in Fayetteville?
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes. I sent him word that I was coming to church and if he preached that sermon, I was getting up in the middle and walking out and that I thought that would get some attention. I did not go and he did not preach it. In any event, it was very vicious. Now, by a coincidence, as I was leaving the Carolina Hotel to go to the airport to go to Los Angeles, I ran into Bishop Garver, the bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church. And he said whatever he said and I said, "You know, bishop, I might end up being for John Kennedy." He said, "Go to it, boy." Now, he was very supportive, he was a much more enlightened person than my particular preacher, who is now dead. So, it was a shocking thing to them.
I went out there with 90% of the delegates being my people. They had worked in my

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campaign, my western campaign manager, everything west of Asheville, was a delegate . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Were you chairman of the delegation?
TERRY SANFORD:
No, I had very graciously made Luther Hodges the chairman. That had been our custom in this state, to make the sitting governor the chairman and he sent me word that he wanted very badly to be . . . he wanted to be Vice-President under Adlai Stevenson. He was openly for Johnson and secretly for Stevenson, feeling that if Stevenson was the nominee, he would make a very good Vice-President, and that's true, he would have. Well, anyhow, I was trying to heal the wounds and I didn't want to break that precedent and especially in view of the fact that twelve years earlier, '52, . . . eight years earlier, Scott had been the sitting governor and because he was not for . . . not part of the Old Guard, Luther Hodges was there as the nominee for lieutenant governor, they denied Scott the privilige of being chairman and elected Cameron Morrison. Well, I didn't want to do that, that created a lot of bitterness and even though Hodges was a part of that, I felt that the gracious thing to do was to let him be chairman. Now, I later regretted that. I'll tell you that story if we get to it. But he was the chairman. Leonard Lloyd, my friend, long-time close associate, from western North Carolina . . . "No way, you've ruined us. I can't go home if I vote for Kennedy." They all started saying that and where I had . . . I think that we must have had 72 votes that year, it changes from year to year and out of those 72, I probably had 60 of them. I finally got twelve for Kennedy, counting mine. Twelve people. That's right, there were 72 people, 36 full votes, each of the 72 had a half vote. I got twelve,

Page 54
counting me. We had six votes. That's how bad it was.
BRENT GLASS:
After you had polled the delegation?
TERRY SANFORD:
Polled them?
BRENT GLASS:
This was in the final vote?
TERRY SANFORD:
This was in Los Angeles. Half of them came out of there with broken arms and cracked skulls that I had put on them . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
TERRY SANFORD:
You want to stick with that a minute?
BRENT GLASS:
Yes.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, it's really not state government.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, I'm interested in the national picture, too.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, the day of the nomination, Drew Pearson, who was a big Johnson supporter honored me by making me the victim of his column and he reported that Kennedy relationship with Lou Harris and implied without saying so that I had taken a tremendous amount of money from the Kennedys for my campaign and consequently, that was why I supported Kennedy. It was an attempt to discount my support. So, the old chairman of the Greensboro, Guilford County party, who was a delegate, moved that they pass a resolution of censure of Drew Pearson for slandering their Democratic nominee for governor, me. Hodges was presiding. Hodges manouvered around and managed to get that tabled, which of course, was a vicious thing. He ought to have been very supportive of me. AFter all, I was nominee of the party and if I was discredited, the party would be discredited. Drew Pearson later retracted that, which is very unusual for Drew Pearson.

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BRENT GLASS:
Why did Hodges do that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Because he didn't want Kennedy to win. He didn't want Kennedy to win because if Kennedy won there was nothing in it for him. If Kennedy didn't win, he knew Johnson wouldn't win and he figured there would be a stalemate and Stevenson not only was lurking, he was stirring. Well, that was a most unfriendly thing. Anyhow, I went over to the hotel and saw Kennedy shortly after that and I told Kennedy, I said, "If I ever come to you recommending that you do something for Luther Hodges, I hope that you'll kick me out of your office." I remember Kennedy so well standing there, characteristically hand in left pocket, chewing chewing-gum, I suppose to ease the tension. He said, "He is a bastard, isn't he?" And later, parenthetically, I was in Georgetown saying, "You've got to make him Secretary of Commerce," and we laughed about that. But in the meantime, Hodges, with my approval to the Kennedys, he was appointed the National Chairman of Businessmen for Kennedy, causing Bennett to say that in the Lake campaign and now here, that "Luther Hodges has always worked hard to get us out of the trouble that he got us in." Hodges and I became very close friends before he died, but at that particular moment, I shared Kennedy's designation. Well now, as soon as I announced for Kennedy out there, it did make a considerable stir, as they anticipated and immediately, Ervin and Jordan flew Bill Cochrane to Los Angeles to make me change my mind. Bill Cochrane was a close friend, a room-mate of mine. I had taken him to Washington with Scott and he had stayed with Jordan and I came back in the hotel and there was Cochrane standing there behind the bush. I said, "You ought to have had more sense than to come all the way out here. You know that

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I'm not going to change my mind." He said, "I know that, but they made me come." So then we had a meeting that night with Bill Brawley, who is kind of an oaf and a fool, but he was a big supporter of Jackson's this time, and he was a big Johnson supporter then. I think that he is one of the most clumsy politicians that I have ever observed.
BRENT GLASS:
Where's he from?
TERRY SANFORD:
Goodness knows . . . South Carolina or somewhere. Where is he from? Anyhow, he was the southern expert. So, he sat up there and argued with me and they told me all kinds of lies that Bobby Baker and others had told me earlier about Kennedy. Finally, I said, "Cochrane . . . " we had been sitting there arguing and talking for two or three hours . . . I said, "Tell Brawley that there is not any way under the sun that I'll change my mind, that I don't operate that way." Cochrane said, "That's right, Bill, let's close it up." I'll never forget this, because it was so absolutely ludicrous, Brawley threw his hands down and said, "My God, you've just denied Lyndon Johnson the Presidency of the United States." Well, I laughed, of course, and that ended that. And the thing was rather tense, because even my friends, who were not at all bitter about what I had done, felt I had made a terrible political blunder and it would probably cost me the governorship and they sat there and . . . it was so unpleasant for me that I sat out in the orange juice tent most of the time watching it on television. Somebody had a little press tent outside. I would occasionally come in and I told Bobby again on the floor that I simply wasn't going to second the nomination. He said, "You really don't want to, do you?" I said, "Not only don't want to, not going to." Well, he came back and Jack insisted that I do it and I finally just had not much alternative. I, of course, now don't regret

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it but at the time, it was with great reluctance. I tried to call Donald McCoy, who was back in Fayetteville, to tell him that I saw no way out of it. I couldn't get through. Again, the East-West problems of communication. So, I shocked McCoy, too, when he watched on television and saw that after all, I was seconding the nomination. But they thought it did them some good and so I was more or less obligated to go on with it. The North Carolina delegation that first night, prior to our seeing Brawley, called an immediate reception in honor of Lyndon Johnson. That was their reaction. This was Luther Hodges, Sam Ervin and to some extent, Everett Jordan. Everett Jordan, I might say, in spite of being for Johnson, was the only one of that trio that was constantly gracious and considerate with me. He had less reason to be, really, but he was and I never forgot it, either. In any event, I made it my business to be standing in the door by the time the bartenders got there. I was the first one there. So, here comes Lyndon. Now, I had known Lyndon Johnson. I didn't know Jack Kennedy, but I had known Johnson and I sometimes told people that was why I was for Kennedy.
BRENT GLASS:
How did you know him?
TERRY SANFORD:
Because of when Scott was in the Senate, you see, and I was up there about once every week or so, just sort of keeping tabs on . . . that then, was the beginning of the political organization in North Carolina that later elected me governor. I was just keeping in touch with that office. Anyhow, I knew Lyndon. So, he came striding in there and the first person he saw was me and he walked right on up to me and stuck out his hand and he said, "Terry, you and I have got one thing in common . . . " I thought that it

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was funny that under all the circumstances, this was the way he handled it. I said, "What's that, Lyndon?" He said, "You and I both outmarried ourselves." [laughter] Well, we got through it. I hated to come home. Everett Jordan and his wife had a friend out there that had been on an around the world trip with them some years earlier and they had a little small dinner for him and asked us to go with them. Again, a very gracious thing. So, we went with them and I delayed coming home for one day. When I got home, there was just all hell to pay. Nobody much thought that I was in my right mind. There was one reporter, whose name escapes me right now, for WPTF was out there and he was just wildly enthusiastic about what I had done. He was a Catholic.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you think that if the convention had been held later in August, let's say, as it was in '64, or as the Republican Convention was this past week, it might have altered your . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I think that I would have had to show my hand sooner and I would have showed it here and I could have explained it. You know, my point was that they were only getting a sentence or two back here as to why I had done what I had done. Now obviously, it would take a pretty stupid person today to think that I had made a mistake in doing that. But in the summer of '60, trying to explain it long distance, I didn't explain it very well.
BRENT GLASS:
Let's move on a little bit to your relationship with Kennedy during those years. It seems that Kennedy became more identified with the race issue after he was elected than before, so . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I think that's true.
I don't think that Kennedy ever

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understood the race issue, really.
BRENT GLASS:
Not Jack Kennedy, but maybe Bobby Kennedy did a little bit more.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I don't know that Bobby understood it. Bobby saw the politics, the positive politics in it by that time, but I don't think they had any awareness. They didn't have any experience. You know, I gave Jack Kennedy about as good advice as he ever got on the race issue because I knew more about it. No, he had called Martin Luther King in jail and made a lot of points, but then of course, people in the South didn't like him. There is an interesting little 1956 story. At that time, it was Kefauver-Kennedy as far as the North Carolina delegation was concerned. Scott was there supporting Kefauver. Nobody in the Old Guard liked Kefauver because he had been a "traitor to the South" and he was fairly liberal on the race issue. So, Sam Ervin and the Old Guard supported Jack Kennedy for Vice-President, something that they never fully explained in 1960 when they were so bitterly opposed to him. So much for that.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, after you made the seconding speech, were you then sort of pressed onto the national scene as the southern spokesman?
TERRY SANFORD:
I didn't want to be. I very carefully advoided that role. I didn't want to be, I didn't have any interest in the national scene except as another citizen. I was concerned with North Carolina and what I was going to do. [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
BRENT GLASS:
I think that we were talking about your role as a spokesman for the South.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I didn't think that the South needed a spokesman.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, a liberal spokesman.

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TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I didn't really want to put myself in a role that diminished what I was doing in North Carolina, even to the extent that I instructed Henry Wilson not to let my name get on any invitation lists for any of the dinners at the White House. I got out of the governor's office in Kennedy's second term. I didn't want the people of North Carolina thinking that I had supported Kennedy because I was trying to play the role of big shot and jet setter and the like and I didn't want it to diminish anything that I was doing. Now, I met with Kennedy a number of times in the White House about various things, most of which pertained to North Carolina. I did go to one meeting of key people that he called to talk about the race issue. I went several times to talk about several things such as the Appalachian program we were trying to develop at the time. I went to see him about . . . I really leaned on him to get the environmental health center put here and so I went several times to see him about that and leaned on him hard. That's what I turned my green stamps in for. Anything else that I wanted for North Carolina, I simply called Henry Wilson or Bobby Kennedy and didn't bother the President, assuming that I could have gotten through. I assume that I could since Evelyn Lincoln was very fond of me and always appreciated, probably more than the rest of them, what we had done for him. But I never attempted to play that, I never attempted to use it, when I was asked about Jackson, Miss . . . we happened to have a Southern Governors Conference as that was going on and Kennedy made his dramatic television speech, nobody else would give it a favorable word except me. But other than that, I didn't attempt to be a spokesman and didn't want to be. I felt that it would take away from the extremely

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demanding tasks I had set for myself in North Carolina.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, you said that you did talk with him from time to time or at least once about the time was right for a national southern figure.
TERRY SANFORD:
He raised that question by simply saying that the bar to being a Catholic had broken down and he said, "Now, I think that the bar of being from the South can be broken." I dismissed it. I wasn't going to enter a serious conversation with him about how I ought to be the next candidate. I thought that it was presumptuous, I would have even thought that it was silly, but I think that obviously was what he was getting at and I said, rather jokingly, "You've got Lyndon Johnson."
BRENT GLASS:
He didn't consider Johnson a southerner?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I don't know whether he did or not, I never asked him. But Johnson, of course, was a southerner, he was accepted in the South as a southerner.
BRENT GLASS:
Did any of your contacts with the Kennedys or with other national figures plant a seed in your mind as far as running for national office?
TERRY SANFORD:
I don't know that I could ever say that a seed was planted. I said that thought was lurking around in my mind as a possiblity, it was a possibility that somebody from the South could move into the Presidency through the nominating process, not the way that Lyndon did, but I was beginning to be more and more convinced that that time in history had come. I didn't talk to anybody about it, I wasn't trying to develop that idea and I wasn't really focusing on it and I didn't really have the overwhelming desire to do it, in any event.
BRENT GLASS:
I know that you've been asked this several times, the possibility

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of your being on the ticket in '64. Was that ever . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Never discussed, unless you would count that other little passing comment to be an opening discussion, but it was never pursued. I don't have any idea that Kennedy had even started thinking about what he was going to do when he was killed. If he had asked me, I would have said to stick with Lyndon.
BRENT GLASS:
You weren't ready for that in '64?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I thought that it would be damaging to him and I didn't have any desire to be it. Now, I happen to think that in the turn of history, it would have been far better if I had been because I would have handled the Vietnam War a lot better than Johnson did.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, eventually, you did decide to run for President. What changed your mind on that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I didn't change my mind, you know, it wasn't a question of changing my mind . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Well, that's eight years later.
TERRY SANFORD:
It sort of drifted in that direction. It appeared in '72 that the Democrats were about to go down the drain and if some fresh face came on the scene, that that might very well be a proper time in history for it to be done. The trouble is that I couldn't pull it off, I got in too late and I didn't get taken seriously enough until it was too late. Even Governor Scott wouldn't support me initially. He thought that I had lost my mind. They later saw the wisdom of what I was trying to tell them, but when they saw it, it was too late and we simply didn't pull it off. So, I got into it more because the chance seemed to be so perfect, rather than some

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deliberate planning to get there. Maybe that's why I didn't get there. I never did really want it badly enough to deliberately plan it to make the sacrifices that one has to make to be totally devoted to it to the exclusion of everything else. I just never got my mental attitude to that point. But I did think that it could be done and obviously, it was done, but not by me.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. I was going to ask you . . . of course, Carter has had a different approach in which he methodically for at least two years, maybe longer than that . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I think that you could say eight.
BRENT GLASS:
Eight years. I wasn't aware that his thinking went back that far, he was a pretty young man to be thinking about that then, back when he ran for governor.
TERRY SANFORD:
The second time. Well, I think that from his inaugural speech, it was obvious that he was thinking of it. He turned from the kind of campaign he had made and made a national speech. I didn't have any doubts at the time that he had that in mind, but then I had a particularly sensitive ear for that kind of thing.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. Well, this year, when you decided to run, you must have seen him and Wallace . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
I felt that Wallace was dead politically, and of course, he was. A lot of people didn't think he was, a lot of people here, but I thought that history had passed him by and that particular issue that he traded on was gone, so I never thought of Wallace as being very serious, nothing but a kind of irritant. But obviously, I saw Carter as an extremely serious

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candidate, far before most people did.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you think that his way of going about the nomination is really the only way you can do it?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, in the present system you've got to have an independent income and you've got to devote full time to it. Now, you've got to have some other things to go with that, but the other things are not enough alone. The records, qualifications, are not even looked at. It's the man that is going to spend thirty-five days in Iowa and thirty-five days in Florida and thirty-five days in New Hampshire altogether and devote full time to it that can get the nomination, and that's the kind of sacrifice that you've got to make. And not just the sacrifice, you've got to have an independent income. You can't live off the campaign. You've got to have enough money for your livelihood and I think that was a disadvantage with Udall. He couldn't devote full time to campaigning.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you think that your identification at this point with the establishment of the Democratic party hurt or helped you?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I don't think that I even got to the point where that was . . . where anybody cared.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, let's project a little bit further as far as the national scene is concerned. On one hand, I've read a column recently which said that conspicuously absent on the platform at the Democratic convention was Fred Harris, Ted Kennedy and Terry Sanford. On the other hand, I've read another column that James Reston wrote where he said that Carter will be relying on key southern leaders like William Friday and Terry Sanford for advice during his administration, which . . .

Page 65
TERRY SANFORD:
And yesterday, you read a newsletter that said I might be the Secretary of State and all of that is about in the same category. I didn't go to the national convention because I wasn't invited to go to the national convention and I wasn't going up there and hanging around the stage door. It's that simple.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, do you see a role for yourself in the coming campaign or in the future in the Democratic party, a national role?
TERRY SANFORD:
I think that I've done my duty by politics and American government and citizenship. I think that what I've done in the past has been more than most people have done and I'm not eager to do anything else. And I, under no circumstances, want to be involved in a government job.
BRENT GLASS:
Well then, that leaves the state. Do you . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
No, it leaves a great many things. You don't have to be in politics to be living.
BRENT GLASS:
That's true.
TERRY SANFORD:
I've been there. I don't know that I want to do anything else.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, it just seemed to me that since it had been so much of your life and so much of your background, that . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
But you remember that I started out not to be a politician, so I'm perfectly content not to be one.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. But it seems that pretty early on you decided that you were going to run for governor. That's one decision that you were sure of.
TERRY SANFORD:
That's right, but I didn't want to be a politician, I just wanted to be governor and you had to be a politician in order to be governor.

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I didn't want to be a politician in the sense that I was going to devote my life to politics and under no circumstances did I ever want to get in a position where my livelihood depended on politics. I think that too often the temption is there and you have to compromise anything in order to stay in for the simple reason that it is your livelihood. So, I have never been dependent on politics and from a very early point I determined that I was never going to be dependent on politics for my livelihood. To that extent, I didn't want to be a politician. I have nothing against politicians, in fact I rather admire people who are willing to be and I take great pride in the fact that I was a reasonably good politician, at certain stages, anyhow. It's just that I didn't want to devote my life to politics. I wanted to do some other things and I have done a lot of other things.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, let me just ask one more question about that. After leaving office as governor, any other political office or appointment that might have come your way, you were more willing to let circumstances sort of unfold without really devoting, without it becoming an all-consuming enterprise on your part?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, that's exactly right.
BRENT GLASS:
That's a fair summary of things after '64?
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes. Had the circumstances been such that I could have done something, I might have even run for the Senate, although I didn't really have that ambition and having seen the Senate with Governor Scott, I really didn't much want to be a Senator. I didn't want to be a part of that up there, voting on things that never really seem to sccomplish anything, dashing back here speaking to all kinds of little special interest groups just to keep yourself in power. It didn't appeal to me. But had there not been an Everett

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Jordan and a Sam Ervin immediately there . . . I grew to love Everett Jordan to the point that I would not have hurt him, I wouldn't have run against him. I would have run against Sam, but didn't particularly want to. But had neither of them been there and had there been a void, as there later was, when it didn't suit me to run, I might have immediately moved in there two years later. But it wasn't, and I didn't regret it. I certainly didn't have any intention of being anybody's Cabinet member and I think I turned down a chance at least twice to be a cabinet member. I say, "I think," because nobody just straight out says this. They say, "The President wonders if you will have any interest . . . ", that type of indirect approach, because the President will not be denied. I think that when Wilbur Cohen was made Secretary of HEW, that all I had to do was to make one phone call to have been. Well, I made the phone call and recommended Wilbur Cohen.
BRENT GLASS:
When you were getting your short campaign of '72 and '76 together, did you try to reassemble the same team that you had in '60?
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes, it was right there. The trouble is, we didn't have time to touch base with them. We had less than thirty days and the ones that we touched base with came through in a wonderful way, although some of them wrote me, "You must have lost your mind," we just never got it together. Well, for two or three reasons. Most of them were already tied up in a very tough campaign for governor, Taylor and Bowles were neck and neck and all my friends were involved in that campaign or some other campaign and it was very hard to get their attention. Somebody like Wallace Hyde, a great friend of mine, did about all that he could do in Asheville, for example But he was so tied into the Taylor campaign . . . I suppose it was the Taylor

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campaign, that despite his good intentions and all, his priorities obviously fell with getting a governor instead of letting an old buddy go off on some crazy flight like running for President in an impossible situation as he saw it. Now, he would agree that we could have done it in '72 if we had all gotten together, but we didn't.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, how about this year? Did you try to reassemble some of it?
TERRY SANFORD:
We had an extremely . . . the only really good organization that we had when I got out of the Presidential race was North Carolina. We had it tightly organized almost county by county, not just those, but we had brought a good many younger people in. Bill Whichard, who had assumed the managership in North Carolina, had done his job and North Carolina was ready. We didn't have a problem in North Carolina. It was the only place that we didn't have a problem. We had problems in Iowa and New Hampshire and if we had had the time to have done that the way that it should have been done, I think that we could have stayed in. About all that you had to do was to do those first three, but I wasn't in a position to do it, I didn't have any money, I really didn't have a good national campaign manager. I had made two passes at campaign managers and both of them flunked, for lots of reasons. Some of my major friends that could have done things didn't get to it, waiting until I got free, I suppose, which carries me back to "you can't run if you're not devoting full time to it." So, we were not ready anywhere but North Carolina.
BRENT GLASS:
Let's move over to your work at Duke, because I think that's important and I want to have some time to talk about that. You came into office at Duke at a pretty tense time. We talked about it a little bit before

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we started recording, but did you see any . . .
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]

[TAPE 3, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
BRENT GLASS:
You started as president of Duke in 1970, didn't you?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, '69. I was elected and actually became president on December 13, 1969. I was elected president December 13. I could not immediately come to work, I had too many things going and furthermore, I didn't want to come over here. They had an acting chancellor who was holding the fort very well and I thought if I dashed in here before I knew more about it, I might get in trouble. So, it served two purposes. I was president, but not on duty. I would come over here about once a week and talk with Dr. Woodhall, got myself pretty fully informed about everything. At the same time, I was cutting loose with the law practice and the business connections and things that I had, so that I didn't actually come on duty until April 2.
It was deliberate that I didn't come on duty April 1.
BRENT GLASS:
Why?
TERRY SANFORD:
It was April Fool's Day. [laughter]
BRENT GLASS:
Are you superstitious?
TERRY SANFORD:
No, but I thought that was sort of fun, not to come to work on April Fool's Day. But I went on the payroll April 2. During that other period, when I was actually president, I wasn't being paid. Then of course, immediately within a month came Cambodia and Kent State, but I was ready for it. I knew what I was going to do under such circumstances. I did it and it worked.
BRENT GLASS:
What made you ready for it? You suspected something like this? You had seen it on other campuses?

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TERRY SANFORD:
First of all, I liked students. I wasn't afraid of students. I understood crowds and mobs and demonstrations from having been governor at the very toughest period of demonstrations and I knew the way to handle the students was to be one of them and that's the way we handled it. We got away from this remoteness that most college presidents had followed and the barricades that they gave their commands from behind. We simply moved among the students and that gave us the rapport that was necessary. It was tense, of course. But we didn't close down as some did, didn't miss a class to my knowledge, unless some professor decided that he didn't want to go. But it worked out very well and was extremely fortunate, as it turned out, for me because within six weeks of coming here I had totally established myself as being absolutely in charge of everything. It helped me with alumni, trustees, students and the faculty. Because it turned out, obviously, there was some luck in it, but it turned out very, very well.
BRENT GLASS:
Did you think of the parallels ten years earlier with the civil rights . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, of course. And I knew then that I need not be afraid of those people. I knew then that I could walk into those demonstrations and I wasn't . . . certainly, with the hostility that you would have expected from young blacks and demonstrators of that kind. Compare that with the hostility of students, it's bound to have been far greater. So, I wasn't the least bit afraid of students. You wouldn't remember this, but when all the black students and demonstrators in North Carolina descended on the mansion, they were demonstrating against the system, not against me. When I went out there and moved among them, I knew that I had them, because I knew

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what I had been doing was right and they did, too. So, I knew very well here that I wouldn't have any problem if we just treated them as people with a damn good complaint against society and against the university. I told them, "I have been against the war longer than you have and can prove it. I was one of the few public figures to never be for the war." Even McGovern was for the war briefly.
BRENT GLASS:
But at the time that the war was starting up you were out of office, right?
TERRY SANFORD:
Yes.
BRENT GLASS:
But you were able to make public . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
I happened to be speaking at Harvard and I happened to be asked that question and it was the first public statement that I ever made on it. I said that I thought it was one of the most tragic errors that the United States had ever made. I might say that up until that point I hadn't made up my mind.
BRENT GLASS:
The question just popped up at you and you . . . this would be what, '65, '66?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, it was . . .
BRENT GLASS:
Later than that?
TERRY SANFORD:
Lyndon Johnson took office in . . .
BRENT GLASS:
'64.
TERRY SANFORD:
. . . '65.
BRENT GLASS:
'63, I mean.
TERRY SANFORD:
No, as the elected president, in '65, and it was in the spring of that year that they committed the troops. That, of course, was the error.

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BRENT GLASS:
This is sort of getting away from Duke, but I wanted to ask you, do you follow international affairs as closely as you do domestic affairs? As President, say, where would your expertise have been greatest?
TERRY SANFORD:
Both. I thought.
BRENT GLASS:
I was just wondering, your experience was mostly in domestic.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, of course, nobody gets any experience in foreign affairs unless they are Secretary of State. But I was on a couple of United Nations things, I've run foreign study programs, I've taught in Austria. I've kept up as well as a person can keep up who is not actively engaged. Gerald Ford had no experience. Nixon had a little because he was Vice-President, but you know, I had been on more or less official missions to Russia, so I didn't feel the least bit uncomfortable about it. Not that I knew all the answers, but then nobody else does.
BRENT GLASS:
Did you fashion yourself a Cold Warrior? You were of that generation, certainly.
TERRY SANFORD:
No, I was for the admission of China to the United Nations twenty-five years ago. Oh, I say twenty-five years ago, in the late forties I thought that General Marshall made a terrible mistake for Truman and they let the Cold War start under the pressure of McCarthy. I never did see any sense in excluding what they now call The People's Republic of China. No, I was never a Cold Warrior. I was a hot warrior in World War II, so I didn't have to apologize for that.
BRENT GLASS:
What kinds of things do you see for you to do at Duke, what kinds of things have you tried to do since you came here?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, we have a lot of things to do. Duke is certainly one of

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the half-dozen great private universities in the country, by anybody's measure. And it was to take advantage of that potential that I thought that Duke had not done a great many things that it could have been doing to build on that. We had a budget that was a million dollars in the red for the first time in Duke's history. So, we had to get on a sound financial basis, which we did. We have been operating in the black. The alumni were terribly turned off and we turned them back on. We had some fundamentals to do. I saw mostly the five or six years that I had intended to devote to Duke as getting Duke back on the track so it could just naturally achieve its potential. We had never had a sucessful major fund drive. We didn't quite know what we wanted to spend money for anyhow. So, it took some planning and direction-setting, which we did immediately and we started and I think that we are going to complete successfully the most ambitious fund raising campaign we've ever had. We certainly have improved the attitude of the student body. Duke had so many things going for it but still you had a bunch of soreheads, not all of them, but you had enough of them to give that impression to the outside. Now, we've got a student body . . . well now, we have more students seeking us maybe in proportion to the spaces available than any other university in the country. So, we have certainly established this as a place that students want to come. We've recruited since I've been here at least forty major faculty positions of people like James David Barber, but I could go right on down through anthropology and chemistry and foreign affairs. We've simply improved the faculty in many, many ways. Certainly, the alumni have never been happier about being where they are now. For the first time, the alumni annual giving has topped a million dollars for this year and we expect to top

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five million before we quit on annual giving. It's there, nobody has ever worked at it. So, all those things that I set out to do sort of bring some order back to a great university and we've done it. Now, my problem is to dig out what to do for the next five years.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you project another five years at Duke?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I think so. With this reservation: I'm not going to outstay my welcome.
BRENT GLASS:
Are you one who . . . I forget which college president it was who said that no college president should stay for more than ten years . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
That was Kingman Brewster and he said seven years because that happened to be how long he had been there. [laughter] Kingman Brewster is probably the best university president in the country, in my judgement anyhow, if not that of his alumni. He understood the storm when it came better than anybody else then in office. He rode it out and at that time, all the bitterness built up around him as he attempted to identify with students and alienated alumni in doing so and he said "To hell with it. Seven years is long enough and I want to take off. If you want to invite me back, you can and if I want to come, I can say yes at that time or I'll say no if I want to." I think that he wanted to stay, probably, and in any event, he did take off a year after having made that statement. Well, that's all about the time that I was coming to Duke. So, I told the chairman of the board, "I'll stay six years. No more." I announced to the faculty that I would stay five or six years and then, "I'm leaving, or at least I will leave a year on sabbatical and following the Kingman Brewster pattern, if they want me to come back, I'll come back if I want to." Well, in the way that

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turned out, my sabbatical came up about the time that I needed to get off to be in the Presidential campaign. If it had come up six months earlier, I might have stayed in it because I would have had some time when I really needed it. But I didn't take it and they did ask me to stay and at the moment, I'm sure that the trustees would hope that I would stay here until I reach retirement age, but whether I do or not, we'll just see how things turn out.
BRENT GLASS:
Could you reflect a little bit on the politics of higher education in this state? Because there is quite a bit of political infighting that goes on, I know. Are you involved in that with a private university, or do you follow it pretty closely?
TERRY SANFORD:
I attempt to lead it, not follow it. Well, I think the higher education situation . . . we haven't really talked much about the four years when I was governor and what happened, but that was one reason that I wanted you to have that little booklet. I think that we did a lot of things that are worthy of mention because I set out to be the best governor North Carolina ever had and history will have to determine how successful I was. But I wasn't interested just in improving education. We looked at everything government was doing and we were looking at higher education. I immediately put together a commission to plot a course for higher education in the state, which was in pretty good shape but in some chaos. The previously designated teacher's colleges were becoming liberal arts colleges. In one or two areas, we didn't have adequate public education. In Asheville and Wilmington, we created four year colleges out of rather inadequate junior colleges which had come out of the GI bill. Charlotte,

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our major city, didn't have any public institution and we created a new campus, or at least laid the groundwork for it and all but put it together by the time I left office. What we did was to establish a pattern that was very, very sound. We had the university at the top. This was the university in the pure sense of the word, that would have the Ph.D., a graduate university. Chapel Hill, State and Greensboro had been part of the Consolidated University. Greensboro was not really a graduate university. Historically, it had been brought in in Max Gardner's term to be a consolidated university. Chapel Hill had gained international stature and so had State. We made Greensboro a full-fledged graduate university and co-educational, which some people might have resented, but it had to be done and now it would have to be done if it hadn't been before. We then set up Charlotte and my concept was that those four, since Charlotte was a major city, we needed a graduate university there but it would take fifteen or twenty years to make it truly a worthwhile university, but we started it. My concept and the concept of the commission was that this would be the capstone, this would be a great university with four campuses. Then, we would have very good liberal arts colleges available all over the state that would have been the previously all black schools and it would take twenty years to work out of that pattern, but you had to start working. It would have been the East Carolinas and the Appalachians and the like, Cullowee, Western North Carolina. All at the liberal arts college level, feeding into the graduate, maybe having a couple of masters programs in limited fields, but not aspiring to be part of the university system, but being first-rate colleges. So, we supported that and if you look at the appropriations to upgrade those colleges,

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was tremendous. Then we created a brand new thing, which may be the most significant thing in the long run that my administration did, the creation of the community college-technical institute system. We had a few industrial education systems connected with the public schools, but what we, of course, were trying to do was to get at a kind of education that had never been available before and on a basis of being within commuting distance of everybody in the state. And we achieved that. Now, I left it in damn good shape. Leo Jenkins and Governor Moore loused it up.
BRENT GLASS:
In what way?
TERRY SANFORD:
Leo Jenkins had ambitions far in excess of what was good for the total system. Admittedly, what he wanted to do was good for East Carolina, so you can't fault him totally. In fact, I admire his determination to do something for his school. The trouble is that somebody needed to keep it in the proper structure. That somebody had to be the governor. Governor Moore didn't understand it. They then got into a political situation that had to be dealt with. So, as Moore was governor, I suggested to Bill Friday and Governor Moore through Watts Hill, who was head of the Board of Higher Education, that if we followed a pattern that Minnesota then had of having regional universities, we could satisfy some of the things that Leo would like to do for Eastern North Carolina. Also, we happened to have two other colleges that could be legitimate regional universities, meaning that they had a regional responsibility and that they would have the masters degree in several courses, but that we wouldn't louse up the idea by trying to make East Carolina equal to State and Chapel Hill. We didn't need to do that. Nor could we afford it and have quality in the university system. John Henley was

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chairman of the Committee of Higher Education in the Senate and fully understood the problem and proposed that we make these regional universities with a special mission somewhere between the university system and the liberal arts college system, but part of the liberal arts college system and designated differently and given broader curriculum possibilities. Well, Moore didn't understand that and Watts Hill didn't understand it, that is to say, and consequently, Moore. They pulled a terrible boner that they thought would defeat that bill. Now, they had far better ways of keeping Leo under control. After all, the governor is the budget officer and all he had to do was to say . . . and I told Watts Hill this but they didn't do it, just put the word out that in the budget office, anytime they wanted a line item transfer in the East Carolina budget, the governor had to personally approve it and that would have settled that once and for all. They didn't do it. Instead, they had their troops amend that regional university bill to include A&T in Greensboro. They thought that would defeat the bill, but they were stupid in thinking that, because who was going to vote against a black college under those circumstances. Now, A&T had another mission, not that mission, if anything, A&T ought to have been brought along as a land grant college and merged into the Chapel Hill system, but anyhow, that was not yet ready. But that passed and then you had four colleges called universities and as was predictable, the next time, every college in the state got itself designated as a university and we were in the peculiar position of not having a single college in name. Then Bill Friday made a blunder in his desperation. He added Asheville and Charlotte colleges, that were very inadequate colleges in terms of being

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universities, to the university system. So he then had five campuses, two of which in no way could be adjudged better than Cullowhee, East Carolina, Appalachian, probably North Carolina Central and A&T. So, you had a system that simply was in shambles within four years time, it had just been torn to pieces and it had to be reorganized. The reorganization that came out of it, making them all one university, is not going to be good in terms of keeping a very high quality university available to North Carolina. There is going to be a constant fight to take away from the university concept and spread all over. So, instead of improving it, we are simply going to level it out. I think it's very bad, but I think what we've got now is better than what we had at the end of '68.
BRENT GLASS:
Would you attribute this watering down to the political ambitions of various . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
No, it is just the very nature of an institutional pride and ambition. They all want to be a little bit better and they all want to do things that Chapel Hill does, but we can't have sixteen Chapel Hills. We don't have the resources, nor do we have the students and we don't have the need. But that's about the way it is and Bill Friday is dedicated to keeping Chapel Hill and State at the top in terms of national performance. It is going to be a very difficult thing to do and one reason that they've been able to do it, they've got a lot of private funds. All right, so much for the state system and I suppose that it is doing about the best that it can do, giving where it had to start over again from. In fact, I was in favor of doing it this way. There wasn't any other way out of it, unless you went back to what we had and nobody would go back to that, of course.

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You weren't going to take the name of university off of Pembroke, although Pembroke had no business being called a university, but there wasn't any way politically to take it off. So, you had to reorganize, as we did reorganize and I was in favor of this because I saw no other way out of it. So much for that. They will have to do the best they can. In the meantime, not only has that ambition attempted to level it out, but the unspoken determination has gone along with it to compete unfairly with the public schools. I say compete unfairly, because if students going to private institutions were charged on their ability to pay what it costs to run those institutions, there wouldn't be any unfair competition, but as it is, the state, properly in my judgement, subsidizes a student going to a public insitution and the private school has to charge the student that subsidy. There's no other place for it to come from. All of this came about by inflation, the dollar per student that we spend now compared to fifteen years ago is probably four times . . . just guessing. So, the private schools are going to perish if something is not done to break down that unfair competition. In my judgement, the best approach is for the state to pay the student an equalization grant, or call it what you want to, a tuition grant, an equalization grant, if the student chooses to use some of the private resources available to the people of the state. I have argued that there are at least three good reasons for the state adopting such a policy. First, it's fair to the student. Second, it preserves . . . not necessarily in this order, maybe the most important thing is that it preserves the dual system, which has been very good for American education. The third thing is that it saves the state a hell of a

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lot of money. I would propose that the state pay to the student going to a private school a grant that could be used against his tuition up to 50% of what it costs to subsize a student at a state institution. Well, you save at least that much money and you preserve the system. It's not so much that the private school loses its identity and independence as an independent private school, so we keep the dual system and they stay alive. I've been working for that. We've got it up now to 200, 300 and 400 in effect, except that there is a little quirk on half of it, that a student who doesn't need it doesn't get that second 200. It ought to be about a thousand dollars across the board and then the state would have its system back in reasonably good shape, it's dual system. We'll reach that point in another few years. The university system unfortunately, regrettably, is opposed to this. It is a very short-sighted public view and I hope that we can bring them out of it. The legislature, fortunately, is not opposed to it, they see the wisdom of it.
BRENT GLASS:
So you are involved in discussing this with legislators?
TERRY SANFORD:
I've been involved from the first day. I also am in the happy position of having proposed this when I was governor and the only reason that we didn't push it through was that the situation was not as critical then. I could see it coming but it wasn't yet critical and I had put it in as a supplemental proposal, meaning that we couldn't legally consider it until we got the budget through. I had two or three other things that were more important. This was about a three million dollar package at the time. Among other things, I had a ten million dollar package for retarded children and their education, which was far more important to the

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state and to me in terms of our program. In trying to balance off the budget at the end of the legislature, I just had to let the private college go. It wasn't urgent enough to insist on it, but at least I proposed it as chairman of the board of the University of North Carolina and Governor of North Carolina. I proposed it not as president of Duke. So, I am in a good position to argue it with legislators now, "You would have saved a hundred million dollars by now if we had done this when I was governor and we'll save another hundred million in the next ten years if we'll do it now." So, we are moving in that direction and that will put the balance back and most states now are following this pattern. So, the future of private education is dependent on two things: One is this equalization payment and the other, along with public schools, with a fair student aid program financed by the federal government, which has to do with needy students, loan programs, grants, work-study and the like.
BRENT GLASS:
How do you deal with some of the criticisms of the concept of the community college system, where . . . I have heard people say or read it written that this is sort of interpreted as a feeder to the industrial base of the state at the taxpayer's expense.
TERRY SANFORD:
There's nothing wrong with that. Well, for heaven's sake, who are we feeding with the engineers from North Carolina State? Who are we feeding with the lawyers from Chapel Hill or the doctors from Chapel Hill? Of course, you educate human beings to be productive but you are not going to have a productive society unless you do. Now, we were educating the elite and leaving everybody else out. I think that such a criticism of that is stupid.

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BRENT GLASS:
I have just one or two other questions. One was that you said that one of the reasons that you did not pursue public office with the same intensity that you pursued the governor's office was that you wanted to have time to do other things. What are some of the other things that you like to do?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, there are thousands of things that you can do in life without getting so singlemindedly on a political track.
BRENT GLASS:
Do you have any particular hobbies or . . .
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]

[TAPE 4, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
BRENT GLASS:
You say that you don't spend too much time relaxing?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I could do a lot of other things if I was determined to do them. I sometimes think that I don't accomplish as much as I ought to be accomplishing, but on the other hand, I've ranged across a lot of different fields and doing a lot of interesting things and I hope that I am doing my basic job of running the university adequately. When you stop to think about it, being president of one of the great universities in the country ought to be satisfaction enough for anybody, even someone that didn't set out to pursue that career.
BRENT GLASS:
Yes, that would make me very happy, I think. I remember talking to you about various stages of your career and getting that sense of excitement when you're in a political campaign, the one that we talked about a couple of months ago.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I think that I regret that I couldn't put the Presidential campaign together for a lot of reasons. It's not just to have

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achieved an ambition that I had picked up. But you know, there are a lot of things that I think common sense can bring to government that people who have been too close to it are not going to bring. And people that have been too inclined to be political are not going to do. Now, I might not have been able to do it, but I know what ought to be done about the welfare system to open it up to human development. I know, I think, what ought to be done in terms of leadership in the world. I think I know more about what ought to be done about the economy and I would be more determined to do it than what is going to be done. Now, I may be wrong and this may be a prideful statement that is not justified, but of course, I regret that. It's taken me about six months to get over it, that I, you know, feel . . . my wife said, "Look at all the things you've done and are doing and still you think that you're a failure." Well, in a way, having become revved up as a candidate, feeling that I had a grasp of the issues and that I had a background broader than anybody else running, in the various fields, that I couldn't put it together irritated me. But I've about gotten over that irritation because I'm certainly not going through life bitter and I'm not going through life carrying any disappointment or resentment. Yes, I would like to be moving out there right now daring Ford to debate me on the economy of the country.
BRENT GLASS:
Was it more irritating the fact that the nominee is a southerner?
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, no.
BRENT GLASS:
A southern liberal, or southern moderate?
TERRY SANFORD:
No. It's none of my business, really. Who I would have supported if I had been in a position of significant support, there's no need for me to say. I'm supporting the nominee. I was in the process and I

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never had any doubt that I would support the nominee.
BRENT GLASS:
Part of the strength of a public figure is the people who he surrounds himself with and we've talked about that when you became governor. Who are some of the national figures in the Democratic party that you would have surrounded yourself with? Who are some of the people on the national scene that you have been close with over the years? We talked about the Kennedys, but . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I don't know if I could answer that question in the sense that I could pick a cabinet now that I would have picked. I couldn't, because you can see how they would develop. But I have been close to all the factions of the Democratic party, for a lot of reasons, and I never have been a part of any of them, maybe. I was reasonably close to the Kennedys, but I never was really a part of the Kennedy organization. I never wanted to be. I was close to Lyndon Johnson ultimately. He asked me to be his national campaign manager in 1968, before he withdrew. That's how close I had gotten to him in a period of time when I had never been his man and was never for his war. And he knew it. I was, of course, extremely close to Humphrey and his people. I was his national citizens chairman and I devoted all summer trying to help him get the nomination. He seldom took my advice on how to handle some of the more difficult things.
BRENT GLASS:
How about on the war?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I wanted him to handle the war by resigning as Vice-President. That's the only way that he could have disassociated himself from Johnson, but he chose not to do that. But that's neither here nor there.

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Then the McGovern people stayed very friendly to me. One of his principal people, Jean Westwood was totally committed to my campaign. So, I had kept my ties . . . just over the years, I happened to develop ties with all those so-called factions of the party.
BRENT GLASS:
I mean, because you established yourself as a member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party in North Carolina, I was just trying to see where you placed yourself in the national picture?
TERRY SANFORD:
That's more difficult, because I never have been a knee-jerk liberal and I don't necessarily take a position that I think is going to be popular with the so-called liberals. I'm not in favor of breaking up the oil companies. Nothing could be more stupid if we want to develop the energy potential, but that's a knee-jerk liberal response. And in handling the economy, the knee-jerk liberal response is to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and be done with it, hire everybody that is out of work. Well, that's not the way to build a strong economy, that's a last ditch backup and most people are focusing on that as the end all of the problems of employment. I don't know where I fit. I would refuse to take a definition and a label.
BRENT GLASS:
I just get the impression that you have a kind of an aversion to some of the cosmetics of modern day politics and also the handling of the media. We haven't really discussed that. That didn't really enter into running for governor very much, did it?
TERRY SANFORD:
The media was very much for me in 1960. I suppose that I had the endorsement of every major paper and most of the minor ones. I could count on one hand the papers that weren't supporting me and when I ended office, I could count on one or two fingers the papers that weren't supporting

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me. Now, some things have changed. The ownership of papers has changed and the editorial policies have changed and we've got more absentee ownership than we have then. The Greensboro paper was a strong advocate of my candidacy, the Asheville paper was, the Charlotte News was not because the Charlotte Observer was so strong for me that they felt they had to take a contrary position. They weren't bitter, but they were always sniping at me and likewise, the Raleigh Times as distinguished from the News and Observer. I suppose that Frank Graham and I were the only people that the News and Observer ever supported with front page editorials. So, I had a good working relationship with the working press and I felt that most all of them were secretly for me and still trying to be objective. I never had any problem with the press nationally or locally. I chided the national press last year considerably for refusing to look at qualifications and issues and being concerned with polls and campaigning, but I never had any problems. When I got out of the race, most of the people that commented, commented in extremely favorable terms, which is about the first time that I got any attention. But I never have had any complaints about the press. They've done their job as best they can do it in the system. We probably leave to the national media too much of the decision-making and shaping public opinion in presidential campaigns and that's not good. But I don't know that there is an easy answer to it. Among other things, I would endeavor to do away with VHF, then you could have a dozen networks. You could have as many television stations as you've got radio stations and I think that you would take away the concentration of ability to influence even inadvertantly. So, if there is

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an evil, it's the concentration of television media. Walter Cronkite is not an evil person by any means, but he's got too much power for the good of the country. He endeavors to use it properly but there is no way he can do it. He doesn't even have time to do it even if he had the wisdom to do it.
BRENT GLASS:
There's no guarantee, no check.
TERRY SANFORD:
And who is going to be the next Walter Cronkite? So, I think that there are some evils in the system, but everybody has been perfectly decent to me. I don't have any personal complaints.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, I was thinking more in difficulty of projecting a record.
TERRY SANFORD:
Oh, absolutely. You couldn't get their attention on those two things, on issues and record. They didn't look at the record of anybody running. Not yet have they done it. Maybe this campaign now will bring some of it out. Who knows anything about Mondale? Not two percent of the people in the country, outside of his home state and the Senate. But they will.
BRENT GLASS:
Hopefully in a campaign.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, that's the detriment of the system as far as the Democratic party is concerned. They've now built to where they are on organization and campaigning and we have yet to look at issues and records and personalities and capabilities. That's what happened when McGovern got the nomination.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, the national party, though, is a every four year kind of affair. You've been involved in the national party in off years, but how many people really do get involved?

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TERRY SANFORD:
I'm not talking about the national party in terms of its committee, I'm talking about the party all over the country.
BRENT GLASS:
Right.
TERRY SANFORD:
The national committee has very little to do with the preliminary campaigns and where we are today. It had nothing much to do with it except to arrange the convention accomodations. But the Democratic party all over the country has fallen into the system of letting less than ten million people, perhaps, decide what the outcome is going to be and they are making the decision on very superficial evidence presented by the press and television.
BRENT GLASS:
It seems that it is very easy for someone outside the party, or someone who really hasn't been involved in the party machinery for very long, to capture the nomination. Jack Kennedy could even be cited as such an example, although he was more of an insider than Carter.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, Carter is very much an insider. Carter worked with the Democratic National Committee perhaps more than any candidate running. He was in charge of the '74 elections and at Democratic National Committee expense, went to every Congressional district in the country that had an election. You know, if anybody was part of the system, it was Carter. Now, the press might have overlooked this. You might find that most members of the press are not even aware of the fact that he was involved in that party exercise.
BRENT GLASS:
That was his first party assignment, though.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, that's right. You don't need many.
BRENT GLASS:
Right. One question I want to get to, we've talked a lot about

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the progress of North Carolina, but it is still true that North Carolina ranks pretty low in many categories, including . . . I guess this would be more secondary education, and health and industrial wages and things like this. How do you account for this?
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, I've been disappointed in the progress that North Carolina has made since '64. That may be vain, but nevertheless, we had some good things going that we let get away from us. We had more excitement in public education than anywhere else in the country and we let such things as the Advancement School, which was one of the truly experimental public schools in the country, go down the drain, we let the Learning Institute become just a mediocre research organization instead of what it was contemplated to do to improve public education across the state. I don't know how you measure the quality of education and probably if there was an adequate way to measure it, North Carolina would be much better than indicated by the measure of faculty salaries, for example, which is about the usual way. You rank 32nd because of your salary scale and I think that we ranked about 45th when I became governor and we ranked about 30th when I left. I don't know where we rank today, but that's not really the measure of the quality. I think that the quality has gone down somewhat, but I think it has gone down all over the country with our preoccupation with other social objectives of education and we've overlooked the main thrust of educating the individual child. We are getting back to that now and that's true all over the country. Certainly, the schools of New York would rank far above North Carolina in terms of faculty salaries, but nobody could say that the city school system of New York was better overall than North Carolina

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school systems, that knows anything about it. I don't know quite how you measure it, but I do know that we have lost a good deal of the thrust for improvement. Prison reform is a good example. In 1964, all over the country they were looking at the North Carolina prison system and in two or three years time, it is just back where it was. So, we've missed a lot of things. One bright exception is the community college system. It's probably the best in the country, but it's new and it's fresh and it's had its own momentum.
BRENT GLASS:
You weren't building on something from before and you didn't have to change something.
TERRY SANFORD:
Well, they haven't had time to get in a rut. They will, if someone is not ever constantly alert to keeping it a fresh organization.
BRENT GLASS:
How about industrial wages?
TERRY SANFORD:
It's a very interesting thing, Mrs. Van Alstyne did a study for us for the North Carolina Fund, because that was a constant puzzle to me. I looked at South Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. And Arkansas. I couldn't understand why our industrial wage was always about 48th or 49th, somewhere in there. She analyzed it pretty thoroughly as an economist. This is an oversimplification and maybe an overrationalization, but part of it was that we had more jobs. A person working on a farm part-time living in poverty is not counted in the industrial wage. When we got in lots of little industries and marginal regions that paid marginal wages but yet much more than anybody had before, when the wife comes in and works at a shirt factory and the husband is still doing part-time farming, they are much better off but the average is much lower. When you put all of that into it.

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One of the things that contributed to it, is that our three basic industires, textiles, furniture and tobacco, are relatively low paying industries. Now so much low paying in terms of the individual take home pay of rural Guilford County which is a fairly adequate income, but compared to an autombile worker or a steel worker in Birmingham. So, as we spread out the availability of jobs, we were averaging from a rather low average anyhow, with these three basic industries. And you put this business on the bottom and it drags it down. Now, DuPont and and companies like that that came in to build up the average at the top with higher paying, more skilled jobs, were not enough to drag that up. So, I don't think that's as bad as it looks when you look at the industrial wage. Now, another factor has been the lack of unionization and I'm satisfied that's a part of it, that if we had unions, we would jump to 45th. But I don't know that you are so great when you get to 45th. You are not going to get out of that, really, so the answer is to build as many jobs for people who have the capability as you can. That's where the fallacy of this business of using state money to train people for more skilled jobs falls down. The more we can train, the more we improve their lot in life and the more we attract to the state the kind of industry that could give them a better opportunity in life in terms of economics. So, I don't think that we are as bad off there as we appear. We are worse off in some other things. We certainly haven't taken the full potential available to us in food processing and converting our agricultural economy more to the production of beef cattle, which incidentally, North Carolina is a very good beef cattle state, better than Texas, because you have richer

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soil and you can grow more cattle on less acreage. And we are getting into it. We are getting into pork production. We are getting into soybean production and we are getting away from the old . . . well, we are almost totally away from cotton and we are getting away from tobacco and that's going to help everything.
BRENT GLASS:
So, the diversification of industry and agriculture is . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
We are moving in those directions, not as vigorously as we might.
BRENT GLASS:
One final question . . . I've kept you longer than I was supposed to, but with the kind of public life that you have led and still lead, to a large extent, how much time have you found that . . . are you able to spend much time with your family?
TERRY SANFORD:
I don't think that's been a detriment. Whether I've spent it as wisely as one should, you never know until you've been through once, but I think that any shortcomings that I've had have not been from lack of time spent with my family.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, what I mean is, has that been a source . . . well, in allotting your time, has that been . . .
TERRY SANFORD:
I don't think so. I haven't been that much in the public eye. Admittedly, somebody named Terry Sanford, Jr. has certain handicaps to overcome, but there are also certain advantages and I hope it offsets it.
BRENT GLASS:
Well, I would like to thank you for giving me all the time that you have and perhaps we would want to get together for another session, but we'll read this over and see what it looks like.
TERRY SANFORD:
Very good.
END OF INTERVIEW