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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0087, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Jack Hawke served as the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party from 1987 to 1995. In this interview, he describes the evolution of the Republican Party in North Carolina from the early 1960s, when he first became involved in politics, through 1990, when the interview was conducted. Hawke begins by offering his assessment of Frank Rouse, who served as the state chair during the early 1970s. According to Hawke, because of Rouse's ability to boost membership and his innovative use of television for political purposes, he was the most effective chair of the party during the years under consideration. Hawke goes on to describe divisions within the Republican Party. Recalling the impact of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential bid in drawing new membership for the party, Hawke describes how divisions between state leaders such as Jesse Helms, James Holshouser, and James Gardner especially shaped the party's development from 1964 through the 1980s. Hawke spends a great deal of time discussing Gardner's role within the party, focusing on both his limits as a leader and his successes in strengthening the party statewide. In addition, Hawke addresses the impact of the Watergate scandal, the role of the Congressional Club, and consequences of structural obstacles at the precinct level on the evolution of the party. Finally, Hawke discusses the state of the Republican Party in North Carolina in 1990, with midterm elections on the horizon, and forecasts the party's immediate future.
North Carolina Republican Chair Jack Hawke outlines the evolution of the party from the 1960s through the 1980s. Hawke especially focuses on divisions, various leaders, and organizational limits and successes within the Republican Party.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview on June 8, 1990 with Jack Hawke, present chairman of the state Republican Party in North Carolina. Jack, could you tell me some of the changes taking place when Bill Cobb was chairman of the party from 1958 to 1962?
Well, I'm sorry, but my real knowledge comes into play about 1963 right after Cobb stepped down. I arrived on the scene during Bob Gavin's second campaign for governor and in the aftermath of Bill Cobb having stepped down. He was still, even with the scandal surrounding his departure, very much loved within the ranks of the Republican Party.1 I think it was 1966, somewhere around there, he reemerged and came back to his first state convention after having stepped down as chairman, and when he walked down the convention floor, the delegates all rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.
Did they really?
So even that many years and having left, I guess we'd say, in disgrace, he was that well liked and respected for the job that he'd done with the party, that's the kind of response he got. So I only knew him in his later years and knew him in the late '60s when he was working with Jack Stickley, and really didn't know him when he was state chairman. Sorry I didn't. I would have liked to have been around during those times.
Some of the stories you were talking about, some of the precinct building techniques, he used television cameras and canvasing.
No, I'm sorry, that was Frank Rouse.
Oh, that was Frank Rouse?
That was Frank Rouse in the early '70s. Frank was probably our first
really full-time state chairman. He just took a leave of absence from
his business, and Frank's motto was total commitment, and he gave it
total commitment to the extent that he ended up with his business going
bankrupt and having some real personal, even eventually personally
declared bankruptcy. But he was a total commitment to the party when he
was chairman. He started the first real staff at a state headquarters.
He put in a T.V. room where he had a camera, and he'd bring candidates
in and let them practice and train and do films for them. In those days,
you could get away with having your own camera and doing a news
statement and sending it to the T.V. stations and they'd use it. Today,
you can't get away with that. That ended in the early '70s. In the '60s
we used to do that too. So that way you could say what you wanted to and
send it to the news department and it would get on the air unedited the
way you wanted to say. Frank did things like that. He probably started
our first state newspaper that went statewide. He was very strong in
organization. Frank's weakness as chairman was that he had foot and
mouth disease, and he often said things that got him into a lot of
trouble. In the middle of his term as chairman there was our first real
primary for governor with Holshouser and Gardner,
And he was from the east wasn't he?
He sure was. At that time he lived in Kinston. He's now down at Emerald Isle.
So did he bring a greater number of easterners into the party?
Well, when I got started in the party, and I suppose it went on from time
in the beginning, there was a division between east and west. A lot of
people called it conservativeliberal. It became in the early days,
Holshouser-Gardner and then became Holshouser-Helms split. It really was
more geographic in that the Holshouser wing of the party, if you will,
came from the mountains where we traditionally won, where we had local
office holders that were Republicans from birth. The Gardner wing of the
party came from a little more eastern part of the state and some of the
Piedmont in those days, which were Democrats who had turned Republicans,
and a lot of them came because of Barry Goldwater. That was the first
real division.
Oh, that started in '66 with Gardner?
Gardner had one while he was a Congressman called the Congressional Club, and I think it was the first time it had been done in North Carolina. We raised money while he was a congressman because he was a very active congressman. We sent out newsletters monthly. Instead of doing it as they do now with government printing and everything, we printed them at our expense, and wrote all over the bottom, "Not paid for with government funds." And he had a district office in every county of the district. So we paid for that with funds that we raised through the Congressional Club. And he traveled a lot. He planned to run for governor, or did run for governor. We paid for all that through the Congressional Club. So when he got out of politics in '72, he turned all those files and all his contributors list over to the Helms organization. And I don't know whether anybody still admits it or not, but there was really how they got their Congressional Club started.
Because it started off in '73 to polish off some of his campaign debts.
That was the original point of it, but they also started out to pay some
of Helms travel expenses and things that were involved in being a
senator. So I really think it was an
We were talking about the Holshouser-Gardner, Holshouser-Helms division within the party, which you were saying is primary geographic.
That's my opinion.
Do you think there's an ideological focus to it as well.
Well, you sit Jim Holshouser and Jim Gardner down in a room, and they sit there right now and they say they can't remember where they disagreed philosophically. They were two young guys, moving up in the party, on a collision course, one from the east and one from the west. And that will be the explanation they'll give you today. It was often talked of as a philosophical difference, but I'm not sure there was that great a difference. I mean, Charlie Jonas's voting record was about as conservative as you'll ever get.
ACA gave him 95%. But still there's a difference in that Gardner endorsed Wallace whereas Holshouser went for Nixon.
No, he didn't. Gardner endorsed Reagan.
He did endorse Reagan, but then when Reagan lost the nomination, he spoke highly of Wallace. And the Nixon folks took it as sort of a departure from the party.
Remember that Jim Gardner ran ahead of Richard Nixon in North Carolina.
As we have won governor's offices in this state, we have carried our
candidates in on tails of a candidate for president that's been winning
the state. I would guess if
That's true.
So there were some political dynamics that year.
Oh, he picked up the Wallace voters.
That meant he had to make some moves in order to get elected governor. Now, I truly believe Jim Gardner lost that race. Bob Scott didn't beat him; Jim lost it because of mistakes he made. But I'm not sure the wallace connection was one of the mistakes, because you had to do that in that year because he—what did Wallace run? Second in state or did he run first? He may have run first.
Wallace ran second. Nixon ran first, the first time a Republican won the state. Wallace ran second, and fascinatingly Humphrey ran third. The Democratic candidate ran third. It was the first time Republicans cracked the state since '28.
Gardner, in my opinion, could have won that race, but Jim's got the same
problem I mentioned with Frank Rouse before. He, in those days, was an
extremely charismatic figure. Could just attract crowds. Would walk into
a room and everybody would turn. He just had an aura about him that
attracted people. But I remember, I think two occasions really cracked
his golden armour. One was when he went to the national convention and
endorsed Reagan over Nixon. Today everybody looks back on that and says
fondly how smart Gardner was to be ahead of his time. But at that time
Nixon had the nomination wrapped up in most
Cliff white says that Reagan came within a whisker of winning but for an unfortunate twist or two.
I'll tell you what saved Nixon. Strom Thurmond saved him.
Strom Thurmond made a deal.
I sat there and watched him do it. Strom Thurmond saved Nixon. But anyhow, that cracked his armour a little bit. He was no longer the golden boy that everything he touched went right, from Hardee's to being state chairman to running for Congress. Then he had a couple of things, like he—I don't even remember what the topic was. It was probably something to do with tobacco. But he made a statement in Charlotte. Got on an airplane and flew to eastern North Carolina and made exactly the opposite statement. And those kinds of things caught up with him. And that's why I say he lost it rather Bob Scott winning. Scott just kept plodding along, making no mistakes, and Gardner started making mistakes, or we would have had our first governor in '68.
Well, it was close. It was very close.
In '72—I'm sure you've studied this a whole lot better than I have—a
historical thing that most people have missed, though I think it's
fascinating, Gardner was just a few votes short of winning the first
primary. There were a couple of
Did Goldwater bring a lot of former Democrats into the party on a more
permanent basis? As you were saying the Republicans in the '60s started
to have more meaningful primaries, something that had never typified the
state before. So Goldwater, with an ideological intensity, completely
repudiating the Democratic New Deal, completely going against the
My impression is that he brought in a whole group of young activist
Republicans that became committed and involved during that period of
time. And that was really the heart that built the party through '72. It
was also part of the group that was hit hard by Watergate because they
had a vision that a Republican would really make a difference. That we
were just that much better than the Democrats. That we really would
change the world. That we really would be more honest. That we really
would accomplish more. Why do you keep losing and keep getting your
brains beat in but coming back year after year, working the way that
group did? And a lot of them did, and in '74 when the roof fell in on
Watergate, most of those people that I always used to see that we
depended on were gone. And it took five or six years for them ever to
get their interest back in politics, and that was a period of time when
young people were not coming to the Republican Party. We had a period in
there which was real hard and no growth really, I'd say. The only thing
that held it together was Helms and the Congressional Club. In fact, the
party headquarters and the state chairman of the party itself became
almost nonexistent in terms—the real power was over in the Congressional
Club of everything that happened. But I think that's what Goldwater
attracted to the party. What he brought to the party was a whole group
of younger, dedicated people who
Well, that had been a myth for forty years.
Absolutely believed it. There was no question. It didn't matter what the
polls said. It didn't matter what your door-to-door canvases said.
People were going to come out of the woodwork to vote for Barry
Goldwater, and it just didn't happen. But it did bring a real activist
group into our party, and I think that probably was the start of the
philosophical differences. There weren't many Rockefeller people in the
state but there were a lot of traditional Republicans in this state,
who, I think, probably resented this new group coming in and wanting to
take over. They'd been winning elections for years. Up until 1965 the
state headquarters was in Charlotte. There was an office and a state
headquarters when I went to work for the party in '63. Herman Saxon was
chairman. The office was in
Well, at least, if not philosophical, a question of intensity, I think.
Probably, yes. Your people in the west would support a Republican because he was a Republican. The people that I would say were the Goldwater or eastern, didn't feel that way. They'd been Democrats, and they didn't feel you supported Republican just because he had an "R" after his name. He had to be better, and by better that sometimes meant philosophically more intense.
Some observer noted that a number of the Goldwater converts were members of the John Birch Society and felt they had a divisive influence. Did you note that, or do you think there was any…
I'm, I think, somewhat naive about that. I always wondered how many of
them were John Birchers.
There were never hard numbers and it was a secret organization.
And I used to think that person's got to be a Bircher but, you know, I
never knew it
So they weren't disrupting precinct meetings or taking the party in a new direction that was rankling the old, more established leaders, or anything along those lines?
Not that I saw. Now, I'll give you just a real quick background. I came
here having graduated from college in New Jersey. And I had been state
college chairman in New Jersey, very close to the state chairman up
there. I went to a state meeting that we had called. Had a little
warning that there was a problem coming up. And the Goldwater people
stood up in the middle of the meeting—I hadn't endorsed anybody for
president or said who was going to be for or against. But since I hadn't
endorsed Goldwater, this movement that in New Jersey was called the
Ratfinks stood up and moved for the impeachment of the chairman so they
could take over at the college level. Then they were going for the Young
Republicans and then to the state chairman. I ended up beating them, but
I didn't see any of that
Like Steven Shaddock, a Republican philosopher, had read Mao and Lenin and was using tactics of takeover techniques that way, stocking meeting and…
Well, I'll tell you, Barry Goldwater did that. He took over the party from the precinct up. They had a very definite plan. In those days in North Carolina you could have taken over this party if you could turn out three people in a precinct meeting. And that's what they did throughout the country. How he really took over. New Jersey was a lot further along in Republican developments than North Carolina, but they very systematically did it there. I just happened to be the next down the list. And it wasn't even that you were for somebody else. If you weren't a 100% for them, then you were suspect.
That's like Charles Jonas, the Congressman, and Broyhill were booed at the [North Carolina Republican] convention because they refused to have the delegates at large endorse Goldwater before the convention, and the state party here booed them, much to their surprise.
And the other real bad national convention with people jumping all over, was '76, and Jim Holshouser was denied a seat as a delegate, as was a young Congressman by the name of Jim Martin.
Denied by the Helms faction who controlled patronage.
Who has never forgotten it.
But that had to hurt the party.
That hurt the party bad.
Because a governor and a Congressman cannot attend their convention, and there was a time when it seemed the Congressional Club was more interested in possibly forming a third party. In fact, Helms had explored the formation of a conservative third party in the early '70s and it didn't materialize. But some would look at the Congressional Club as being almost de facto the third party.
We were on a course where we were making mistakes on both sides. Jim Holshouser's desire to defeat Frank Rouse was not politically astute, and I think Jim Holshouser is a very astute person. But there almost developed a hatred there, and they were going to defeat Rouse no matter what. That convention really tore us apart badly. Frank had been a good chairman, and he had friends all over the state. He was the type guy that even though he might make a public statement that sounded terrible, he was all over. He knew people by their first names, had a lot of friends, had done an awful lot. For instance, my congressional race went into a court case because we lost by 900 votes.
This is 1972?
'72, and Frank said, "You're going to go to court, and we'll finance it
through state headquarters." Because I said, "No, the election's over.
Let's let it drop." Frank did things like that for people all over the
state, and when a sitting governor opposed him, Frank came close to
almost beating him, all by himself. He didn't have Club support. That
was pre-Club. He was all alone with all the power of state government
against him, and he stood up to them and came close to beating them.
That was the first really kind of bitter—Frank has memories of it being
a huge convention. But I know there were over 2,000 people there. Now,
he'll tell you there were 7,000. It don't think there were, but it was
an extremely well attended convention. It was packed. It was a close
vote, and the governor had turned out every one of his appointees and
everybody that was in government to vote on his side. So that was a very
divisive thing, followed by Watergate which tore us apart, followed by
these people who had been working in the Republican Party kind of taking
a walk and saying, you know, everything I believed in isn't true to a
degree. And the only act left in town was the Club. The Party was on its
back. It couldn't raise any money. And I think probably political
survival had Helms and people like John East saying, "How do we keep a
more conservative voice alive if the Republican Party's dead." And it
almost was in this state. And I think that's when they started
exploring, can we have a conservative party or third party? I don't
think it ever got off the ground, but there was very definitely a long
time in there where the Club, in essence, was the party. They
Yeah, with 10% turnout, I mean, 10% Republican registration in the state in 1959.
So that the Helms organization today is much different. They're working very close with the state party. We had a fight when I ran for chairman.
Right, they opposed you.
Which was more philosophical in nature, I guess.
You think it was? What was the philosophical difference that led the Club to oppose you?
Well, I say philosophical. It was almost like the situation I had when I was a college kid. I wasn't a 100% so, you know, I was suspect.
What were the suspect areas that made you less pure or just different?
They tried to make it because I wanted to talk about building a
Republican Party and attracting candidates and doing a grassroots
organization and had been part of the Martin administration, so talk
about state issues. That that meant that I wasn't pure. Fighting
communism, on abortion, on prayer in school, on all those things that
were issues in those days. And
Where they offered up Funderburke and he lost to Broyhill and then Broyhill lost to Sanford. So a lot of blood.
Yeah, I think their primary concern has always been U.S. Senate, U.S. Congress.
Well, is that how they think they're going to turn the state Republican, by focusing on national issues, where there's a greater difference between Democrats and Republicans, than on state issues. So they down play grassroot precinct level tasks, thinking that it would bring the troops out of the woodwork by focusing on a bit more traditional issues, is that it?
Yeah, I think the Club truly believes that you motivate people to vote on emotional issues and they don't believe in grassroots organization. That's my observation. And they do it through T.V. ads, and they've been very successful with it.
You know, they ran old John East who was a great guy, tremendous individual, but nobody ever dreamed he could be U.S. senator.
Right, against Morgan.
And they ran the Panama Canal right up I-85. Everybody thought it was in our backyard.
Before it was over. And did it purely on T.V. That was not a turn-out-the-vote effort. What I always caution people though is that those great victories that the Club had always came in years when there was a Republican trend nationwide. If you'll remember in that year when John East was elected, we picked up Republicans all over the place.
That was 1980 with Ronald Reagan's first election and Carter.
That's right. And six years later we lost a good deal of those, including Broyhill. So I've always contended national trends have more to do with it than whether it's a Club-run candidate or not. Jesse's big off-year victory, 1978, that everybody talks about—Jimmy Carter was in the White House. It was in the middle of his term when the party out of power always picks up seats.
Also the financing was—Helms had 7 million dollars and Ingram had a quarter of a million dollars.
Well, I still, yeah, there's a difference there, but I'll tell you, it's a whole lot different running this year when we have the White House than it was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House and everybody was mad at him.
So it's going to be more difficult this year.
It's going to be more difficult.
I sense you're a little apprehensive, maybe, about the '90 race with the new candidate of two days determined, Harvey Gantt, facing off against Jesse Helms. You think there will be a new type of strategy in this campaign, a new emphasis?
Be a whole different kind of race. Our growth in recent years has been in metropolitan areas, suburban areas, where Gantt has strength, if he has strength, is in metropolitan areas. Where Helms has traditionally done a little better than the average Republican candidate has been in rural areas. So we may see a victory this time based on a little different voter dynamic than we have in the past. Because I would expect that Gantt will make in-roads into the metropolitan areas, and Helms will make even deeper in-roads into some of the rural areas. You'll have a real—we're lucky because you'll have a real division on issues which can keep it from becoming a question of race. You know, they can argue over death penalty. They can argue over taxes. They can argue over what's going to happen with the peace dividend. They can argue over all kinds of things like that, and it never has to be a race question. But those issues will tend to motivate the rural people more, I think, and the race issue will be there. If Helms is smart, he'll never mention it but it'll be there. And that will help him in rural areas, and it will help Gantt in metropolitan areas.
So the old urban-rural split is how you…
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
The problem I see is also a historical one, that Republicans lose—that party out-of-office loses. But in this state in recent years Republican turnout has been very bad in off-year elections. Did a little study in the fourth district and compared Martin-Jordan to Broyhill-Sanford. The drop-off from Jordan to Sanford was like 14,000 votes. The drop off from Martin to Broyhill was 69,000 votes in this one congressional district. People just didn't vote.
Are those mostly registered Republicans or the Democrats who crossed party lines?
I did not check their registration, but they're people who voted for Martin who didn't vote. So they showed an inclination to vote Republican. The other problem we have in off-years is a lot of our growth in recent years has come from young folks. 18 to 24, 18-28 year olds are choosing Republicans three to one over Democrats. In fact, a whole lot of Chapel Hill said they'd take Independent second. But those young voters don't vote in off-year elections. They vote in presidential years.
Right.
And my guess is that Jesse Helms will not excite them to vote in an
off-year this time. So I think that we have potential problems there.
The age group that we get the strongest support from is the age group
that tends to vote primarily in presidential years. So I think that's a
problem for us. Off-setting it, we have the highest number of candidates
So Jesse Helms ran a good number of radio ads, more of them against Easley than Gantt from what I can tell from the newspapers, by my own hearing on the radio. In fact, there was an anti-Easley ad after the primary polls shut down at 8:00 Tuesday night. Do you think Helms preferred Easley and that's why he ran against him, or do you think he preferred to run against Gantt? How do you think he sized it up?
I think there were a lot of dynamics going in there, too. I think that
the old Hunt-Helms feud has not died to this day, and they just really
don't like each other. And I think that the Helms people truly believe
that the Hunt machine was behind Easley, and they wanted to send Hunt a
message, number one. Number two, it's much easier for them to have
philosophical differences that they have with Harvey Gantt, than to run
against a guy that was for abortions but not really, that was against
taxes but not really. That raised a lot of money from the arts community
because of Helms amendment but then endorsed the amendment.
The clearest, yeah.
The clearest division you could have. There's always been a debate, maybe
just within political junkies, as to whether the Jessiecrats chose John
Ingram in 1978 because they thought he was more beatable than Luther
Hodges, Jr., and that debate goes on to this day. I don't think in the
future they'll debate the fact that the Jessiecrats
So you think Jesse's supporters turned out at the polls at the Democrat primary, voting for Harvey Gantt.
I think so. I think they sent a loud and clear message, and the folks got it. In the polls that I saw, old Easley was going up. And it's amazing to me that as likely as he was, that he fell so quick, because that was not a hard hit. But his momentum just stopped when those ads went on the radio. It's interesting, real interesting.
Yeah, that is interesting.
I think the Club, I'm speaking for them and probably shouldn't, I think that they had drawn the conclusion that Easley was going to win, and they just didn't want to let him come out of the primary a golden boy with 60% approval rating when the primary was over and the party unified and so on. They wanted to get some knocks in early so he didn't come out in quite as good shape. I think the success of their strategy even surprised them.
Yeah, well, it'll certainly be an interesting campaign. I think it's tough to predict because there's just too many variables in it this year.
And you can't poll it. You will not be able to poll it. You can take all your polls and throw them out the window. People are not, when George Wallace ran, nobody was going to vote for George Wallace in the polls but he carried, you know, came in ahead of Humphrey.
With Wilder running people wouldn't say in the polls that they weren't going to vote against him, and then they did.
Again, a little digression, but Lee Atwater called the day before that
vote and said, "We're going to lose." It was
Plus, for an off-year, like you say, the turnout question is the biggest question of all.
My guess is the Democratic Party and Harvey Gantt will register 200,000 people between now and election day, and that will be their secret margin of victory. That's my guess. We'll see if that comes true. Who knows?
Let me back up because you're doing a historical thing and just talk
about the party at the time that I love. Jim Gardner has not, in my
opinion, been given the credit for the growth of the party that he
really created. Even with Gavin on the scene and Cobb, they were western
oriented. They were traditional Republican oriented. You know, Cobb even
lived over in the western part of the state. Gardner was the first one
who came out of the eastern part of the state, and his race against
Harold Cooley was a classic off-year election in that it was grassroots
up. It was ID voters and turn them out, and it was also probably the
first real good use of T.V. advertising in this part of the state and
maybe the first
Wow, I didn't know that.
And we ended up getting 58% of the vote. So it was a great race. Gardner ran in '64 and came close and lost. In '65 the state party, like I said, was on its back. The people didn't come out of the woodwork to vote for Goldwater. We were probably $200,000 in debt. The chairman stepped down and said, "I've had enough. I quit." And Gardner ran for chairman, and most of his political advisors said, "Don't do it. You're taking over a debt." He took over the party and really travelled the state for about a year, pumping life back into everybody. He was a real dynamic, exacting speaker. And he just went all over giving everybody pep talks and stepped out of office with the debt paid off and party back on its feet.
Runs for Congress, wins this race. We took a poll at the end of his first
year in Congress because the Republican Congressional Committee in
Washington wanted to convince him to run for reelection. We ran
everybody against him we could come up with from Bob Scott to Jesse
Helms to Bill Friday. Every name we could come up with, we ran against
him, Nick Galafanakis. And he was wiping out everybody. He was doing
what we are criticizing congressmen for doing now—all the frank mail,
but it was being paid for by the committee. Everybody that got married
got a bride's book and a letter from the congressman. Every school got
flags. Everybody got agricultural yearbooks. Tapes to schools about how
you write to Congressman. If your picture
Those are old Jonas tactics, aren't they? That's what he did.
Yeah. And we went one step further. We formed a little, in those days you didn't have computers. We had those old NPSP typewriters that typed letters, and they were slow. But we formed a coalition of four other young congressmen, and all pooled our NPSP type things. One congressman gave the room. Everybody gave their machines. Each of us gave a staff member, and we sat up our own mail room. If you wrote in on gun control, we from the office would answer the letter, and then we'd send it upstairs and say, "File it." Anytime something happened on gun control, committee meeting, a vote, anything, you'd get another letter on it. And all we had to do was write one letter, ship it upstairs, and a thousand would go out.
What a network.
It was pre-computerization. The congressmen in that coalition, let me
just mention, were George Bush, Jim Gardner, Bill Brock, who was later
Secretary of Labor, and another congressman from Texas by the name of
Price, I think it was Bob Price. It's just kind of interesting that
those guys got together in 1966. Gardner then ran for governor in '68
when, you know, Gavin had made a great race but we'd been blown away in
'64. And he should have won in '68. He really made people, for
Well, he was criticized in the newspapers for being more concerned with the future gubernatorial race than being a good congressman. And, if that was so, it certainly does prove your point that he was very good for the party. He did a lot for party growth.
Jim did not like being a congressman, perfectly honestly. He did not like
Washington. He did not like the slow pace. He didn't like all of the
debates that never led to anything. The votes that kept being put off.
The man had
His attendance record wasn't due to laziness but due to a different priority that he was working and accomplishing.
Consequently, our goals for the first year in office when he was
lieutenant governor was you will be at the start of the session
everyday. You will bring the gavel down at the beginning of the session
everyday. You will walk the halls and talk to people in between
sessions. You will be low-key. You will not be combative. You will be a
nice guy in the halls of the legislature. Always available to a
reporter, always available to go to a meeting, and that's what he did
for a year
Just shifting the subject once more, I was wondering if you could talk about some of structural impediments to the party's growth, some of the gerrymandering, some of the ballot frauds, some of the Democratic stacking of local committees, election boards, that worked against the growth of the Republican Party for a good number of years.
I'll give you one that's going to happen to me next week. I'll get a check from the state for North Carolina check-off funds, which is on your income tax, that little box that you want to contribute to the party. Originally that thing said, "Do you want to contribute to political parties? Check Republican or Democrat. The problem was too many people checked Republican. So the legislature came back to town and changed the law. The law now is that you just check the box you want to contribute, and then it's distributed based on registration. So when I get $50,000 next week, the Democrats will get $125,000. When I got $300 and some thousand in the presidential year, they got close to a million. So we start right there not on an equal footing.
When did the legislature change that law making it based on party registration, instead of the check on the box?
I called, I don't know whether it was the Board of Elections or the
Treasurer's Office or who, and asked that very question. You might want
to call and ask them. The answer I got was I don't remember what year it
was but if you come down and look at the records, you can see it right
off because it's the
And these are the registrars who would tell you that, and the registrars, how would they get their position?
By law now, the party that holds the governorship had the registrar—the
party in power always has one more vote than the other party. The
registrar is always a member of the party in power, and there's a judge
from the Republican side and a judge from the Democrat side, and three
vote, and it's always two to one. So we never had that until '72, and
even then we didn't have it because we didn't have people in all the
precincts across the state to put it into place. My election, when we
Well, there have been cases, for instance, the Jim Vosberg case up in Madison county where, as I understand it, he was in a car watching the number of people who go in to vote, counting them, to make sure the Democrats didn't vote several hundred fraudulently. And he was arrested by the sheriff, thrown in jail, and then only got out because the Democratic state chairman realized how bad it was making the Democrats look.
Zeno Ponder could do anything he wanted to. There is a great story, and
you're doing a Republican thing here, but there's a great story about
the year George McGovern ran for president, and a bunch of college kids
from Mars Hill or someplace decided to take over a precinct, and it was
Zeno's precinct. They actually held a vote and voted Zeno out. They
turned the votes out. And it erupted into a major battle and
In my election in '72, Durham didn't report in. We were ahead. We were
6,000 votes ahead when we hit Durham, and Durham didn't report in and
didn't report in and didn't report in. I said, "Get a field man over
there and see what's happening." They called back from the county Board
of Elections and said, "Well, they haven't reported because five
precincts," which all happened to be black where we had no watchers, we
had no workers, "are still open." "What do you mean, they're open at
midnight?" The law says only if you're standing in line at 7:30 can you
go on and vote. Well, they said people were standing in line and it's
still open. And I contend to this day, they waited to see how many votes
they needed
And is there a law against bullet voting, voting for only one of say four in a district-at-large sitting?
I don't think there's a law against that.
I know they tried to pass one against Bill Osteen.
Out of Greensboro. I don't think there's a law against that. They did
have a problem with, which I'm sure you looked into, with Jonas. Where
if you take a paper ballot that says at the top, Democrat or Republican,
and then it gives the names you can vote for, and some people would say,
"Well, I'm a Democrat but I'm voting for Charlie Jonas." And they were
saying, "Well, that's a straight Democrat vote. Jonas didn't get it." So
that's a problem that they had too. But that's who controls the
elections board. I would hope, having had a governor for five and a half
years, that we solved some of the problems in local election boards. But
what they did, although we took over the vote now on that board with the
registrar and
But in the long run it'll probably work for your benefit. Now it's more of civil service type of position. Or how are those positions filled once those folks… ?
When Jim Holshouser became governor, they passed a law that said that anybody that had been a state employee for one year was protected under the State Employee's Act and could not be replaced without cause. When Jim Holshouser left office, they passed a new law that said you had to be a state employee for five years in order to be covered under the personnel act and not be replaced. So everybody hired by Holshouser could be fired without case immediately.
And were they?
Yes, yes. I don't know of one Republican that survived. But, you know,
you want to get into a whole new area, we have a real problem with the
media. When Josphesus Daniels started the News and
Observer, we have a letter that he sent to investors where they
promised they would never say a good word or endorse a Republican. Never
say a good word about a Republican. And they lived up to it
END OF INTERVIEW