Title:Oral History Interview with James E. Holshouser Jr., June 4,
1998. Interview C-0328-4. Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Electronic Edition.
Author:
Holshouser,
James E., Jr., interviewee
Interview conducted by
Fleer, Jack
Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the
electronic publication of this interview.
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Kristin Shaffer
Sound recordings digitized by
Aaron Smithers
Southern Folklife Collection
First edition, 2008
Size of electronic edition: 108 Kb
Publisher: The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2008.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
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2008-00-00, Wanda Gunther and Kristin Martin revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic
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Source(s):
Title of recording: Oral History Interview with James E. Holshouser Jr.,
June 4, 1998. Interview C-0328-4. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series C. Notable North Carolinians. Southern Oral
History Program Collection (C-0328-4)
Author: Jack Fleer
Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with James E. Holshouser
Jr., June 4, 1998. Interview C-0328-4. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series C. Notable North Carolinians. Southern Oral
History Program Collection (C-0328-4)
Author: James E. Holshouser Jr.
Description: 127 Mb
Description: 28 p.
Note:
Interview conducted on June 4, 1998, by Jack Fleer;
recorded in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
Note:
Transcribed by Unknown.
Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series C. Notable North Carolinians, 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.
Editorial practices An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition. The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original. The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines. Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
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Interview with James E. Holshouser Jr., June 4, 1998. Interview C-0328-4.
Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Holshouser,
James E., Jr., interviewee
Interview Participants
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR., interviewee
JACK
FLEER, interviewer
[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Page 1
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
JACK FLEER:
[text missing]
Governor Holshouser, what was the most satisfying decision that you made
as governor?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I am trying to think. I am not sure I remember what I said the last time.
I look at the big picture and it was getting some things done that I had
not been able to do as a legislator which is the reason that I ran for
governor to start with I think. So just little things like changing the
five-year license tags, saving the state money. We had the private
sector come in and do an efficiency study. Came back with a whole bunch
of recommendations about 600 of them and as implemented it was suppose
to save us about 80 million dollars a year. Now that is the kind of
thing that managers ought to be doing periodically, not every other year
because it is fairly time consuming. But once a decade at least that
kind of thing ought to happen. In terms of specific things I have a
feeling that avoidance of damming up the New River probably not only
took about as much time as any single thing during the whole four years
but also had as much of my own heart and soul in it as about anything.
That was a long fought battle that was won and that was satisfying. I
think the establishment of an ombudsman office so that the people had
some place to come when they could figure out who they were suppose to
talk to about a problem in state government was a good step forward in
terms of how people feel about their government. I guess overall looking
back finishing four years with people feeling
Page 2
like
the governor had been trustworthy and responsive to the kind of problems
we had was as satisfying as any thing looking back at the four years.
That is not a thing, a project, but it is important.
JACK FLEER:
Important legacy actually.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And in a sense secondarily to that from the standpoint of building a two
party system in the state it was satisfying. People felt like that the
government could be entrusted to Republicans without the world coming to
an end.
JACK FLEER:
Let's talk a little bit about the ombudsman decision that grew
out of or was certainly associated with your people's day
efforts.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
That is right.
JACK FLEER:
And what did you expect from the establishment of that office and what do
you think it achieved?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well sometimes you get results that you don't expect in a way.
When we started off with the people's day things, it was one
of these things that you do it as much as to let people have the
opportunity even if they don't exercise it as you do for the
people who come in. But at the same time setting up the mechanism with
the people that was going to staff that project and then expanding that
into a full-grown ombudsman effort. It seemed to me it should have been
a very positive long term thing saying that John Jones out here on the
street, you have got a problem with DOT or the Department of Corrections
or Environment or whatever. You have got some place you can call without
having to be bounced around from phone to phone in the government which
happens an awful lot. I mean it still happens to me and I know the
government pretty well. Occasionally I will call up and they will say no
you need to talk to so and so and I'll
Page 3
call and he will be out of town until next week and he calls back and
says no, that is not my department, somebody told you wrong. And I
don't get frustrated because I sort of know about those
things. But the average person on the street sometimes will just throw
up their hands and say I can't get anywhere with this. Now I
have not really kept up to see whether that office has functioned on a
continuing bases or not. There has been a separate effort on
volunteerism. It seems to me that maybe those two offices got
merged.
JACK FLEER:
They have been.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And how well the office functions as an ombudsman, it is hard for me to
know.
JACK FLEER:
I was tracking yesterday in the budget office, the growth of the
governor's office and particularly the growth of what is now
called the Office of Citizens Help or Citizens Affairs which title they
are using right now. The ombudsman is part of that and it is pretty
significant. I think Governor Hunt, for example, picked up on
particularly the volunteer side but also kept the ombudsmen side going.
But it has continued to a part of the governor's office and
an important part of the governor's office.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And the trick about this is that I am not sure that Joe Jones out there
on the street knows to call that particular office. Now if the people in
the administration are turned in the first call that comes that it is
not in my jurisdiction I ought just to send them to the ombudsmen office
but I suspect that doesn't happen. It is a little hard to
know you. Sometimes you set things in motion and you have a core but it
takes more tentacles of reaching out within the various departments. But
what I did find is that the people in that office, because they spoke
with the authority of the governor's office, could cut
through a bunch of what politicians call the bureaucracy and the red
tape and get a response back to
Page 4
people even if it
wasn't always what they were looking for. Frankly a lot of
times if you got the response back to somebody even if it was no, if you
could explain to them why it was no, that was enough.
JACK FLEER:
On the New River decision why was that so satisfying?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well I grew up in the mountains. Watauga County was just adjacent to Ashe
and Allegheny was next over. A long time a friend of my father, a lawyer
by the name of Floyd Crouse over in Sparta, had been very involved
during the Scott administration in the citizens' efforts
against the dam so to speak. You had some people who thought this was
going to be the greatest thing since slice bread. Real estate developers
could just see lots of things but it was going to change the basic
character of that part of the state. There were enough people who felt
so strongly about the land and its use that I became convinced that it
would be much better to leave it as it was. I don't guess I
will ever know whether that was right or not because you
don't know what would happen the other way. We spent a lot of
time and books were written about it. But it was very well down the
pipeline at the time I came into office. The state basically had a
posture of not fighting the (national) government. There were three or
four different initiatives in court, some in Congress, some in the state
legislature. As I indicated to you previously there were congressional
offices involved — Vinegar Ben Mizell, Steve Neal. Rufus
Edmisten when he became Attorney General and Senator Helms office all
took an active hand at one time or another. I ended up going to see, I
think it was, four different secretaries of the Interior over time to
get their support for the approach of using the Wild and Scenic
River's Act as a mechanism to say you can't touch
this.
Page 5
JACK FLEER:
It was quite an effort coordinating the various levels of government and
different offices. Now did you see any political benefits from this or
was it essentially an environmental decision?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
You total up the total votes in Ashe and Allegheny counties and they
weren't going to get anybody elected on a statewide bases or
anything. This didn't have anything to do with politics
except in the best sense of the term.
JACK FLEER:
I was talking with the former editor of the Winston Salem Journal a
couple of weeks ago about the New River decision.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Yes, Wallace Carroll was very interested in that too and as instrumental
as anybody in helping to generate support.
JACK FLEER:
And he indicated that his paper decided to endorse you and he believes,
although I haven't actually checked this, that in their major
counties of circulation you actually won at least in part I suppose
because of your New River decision and your involvement with the New
River.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I don't know. I don't remember the New River being
that big of a campaign issue per se. It was heating up but if you asked
me right now what were the major issues in the campaign I
wouldn't say that was one of them. I may be
mis-recollecting.
JACK FLEER:
No I don't think he is implying that either but I think what
he might have been implying was the power of the Winston Salem
Journal.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well you know the Republicans hadn't got many big city
newspaper endorsements. Getting the Charlotte Observer and Winston Salem
papers endorsements were probably as significant of a factor in winning
as anything.
Page 6
JACK FLEER:
What do you think was the most difficult decisions that you had to make
as governor?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Personnel decisions in a lot of cases. Several incidents of having to let
people go from positions. In some cases not because they had been bad in
their intentions but because of the perception of what they had done
came across looking bad. That hurt my feelings pretty bad because at
times you don't feel like you are standing behind your
friends like you should. At the same time there is a process of owing
something to "the government" and people's
perception of it not to have things appear to be accepted. I
don't want to get quoted in the book as being a critical of
the present administration. But the newspapers have written widely about
the fact that every time some body in this administration seems to do
something bad they don't get fired they get moved to another
position. Sometimes with an increase in salary. But I think you have to
decide early on where are you going to draw the line. For instance
Commander of the Highway patrol got caught for speeding in his patrol
car…
JACK FLEER:
During your term?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
The press says first thing, are you going to fire him? And I said I just
don't believe that justifies firing somebody even though the
major job of the highway patrol is to keep the roads safe. That is a
mistake that anybody could make. Shouldn't have done it. But
that is not the kind of thing somebody ought to be fired about. Other
people might disagree with that. And you had people who would just go
off and do crazy things occasionally that anybody in their right mind
shouldn't do it. I mean it wasn't bad. You
couldn't have the administration appear to sanction the
things that were happening.
Page 7
JACK FLEER:
Now is the problem, you mention, sort of the loyalty to people in your
desire to avoid having to dismiss them because they had been friends or
whatever? Is the problem of this type also the difficulty of explaining
the decision or an action, because in the explanation sometimes you make
the issue bigger?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Yeah that is part of it. I am basically sort of a soft approach person
just in general and always and frankly some of the experiences in
Raleigh have taught there are ten different ways to do the same thing.
If you do them one way you just come off looking awful, and make the
person you are dealing with look awful and in other ways there is a way
to even let people go. Sometimes you can help them find another job
outside the government. Let them quietly resign and go their way.
Sometimes it almost can reach the point of hypocrisy in a way. I will
give you an example again not for publication. When Jim Hunt decided
that he wanted to make a change in the chairman of the State Board of
Education with Dallas Herring. Herring did not want to leave. But they
had a big going away party and Hunt got up and said all of the nicest
things in the world about the great leadership he provided forever. He
had done a great job I thought. But at the same time it was sort of just
kicking him out the side door but putting some foam down on the pad so
it didn't hurt too bad.
JACK FLEER:
Did you have any experiences like that in your administration?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
In a way, Henry Kendall at the Employment Security Commission had been
there a long time. I did not have any personal contact with him. But his
age had reached the point where it was time for him to step down. He
still didn't want to. We decided that we would make a change.
So we did a good farewell party for him. It was from my mind having to
have him leave shouldn't have been a reflection on his
service
Page 8
because he had been exemplary but there is
just a time for all of us. So you just try to make it as good as you
can. I saw people get fired in the most brutal kind of way and the
smoothest kind of way within the same administration. Just different way
people handling it. The smoother you can do it, the better off you
are.
JACK FLEER:
Other than these sort of personnel decisions and the difficulty of making
those and explaining it fairly to the people involved, were there any
substantive or policy decisions that you wish you could have made more
progress on or made progress on of any type?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well we talked before about the bear of getting the mountain area
management act through. I think that was the single biggest
disappointment in the four years. Because the coastal act had gotten
through and we just couldn't hold together the coalition for
the mountain act. I still think the mountains would be a lot better off
if we had. Since that is my part of the state, I feel a special sense of
disappointment about that. Even though if it had passed, knowing the
mountaineers and their independence, a lot of them would still be
fussing about Jim Holshouser probably. So in a sense of personal legacy
they probably think better of me because of how things happened than if
we had gotten it through.
JACK FLEER:
I was thinking in the context of contemporary North Carolina politics
that there is this discussion today about eliminating the sales tax on
food. I believe that you made a proposal back in the 1970s to do that
and you withdrew it, if I recall correctly.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
That is right.
JACK FLEER:
Could you talk a little bit about that as sort of substantive decision
that you proposed and were unable to fulfill?
Page 9
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I can't remember when we talked about what. But I have come to
this conclusion over time that a lot of time your record, your
achievements or lack of them, are controlled by events that are beyond
your control. It is the same way that when you run for office and
it's the same while you are in office. We proposed that in
1975 in a speech to the legislature probably in January. The week before
that speech was made, we saw the first increase in applications for
unemployment. The budget officer came down and talked with me and he
said you need to be aware that this is happening. It maybe just the tip
of the iceberg of what is coming. I am not saying change what you are
going to say but you just need to be aware of this. Over the next two or
three months those figures just continued to rise, sales tax figures
started to drop, and it became apparent that the next fiscal year
wasn't going to be able to support the repeal of the food
tax, even on a partial bases. So finally you just bite the bullet and
tell the legislature. I know I asked you to do this you probably are not
going to do it anyway but I am telling you this is not a good thing to
do right now.
JACK FLEER:
Now was that, of course you weren't running again for that
office, but do you think that decision had any negative or positive
consequences for the party having made that proposal and then changing
it?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I don't think so. It is interesting the different views people
have about that particular tax. There is a certain segment of the
population says that is the only tax some people are going to pay and
everybody ought to pay some tax so you shouldn't take that
tax off. Other people say that it is regressive tax, it hits the people
who can least afford it as a higher percent of their budget than anybody
else. And that is true. It is not an avoidable tax because you have got
to eat and if you need medicine you have got to get
Page 10
medicine. So you know that that equation is out there before you ever
make the decision. But if you decide that you are going to do it try to
do it. Having to back off always looks a little weak I think. But at the
same time you have to be blind not to realize what was happening with
the energy crisis and all of that at the time. And I didn't
really think that had a lasting impact.
JACK FLEER:
The reason I mentioned that is because so often, not only among public
figures and citizens but also among scholars, there is the idea that
once you make a commitment there is all negative on the side of facing
facts and realizing that you can't do what you said you were
going to do.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Yes and I had the advantage in this case in that I hadn't
promised it during the campaign. I think when you make promises during
the campaign and then don't follow through on them it just
adds fuel to the fire and the public feeling that politicians
can't be trusted. I had been very careful in the campaign to
say I believe that I know enough about the budget that I can assure you
that there won't be any tax increases during our
administration borrowing some kind of unexpected event. That is about as
far as I ever went. Never talked about tax cuts.
JACK FLEER:
Right. Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about ethics in
government. There is always a lot of talk about ethics in every
administration and I would suppose that governors come into office with
some kind of idea about what they find acceptable and what they would
find unacceptable. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of ethical
code you brought to the office of governor?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well I think you start off with your own personal standard. It is sort of
interesting because looking back I suspect even that changes with people
from time to
Page 11
time over the passage of time. Maybe
there is a better way to say that. That also gets affected by things
that were out of your control. If you have a major scandal in another
state or in Washington about a specific thing that makes everybody in
every state more likely to set up and pay attention. We did things that
everybody accepted as fairly standard at the time that today probably
wouldn't be. (I) used the state plane a lot for things that
people don't, I shouldn't say people
don't let you do, but its become politically unwise to do any
more. Never had the sense that we were taking public money to put in our
own pocket because I made the determination early on in politics that if
you are honest you couldn't get rich in politics, you
probably lost money. And you shouldn't ever let that get to
be a factor. I think you also had to figure that as the first Republican
in administration, I thought it was especially important that we not get
a black eye. The jury is still out at this point on whether that may
happen with our legislative folks or not. And if it turns out that they
do get a black eye, and to a certain extent they have got a black eye
already just in fact that there has been as much publicity as there has
about it. And I think they let the party down in this strictly partisan
sense. In the broader political sense, they have let the governmental
process down by having it appear that there is too much wheeling and
dealing.
JACK FLEER:
And you are referring to the fact that the Republicans are in majority in
the house and some action that has been in relation to the decisions
there?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Right. Some of the accusations that have been made, if they are proven
true and so far they haven't been it appears. And I generally
told people they shouldn't do anything they
wouldn't want on the front page of the newspaper.
JACK FLEER:
Did you feel the standard was higher for the first Republican
administration?
Page 12
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I did.
JACK FLEER:
Yes.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I would hope that if I had been the fifth Republican I would still have
thought the standard ought to be the same and keep it high. But I
can't measure that.
JACK FLEER:
Right.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And I had always felt that the public in general had a feeling that there
was something a little unsavory about politics. I remember talking to
some of my mentors in the mountains about that, about whether you could
actually get into it with both feet up to your ears so to speak without
getting tangled yourself. That is harder today than it was when I was
around I think because of the attack mode of the campaigns. When we
talked before one of the things that I didn't mentioned that
I probably should have is that despite the fact that Gene Anderson got
some bad publicity during our administration, I think Gene felt one of
his jobs was to keep his antenna out there, and his ears and eyes open,
and have people talk to him about whether something was happening in one
of the agencies that it was going to be an embarrassment. Somebody doing
something wrong. And just periodically he would come in and say I think
you need to take a look about this, something is happening. And I think
he never did get any credit for that. It wasn't a public
thing but it was very important in terms of keeping the
administration's record clean.
JACK FLEER:
Is it—?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
What I did find is this though. When you have got 60,000 people out there
working for the state a few of them are going to screw up every day and
the guy at
Page 13
the top eventually answers for all of
that. It just depends on the degree the press gets interested as to how
much publicity that gets.
JACK FLEER:
You mentioned Gene Anderson's role. It is necessary do you
think and is it generally the case that an administration will have
someone or should have someone who will sort of blow the whistle
whenever that kind of potential difficulty occurs?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I think it is. I think somebody can. Sometimes it just happens because of
the personalities and Phil Kirk shared that sense of responsibility but
just in a slightly different way. It is sort of hard to explain and I am
not sure that I can. Both of them felt an obligation to sort of keep
their eyes and ears open. If you don't have something like
that, then if the governor is doing his job he is out there being the
spokesman for the state and looking at policy and this sort of thing.
Something will just reach up and just bite you from behind in case you
don't have time to personally oversee all of this stuff. So
part of your own protection of yourself is to have somebody who is doing
these things that you don't have time to do.
JACK FLEER:
Right, right. Some people argue that governors and other people in high
positions of responsibility sometimes make it difficult, maybe
unintentionally, to find out the things that are going wrong in the
administration because they surround themselves with people who are
loyal but want to be loyal want to make the job as, not necessarily as
easy, but as doable as possible. Others argue that that is a recipe for
disaster. If you don't have someone in the administration who
will tell the governor that either he is doing something that may not be
intentionally undesirable or someone else in the administration in his
name are doing that, that you inevitably run the risk of having to look
on. Can you talk about that dilemma?
Page 14
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I have seen that from both sides as a state chairman. I use to sit in
meetings with other state chairmen from the south and other parts of the
county, Republicans. With a Republican in the White House we would say
you ought to do this, you ought to do this. Everybody would go in and
everybody, either out of in awe of the Oval Office or the person with
the presidency, gets cold feet. Or maybe they don't want to
be the bearer of bad tidings so to speak. I told our staff, I told the
cabinet early on that we couldn't afford yes men or yes women
because we have them too. We had a disadvantage in not having a lot of
experience but we also had an advantage in that we had all sort of
fought the war together and there was a sense of a team and there
wasn't much, there was tremendous respect for me as governor
but there was a fair amount of disrespect for me as a person that was
really good. And the staff would give me a pretty hard time occasionally
about something or another. And I told them that we couldn't
afford to screw up. Which is what would happen if any of them were
afraid to bring something bad. Now I think that worked fine where the
staff was concerned. I didn't think the same thing always
worked where people coming in from some small mountain county who
hadn't seen you while. He has known you and worked with you.
He is still so thrilled that we have got a Republican governor. He
doesn't want to tell you something. So it is a little hard no
matter what you do to assure that people tell you what you need to hear
all of the time.
JACK FLEER:
Did you have any cases during your administration where you would find
out about something and thought, well why didn't somebody
tell me about that?
Page 15
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Not a lot, not a lot. I am thinking it has been almost twenty five years
now and times tends to blur these things. If I went back and looked at
the newspaper clippings, I would probably find something.
JACK FLEER:
But nothing after twenty five years still bothers you that somebody
didn't tell you at the time.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
That is right.
JACK FLEER:
What do you think is the biggest threat to ethical behavior in politics
and government?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well I think it is when people who are honest and responsible are not
willing to stand up to those who aren't and say we
can't do it that way. I think the public is less inclined
these days to be outraged. Maybe they have gotten, like people in Europe
centuries ago, too jaded with things. There is not as much potential for
political backlash as there once would have been in this country and in
the state I think. Although I think we are a little bit better than
maybe the country at large. It is hard to know. I think we are. And I
said earlier there are some things that people fuss at you about today
that they didn't fuss at you then. There are things today
that are done that would have gotten a lot more outcry twenty years ago
simply because I think there has been some lowering of the standards in
some way or another.
JACK FLEER:
Do you have an example of that?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I think people who serve on boards and commissions in some cases may
think of themselves as wheeler dealers a lot more than people did twenty
and thirty years ago. Now that may have been because I was more naive
twenty and thirty years ago and didn't see some of the
wheeling and dealing that's going on. But it seemed like to
me
Page 16
that maybe it started during that period of big
federal grants from Washington during the '60s and
'70s. But it seems to me that people have become more aware
of the potential for use of the public trough for their own personal
benefit than they did back years ago. Sometimes personal observations
sort of shoot from the hip. They may not be well founded but that is
sort of the impression I have.
JACK FLEER:
One of the things that seems to me has gotten somewhat more publicity in
recent years in recent decades in fact, than it did possibly in the
'70s or '60s or even earlier and that is what we
commonly refer to as pork barrel activities. Some interpretations of
pork barrel activities suggest that this is an unwise use of public
treasury. Other people say no, it is a matter of good causes that are
getting reasonable help from the state. The first of those suggest the
kind of pressure, buying votes, those kinds of things. Others suggest
the kind of public interest that benefits from this. Am I right that
those kinds of things are more public today. If so is that something
where in a sense ethical standards or standards for political decision
making consistent with the public trust are greater today than in the
past?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
It is a mix. You start off with what I think is a fact, that pork barrel
is always going to be a miniscule part to the overall budget. It gets a
lot more attention than it deserves as a percentage of spending. There
also are certain number of pork projects that a guy from West Virginia
is going to call pork and a guy from Virginia is going to say it is just
something that needed to be done and there wasn't any other
way to get it done. I suspect that people who come from rural areas tend
to look more at that latter approach. That they would never get anything
based on the numbers. And at the same time there is also been just some
blatant examples of tax monies that shouldn't have been
Page 17
spent on projects. There wasn't any way
that you could justify it no matter how you cut it, except that Senator
A wanted it.
JACK FLEER:
I was told yesterday in talking to some people in the budget office that
there used to be a practice that whenever a particular project received
a state allocation, let's say $50,000 pick a modest
number in some people's judgement, the check would actually
be made out and given to the legislator who in turn would present it to
whatever organization it was.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
You have seen pictures in the paper of the legislator actually handing
the check.
JACK FLEER:
That is right. That is right. That is no longer the case apparently. It
sounds that it might be an example of higher ethical or public trust
standards today than in the past. Do you have any comment on this? Was
the budget officer wrong when he told me about that?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I don't think the checks were made out personally to the
legislator.
JACK FLEER:
Yes, I didn't actually mean personally.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And having been a Republican legislator I never got any checks given to
me to give to anybody and it seems to me that that is one of those
things that was sort of a phase. May have been during the early 1980s
that that happen. Now today from Washington and from Raleigh, the
chairman of the county commissioner is going to get a letter from one of
our state Senators or representatives saying I am pleased to let you
know that the department of so and so has approved a grant for you. That
tells you that that legislator has asked the departments to let them
know anything that is happening in your district or maybe the cabinet
secretaries said to be sure to let the legislators know so
Page 18
that they get as much political credit as they can. It
depends on how acknowledgeable the public officials are at the local
level as to whether they think that letter from the legislator was
important or not and that is just part of the political game I think.
Part of the advantage of being an incumbent.
JACK FLEER:
One might argue, I remember in an earlier conversation that we had. I
think you quoted a fellow named Andy Jones as saying I don't
know why you want to be governor because you make at least an enemy a
day. But the other side of that kind of thing as it relates to pork
barrel projects is that if you as a legislator or governor are trying to
help out some particular local organization with a state allocation that
means that money is not going to somebody else and probably also has in
their mind a legitimate request in there. So you do run the risk some
times of making some people unhappy in that process.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
And the more discretionary money you have the more those decisions have
to be made. I am not big on discretionary money. They tend to be slush
funds that are used for less than the best purposes all too often. At
the same time the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Coastal
Plaines Regional Commission monies from Washington were things that we
used very effectively for things that needed to be done and because of
the way the state budget was set up couldn't have been done
that way in some cases because of timing. When Old Maine, the original
Indian structure at Pembroke burned in '73 or '74,
there had already been some talk about that building needed to be torn
down and the Indians were all unhappy about it. I had promised them that
if I were elected, that I would see that that didn't happen.
When it burned down I called Bill Friday and I said just sort of an
extension of that promise we needed to try to
Page 19
rebuild that building rather than demolishing what is left. Take the
walls that are still standing and work from that. I will get you some
planning money from Coastal Plains Commission to go ahead and start
which is always the first thing you do with people is telling them you
will help them a little bit with the money. Otherwise the university
would have to come back in the next budget cycle with money for plans
for building it; that would have been two or three years down the road.
As it turned out they were able to start the planning the next week. And
that is effective use of that kind of money. At the same time a lot of
it just gets sort of frittered away on things. Because if Joe Jones who
is your county manager in X county calls up and says we really got to
have something done about our library up here; it is fallen in. An
Appalachian Regional Commission has some money that can be used for
libraries and so maybe that is not a bad thing. But that might not have
been the best use of that money. It ended up there because Joe Jones was
your old friend. And government ought to be on a basis of policies not
people for the most part. But again, a lot of happens because of the
Floyd Crouses of the world.
JACK FLEER:
Right. We do know however it is not possible to take politics out of
government. I want to talk with you finally with some questions about
your relationship to the political party and the development and
particularly of the Republican Party in this state from the time that
you were governor. During the time that you were governor one of your
stated goals was to help develop a two party system, a stronger
Republican party in the state and a two party system in North Carolina.
What were you able to do as governor to move toward that goal?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Not nearly as much as I would have liked simply because of Watergate.
That tainted the Republican party for not a decade but certainly for a
couple of elections.
Page 20
The 1974 election, 1976
election, and 1978 election were all tainted. It was only Ronald
Reagan's election in '80 that sort of turned that
cycle back around. North Carolina's elections are impacted by
national elections more than most people realize. If North Carolina
doesn't carry the state for president on the Republican
ticket, we don't do nearly as well in local and congressional
elections. And I came into office with a different background than a lot
of governors around the country having been the state chairman for
almost six years and sort of seeing the state through those glasses. At
the same time I also believe that once the election is over that the
best job that you can do for the party is the best job governmentally.
So while we went out and did rallies and speeches and different things
on the side, from the governmental standpoint, I sort of thought that
was over here on one side and politics was over here. While you have got
people interested in jobs particularly from lower income areas of the
state where government is more an employer of first resort or best
resort. That personnel side of government is a function and it is there.
But the policy side of government ought to be mostly, can't
say non partisan because political philosophy that is involved in a
party has to do with how you operate the government. But you
don't try to operate the government as the vehicle of the
party I guess is the better way to say that. And I know sometimes you
can get sounding too high minded with these kind of things. If you have
got a political bone in your body which you should if you run for
something, you can't help but think about the impact of what
you are doing on the political process. There are policy decisions that
you make that can definitely effect how the party is perceived not just
you as an individual. And I get a little concerned these days that our
Republicans are potentially perceived as more libertarian than
Republican and more laissez faire than we can afford to be at modern
times. But on
Page 21
the other hand I know that, if I
look back at the evolution of parties over the last forty or fifty years
that I have been an adult, I realize that parties are not mondilitic and
nobody in any party marches down the same road to the same beat all of
the time. There is always that if the umbrella is big enough to be
successful that it is going to have people with different stripes and
philosophies in it. I think that when you are in office that what you
propose and how you vote as a legislator does make a difference in how
people perceive that.
JACK FLEER:
Now you talked about, you said that you didn't make quite the
progress that you would have like to have because of Watergate. Were
there steps as governor that you could take to offset the effect of
Watergate on the Republican party in North Carolina and did you take
those steps?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I don't think there was much. You tried to do what you
could.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I believe it was the Republican governors' conference in
Memphis in November of 1973. Nixon had said coming into that particular
conference that there were no more surprises. In the next day in the
paper was the gap of the tapes of Rosemary Wood's tapes. I
just came back and said we are not going to say anything more about
this. Because the guy looked us in the eye yesterday and told us
something that flat got proved wrong in today's'
paper. He was bound to have known it was going to get proved wrong. So
we are just going to sit tight. And I didn't try to just
never go to Washington and distance ourselves from that administration
because there was too many things in Washington that still had to get
done. Frankly, Washington was in such a state
Page 22
of
disarray in terms of function that you could only get some things done
by going to the cabinet secretary as a rule. Only the governor could
probably do that most of the time and say we need this done and he would
tell somebody to do it and it got done. But you didn't get
any more entwined with the president personally than you had to.
JACK FLEER:
As far as your effort, if you made it to try to shape the Republican
party in North Carolina during that period, what about the resources of
the Republican party of North Carolina in itself? How much
"control" or influence did you as governor have over
the party?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Well we had of course a major fight over the state chairmanship in the
Spring of 1973 and won and put in a state chairman whom I felt
comfortable with and was close to. That lasted two years and then
another state chairman came in that I felt okay with and had not gone
out and recruited and actively promoted around.
JACK FLEER:
Did not recruit the second person?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Right. And wasn't unhappy with him. Bob Shaw was fine. And you
sort of become a little bit of a lame duck as you go along with that. It
is obviously more up front. The main thing there was that you needed
some kind of mechanism that if you can get it set up that would allow
this business of personnel to be handled in some kind of organized way
and the state headquarters has a way it gives a county chairman out here
a vehicle to say Joe Jones' wife is sick and he has got a
bunch of expenses and he needs a job that is going to pay more than what
he is getting where he is. The county chairman calls the state chairman
and he meets with somebody over in the governor's office that
kind of thing periodically. If you can have a state party move in to
function like that, it seems like to me that there's a
process that helps government by not having government
Page 23
constantly involved in this political side. May be kidding
myself about that. It may be it just has to happen anyway. But I have
always thought that you didn't necessarily have to hire, fill
every position with a Republican. Frankly I didn't think we
had enough Republicans that wanted jobs to be able to do that. But I
thought Republicans who did want jobs that if they were qualified could
get just as easily hired. In previous administrations, understandably
none of them got hired unless they changed their registration.
JACK FLEER:
You mentioned that you had a sort of a well publicized row over the
selection of the party chair and some of that has happened with
subsequent or the subsequent Republican governor. Would you talk a bit
about why it appears, I don't know whether this is perception
on my part, it appears that Republican governors have had more
difficulty in securing chairmen that they want without challenge.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I think we are new at it. Democrats have had governors for years, well
decades and decades and have gotten use to over time. Maybe it is sort
of grown up. I have not done enough research to really know, that the
state chairman is just selected by the governor. It is certainly still
the case with the Democrats. Republicans have been selecting their state
chairmen without anybody being able to tell you what to do forever in my
lifetime. It is just something that there wasn't any
tradition there. I don't think governors got turned down on
their choices of state chairmen on our side but it has not been without
a fight.
JACK FLEER:
Does it have anything to do with factions and the difficulty to
overcoming factional differences within the Republican Party?
Page 24
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I think that is a part of it and that goes right down to the county level
because you have factions in every county just about. In some cases I
have probably said this to you before, if Joe Jones is for you in this
county you can be sure that Joe Smith is going to be against you, not
because he doesn't know anything about you or
doesn't like you. He is just not going to be with Joe Jones.
They are always on opposite sides. Maybe that is just the nature of how
politics is. That is getting a little bit less clear these days as
television is able to sort of bypass the organization posts and go
directly to the voters even in the primaries.
JACK FLEER:
To what extent has the Republican Party fulfilled the expectations you
had when you were governor of North Carolina? Has it met those
expectations or exceeded them or not reached them?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
I am really pleased. I feel like a real sense of personal satisfaction
there. I think we have built a two party state. I think that is good for
North Carolina. It is sort of hard to say it in a succinct, correct way
Jack. But I am a Republican who made that conscious choice
philosophically about how I view government. We talked about that big
umbrella that I don't feel always comfortable with what my
party is doing. I would feel less comfortable as a Democrat although
there are times that I feel more comfortable with, an immediate Democrat
position than I do a Republican position some places. But I think that
the higher part of what I was about in that part of my life was building
a two party system as such. I told Pat when I'd come home
from a state's chairmen's meeting some time or
another and I had heard a chairman from Indiana or Ohio or something
talk about government and how it was and I came home and said you know
he sounds just like the Democrats. Had to be his approach to this. They
had been in control for so long and
Page 25
how their
patronage machine was set up and how the contribution machine was set
up. I said in that state I probably would be a Democrat. I doubt I know
that is probably not so because philosophically I wouldn't
move in that direction. At the same time I have always thought that
balance helps the political process and that one party government is
just not good even when it is Republican.
JACK FLEER:
Do you think that the advances that the Republican Party has made,
let's say by 1998 when we are talking, are greater or lesser
than what you would have anticipated in 1970, in the state I am talking
about?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
If you had asked me in January of 1973 I would have one opinion. By 1976
having seen the full impact of Watergate and how much of an impact it
had, I am extremely pleased that that rebound came in the 1980s. By the
1990s we had a majority in one of the houses of the legislature. We
haven't elected many Council of State people. That is the
only area where we are sort of short.. We have elected judges, which is
sort of another case, because I don't think they ought to be
elected. That is an evolutionary process from 1982. But I thought it
would be long time before we elected a majority in the legislature.
JACK FLEER:
Do you think the Republican party is more or less cohesive today than
what it was in the 1970s? Is it more factionally ridden today than what
it was in the past?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
It is different. In the '70s there were two pretty clear
factions. I shouldn't say the '70s, in the
'60s there were two pretty clear factions. As we have grown
and the base has grown, let me back up a minute on the legislative
thing. I thought we had the potential to elect the governor, to elect
congressmen, to elect a US senator, before we elect the legislature
simply because that requires a base in so many legislative districts
Page 26
across the state that I thought it would come
last. The lines have blurred in some ways and have changed in some ways.
The issues in the '60s just aren't the issues in
the 1990s. I think probably the single thing that sort of juts out at
you that has happen in this period of time is the growth of the
Christian Coalition. There have always been people who were concerned
about social issues on either side of the spectrum. At the same time
that in the 1960s and early 1970s I think the left side of those social
issues was more organized. I served in the late 1970s and early 1980s on
a thing called the Council on Theology and Culture of the Southern
Presbyterian Church. I went to the meeting as part of that which was
held in Washington in the early 1980s. George Chancey was basically a
lobbyist for the Presbyterian Church in Washington at that time. But
this was a multi-denominational thing. They were trying to organize a
network in which if an issue came up in Congress you could send out
wires to everybody and all of these networks would go out and everybody
would write their congressmen back. And almost every issue that they
talked about and position they were taking I was against. I came home
feeling really bad about that. On the other hand in the 1980s and 1990s,
you have seen the growth on the more conservative side of the social
issues and it has been more visible than the left ever was I think. That
may be simply because the media didn't view the left
organization with fear whereas they do the right. I think what concerns
me the most about both sides is the lack of tolerance for the other
position. I wish I was as convinced of my own and certain about my own
religious feelings as most of the people are in those organizations on
either side. Life would be a lot easier if you didn't have to
struggle with some of these things.
Page 27
JACK FLEER:
Separate from, let me ask you, is separate from the Christian Coalition
and the social conservatives that you talked about, a faction that for
lack of a better term is referred to Libertarian?
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Definitely is and those two necessarily don't go hand and
hand. They both are a little bit out of a mainstream in a sense.
Although the Christian Coalition's growth has made it more
mainstream than it would have been at one time and Ralph Reed and people
like that have made it more that way. There is definitely a laissez
faire libertarian approach that says let the private sector do its thing
and get out of the way. The less government the better. In an early day,
a less complex day, I would probably have felt more like that than I do
today. I still feel just like Lincoln. The government ought not do the
things, people things, that people can do as well for themselves. But
there are just so many issues today that people can't handle
from a private sector's standpoint. Even though I am not a
tree hugger in a sense I think the environment is one of those things;
that acid rain doesn't stop at state lines or county lines.
What may be contaminating the stream down in my neighborhood may be the
direct results of what is happening up in your neighborhood. So I think
government does play more of a role today than it did in
Lincoln's time.
JACK FLEER:
Does and has to, you are saying because of
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
Yes I think it does. Those who take position of a less government the
better and I have heard that stated directly by a young legislator in
the east about ten years ago I guess. I understand the point of view
that they have; I just don't agree with that.
Page 28
JACK FLEER:
So in a sense as we talk about your history with the Republican party, it
probably has made more advances, more quickly than what you had expected
back in the 1960s and 1970s but it has become a much more complicated
party.
JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER JR.:
It has, it has and the bigger you get, the more viable force you are, the
more that is going to be the case just by the natural demographics of
things. People get into politics for different reasons. Some of them get
into politics simply because they see it as the only way they have any
hope of getting done something they want to do, good or bad.