Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress, and Outrageous Ambitions

609 Pages·1999·41.08 MB·English

by  Howard E. Covington Jr.

TERRY SANFORD

TERRY SANFORD
Politics, Pro.gress, and Outrageous Ambitions
~
Howard E. Covington Jr. and Marion A. Ellis
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London, 1999
© 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper i§I
Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging
in-Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of this book.
Contents
~
Foreword by David Gergen Vll
Acknowledgments xiii
I Double Moons over Laurinburg 1
2 Runnin' on Rims II
3 The "Promised Land" 26
4 Albert's Boys 45
5 The Battling Buzzards 60
6 The Third Primary 83
7 The Branch-Head Boys IIO
8 A Dangerous Dream 144
9 Breaking in Line 185
10 "Puddles of Poison" 201
II A New Day 238
12 A Shore Still Dimly Seen 273
I 3 But What About the People? 294
14 New Horizons 35I
IS A Tar Heel Blue Devil 378
16 "Outrageous Ambitions" 417
17 Never Look Back 447
18 A North Carolina Regular 471
Epilogue: The Eternal Boy Scout 503
Notes 5II
Bibliography 537
Index 545

Foreword
DAVID GERGEN
WHAT MAKES A GREAT LEADER? Examining the lives of American presi
dents, Henry Adams once observed that "he must have a helm to grasp, a
course to steer, a port to seek." Throughout a half century of service to his
beloved state of North Carolina, Terry Sanford had all of these-and by the
time of his death in I998 he had brought countless numbers of his fellow
citizens within sight of port.
Terry never had any trouble finding a helm. He was a born leader and re
sponsibilities naturally flowed in his direction. From his teenage years on,
others sought him out to run for office, to seek the governorship, to take
charge of a major university, to gain a place in the u.S. Senate, and to lend
his time and imagination to innumerable projects that would strengthen
civic life. He was a pre-eminent member of the World War II generation
that rebuilt the country in the closing half of the twentieth century.
What truly distinguished Terry Sanford, however, was not just the num
ber of posts he held, rather it was the unquenchable spirit that he brought
to everyone of them. In his soul he believed that people could shape their
own futures, that men and women weren't just flotsam and jetsam float
ing on the tides of history but rather could choose their own destiny. Even
toward the end, as Howard Covington and Marion Ellis write in this warm,
engaging story of his life, Terry was in character. When doctors told him
cancer would take his life within six months, he cheerfully told the press,
"They said it was inoperable, but they didn't say it was incurable." That
was one of the few cam paigns he ever lost.
His was a moral leadership. He never thought of himself as perfect, but
he thought that people working together could create a more perfect world.
Nowhere did Terry put that idea to work with more imagination and cour
age than in advancing civil rights. Long before almost every other political
figure in the South, he insisted that blacks, women, and the dispossessed
should have an honorable seat at the table, too. It wasn't a popular stand
indeed, he suffered at the polls-yet he never flinched. Ultimately, he was
vindicated by the enormous progress that liberation brought to his own
people, white and black alike.
Each of us who was touched by Terry Sanford has a story to tell. I was
in college when he was in the governor's chair, and one of his prized assis
tants, Joel Fleishman, came to campus to recruit interns. Those were the
years when John F. Kennedy was firing up the idealism of young people
nationwide, and a young governor of North Carolina was electrifying the
native sons and daughters in much the same way. I signed up on the San
ford team and was promptly assigned to the Department of Commerce in
Raleigh, where I was asked to write a market report for a company that
made retreads for car tires and was thinking of settling in the state. My
boss ordered me to visit a couple of existing companies and count how
many tires they had in their lots. After a boiling day on a company lot in
Cary, carefully counting a gazillion tires, I called Joel Fleishman to ask if
there might be room for a restless intern on a new commission the gover
nor was creating, the North Carolina Good Neighbor Council. Joel gave his
blessing, and I was off to one of the most satisfYing experiences in public
service I have ever been privileged to enjoy.
At that time, David Coltrane was, for the most part, the entire Council.
Terry had persuaded him to serve as chairman, and when I joined him as an
intern he had only a bare office and a secretary. Coltrane was a no-nonsense
fellow who had once been a farmer but went on to serve in several state
posts, notably as budget director. For most of his sixty-plus years he had
been a conservative Democrat who accepted segregation as a southern way
of life. But he had a heart of 14-karat gold, and Terry helped to convince
him that segregation was wrong and had to end. Later, because Coltrane
carried so much weight among local townsfolk, Terry wanted him to run
the statewide Council.
The governor was a shrewd judge of people, and in Coltrane he once
again found just the right person for the job. With demonstrators engaged
in sit-ins from Greensboro to Greenville and a murderous look coming
into the eyes oflocal toughs, David's job was to criss-cross the state, carry
ing the governor's message and setting up local good neighbor councils
that would bring together leading whites and blacks. Ostensibly, the coun
cils were to focus on jobs and education for black citizens, but the more
immediate purpose was to keep racial peace until changes could come. I
spent three summers with David, often traveling with him to little places I
never knew existed. "Driving Mr. Dave," as I recall it these days.
What I saw in those early 1960s was not only the effectiveness of a con-
Vlll FOREWORD
vert like Coltrane, whose memory I still cherish, but the good that a sin
gular political leader like Terry Sanford can do when he holds the highest
office in the state and appeals to the best instincts of his people. Despite
a sizable presence of the Klan - its North Carolina membership swelled
to the largest in the South in the mid-I96os-North Carolina mostly kept
the peace. The local councils turned confrontation into conciliation. Best
of all, the state began to turn the corner, heading into a new day of racial
liberation. That was one of Terry's greatest gifts to North Carolina and to
the South. As much as the coming of technology and dynamos like the Re
search Triangle, the civil rights era was a springboard toward the economic
and social advances that transformed the state. Putting an end to the sepa
ration between black and white was not only the right thing to do but also
broke down the separation between the South and the rest of the country.
By law he could serve only a single, four-year term, but in that brief mo
ment a Harvard survey found that Sanford had earned his way into history
as one of the ten best governors of the century.
Joel Fleishman, who assisted Terry Sanford in so many ways through life
and now has his own army ofa dmirers, put it well at Terry's funeral in Duke
Chapel. His dear friend, he said, was "a great-spirited, great-souled man, a
man of passion, a man with a conscience that had real bite, a man of loy
alty. But most of all Terry Sanford was a creative genius, but a thoroughly
practical one who transformed everything he touched into something finer,
better, worthier, and more useful to the world. If! had to describe him with
a single phrase, it would be the 'great transformer.' " That phrase rang true
with everyone who has studied leadership and knows the distinction that
the scholar James MacGregor Burns draws between typical politicians
the "transactive" - and those rare sorts, the "transformational."
Instinctively, Sanford knew something else about leaders: that the best
are teachers. A century and a half ago, John Stuart Mill defined leadership
in a democracy as "a rostra or teacher's chair for instructing and impel
ling the public mind." In our own land, James Madison argued that in a
democracy the role of the leader is "to refine and enlarge the public views."
Soon after he was inaugurated, Franklin Roosevelt declared that his was
pre-eminently an office of moral leadership, and that one entrusted with
high office must clearly define for people the moral issues of their time,
as Jefferson defined freedom in the Declaration and Lincoln defined a new
birth offreedom at Gettysburg.
Sanford loved to teach, whether in the governor's chair or in the class
rooms at Duke. As proud as he was in his accomplishments as president
of the university, which he propelled into the highest ranks of the nation,
one had a sense as he grew older that nothing gave him more pleasure than
FOREWORD ix