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Terry Sanford
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James Terry Sanford (August 20, 1917 – April 18, 1998) was a United States politician and educator from North Carolina. A member of the Democratic Party, Sanford was the Governor of North Carolina (1961–1965), a two-time U.S. Presidential candidate in the 1970s and a U.S. Senator (1986–1993). Sanford was a strong proponent of education and introduced a number of reforms and new programs in North Carolina's schools and institutions of higher learning as the state's governor, increasing funding for education and establishing the North Carolina Fund.
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James Terry Sanford (August 20, 1917 – April 18, 1998) was a United States politician and educator from North Carolina. A member of the Democratic Party, Sanford was the Governor of North Carolina (1961–1965), a two-time U.S. Presidential candidate in the 1970s and a U.S. Senator (1986–1993). Sanford was a strong proponent of education and introduced a number of reforms and new programs in North Carolina's schools and institutions of higher learning as the state's governor, increasing funding for education and establishing the North Carolina Fund. From 1969–1985, Sanford was President of Duke University.
An Eagle Scout as a youth, Sanford became an FBI agent after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1939. During World War II, he saw combat in the European Theatre and received a battlefield commission. Following his return to civilian life after World War II, Sanford attended and graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law and began a legal career in the late 1940s, soon becoming involved in politics. A lifelong Democrat, he was noted for his progressive leadership in civil rights and education; although his opponents criticized him as a "tax-and-spend" liberal, Sanford is remembered as a major public figure of the South after World War II.
Early life
Sanford was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina to Cecil and Elizabeth Sanford. He became an Eagle Scout in Laurinburg's Troop 20 of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Shortly before he died, Sanford related his Scouting experience to journalist David Gergen and said that it "probably saved my life in the war. Boys who had been Scouts or had been in the CCC knew how to look after themselves in the woods. ... What I learned in Scouts sustained me all my life; it helped me make decisions about what was best." The BSA recognized him with their Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.
Sanford graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1939 and then served as a special agent in the FBI for two years. He married Margaret Rose Knight on July 4, 1942 and later had two children with her, Terry Jr. and Elizabeth. During World War II, he enlisted as a private in the US Army and later attained the rank of First Lieutenant. He parachuted into France with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and subsequently fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his bravery and wounds, respectively. Sanford was honorably discharged in 1946. Sanford later served as a company commander with the rank of captain in Company K of 119th Infantry Regiment of the North Carolina Army National Guard from 1948 to 1960. After the war, Sanford earned a law degree from the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Gubernatorial career
Sanford was an assistant director of the Institute of Government of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 until 1948, then began a private practice of law in Fayetteville. As a Democrat, Sanford served one term as a state senator (1953–55), before running for governor of North Carolina in 1960. Sanford was elected to the governorship and served through January 1965.
Driven by his belief that a person could accomplish anything with a good education, Sanford nearly doubled North Carolina's expenditures on public schools. He began consolidating the University of North Carolina system to ensure its solvency and strength and oversaw the creation of the North Carolina Community College System. He conceived the idea for the Governor's School of North Carolina, a publicly funded six-week residential summer program for gifted high school students in the state. He established the North Carolina School of the Arts (now University of North Carolina School of the Arts) to keep talented students "in the fields of music, drama, the dance and allied performing arts, at both the high school and college levels of instruction" in their home state. He fought for racial desegregation, and even sent his son to a desegregated public school at a time when such a position was politically unpopular and possibly dangerous. He also established the North Carolina Fund under the leadership of George Esser to fight poverty and promote racial equality across the state.
Controversial tax increases were made to finance these educational programs. One such tax, on food, roused much opposition and was decried as regressive by many, including by some of the governor's most loyal supporters. The food tax, nicknamed "Terry's Tax", and other taxes implemented by Sanford diminished his popularity and were heavily criticized by his political opponents.
Governor Sanford was a close political ally of President John F. Kennedy, a fact that disturbed some North Carolina Democrats who were unhappy with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's efforts to push for civil rights. According to President Kennedy's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, Sanford would have been Kennedy's choice for vice president on the 1964 Democratic ticket, had Kennedy lived. In her 1968 book Kennedy and Johnson she reported that President Kennedy told her that Lyndon B. Johnson would be replaced as Vice President. Lincoln wrote of that November 19, 1963 conversation, just three days before Kennedy's assassination:
Additionally, Sanford used his leverage with the White House to further expand the Research Triangle Park (RTP), which sparked an economic surge in the state, eventually luring IBM and the United States Environmental Protection Agency to the Triangle area.
After his term in office ended, Sanford opened a law firm. He had agreed to serve as Lyndon Johnson's campaign manager in 1968 just before Johnson's withdrawal on March 31, but later took over as the campaign manager for the Democrat nominee Hubert Humphrey in his race against Republican Richard Nixon for the presidency. President Johnson wanted Humphrey to pick Sanford as his running mate. On one occasion, the Humphrey campaign asked Sanford if he wanted to be the vice presidential candidate. Sanford declined and Humphrey ultimately picked Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. Though Sanford received a number of legal and business offers from the private sector during this period, he was interested in a position that would allow him to keep his political prospects open.
President of Duke University
In 1969, Sanford became president of Duke University, a position he held for the next sixteen years. While involved in nearly every aspect of the university, Sanford primarily focused on fund-raising, athletics, and relations with university trustees. He also maintained a policy of accessibility to the students and helped defuse racial tensions. This approach helped quell student unrest over the Vietnam War early in his tenure as university president. Addressing the protests with a mixture of tolerance and determination to maintain control of the campus, he met with students and successfully avoided the campus shutdowns that plagued many of the nation's other college campuses at the time.
Perhaps the greatest controversy of Sanford's presidency was his effort to bring Richard Nixon's presidential library to Duke. Sanford raised the subject with Nixon during a visit to the former president at Nixon's New York City office on July 28, 1981 and continued to seek Nixon's help in the months that followed. The proposal became public in mid-August, creating considerable controversy among the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the university. Though Sanford enjoyed some support for his effort, most of the faculty were against the proposal, the largest concern being that the facility would be a monument to glorify Nixon rather than a center of scholarly study. Sanford tried to engineer a compromise, but the proposal by the Duke Academic Council of a library only a third the size that Nixon wanted and their rejection of a Nixon museum to accompany it ultimately led Nixon to decline Sanford's offer and site his library elsewhere.
Campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination
Though Sanford enjoyed his time as Duke's president, he still harbored political ambitions. As the 1972 presidential primary season began, he was approached by several people who felt that the field of Democratic candidates was weak. He was particularly keen to challenge Alabama governor George Wallace in an effort to show that Wallace's segregationist views did not represent Southern opinion. Announcing his candidacy on March 8, he faced long odds in a crowded field. Knowing that he could not win a majority of delegates in the primary, he hoped to secure enough to emerge as a compromise candidate in a deadlocked convention. Even in the North Carolina primary, however, Wallace beat Sanford by 100,000 votes, and Sanford managed only a fourth-place finish at the 1972 Democratic National Convention with 77.5 votes, behind George McGovern (1,864.95), Wallace (381.7), and Shirley Chisholm (151.95).
Undeterred, Sanford began preparations two years later for a run for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Announcing his candidacy on June 1, 1975, he juggled campaign appearances with his obligations as president of Duke. While he developed a following among educators, he did not have a satisfactory campaign theme by the new year. Then, while campaigning in Massachusetts in January, he suffered sharp pains and was diagnosed with a heart murmur. On January 25, Sanford withdrew from the primaries, the first Democrat to do so that year.
Senate career
After retiring as president of Duke University in 1985, Sanford remained active in state party politics. After failing to find a Democrat willing to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican John P. East, Sanford announced his own candidacy for the nomination. His opponent was Congressman Jim Broyhill. After East committed suicide on June 29, 1986, Broyhill was temporarily appointed to the seat on July 3, until a special election could be held on November 4. Despite being attacked as a liberal, Sanford defeated Broyhill by three percentage points in the November election. Critics of Sanford primarily focused on three areas: his promotion of opportunities for minorities, "tax-and-spend" education funding, and his anti-poverty campaign. He took office on November 5, the day after the special election, to serve out the last two months of East's term and the subsequent six-year term.
Sanford found his years in the Senate frustrating. He was concerned about the runaway deficit spending of the era, and he pursued economic development for Central America as an alternative to Republican-driven military policies. He led the Duke-based International Commission for Central American Recovery and Development, a task force of scholars and leaders that published Poverty, Conflict, and Hope: A Turning Point in Central America (also known as the Sanford Commission Report since he was the "the principal catalyst of the commission's work") in 1989 with the principles for promoting peace, democracy and equitable development in Central America. Sanford served on multiple Senate committees: Select Committee on Ethics (Chair); Special Committee on Aging; Budget; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs including the Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy and Subcommittee on Securities; and Foreign Relations including Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Chair), Subcommittee on African Affairs, and Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere and Peace Corps Affairs. He had a liberal voting record in comparison to his Democratic colleagues from the South, and he campaigned successfully against the passage of a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag-burning with a counter-campaign promoting the United States Bill of Rights. Yet Sanford thought his accomplishments in the Senate paled against those he made as governor, and he seriously contemplated retiring and pursuing other projects before deciding to run for reelection.
Sanford's opponent in the 1992 election was Lauch Faircloth, a former Democrat turned Republican who had served as a highway commissioner in Sanford's gubernatorial administration. Enjoying substantial backing from Sanford's Senate colleague, Jesse Helms, Faircloth accused Sanford of being a tax-and-spend liberal bound to special interests. While initial polls showed that Sanford had a comfortable lead over his rival, he lost supporters after an operation for an infected heart valve kept him from campaigning for much of October and raised doubts as to whether he was capable of serving another term. On November 3, 1992, Faircloth won the election by a 100,000-vote margin.
Later life
Sanford wrote several books, including But What About the People? where he describes his efforts during the 1960s to establish a system of quality public education in North Carolina, Storm Over the States where he lays forth a new groundwork for state government and the federal system by recommending a "creative federalism, and Outlive Your Enemies: Grow Old Gracefully where he describes actions that will slow the aging process and rules for prolonging healthy life. He also taught classes in law and political science at Duke University and campaigned for the construction of a major performing arts center in the Research Triangle area that would provide a permanent home for the American Dance Festival, the North Carolina Symphony and the Carolina Ballet.
Sanford announced in late December 1997 that he had been diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer and that his doctors said he had a few months to live. After his release from the hospital, his condition slowly deteriorated. He died peacefully in his sleep while surrounded by his family at his Durham home. He was 80 years old. At his funeral, he was eulogized by a childhood friend who said Sanford "took [the Boy Scout] oath when he was twelve years old and kept it. It started out, 'On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country,' and included such things as 'help other people at all times.' He believed it. He was the eternal Boy Scout." Sanford is entombed in the crypt of Duke University Chapel.
Legacy
Sanford was a major public figure of the post-World War II South. He played a key role in the transformation of Southern politics into the New South, primarily in the areas of race relations and education. In recognition of his efforts in education and in countless other areas, a 1981 Harvard University survey named him one of the 10 best governors of the 20th century.
The Terry Sanford Federal Building and Courthouse in Raleigh, the state capital, is named after Sanford. President Bill Clinton said in a statement issued from the Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile: "His work and his influence literally changed the face and future of the South, making him one of the most influential Americans of the last 50 years." John Edwards said in Terry Sanford and the New South that Sanford was his political hero.
Duke University has since established an undergraduate and graduate institute in public policy called the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Fayetteville High School, in Fayetteville, NC, was renamed Terry Sanford High School in his honor in 1968.
See also
Further reading
Selected books by Terry Sanford
External links
- , Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
- Oral History Interviews with Terry Sanford , , , , from
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