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As far as I could see, the Old South was under no immediate threat in 1959, when my search for a “real” job—away from the sheltering family—led me to Raleigh, North Carolina. But it was not without a sense of adventure and its sibling, anxiety, that I headed down Quintard Avenue pulling a U-Haul-It filled with furniture from Mother’s attic. I had landed a job as a political reporter for the now-defunct Raleigh Times, an afternoon paper owned by the Daniels family that was a training ground for at least one other publisher of a family paper, Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times. A gubernatorial election was going on up there, and the issue was the same as it had been—which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man? Present, however, was a North Carolina difference that wasn’t immediately apparent to me at the time: a patina of moderation covered the race issue there that would have melted in the blazing racial rhetoric of Alabama and Mississippi.

Once in Raleigh and situated in a one-bedroom apartment in Cameron Village, a real estate development surrounding one of the South’s earliest suburban shopping centers, I began to sniff around, looking for girls and absorbing the different character of the place. There were three things afoot about which I knew little or nothing. A now-celebrated research park was forming in a wasteland bordered by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, a crucible where government, business and education came together in a chemistry that produced a fabulous sprouting of wealth and social enrichment. A non-hysterical, undefiant roadbed of laws, lubricated by moderate rhetoric, was allowing social revolution to overturn the established order without Alabama’s blood and fury. And finally, the state was making sense of its scattered colleges and universities by assigning accountability for the planning and coordination of the system to a single entity, the Board of Higher Education.

The Daniels family, which owned the Raleigh Times and the famous News and Observer—Frank Sr., Frank Jr., and most assuredly, Jonathan, a former press secretary to President Truman—were Carolina natives, steeped in its culture and politics. They knew what was going on. They had been cussed and discussed by Tarheels since the time of Josephus Daniels, the founder of the old “News and Disturber,” a lifelong progressive Democrat who had been Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and later ambassador to Mexico for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had been Daniels’s assistant secretary at the Navy Department). Mr. Josephus and my grandfather were contemporaries as Bryan Democrats in the late nineteenth century and the Danielses have been friends of our family for three generations, prominent in the network of a dozen or so moderate-to-liberal Southern papers.

As a pea-green reporter for the Times, I could see clearly about six feet in front of me. Unaware of the labors of gubernatorial and legislative commissions, and what in time their labor would bring forth, I had only a vague sense that North Carolina and Alabama were not the same. They were, in fact, remarkably different. Geology and history combined in North Carolina to create a culture defined by a business-political oligarchy so unashamed of its more humble past as to be, in Jonathan Daniels’s phrase, a militant mediocrity, yet one that was a model of progressivism in the South. Alabama’s more numerous land barons continually fought to control affairs of the state, subduing the white yeomanry and working class by scaring them with the threat of taxes and black domination. The result was an almost anti-progress electorate, a plurality which was willing to accept things as they are, whose buried resentments flare only when breached by meddlesome government, do-gooders, and liberals. Alabama‘s culture is one of fighting-mad resignation.

North Carolina did not regard itself as a kind of agricultural Versailles, the self-image held by the haughty “plantaristocracy” of South Carolina and Virginia. Neither did it have the nouveaux land-riche pretensions of Alabama’s Black Belt plantation society and the Delta planter culture of Mississippi. It had no reason for such pomposity, because its “black belt”—soil suitable for large-scale cultivation by slave labor—was a comparatively little patch in the northeast corner of the state. In 1860, North Carolina had 744 plantations (fifty slaves or more) while Alabama had 1,687 and Mississippi had 1,516. If you think of slave labor as the human equivalent of thousands of six-figure modern combines, imagine the capital investment that vanished with the end of the Civil War. North Carolina didn’t lose so much in the Lost Cause and so the state was not quite as enthralled by the dry bones of past graces and glories. It might have taken some pleasure from its snobbish neighbors being brought low. The lofty disdain of its two adjoining states, however, wasn’t lost on my wife’s family, which came from the plantation patch.

The Ehringhaus clan took pride in having an ancestor who served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolution. In 1932, it gave the state another in a line of “education governors,” J. C. B. Ehringhaus, my wife’s grandfather. If not unique, Ehringhaus was an unusual candidate who promised during the campaign that if it took raising taxes to keep North Carolina schools open during the Depression, he would raise taxes. From a tax-toxic Alabama perspective that was a damn fool thing to promise and Alabama would have set him down. Tarheels elected him anyway. The new governor found keeping that promise hard going. Discovering that increases in corporate franchise and income taxes wouldn’t cover school expenses, he turned to a sales tax. In a 1934 address to the Medical Society, he fixed on the results of the battle: “After trying to find any form of tax that would eliminate the danger . . . we went to the much ‘cussed’ and discussed sales tax, and whatever may be said in criticism . . . , we have saved the schools of North Carolina for the little children.” Another address piped into schoolrooms statewide would be remembered for its surprise ending, a notorious example of the misplaced pause. Emphasizing the use of every resource in a time of scarcity, he concluded, “Now children, remember, every night when your momma puts that supper plate in front of you, I want you to eat every bean (pause) and pea on your plate.” Necessity being the mother of invention, a more lasting and significant claim to the title “education governor” rests on his consolidation of the state’s universities as a Depression inspired, cost-cutting measure. Later governors would thank him.

One of the state’s historical treasures is the family’s plantation, Greenfield, near Edenton. I visited that fine old house when Josephine toured me through what seemed the entire eastern third of the state to stand inspection by her relatives—the equivalent of sniffing a strange dog. Of course, I was shown the famous Edenton Tea Table, an unpretentious piece of furniture that still resides at Greenfield. It was upon that table in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the first church built in the state, that fifty-one Edenton ladies on October 25, 1774, held the famous Edenton Tea Party—following the more-publicized December 1773 Boston Tea Party. The spunky group resolved: “We, the Ladys of Edenton, do hereby solemnly engage not to conform to the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea,” or that “We, the aforesaid Ladys will not promote ye wear of any manufacturer from England until such time that all acts which tend to enslave our Native country shall be repealed.” Despite the family’s distinguished past, I kept hearing from them during our “inspection tour” a self-conscious phrase: “North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mounds of conceit.” It finally dawned on me that Tarheels are mighty cocky about their humility. North Carolina, as Jonathan Daniels and others have suggested, is Mediocrity, Militant.

Having lost relatively little in the war, North Carolina went briskly about the business of building a better state for all its people. Alabama—Ashley Wilkes with an attitude—moped about, plotting revenge. Leaders in both states recognized that newly enfranchised, illiterate former slaves were being manipulated at the polls. Both set about constitutional reforms—reforming black citizens out of the political life of the South in 1900. North Carolina sent its black citizens to wander in the political wilderness with kind words. Alabama banished them with a vengeance, and tried to get rid of poor whites, too. Alabama’s aristocracy reserved noblesse for itself and gave the burden of oblige to lesser sorts.

Unlike Alabama, illiterate whites were exempted from Carolina’s 1900 literacy law, but it wasn’t deaf to the siren call of racial prejudice. Even one of North Carolina’s icons, its first “education governor,” Charles Brantley Aycock, was swept into office as leader of a White Supremacy movement. White Democrats with ferocious determination set out to recapture state government from “Fusionists” (Republicans and Populists), which included a number of black office-holders. The Fusion ticket won a majority in the legislature in 1894 and elected a governor in 1896 with a significant black vote in both elections. During the legislative races of 1898, Aycock winked at the activities of the hundreds of mounted and armed Red Shirts who intimidated black voters in the heavily black counties along the South Carolina border. Democrats won two-thirds of the General Assembly and promptly passed a constitutional amendment disenfranchising blacks. In the governor’s race of 1900, the Red Shirts were out again. A Colonel Waddell in black-dominated Wilmington illustrated the temper of the times in an election-eve speech. The Colonel advised white men to go to the polls armed “and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”

Once in office, Aycock governed with exceptional vision and liberality for the time. In and out of office, he was a passionate advocate of public education. As governor, he persuaded the voters to pay the taxes to create universal education and prevailed in getting increased appropriations for the state university over the opposition of denominational colleges. He planted the seed from which grew a first-class state university system. And, though elected in a great racial upheaval, Governor Aycock proved to be a defender of the black man. He was a vigorous opponent and prosecutor of lynch mobs. In a speech opposing a plan to limit support for Negro schools to taxes collected from black property owners, the governor said: “The proposal is unjust, unwise and unconstitutional. It would wrong both races, would bring our state into condemnation of a just opinion elsewhere and would mark us as a people who turned backward. Let us not seek to be the first state in the Union to make the weak man helpless.” No such benign words accompanied the 1901 Alabama Constitution, which banished blacks and eliminated as many poor whites as possible through a cumulative poll tax.

Once set in motion, historical inertia holds fast and steady, rolling through the decades. Alabama fought integration with bombs, blood and frenzy, while its “better” class preserved its favored tax status in the Constitution and cowed the white majority with fear of property taxes and hints of black domination. History bred into too many Alabamians a bitter resignation that says: “Our lousy schools were good enough for me and my kids. I don’t want none of your progress, race-mixin’, taxes and home rule. I’m all right, just don’t mess with me.” In North Carolina, by contrast, forward historical forces prepared Carolina to build the wealth-fountain that is Research Triangle Park, for peaceful integration, and a consolidated university system with top-ranked research programs.

All that would become clear to me in time. But the gubernatorial campaign going on when I arrived had all the elements of a traditional no-party election of that time, the only question being which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man—whether conservatives or progressives would govern. Those were the two wings of the Democratic Party, the arena and the contrasting ideologies, which would have divided the two parties, if there had been a competitive Republican Party. The first primary was a culling process, which discarded the lesser candidates and chose the two prime contenders for governor.

It would become apparent to me in later years that a far bigger story was going on than the traditional cleavages within the all-segregationist, all-Democratic South. That was the story of progressive Southern governors channeling the churning white waters of racial turmoil into pools of relative peace. The state was also finding ways to accelerate the waves of economic growth that had been unleashed in the South by, among other causes, the end of discriminatory freight rates in 1952. That was the story of Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford who stood at the head of an invisible line of progressive Tarheel governors stretching back to 1900 and before, and who became my models for judging political leaders in Alabama and the rest of the South.

This 1960 runoff election was taking place just six years after Brown v. Board of Education—that first rumbling edge of the approaching civil rights storms. North Carolina had developed a political culture that provided some sanctuary from the storm fronts. The march of progressive education governors included Charles Brantley Aycock in 1900; the more conservative, J. C. B. Ehringhaus in 1932; and the populist-progressive, W. Kerr Scott, in 1948. It would certainly have to include Luther Hodges, who saved the public school system in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision and Terry Sanford, who blunted race as a political issue and rationalized the state’s higher education system.

Sanford was to be part of the North Carolina continuum of education governors. Ironically, his runoff opponent was himself an educator, a racist with a Phi Beta Kappa key, Dr. I. Beverly Lake. Dr. Lake was no shirttail demagogue. He was Harvard-trained, had studied utility law at Columbia, won a reputation as a consumer advocate as a state assistant attorney general, and had taught law at Wake Forest College. In short, he was a bigot with refinement. Dr. Lake would have been an ideal candidate for Alabama, reminiscent of former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon, east coast-educated, with the dignified good looks of a Methodist bishop. Governor Dixon gave a fighting keynote address at the Democratic breakaway “Dixiecrat” Convention in 1948, damning the Democratic Party and asserting that the States’ Rights movement would defend “against those who would destroy our civilization and mongrelize our people.” Later, Governor Dixon muted the racial themes, putting a high-minded gloss on the Dixiecrat movement in order to attract allies from outside the South. In private correspondence, he was more candid, lamenting that “the Huns have wrecked the theories of the master race with which we were so contented so long” and referring to blacks as “apes” and “gorillas.”

The flame of demagoguery, which would roar to life in the flammable Alabama atmosphere, was banked by the determined common sense of North Carolina leaders. Within weeks of the May 1954 Brown decision, a mortally ill Governor William B. Umstead had appointed a commission to study the state’s response, headed by a distinguished former North Carolina Speaker of the House, Thomas J. Pearsall. Before the year was out, Governor Umstead had died and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Luther Hodges, a former textile executive and Marshall Plan administrator in Germany. Hodges retained the Pearsall commission, which by December reported a plan to transfer pupil assignment from the State Board of Education to city and county boards. It was a local-choice solution, which did not defy the Supreme Court, made it possible for enlightened systems to gradually integrate—or to mount legal resistance—without locking the entire state in one immobilizing court order.

While North Carolina was adopting the Pearsall Plan and reelecting Governor Hodges in 1956, Alabama was adding Amendment 111 to its constitution, which exempted the state from the responsibility for educating its children. The amendment was described clearly as segregationist in newspaper articles at the time. “This is the intent and purpose of this amendment. (It) will prevent any child in Alabama being compelled by Alabama law to attend a mixed school,” said F. E. Lund, then the president of Alabama College at Montevallo, in an August 25, 1956, story in the Montgomery Advertiser. In the same story, former State Superintendent of Education W. J. Terry said passage of the amendment was needed so “we can make sure that Alabama’s public school system will continue to function in every county of our state on the segregated basis which has always been maintained.” The amendment was recommended by a legislative committee established in 1953 to study ways to maintain school segregation. In an August 26, 1956, article in the Advertiser, state Senator Albert Boutwell of Jefferson County said the amendment would allow the legislature to abolish a public school system to avoid a court order to integrate a school. Another article quoted then-Lieutenant Governor Guy Hardwick as saying the amendment gave the people of Alabama an opportunity to answer the U.S. Supreme Court and “the radicals of the north.”

North Carolina’s Pearsall plan finally approved by voters in 1956 was chameleon-hued. It provided comfort for segregationists and realists alike, but its very centrist sensibility put Hodges in no-man’s-land between hostile extremes—outspoken racists such as Beverly Lake and liberals such as Jonathan Daniels at the News and Observer. The most ungovernable rhetoric came from Lake, who fumed all the way through an integrated meeting on the Pearsall plan called by the governor, and seemed to regard the NAACP as a personal affront. A few days after the meeting, Lake told the Asheboro Lions Club: “We shall fight the NAACP county by county, city by city, and if need be school by school and classroom by classroom to preserve our public schools as long as possible, while organizing and establishing other methods of educating our children.”

It was the language of “Massive Resistance” preached by the courtly scion of the Virginia political machine, the gentleman farmer, newspaper publisher, and U. S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. It was the bitter-end resistance that would be waged by the handsome young Alabama governor John Patterson, a year after North Carolina adopted its moderate Pearsall Plan. In his 1958 campaign, Patterson courted the Ku Klux Klan and won its formal endorsement in his victory over a then-statesmanlike George Wallace. On election night Wallace pledged to intimates that he would “never be out-nigguhed again,” and he wasn’t. Patterson, soon after his election, assembled constitutional lawyers who advised a campaign of delaying tactics—a chief element of which was to drive the NAACP underground.

Alabama and North Carolina presented a duel between reason and emotion: a thoughtfully articulated vision opposed to a clutch of inarticulate feelings—resentment, insecurity, and anger. Alabama’s constant harangues against the government of the United States and hysterical posturing in opposition to its laws would infect the state with a kind of psychosis. This verbal Niagara of fear seemed consciously designed to create mass dementia: A belief that our nation’s government was malevolent, infected by alien ideology bent on crushing long-held values, forcing obedience to unnatural associations and patterns of daily life. Molded by such behavior and speech, the minds of too many Alabamians were conditioned to believe they were doomed to a perpetual Pickett’s charge against a hated enemy, and forever fated to be crushed by it—a predestined defeat to be borne with sullen resignation.

North Carolina governors Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford were bookends of statesmanship on either side of George Wallace’s energetic manipulation of popular anxiety and indignation. The chronology was: 1954—Brown v. Board; 1956—Pearsall Plan, Alabama’s Segregation Amendment 111, and Hodges reelected; 1958—Patterson wins with Klan support and tries to banish the NAACP; 1960—Sanford beats educated racist Lake; 1962—Wallace wages defiant segregationist campaign and wins. We are left to wonder whether Patterson and Wallace could have led against the pull of popular agitation and followed the path of prudence and progress exemplified by Carolina leaders. At any rate, a self-confident Governor Hodges, two years after Brown, presented the Pearsall Plan to North Carolina voters. It was approved by 80 percent and carried all one hundred counties. Hodges that year won the Democratic nomination (tantamount to election in those days) with more than 400,000 votes to his closest rival’s 29,000. In the fall of 1957, schools in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem were quietly, voluntarily integrated.

In February of 1957, Governor Hodges gave a budget speech to the General Assembly unlike any heard by the Alabama Legislature in my lifetime. His vision was:

I see a land of thriving industry in well-planned small towns and medium-sized cities, without the slum conditions, the polluted air, and the unmanageable congestion of the typical American industrial center. This is a land where all workers are landowners and homeowners, rather than modern-day cliff dwellers, cramped in gloomy rented flats and furnished rooms; a land with prospering farms no longer dependent on a one-or-two-crop market. I see in every community well constructed, modernly equipped and modernly run schools, supported by enthusiastic people who demand nothing less than the best for all children. This is a land where all citizens have sufficient economic opportunity and education to enjoy the best in life. And in this land, looking out over all, there are towers of colleges and universities—for it is an enlightened land—and the spires of many churches—for it is a moral land.

This is the vision, the North Carolina dream. It is not an unattainable thing. We have a great heritage of courage and faith and hard work. We have the people and the resources to turn this dream into reality. You and I, in the years remaining to us, can only lead our state a little way, but if we do that, and hand over to those who come after us the courage and faith which were given us, then, God willing, this vision of North Carolina will become her destiny.

Alabama saw no similarly inspiring vision. It saw a young governor conditioned by the culture in which he was raised, Patterson, wrestling with the NAACP, and the needy, crafty little wizard, George Wallace, booming defiance while behind the screen he was on his knees before a federal judge. When ordered to turn over voting records to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1959, the public saw and heard stage-managed defiance, but as Dan Carter recounts in his biography of Wallace, under the cover of darkness late at night Wallace slunk into Judge Frank Johnson’s home. Mrs. Johnson, awakened by the doorbell, heard Wallace plead, “Judge, my ass is in a crack. I need some help.”

The wizard’s machine worked wonders. The fighting little judge secretly arranged to surrender the voting records while dominating the headlines with a blazing anti-government grand jury statement that Wallace crafted and personally typed. The wizard won the 1962 governor’s race and turned the state into his own Land of Oz. It started with an inaugural address in which he said the federal government encourages the “false doctrine of communistic amalgamation” and “encourages everything degenerate and base.” The most memorable rhetorical flourish, of course, was: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever!”

The gauntlet thrown by Wallace got a lot of wear—most famously when he threw it at the feet of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach at the University of Alabama to prevent enrollment of a young black woman and man, Vivian Malone and James Hood. That was another Wallace-produced classic: Defiant special effects, which masked the planned and scripted end—surrender. And the medieval glove he flung “at the feet of tyranny” was pretty beat up by thousands of school buses running over it en route to integrated schools. There was no magic in it, only an invitation to a preordained defeat—as tragic as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and stupid as the charge of the Light Brigade into the Russian artillery in the Crimea. Nothing was left after Wallace’s rhetorical fireworks but the ash of pointless defiance.

Meanwhile dull, old, commonsensical North Carolina was methodically building the fabulous fountain in the Research Triangle that in time would spew high-salaried jobs by the thousands, and raise towers of nationally ranked research universities. The benefits would prove larger than economic development. It became an importer of intellectual capital. The companies attracted to its agreeably landscaped campus brought the state an infusion of ideas and vision that raised North Carolina business, education and government leadership to a new, more global plateau.

On the surface, the Lake-Sanford campaign did not seem to threaten the ancient regime of segregation into which every Southerner living at the time had been born. Both men spoke in favor of segregation, but Lake opposed the Pearsall Plan and was race-obsessed, threatening “to drive the NAACP from North Carolina.” Sanford assured voters he, too, was against integration but defined Lake as reckless, someone who would let the barbarians through the gates. In a crucial television interview during the runoff, Sanford faced the WRAL cameras and said of Lake: “He is injecting a false issue on integration and it is false because I am, and he knows I am, opposed to integration. The difference is that I know how to handle it, and he doesn’t . . . Professor Lake yells about mixing of the races, about NAACP domination, and is appealing to blind prejudice for the pure and simple purpose of getting himself a few votes.” Then Sanford drew the bright line between recklessness and reason. “Professor Lake has put us in a perilous, dangerous position. His talk is not going to stop anything but his reckless words could start something we can’t stop . . . And though we don’t like it, the Supreme Court has the last word. He is inviting the Supreme Court to step into North Carolina.”

In the anxious climate of the time, Sanford could not allow himself to say what was on his mind—and in his heart. He knew that segregation was finished and believed it was right that it should be. That would become clear in yet another juxtaposition of crazy Alabama and calm Carolina. Four days after Wallace’s inaugural, Governor Sanford announced his statewide Good Neighbor Councils to create equal opportunity for black citizens. He told the audience at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn: “We cannot rely on law alone because much depends upon each individual’s sense of fair play . . . We can do this. We should do this. We will do it because it is honest and fair for us to give all men and women their best chance in life.” Alabamians aren’t any different from North Carolinians—our blood is coded with the same wild Highland Scotch, rebellious Irish and tribal African genes. We might have responded to a sensible, local-choice integration plan. Our legislators surely would have thrilled to visions such as those of Hodges and Sanford. We didn’t, because shortsighted, hotheaded leaders manipulated us. Must it be said that we got the leaders we deserve? Surely not.

The significance of those events was not clear to the young, expatriate Alabama reporter, but everything about Sanford just sounded and felt right. In later years, I thought of him as a model. In fact, the night before he died I spoke to the Alabama Political Science Association on a “Tale of Two States” in which Terry shone as a statesman. On learning of his death, I was struck with an eerie connection my family had with North Carolina statesmen. Dad had been in the audience in Birmingham when Governor Aycock began his speech, “I have always spoken of education . . .” A shocked audience then saw him slump to the floor, having just uttered his own epitaph.

Though North Carolina’s democratic oligarchy has produced a line of solid and sensible governors, not all of its public men belonged in a statuary hall of statesmanship. Neither has its story been one of perpetual placidity, undisturbed by the winds of controversy. The state had suffered strikes, labor upheavals of violence by unions and the National Guard. A wave of passive resistance—deeply disturbing to its white citizens—rippled through the state in February of 1960, the lunch counter sit-ins by black students that began in Greensboro and moved to Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Durham, and Fayetteville, reaching Raleigh on Wednesday, February 10. The neatly dressed, quiet black students first sat in at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter, which promptly closed as did counters at the other stores visited by the student demonstrators. They were heckled by white teenagers, but there was no real violence. The most violent act was by a red-faced man who raked his lighted cigar across a young woman’s sweater. He then stared at her, arms folded, unaware that embers had landed in the crook of his arm. A thin stream of smoke curled from his burning sleeve. The sit-ins worried moderates in the Sanford camp, fearing that the campaign would inflame racial feelings and help Lake.

North Carolinians were not immune to racial appeals. The revered former president of UNC, Frank Porter Graham, had been defeated in a U.S. Senate campaign by A. Willis Smith, whose campaign exploited racial prejudice, including doctored photographs of Mrs. Graham dancing with a black man. Young Jesse Helms got his start in Tarheel politics by writing advertisements for the Smith campaign and has gone on to earn a place in the pantheon of bigotry. In a phrase credited to Helms, the initials UNC, which Dr. Graham had raised to the first rank of state universities, stood for the “University of Negroes and Communists.” A candidate for mayor of Durham, later chancellor of UNC and acting president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Paul Hardin, claimed Helms referred to him on the air as “a nigger-loving Communist sympathizer.” (No tapes exist to validate the claim.) Young Jesse, who had the brassy bigotry of a John Birch believer, ripened into a courtly caricature of old-fashioned manners and prejudices.

What made Helms so hard to read or predict is that he was an anachronism: cussedly, proudly out of sync with his times—a man stranded by the turbulent river of history on the other side of the canyon—left behind in an Old South tradition with many charms and a great evil. He could be a character out of the 1970s TV series, The Waltons, about a large, likable white rural Virginia family during the Depression. He is Grandpa Walton with courtly concern for the sensitivities of the little old ladies of the UDC.

He appealed to Tar Heels who yearn for the simple values of Walton’s Mountain—life as it is remembered rather than the cruelties of life as it was lived in the Depression South. His appeal to the prejudices of his home state was mellow, Old South condescension: One must be polite to the “coloreds,” but they should know their place and station in life. Helms kept winning because he was only a faded, brown, daguerreotype demagogue—not dangerous as Wallace was. He connected with voters because he honestly believed that the vanished civilization he represented was superior to anything and everything that has happened from the 1950s forward. His likeness will not be found in the pantheon of statesmen, but he deserves a place in the museum of national antiquities.

Now, reviewing those years from the distance of forty-plus years, I am of course amused at my own innocent astigmatism, I shake my head in wonder that a state which could produce Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford also regularly elected Jesse Helms (though Tarheels had the good sense to ship him off to the attic of Washington like a goofy uncle). But more importantly, I am struck by the significance of Sanford’s and Hodges’s leadership. Terry was a model of effective and moral governance, and later an admired friend. He elevated what Hodges saw as industrial trade schools into a system of comprehensive community colleges, wedding academics and skills for the modern workforce. It was his Commission on Education Beyond the High School that laid out a sixteen-college higher education system finally implemented by his friend, Governor Bob Scott. “It was a monumental piece of work,” former UNC President Bill Friday said in a letter to me, “ . . . Terry was really the architect and visionary when it came to reorganizing public higher education.” Hodges had the advantage of being in office for most of two terms in a then one-term state. On balance, it is fair to say that he would have to rank a nose ahead of Sanford in the state’s history. Add up his accomplishments: the Pearsall Plan that saved public schools and broke the back of the race issue in the state, the beginnings of a community college system—and the Midas touch of the Research Triangle Park. A half-century of Alabama governors could claim only one accomplishment of similar significance, an overbuilt, unplanned and disoriented trade school and junior college system.

In terms of personal and professional moment, my one noteworthy journalistic achievement was revealing the plight of migrant labor in North Carolina in the wake of Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” broadcast on CBS. However, there were moments in the 1960 campaign with multi-tiered significance. The first televised presidential debates affected the work of local reporters, and gave me a chance for a memorable encounter with the plainspoken former President Harry Truman. During the third debate Vice President Nixon took advantage of a question to criticize Truman’s language during the campaign. Senator Kennedy’s response was: “I really don’t think anything I could say to President Truman that is going to cause him at the age of seventy-six to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.” The next morning President Truman arrived at the Raleigh-Durham airport, where I began a question about Nixon’s criticism. Truman interrupted, “Don’t talk to me about that man, boy. It’s liable to start me to cussin’.”

The next day, I puffed along beside the former president on his early morning walk and asked him to respond to Republican charges that his own Secretary of State, James Burns, was for Nixon. Truman’s response was: “Jimmy and I split when I sent him to Russia and didn’t hear a goddamned word from him until an assistant told me he was arriving at Patuxent River Naval Station and that he was setting up the networks to report to the American people. I sent him a handwritten note that said, ‘Jimmy, you better get your ass up here and report to the boss, first.’ He resigned a few weeks later for reasons of health—and the old scudder ain’t dead yet!”

Television was decisive in carrying North Carolina for Senator Kennedy, but it was not the TV debates that turned the tide. Voters in the thirty counties west of Raleigh, where Democrats traditionally got their majority, did not warm to the notion of having a Catholic in the White House. They were going fishing until late October when the handsome young senator campaigned “Down East,” and more significantly, the regional TV stations ran non-stop commercials of the candidate’s meeting with the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Among Kennedy’s remarks that made a personal connection with the predominantly Protestant ministers was when he wondered aloud whether anybody asked defenders of the Alamo what church they belonged to.

Of much greater and more lasting personal significance was a blind date with an attractive Raleigh girl, 18-year-old Josephine, who was then known as Josie, Ehringhaus, the governor’s granddaughter. The date went badly. I wore a straw hat, which she thought “fruity.” When we arrived at my apartment and encountered a couple campaigning for Terry Sanford, she treated them rudely, because her father, J. C. B. (Blucher) Ehringhaus Jr., was supporting Lake. Inside the apartment, I angrily made a comment not calculated to endear me, “If I knew you better, I’d spank you.” Still, some kind of connection had been made. Josie was beautiful, though I resolutely declined to admit it when she asked if I thought she was, instead substituting another adjective: “arresting.” In spite of the rough launching, I pursued her because she was smart and good looking, inviting her to an invitation-only premiere rerun of Gone with the Wind. We began to click and fell in love when Terry brought dancing back to the Governor’s Mansion—a black tie affair with the North Carolina symphony playing waltzes. My standing as a likely son-in-law was cemented with Josie’s witty and charming mother, Margaret, when Josie begged off a date to stay with her. Blucher was out of town and there had been a serious crime in the neighborhood. The “girls” would keep each other company and watch Margaret’s favorite show, The Untouchables. That night, I sent a telegram to Margaret: “Don’t worry, my agents have your house under surveillance. Signed, Elliot Ness.” When Margaret discovered the author, I was in.