News & Observer - Sanford’s ‘special touch’, April 23, 1998

Old friends recall man with power to persuade

By MARTHA QUILLIN, Staff Writer

Those who worked at his elbow through the years say they will remember Terry Sanford -- former governor, U.S. senator and university president -- not for the political power he wielded, but for his powers of persuasion.

At heart, they say, he was always the country boy from Scotland County, a charmer who could talk the skin off a snake, if he thought it would be good for something. He once talked a friend into going to law school. After he was elected governor, he cajoled a cadre of acquaintances who knew nothing about state government into moving to Raleigh to help him run it. Perhaps to the detriment of his political career, he talked state legislators into passing a food tax to fund education reform.

North Carolina is full of people whose lives turned on something Terry Sanford talked them into -- or out of.

"He had a special touch," recalled Bill Green, who worked as Sanford's press aide for nearly two decades, beginning when Sanford was named president of Duke. Just as Sanford took the job, Green said, students organized a protest on campus. It was a time of unrest at colleges across the country, as young people reacted to the war in Vietnam, to racial issues and other concerns. Not long before, students had stormed the former president's home, and some within the administration were fearful.

Not Sanford.

"He walked out among the students and asked the leader of the group what they really wanted to do," Green said. "And the leader said to him, 'We're going to take over ... the administration building.' And Mr. Sanford said to them, 'I wonder if I could go with you. I've been trying to occupy that building myself for the last six weeks.'

"It was a touch of humor -- completely characteristic of him -- when nobody else was laughing."

Those who knew him well say that from the time he was a young man, Sanford had great, if vague, ambitions. He would amount to something, he said -- he wasn't sure what -- and he learned early that the way to do so was to associate with people who were able to get things done.

"He had the ability to surround himself with really fine minds," said John Winters, who had just begun a term as Raleigh's first black council member at the time Sanford took the governor's office.

Sanford asked much of those who worked with him, and trusted them to deliver.

When he began his term as governor in 1961, he took with him to Raleigh a young Hugh Cannon, who had written speeches for him during the campaign. Cannon, who had never even visited Raleigh, suddenly was in charge of the budget.

For the whole state.

The days often started with a business breakfast at the governor's mansion, and lasted late into the night, with Sanford's staff scrambling to keep up with all his assignments. They came in the form of stacks of paper, with sticky-notes on top. "Handle this," the notes would say, signed, "T.S."

At the end of his tenure as governor, Sanford was to be roasted at a dinner. His staff thought a playwright had been at work on the program for two months.

The night before the event, Cannon said, Sanford and his staff met with the writer, who asked the governor, "Where is my script?"

"Sanford never missed a beat," Cannon said. "He turned to me and said, 'Have you got the script ready yet?' I said, 'No, but I'll have it tomorrow morning.'

"My secretary came in that night and we stayed up all night. I can't say it was written all that well, but we got it done."

So powerful -- and sincere -- were Sanford's arguments that when he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the esophagus late last year, they believed him when he said he could beat it.

"Everything medical says you can't defeat this," said Tom Lambeth, who was administrative assistant to then-Gov. Sanford and is now director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a charitable trust. "But they'd never had to deal with him before."

They knew, deep down, there was no negotiating with cancer, but Lambeth admitted he and others were somewhat surprised to hear of Sanford's death.

"I think we thought he'd pull it off."

© 1998 The News & Observer Publishing Co. / Raliegh, NC  Used by permission.

Sanford Building
Sanford Building