In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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