During more than 30 years as a journalist, another six as a government operative and a lifetime of being a political junkie, I’ve known and/or covered hundreds of politicians — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, saints and sinners, statesmen and scoundrels.
It flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but I came to like most of them, even a few of the scoundrels.
Most of them struck me as fairly upstanding sorts, people who practiced the gentle art of politics with a modicum of integrity, not always pure of heart or motive but usually possessed of some semblance of a conscience — particularly when they were within sight or earshot of the Fourth Estate.
Some of these folks I remember more vividly than others because of their rich personalities, the significance of their accomplishments or failures, their intellectual or political brilliance or their outright stupidity. Ain’t democracy grand?
Here, in no particular order, are some condensed profiles of some of the political figures I remember best and some of the reasons why.
Jim Hunt
Hunt kind of goes without saying, because of the sheer magnitude of his public life. A Democrat, he was lieutenant governor for four years and governor for 16. His achievements in such areas as education and economic development are without parallel.
I covered him as a reporter and commentator during his time as lieutenant governor and during 11 of his years as governor. For six years of his governorship, from 1979 through 1984, I was his press spokesman.
Before I went to work for him, I viewed Hunt as something of a phony. After all, nobody could be that relentlessly earnest, that idealistic, that much of a workaholic. Wrong. What you saw was what you got. He was the most driven human being I have ever known, and he still is, though he’s ostensibly an elder statesman.
Hunt’s intensity had its tragic side. One day he was sitting in his office for an interview with Ken Eudy of The Charlotte Observer. Eudy’s first question was: “Governor, outside of your immediate family, who’s your best friend?”
It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Hunt totally flummoxed. He sat there for what seemed an eternity and couldn’t think of a single name that would have credibility. That’s because there were no names. He finally mentioned Phil Carlton, Burley Mitchell and Charlie Winberry, all confidants and all judicial appointees of Hunt, but it just didn’t ring true.
Hunt, you see, had allies. He didn’t really have friends in the conventional sense.
Jesse Helms
The ideological antithesis of Hunt. Hunt was moderate. Helms, North Carolina’s Republican U.S. senator, was a bomb-throwing right winger.
Hunt was sometimes uptight and edgy. Helms was folksy and witty. Hunt glad-handed practically everybody. Helms could be downright hateful when confronted by someone or some idea not to his liking. Hunt was a born compromiser. Helms never gave an inch when it came to his conservative agenda.
In 1984, as Hunt’s second four-year term as governor was winding down, he mounted a U.S. Senate challenge to Helms, and the two engaged in the most negative, mean-spirited campaign in the state’s modern history. It was billed as a battle for the political soul of North Carolina. That soul was won by Helms — at least for the time being.
I covered Helms during his first term in the Senate and the early part of his second. The two of us always got along well. I found him accessible and easy to get along with.
But a few years ago, after having worked for Hunt, I was on assignment in Washington for The Pilot. I ran into Helms in the Senate subway. I walked up to him and extended my hand, saying, “Senator, I don’t know if you remember me…” “Oh, yeah, I remember ya,” he huffed, and with that he spun his motorized scooter around and made off, leaving me standing there with my hand out.
Teena Little
Her husband, George Little, is a legendary political strategist, organizer and fund raiser, but Republican Teena Little of Southern Pines has carved out a creditable political and governmental record in her own right.
She has served on the Moore County and state boards of education and in the N.C. Senate. She is personable but tough. As a member of the county school board, she was a key figure in engineering the ouster of schools superintendent Bob Tyndall (an idea whose time had clearly come).
Jim Holshouser
The first Republican governor of the 20th century, Holshouser is due much of the credit for making North Carolina a two-party state.
After he was elected governor in 1972, he could have played the race card. He didn’t, instead carving out a progressive record. During Holshouser’s watch, our state didn’t go off the ideological and racial deep end, as some other Southern states did during the 1970s.
Richard Morgan
Morgan is finally getting the credit he has long deserved for being a brilliant political tactician.
His skills were demonstrated in 2003, when Moore County Republican state Rep. Morgan and Mecklenburg Democratic Rep. Jim Black put together a bipartisan coalition that made them co-speakers of a closely divided House.
The arrangement was ridiculed as something that couldn’t work, but it did — quite well, in fact. It’s quite possible that no other arrangement could have worked. Morgan’s bookish persona belies his toughness and resiliency.
Blanchie Carter
A longtime Southern Pines school principal and now a member of the Moore County Board of Education, Carter has used her intellectual, political and diplomatic skills to further the cause of children.
Howard Lee
He blazed a trail for black politicians in North Carolina when he was elected mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969.
He later served as secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources and Community Development and as a state senator. He is now chairman of the State Board of Education. Politically moderate, Lee is a skilled negotiator and diplomat.
Richardson Preyer
The longtime Democratic congressman from North Carolina’s 6th District, the aristocratic Preyer could have been sent up from Central Casting to play the role of the consummate statesman.
He would have made the perfect ambassador to the Court of St. James. He never raised his voice, letting quiet dignity convey his authority.
The Greensboro resident got rave reviews in the late 1970s, for his conduct as a member of the House Committee on Assassinations and his chairmanship of the House subcommittee that investigated the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Howard Coble
Crusty, folksy and irascible, Republican Coble represents a district in the U.S. House that includes Moore County.
A legendary tightwad with both his own and the taxpayers’ money (Washington folklore has it that after first being elected to Congress in 1984, he threw the first housewarming party in the history of the nation’s capital that had a cash bar), he refuses to enroll in the congressional retirement system, driving the bureaucrats on Capitol Hill to distraction.
If he is re-elected in 2006, he could be a contender for the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. If your Social Security check is late, Call Coble’s office. His constituent service is par excellence.
John Ingram
Oh, brother! Where do I begin?
As state commissioner of insurance from 1973 until 1985, Ingram used his Southern drawl to voice demagogic attacks on insurance companies.
He lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate in 1978 and governor in 1984 (thank goodness). When asked during his Senate campaign for his views on the B1 bomber, Ingram would launch into a tirade about insurance company conspiracies.
It was often suggested that he wasn’t playing with a full deck. At the very least, he was eccentric.
George Little
The consummate Republican power broker, Little is a throwback to the political bosses of old. (And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?)
Mickey Michaux
My most memorable moment involving Michaux, a Durham Democrat, came in the late 1970s, as he was saying goodbye to his colleagues in the N.C. House after taking an appointment from President Carter as U.S. attorney. He said he would miss his fellow House members, even the Republicans.
“Of course,” he added, “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.”
Kenneth Royall
The longtime state senator from Durham was a force to be reckoned with in the General Assembly.
A big, gruff, strapping man, Democrat Royall almost never rose to speak in the Senate. All he had to do was grunt into his microphone to let his allies know how he wanted them to vote on a bill. And he almost always got his way. He was a champion of the mentally ill.
Charlie Smith
Never heard of him? That’s just the way Smith wanted it.
He preferred anonymity. He never ran for office at any level, but he put together campaigns that propelled a number of other Democrats into office. He was the principal strategist for then-Attorney General Rufus Edmisten, and Smith was to Edmisten’s Justice Department what Karl Rove is to the Bush White House — the political godfather.
During Edmisten’s 1984 campaign for governor, the folksy Smith was killed in a plane crash while on a campaign trip. A lot of Democrats say Edmisten would not have lost to Republican Jim Martin in the general election had Smith lived.
Zeno Ponder
Ponder was N.C.’s answer to New York City’s Boss Tweed.
He was political dictator of mountainous Madison, so he didn’t need to run for office. He controlled local elections, anyway. (His brother, E.Y. Ponder, was sheriff for decades.) Folklore has it that cemeteries in Madison functioned as voter precincts on Election Days, and it’s probably true that the dead there voted early and often.
I was once in Marshall, the county seat, to cover some State Board of Elections hearings into alleged voter shenanigans in Madison. I caught Zeno coming out of the courthouse and asked him about the charges.
“It ain’t nothin’ but pootin’ under the covers,” Zeno said.
I didn’t ask him to elaborate.
Thad Eure
From 1979 until 1985, it was my privilege to occupy an office in the state Capitol across the hall from the Oldest Rat in the Democratic Barn, Secretary of State Thad Eure.
He held that office for 52 consecutive years, from 1937 until 1989. When he first ran for the office in 1936, his campaign slogan was “give a young man a chance.” And they gave him another chance every four years for most of the rest of the century.
Mr. Eure was in his 80s by the time I went to work for state government. On occasion, he would walk into my office at mid-afternoon, wearing his trademark red bow tie, sit next to my desk and light a cigarette.
Then he would say, “Brent, I’m well past 80 now, I’ve been smoking since I was in my 20s, and when I die, they’ll say cigarettes killed me.” Then he would laugh uproariously.
Mr. Eure served as the grand marshal of the annual Ramp Festival in western North Carolina (a ramp is an extremely pungent wild onion), and he ate them raw with gusto, not an easy thing to do. He loved North Carolina, and his booming, baritone voice constantly extolled the praises of all that was Tar Heel. Mr. Eure literally had an open-door policy.
His staff was under standing instructions that for as long as he held the secretary of state’s position, the door to his inner office was never to be closed. As far as is known, it never was. For these reasons, I rank Mr. Eure as the most unforgettable of a long list of memorable political figures.
