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Prichard:—anyway either about him to me. We’ve each been rather cautious in what
we’ve said about him to the other. Now, her children have asked me all kinds of things about him.Hellard: ( ) just go now. This is tape number nineteen, side one, of the Edward
F. Prichard interviews, August the second, 1983. Do you want to talk anymore about Kathleen Brady?Prichard:No, now now.
Hellard:Okay.
Prichard:I mean, I—I could—I could talk a lot about her. But I don’t—
Hellard:( ). Today I’d like to talk very much about Henry Ward and the end of
the [Edward] Breathitt administration and—and how it came that Henry Ward was the—the administration candidate.Prichard:Well, I think Henry Ward was the administration candidate simply
because nobody appeared to be quite the combination of—of capable administrator and—and one who really had political strength that he had. Henry Ward really, it struck me, was the only candidate that was seriously considered once Judge [Bert T.] Combs went on the bench. Now, I think everybody—everybody’s preference in the political circles would have been Judge Combs. But Judge Combs went on the bench just about the time the primary shaped up. And I think the refusal of Judge Combs to make the race, his preference for the bench, really left no serious alternative. As I look back, you know, you already had candidates horsing to run—[A. B. “Happy”] Chandler, [Harry Lee] Waterfield, I believe David Trapp got in that race. Well, hell, all that made Henry a cinch to win the primary. You know if he couldn’t have won that primary, he—he shouldn’t have been a constable. All that split opposition. And Henry had the respect of the business community, he had the respect of the press—which always sort of idolized him—he had the respect of the general public. He alienated some of the people in the political groups, but a lot of them liked him, a lot of them got along with him, you know. Henry had an unfortunate habit of doing something for you and making you mad at the same time. He really, you know, other than exercising a certain amount of caution and restraint in what he gave away to the local politicians, Henry was not, in a political sense, just hard to get along with. He might cuss you, and he would tell you how much he knew. But Henry w—and he was acknowledged by everybody to be a very capable administrator. He had run the highway program pretty well. I think he was constantly in some tension with Judge Combs and—Governor Combs—and Governor Breathitt about what he regarded as excessive expenditures on certain highways that—that he thought were politically all right but probably weren’t worth the money they cost. But he wou—he was enough of a—of a regular to go along. And—I heard one politician say, “You know, Henry—Henry made more fights to get his employees and engineers better salaries than any highway commissioner that I ever knew, and yet he’d get in the elevator with them and wouldn’t speak to them. And they’d get half mad at him, even though he’d fight for them to get raises.” Now that wasn’t altogether true. Henry had some of the engineers and administrators over there that just swore by him. What Henry Ward—he did, in my judgment, a—a really outstanding job in that highway department. and, after all, that was then the biggest element in state government. We did not, you know, we were just beginning then to have the big social programs. You know, they really didn’t come in full bloom till the very late ’60s and the ’70s, although they were on the books, some of them. And you know Department of Human Resources didn’t exist then. You had the health department and you had the—the economic security department—it was more of the old-fashioned structure. So the highway department was the—was the backbone of state government, and Henry was able to get financial support in his campaign. A lot of business people contributed to him, ’course some of the contractors and engineers contributed, as they always do, to the incumbent. And it was a little easier to finance the campaign for Henry, I guess, than it would have been for somebody that was more of an outsider. And the—the only defect that he really had, was the defect of personality, which never bothered me ’cause I got along with him fine. You know, he was—and I think a lot of people in the political process got along with him fine. But he could, you know, I can remember once he—he attended a big labor rally they always had at Pikeville, you know, in September on Labor Day I guess, always had a great big crowd, and Henry got up to speak to them. He says, “You know,” said, “I’m glad to have your endorsement,” but said, “I don’t think these labor endorsements means as much as they used to.” You know, he’d say things like that or he would—Hellard:Well, what do you attribute that to? Just a—an ignorance on—in—in
politics or just frankness—Prichard:I—
Hellard:—or—
Prichard:—I think it was—it was a—partly frankness that he couldn’t suppress and
partly it was a kind of ego trip that just—he’s a little fellow, you know. He’d sit in that big chair in the highway department and his feet would barely meet the floor [Hellard laughs]. And I—I think two things bugged him and bugged his ego: one was that he was short and ugly, you know, kind of had pock marks, and the other was that he’d never had a college education. And I think those two things made him have a sensitive ego, and the sensitivity was shown by the way he would be abrasive.Hellard:Was he a reluctant candidate?
Prichard:No. He wanted to run. I—I think really he would have been willing to
run when Breathitt ran, but he took that in good grace and loyally supported Breathitt. And I think Breathitt appreciated that. But I really think what—and Breathitt probably had more impact than anybody on it. He was the incumbent governor. I think what really influenced him above all was his feeling that he couldn’t think of anybody that would’ve made a better governor than Henry, and I really believe that that’s probably true.Hellard:What were some of the issues in that primary?
Prichard:Oh, I don’t know that there were any issues. Chandler was running, and
at that point, you know, he had—he got Kenton and some of them to kind of be his brain trust and they dressed him up a little bit, as I recall it, got him talking about a few good government issues, which, of course, contrasted dramatically with his performance in office. Henry Ward had a, as usual, a kind of a grouchy campaign, you know. Henry was—I mean, not Henry Ward, Harry Lee Waterfield. Harry Lee was kind of a grouch. And I guess Henry talked mainly about being tightfisted, and about being a good manager of the state’s affairs. And you know, ran to a certain degree on the record of the Combs-Breathitt performance, like the mountain parkway and the roads they built and the universities and the educational program. But I think if Henry had of been elected, he would have been much, much more of a penny pincher than Combs and Breathitt were.Hellard:Well, of course, Ward won that primary. What—was it a very large—
Prichard:Oh, p—
Hellard:—vote?
Prichard:—why, yes. He—and that probably is what caused him to get beat in the
fall. He—he—you know, he—I expect he got pretty near as many votes, maybe as many, as Harry Lee and Happy put together. Oh, he—he got a huge, huge majority of plurality in the primary and—and in a—in a way, why wouldn’t he? He had a well-financed campaign, Happy and Harry Lee didn’t have anything much. He had a state organization for him. And yet I think he convinced himself that he won that primary because he was the darling of the people and because he was just recognized as the ablest fellow in the state to be governor and, although this latter may have been true, I think it gave him a certain arrogance for the fall. And he never really went out and courted the opposition. He never went out and courted the local politicians. And I think Chandler bolted, and Harry Lee about halfway bolted, and their people just laid down on it. And then in the course of the campaign, early, they had the annual—is it a luncheon or a breakfast—of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce at the state fair.Hellard:I believe it’s a breakfast.
Prichard:All right. And usually the candidates debated each other at that thing.
And Harry Lee—and Louie Nunn and—and—and Henry Ward debated. And Lou—Henry Ward knocked him out of the ring. The unanimous consensus of everybody that was there—business people, politicians, everybody else—was that Henry had just knocked him out of the ring. Louie emerged from the primary scarred. He had had that nasty race with Marlow Cook in which religious prejudice played probably the decisive part. You know, Tim Lee Carter had spoken very scathingly of him after the primary, others did, the Courier-Journal had run stories about the efforts to stir up bigotry. And it looked like Henry was a cinch and Louie was a dead cat. But two things happened: Henry just took it for granted that he was the victor and began to get more arrogant and more stiff, stiffer, and Louie went out and just used every stratagem he could to pick up every dissident that he could. And they did a very skillful job of mobilizing the sore toes of the little local politicians whom Henry had not made much effort to appease after the primary—the ones that had opposed him. Well, Henry also—Louie also did a good job of knitting up the—the raveled sweater of Republican unity, at least to the point of getting Cook and [William] Cowger to go down the line for him in Jefferson County, and Dr. Carter to go down the line for him in the fifth district, and he presented a rather united front. And then he s—seized on an issue that proved pretty good. He found a study that some graduate school in Missouri or some place had done about the rankings of the various states in economic development and education and all these other things, and it ranked Kentucky very low. And Louie started hammering, toward the end of the campaign, on the proposition that after, whatever it was, sixteen years of uninterrupted Democratic rule, Kentucky ranked at the bottom in everything. And he did a right effective job with that. I mean, I think that probably helped him with what you might call the independent voters and some of the dissident Democrats. And Henry sat on his butt and didn’t do much in the last month or two of the campaign. After he had him knocked out, then was the time—I begged Henry, I—I helped him that campaign—I didn’t stay down there the way I had in some others, but I’d go down and spend the day or two or a day and a night or two days and a night—and I kept begging him, I said, “You’ve got him down, don’t let him up. Don’t let him up. Just make his name an indecency, because the people are ready for that with it.” And you know, he—he was reluctant to do it. He thought he was a cinch to win and he wanted to maintain his dignity as a gubernatorial governor. And the consequence was that, with the dissidence in the Democratic Party and with Louie’s pretty good kind of a negative campaign and the unity that Louie managed to put together in the Republican Party, Nunn beat him about thirty, thirty-five thousand. Now, that was it. And the, you know, it was a particularly a bitter pill for—for Henry to swallow. When the lieutenant governor was elected, Wendell Ford, and while there was some people that, you know, there was some—that’s another thing Nunn skillfully did, you know. In places where the Democrats were strong, they’d put out a little talk and even had some Nunn-Ford stickers printed, automobile bumper stickers. Now, I never thought that Ford had anything to do with that, or that it was really an organized thing among Democrats, but I think it—that Nunn skillfully played on it, and, as you recall, the—the Demo—most of the Democrats on the ticket were elected. Wendell was elected, John Breckinridge was elected, Wendell Butler was elected—Hellard:Thelma [Stovall].
Prichard:Thelma Stovall was elected, that’s right. The only Republicans had won
were Louie Nunn and the auditor, who was Clyde Connolly and—Hellard:Dick Vermeegan.
Prichard:What?
Hellard:Dick Vermeegan, clerk in Court of Appeals.
Prichard:And, yes, and the commissioner of agriculture, I forget his name now,
he was from down in—in Monroe County. I forget his name, pretty nice little fellow. That’s right. Now, they won. But still, it’s remarkable that when the gubernatorial candidate wins by 35,000 votes that the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, treasurer, and commissioner of agriculture on the opposite ticket are elected. Indicates to me that it was a sort of personal thing for Henry—against Henry.Hellard:Well, I think they played a great deal in that campaign, too, on Henry’s arrogance—
Prichard:Well, of course.
Hellard:—I mean, they just came out and say he was arrogant and some of his actions—
Prichard:Well, he—
Hellard:—his actions were—were such that—
Prichard:Henry himself wouldn’t deny he was arrogant, I don’t think. Henry was
kind of proud of it.Hellard:Well, how did—how did he take the—the defeat?
Prichard:He took it all right. He—he just figured he was out of politics
He—he—he took the—did he first go over to Paducah with the paper or to the Chamber of Commerce?Hellard:I think Chamber.
Prichard:No, I’m not sure about that. I—I can’t remember. He had been with the
Chamber back when Chandler was go—after [Earle C.] Clements was beat, I thought, maybe. And then he went to, you know, he worked in Clements’ office in Washington after—after Chandler was elected until Clements got beat. Then I guess he did work for the Chamber, but then he went to Paducah and then came back to the Chamber. He fell out with the Paxtons. He went over there and—as editor and publisher of the Sun-Democrat, and that didn’t last very long, and he went back to the Chamber of Commerce.Hellard:During that cam—
Prichard:No—or the independent colleges. That’s what he went to after the
Chamber—the Sun-Democrat, he went to be head of the organization that was to raise money and promote the so-called independent colleges, you know, the private colleges.Hellard:Well, during the campaign, who were—who were some of his key advisers?
Prichard:Well, Foster Ockerman was his chairman. You can’t fault that ’cause
Foster was Breathitt’s chairman and was the best I ever saw. Ed Farris was one of his key advisers, Bob Matthews, which probably wasn’t all that much force. I would say those people, you know—Hellard:Did you mention Bob Bell?
Prichard:Bob Bell, that’s right, of course, Bob was in the highway department.
Or Bob may been over in—was he in parks or revenue by then? He had been— Phil Swift, I, to some degree—Hellard:Well, what was that guy—
Prichard:—but you know, Henry—Henry managed his own campaign. That was one of
his troubles.Hellard:What was the impact of Nunn’s victory on the Democratic Party?
Prichard:Well in a way it’s kind—
Hellard:What changes can you—can you attribute to Nunn’s victory in the
Democratic Party?Prichard:What—what?
Hellard:What changes in the Democratic Party can you attribute to Nunn’s
victory? Any at all?Prichard:Not much. Oh, I—I can attribute the—the rise of J. R. Miller and—and
Wendell Ford to the election—to the election, that was the main thing, and it was pretty important. I don’t, you know, I think the Democrats were shattered at first. They were broke. They had little old headquarters down there on East Main. Owed money. They had a deficit. The party felt shattered. It was the first time they’d been out of power in—in twenty years, or first election they’d lost in twenty years. And the legislature was, oh, I don’t know what you want to call it, in disarray. And they were—the legislative numbers were close enough to where Louie, with certain skill, was able to pick up enough Democrats to prevail. Republicans had much better discipline than the Democrats ’cause some of the Democrats that played with Louie got patronage, that kind of thing. Where’s my matches?Hellard:( ) Here you go. Got it?
Prichard:Uh-huh. Just take, for instance, the two percents—two-percent addition
to the sales tax. The Democrats, of course—Louie, in the first place, had a good issue because, you know, right after the November election, Breathitt revealed the existence of a shortage of funds. That was the time when we had a credit crunch, in ’66, with the Vietnam War, interest rates went up. It was some ways similar to this condition, except not as severe. Receipts went down. The crunch was in ’66, but as usually happens, the fiscal consequences were a year later, so we had a shortfall of revenue in nineteen and sixty-seven. Breathitt, after the election, issued an order impounding sufficient funds to balance the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, including some educational funds and others. He—this made it much easier for Nunn to get by with an increase in taxation because he tried to justify it on the grounds that the Democrats had left the cupboard bare and that he had no choice, and that his commitments not to increase taxes were made in the light of information he didn’t have. Well, of course, if he’d had people around him in his campaign like [Lawrence E.] Forgy [Jr.], who—who—who helped him some but wasn’t that close then. Forgy was then working in Washington, I believe, for [John Sherman] Cooper. But anyway, if he’d had people like that, they could have told him.Hellard:Would that have made any difference in what he said?
Prichard:Oh, I don’t know whether it would have made any difference or not, but
it would have, you know, he—he couldn’t have had it as an excuse, I guess, as easily as if he— But it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, you know, the—the shortfall didn’t accumulate just in the month after the election. So, regardless of that, it made it easier for Louie to advocate a tax increase and give a Democrat some reason to go along with it.Hellard:What about the Nunn administration? What do you—what do you think it’s—
Prichard:Now, wait a minute, let me finish with the taxes now.
Hellard:All right.
Prichard:In addition, Nunn used the raw power of patronage to buy enough
legislators to pick up a scant majority. Let’s face it, Nunn had run on a—on a promise to get Bill May out of Frankfort. Like most every governor that wasn’t on the inside, he ran on a platform, “Let’s get rid of Bill May.” ’Course Breathitt had let contracts during the year of the campaign to May and others for the engineering work on the Daniel Boone Parkway and the Cumberland Parkway, which were of doubtful fiscal merit—not the contracts, but the roads. And one would have thought that if the—that if the state was in that bad a shape, that an incoming governor would have stopped those new roads, which, as you know, were denominated toll roads but actually were paid out of tax money. But instead, Louie, through Harold Kelly—who had been Louie’s roommate or something in law school—made a deal with Bill May that if Bill would deliver him some votes in the senate, he would go ahead with these roads and give the contracts to May, who already had them, tentatively. And I’ll tell you, he delivered the votes. He delivered the vote of Lawrence Wetherby; he delivered the vote of his cousin, C. B. Ladder; he delivered the vote of—what was his name—Pearl Strong, one of the Strongs from up at Hazard; he delivered several votes in the senate. And Bill May got more business from Louie Nunn’s administration than he got from Chandler, Combs, Breathitt, all added up. Now—now what was your next question?Hellard:What—what is the chief contribution made by the Nunn administration?
Prichard:Well, I think probably the chief contribution was what he did that I’m
denouncing. That is, he went ahead and put the extra taxation on, or got it through, and that kept the state government solvent and—and enabled certain things to be done. Education. He—Nunn built that mental, you know, retardation facility down near Somerset. He built a lot of roads, you know, they weren’t all needed, but he—he built them. He kind of did the same things in—in overall policy that Democratic governors had been doing—more taxes, more money, more money, more programs for education, more programs for mental health, more programs for highways. It was a very corrupt administration. They—of course one of the worst things they did was to try to gut the state personnel act, and that was one of the things that put me into collision course with him. I represented a lot of the employees that he’d fired. And on behalf of a lot of others, I filed a class action which was ultimately, at least partially, successful and was finally settled during the following administration, after Judge Meigs had entered a judgment in our beha—favor.Hellard:That was a rather sizable judgment, in fact.
Prichard:Uh-huh. Or it could have been a whole lot bigger. But I guess the
employees and I both wanted a hand—bird in the bush, you know, bird in the hand, you know. Judge Meigs didn’t allow us all we should have had. And truth is that if I had a—a really—had my wits totally about me, I could have filed a second class action based on a group of mass firings the following May or June. And I was, you know, I was so busy with this one that I never got around to filing that one. The basis of my class action was that they had fired these employees en masse and had cited no specific charges against them, just said, “Political activity.” And you know, Judge Cullen had held in one of the cases involving an individual employee and he—he said, “It wasn’t necessary.” They argued, you know, that you sh—had to go before the personnel board and couldn’t go directly to court. And Judge Cullen, in this opinion, said that where the dismissals were just void on their face and didn’t state any basis even on the face of it for firing them or anything specific, then they could go to court directly and s—bypass the personnel board. And that’s when I filed my class action, when I saw—’cause that was my case Cullen wrote the opinion in. But you know, there was a second bunch of firings, very large bunch, in about May, I believe it was, or June of nineteen and sixty-eight, where they simply cited the statute—certain sections of the statute—but didn’t cite any names, any dates, any specific conduct, and, really, I had a good class action there, too, and never did perfect it. I guess I just had my hands full. But anyway, that was a—that was the way it went. Now—Hellard:Well, there are rul—
Prichard:—of course, he did other things. He—he—you know, he—he assessed the
employees in the most vicious way. He had his people from the governor’s office in the highway department going out time after time and collecting huge sums in cash and nobody knew where they went. He had people in his office like Murphy and that boy that killed himself and a couple over in the highway department. I had affidavits on it all.Hellard:It was during his administration that the—Rita Beard, was that her name,
who—with ITT—wasn’t some kind of uproar that he—he was connected with, no, she was here on Derby Day—Prichard:Well—
Hellard:—or was she the one that was supposed to have brought down a hundred
thousand dollars into the campaign? Or am I totally—totally off base?Prichard:Well, you are not totally off base. But none of this was revealed, I
don’t believe, until the Watergate came out in ’73. I think the facts were that she was down here for the Derby, maybe when John Mitchell was here, and that she was supposed to have passed out drunk on the floor of the mansion drawing room, and that her purpose in being here was supposed to have been to bring a pile of money for Emberton’s campaign. And that was all revealed, at least a good part of it, I believe, in the Watergate hearings—or was it in the IT and T hearings? ’Cause she—Hellard:I think that ( )
Prichard:—worked for IT and T.
Hellard:I think IT and T.
Prichard:That’s right. That was—but the IT and T hearings were in ’73, too. That
was Harold Jeanine and— And by the way, do you know who—who represented IT and T during the course of all those things?Hellard:No.
Prichard:Felix Royton.
Hellard:Is that right?
Prichard:Not as a lawyer, but as a banker. And he was greatly embarrassed by
those—although they did not reflect anything particularly on him personally, except that he was connected with IT and T as their banker.Hellard:Well, Nunn’s election, according to some people, really began the—the
general assembly on a—on a kind of a reform road in terms of its—its structure, its procedures, and—and these same people would say it’s led to a more independent-thinking legislature. ( )Prichard:Independent. I won’t say thinking.
Hellard:Do you have any assessment of that?
Prichard:Oh, I think the—the tension between the Democratic legislature and the
Republican governor and the Democratic lieutenant governor and the Republican governor obviously led to some of that. I never thought they were very effective during Nunn’s administration, they talked about it. And I think the only thing I can remember now that they really accomplished—’course, the LRC [Legislative Research Commission], perforce, became a more independent agency because it—the governor didn’t control it. And that was the way Ford had his staff. That was very helpful to him politically. Then the other thing that happened during that was the legislative audit committee, which I think was the beginning of some effort to keep tabs on the executive branch with regard to finances and expenditures, and don’t you—am I not right that that’s when you first had a legislative auditor?Hellard:That’s correct.
Prichard:And I think that tended to build some independence. I think the, yes, I
think the friction between Nunn and the legislature probably did two things: it made Ford the—the strong candidate that he was in 1971, and it began to sow the seed of more legislative independence. I don’t know of very many things on which the legislature actually demonstrated dependence when, independence, when push came to shove during the Nunn administration. He got his budget fair—I—I think they may have modified his budget a little bit, which was the first time they’d done that, but they didn’t modify it in any serious way. But it—it—it laid the groundwork, there’s no question about it, and it bore fruit ultimately. But there were a whole lot of twists and turns before it did. I think that the emergence of Ford was obviously attributable to—to his being the, you know, sort of titular head of the party during that administration, and the fact that his friend Miller was chairman of the Democratic Party. In fact, Breathitt chose Miller. You know, when you had the Democratic Party reorganization in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight—well the truth is Miller was made chairman before that. I think—I’m trying to think who was chairman. Shelby Kincaid was chairman during that primary in ’71. See, J. R. resigned. But right after the election in ’67—who was it—Ockerman resigned, I believe. And so Breathitt, who controlled the committee, had us to put Miller in as chairman, and the party was broke—I’ve gone through that a little bit earlier—but the party was broke, they had that little old headquarters down on Main Street. And Miller took charge, and he was picked by Breathitt. And Miller was the best organizer that was ever party chairman that I know of. He made bricks without straw. He raised enough money by hook and by crook to keep the party organization going, barely, on a frugal basis. He financed legislative campaigns for nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, enough to keep us in good shape and win some victories. We’ll started electing the officials in Jefferson County again in 1969. It was a—that’s when the turn around occurred. Part of it was anti-Nunn, part of it was a resurgence of Democratic organization and vigor. It was not issue-oriented to any great extent. There were a few things. Terry McBrayer introduced somewhere along that line the first consumer protection bill, did he not?Hellard:I think that’s correct.
Prichard:There were some things like that that came along. The Young Democrats,
under the presidency of Don Mills, became resurgent and energetic. It was the beginning of a period of almost uninterrupted Democratic domination in this state that has lasted, pretty much, to the present time. And of course, both partly the creator and partly the beneficiary of it, was Wendell Ford.Hellard:Had Miller been on the scene, state scene, for a long time or— I’m—I’m a
little foggy on his history. Or did he come up with Ford and [Julian] Carroll?Prichard:No, he wasn’t—
Hellard:Carroll was also a protégé of his, was he not?
Prichard:Uh-huh. Miller’s emergence goes back to Clements’ time. When Clements
was governor, his organization in Daviess County was basically Clyde Watson—that’s Bobby Watson’s daddy—and J. R. Miller. That’s when I first got to know J. R. Of course, J. R. was the head of the Green River Electric Co-op and it was his—his fondest wish to go in the generating and transitions—transmissions business. Clements’ Public Service Commission gave them their first certificate of authority and that’s the first time that a rural co-op in Kentucky went in the G and T business. At that time, he was very close to Clements, and I think probably continued to be. You see in nineteen and sixty-five, you know, Cap Gardner had been the floor leader in the ’64 session and had infuriated Breathitt, Miller and all of them by being a disloyalist and following a kind of Waterfield heresy, that I mentioned before. And the—the—the thing was to beat—to beat—Hellard:Cap.
Prichard:—Cap Gardner. And so, in order to do that, they picked—J. R. and Clyde
picked Wendell Ford. His father had been a long-time politician over there, he’d been state senator. Never was highly respected, he was considered kind of a sleazy politician. My father always told me, “You could get him for a hundred dollars. Didn’t have a hundred, you’d get him for fifty [Hellard laughs]. You didn’t have fifty, you’d get him for twenty-five. If you didn’t have twenty-five, you could get him for a ham or a shoulder or a side of bacon.” But anyway, Wendell was always anxious to clean up that image and did to some degree, not sure it lasted, but anyway— Breathitt went all—you see, Ford had been Wendell—Wendell Ford had been Breathitt’s chairman in 1963 in Daviess County and had done a hell of a job. Breathitt carried the hell out of Daviess County. And so Breathitt put everything in the world he could into Ford’s campaign—money, patronage, everything—and Ford only beat Gardner by about a hundred votes. And I remember Cattie Lou [Miller] and I used to sit up nights making ads for—for Ford and for TV spots, I reckon they had TV then, but anyhow, for—for ads, and one of them is “There’s a Ford in your future.” [Hellard laughs] And I can remember that just as well and—Hellard:That was a—that showed great originality, would you say?
Prichard:Oh, I don’t know [Hellard laughs], I don’t know. Wasn’t it pretty obvious?
Hellard:( )
Prichard:But we used it. You know, usually, things you use in a campaign are
always obvious. But anyhow, we— But you know, Breathitt had some trouble with Ford. When Breathitt—I told you about the strip-mine bill, didn’t I?Hellard:Yes, sir.
Prichard:Well, Ford was one of those that didn’t want to vote for it and J. R.
didn’t want him to vote for it. ’Cause of course, you know, they—those power plants had a close tie with coal people. And Breathitt just twisted his arm and made him do it in ’66, after he’d gotten him elected into the senate. Fact, it’s a strange thing, but in that ’66 session on the strip-mine bill, most of the high-type people voted wrong, like Dick Frymeyer and Sonny Hunt, who was considered a reformer then, and people like that. And the people that—that Breathitt got to pass the damn thing for him were John Raymond Turner, Billy Angle, Russell Reynolds, all the scalawags. But he did it by patronage. You can read all about that in a book on it by Mark Landey which was published several years ago. But—Hellard:Is Mark still a part of it?
Prichard:No, no, he’s at Boston College, got a tenured professorship. But
anyway, that’s the—that’s the emergence of Ford and that’s the beginning of the resurgence of the Democratic Party.Hellard:During the Ford years—Ford years as lieutenant governor, were you an
adviser to him—Prichard:Yeah—
Hellard:—much as you were to Breathitt?
Prichard:—to him and J. R. both, you know, in a—in a moderate way, yes. We got a—
Hellard:But you remained on the executive committee of the party at that time?
Prichard:Oh, certainly I did. I remained on it. Have been on it s—ever since.
I’ve been on it for twenty-four years. Been on it since 1960. Yes, and I helped J. R. very much, really more J. R. than Wendell, although I had close ties with Jim Fleming—Hellard:Hold it. [tape turned off and on]
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