Oral History Interview with Edward F. Prichard, Jr., August 9, 1984

Hellard: Testing one, two, three. Let me see if I’ve got this thing working. This is Edward F. Prichard interview on August 9, 1984. Okay it’s working now.

: ( ) before you turned it on, beginning where?

Hellard:Well, I was going to start right now and—and ask you if—not necessarily about [Steven] Beshear’s futures committee, but what about the future of ? What problems do you foresee?

:I, well, I don’t think it takes any—any prophet to foresee the problems. The problems are already here. We have had in Kentucky an economy, society, based on sort of three, a tripod—manufacturing, coal, and agriculture. All of them are in trouble, for different reasons. Our—our manufacturing base is—is—is in a—is shrinking as far as the numbers of people employed are concerned. All of them are going to be restructured [microphone interference], and they’re going to restructure themselves [microphone noise], and they will use—use technologies that require fewer employees. We have, you know, we have automobile plants at , , I don’t whether we’ve got very many anywhere else. We’ve got that steel plant at Ash-—steel at and steel at . [microphone noise] Those are all going to restructure themselves. They have to to survive, and that means heavy investment in—in high technology and in robotics. We’re not in a position to manufacture the robotics or the high tech because we do not have the research capacity in . We have not invested in our two major universities enough—enough resources to stimulate the kind of thing that’s happened up in Massachusetts and New England where the very advanced system of higher education and of research in the universities has stimulated all kind of —all kinds of new technologies and information, businesses that have—that have kept their unemployment rates way below the national average. If you go to—if you go to—next to agriculture, tobacco is in serious trouble. There’s no two ways about that. The—the—we have begun for the first time in the history of the burley tobacco program to accumulate surpluses, for the first time in twenty-five or thirty years. We cannot expect to keep on maintaining high support prices without drastically reducing production, and that of course will cut down on farm income one way or another. The high price supports have begun to stimulate foreign production of burley tobacco, as well as other kinds. Many of our American companies are themselves financing the production of tobacco in countries like Central and and other places. Imports are increasing, exports shrinking. Part of that is the high value of the dollar, but part of it is also the support prices. We—we—we’re trying to maintain the prices of burley tobacco at a higher level than the world market, and that—that is extremely hard. If you go to grain and soybeans, the same problem exists in a different way. We’re overproducing, overproducing, and our exports are in trouble, and—and the price supports are—are causing a level of production that squeezes the farmer. The high interest rates, which may be temporary, are accentuating the problem for the farmers. We’re in serious trouble for the loss of our agricultural land. We’re—we’re more and more eating up, and chewing up, and turning over to development and subdivisions and other commercial and industrial uses the best land we’ve got instead of guiding development to the land that isn’t so good from an agricultural standpoint. We—if you look at coal, it’s in serious trouble on acid rain. The coal industry right now is putting it’s head in the sand in the same way on acid rain that the tobacco people did on health, and that’s another factor that’s going to continue to hurt the tobacco business—is the—is the increasing tendency of people to smoke less because of cancer risk. All those things are very, very serious. We ought to be developing new agricultural alternatives. We’re an importer of meat in , we’re an importer of fruits and vegetables. We’re an importer of all kinds of things that people eat in this state, and we’re not doing very much to stimulate that. That means you have to stimulate processing plants to come to . I don’t see any real detailed plan for that. As to coal, I think that the coal business is going to pick up some, as—but if the price of oil were to go down again in the immediate future, which is highly likely, that’ll strike another blow with the coal industry. That’s on top of the problems of acid rain. We may will end up with a bitter internecine struggle between the—the high-sulfur coal and the low-sulfur coal areas of . Strict acid rain controls would help the—the low-sulfur coal areas and hurt the high-sulfur coal areas, and that would create internal conflict within the coal industry. All those things are very serious, and, you know, the remedies are not easy, but one remedy would certainly be to diversify our agricultural base. Another remedy might be to begin to develop some economic diversification in the coal areas, not necessarily vast industries, but local entrepreneurial types of industry and certain types of agriculture suited to the mountains on reclaimed land. Reforestation of reclaimed land. We certainly need to develop, and—and re—re—redevelop, our timber industry in Kentucky and try to develop some woodworking industries in the coal areas so that we can have employment in the—in the finishing and processing of timber. And above all, we need—we need a research capacity in our universities, possibly a merged commonwealth university that takes in our two major state universities. We could, I think, develop, with corporations like Humana coming to occupy a more important role, probably make a center for—for the health-care industry, and certain financial and other services of that sort, but we would need more high-tech research for that. I don’t know. Those are not a very complete list, but those seem to me the directions. And we’ve got to face environmental problems, we’ve got to face soil conservation problems, we’ve got to face preservation of agricultural land, and all those are controversial issues. They’re not things that you’re going to get a total unanimity about. And it takes bold leadership—and perhaps leadership that’s willing to court a certain degree of unpopularity and controversy—to deal with these things. Our tax structure needs—that’s another point—our tax structure needs to be—needs to be overhauled. We—we certainly need, it seems to me, to revise the income tax. The sales tax is riddled with exemptions that don’t really help anybody, or may help special interests, but that limit the amount of revenue you get from the sales tax. We’ve got the whole question of property taxes as they bear on local school support, you know, we have among the lowest property taxes in the country, and yet they’re the most unpopular, politically, of any taxes. And we’ve either got to move toward something like Hawaii has, which is state support for schools from top to bottom with no appreciable local contribution, or we’ve got to find ways to—to help local school districts, or induce local school districts, to contribute more to education. That's very controversial. So if we’re going to really develop—going really to develop a program for ’s future, we’ve got to head into some very difficult, complex, and controversial issues. And it is my fear that Steve Beshear’s effort may not be willing to grapple with those issues.

Hellard:What positive things does have going for it?

:Well, its location is pretty good. We’re in the central part of the . We have the Ohio River and the . We have many miles of streams in —water is a very scarce resource and becoming increasingly so—and we probably have an abundance of water. We have an abundance of good soil if we’ll conserve it and protect it. We have a lot of people here who, if they were trained and educated and skilled, could make a highly productive labor force. We have, from a transportation standpoint, we—we’re—we’re in the center of the country. We’ve got some good highways, we need to improve them some, but we on the whole, we got better highways than we got anything else. We certainly need to improve some of our rural highways, and we’ve got to get some—we got to get some handle on the question of coal hauling and how it—how the damage it does to the roads is going to be paid for. But we—we have a , you know, we have a reasonably good climate. We have a population that is potentially productive if we’re willing to— Another one of the problems we face is though that an increasing fraction of our population in is going to come from the minorities. We’re going to—we’re going to have a larger proportion of blacks during the coming decades than we’ve had in the past because their birth rate is higher. And so we must do something about the education and—and the acquisition of skills by our blacks and by the peo-—the people that live in these remote rural areas who—who don’t have adequate educational opportunities. The whole problem of education is at the heart of much of what I’ve been talking about. And the greatest problem we have in education, —and we have many—but the greatest single problem we have is that ignorance begets ignorance, and that the educational attainment of a child, unless there can be some form of intervention that corrects this unjust, injustice and imbalance, is that the—is that the children of uneducated and semiliterate people, and people in poverty and deprivation, that those children will be slow learners and dropouts. And we’ll never resolve or solve the dropout problem unless we get back to the condition of children. And I think the recent report of the Kentucky Youth Advocates is one of the most stirring and—and profound things that’s been said about this recently. You’ve got to start with the child almost in the womb. And when children walk in the schoolhouse door reared in homes—or what passed for homes—where the parent or parents—many of them are single parent families—don’t read, don’t teach them to read, don’t read stories to them, don’t sing songs to them, don’t teach them to draw, and—and give them any stimulus to appreciate the things that are the foundation of an education, they will continue to lag behind, and not even the kind of remedial education we give them in the schools will be sufficient. The remedial education must begin before they ever go to school. We ought to have a, you know, we need something like a Head Start program that goes down to about three years of age and gives a much wider participation then we have now. Right here in , we’ve got a Head Start program, and it can only accommodate 10 percent of those that are eligible for it, and that’s in one of the most advanced communities in the state. And I think we need to—it’s going to take a great investment of money, but more than money, it’s going to take an investment of human concern. We could stimulate volunteers from among senior citizens and among high school and college students to go and give their time to help these children. We ought to have kindergartens and—and—and other types of institutions to educate and begin to stimulate the intellectual interests of our little children. Along the line of the old one-room schoolhouse, for instance, where in these remote neighborhoods you have just some little kind of a shack, and fix it up, and some people or persons—they don’t have to be trained teachers, they can just be people with some education themselves, and some human concerns—go and try to be sort of surrogate parents for those children in stimulating their interest in education and in the things that go with it. I—I think a tremendous volunteer movement like that could shake this state from top to bottom if we could really mobilize people. All these things, I think, are—are critical and—

Hellard:But under Governor [Martha Layne] Collins’ leadership, do you foresee something like that happening?

:Well, of course not, of course not. I think she’s petulant, fearful—

Hellard:Do you think such an effort could succeed without the governor’s wholehearted—

:It would be very hard, it would be very hard. “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, then who shall prepare himself for the battle?” And if we look at the states where progress has been made—whether it be Texas, whether it be Iowa, whether it be South Carolina, whether it be Florida, whether it be North Carolina, whether it be Mississippi, whether it be Arkansas, whether it be Tennessee—in almost every case, it’s a governor. The only state I know where the governor didn’t take leadership and where you achieved anything, was in , where they elected a very innovative superintendent of public instruction, who went to a legislature and got the legislature stimulated. But in most states it has taken a governor, and an innovative and courageous governor, and a dedicated governor, and I don’t think we have one in this state.

Hellard:Do you think she was genuine in her efforts during the last session?

:I think she was as genuine as she knew how to be. I—I don’t think she—I don’t think she knew how. It was more a lack of skill. Surely—surely she must have not wanted to—wanted not to fail because that failure left her a political cripple, Vic, left her a political cripple. I—I think she just doesn’t know how. I think she just doesn’t know how. She has no impulse to reach out beyond an almost non-existent inner circle. The people that she’s got in her cabinet are mostly her husband’s friends and not hers, and the people she’s got on her staff may be her friends, but they don’t have the skill and the—and the capacity to do anything. You know, time after time you hear legislators, and god knows they’re not the trumpets either lots of times, but they—they—they could have been influenced and—and they felt they had no rapport with her. They felt they had no—no real closeness to her. And—and I believe she’s afraid. I don’t believe she knows how to let loose. She’s uptight all the time. I don’t believe she knows how to just, you know, sort of undo her bodice and—and—and—and have a human relationship with these people. I—I think she’s an artifact. And I—I sometimes don’t have the capacity to express it, you know, I don’t think she’s evil.

Hellard:Do you think it’s a fair—a fair assumption that she certainly wouldn’t want Alice McDonald leading the battle in a successful manner?

:Well, that’s right and—and yet—and yet she’s fixed it so is assuming that leadership. You know, you’d think that she would want to trump ’s ace, but instead is trumping her ace. You know, to the extent anybody’s assuming the leadership that’s holding public office, it’s . And has reached out. has reached out. She—she hasn’t just stuck with the KEA [Kentucky Education Association]. Everybody thought was going to come in and be just a KEA stooge, but is reaching out to the administrators, reaching out to the school board association, reaching out to our committee, reaching out to the Chamber of Commerce. You know, is doing, within the limits of her own power in that department, is doing as much as one could, I think, under the circumstances, to—to assume leadership. But she has always to be careful because if, you know, if she seems to assume too much leadership, she’s always got Nystrand looking over her shoulder, she’s always got the governor looking over her shoulder, and obviously their relationship is not good. One may hope that it will just remain—that it will remain just barely tolerable or maybe that that it would be better. But the truth is, you see, if Martha Layne had, as a part of her own leadership role, taken Alice into the fold and—and built Alice up instead of trying to tear her down, that would have helped Martha Layne. Because, you know, a strong leader adds to his or her strength by reaching out to other people and co-opting them. That—the man who taught me that as much as any one person was Earle Clements. Earle Clements, he—he picked up people that had been against him and built them up, people like Henry Ward, and brought them into his administration and— And I will say this, not in so much in an administrative sense but in a political sense, Wendell Ford did some of that. Wendell Ford united the party when he came in. He didn’t run everybody out that hadn’t been for him. He tried to bring them in. His attitude toward people that had been outside of his own circle in the campaign was entirely different from Martha Layne’s. Now Wendell had faults, and I’m not going into all the pluses and minuses of his administration, and there were some moral delinquencies and—and political shenanigans, but from a political standpoint, he united the Democratic Party and probably built the strongest political organization that had existed in a long time and really ended the old factionalism. I’m not saying you don’t have factions in a way now, but you don’t have those hard lines that you used to have.

Hellard:Given the governor’s—Governor Collins’ failure in the last session, can she now regain the offensive?

:It’s up to her. If she’d show the qualities that she didn’t show, if she would assume the le-—

Hellard:What should she do?

:Well, I would think she'd begin to reach out and ask people to help her, for one thing, ask for suggestions, ask for ideas. She’d begin to go out— I’ll tell you an example. We’re now, our committee is sponsoring these town forums all over Kentucky, in every school district in Kentucky, this November, and we’ve—we’ve got a staff person working on it, and we’ve got the KPA committed to us, Kentucky Press Association, we’ve got the Jaycees committed to us, and we’ve got other groups, got the school administrators association committed to us, got the school board association committed to us, we got a half-ass cooperation from the KEA—they fear it for obvious reasons—but a lot of individual teachers are—are caught up in it. And—and we wrote her a letter, I wrote it, and ask—said we were going to have a one-hour program that night before the town meetings commenced on the KET [Kentucky Educational Television] broadcast over the whole state, telecast over the whole state. And we wrote her a letter and asked her if she would come and—and be the kind of keynote speaker that night. I’ve never had an answer from her. And we traced the thing through Joan Taylor over there, who’s a fine woman by the way, have you met her?

Hellard:No—no I haven’t.

:Well she’s a black woman and she’s on—supposed to be an educational staff person for Martha Layne. My guess is they’re not going to let her function, but she’s been—she was head of the—of the CETA program here in Lexington and her husband, Vertner Taylor, used to be on the board at UK [University of Kentucky], I believe. And she’s a first-rate person, just a dynamic person, and I just love her. And—and—and we asked Joan to trace it, and the letter had been lost, and they finally located it, and it’s never yet been answered. Now that’s a typical thing, you know, we’re trying to help her. You know, I can’t be a threat to her. I don’t want any office. Hell, I’ll be seventy years old next January.

Hellard:Here, ( ). Let me light it for you.

:I—I—I—I don’t understand that. I mean, why couldn’t she—I mean, I’m not—it isn’t that it makes any difference to me from an ego standpoint, but why couldn’t she try to use our committee?

Hellard:Here you go.

Prichard:There are plenty people on our committee that were for her, Pat Kafoglas, Henry Mann, others, I mean, we’re not—

Hellard:Have any of those people talked to her?

:I guess so, but I don’t think they have that much access. She put Pat on the Council on Higher Education. But I don’t know. I’m bound to think and—and you know this may sound vain on my part or egotistical, but I’m bound to think that she just detests me and fears someway anything that I’m connected with or have any leadership role in.

Hellard:Well, that could stem from an insecurity on her part.

:Well, it would also stem from an indiscretion on my part. I made a very rough speech about her during the campaign which I probably shouldn’t have done.

Hellard:Was that the famous shrew speech?

:Uh-huh. And if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t say it. But I was so indignant about those commercials she ran—

Hellard:Yes.

:—that it just—I lost—temporarily lost control of myself. What I said, every goddamn word of it was true, but at the same time—and she does have a shrewish side to her.

Hellard:Of all the potential gubernatorial candidates that we now hear about, do you foresee any of those taking the kind of leadership role that you feel is necessary to do for education what’s required?

:Oh, I think so. I think—I think either Grady [Stumbo] or Steve [Beshear] could do it.

Hellard:Is it fair to say that increased revenue base or increased taxation is necessary to—

:Oh yes, yes. And Steve—

Hellard:( )

:—Steve knows that. Steve tried to support her tax program during the legislature, don’t you think so?

Hellard:It would have passed the senate.

Prichard:I say it would have passed the senate, and Mike Moloney said they had twenty votes and—and—and I think Steve was—was right with her and—I know, I’ve heard Steve say it, I mean, I’ve heard him talk about it and— And I’m sure that Grady would be—I know in the campaign, you know, Grady refused to take a position that he would preclude any possibility of increased taxes, just as Harvey [Sloane] did, but Gravy—Grady might have been even a little more forthright than Harvey. And I—I think either one of them would do it. I’m not arguing, you know, necessarily to be for either one of them for governor.

Hellard:I know, I know that.

:I’m just saying that I think they would have some possibility of doing it. First place, Steve, I think, is smart enough to know that if he didn’t do something like that he would be a failure as governor, and I think Grady feels the same way. Now Grady has other interests too, which is of course human services and health and those things, and those are important, and I think what we need is a coalition of forces to—if we’re going to get revenue increases, we need a coalition of forces, basically the highway lobby, the social services and human services lobby, and the education people to come together. And I’m having a meeting next week with the Kentuckians for Better Transportation, who approached me about this, and I’m having a meeting with them next week to see if we can get that started, and then I want to go to some of the people in the—the what you might call the human services area, they’re probably the least powerful of the three, but still, they have some influence. And if we can do that, you know, we’re going to try to go on and get something going. I don’t know whether it will help, I don’t know what Martha Layne’s reaction will be. I don’t believe Martha Layne really understands about education, you know, she might have been a home-ec teacher, but I don’t think she has any real understanding of education or of the issues. I think she goes through the words, goes through the motions. But I don’t know whether she has any understanding of any issues.

Hellard:Well, that’s a good question, that’s a good question.

:I think she believes an issue is something to be avoided rather than to be faced. You know, it’s one thing to face an issue and then say, “Well, I can’t accomplish all I’d like to do and I have to compromise.” It’s another thing to say, “Well, let’s just sweep it under the rug and pretend that it doesn’t exist, or that it can be resolved by some little formula that means nothing and does nothing.” And—but I’m telling you that, much as this sounds as if I’m putting her down or hated her or something like that, there’s nothing would make me any happier than for her to be a successful, outstanding governor, because this state needs it. And it doesn’t—you know, it doesn’t—it doesn’t help me for her to fail. I suppose it gives me a certain, I told you so, satisfaction, but I—that’s petty. I don’t really care about that. Hell, I—any governor—I—I would do my best to help any governor that I thought was trying to do the right things and—and—and solve some of these problems. Hell, there’s nothing that I want that much from any of them. I think others, I mean, I think they’re plenty others that would be glad to help her, not just me. I think that all the people on our committee would be, Dot Ridings would be, people like Governor [Bert] Combs would just be dying to do it. I think Combs feels really that his last hurrah would be to accomplish something now to move us ahead in education. You know, and—and I know there’s some legislators, and you do too, that feel that way. They may be in the minority, but I certainly believe that Joe and Mike and some others feel that way, and—and if they’d had more leadership, I—I really believe that Bobby would—would have liked to have helped her. I don’t think Bobby showed any lion-hearted courage about it, but he may have felt it was just so hopeless that it wasn’t worth getting bloodied. I don’t know. You’d have a better assessment of that than I do.

Hellard:I think he had one thing on his mind this past session, and that was the speaker’s race for next—

:I—I think that’s true and he didn’t want to antagonize anybody, but—

Hellard:But he had—

:—but I—

Hellard:—he had

:—I’m not sure that helped him that much.

Hellard:Well, he and Bill Collins, of course, are no—are not friends or allies at all.

:Oh, I know that.

Hellard:So I, you know, there may have been a reluctance on his part there to get too closely involved.

:And I think, too, that Martha Layne and Bill probably resented his assumption of a assertively active role in ’s campaign. He really wasn’t all that active. I never saw Bobby to really show dedication in that campaign.

Hellard:Let me—let me change the subject just a minute. Staying with current affairs, what were your impressions of the Democratic convention, platform, and the candidates?

:Well.

Hellard:And then I want to get to Jesse Jackson and some of the rest—

:Well, I think that—that the convention was a tremendous success. I think it came out—it couldn’t have come out better, except possibly for [Senator Gary] Hart. I think Hart could have done better, but I thought the rest of it was just fine. Thought the party came out with a better spirit, more unity, more optimism and I believe the [Geraldine] Ferraro factor had a major impact on it. I thought [Walter] Mondale’s speech at the end there was one of the best—was not the best he’s ever made. I thought he showed a strategy that was very astute. He painted [Ronald] Reagan into a corner on taxes. I—I—I thought it was just great. I think that—I think Jesse Jackson’s speech was very effective. But I think Jesse Jackson is still, and always will be, a kind of a two-edged sword. I think he, you know, on the one hand he wants to have a rainbow coalition and talk about coalition building, on the other hand, I think he wants to be a factional leader, and feels that in order to maintain his own status as the preeminent black political leader in the Democratic Party, that he must always be making some trouble. And that’s a hard—a hard knot to keep tied. I don’t know. We’ll have to see how he acts during the campaign. I do have great fears about his anti-Semitism, or some trace of it, about his excesses in the field of foreign policy, what the New Republic calls his third world agenda, that is really different from the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and different from the mainstream of black people in this country. But I think they’re so—so entranced with his eloquence and his—his nerve, that many of them go along with him when he’s carrying them in a direction which, of their own volition, they wouldn’t particularly want to go. As to the platform, I thought it was mediocre.

Hellard:Do you need to flick your ashes?

:It’s got too much—it’s got too much detail in it, too much wish list in it, too long. I don’t—but platforms don’t mean anything anymore. They—I don’t think people pay much attention to platforms. But I think the Democrats came out with at least an outside chance of winning.

Hellard:Was Ferraro a—a good move?

:Oh, I think a—a brilliant move. It was a gamble, but I think it was a brilliant gamble. And I listened to Lou Harris this morning on the public radio, and he read his latest poll on it, and it showed that even Republicans felt that it was a positive thing and that, you know, that it was overwhelming sentiment that was favorable to her.

Hellard:Would it have been the same had the vice presidential nominee been—what?—[Dianne] Feinstein from or—

:I don’t know. I—I think—

Hellard:It’s more than just the fact that it is a woman, isn’t it?

:Yes, oh, I think, no, I think Ferraro was a better choice than Feinstein would have been. I—I think she’s an able person. First place, I believe half the people would’ve thought she’s Jewish, she isn’t, but half the people would have thought so. And I think that a lot of people think is sort of a center of far out, outré groups, you know, gays and all that kind of thing. I think Ferraro—I don’t think this is true of Feinstein, I think Feinstein actually is a moderate and has been kind of a person who held all those crazy groups out there together and kept them from getting out of line too much. But I think the perception would have been somewhat different. And in the case of Ferraro, it reinforced the efforts of the party to get back to the issues of patriotism and the home and family and hard work and all those things. And I believe she was the best choice. I think he was right about it.

Hellard:Do you think she’ll stand a chance of carrying ?

:Well, I would think so. Reagan only carried this state by 17,000, and you if throw in the [John] vote, I’m not sure he carried it at all. got about as many votes as the difference between Reagan and [Jimmy] Carter, maybe a few more. I mean, I don’t—I’m sure a poll right now would show Reagan carrying the state, but I think that with proper leadership, again, Martha Layne has got some responsibility there. I think if—if Julian Carroll had been governor, now this is a strange thing to say, I think Carter would have carried in 1980. I don’t think [John Y.] Brown did a hit or lick. And the Democratic Party organization wasn’t built up and used. Now if Martha Layne can, you know, she does have a kind of a network still, and if they can stimulate them to work along with other groups like labor and the blacks and the farmers, you know a lot of the farmers are disenchanted with Reagan’s policies and the high interest rates, I think we could carry . A lot will depend on whether she goes out and helps raise the money. Brown didn’t help raise a quarter for—for Carter in 1980. In 1976, Julian—Julian was a real factor and—and now I don’t know, Julian might have been so discredited by 1980 that—that he couldn’t have done it, and he wouldn’t have been governor, but assuming that he was governor in 1980, and had the standing he had in 1976, I think Carter would have carried Kentucky. But it’s—it’s—it’s iffy. I’ll say this, if Mondale doesn’t carry , he’s probably not going to win. I think he’s got a real shot at carrying and even a shot at carrying .

Hellard:Let's talk about—

:I think it depends a lot on his own campaign. It’s got to be a bold campaign. He—he’s got to take risks. He’s got to confront Reagan on the issue of the budget deficit and talk in specific terms about what taxes he wants and about what spending he wants to restrain. He can’t just put it all on taxes. There has to be a combination. And he’s got to deal with the whole question of the growth of entitlements and how we deal with them. And he’s got to deal with some of these domestic spending things that are not human services and are not social programs, but which use up a lot of

money. You know there’s a whole lot of stuff in the budget that isn’t for the poor and the elderly and—and—and it takes a lot of nerve. All these water projects, for instance, and the whole question of how you deal with these farm price supports. They—the farmers are in—in bad shape and yet we—we’re—we’re adding twenty-one billion dollars to the deficit this year just for farm subsidies.

Hellard:Throughout the primaries, of course, Gary Hart was talking about new ideas. I’m not so sure he had any, but as contrast, in trying to contrast—

Prichard:That’s right.

Hellard:—Mondale as a traditional, New Deal liberal.

Prichard:That’s right, well Mon-—

Hellard:Did you—did you per-—what—what did you perceive it was that Hart was saying?

Prichard:Well, I think he was saying what a lot of people feel, that we have new problems, new issues, new conditions to confront, and that we can’t solve them all and meet them all by simply the remedies that we used for the old Depression and during the period of the ’60s. We don’t have to abandon all those programs, but we’ve got to—we can’t simply deal with the country’s needs by expanding them indefinitely. We have to deal with, well, the whole question of education, for instance, is at the heart of it. The productivity of the labor force, the whole question of an industrial policy, not in the sense of some super planning agency that’s going to pick winners and losers, but rather some kind of—some kind of effort to stimulate the restructuring of our industries, of our basic industries, so that they become more productive and retraining our surplus workers for new jobs. And we’re probably going to have a—several million permanently unemployed or semi-, semi-permanently unemployed people because of the restructuring of the basic industries, and some of them are going to be too old and too set in the communities where they were born and raised simply to move them somewhere else and put them in some high-tech industry. And we may have to have some work programs for them or—or something to—to tide them through. It’ll be a generational matter. Now, their children are something else. But you take a man that’s fifty years old and worked in an automobile factory all his life, or a steel mill all his life, fifty or fifty-five years old, you—you can’t just retrain him for some new job, you’re going—you may have to have some kind of a—of a—of a work—work program. I—I think we need to— But the whole question of education and research, basic research, applied research, is at the heart of an industrial policy and I think we—we’ve got to— One thing I think Mondale runs a risk of is going so far in the direction of protectionism that he may—he may be looking backward instead of forward. If we reduce the deficit, that will help a lot because it’ll—it’ll overcome the inordinate strength of the dollar and will help our exports and render our imports, vulnerable industries, less vulnerable. Because right now the budget deficits and the high interest rates stimulate imports and dampen exports, and we need to get a better balance of trade. I think that’s important. I think Mondale’s got to be specific on that. I think that we need a new social contract between labor and management, in which labor changes the focus of its demands, away from cost of living and bonuses and that sort of thing, toward—toward wage increases based on productivity, rather than on— And—and you know, they need to—to loosen up on the tight work rules and things of that sort so that labor will be more productive. And at the same time, I think management is going to have to be persuaded to stop its drive to destroy the strength and decimate the power of organized labor. There’s got to be some kind of a social contract between management and labor. I—I would hope it could be voluntary. But you know, if you’re going to get away from the old cycle of stagflation then you, seems to me, you have to begin to develop some kind of an incomes policy in which wage settlements are not a driving force for inflation. And I think we need to get away from government policies which stimulate and encourage all these mergers and all these corporate finance dazzles—razzle dazzle schemes, and get back to stimulating the—the old-fashioned entrepreneur who starts a small business and builds it up. That’s where the new jobs come. We run a real risk that the transition to a high tech in a service oriented economy may—may bring about a lowering of the standard of living of the workers. Because the—if we have fewer and fewer of the high-paid workers in the old basic industries, then we may have what Cutner calls “the decline of the middle,” in which we create a lot of new jobs but they’re rather low-paid jobs. And that means that there—there must be some trade union strength among the lower paid industries so that the nursing homes, the hospitals, the—the service industries, the—the computer and high-tech industries—that—that’s where the unions have been the weakest and it’s where, in many cases, what we do is break down the old, middle-class blue collar and white collar jobs. We—we eliminate them, and then we create all these new jobs that are—that are much lower paid, you know. Is everybody going to work at a McDonalds? Is everybody going to, for instance, there’s some indication that a lot of the service industries, like insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, are—are laying off their middle paid, middle—middle wage earners and high wage earners and—and going down to hiring women to work at home by the hour on, you know, for four or five dollars an hour. All those problems have got to be faced. I think we need to reform—he needs to be very specific about the reform of the tax structure. Something along the line of the Bradley-Gephardt proposal that will reduce the top rates and bring a bigger base into the tax structure. We may ev-—he may even have to consider some kind of a consumption tax, a graduated consumption tax, one that maybe gives a rebate to the very lowest paid people, and in return for the value-added tax reduce the—what’s getting to be the very burdensome Social Security and payroll taxes that the lower income people— We—we’ve got people in the poverty level now that are paying substantial federal taxes. But Mondale's got to be bold and somewhat specific in what he advocates.

Hellard:What do you think—

Prichard:I think, for instance, he ought to consider making all the—the social benefits subject to income tax so as to reduce the drain on the budget from social benefits that go to middle and upper-middle income groups. You know, there’s no justification for people, for rich people, getting Social Security tax free. Now the last bill alleviated that to some extent, but it’s only half. We’ve got to restructure, another thing, got to restructure the whole system of health care. That’s one of the most critical areas, both as far as the budget is concerned and as far as the cost of health care is concerned. Got to stimulate the development and growth of—of prepaid health plans, capitation basis, so as to reduce hospitalization and get away from the fee-for-service for doctors toward a different system of compensation.

Hellard:What do you think the future is for Gary Hart?

Prichard:It’s hard to say. I don’t know. A lot depends on him, on whether he makes himself—If people end up blaming him for the defeat of the party this year in some way, his future will be very doubtful. If he gets aboard, and if he and Mondale can agree on some programs and issues to deal with the problems I’ve been talking about, he might have a great future.

Hellard:Let me flip this tape right quick. Side two, August 9th interview with Edward F. Prichard.

Prichard:There’s not a—there’s something not very lovable about Hart. He needs to—to seem somewhat warmer and somewhat—there’s something a little cold and hard about him. He’s got a nervous laugh sometimes that worries me. But he’s unquestionably a bright person. He could be very valuable to Mondale on the—the—dealing with the military budget. You know, you can’t deal with the military budget by just talking in dollar terms. It’s like telling a man he’s overweight and therefore ought to have a leg cut off. You must build your—your—your military budget around strategic concepts. What are we going to be prepared—where are we going to be prepared to fight? Where are our vital interests? And what forestructure will protect those vital interests? And I think that Hart has had some very original ideas on that that I think Mondale could—could use to good effect.

Hellard:Let me go now and ask you about Carl Perkins, of course who just died. How well did you know Mr. Perkins?

Prichard:Very well. Known him since, well, since back in the ’40s. He—he served in the 19, I believe ’40 legislature. My father had been in the ’38 session and was in the ’42 session and he got to know Carl. He—he always hung around over there even when he wasn’t a member. And I got to know Carl when he was pretty young. I didn’t know him real well. But then when Clements ran, I got to know him very well ’cause he was very active in Clements’ campaign. He and Clements became very close and he became legal counsel for the highway department during Clements’ administration, and Clements caused him to be nominated for Congress in 1948. It was the support of the Clements administration that gave him that victory.

Hellard:Did he beat an incumbent?

Prichard:No. You see, Jack May had been defeated, he’d been disgraced, and he had been defeated by Housey Meade [William H. Meade] in nineteen and forty-six, which was a big Republican year, and Housey Meade [William H. Meade] served one term, and then the Democrats had a—a primary for—for the nomination and, hell, there must have been eight or ten candidates—Judge Ed Hill ran and—and—and Jim Wine from Pikeville ran and Doug Hayes from Floyd County ran, that’s John Doug’s grandfather. And there was just a whole bunch of them running. And Clements turned on with the administration. In those days, you know, the administration had great power in primaries, and Clements went all out for Perkins, and Perkins won it. And then Perkins had another race in 1950, and had several opponents, and of course he won much more easily then. And from then on, he never had any serious trouble.

Hellard:Was he as good a man as the—as the—all the comments in the paper for the last week—

Prichard:He certainly was. He was a good man. He was—he was a man that had a great dedication to good issues, good causes, at least as I see them. He was—he was a great power in the house with his seniority and his—his indefatigable work. I never knew a man to drive himself any harder. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. He drove himself almost beyond endurance. He—he—he not only was powerful, a powerful influence on issues like education, and—and mine health and safety, black lung benefits, food stamps, school lunches, all those things and—and then some, one or two things that I was not quite as clued in on as he was, all those dams and water projects that he sponsored, some of them seemed to me to be less than high priority. But for the most part, he—he was always a defender of racial minorities—always voted with the, oh, for the measures that helped the blacks, although he had few—few if any blacks in his district. He—he was just a powerful force in the house for good. But in addition, he maintained a—a close rapport with practically every constituent he had. He would interrupt some conference on some big matter that he was trying to get resolved—I remember one case, some people were in there talking to him and—about a matter over at the Labor Department, and he was making an appointment with them for the secretary of labor, and in the middle of it all a widow woman from up in the mountains called him and said that her swinging bridge had been washed away by a flood and asked him to call the highway department in Frankfort and get them up there to repair her bridge. And he stopped all these people in order to make that call. That was the kind of a thing he did. I mean, he—he—he knew every person pretty nearly in his district. And he was always taking time to get some widow’s Social Security worked out, or to get somebody, you know, a black lung benefit, or—or something of that sort, and of course he—he—he had the most intimate rapport with his constituents of almost any congressman I knew, especially the humble ones.

Hellard:How did he maintain himself like that?

Prichard:Just by sheer physical energy. He didn’t sleep. He drove home most every weekend. Had a car, never had it—somebody said they never knew him to have a new-looking car. And sometimes he’d come down here over weekends, the only recreation he had, he had a farm—he and his brother-in-law over in Scott County that they bought back before land got so high—and he’d come down if he wanted to have a weekend of recreation. He’d drive that old car from the Lexington airport over to Scott County and spend the weekend mowing weeds and cutting brush. He was very temperate in his habits. I don’t know whether he even took a drink. If he did it was very rare. I remember one night Lucy and I had him out to dinner, here in Lexington—you know Allen worked for him when he was in law school. We didn’t live in his district, but he—he was a great friend of mine, and he—he’d heard something about Allen, and he just asked Allen to work for him while he was in law school, part-time. And Allen just adored him. And he would—we took him out to dinner one night and we all ordered a drink, or most of us did, and he just wanted a glass of buttermilk and [laughing] he—he just lived a very simple life. He never played the cocktail circuit in Washington. He never went out to fashionable dinner parties. He just worked, worked, worked and his—and his wife taught school all those years. She was a high school teacher over in northern Virginia. And he loved the Hindman Settlement School, where he was educated. And he loved Alice Lloyd [College] where he went to college, which was then called Caney College. And if you noticed his speech, he was not a great orator, but he always spoke very excellent English. I mean, he was—it was—it was that fundamental education that those women gave at the Settlement School and at Alice Lloyd College, or Caney College, that he had and—and—and he—he—he—he—he didn’t make grammatical errors. He—he didn’t have overblown rhetoric, but he was a very excellent, simple speaker. And always spoke in a soft voice. He never pounded the table, or yelled, or any of those things and he—he never took money. He—he—he lived a simple life and whatever he accumulated was whatever he made by investing in that farm which he paid for through the years, you know, year by year. He wasn’t a—he wasn’t a rich man. He didn’t—nobody ever accused Carl Perkins of being on the take. And in most of his campaigns, he either spent no money or just a pittance. He never—but he drove all over his district when he had a campaign, and went from county seat to county seat, and kept in close touch with the voters and the local officials and, you know, he was just the idol of his district. And certainly did a lot for Kentucky and eastern Kentucky and Appalachia.

Hellard:If you had to say he had a—had a single most important contribution, or maybe the single most important contribution, what would that be?

Prichard:I think probably his sponsorship of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which he fought for for years, and finally got passed when Lyndon Johnson endorsed it. But many other things. The—the mine safety legislation was important. There—there were just so many things, school lunch program. You know, he always said you couldn’t expect a child from a poor household to go to school and learn along with other children if he hadn’t had a good breakfast, and, you know, he—he had not only the lunch program, but a school breakfast program. And all those things, seem to me that—I would say the education thing was the biggest and most important, but there were so many things. And he—

Hellard:You weren’t—you were not in Washington when he first came, though, you were back here in—

Prichard:Oh yes, that’s right. No, I was not. Jack May represented that district and he was an old crook.

Hellard:I’m just—I’m just wondering how he gained such a reputation in his early years.

Prichard:Well now, he—it took him—he didn’t become chairman of his committee—

Hellard:No, I know that.

Prichard:—until he had been there eighteen years. I think hard work, hard work and dedication, is what made him, and seniority, and seniority. He served in his first session on the committee with [John F.] Jack Kennedy. Jack was on that committee, and Jack always gave Perkins his proxy if he couldn’t be there, and they were very close. And he was close to Lyndon Johnson. Of course the Great Society was just right down Perkins’ alley and, in a sense, he’s sort of the last survivor of the New Deal-Great Society period.

Hellard:I assume that Chris Perkins announced this morning, I haven’t heard—

Prichard:Oh, I’m sure he did—

Hellard:—I haven’t heard that, but I’m—

Prichard:—and I’m sure he had no opposition—or will have none.

Hellard:Do you think that because he is Carl Perkins’ son that will stand him in better stead than a normal, or, you know, average incoming legislator?

Prichard:Oh yes. It will help him, in the beginning. But how he carries that forward, and what he does with it, will depend on his own talents and his own effort. I think he would make a great mistake to go up there and assume because he’s Carl Perkins’ son he was going to be another Carl Perkins in two years. And in my judgment, he runs the risk of lacking some of Carl’s human touch and rapport with the small people. There’s a little bit of the heir apparent about him that he needs to watch out for. I think he has ability. I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he has ability and that he would probably be oriented in the right direction on issues, but, you know, if he—he needs a certain humility which I’m not yet convinced that he has. And will he—will he ride the byways and the trails and the little side roads and exhaust himself going to see the—the individual constituents the way Carl did?

Hellard:I don’t know. I don’t know. It sounds to me that Congressman Perkins may have spoiled the district.

Prichard:Well, I think there’s some truth to that. It’ll be very for anyone to suc-—to follow him and not seem to be a lesser person. And remember it took him a long time. He didn’t just walk in and—and, you know, become a great leader in the House in two years. He worked his way up. He was chairman of—of an important subcommittee. But he had a terrible burden to bear when Adam Clayton Powell was chairman of that committee because Powell was so out of touch and, you know, such a stranger to so many people in the house, that—that Perkins had to kind of work around him when he wasn’t chairman of the committee. And Perkins showed a lot of tact and a lot of ability in—in being able to work that way when Powell was chairman.

Hellard:What about Congressman Perkin’s influence in Kentucky—in gubernatorial the campaigns—was he active in Kentucky politics?

Prichard:Oh very active, very active. Took a—probably took a greater part in primaries than most of the Kentucky congressmen. Watts did when he was in; Natcher to some degree, but not a whole lot; Stubblefield to some degree, but—but Perkins was in every one of them, particularly if someone from the mountains was running. He was active for Combs in both Combs’, all three of Combs’ primaries. He was active for—for Breathitt in Breathitt’s primary. He was active for Ward in Ward’s primary. He was for [Terry] McBrayer in McBrayer’s primary, and he was for—he was for, I don’t know who—he was for Stumbo in his.

Hellard:And yet that apparently never had any adverse consequences.

Prichard:No—no, no, not right—that’s right. No indeed, it did not. But he was—he was extremely active for Combs. I know that ’cause I worked with him. And you know, it was wholly natural that he—he had an excellent excuse, you know, to be for a mountain candidate. He was probably a little less active for McBrayer than he was for some of the others, but he was for Terry.

Hellard:And I assume he could produce the votes.

Prichard:He was a great help. He certainly was. He was a great help.

Hellard:Mr. Prichard, it's quarter after four, and I'm going to have to end this one.