Interview with Charles Campbell, May 5, 2009
Sally Russell Warrington, Interviewer | RBRL175OHD-011
Richard B. Russell Library Oral History Documentary Collection | OHD-011 Interview with Charles Campbell finding aid
00:00:00 - Introduction
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Partial Transcript: Good morning.
Segment Synopsis: Interviewer Sally Russell Warrington introduces interviewee Charles Campbell.
Keywords: Russell Foundation; chairman
00:00:35 - Work for Senator Russell
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Partial Transcript: I would like to ask you to start with telling us when you came to work for Senator Russell and maybe a little bit why you were a very young man.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about how he got the opportunity to work for Senator Richard B Russell so soon after obtaining his Master's Degree from the University of Georgia.
Keywords: Butts County; Jackson, Ga; National Honor Society; University of Georgia; blue key; homecoming award; law school; political science
00:02:34 - Washington, D.C. / Law school
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Partial Transcript: So how did you feel giving up your idea of going to law school-- you've told me a little story which we'll get into in just a minute.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about the struggle of working in Senator Russell's office and attending law school at night. Campbell shares how he was thinking about dropping out of law school until Russell encouraged him to finish his degree.
Keywords: Georgetown University; Jack Flynt; advice; law school; reserved
00:07:37 - Relationship with Senator Russell
Partial Transcript: Well, yesterday you told me a little bit about the difference in Washington Russell and the Russell that you got to know when you were traveling some with him.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about the difference between the Russell when he was in Washington and when he was back at home. Campbell also talks about Russell's relationship with his staff.
Keywords: Babs Raesly; Herman Talmadge; Proctor Jones; Warren Commission; Washington DC; Winder, Ga; legislative assistant
00:14:08 - Russell's relationship with other Senators
Partial Transcript: Well, you spoke to me about the difference in the fact that he was respected but not necessarily liked by the other senators.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about how Russell did not have many personal relationships with other Senators, but he had good professional relationships with his fellow Senators.
Keywords: Armed Services Committee; Edward Kennedy; Herman Talmadge; John Stennis; Leverett Saltonstall; Lyndon Johnson; emphysema; prison reform
00:19:23 - Russell's defense of Georgia / Civil Rights
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Partial Transcript: Well, that's one of the things that I've been impressed with in my work is how much he loved Georgia and the South but the nation, too.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Russell's love for the South and Georgia. Russell was very sensitive about any criticism directed towards Georgia. He goes on to talk about Russell's views on Civil Rights, and he talks about Russell's cooperation once Civil Rights legislation was passed.
Keywords: Berry College; Civil Rights Act; Civil War; Martin Luther King Jr; Rome, Ga; Southern Caucus; Strom Thurman; United Nations; filibuster; sit-ins
00:27:44 - Russell's Senate career
Partial Transcript: You've spoken about all the things that he did.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks a little bit about Russell's early Senate career, and he shares the story of how Russell was appointed to the Appropriations Committee his first year.
Campbell later goes on to talk about all of Russell's accomplishments in his Senate career.
Keywords: Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee; Appropriations Committee; Court Packing Plan; Franklin D. Roosevelt; Lyndon Johnson; New Deal; Senate Space Committee; food stamp program; majority leader
00:35:47 - Russell's views on race relations
Partial Transcript: Tell us about Senator Edward Brooke and what you saw in his relationship with Russell.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Senator Russell's segregationist views, and he makes sure to state that Russell was not anti-black. Campbell goes on to speculate that if Russell had been exposed to powerful Blacks like President Obama, Andrew Young, or Martin Luther King, his opinions on segregation would have been different.
Keywords: Armed Services Committee; Brown v Board of Education; Civil Rights; Edward Brooke; Marietta, Ga; Plessy V Ferguson; segregationist
00:46:22 - Russell's leadership
Partial Transcript: Maybe you could speak to that a little bit in the fact that he did have a perception of himself as a leader.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Senator Russell's leadership style of leading by example. He also talks about Russell's strengths and weaknesses as a Senator.
Keywords: Atlanta Braves; Civil Rights; Meet the Press; Red China; Vietnam War; congressional directory; leadership; school lunch program
00:56:04 - The Russell Foundation
Partial Transcript: I'd like to talk a little bit about the Russell Foundation.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about the creation of the Russell Foundation. He later talks about how he became the chairman and why the job was so satisfying.
Keywords: Dr. Aderhold; Herman Talmadge; Judge William Norton; Russell Foundation; Russell Library; Russell Senate Office Building; Russell Symposium; University of Georgia; Woodruff Foundation; foot soldier project
01:10:10 - Russell's legacy / Legacy in national security
Partial Transcript: I was looking through your talk you made when you resigned from the -- not resigned, but stepped down from the chairman --
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Senator Russell's legacy in the Senate and in national security.
Keywords: Armed Services Committee; CIA oversight committee; Cold War; Douglas McArthur; Naval Affairs Committee; World War II; agriculture; atomic energy program; career; memorial stamp; space program
01:17:12 - Russell's legacy in research
Partial Transcript: The other part of his legacy that I think is maybe not as well known that the area he promoted so much research -- scientific and agricultural, the nuclear, could you speak about that?
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Russell's efforts to gain research funding and facilities for Georgia. Russell found researching very important.
Keywords: Appropriations Committee; agricultural research; earmarks; funding; research; scientific research
01:22:00 - Russell's simplistic lifestyle
Partial Transcript: One thing that you spoke about, which I think is worth knowing is that Russell led a very simple life, that he didn't try to enrich himself by his public office.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell and Warrington talk about Senator Russell's simplistic and frugal lifestyle. He owned a small one bedroom apartment in DC and a small estate in Winder, Ga.
Keywords: Abraham Ribicoff; Foggy Bottom; Lyndon B Johnson; Winder, Ga; bachelor; estate; frugal
01:27:49 - Work Horses and Show Horses / Constituent letters
Partial Transcript: We have talked about this a little bit, but maybe we could emphasize a little bit more or discuss a little bit more how he was a workhorse as opposed to a show horse in the Senate.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about Senator Russel's work ethic and how he was considered a work horse rather than a show horse. He was very devoted to his job. Campbell goes on to talk about the special attention Senator Russell's office gave to responding to constituent letters.
Keywords: Douglas McArthur; Herman Talmadge; constituents; letter writing; nut pile; show horse; work horse
01:35:11 - Russell's influence on Campbell
Partial Transcript: I hate to close this down but I know people have got to go.
Segment Synopsis: Campbell talks about the qualities that he admired in Senator Russell and how his qualities were an influence on Campbell's law career.
Keywords: Civil Rights; Vietnam War; integrity; national security; trial lawyer
SALLY RUSSELL WARRINGTON: Good morning. I'm Sally Russell Warrington and this morning at the Richard B. Russell Center for Political Research and Studies we are interviewing Charles Campbell who was Richard Russell's last administrative assistant and who has been president of the foundation--
CHARLES CAMPBELL: Chairman.
WARRINGTON: Chairman of the Russell Foundation for 17 years. He has stepped down from that job and we're glad to have you this morning, Charles.
CAMPBELL: Thank you, thank you, glad to be here.
WARRINGTON: I would like to ask you to start with telling us when you came to work for Senator Russell and maybe a little bit why you were a very young man. Were you only about 22 or 23 weren't you?
CAMPBELL: Well, it was in 1965 and I was born in 1942, so I would have been 23 but it really happened quite by accident. In the fall of 1965 I was in graduate school here at the University of Georgia working on a master's degree, getting 00:01:00ready to go to law school.
WARRINGTON: And your master's was in what?
CAMPBELL: Political Science. I graduated in '64 and an organization I had been active in and an officer of my senior year, Blue Key National Honor Society was giving Senator Russell a homecoming award at a banquet to be held in October of 1965. And it so happened that my roommate at the time was then the president of the Georgia Chapter Blue Key and so he asked me if I would be willing to introduce Senator Russell at this banquet. I'd never met him. Of course, I'd heard of him but didn't know frankly a whole lot. I knew he had a distinguished career and was a very powerful senator.
WARRINGTON: Can I just ask you to say where you're form?
CAMPBELL: Jackson, Georgia is where I grew up. My father was a county agriculture agent, so we moved around a lot but most of my grownup years were in Butts County.
WARRINGTON: That's pretty much right in--Jackson, is it middle Georgia?
CAMPBELL: Yes, between Griffin and Monticello, right near I-75.
WARRINGTON: That's where I'm picturing it.
CAMPBELL: But at any rate, so I introduced Senator Russell at this October 1965 banquet and about a week later I got a call from his office wanting to know if I was interested in joining his staff, so that was about it. And then I completed my coursework in December of '65 and immediately went to Washington and joined his staff where I worked until January of '71 when he died.
WARRINGTON: So how did you feel about giving up your idea of going to law school--you've told me a little story which we'll get to in just a minute. But to give up that idea and go up there, I mean, what attracted you more to this than what you were doing?
CAMPBELL: Well, of course, going to work for a United States Senator, any United States Senator would have been a great opportunity, but going to work for Richard Russell was even a greater opportunity and, of course, I'd majored in political science, so I had an interest in politics and government. And I really 00:03:00loved the University of Georgia and I was looking forward to going to law school here but it was, kind of a no-brainer. I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it turned out that it was. It was a real career changing opportunity.
WARRINGTON: You said your father was a county agent, did he advise you any on that or--
CAMPBELL: No, I don't think I asked anybody about it. I think I immediately accepted on the phone. There was a little complication because the congressman from my district had offered me a job on his staff.
WARRINGTON: Who was that?
CAMPBELL: Jack Flynt and we had some miscommunication because later his officer claimed that he thought that I was going to accept that and Senator Russell had, kind of, preempted it and so forth, but I really had not planned to go to Washington to work in a congressman's office. I was going to go to law school 00:04:00here. But I didn't have any long, deliberative process about it and consult with a bunch of people. It seemed to me to be a wonderful opportunity and, of course, I could go to law school at night up there. That was the other thing I did talk to Senator Russell's staff about and they said, "Absolutely. That'd be no problem."
WARRINGTON: So where did you go to law school at?
CAMPBELL: I went to Georgetown Law School.
WARRINGTON: Would you tell us that story about some advice that Senator Russell gave you that was good advice.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, Senator Russell was a very, shall we say, reserved person. He didn't get into a lot of emotional conversation with you. He didn't express his inner sentiments a lot. He's just a very reserved, some people would even say shy, sort of person. But once he got to know you and was comfortable with you, you know, It was a completely different personality. But the only advice he ever gave me--I became concerned at one point that I was taking on too much, that I 00:05:00wasn't doing a very good job in law school and I wasn't doing a very good job in his office. So I went to him one time. I said, "Senator, I'm thinking about dropping out of law school because I just don't think that I'm doing justice to your office or to the law school." And he said, "You stay in law school and you get married," very matter-of-factly, and that was that.
WARRINGTON: So how did you manage that then? Did you feel that you would stay in law school? You continued to work, I know.
CAMPBELL: I mean, I could make passing grades but I was used to making A's and B's and Georgetown was, you know, a pretty difficult law school. But yeah, I struggled through and it's probably not a great way to go to law school because you're not focused. I mean, if you're working all day. But the reason I had the conversation with him was I would have to leave four days a week at 5:30 to go to law school and things were a lot of times cranking up then in the office and 00:06:00I felt bad about that. So that was what prompted the conversation.
WARRINGTON: I don't know how you would have had any time to study.
CAMPBELL: Weekends. I would generally go four nights a week and Saturday morning, or five nights a week depending on what courses I was taking.
WARRINGTON: Did your work in the government help with that at all? The fact that you had some practical experience?
CAMPBELL: It may have helped a little but I don't think a whole lot and frankly, I took what I considered to be the easiest courses in law school because that made it easier. I didn't, for example, take any tax courses which was a mistake going into civil law practice because that's one of the most important areas. But I took international law courses because that had been one of my concentrations in undergraduate and graduate school and I knew a lot about that area but it wasn't any good at all for me in the law practice. But it was a matter of being able to satisfactorily do both of them at one time.
WARRINGTON: Well, lawyers have always had to learn on the job. I mean, that's the way they learned to start with. They didn't even have law schools, so you're just carrying out that tradition.
CAMPBELL: And Senator Russell was very understanding about it as the conversation that I've related illustrates, he wanted me to stay in law school and get my law degree.
WARRINGTON: Right, and he spoke about getting married because he was always questioned about being a bachelor.
CAMPBELL: Well, I was a young single person and he probably said that, you know, he's probably enjoying the social life up here a lot and so forth. So I didn't really have a lot of time to do that but--
WARRINGTON: Well, yesterday you told me a little bit about the different in the Washington Russell and the Russell that you got to know when you were traveling some with him. Would you tell us a little bit about that?
CAMPBELL: One of the most fortuitous things that happened to me was not long after I got there, Proctor Jones, who was kind of his personal assistant and very close to him--
WARRINGTON: What was your title to--
CAMPBELL: I started off as legislative assistant for about two years. That was 00:08:00really a misnomer. It was really a glorified mail answerer is what it amouned to. I didn't write any legislation or anything of that kind. Senator Russell wrote his own legislation and then after two years I became executive secretary and then I became administrative assistant, which is now chief of staff. They changed the name of it--for about the last two years or year and a half--but he was--
WARRINGTON: He must have had a lot of confidence in you. You were very young to have those positions.
CAMPBELL: Well, there was a lot of turnover on his staff. There were a lot of people that had been there a long time and these were people that were committed to staying in Washington, and so they could see that Senator Russell wasn't going to be there too much longer, so some of them went to committees. For example, Bill Jordon went to the appropriations committee and Proctor did eventually. But I was never planning on staying in Washington. I was always coming back to Georgia to practice law, so that's one of the reasons I think that I rose pretty rapidly. But getting back to your question about getting to 00:09:00know him, the fact that Proctor went into the Marine Corp for almost two years meant that I had the opportunity to travel with him a lot which I probably would not have had if Proctor had been there and that really gave you the opportunity to get to know him because in Washington it was a completely different environment. He was harried, had way too much to do and, of course, he wasn't in the best of health in most of the years that I was with him. So you didn't have a lot of time for joking around, you didn't see a lot of illustrations, for example, of his great sense of humor. But when I would travel with him away from Washington, either to Winder on weekends, or on a few campaign events in '66 that we traveled to or to military bases, then you would get to see what I considered to be the real Richard Russell.
WARRINGTON: How do you think his staff in general felt about him in those last years? I know that there were some difficult times.
CAMPBELL: Well, one of the weaknesses of Senator Russell, and he didn't have very many, is that he had very little interaction with 90 percent of his staff. He almost never walked through the office. In fact, when I became administrative assistant, I started trying to encourage him to do that more. And a couple of times it didn't work very well because there was some nut in the office about the Warren Commission that accosted him and started asking him questions. But he saw on a regular basis, Babs Raesly, his personal secretary. Bill Jordon, until he left. Bill, kind of ran the office when I got there. Leeman Anderson had the title of administrative assistant. He had been with Senator Russell since the '30s but he was in very poor health and wasn't really functioning as running the office. Of course, the press secretary, which changed a couple of times while I was there. Proctor saw a lot of him, and myself and that was kind of it.
WARRINGTON: Well, he, kind of, had a reputation for keeping a small staff, didn't he?
CAMPBELL: Yes, we referred to it as--he and Senator Talmadge had a conspiracy to keep staff salaries down, not only the size of the staff but the salaries. When I was administrative assistant, Bo Ginn was administrative assistant to Senator Talmadge and we used to argue about whether he was the 98th or 99th lowest paid administrative assistant and I was the 98th or 99th. We referred to each other as 98 and 99. But he had a very small staff. He was the last senator to hire a press secretary. I was the first legislative assistant that he ever had and I think that was the last senator to hire a legislative assistant. So he prided himself in turning money back in from the staff. He had a very small staff. I'd say we probably had, at the top, probably 15 in the Washington office.
WARRINGTON: Did the staff resent that at all? Did they feel like they would like to have had more help or--
CAMPBELL: I don't know about help. Of course, he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and ranking Democrat on the appropriations and those were huge staffs and he had access to them so I would say the thing I recall the most, it was not funny at the time, was I hired--this is after I became administrative assistant--I hired a young lady from Tennessee who had worked for the governor of Tennessee who had then been elected to the Senate. He was a new senator and even though she'd been working in the office for a year, she'd never met Senator Russell and that just, kind of, tells you the lack of--and I was walking down the hall one day with him and the new senator from Tennessee was walking down the hall with this employee and the senator from Tennessee introduced the employee to Senator Russell who she had been working for, for a 00:13:00year. That made me feel bad. But he just didn't have time, frankly, and so he with exception to the ones that I identified, he literally had no contact. Now, there was another lady in the office named Jane McMullen whose family's from here in Athens and she saw him some because she'd been there a long time and Marge Warren was a lady that had been there a long, long time, so they did see him occasionally. But on an everyday basis in terms of a lot of contact the people that I identified are about the only ones that saw him.
WARRINGTON: I just wondered if the staff, kind of, resented that at all. I mean, you were young coming in there and if they \understood because it was the way he worked.
CAMPBELL: Well, not only that but to be able to work for Senator Russell, I mean, he was without question the most powerful and respected member of the Senate. So it was, kind of, considered to be a plum of a job. I mean, even these 00:14:00people that didn't meet him, they were glad to have a job in his office.
WARRINGTON: Well, you spoke to me about the difference in the fact that he was respected but not necessarily liked by the other senators. Not liked, but he was not loved.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, and that does seem, kind of, strange but again he was a reserved person and he didn't go out socially a lot. Now, I'm talking about the five years I was with him. In the '30s when he was a young man I don't know.
WARRINGTON: He did go out more then.
CAMPBELL: I'm sure he did. But he was very much focused on his work and he had good friends in the Senate but they were senatorial friends. They were not warm, personal friends that he saw frequently. I think earlier he had been pretty close with Lyndon Johnson and his family because I know he went to eat with them frequently and became very fond of their daughters. But that was, kind of, 00:15:00atypical. In the years that I was there, I'd say Senator Stennis of Mississippi was a good friend. Senator Talmadge, of course. They got along wonderfully which was surprising given that Senator Talmadge's father, Gene Talmadge, ran against him for the senate in '36. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington state was close to him. Senator Milton Young of North Dakota who was a republican, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts--he was a ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. So those were good friends. No question about the fact they were good friends, but they were not intimate friends is the way I would put it. And Senator Russell was--this is probably part of his personality that's probably not well appreciated. He was a very, very tough politician. I mean, it's true he was a quintessential southern gentleman and very courteous to 00:16:00people, but he could be tough as nails and if a senator crossed him on something, he didn't forget it. I'll give you one example. He was not a vindictive person, but he did not have a short memory and I remember one time Senator Edward Kennedy was chairman of a labor committee sub-committee and they were holding hearings on the manpower force in the United States and one of the things they addressed was the impact the draft had on the manpower situation. Well, of course, Senator Russell considered the draft to be within the exclusive providence of the Arms Services Committee so he got all upset about these hearings and so forth and he actually introduced a measure that made it clear that the labor committee didn't have jurisdiction over that. And it actually went to a floor vote and I think there were maybe 22 or 23 senators that voted 00:17:00with Senator Kennedy. You know, Senator Russell's position was upheld. But I saw several months later, I just happened to be in his office one day and he pulled out of his pocket the vote tally on that amendment and he was going through the congressional record seeing how people were currently voting on issues. And so he didn't forget things.
WARRINGTON: Apparently that's really critical in the Senate. You've got to know how you think people will vote.
CAMPBELL: Yes, yes.
WARRINGTON: Of course, they said Johnson was the master of that but he may have learned it from Russell.
CAMPBELL: Yes, and also critical to be as effective as Senator Russell was you couldn't be someone who the other senators felt they could run over without consequence. So very few senators crossed him in the Senate on personal things that were of great interest to him, very, very few. They might vote in a way different but--
WARRINGTON: But they wouldn't cross him. Tell us that story about the time the senator was going to read a lot of bad statistics about Georgia prisons.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, this happened after he got real sick because I know he had emphysema and had had it for years but it got much, much worse and so toward the end he had a little scooter that had actually been developed by the space agency that he could scoot up and down the Senate. He really couldn't walk without taking oxygen at that point. But at any rate a senator was giving a speech on prison reform and in one part of the speech he was criticizing Georgia's prison system. This must have been in '70 or '69 and that wasn't the focal part of the speech but it was in there and somebody called that to Senator Russell's attention. I don't know if it was another senator but at any rate he found out 00:19:00about it. So he got on his scooter and went over there and he was sitting on the Senate floor, because when he got to the Georgia part he was going to stand up and defend Georgia. Well, I guess the senator saw him there so he simply skipped over the Georgia part, so it never came up. But it was in the speech in the congressional record.
WARRINGTON: Well, that's one of the things that I've been impressed with in my work is how much he loved Georgia and the South but the nation, too. I think he certainly had the heart for all of those, but he didn't want anybody to criticize Georgia.
CAMPBELL: He was without any question the most patriotic person I've ever known. But you're right, he was very defensive of Georgia. I think a lot of the reasons for his Civil Rights stances--and all this is my opinion. Not anything he ever told me or inferred, but it's just my observation I think it had more to 00:20:00do with people outside the South telling the South what to do. He was without any question an authority on the Civil War. I mean, I think you would say that he could have been a professor. He knew every battle, every general, every junior general.
WARRINGTON: I thought he knew General Lee and General Jackson personally.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, I mean, he was incredible and he, even as late as the time I was with him, occasionally he would go to a battlefield in the Washington area. So I think he was very defensive about people criticizing Georgia, especially if they were not from Georgia or the South and my own theory is that accounted for a lot of his strong feelings.
WARRINGTON: I would agree with that, too. Do you think if anyone from--do you recall any incidences where people from Georgia had criticized that, how he reacted?
CAMPBELL: Well, of course, when the Civil Rights--and this was largely before I 00:21:00got there because in December of '65, of course, the '64 act had passed. The '65 voting rights act had passed. There was a '68 housing bill but Senator Russell was largely--he had given up the chairmanship of the Southern senators by then.
WARRINGTON: Which must have been a relief I have to say.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but he didn't talk during the time I was there a lot about Civil Rights. I mean, it just wasn't a conversation in the office. During that time the Southern schools were being desegregated and so there were a lot of school superintendents that would come up there and ask for his help with HEW and, you know, we would host meetings and Senator Russell occasionally would attend one. I remember him joking one time and telling a school superintendent he knew quite well, "Well, if they put you in jail I'll send you flowers," or something like 00:22:00that. But there wasn't a lot of discussion about Civil Rights around the office.
WARRINGTON: Because he really was cooperative with that after it passed.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, and in fact one of the things that I think is worth noting, in his first public speech in Georgia after the '64 Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson, it was a speech Rome, Georgia at Berry College. The speech wasn't about Civil Rights. It was about economic development in northwest Georgia, but he departed from his remarks and said and this was in an environment where there was a lot violence and unrest and some southern politicians were encouraging resistance to the implementation of the act and Senator Russell said that now that the act is on the books it's or duty as good citizens to obey it as long as it's there and to avoid all unrest and violence. And I know President Johnson said at the time that that was the most important 00:23:00statement made by any public official as they were trying to implement the act. And there were a number of newspaper editorials around Georgia that called on other politicians to quit the agitation. So he was a person of great principle and he stuck with those principals in good times and bad times and whether it was popular or unpopular.
WARRINGTON: And that's very unusual today.
CAMPBELL: Yes, it is. It was unusual then.
WARRINGTON: That's true, you know, we like to think about that as something that's just happened but it's really not, is it?
CAMPBELL: That's exactly right.
WARRINGTON: Well, there're so many things. Do you ever remember him saying anything about Martin Luther King. King, of course, was one of his constituents. You know, he was a Georgian.
CAMPBELL: I remember conversations--and it would usually be if somebody asked him. Senator Russell felt very strongly that the sit-ins were illegal and--
WARRINGTON: Yeah, I've taken that from what you said he believed in obeying the law.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, he was in favor obeying the law whether you agreed with it or not and whether it was just or unjust. I remember he was very critical. The ambassador of the United Nations made a commencement speech in which he was praising the sit-ins and Senator Russell castigated him on the Senate floor. But he was very measured in what he said generally. It was very, very seldom he would lose his temper and even reading some of the Civil Rights debates that happened before I got there, he was much, much more temperate than most of the--than almost all the Southern senators. It's interesting, when he took over the chairmanship of the Southern caucus, there were a lot of these powerful old-line segregationists that were still there and they were very powerful 00:25:00senators and there was a lot of fighting in the Southern caucus, but Senator Russell's position was that if you don't have something serious to say in the filibuster, let somebody else do the talking. And he had a lot of fights within the caucus, but the tone of the debate changed. And people used to read, for example, recipes, old Southern recipes or something, you know, just totally irrelevant and the "N" word was used frequently in Senate debates and after he took over you never heard that.
WARRINGTON: And he wouldn't let them read recipes and things.
CAMPBELL: That's right, that's right. Some of them still did because they did what they wanted to.
WARRINGTON: He recommended that they didn't do that.
CAMPBELL: But in specific to answer your question, I don't remember him saying anything particularly about Martin Luther King. I have a vague recollection that somebody referred to King as a rabble-rouser and that Senator Russell agreed with it or something like that and it was in the context of these sit-ins that 00:26:00he thought were illegal. But beyond that, I don't remember any conversation about that.
WARRINGTON: Would you say that during the time you were with him that he did, sort of, withdraw from the Civil Rights debate if there was any which there was still some going on.
CAMPBELL: I think the big fights were over by the time I got there.
WARRINGTON: Yeah, they were and so he saw that.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, I mean, I don't think he changed his views, but I don't think the occasion--I know somebody said one time, "Well, a lot of these Southern senators change their positions." They cited Strom Thurman and others, but Senator Russell never did. Of course, he died pretty early in the period when the transformation was taking place. But also a lot of Southern senators demagogued the race question when segregation was in vogue and then they went over to the extreme when integration became in vogue and that was not Senator 00:27:00Russell. I mean, he was as far from a demagogue as you could get. So it was important to him. He did not take positions based on whether they were popular or unpopular, at least not in the period I was there or really in the immediate prior--
WARRINGTON: I don't think he ever did.
CAMPBELL: And so when he took a position for a long period of time, it would have been very difficult for him to just suddenly, "Okay, well, now if people feel differently I'm going to just do an about face and go the other way," because it wasn't a political issue with him. Of course, he was very critical of Lyndon Johnson on that very issue.
WARRINGTON: Yeah, that he changed. You've spoken about all the things that he did. Maybe could you name some of those things besides Civil Rights like the armed services, like the agriculture.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, I think one of the unfortunate things about Senator Russell's 00:28:00career is that because the Civil Rights thing has gotten so much attention and properly so. It was an important part and it should not be ignored, but it was only one part of his career. I mean, when you think back over his career just in the Senate. You know, forget about being governor during the Depression and speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives before he was 30 years old, forget about all that. When he went to the senate in 1932 he was an avid New Dealer.
WARRINGTON: Which was a liberal position in that day.
CAMPBELL: He supported almost all of FDR's New Deal program. In fact he gave a seconding speech for FDR at the '32 convention, at Roosevelt's first nomination and it wasn't until the court packing plan where Roosevelt tried to increase the size of the Supreme Court to overcome a couple of the New Deal laws that were declared unconstitutional that Senator Russell started having differences with Roosevelt.
WARRINGTON: And that's really part of his integrity because that was a constitutional thing with him. You don't tamper with the Constitution. It was done for a reason and written that way.
CAMPBELL: But up until then, and that was after almost all the New Deal legislation had passed and then, of course, his role in agriculture is often forgotten. I mean, for probably the first ten years of his career, he was the most important person in the Senate on agriculture policy and he didn't even serve on the agriculture committee.
WARRINGTON: Explain a little bit why that was.
CAMPBELL: He was chairman of the Agriculture Appropriation Sub-Committee. When he got to the Senate, through kind of a fluke--Huey Long was a maverick in the Senate at that time harassing the leadership and disrupting things on the Senate floor and refusing to serve on committees because they wouldn't let him on the 00:30:00committee he wanted on. So when Senator Russell got there, the majority leader asked him what committee he wanted to be on or committees and he said, "I want to be on the Appropriations Committee." And the majority leader said, "Well, that's out of the question, Senator. I mean, we've got senators that have been here ten years trying to get on the Appropriations Committee so what's your second choice?"
WARRINGTON: He did say that Senator Harris had been on the Appropriations Committee.
CAMPBELL: Senator Harris, his predecessor, had died was on Appropriations.
WARRINGTON: He, kind of, had that little reason.
CAMPBELL: So Senator Russell said, "Well, if I can't be on the Appropriations, I'm not interested in being on a committee at all. That was probably a bluff on his part but in the context in the Huey Long thing, "Oh, no, we're going to have a second one." The majority leader worked it out, so he got on the Appropriations Committee from day one which was almost unheard of. And then through another fluke, the person who should have been chairman of the Agriculture Appropriation Sub-Committee under seniority which is the way it was done, the chairman of the committee didn't like, hated it. So he named Senator Russell as chairman of the Agriculture Appropriations Sub-Committee right off 00:31:00the bat which was just absolutely unprecedented. So for about ten years, which was all through the New Deal, Senator Russell was the predominant person on agriculture policy. And then he also lifelong maintained an interest in it even after that, but certainly the military area and national defense was a prime area. He was on the predecessor to the Arms Services Committee, the Naval Affairs Committee, and then later a chairman of Armed Services and that's really probably where he made his mark more than any other one single area. But there were a lot of areas, the school lunch program. He was the father of it.
WARRINGTON: That was two things that he was really interested in, education and agriculture because it became a way to use farm surplus.
CAMPBELL: That's right. He was the author of what was the forerunner to the food stamp program, which most people don't realize. Of course, he was a leader 00:32:00in extending electricity to rural areas. He worked closely with Roosevelt on that. He was very active in the space program. He was one of the first members of the Senate Space Committee and he was one of the first members of the joint committee on atomic energy.
WARRINGTON: Do you think he saw that as part of national defense?
CAMPBELL: I think, yes he did, I think both of those in a way. But he gave a number of speeches on saying that the country in the long run was going to have to use atomic energy to provide its electricity needs and, of course, that's turned out now that's a very current debate that's going on. Atomic energy had a bad name for a number of years but now people are coming back. I know Senator Nunn gave a speech recently very similar to that saying that we just had to have a larger component of nuclear energy. So he did a lot of things and then on top 00:33:00of all that I think his role in the Senate was probably almost unique. He could have been majority leader on any number of occasions and instead he didn't want to feel like he was committed to supporting any president's program and that the majority leader was expected to support it if it was in your party, if it was in the White House and he didn't want. So for example, he almost single handedly made Lyndon Johnson majority leader when they were trying to get him to take it and which is what got Lyndon Johnson started. But he, kind of, became a lot of the senators in their eulogies when he died referred to him as a senator's senator or a mentor and I think that is probably as important as any single thing he did and that's probably why the Senate office building was named The 00:34:00Russell Senate Office Building to be honest with you, because he took a great interest in senators of both parties. I know one election day I was in Winder with him and he would get calls from these new senators, some of them Republicans. They'd obviously been told by people that served in the Senate, you know, "The first thing you need to do is you need to get in touch with Senator Russell." And the story is told that, in fact, Senator Edward Kennedy told it that when he was elected to the Senate he went to his brother, President Kennedy, and said, you know, "What is the most important thing for me to do to get off to a good start as a senator?" He said, "Go talk to Senator Russell." And Senator Russell spent a lot of time with these junior senators. He would make himself freely available which was very unusual and it didn't matter whether you were a Southerner or a Westerner or North-Eastern or Republican for 00:35:00that matter.
WARRINGTON: I've read it somewhere that he never tried to pull rank on any senator no matter how junior they were. He treated them as an equal, as a peer. Once you were in the Senate, you were a peer.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, some of the eulogies that were given on the Senate floor make that point where senators would say that, you know, "He never pressured me." And some of the senators said they would go talk to him about things where he was on the other side, you know, Senator Russell was going to vote the other way but they would talk to him about what was in the best interest in their state and so forth.
WARRINGTON: And I read he would say, "This is the way I think my constituents would look at that, but yours are going to be different." And that was an important thing. Tell us about Senator Edward Brooke and what you saw in his relationship with Russell.
CAMPBELL: Well, he was the only African-American member of the Senate during Senator Russell's tenure.
WARRINGTON: And he was from Massachusetts.
CAMPBELL: Right, he was a Republican from Massachusetts. He had been attorney 00:36:00general of Massachusetts and they hit off very well. I was reading just the other day Senator Brooke's oral history here at the Russell Library and he said that Senator Russell came up and congratulated him. Now, Senator Brooke probably knew something about Senator Russell because Senator Saltonstall who I referred to earlier held that Senate seat before Senator Brooke. And he, of course, knew Senator Russell very well because he was a ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, so that probably may have paved the way, but they had a great relationship and if you look at Senator Brooke's eulogy when Senator Russell died, it's one of the best. The only thing I remember personally was that one day I went over to the Senate to get Senator Russell to go to a constituent meeting and he and Senator Brooke were on the Senate floor talking to each other, just the two of them and obviously it wasn't the first 00:37:00conversation they'd had. So from all appearances they had a very good relationship. And this is another thing about Senator Russell that's not generally know, a lot of people assume that he was anti-black or anti-African American which is just not true. He felt like the Civil Rights laws were bad policy and in the long run would not help the country or either race and history has judged him wrong on that. But that was a sincere belief he held but in terms of dealing with individual African-Americans, he dealt with them just like anybody else. You know, Senator Brooke is an example. I'll give you another example. I don't want to use the name because this person's still living but a very prominent Civil Rights leader had a family problem. This was before I got 00:38:00there but it was well-known and talked about in the office.
WARRINGTON: Was this person from Georgia?
CAMPBELL: Yes. And this person had a family problem and somebody in that family was not going to be able to stay in this country. It was an immigration type issue and somebody told them, "Well, Senator Russell is the only person that's got the kind of power that can get this straightened out," and it was straightened out. And I'll give you another example now that I think about it. The waitresses in the Senate dining room, most of them were African-American, not all of them. He was probably their favorite. In fact, I remember they sent flowers when he was in the hospital. So he was not a simple person to understand. You know, people tend to stereotype people and say, "Well, you're this, so therefore you must be this," but it's much more complicated than that.
WARRINGTON: I think probably his position was rather difficult for him, you 00:39:00know, to say these races are not equal but we're going to keep them separate but equal.
CAMPBELL: Right, right, well, one of the interesting oral histories that I've read here was a woman by the name of Tina Panetta. She was a waitress in the Senate dining room. She was from Italy. She was born in Italy and she came to this country and her duty station was the table Senator Russell ate breakfast every day. And she praised him to high heaven about how kind he was, advice that he gave her with respect to her sons, one of whom was at Georgetown undergraduate and, you know, reading things like that gives you a glimpse of why these stereotypes are wrong. He's just a different kind of person than these stereotypes would depict.
WARRINGTON: That's right. When we've talked about respect versus affection, I 00:40:00think he wasn't trying to make people love him. He was trying to do something that he considered could be respected and I think some of that has, kind of, worked in the opposite direction. There're so many things I want to ask you. If you could speak a little bit more about the--if we want to talk about the Civil Rights and the segregation that you've told me about, which has helped me put it in some perspective was that what was the law when he was born and for so long.
CAMPBELL: Well, he was born in 1897 and in 1898 the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Plessy V. Ferguson which basically said that segregation was constitutionally legal so long as it was separate but equal. And that was the 00:41:00law of the land until the Supreme Court decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education where they said that segregation is inherently unconstitutional, illegal because it's not equal. It's inherently unequal. Well, by then Senator Russell is almost 60 years old. I mean, you know, he'd lived most of his life, 5/6th of his life.
WARRINGTON: And the thing I've noticed about that is yes, it wasn't equal but everybody in the South was poor and there was a lot of--
CAMPBELL: And he had grown up talking to people that fought in the Civil War. The reason I know this is that one of the things when I would come with him to Winder, he was, kind of, a habit of routine and habit and in the afternoons we'd drive around either Barrow County or some of the surrounding counties and I remember him telling me one time we passed a general store and he said when he was a boy that he would be there and talk to people who actually fought in the 00:42:00Civil War. These are not people that are, you know, and I think--and of course, his family was greatly affected because when Sherman came through Georgia, his grandfather was a very prominent, rising, prospering businessman in Marietta and they were completely burned out and he was a hired hand for the rest of his life. So I think any fair-minded person would say he was a segregationist and if Senator Russell were here today I think he would say that. So there's no point in pretending otherwise. But I don't think that meant he was anti-black. I think he had a view as to what the best policy was and that in the long run if things were done gradually with the South onboard, that the adjustment would be better than it being forced on them.
WARRINGTON: And there's really no way probably to judge that, but he thought 00:43:00that he had slowed it down enough because even the things I've read have said that even the people who were pro-civil rights felt that the fight the South made, made that law enforceable where as if it had just been--
CAMPBELL: I think the weakness in that, of course, to look at both sides, the weakness in that is that there was really no effort to make it separate but equal. The educational system without any question in the South, I know, because I grew up in a rural Georgia county and the black school didn't have anything like that facilities and the quality of the teachers and the school books. So that was the big weakness.
WARRINGTON: The other side of that for me that I've seen is that Martin Luther King was one of my heroes. I think he is one of the greatest Americans, but 00:44:00until we had a black person who could lead the black people that way, it wasn't going to happen because white people didn't have the motivation nor did they really have the trust of the black people. And so when we got that great leader, see, it happened.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, somebody asked me one time, I can't remember when this was, what did I think would have changed Senator Russell's view from being a segregationist and I said, "Well, you know, I think--we're all products of our experience," and the only blacks he came in contact with were maids, farm hands--he never really came in contact with blacks that were the intellectual equal and maybe that's because they were deprived of opportunity. That may very well be but the fact is--and so I think back to one of my own experiences. The 00:45:00schools were just beginning to be segregated but when I came to the University of Georgia and was on the debate team, there were blacks on other debate teams around the country and they would not infrequently defeat us fair and square. Well, you have a few of those kind of experiences and it's more difficult to say, you know, that blacks are inferior. And after I got in the law practice, there was a well-known black lawyer in Atlanta, one of the best trial lawyers, you know, he beats everybody. So it's very difficult if you have those kind of experiences, but Senator Russell didn't have those kind of experiences and I think if he'd have been exposed to people like, say, President Obama or even Andrew Young or Martin Luther King on any kind of sustained basis, that would have been more likely, in my view, to change his opinion because he wasn't going 00:46:00to change it for political reasons. In 1952 it was generally regarded that he had a legitimate shot at being president and he was told that, "Look, if you don't change your position on Civil Rights and on certain labor issues, you're not going to--." And he didn't. So he wasn't going to change for political reasons. If he had been he would have done it at that time.
WARRINGTON: Maybe you could speak to that a little bit in the fact that he did have a perception of himself as a leader. I think you speak about that in your talk to the Russell Foundation that his leadership, you know, that he had ideas and he had beliefs and so you don't change those just because--I mean, he spoke to me about that a little bit when I was very young, how hard it is for a senator to balance doing what his constituents wants and what he knows because of different things might be a better way.
CAMPBELL: Well, he said at one point that, "If I reach the point where my views 00:47:00are so divergent from the people of Georgia's that I can't faithfully reflect their views then I'll just resign and not serve. Now, you know, that's, kind of, self-serving in a way because his views were pretty consistent with the views of the majority of Georgians.
WARRINGTON: I do think that was important to him though.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, that was important, but I think Senator Russell's leadership was more by example than anything else. I mean, if you look at these oral histories these senators have done that are here in the Russell Library, almost all of them say that it was by example. It was exampley set.
WARRINGTON: He didn't preach one thing and do another.
CAMPBELL: He wasn't one of these glad hander's. He wasn't somebody that bragged about that he did. He was very understated, very reserved, very modest and I think that was one of the secrets to his success and one of the things I found interesting when was up there. They published something that's called the congressional directory and it lists all senators and their principle staff and 00:48:00the senators write up what they've done. Some of them have been governors of the state. Some of them have been attorney generals.
WARRINGTON: Like a senior yearbook.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, you know, and some of them just go on for several pages. Well, here Richard Russell throughout his entire term in the Senate said Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Winder Georgia and that was it. Nothing else and here he had accomplished more than anybody, so that, kind of, illustrates his modesty.
WARRINGTON: I've been impressed with that myself as I've studied the continuity of that. I think he genuinely didn't care whether he was remembered or not in that way, you know, recognized maybe is the word I want. But he did, I think, in the later years, he wanted to be known as the father of that school lunch program.
CAMPBELL: Yes, he said in an interview that WSB did toward the end of his career that he was proudest of that of any other single thing that he did.
WARRINGTON: That, I think is consistent. If he had a blind spot or a weakness what would you think it was? I mean, he did obviously, we all do.
CAMPBELL: Well, I've thought about that before and you'd be tempted to say the inability to change, certainly on the Civil Rights issue you could say that, but on the other hand he was very adaptable about a lot of things. For example, some of the Lyndon Johnson tapes that have been released now--tape recorded conversations President Johnson had in the White House. One of them is with Senator Russell about whether to recognize Red China and this was probably before '68 because that's when Johnson went out and Senator Russell said, "Well, of course, we're going to recognize Red China. There's no question about that," but that would have been poison at that time, so that just shows you even though 00:50:00he was about as much of an anti-communist as anybody, that he was very adaptable on most things. So I don't know that I would cite that as a weakness. I would say--and I read an oral history that President Nixon gave that's here at the Russell Library and I hadn't thought about this until then but if I was pressed to cite one thing I'd probably agree with President Nixon that when you got into the television age and the media age, I said earlier Senator Russell was the last senator to hire a press secretary. He very seldom gave interviews to the news media. He very seldom went on the talk shows even though they were trying to get him on all the time because again, he was reserved, modest, not a promoter and Nixon cited that. If I had to cite one weakness I'd say that probably was a weakness and I would probably agree with that, that'd be the closest thing to a weakness that I can think of.
WARRINGTON: We can go from that and you might tell us that story you told me about how he loved sports and he went down to the baseball game in Florida.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, this was '67 because he autographed a picture that was made at a banquet while we were down there but in spring he would go to Florida to MacDill Air force Base in Tampa ostensibly to be briefed on various military matters but part of it and a big part of it, probably the biggest part was to go to exhibition baseball games. He was a huge baseball fan. And we were at a Braves expedition game. They trained at that time at Bradenton, Florida nearby and we were there and so he looked up and he saw in the press box--I can't remember which one it was, it was one of the principle sports writers for the Atlanta newspaper. I don't know if it was Furman Bisher or Jesse Outlar or who it was. He said, "I see so-and-so up there." Said, "Tell him if he's interested 00:52:00in my assessment of the Braves this year to come down and I'll talk to him." So I went up there and told him, so he came down, so the next day in the paper it said Senator Russell is predicting this and that about the Braves. Well, in Washington the reporters had been trying to get an interview with about something having to do with the Vietnam War and he wouldn't grant them the interview and they were just absolutely livid that he'd talk to some damn sports writer in Florida but he can't talk to us. But he very--
WARRINGTON: Don't you think he recognized the humor in that situation?
CAMPBELL: Oh, yeah, and he had a good relationship with certain media people, Margaret Shannon with the Atlanta newspaper. He had a wonderful relationship with her. There was a reporter named Wayne Kelly. He got along well with Roger Mudd but he referred to Drew Pearson on the Senate floor one time as a skunk and 00:53:00there was a reporter, a columnist in Washington called Joseph Alsop. He referred to him as Al Slop on the floor one time, so but he just didn't make himself available. He would occasionally go on "Meet The Press." I remember one time he was on "Meet The Press," and this was during the Johnson administration and they were asking him about the Vietnam War and he said, "Well, my guess is if you had a truly democratic election through both North and South Vietnam with no coercion that Ho Chi Minh would win." Well, the White House just went absolutely bananas and Johnson was having a press conference the next day and a reporter asked him, he said, "I didn't know Senator Russell was an expert on Vietnamese politics," or something like that. But he very seldom went on those shows.
WARRINGTON: That actually proved to be true didn't it?
CAMPBELL: I think it probably was true. But he went on "Face The Nation" 00:54:00occasionally but not very often. Not very often.
WARRINGTON: Well, there's so many things we could talk about. What did you see as his view towards women? Was he conservative about that or--
CAMPBELL: Well, my impression was and this is based as much on reading, he had very much an old Southern view of women which is really, kind of, an exalted position to be honest with you. Of course, his mother was without any question the most important woman in his life. She was the first lady of Georgia when he was governor because he was not married and, of course, he never got married. In terms of senators I think Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine who was a Republican, knew him well because she was on both the Armed Services and Appropriations Committee for almost 15 years.
WARRINGTON: Was she the only woman senator at that time?
CAMPBELL: No, I think there was one other one as I recall. But if you read her eulogy it's one of the best I've ever read anywhere and so he got along, you know, great with the women senators, the few there were but I didn't ever hear him--I don't recall him saying, I recall him saying repeatedly that the finest woman he ever met was his mother. And of course, he almost got married and his advice to me to stay in law school and get married, I think, is probably an illustration that he thinks that was a mistake not to get married.
WARRINGTON: I think at the end of his life he definitely said that but I think he was a very traditional person and the way he was raised to think about blacks and whites, he was also raised to think about men and women, but he had to make a lot of changes in that way, too. I'd like to talk a little bit about the 00:56:00Russell Foundation. You were a chairman of the foundation for 17 years?
CAMPBELL: That's correct.
WARRINGTON: And then you said you found that work very satisfying. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about the history of the foundation, why it came into being and then what you found satisfying about that work.
CAMPBELL: Okay, well, Judge William Norton from Gainesville, Georgia who was a long-time friend of Senator Russell, his wife Adelaide had worked in Senator Russell's 1952 presidential campaign and they'd known the family for a long time. I first approached Senator Russell about the possibility of setting up an independent foundation that would house his papers in some kind of suitable facility. This was probably in '69. The University of Georgia Dr. Aderhold, the 00:57:00president of the university had previously talked to Senator Russell about giving his papers to the University of Georgia and Senator Russell, of course, graduated from the law school here at Georgia and loved the university and I think that was the direction he was going in, but he had a concern that his papers would, kind of, get buried in a huge library. He wanted them to be available for researchers. It was his primary interest. And so it, kind of, dovetailed nicely. He didn't act on Dr. Aderhold's respect in any formal way. He had a nice meeting with him but when the Judge Norton broached the idea of an independent foundation that was attractive to him. So Judge Norton had been out and visited, I think, the Harry Truman, or maybe a couple of senatorial as well as presidential libraries and so the idea formed to setup this foundation that would be responsible for the management of the papers and so forth, enter into 00:58:00an agreement probably with University of Georgia Library. And as a part of that one of the important things that I guess Senator Russell, I don't remember if he was the one that insisted on this or it was after Senator Talmadge was named as the first chairman, but they wanted a library. Either a separate library or a library with a separate entrance, again addressing Senator Russell's concern that it not be buried in part of the big library. So that resulted in this facility that we're in today and a board of trustees was appointed. Senator Russell selected most of them himself. Senator Talmadge, I think, selected a few. It was agreed Senator Talmadge would be the first chairman, which he was, and Senator Talmadge primarily was responsible for raising almost all the money that was raised. I think there was $3 or $4 million was raised and then the 00:59:00Russell estate would convey the papers to the foundation, who would enter into an agreement with the university and that was done. And in addition to that, the foundation endowed a chair in American history here in Georgia which is still here and gave some scholarships and other things. That's, kind of, what got the foundation started.
WARRINGTON: Now, you know, Charles, the history of how that chair was endowed, where the first money came from that?
CAMPBELL: Senator Talmadge raised that money.
WARRINGTON: We didn't speak about this before, but that Russell would always give back the money in his campaigns if he didn't need it. And that's just unheard of but for the Democratic nomination a lot of that money came in and he didn't know who had sent it and he had just kept it in a bank account.
CAMPBELL: No, I think what you're talking about is, there is a chair in the political science department here that's held by a Dr. Charles Bullock. I think this is what you're talking about. That came out of the estate, the money came out of the estate and so my guess is that's that money.
WARRINGTON: Yes, but is that the Richard B. Russell--
CAMPBELL: It's the Richard B. Russell either chair or professorship in the political science department. The political science departments been renamed since then. It's The School of International Affairs and Study or something. But this one, the history department was something that was done exclusively, the chair, and that was again, they had a fund raising committee. I don't want to say nobody did anything but Senator Talmadge, for example, got the Woodruff Foundation to give, I think it was $750,000 and so most of the money was raised from foundations.
WARRINGTON: Because we hadn't touched on that I thought it was a good idea to bring that in because education was also a big thing with Russell, always, and 01:01:00that money that he couldn't say who it belonged to, he just then made it go into education.
CAMPBELL: That's right and Senator Talmadge served as first chairperson for about four years and then Congressman Phil Landrum who was the congressman from Senator Russell's home district and had known him very well, served as chairman for about four years. And then Jasper Dorsey who had been head of Southern Bell in Georgia that I referred to earlier in connection with the Russell funeral. He became chairman in 1978 and died in 1990 and I became chairman in 1990 and served until 2007. And the way that happened--in fact, I was not originally on the board of trustees at all, but Jasper Dorsey and I became very close. His 01:02:00son, Tucker Dorsey, and I became very good friends in Blue Key, really. And at the very same time I was driving to Washington to join Senator Russell's staff in December of 1965, Tucker was driving to have Christmas with his family. At that time Jasper was head of a government relations of ATT in Washington and Tucker was killed in an automobile accident in North Carolina. So Jasper and I became very close, almost like a surrogate father/son relationship when I went to Washington. And so he became, kind of, my benefactor, if you will. So he was the one that was responsible for me joining the Russell Board of Trustees in, I think it was '80, and then he was chairman when I was named secretary, so he was really largely responsible for my becoming chair of the Russell Foundation.
WARRINGTON: So what did you find so satisfying about that?
CAMPBELL: Well, of course, I thought it was important that Senator Russell's legacy be preserved and better understood and that was a large part of what the foundation did, but beyond that we did a number of things. We endowed scholarships. The foundation now gives three debate scholarships at Georgia each year and incidentally the Georgia debate team is one of the top five in the country now, much different than when I debated here. We give three teaching awards for outstanding young faculty members for high performance in the classroom. Senator Russell though teaching was very important.
WARRINGTON: And blacks received these awards?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely. The awarded recipients are selected by a committee of faculty members and one Russell Foundation Member. Then we do a--
WARRINGTON: Maybe this not exactly a fair question but would you say that the 01:04:00foundation is in anyway prejudiced against blacks or is that--
CAMPBELL: No, not at all. No.
WARRINGTON: I would say it's definitely an equal.
CAMPBELL: In fact, one of the longest serving trustees of the Russell Foundation, Jesse Hill, who was one of the ones named by Senator Russell originally, he's emeritus now. He's probably 85 years old but he served through the whole time, so no, the University of Georgia has been a wonderful partner for the Russell Foundation because we don't have to have any staff. The university handles all the administrative things with these programs but, for example, in addition to the ones I've already named we did a biennial program on national security where you have people like Robert McNamara, Bob Gates the current secretary defense.
WARRINGTON: Russell Symposium. That's been an excellent--
CAMPBELL: When Dean Rusk came on the faculty here in the law school he joined the Russell Board as a trustee and he inaugurated a series of lectures on constitutional law that the foundation underwrote. So we just do a lot of different things, very worthwhile activities that are justification in and of themselves but they also preserve Richard Russell's legacy and his name.
WARRINGTON: That's why I brought that up. I wanted to just, kind of, make that clear that the foundation has not been anything about a legacy of racism because that wasn't an overall thing.
CAMPBELL: In fact, the second professor that held the chair, he's retired now, he was an authority on Fredrick Douglas. He'd written three or four books, I believe, on Fredrick Douglas. A professor named Gilbert Fite, who wrote the 01:06:00definitive biography of Senator Russell, was the first one. Then there was McFeely was the Fredrick Douglas expert and then Ed Larson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on the Scopes Trial, was the third. So they'd been distinguished holders of that chair. So I think--
WARRINGTON: I think in that way we can say that Richard Russell changed in a certain light.
CAMPBELL: In other words, we don't run these programs. We provide the money. The university runs them like they would run any other program.
WARRINGTON: And I personally do feel that he would approve of that 100 percent. I have never felt that any of that would be something that he would--
CAMPBELL: I don't think Senator Russell probably could have envisioned that the Russell Foundation would get into as many of the activities we have because, again, his primary interest, he was really a historian and his interest was in 01:07:00being sure that his papers were preserved here. But thanks to Senator Talmadge's effort to raise the money and the investment of that money over time. At one time we had about $7 or $8 million. Now, we have just given $3 million to a new special collections library building that's going to house the Russell Library and the other two special collections libraries here. And the foundation put a statue of Senator Russell in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington and we have bought books--bought your book on Senator Russell's father, your biography, and circulated those to public schools and private schools in Georgia. And I remember when Zell Miller was governor the Fite biography came out and Governor Miller made state funds available and we supplemented them with 01:08:00Russell Foundation funds, so we've done those kind of things as well. So it was a wonderful experience for me because I thought it was worthwhile and I thought that I was doing something that Senator Russell would appreciate.
WARRINGTON: Did you meet any of the students or teachers that got their awards?
CAMPBELL: Oh, yeah, absolutely because for 15 years I presented the awards each year at what's called the Faculty Recognition Banquet in the spring. And so of course I participated on the selection committee, so I guess is if you picked one thing other than preserving his papers and making them available to researchers that Senator Russell would most be impressed by it would be those teaching awards.
WARRINGTON: I would agree, too. Do you remember about the foot solider project? You told me about that.
CAMPBELL: That's a project that a professor in the social studies program here, 01:09:00I probably got the name of it wrong, but Maurice Daniels started and Sheryl Vogt, the head of the Russell Library collaborated or is collaborating on and it's based on the idea of interviewing foot soldiers in the Civil Rights project and preserving their recollections. There's a lot that's been done on the Civil Rights leaders, but not very much on ordinary, common people. And I know, for example, they did one on Horace Ward a video interview which is great. I, of course, know Judge Ward and handled cases before him. He was a federal district court judge in Atlanta, still is, and I thought that was great. And that project is ongoing. It's not finished.
WARRINGTON: Yeah, I think that's an outstanding project and that it's come through this library. I think it's worth noting. I was looking through your talk 01:10:00you made when you resigned from the--not resigned, but stepped down from the chairman--
CAMPBELL: Decided 17 years was enough.
WARRINGTON: And I want to point out that that is available at the Richard B. Russell Library if people wanted to read that. I don't think you would get a better summary of Senator Russell's career, but I would like for this tape to explain why you think that he left a great legacy in national security because today we're so concerned about national security.
CAMPBELL: Well, as I said in those remarks, I, kind of, divide Senator Russell's legacy into two parts; what he did and who he was.
WARRINGTON: You might tell us where that comes from.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, the way I got that idea, that didn't originate with me, but I guess it was close to--well, it was 1974 I believe.
WARRINGTON: I believe it was '74. Might have been '75.
CAMPBELL: The postal service did a Richard Russell memorial stamp and the tagline on the first day cover was not just what he did but what he was and that's what, kind of, got me to thinking about that his legacy is what he did, certainly national security as I said earlier was one of the predominant areas, but agriculture, the space program, the atomic energy program, a lot of other things and then his personal traits and characteristics of integrity, modesty, work ethic, devotion to the public interest.
WARRINGTON: I want to come back to work ethic at some point.
CAMPBELL: Family, you know, all those were important attributes of his and 01:12:00that's, kind of, combined together that was the way I looked at his legacy.
WARRINGTON: But specifically in national security you had some good remarks about that.
CAMPBELL: Well, in national security that really dominated his career because from the time he got on the old Naval Affairs Committee which would have been, I guess, in the late '30s. For example, in World War II, he led the only congressional delegation that toured all the major theaters. It was a six week around the world, basically, tour and they went into literally all the European, Pacific--all the war theaters. And he came back and made an exhaustive report to the Senate. That's, kind of, what kicked him off as an increasingly recognized expert in national security. And then of course he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee and was for 15 years during the height of the Cold War when 01:13:00President Truman dismissed General McArthur from his commanding career for basically insubordination, a joint committee of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee was organized to have a congressional inquiry and Senator Russell was elected to chair that joint committee and received high praise for the evenhanded way that he did that.
WARRINGTON: For people who listen to this now might not know, but McArthur was enormously popular. I mean, he was just a hero to everybody and to have removed that--it was very delicate thing.
CAMPBELL: When he came back from Korea he had a huge rally in San Francisco where there were, I think, over 100,000 people and then he stopped--he just had a barn storming tour and the thought was he's going to be a presidential 01:14:00candidate. He addressed a joint session of Congress when he got to Washington, but Senator Russell, kind of, diffused it over time. He gave General McArthur all the time he wanted, you know, very respectful, kept the political part of it out. Of course, the Republicans were wanting to attack Truman, you know, and Senator Russell had had his differences with Truman, but he's generally credited with saving Truman's presidency as a result of that. But finally after about 40 days of hearings, it kind of, died down and the joint chiefs of staff that testified disagreed with McArthur on most of the critical issues and so he, kind of, receded into the background.
WARRINGTON: It may be the reason that Eisenhower--
CAMPBELL: Yes, probably had a lot to do with that, exactly. But armed services from then on was, kind of, his signature expertise, if you will, and one of the 01:15:00reasons for that was they changed the rules of the Senate. This couldn't happen now because they divided the committees up into A committees, B committees and C committees and you can only be on one A committee. Senator Russell was on three A committees and at the same time he chaired Armed Services. He was chairman of the Defense Appropriation sub-committee. So he chaired both the authorization of military funds and the appropriation of military funds across the whole government. So that was unprecedented power in the hands of one person and on top of that, he was head of the CIA oversight committee. So that couldn't happen now. They don't let one senator have that kind of power.
WARRINGTON: Do you think he abused that power in any way. My own personal 01:16:00feeling is that it's probably not a good idea to have that much power in one person's hands. Like, the CIA sub-committee is a good example. Back then Senator Russell basically solely provided oversight of the CIA because they were so concerned there'd be leaks that Senator Russell would meet with the director of the CIA and that was about all the briefing that took place. Occasionally Senator Saltonstall would participate and there were not leaks. Now, they have three or four committees that are responsible and you have all kind of problems with leaks. So there's probably no perfect system.
WARRINGTON: I hope some scholar will really study that. There's a good book in that, I think.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, there's been several books written actually about that, about the organization of the CIA and its history.
WARRINGTON: Does he get press that? I'm not familiar with those.
CAMPBELL: Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the programs the Russell Foundation 01:17:00had was a program on the CIA where the authors of several of these books participated.
WARRINGTON: The other part of his legacy that I think is maybe not as well known is that the area he promoted so much research--scientific and agricultural, the nuclear, could you speak about that?
CAMPBELL: Yeah, and this is one of the things that Senator Edward Brook that we were talking about earlier mentioned in his eulogy of Senator Russell and in his oral history here at the Russell Library. Senator Russell was a big believer in scientific research, medical research, educational research. Of course, he didn't miss any opportunity to get the funds for Georgia. That was also very important to him and I'll tell you a funny story. The Richard B. Russell research laboratory that's here at the university still, they were considering 01:18:00it in the Appropriations Committee.
WARRINGTON: That was agriculture?
CAMPBELL: Yeah, it was an agriculture sub-committee and a friend of Senator Russell, kind of, said tongue and cheek he was going to vote against the appropriation because he knew from past experience if the funds were appropriated Senator Russell would try to put the facility at the University of Georgia and that he understood that Athens wasn't very close to the Atlantic Ocean but that Senator Russell was putting so much money in here that he was afraid it was going to break off and fall into the Atlantic Ocean and Senator Russell generally had a pretty good sense of humor but he sad rather dryly and directly, "If the funds are appropriated you're damn right I'm going to try to get them for Georgia," and he did. And most people don't realize the role he had in establishing the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta. He was a major mover of that and The Woodruff Foundation contributed property but Senator Russell got it located in Atlanta. And peanut research labs, water research labs, there's 01:19:00all kind of research facilities located in Georgia and Senator Russell would generally pretty consistently vote to increase those appropriations. He is, as we said earlier, was very frugal, but in certain areas he would spend consistently and research was one of them.
WARRINGTON: Would you like to comment on that as vis--vis our concern now about earmarks for legislation. Isn't that pretty much the same thing?
CAMPBELL: I think it's, kind of, the quintessential earmark. I think the part of it that it's done incognito or under the radar and it's not known who put it in. Senator Russell wanted people to know he put it in, so they would name the lab for him. But he felt that--and I think he would feel if he were here today 01:20:00my guess is that his position would be that, look, Congress is responsible for appropriating all this money. Nobody accuses the executive of having earmarks and they're making decisions on all this money about where to spend money, so why isn't that an executive earmark? So why should Congress forfeit its prerogative to decide where some small percentage of this money is spent. Now, he would certainly be opposed to the "bridge to nowhere" and wasteful projects but I think he would have been a defender of the senate in the congressional prerogative to decide where some of this federal money is spent.
WARRINGTON: Well, that's part of our system really is these are representatives from various states and they're supposed to be trying to do those things for their state. When he went up, the whole thing was so much more emphasized states 01:21:00rights than we do now.
CAMPBELL: And of course, his attitude was he was very conservative in most areas, research being a notable exception. In most areas he voted for less expenditure but if Congress decided theywere going to spend in a certain area, he was going to do everything he could to see that Georgia got a disproportionate. His kind of attitude was that if you're going to spend the money, it's only fair that we get more than our fair share. That was his attitude and he worked at that.
WARRINGTON: And he was so powerful he was good at it but that's the quote that he has often said. He was "Georgia's man in Washington" and so he was going to do the best he could for Georgia and he did quite a lot. I'm just looking through. I had a few notes here. One thing that you spoke about, which I think 01:22:00is worth knowing is that Russell led a very simple life, that he didn't try to enrich himself by his public office.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, when you think about it, he had a very modest estate when he died and the two biggest things, I guess, in his estate was his condominium in Washington and it was a one bedroom, one small living room kitchenette--right across the street from The Watergate Building by the way, in the foggy bottom area of Washington. That's basically the only thing he really owned. I don't know if he had title to the home place
WARRINGTON: He did.
CAMPBELL: Or I think his parents left the home place to him.
WARRINGTON: No, they left the home place to the whole family and he bought out everybody's parts and then left it open to everybody. It was always--
CAMPBELL: But other than that he didn't have very much but he was very, very 01:23:00frugal and part of this was being a bachelor. I mean, that one bedroom condo was nothing to write home about and the way it was kept up it was very junky and there'd be books lying everywhere that he was reading. He'd read five or six different books at a time and I remember one of the eulogies that was given by Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut who was a very liberal--he was secretary of HEW under Kennedy and Johnson and then later was elected to the Senate in Connecticut. And so he visited Senator Russell one time in Winder and one of the things he noted in his eulogy was he was struck by the fact that the most powerful member of the United States Senate was living in such simplicity. And I thought to myself when I read that, I said, "He should have seen that condo," 01:24:00but there's no question about that. Senator Russell, it was not important to him. He was very frugal. I'll tell you a couple of little stories that illustrated that are, kind of, funny. When I first got up there, one of the first things I was asked to do--he was going to a White House reception--was to go and buy him a shirt--a new white shirt. And of course, I'd been here in Athens and gone to the clothing stores here and so what did I know? So I go down to Woodrum and Lothram, which I think Bill Jordan told me that's where I should go. And so I go down there and I buy him a shirt. I think it was $4 and something or $5 and something then which was not outrageous, I didn't think. But at any rate I brought it back, well, he didn't say much after he saw the bill. A day or so later a member of the staff told me that Senator Russell had told them, "I'm beginning to question this Campbell boy's judgment. Do you know how 01:25:00much he paid for a shirt?" And another episode that happened one time was involving President Johnson was when Lady Bird would leave Washington, President Johnson would invite Senator Russell down to the White House and just the two of them would have dinner and they'd have a couple of drinks and have dinner. But on this particular occasion Senator Russell had been sick and he's lost a lot of weight and there was a clothing manufacturer over in Bremen, Georgia that gave Senator Russell three or four suits every year. They were very cheap suits. I mean, when I was growing up I worked in a department store that sold those suits and so I know how cheap they were. And probably most senators wouldn't be caught dead in them but Senator Russell used them all the time. And when he was talking to Johnson he was telling Johnson this time that he wasn't going to be able to use them because he'd lost so much weight and they simply didn't fit and President Johnson apparently told him, "Well, I know this great tailor and so 01:26:00you got to get in touch with him." Said, "I'll have somebody call your office on my staff and give you the name and number." So the next morning I got a call from somebody at the White House and they said that the president and Senator Russell talked last night about a tailor that president's recommending and here's his name and number. So he came down and he measured the suits and so forth, pleasant sort of fellow and a couple of weeks later or ten days or so, the suits arrive and they fit very good and so forth and everything was great until Senator Russell saw the bill and, of course, the bill was about four times what the suits were worth. So I will never will forget Senator Russell said, "No wonder this country's gone to hell if the president of the United States hasn't got any better sense than to do business with somebody like this." And, of course, I'm sure Johnson didn't pay a dime.
WARRINGTON: He didn't have any idea what they cost.
CAMPBELL: So he was very frugal not only with the tax payer's money but with his own money.
WARRINGTON: Right. But he was frugal with the country's money, too. He tried to 01:27:00keep that down, I think, as much as possible. I believe you told me Charles that the last time the federal budget was balanced before Clinton, before there was no deficit in spending was when Russell was chairman of the Appropriations Committee.
CAMPBELL: I believe that's right.
WARRINGTON: I think we all feel a little reluctant for those good old days maybe. We feel like we're missing those. We have talked about this a little, bit but maybe we could emphasize a little bit more or discuss a little bit more how he was a workhorse as opposed to show horse in the Senate.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, that was Senator Talmadge in his autobiography had a chapter called Work Horses and Show Horses and he said about 90% of the members of the Senate are what he would call show horses. They issue a lot of press releases and have a lot of press conferences and talk about all the great things they'd done and there are work horses that do all the work and he listed Senator Russell as a quintessential workhorse. And Senator Russell was 65--well, when I went there he would have been 68 I guess or 67 because he was born in 1897. I went there in '65. But even then he would be there by 8:00 or 8:30. He would be there until 7:00 at night. He worked a half a day every Saturday and so I can imagine what it would be like back when he was in good health, you know, in the 01:29:0030's and 40's and 50's and a younger man. And one of the secrets, I think, was he did his own work. When you read these oral histories of senators that are here at the Russell Library they constantly say that if he spoke on the Senate floor he knew what he was talking about. He didn't get up and give a speech written by somebody else that he didn't know anything about. He just didn't do that and I think that's right. I think that in addition to integrity, modesty, devotion to the public interest, I think work ethic would be right up there among the most important.
WARRINGTON: I think that's almost hard for us to grasp how hard he worked and how important that was.
CAMPBELL: And you know, I mean, I think most public servants work pretty hard. I mean, you know, most senators up there. But a lot of them now spend their time 01:30:00on PR. Senator Russell spent his time substantive matters that he was addressing.
WARRINGTON: Several oral histories I've read spoke to the fact that in the committee meetings he was always so prepared that he had studied the stuff, done his homework and he knew these things and so he would dominate the discussion because he knew and a lot of other people didn't know that and they learned they could trust him.
CAMPBELL: Well, one of the interesting things that's in one of these books that Robert Caro has written about Lyndon Johnson and it had to do with Senator Russell's conducting the hearings of the joint committee on Truman's firing McArthur. Senator Russell did all of his own work and Johnson thought that was outdated. He said, "Look, you don't have use them, but I've got two great 01:31:00members of my staff and so we've got certain witnesses coming up tomorrow and they will have a series of questions and you don't have to use them, throw them in the trash and burn them, do anything you want to with them." And so Senator Russell finally agreed. And so he did start using the committee staffs more at that point. But on the stuff he did in the office he did almost all of his own stuff and I'll give you an example, responding to letters. Of course we got numerous letters. And Senator Russell insisted all of them be answered. Every letter from Georgia was answered unless it was what Senator Russell said should go to what we call the nut file. Somebody said, "Well, the nut pile is becoming those that don't agree." But at any rate, except for that small number that went 01:32:00in the nut file, they would all be answered and the way they'd be answered was staff would draft answers but we had Senator Russell's language from prior letters on say, social security, and when you are writing a letter you don't wax eloquent and put Charles Campbell's language in there because if you do and he happens to see that letter, it's going to come back with a note scribbled on it, "I like my language better." So you were to use--and he would see probably 25 to 30 letters a day, which was a very large number for senators. Most senators didn't pay any attention to any of the mail. It was written by staff people, signed on what were called Robo Machines that signed the senator's signature.
WARRINGTON: What would have been in that time that you were there a quantity of mail that a senator would receive?
CAMPBELL: Several hundred letters a day. It was the single biggest activity was 01:33:00to answer those letters. And what they do is you'd have staff people preparing them and then you'd have either the administrative assistant, or Bill Jordan when he was executive secretary, reviewing them and if somebody was a close friend of Senator Russell's that might get into him and the way we knew that was we had a system of name cards by county and this is the way you would address people. If that person's not in those name cards, it's Dear friend or if it's out of state it's Dear Mr. or Dear Misses. If it's in the name cards it's Dear Tom or whatever it is and if it was a close friend or if somebody that was a dear friend that wasn't in the name cards wrote a particularly good letter on some subject, then that might be sent in. And as a part of that process, Senator Russell would be constantly dictating revisions himself and that would become 01:34:00the new language on a given subject and that was the way the staff would prepare responses to letters. I think far more attention was given to responding to mail in Senator Russell's office than most of the other offices.
WARRINGTON: And that enabled him to keep up with his constituents in a way that he-- CAMPBELL: Yes, because you have to bear in mind that this was one thing and I don't know that it was a weakness in Senator Russell or a deficit, but it was a fact, he saw very few people, very, very few people did he see. By the time you take meetings with the secretary of defense and other senators and director of the CIA, he probably didn't have more than two or three constituent meetings a week and I felt, kind of, bad about that. I would have liked to have had more constituent meetings because these people would come to Washington. 01:35:00They'd been voting for him for 30 years and they would not see him at all.
WARRINGTON: I hate to close this down but I know people have got to go. Could you say how he influenced your life in later times? What are things about that that you would say to young people that you could admire and emulate and then maybe anything you would not want them to emulate.
CAMPBELL: Well, being around him was very valuable to me in the practice of the law because when I started practicing law I became a trial lawyer. And when I first went to work there, it was a little bit difficult for me to understand what the source of his power and influence was because he had just led the unsuccessful opposition of the Civil Rights legislation which was the, kind of, 01:36:00big thing then so he was on the wrong side of that. He was constantly against foreign aid to these countries. And he was, you know, I think it would be fair to say by the time I got there he was outside the mainstream on most national and international issues. The one exception would be national security but even there, for example, he was opposed to the Vietnam War, so he was not with the 'in' crowd in terms of position and so for a while I said, "Well, you know, this doesn't make much sense." But as I worked there longer, I understood that his integrity and his absolutely saying what was on his mind and not doctoring it or, you know, everybody in Washington's got some agenda and they're shading things and so forth.
WARRINGTON: Spinning it.
CAMPBELL: And about that time I was taking a course in ethics at the Georgetown 01:37:00Law School where a very successful trial lawyer was asking this professional ethics class, "What's the single most important attribute of a successful trial lawyer?" And he said, "A reputation for integrity." And so the more I thought about that, that was the secret to Senator Russell's power, and so that helped me a lot in the law practice. It taught me that you don't cut corners. And then the other thing I think that was very beneficial even though in today's world I don't know frankly that this is as successful or could be as successful and that is understatement, modesty, those are qualities that I think frankly that we've lost appreciation for. Now people are expected to be very aggressive.
WARRINGTON: Self aggrandizing.
CAMPBELL: Exactly, but those are the things in addition to work ethic that I would cite. Again, I would have liked for him to have seen more constituents. I would have liked for him to have more interaction with all of the staff. I think President Nixon as I said earlier was right that he was not the greatest with the media, but on the core issues I think he was a very, very great man.
WARRINGTON: Well, thank you so much, Charles and thank you for all the work you've continued to do. You've probably worked for Senator Russell longer than anybody.
CAMPBELL: Thank you.
[End of recording]
Collection Link: Richard B. Russell Library Oral History Documentary Collection
Series Link: OHD-011 Interview with Charles Campbell finding aid