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| Flowers left for
John Dalton
| |  The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, VA, July 31, 1986EX-GOVERNOR DALTON DIES HE SOLIDIFIED 2-PARTY POLITICS John Nichols Dalton, the former governor who made it his business to curb the growth of state government and promote Virginia's right-to-work law, died yesterday of lung cancer. He died at Medical College of Virginia Hospitals, with family members present. He had seemed to have bounced back from the cancer after he lost part of his right lung to surgery in August 1983. But he disclosed in December that doctors had detected recurrence in both lungs, which barred further surgery. A funeral will be held at 10 a.m. tomorrow at Second Baptist Church, Gaskins and River roads. Another service will be at 4 p.m. at First Baptist Church in Radford, with burial in Sunrise Burial Park there. Dalton, 55, Virginia's chief executive from 1978 to 1982, was only the third Republican to hold the post in this century. He also was a never-say-die party-builder whose term helped solidify the return of two-party politics to the commonwealth. His non-union, coalminer friends called him "Big John" after he ordered platoons of state troopers to Southwest Virginia's coalfields to quell unrest and violence during a bitter UMW strike in 1978-79. Others remember him simply as "Little Johnny," or as the "Bird Dog," the handle he used on CB radios. Many in Richmond's financial district knew him as one who had parlayed his 16-year tenure at the Capitol into positions of influence in the board rooms of some of the biggest businesses in this state. He was, at the end, a bottom-line kind of guy, a governor turned power broker whose career was studded with the political and financial reward devolving from dogged determination and businesslike tactics -- and good fortune as well. He was the Republican standard-bearer who never lost an election for public office, the lawyer-legislator-farmer and land developer who had made enough money to claim millionaire status well before being elected governor. Voters in Radford and nearby counties remember him as the young lawyer they first elected to the House of Delegates after a hard-fought, door-to-door campaign in 1965 -- in which Dalton passed out thousands of potholders, matches and pencils with his name on them. He was re-elected to that seat three times. Those voters then propelled him to the state Senate in 1972, from which he leapfrogged the following year to the lieutenant governorship. The governor's office, an honor that twice eluded his adoptive father, came four years later. Until the cancer's recurrence, Dalton had been talking like a man interested in seeking another term. Indeed, GOP faithful had once placed him at the top of the list of potential candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination for 1989. And he could have had the same nomination for the asking in 1985. He was a senior partner in the law firm of McGuire, Woods & Battle, which he joined after leaving the Governor's Mansion. McGuire, Woods is listed among the 75 largest law firms in the country and is the second largest in Virginia.He was a director of Signet Banking Corp., parent of Bank of Virginia; CSX Corp.; Ethyl Corp.; and Figgie International Holdings Inc., as well as the Chesapeake Corp. in West Point and Bassett Furniture Industries in Martinsville. He lived at 8902 Gingerway Court in Henrico County. Dalton was born John Clay Nichols, a baker's son, in Emporia on July 11, 1931. He lived in a comfortable, two-story, white frame house with an unpainted tin roof. Old neighbors, as late as 1977, remembered him fondly as "Little Johnny." About age 4, he moved in with his aunt and her husband in Radford, about the time his mother was getting a divorce. That uncle was Ted Dalton, now a senior U.S. District Court judge in western Virginia. The elder Dalton was the veteran legislator and GOP politician whose aggressive, if unsuccessful, campaigns against Byrd-machine Democrats in the 1953 and 1957 gubernatorial races made him Virginia's "Mr. Republican." John Nichols, the boy, had moved in with the Daltons for good, and asked them to adopt him at 15. They agreed. The step both formalized his family situation and gave him an adoptive father whose long fight to give Republicans a voice in the affairs of state helped pave the way to Dalton's eventual election to statewide office. Dalton, following graduation from the College of William and Mary in 1953 and the University of Virginia Law School in 1957, and brief stint as a first lieutenant in the Army, joined his uncle's law firm shortly before the elder Dalton accepted a federal judgeship in 1959. Others in the firm in Radford included James C. Turk, who moved on to a state Senate seat and a federal judgeship, and Rep. Richard H. Poff, now on the Virginia Supreme Court, whose similarly impeccable "mountain-valley Republican" connections served as the base for Dalton's continuing quest for political advancement. In an ironic twist, Dalton significantly expanded that base during the 1977 campaign for governor to include former members of the same Byrd Democratic political machine that twice dashed Ted Dalton's bids for governor.Those aging conservatives, known as the "so-called Main Street crowd," as Dalton called them, or as "the coalition," had already whetted their appetites for victory in 1973 by following Mills E. Godwin Jr., a former Democrat, into the GOP and providing cash and vote s he needed to capture a second term. Dalton was Godwin's running-mate for lieutenant governor that year. The coalition then came out in force for a "mountain-valley" man in 1977, when Dalton found himself pitted against the same candidate who narrowly lost to Godwin in 1973, former lieutenant governor Henry Howell. The coalitionists saw Howell as a liberal devil incarnate with strong support among union and black voter groups. They perceived that Howell, if elected, would radically change their vision of sound doctrine and the Virginia way, and it galvanized their efforts to defeat him. In the long, hot summer of 1977, the Dalton-Howell match was a bitterly contested campaign. It also was perhaps the last of its kind in Virginia, coming before more media-conscious candidates made it standard strategy to blur political conflict in the cool broadcasts of the television age. The candidates went at it more than a dozen times that summer until Dalton -- in one of the key turnarounds of the contest -- opted in mid- September to forgo additional joint appearances the two had scheduled. The Howell camp had charged repeatedly -- but without clear documentation -- that its GOP opponent had both feathered his nest while in the state legislature, and that Dalton had conducted "the most poisonous, divisive hate campaign in the history of Virginia." When Dalton, a less facile speaker, ended the joint appearances, he charged that Howell should not be trusted because of his "headline-seeking, issue-ducking, character assassination brand of politics." Dalton won with a 158,000-vote margin. Judge Dalton made Virginia history in administering the oath of office to his son on Inauguration Day, 1978. Dalton's term as governor primarily reflected his attunement to the conservative tenets of the "coalition" that helped sweep him into power -- the concept of limited government, in particular. He was a staunch apostle of fiscal gospel that cried for reducing growth and costs of state government. He vigorously pushed those goals by imposing new controls on a recalcitrant bureaucracy accustomed to a decades-old diet of incremental expansion. He broke with the Godwin mold and decades of Virginia tradition, however, by moving to settle, rather than oppose, the federal lawsuit that required desegregation of Virginia's publicly supported colleges and universities. Similarly, he signed the bill, previously vetoed by Godwin, that declared that New Year's Day also should be remembered as a state holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader. "It wasn't costing the taxpayers any extra money to do it," Dalton recalled in an interview this year. He became the first Virginia governor to appoint both a black and a woman to the Cabinet in tapping Dr. Jean L. Harris as secretary of human resources. His top priority, he repeatedly told members of the General Assembly, was to "try to control the growth of state government expenditures, and, particularly, the level of state government employment. "State government is already so big and growing so fast that we need to know why, and to find ways to slow it down," he said in one of his formal addresses. ' ' This will be a major objective of this administration." "I want be remembered that way," Dalton added in a videotaped interview April 1 with James Latimer, former chief political writer for The Times- Dispatch. The Democratic legislators who controlled both House and Senate willingly cooperated in Dalton's growth-reduction efforts, and combined forces with the Republican governor to impose curbs on government spending that eventually doomed more drastic taxing and spending controls espoused by some legislators.The Democratic General Assembly majority, in 1980, extended that cooperation, albeit grudgingly, to pass a whittled-down version of the gasoline tax increase sought by Dalton. Some Democratic leaders put up a stiff fight when it came to accepting other initiatives promoted by Dalton, whom they viewed as an overly partisan promoter of Republican philosophies and candidates. (Dalton dismissed such criticism in the April interview by saying he did not view himself as any more partisan that his Democratic successors, Charles S. Robb and Gerald L. Baliles.) The legislature balked when Dalton sought to cut allocations reserved for Virginia's public schools. Believing that local governments already were being asked to do too much under state order, the governor had suggested freezing, rather than further improving, pupil-to-teacher ratios in public schools. Dalton's term, while generally successful in slowing the rate of growth in state government costs and employment, also was marred by recurring controversy and something of a running battle with the press corps that sought to keep tabs on him. In-house Republican pressure found him forced to sever ties, for example, with one of his chief political consultants, who had been handed a consulting contract with a state government agency. Dalton also chafed when reporters and editorial page editors repeatedly pointed to his use of state planes and limousines, and other perquisites of office, which did not, in their eyes, seem to dovetail with his sweeping efforts to tighten government belts. Dalton repeatedly complained during his term, too, that he felt so pestered by reporters that he couldn't properly run state government. Except for occasional weekends at his former home in Radford, or brief, bird-hunting trips, Dalton generally spent long hours on the job at the Capitol, often for more than 12 to 16 hours at a time. He savored getting away from Richmond, though, and rarely seemed more at peace during his term than when he'd don casual clothes and a farmer's cap and wheel around Radford farm properties in a pickup truck. Labor leaders, too, sniped at Dalton for his continued promotion of right-to-work tenets -- the use of state police in the coalfield strike being the most publicized. An AFL-CIO leader went so far, on one occasion, to denounce his actions as akin to treating working people as slaves "under the threat of whip and club." Dalton, though, saw the right-to-work doctrine as a key to promotion of new industrial development in the commonwealth. Social welfare support groups and civil rights organizations, criticized him when he espoused reductions in Virginia's vast Medicaid health care programs or seemed to pay little attention to minority hiring procedures. Dalton managed to brush away such brickbats, and put his best foot forward -- even in adversity. As he said during the Latimer interview, ' ' I felt pretty good about the years we were governor. You have your differences with the press, but by and large I felt things came out pretty well." Dr. Larry J. Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said: "His basic theme was limited government. In a sense, he anticipated the Ronald Reagan phenomenon." Dalton was a 33rd degree Mason, a Rotarian and a Shriner. Baliles said: "We have lost a Virginian of outstanding ability and true accomplishment . . . John Dalton served his commonwealth with dignity and lived his life with courage . . . It is a sad day for Virginia to lose someone so young in spirit and so loyal to the Commonwealth." Baliles ordered all state flags at half-staff for 30 days. Howell said, "I had a lot of respect for John. He represented the conservative wing of the Republican party and stood as out as one of the party's leaders." Of the 1977 gubernatorial race, he said: "It was a vigorous, hard-fought campaign. He was well-financed. He prevailed." Holton recalled he and Dalton taped a television program April 1. "He looked good at the time . . . I asked him how he felt and he said, 'pretty good, but I know I have a serious problem.' He was very courageous." Robb said, "I always admired John Dalton and I will miss him. He knew when to be a partisan and he knew when to be a statesman. Despite our political differences, we were personal friends." Godwin said, "We have a lost a great Virginian who left an enormous legacy to his state." Dalton's survivors include his mother, Mrs. Jessie T. Key; his adoptive parents; his wife, Mrs. Edwina Panzer Dalton; his sons, Ted E. and John N. Dalton Jr., both of Radford; his daughters, Dr. Katherine Dalton Mika of Augusta, Ga., and Mrs. Mary Helen Dalton Tyler; a sister, Mrs. Dottie Updike Gallop; and a half- brother, Jesse C. Key.
-Anonymous
Added: Aug. 7, 2007 |
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