Former South Carolina governor and Congressman Mark Sanford described the controversial 2020 hiring of then-sitting Charleston County Council Chairman Elliott Summey to lead the Charleston airport authority as a “coup d’etat” in his new memoir, Two Roads Diverged, set to be published Tuesday.
Summey, part of a ring of local politicians with a grip on North-Area power, fired back, saying Sanford was just trying “to cash in on writing a book and talk about other people.”
Throughout the new book, Sanford, a former two-term governor who no longer holds office, examines politics from his perennial outsider’s view. The book is filled with the same awkward perspective seen often in his social media posts and throughout the unforgettable, prolonged statewide apology as governor after he admitted he’d been in Argentina with a lover instead of hiking the Appalachian Trail.
In Chapter 7, Sanford runs through a list of “13 things we can do for ourselves” — ways Republicans can recalibrate on the national level. No. 7 on the list is, “Don’t just remember, focus on how politics trades on a different commodity.” Sanford also delivers anecdotes about notorious former Midlands GOP Sen. Jake Knotts and the Lexington Peach Festival before training his sights on Summey.
In 2020, while chairman of Charleston County Council, Summey was plucked from his job in real estate and hired to serve as the CEO of the Charleston Aviation Authority, a job with a $300,000 per year salary, plus perks. The agency took flak from local residents and transparency advocates for not conducting a national search to replace Paul Campbell, the former energy executive and state senator who retired from the post. Summey’s father is the longtime mayor of North Charleston.
Describing the power of political might as a motivator, Sanford wrote some people are good, but “in other cases, people are just crooked. They want what they want because they want it. Take for instance our airport authority in Charleston.”
After describing the airport’s top job as a post for “political folks” intent on “juicing their retirement” by spending their final years of government work in a high-paying position, Sanford launched into Summey:
“But why wait when you can just do a coup d’état? That’s what happened little more than a year ago in Charleston. In this case, Elliot [sic] Summey, a board member and coincidentally the son of the mayor where the airport sits, worked with others to appoint himself to the $300,000-a-year job as airport director. Did he have any experience in this? Did he have any experience running a large organization? Did the board conduct any interviews for someone who might? The answer is no to all the above, though it’s hardly unreasonable to believe that public boards should operate in the public interest, and that public money should be handled through a public process. But this is just another example of the way politics too often works, and why so many of us become disillusioned by it.”
In an exclusive interview with the City Paper, Summey wholly dismissed the criticism, describing Sanford an “unelectable, defeated former politician who has no future … No one really cares what he says.”
“Mark is a very self-centered human being, so through his eyes, I could see where he would think it was self-serving,” Summey said. “He’s never earned anything on his own in his entire life, so why would he care?”
Summey said he didn’t have any previous bad blood with Sanford, but noted he and his father supported former state Rep. Katie Arrington in the Republican primary that ultimately saw Sanford defeated, aided by a late endorsement by then-President Donald Trump.
“I bet if me or dad had supported him over Arrington, I bet he wouldn’t be writing this writing stuff,” Summey said.
The book’s three sections pick apart the past and future of the conservative movement that Sanford was once poised to lead before his fall from grace. There’s even an intentionally ironic part on “Second chances,” and the book closes with an epilogue of letters to everyone from his sons to Congressman Matt Gaetz to “Commenters on My Facebook Page.”
For his part, Summey said he won’t be picking up a copy of Sanford’s memoir: “I doubt his book sells half as many books as his ex-wife’s did,” Summey said. Ex-wife Jenny Sanford’s memoir, Staying True, was published in 2010.
Two Roads Diverged: A Second Chance for the Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, the Nation — and Ourselves goes on sale Tuesday.
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