Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  ALSO BY MARSHALL FRADY

  Across a Darkling Plain:

  An American's Passage Through the Middle East

  Southerners

  Billy Graham:

  A Parable of American Righteousness

  Jesse:

  The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson

  Copyright © 1968, 1975, 1976, 1996 by Marshall Frady

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frady, Marshall Wallace / Marshall Frady.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56105-3

  1. Wallace, George C (George Corley), 1919

  2. Governors-Alabama-Biography.

  3. Alabama-Politics and government-1951

  4. Presidents-United States-Election-1968.

  5. Presidential candidates-United States-Biography.

  I. Title.

  F330.3.W3F73 1996

  976.I´ 063´092—dc20 95–39397 [B]

  Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.0

  Not that I much blame Duffy. Duffy was face to face with that margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test-tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream. But he didn't know he was…

  —Robert Penn Warren,

  All the King's Men

  FOREWORD TO THE 1975 EDITION

  It was sometime back in the spring of 1966, when I was covering the Alabama governor's campaign for Newsweek, that it occurred to me George Wallace was worth a book as the palpable, breathing articulation into flesh of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. I had wanted to write it as a kind of journalistic novel, employing all the stage work, style, and larger vision of the novelist. Not only were the parallels with Stark myriad and giddying-an uncanny instance of life imitating art imitating life-but it also seemed to me that Flem Snopes had a lot to do with George Wallace.

  After that, of course, he asssumed a pertinency beyond that of an intriguing character from which to fashion a novel. When I undertook this project, the prospect that he would be a presidential candidate was still rather vague. But later, as this book was being written, it seemed quite possible, albeit still somewhat surreal, that he might actually manage to pitch the election of the next President of the United States into the House of Repre sentatives for the first time in 144 years-which conceivably could have placed him in the position of arbitrating who our next President would be, and in the process negotiating what certain strategic domestic policies would be. That did not materialize. But he came virtually out of nowhere to intrude himself into the most vital political process of this country, at one of the most perilous moments in this country's history. For some time now-perhaps since the assassination of John Kennedy- there has been the sense of a certain berserkness in the national life; in some subtle but fundamental way things seem to have become ungeared. It has been a long season of anarchic happenings and advents-a natural time for a happening like Wallace. Whatever, he has become a special phenomenon whose significance will probably surpass that of any other maverick political figure-William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Henry Wallace, Teddy Roosevelt during his Bull Moose gambit-in this country's history.

  But whatever happens to Wallace in the years ahead, the effect he has already exerted on the political life of this country has been considerable. Aside from the fact he was more or less the ghostwriter for many of the issues in 1968, the dishevelment in our electoral procedures that was posed by his third-party candidacy almost accomplished in the end, the elimination of the electoral college system. Most important, though, Wallace almost single-handedly alerted the national custodians to a massive, unsuspected, unanswered constituency, a great submerged continent of discontent; Wallace was an occurrence that social seismologists and journalists and politicians will be gauging for a long time to come.

  But the man himself is the reason for this book. Oddly enough he has remained, in the popular mind, essentially a garish caricature, as flat and depthless as a figure scissored from tinfoil. Part of the reason for this is that simply as a man, apart from his political existence, Wallace is curiously substanceless. What one briefly glimpses of him on television is really all that he is every day of his life, from waking to sleeping. He is the complete democratic demagogue, the political creature carried to the ultimate-fascinating as are all pure specimens of a kind. And while this book is basically a tale of the methodical, relentless, and inexorable progression of a political Snopes, with a dauntless, limitless, and almost innocent rapacity, to the threshold of our most important political office, perhaps it also describes, in the form of Wallace, something of the nature of The Demagogue. In a sense, Wallace is common to us all. That, finally, is his darkest portent. There is something primordially exciting and enthralling about him, and there still seems to be just enough of the wolf pack in most of us to be stirred by it and to answer to it. As long as we are creatures hung halfway between the cave and the stars, figures like Wallace can be said to pose the great dark original threat.

  MARSHALL FRADY

  Atlanta, Georgia

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First of all, I want to acknowledge the substantial and indispensable assistance of Bob Cohn, then Atlanta bureau chief for Southeastern Newspapers, Inc., in the research for this book. His work included, but was not limited to, participation in over half of the interviews, the acquisition on his own of relevant newspaper files and other materials, and aid in making a number of strategic contacts. To him should go a significant share of the credit for whatever worthiness this book may have as an exercise in journalism-because he eminently deserves it.

  In addition, I want to thank Ray Jenkins-editor of The Alabama Journal, a man of deep conscience and civilized perspectives who, with a kind of quiet and stubborn outrage, still perseveres in Alabama-for all his courtesies, both personal and professional, during our eight-month encampment in Montgomery.

  I am also grateful for the gracious considerations extended by the Sea Pines Company at Hilton Head Island, South Caro lina-and by John Smith in particular-during our stay there for the actual writing of the book. It was, after Alabama, a benign and restorative place to be to get this project finished.

  In a very special way, I am indebted to Joseph B. Cumming, Jr., Atlanta bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, under whom I learned that the highest journalism is informed by the insights of the poet and the artist. That is the order of journalism to which he belongs: instinctively he brings, to the hectic combustions of events, a most delicate sense of the dynamics of life, the most exquisite perceptions, a Dickensian relish for character, and a grace and vitality of language that approaches magic. His spirit has presided over every page in this book. I hope it does not dishonor him.

  George C. Wallace announces his Presidential campaign, February 8, 1968

  On a cold, rain-flicked night in 1967 a rickety twin-engine Convair 240 began a blind and uncertain descent through low clouds, abruptly breaking out over the scattered watery lights of Concord, New Hampshire. It came in headlong, less by instruments and calculation than with a precipitous lurching optimism.

  A damp huddle of greeters was waiting in the dark, and they waggled dime-store Confederate flags when he emerged from the plane-a stumpy little man with heavy black eyebrows and bright black darting eyes and a puglike bulb of a nose who looked as if he might have stepped out of an eighteenth-century London street scene by Hogarth. Wrapped in a black raincoat, he bobbed spryly down the steps as flashbulbs stammered in the rain. Someone held an umbrella over his head w
hile he said a few words to the newsmen. Asked if he were offended because no local officials were there to welcome him, he'd answered jauntily, “Naw”-his voice rising just a bit-“Naw, 'cause it's the wor-kin' folks all over this country who're gettin' fed up and are gonna turn this country around, and a whole heap of politicians are gonna get run over when they do.” With that, he was bundled into a car at the head of the waiting cavalcade, and, with a swift surge, everyone-he, his entourage, the reporters, his local supporters-vanished into the night. One had the peculiar fleeting impression that a squad of commandos or guerrillas, irregulars at any rate, had just landed in the dark and was now loose in the New England countryside.

  At a press conference that evening in a crammed smoke-hazed motel room on the outskirts of Concord, he seemed- peering over a thicket of microphones that came up almost to his chin, perspiring and a little haggard in the harsh glare of television lights-an improbable apparition. His baggy dark suit was buttoned tightly over his paunch, with a tab-collar shirt hugging the bulky knot of an inexpensive tie. His breast pocket was bulging with plastic-tip White Owl cigars and scraps of paper on which were scribbled random notes, addresses, telephone numbers. He looked somewhat like a traveling novelty salesman. But what this chunky little man was occupied with, what had brought him out of the night from distant Alabama all the way to this New Hampshire motel room, was the election of the next President of the United States-an event now only a year away. He carefully affected, out of deference to this unfamiliar assembly, a subdued and amiable manner, with much congenial winking, and his grammar and enunciation were studiously precise, faintly stilted. (On the flight up, he had mused, “Them New Hampshire folks, you know, they a little more restrained and genteel than Alabama folks. They gotten kind of overbred up there.”) At one point, he announced, “Well, I'm mighty happy to be among all you very intelligent-lookin' folks.” But later, when he interrupted a woman reporter, “What's that, honey? Could you say that again? I don't hear too good,” turning his head with his hand cupped behind his ear so that he had to look at her out of the corner of his eye, he seemed solemnly impervious to the ripple of titters in the room.

  Morning revealed a landscape that had the tidy miniature quality of a model train set, with a trivial city skyline under washed drab skies. It was alien country. Though the month was April, the weather was wintry-not his kind of weather-as if the South and North described not so much regions as perpetual weathers, summerland and winterland. Syracuse, into which he had ventured the week before, had had a profoundly remote look about it, cold and wan under bare bleak trees, with junkyards, power lines, and oil tanks set out in wide weedy fields and cement trucks moving through a rubble of construction. All the towns in the North where he was appearing seemed generations older than those in Alabama, and over Concord's streets there was a kind of static quiescence, a worn and antique quality. When he spoke that afternoon in the square downtown, he was regarded from the capitol lawn by an incredulously scowling statue of Daniel Webster, and his grits-and-gravy voice blared down a main street that was a turn-of-the-century tintype of stark brick buildings crested with Yankee brass eagles.

  But it could have been a rally on a musky spring afternoon in Suggsville, Alabama. His finger stabbing downward, his eyes crackling, the microphone ringing under the impetuous barrage of his voice, he barked, “If one of these two national parties don't wake up and get straight, well, I can promise that you and me, we gonna stir something up all over this country…” Afterward he greeted people along the sidewalks with an instant, easy intimacy: “Honey, I 'predate yawl comin' on out here today in this cold, heunh? Tell yo folks hello for me, heunh?” When a small girl suddenly kissed him square on the mouth, he looked around him for a moment-at all the pleasant faces, at the moil of reporters, at the candy-green capitol lawn, the thin exquisite sunshine, the vast benign blue sky-and grinned almost blissfully.

  Driving on to Dartmouth later for an evening speech, through Devil-and-Daniel-Webster country-weathervanes atop white wooden farmhouses, stone fences and apple orchards, birches and dark cedars sheltering small secret ponds the color of graphite-he removed his wetly chewed cigar to remark, “This sho does look like North Alabama, don't it?” He found the thought cheering. “Yes, sir,” he murmured happily, “you go up there around Gurley, New Hope, Grays Chapel-country up there looks just like this,” and he leaned back in his seat and returned his cigar to his mouth, satisfied.

  Two hours later, after nightfall, over the still, shadowed campus at Dartmouth, there pulsed a dull, steady roar from the auditorium where he was speaking. Scattered groups of students were hurrying toward the sound under the dark trees, but people were already milling under the windows and around the front steps. Inside, students were standing along the walls and sitting on windowsills and in the aisles, and the noise they were making was like a single continuous howl existing independent and disembodied above their open mouths. On the stage, while a student tried to read questions submitted by the audience, he paced restlessly, exhilarated by the violence heavy in the air. Occasionally he spat into his handkerchief and then plunged it back into his hip pocket. When he pounced to the microphone to answer a question, it was as if he were deliberately lobbing incendiary pronouncements into the crowd. He would crouch, looking up, his left arm gripping the lectern and his right swinging and whipping with pointed finger, as if he were furiously cranking himself up: “I'm not against dissent now, but I believe anybody that stands up like this professor in New Jersey and says they long for a victory by the Vietcong over the American imperialist troops, and anybody that goes out raising bluhd and money for the Vietcong against American servicemen, they oughtta be drug by the hair of their heads before a grand jury and indicted for treason, 'cause that's what they guilty of, and I promise you if I-” And then he would step back and spit into his handkerchief again, shooting it back into his hip pocket as the roar rose around him.

  At one point there was a charge by students down the center aisle, led by a young professor with fine-spun hair and a freshly scrubbed cherubic complexion-but his mild face was now flushed, his tie askew, his eyes manic and glaring as he tried to flail his way through campus police and plainclothesmen, bellowing with a crack in his voice, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You are an outrage!” That berserk charge-anarchic and hopeless, an abandonment of fairness, proprieties, all civilized approaches, a retreat to simple brute action-testified not only to despair and fury over the fact that this man could be speaking there at all, but to a sinking of the heart over the absurdly serious import of that figure's audacious aspirations, a dread that something sinister and implacable was afoot in the land. As he was hustled offstage during the short melee, he glanced quickly back over his shoulder at the furor with a curious, bemused, almost awed expression.

  Outside, after his speech, his car was engulfed. White and Negro students kicked the fenders and hammered on the hood, and one policeman was hauled back into the maw of the crowd and disappeared into it, his crumpled cap reappearing a moment later in the hand of a student, who waved it high in the air in triumph. And it seemed as if he, too, this stubby little man, might be on the point of vanishing, consumed whole by the kind of popular violence he so savors. As the crowd seethed around his car, there were glimpses of him sitting in the back seat, his face not worried, but just empty whenever the reeling TV lights washed over it, huddling behind the rolled-up windows with his cigar, all of him as small and still and inert as a rabbit in a burrow while hounds swirl and bay in the grass around it. The car began to ease forward, slowly nosing through the mob-he still not moving, looking to neither the right nor the left-and then, rapidly, it was gone.

  At the least, he is a simple primitive natural phenomenon, like weeds or heat lightning. He is a mixture of innocence and malevolence, humor and horror. “He's simply more alive than all the others,” declared a woman reporter after the Dartmouth fray. “These professors like Galbraith, Schlesinger, the politicians and bureaucrats i
n Washington-God knows, I've been around all of them, and they don't really know what's going on. You saw those people in that auditorium while he was speaking-you saw their eyes. He made those people feel something real for once in their lives. You can't help but respond to him. Me-my heart was pounding, I couldn't take my eyes off him, there were all those people screaming. You almost love him, though you know what a little gremlin he actually is.”

  Many still find it hard to regard George Corley Wallace as anything other than merely the most resourceful, durable, and unabashed of the Southern segregationist governors. But the fact is, he passed that point long ago, and has intruded himself now into the history of the nation. He has become, at the least, a dark poltergeist whose capacity for mischief in the land is formidable. The havoc he has intimated in the procedure of electing the next President of the United States has already raised substantial doubts about the system: he has materialized as the grim joker in the deck. More soberingly, the significance of his candidacy invokes certain questions about the basic health of the American society, both at this time and in the future.

  To many he has portended the ultimate arrival of a racist psychology into American politics. It seems certain that his candidacy can only increase the racial alienation in the country. A moderate Alabama politician declares, “What he's trying to do in the nation is what he's managed to do in Alabama. When you draw the line the way he does, the whites go with the white, and the blacks with the black, and when that happens, you're in for warfare.” A former Alabama senator echoes, “It's conceivable that he could win a state like Illinois or even California when he puts the hay down where the goats can get at it. He can use all the other issues-law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights-and never mention race. But people will know he's telling them, 'A nigger's trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.' What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind of shorthand, a kind of code.”