The man who was the chief architect of that bizarre speech is an elderly Montgomery lawyer named John Kohn, who lives, after the manner of an eighteenth-century English squire, in a large white country home, with two smoke-colored mastiffs, among tawny fenced fields a mile or two out of Montgomery. He long functioned as the sole consultant-intellectual, the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the discreet guru of Wallace's administration. He achieved a minor but permanent local fame when, on the day Kennedy was assassinated, he danced a jig down Montgomery's Dexter Avenue.
At his home one cold, windless, sunless afternoon, settled on a couch with his long legs crossed atop a small table and his hands folded formally across his vest, he said, “Some men like bird hunting, raising dogs, and all that. I like political tactics, strategy, and psychology. I suppose I wrote ninety percent of Wallace's campaign platform. I reckon you could call me the coach of the campaign. But I myself am allergic to politicians. I don't even like to shake hands with them. I simply choose not to mingle with ass-scratchin' politicians.”
His voice was like an old church pump organ, measured and deliberate and staunch. A tall and rather formidable figure, rigidly erect, he has a classic Roman head, craggy and balding, with hair combed in thin and faintly rippling streaks across the pale skin of his pate, and rather fierce watery, glaring eyes. He was wearing a black coat and an unbuttoned black vest loosely held together by a gold watch chain, with a gray silk tie that was just a bit spotted. His baggy gray flannel trousers were also a little stained, and-as if the care and odd formality of his attire began to relax and dissipate as it approached the ground- he ended with a pair of scuffed gray desert boots. The room was cold and faintly drafty, but it had a certain tropical atmosphere about it: the furniture was dark and heavy and cluttery, and there was a large Persian rug, and rattan blinds, and an archaic black ceiling fan which hung now arrested and motionless as a fire rustled quietly at the end of the room.
“Governor Wallace has his hangers-on, but I don't fault him for that. My dogs wag their tails at me, too, and I think I'm a big shot. But adulation is not a virus with him. I have the highest regard for Wallace. You always have a certain number of rats around a governor. Oscar Harper? He's a second Christ compared to some of those jerks Wallace has got with him at the capitol.”
He seemed to talk always through clenched teeth-enunciating precisely, carefully, almost with pain sometimes, his lips forming a small thin smile with the effort-while his eyes would flare and squint with a faintly manic intensity. “These Rotary-type politicians are so scared of being criticized, they won't do anything. They're merely potbellied men living on coupons. We've got no senators now. That applefaced Sparkman-he's a phony. My wife and daughter thought the world of John Kennedy. I'm glad he's dead. He was the most dangerous man in the history of our country. Eisenhower was a great general but a dumb president. Nixon clawed his way to the top. He's a jerk, but he's tough. As for LBJ, he ought to be tried in the docks as a traitor…”
Kohn lightly stroked his taut lower lip with thumb and forefinger. “If this country is going to be saved, it'll take a man like Wallace to save it. He's the Andrew Jackson of 1966-the closest thing to Jackson that's ever come along. He would have ridden with Forrest or Jeb Stuart. He's permeated with the spirit of the Confederacy…” He paused a moment and recrossed his legs. “Now, George Wallace is not a racist. I am. My grandfather was born one hundred feet from the state capitol. He was a banker and in real estate, half Irish and half Jewish, and brought up as a Catholic. I myself was reared on the capitol grounds. Whenever I get in a deal, I call on my Jewish ancestry. And if you've got Jewish, Scotch, English, Irish, or German blood in you, it would be stupid to compare you with my nigra cook. I give them all a fair chance, but don't tell me they're as smart. They never put a sail to a boat or a wheel to a wagon. About all they've ever done was jump up and down and eat each other. I'm not for burning anyone, but I'm an absolute racist. You either have the right momma and poppa the day you're born, or you don't. It's as simple as that… Wallace, however, is not a racist. But he knows this state is the last stronghold of the Anglo-Saxon civilization. He's well-grounded in Anglo-Saxon Western civilization. And he had enough practical political sense to know cussin' nigras was popular. The mass of people were looking subconsciously for someone, and now they have him. He created a devil and then slew him-Hitler used the Jews the same way, Jacob Javits did the same thing with the South. Hitler, of course, was a paranoid. The Germans are either at your ass or at your throat. But this country's full of little Hitlers-people with animosity toward everybody. The Klan, now, they're a little different: they're just poor boys that can't get in the country club, so they put on a sheet and have a little fun.”
He sneezed and produced a huge soiled handkerchief, which, after swabbing it once across his mouth, he stuffed back into his coat. “Excuse me. I'm allergic to everything that grows out here.” He lunged forward on the sofa and propped his elbows on his spread knees, his long arms in the narrow black stovepipe sleeves of his coat forming a stiff and almost perfect triangle. “Man, right where I'm sitting now was once the center of the Creek nation. The Judeo-Christian people ran them out and stole the whole United States. They put the Cross here”-he made a stabbing motion downward with one hand-“and they put the sword here.” He repeated the gesture with his other hand. “You know that. The greatest curse that ever happened to man was Christianity. It's been Christian nations that have caused the wars. They stole this country. Now, I'm a dues-paying church member. I'm not an agnostic, because there's bound to be something superior to man. Man is the worst beast that ever trotted through the jungle. There's bound to be something superior…”
Leaning back, he lapsed into dark and moody contemplation for a moment. “Well, if I die tomorrow, I haven't missed a damn thing. Life's been good to me. I was the only man who went into the Army a captain and came out a captain. If I liked what they told me to do, I'd do it. If not, I'd tell them to blow it. I've challenged two bastards to duels in my lifetime-to shoot it out. I respect a man's intelligence and a woman's virginity. The last time I got drunk, I knocked a fellow down at the country club for killing his wife's dog. I called him a dog-killing sonuvabitch. I challenged him to a duel. I'm not hurting. I'm in my seventies now, but I still get my exercise most every evening.” He produced a pale quick glimmer of a smile. “I am also writing a book. I've done about four hundred pages on it so far. I'm going to call it The Cradle-Montgomery is the Cradle of the Confederacy, you know. It's a combination of Faulkner and Peyton Place, about all the creeps and phonies in this town…” As Kohn described his book, it is to be a collection of miscellaneous oddities, snatches of lurid gossip from around Montgomery, anthropomorphic comparisons between Alabama's larger cities, disguised-for some reason-with fictitious names, and certain random definitions: What is a redneck? What is a slut? What is a bitch? Kohn explained the project at length with stiff and courtly gestures-his hands were long and impeccably clean, and they made single cleaving chops through the air from his shoulder to his lap when he reached a point. He would also sometimes hold one hand up beside his face with two fingers lifted straight upward in a strangely stylized and almost religious gesture, like the poses in Russian icons or medieval paintings of saints. “I'm going to tell it all,” he intoned; “I don't give a damn.”
Kohn was seldom seen at the capitol; he appeared only for such momentous occasions as major addresses by Wallace, standing alone against the wall in the balcony of the House chamber, his coat folded over his arm, gazing down with a steady, tight grin and glaring eyes, and then, when Wallace was through, swiftly departing. But Wallace readily acknowledged, “Oh, I call John about once a week. He's a good springboard for your opinions. When I'm havin' a tough time makin' a decision, when I want to do something and everybody else is wishy-washy about it and tellin' me, 'Now, that might be a little rash, you better kinda hold off and temper it a little,' I go home and pick up the phone before I go to bed and call John
, and he tells me to go ahead and give 'em hell. You talk to him, and you feel like you can do anything. He's sorta our morale builder.”
In the months following his inaugural address, Wallace seemed occupied with little else than engaging in racial skir mishes. All over Alabama, it was a season of sudden furious disarray, in which there was more than a suggestion that Wallace had actually proceeded, with a gleeful hectic haste, “to make race the basis of politics in this state.”
He had only to wait until the end of the winter for his first authentic grand-scale crisis. Negro demonstrations erupted in Birmingham, led by the man who was to emerge as his single great symbolic adversary in the years ahead, Martin Luther King. The two of them were like embodiments of the two popular psyches of the South's racial conflict-a conflict which had actually begun, had its inception, in the Negro church only a short stroll down Dexter Avenue from the state capitol. It was an unlikely bit of stagecraft: from that church, King had led the Montgomery bus boycott during the Patterson administration, and the two buildings-a plain brick church and a domed political citadel on the hill above it-seem to have been set down with just the right exquisite sense of dramatic spacing to challenge each other, serving as the nucleus and source for a confrontation eventually magnified over the rest of the South and then the nation. And all through that confrontation, Wallace and King continued in a kind of unwitting personal collaboration, though they had never once spoken to each other, as the mutual foils, the mutual catalysts of the Negro revolution.
Birmingham's public-safety director, Bull Conner, managed to keep the demonstrators at bay for a while with his celebrated firehoses and police dogs, but after a particularly tumultuous Saturday night Wallace dispatched his state patrol into the city. The force had been outfitted shortly after he took office with steel helmets painted with Confederate flags, and Confederate-flag license tags affixed to the front bumpers of their cars. They had been renamed State Troopers instead of State Patrol. They now swooped into Birmingham, over the protests of a number of local officials, with carbines and shotguns, and before long, the demonstrations subsided. But the summer simmered with bombings and shootings. On a Sunday morning in September, four small Negro girls were killed in a dynamite explosion at a Negro church. Wallace, while deploring the incident, hinted that it had likely been the handiwork of Negro militants-a suggestion he invoked in all the violence that attended his years as governor.
Only a few months after sending his state troopers into Birmingham, Wallace learned that Judge Frank Johnson had ordered the desegregation of schools in Macon County in the Black Belt. The site of Tuskegee Institute, the county has a preponderant Negro population, and the racial attitudes of the white minority approximate those of the whites in Southern Rhodesia. But surprisingly, when Wallace instructed the county's Board of Education to ignore Johnson's order, they voted instead to desegregate the high school in Tuskegee, the county seat. The day the high school was to open, more than one hundred state troopers surged in before dawn with orders for the local officials to close the school. “We hit 'em early and caught 'em off guard,” recollects Al Lingo. “We went up on their porches and rapped on their doors and got 'em up out of bed-they came to their doors with their pajamas on, and we handed them the governor's order and then went and ringed around the school to make sure it stayed closed.” The maneuver was effective for about a week; court orders finally broke up the occupation of Tuskegee, and thirteen Negro pupils began attending the high school. With that, state troopers began transporting white students from Tuskegee to still-segregated high schools in nearby Shorter and Notasulga. Wallace released them from that special duty by confiscating two buses from a northern Alabama trade school and putting them to the shuttling service. He also had the state Board of Education authorize financial aid to the parents of white students boycotting the Tuskegee school.
There were other, rather more elemental gestures, such as Wallace's paroling of a Klansman convicted of emasculating a Negro whom he and a carload of other brutes had picked up at random beside a Birmingham highway one night. Robert Shel-ton, the glum, drowsy-eyed, lank-jawed chief Klansman in Alabama, was discovered to be working as a petty contractor for the state Highway Department. Though Wallace may once have entertained a distaste for the Klan, they were seen frequently prowling through the state capitol, and in no administration within recent memory in Alabama has the Klan lurked so close to the corridors of power. But they were still kept carefully at the fringes of the administration. When a delegation of Klansmen volunteered their services during one civil-rights crisis, Wallace told them, “Naw, boys, I 'predate it, but I 'spect you better let us handle this-I do 'predate yawl comin' by, though.”
In the spring of 1963, when a federal judge ordered the enrollment of two Negroes at the University of Alabama, Wallace's finest hour was at hand. The order presented him with a spectacular opportunity to make good on his campaign pledge to stand in some schoolhouse door, and it also offered the heady possibility that he might manage to have the state occupied by federal troops. It was even more: in personally striking the pose of hopeless defiance, he sensed he was on the verge of becoming the apotheosis of the will of his people.
Wallace at Tuscaloosa, June 11, 1963
Wallace's political psychology essentially derives from the Southern romance of an unvanquished and intransigent spirit in the face of utter, desolate defeat. It has become a dogeared cliche about Southern leaders, but the fact is, the Civil War is still quite alive to Wallace. As he chatters about the days between 1861 and 1865, one is inevitably reminded of the Reverend Hightower in Light in August, whose gray head, as he sits by his window at dusk, is filled with the flash and roar of the old glorious doomed charges, the lifted sabers and bugles and grimy howling faces above gaunt, galloping horses. Wallace seemed to regard his career as governor merely as an invocation and projection of the old aboriginal glory and valor. It was all still happening to him. In fact, one got the feeling that, for him, what was happening was not quite as real as that great primeval conflict.
There is one moment in the history of that war which has for Wallace an almost religious meaning. “When it was about over, they captured Jefferson Davis down in Georgia and put him in jail, and one day several Union troops come around to clap him up in chains and manacles. He was sick and nearly starved to death by then, and old, but he told 'em he wadn't lettin' nobody put chains on him, he had been the president of a country, and that country might be beat now, and they might have him in jail, but he would not allow them to put him in chains. They grabbed him, and he started fightin'-that old man, weak as he was. It took a bunch of 'em to hold him long enough to get it done, and when they turned him loose again, he was still goin', still fightin'…”
It has not mattered to most Alabamians that in his series of confrontations with the federal government Wallace has met with consistent failure. What matters is that he fought, and continues to fight. He answers the romance of defeat. That role has been one of Wallace's central political inspirations: he seems personally to lust for chains. As the University of Alabama crisis approached in 1963, he proposed to a group of legislators in his office, “By God, you watch now, they gonna send federal troops all over this state. We gonna be under military occupation…”
While Wallace regarded President John Kennedy with a certain measure of awe, his attitude toward Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General, was one of bristling suspicion. When Bob Kennedy tried to contact Wallace at the governor's mansion one evening shortly before the University of Alabama confrontation, Ralph Adams, Wallace's old campus crony, happened to answer the phone. Wallace told Adams to inform Kennedy he didn't want to talk to him. “So I told Kennedy the governor was unavailable,” says Adams. “Kennedy kept saying, 'I don't see why he won't talk to me,' and Wallace-he was standing just a few feet away from me-kept whispering, 'Adams, just tell him I plain don't want to talk to him.'”
But Kennedy finally managed to set up a private meeting with Walla
ce at the state capitol. Before he arrived, Wallace had the local contingent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy place a wreath over the iron star embedded in the front porch of the capitol marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. “He didn't like the idea of Bobby maybe steppin' on it,” says one Wallace intimate.
To some, Kennedy's mission to Alabama seemed a curious exercise in naivete. But after the unseemly and embittering spectacle at Ole Miss only months before, the White House desperately wanted to avert another garish rhubarb between a state and the federal government. In a day-long group analysis in the Justice Department of what had gone wrong at Ole Miss, it was concluded there had been a disastrous lapse of communication with Governor Ross Barnett and the other Mississippi officials. So, haunted by the nightmare on the Ole Miss campus, and impelled by the mystique of the face-to-face dialogue, Bob Kennedy flew to Montgomery.
It was a bright lush April morning when Kennedy arrived at the capitol. The governor's outer reception room was as hushed and empty of incidental people as a funeral parlor. Kennedy, quiet and thin, himself looking a bit funereal, had with him Burke Marshall and Ed Reid, the old Alabama political broker who had picked out Wallace to represent the state's League of Municipalities while Wallace was a legislator. They were conducted into Wallace's office, where they found the governor waiting for them with his finance director, Seymore Tram-mell. The five of them shook hands and then closed the door.
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