What followed that glowering June morning was like a dream: Katzenbach, hulking and rumpled, emerging from a car and proceeding on up the walk between banked hushed newsmen and law officers who formed a long aisle of mute and tense expectation, which ended before a stumpy little man in a black suit (poised behind, of all things, a lectern), who solemnly threw up his hand, halting Katzenbach; the two then exchanging vaguely irritable and exasperated phrases, like a short, idle, haphazard argument on some street corner; Katzenbach with arms folded tightly and a faint expression of pained sufferance, beginning to glisten a little with sweat, then turning and going back down the aisle between the dumb, watching faces while the stubby little man turned from the lectern and disappeared inside the auditorium behind him. Four hours later he reappeared to confront the general of the Alabama National Guard, snappily returning the general's salute and then reading from notes scrawled on the back of a calendar pad, and finally stepping aside. Shortly afterward, the two Negro youths-Vivian Malone and James Hood-were registered as students at the University of Alabama. By that time, Wallace was on his way back to Montgomery.
It had been little more than a ceremony of futility-and, as a historical moment, a rather pedestrian production. But no other Southern governor had managed to strike even that dramatic a pose of defiance, and it has never been required of Southern popular heroes that they be successful. Indeed, Southerners tend to love their heroes more for their losses. After the University of Alabama, Wallace entered a new political dimension-both in his state and in the nation.
The whole affair left Wallace with a tingling sense of national involvement. He felt quite gratified by his encounter with Kennedy, and his brief exposure to the country posing in the doorway at the university brought speaking invitations from all over the United States-mostly from campuses, where the interest in him was largely as a grotesque amusement. If Wallace was not exactly aware of that, he recognized they offered him at least heady walk-on parts on the biggest stage of all, in the biggest play of them all. With his instinctive nimbleness, he accepted as many campus invitations as possible.
It was his first venture beyond the snug politics of Alabama, the first audacious extension of his vision of the possibilities for himself into the national contest.
On almost every campus where he appeared-at Harvard, where he was hustled out of an auditorium through a dank basement full of pipes, at UCLA, at the University of Oregon- he was greeted with memorable melees. The old cronies from Alabama whom he carried along with him-Watson, Harper, Adams, Curlee-regarded the free-for-alls in these alien climes as the fearsome gyrations of exotic tribes. Stranded outside the auditorium at Harvard among a crowd of pickets who suddenly began singing “We Shall Overcome,” Watson turned to Harper and muttered fiercely, “Sing, you fool. Sing! I'm too old to run,” and the two of them joined hands with the demonstrators and lustily chorused in. During the college tours, there was about Wallace and his entourage the air of reckless little horsemen on forays into enemy encampments, and reconnoitering later in the evenings in their hotel lobby, after having plunged precipitously through hostile, awesome uproar, they huddled together and chattered breathlessly and exuberantly, most of all just feeling lucky to have survived it, to still be intact, recounting to each other, “You see me put that elbow in that fella? Goddamn, man, two of 'em tried to crowd in against me, and I put a shoulder in one, and then I just slapped the other'n…”
Wallace himself was subject to the most bizarre personal humiliations-one woman in California, when he reached to shake her hand, stuck a lighted cigarette into his palm-but he remained impervious to embarrassment. It was not so much out of calculation as just a simple lingering dauntless country innocence; he seemed to regard such affronts merely with an abstract astonishment, the gentle assumption in the South being that political notions should have nothing to do with good manners. His only conclusion, when he met with such abuse, was that “those folks just hadn't had much raisin'.” Ralph Adams recalls of a two-week speaking tour in Wisconsin, “Our last stop was there at the University of Wisconsin, and it was so cold, the lake had froze up solid. Wallace had this all-night bull session with students at the resort hotel where we were staying, there were about forty or fifty of them sitting around on the floor, and the rest of us turned on in. Then, when we got up in the morning and looked out the window where that froze lake was, we saw that somebody during the night had wrote in huge letters across the ice, 'Fuck Wallace.' The way they fixed it up, I bet it lasted until the spring. It must of still been on there when he came back up to campaign in the primary.” But Wallace is initially oblivious to insult-or, as when he is asked subtly vicious questions by newsmen, doesn't recognize it when it happens. It's only later, mulling things over, that he decides he's been insulted. Days later, many miles away, he discharges his resentment at accumulated slights with almost peevish tirades (when he failed to receive the customary certificate of appreciation after an appearance before the National Press Club, he blared in speeches over Alabama, “Well, they can take their certificate and they know what they can do with it”) against intellectuals and professors and newspaper editors and all other members of that hostile, cold, inscrutable estate whose disdain he has not been able to disarm.
Occasionally in his campus addresses he essayed aesthetic flourishes. “Let us look at the 1954 school case, Brown vs. Topeka, the lawyers call it,” he once intoned. “It did not, I assure you, as some seem to think, spring instantly into existence full-grown and ready for action equipped with injunctive processes, preferred appeals, set bayonets, and all its accouterments like Botticelli would have us believe Venus came to the shores of Greece full-grown and full-blown on the breath of Boreas.” Such unlikely phrases were obviously the handiwork of unseen advisers, designed to make him somehow more palatable to his campus audiences. The effect, instead, was one of baroque implausibility. And he would inevitably deliver himself of at least two unblinkingly gross pronouncements before the evening was over. On one occasion he carefully explained to his audience how the mulatto children born of Union occupation troops and Negro women during Reconstruction took on the characteristics of their fathers, and that the mulatto was the image most Northerners had of the Negro, “whereas, when we speak of the Negro in the South, the image in our minds is that great residue of easygoing, basically happy, unambitious Africans who constitute forty percent of our population, and who the white man in the South, in addition to educating his own children, has attempted to educate, to furnish public health services and civic protection… The people of the South do not hate the Negro. They have carried him on their shoulders and have endowed him with every blessing of civilization that he has been able to assimilate…”
Wallace's own manner, among the howls and hoots that attended his speeches, was a kind of detached playfulness. In the midst of enemies who have a particular blatant and unappeasable hostility toward him, his instinct is to become almost cuddle-somely kittenish, to innocently spank and paw at their rage. At Harvard he told his audience, “You left-wing, pinko liberals should appreciate me puttin' money into your treasury.” When the din would begin to rise around him, he would pause and lean on the lectern with both arms and tilt his hips and grin, with a little shake of his head. “Well, it's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight!” And whenever the tumult became impossible, he would throw up his small arms and blare, “I accept the nomination!”
Besides his facility for puckish disconcertment, Wallace also discovered during his college tours that he generally had the asset of antagonists who underestimated him-who regarded him as a kind of animated caricature. That is, of course, the classic advantage of the wily country boy dealing with supercilious sophisticates. This revelation enheartened and galvanized him.
The prospect that he might be able to enlarge his tribuneship to a national scale had, actually, long been a dimly flickering idea in his head, and with his campus excursions, the possibility became more tantalizing. As the 1964 natio
nal primaries approached, a Montgomery newspaper editor, Grover Hall, directly proposed to Wallace, back in Wallace's office one afternoon, that he enter some of the primaries. “He grabbed it and ran like a hungry fish,” says one Wallace intimate.
Late one afternoon, after a speech at the University of Wisconsin, someone called Wallace's suite at the hotel in Madison and declared that he had a plan for Wallace to run in the upcoming presidential primary in the state. “I thought he was a crackpot,” remembers Ralph Adams. “I told him thank you, and to send his plan on down to Montgomery. But he kept on calling back, saying he just had to speak personally with the governor about running for President. Wisconsin seemed like the last state we wanted to run in-they had no Negro problem, and they had their own civil-rights law. The whole idea seemed like a joke. We'd been on this speaking tour for two weeks, and everybody was ready to get on back home. It was snowing. But this nut wouldn't quit calling, so we finally told him to meet us at this radio station downtown where Wallace had to appear on a call-in program before we flew back to Alabama. He said, okay, he'd meet us there. He was from Oshkosh, seventy miles away, but he drove all the way over in that snow, with us sitting around that radio station for an hour and a half, all ready to leave but having to wait on this nut.”
That's how his 1964 primary campaigns began. Wallace's conversation with the man was hurried, but it left him feverishly excited, and he emerged from the radio station with an outline of the primary qualification requirements tucked into his briefcase. Waiting for him in a limousine outside in the snowing twilight was Wisconsin Governor John Reynolds, a large hunk of Wisconsin cheese in his arms, and he offered to drive the Wallace party to the airport. “I guess he was pretty happy to get us on out of the state,” says one Wallace aide, “but if he had known what we were all sitting there thinking about on the way to the airport, he probably would have told us to get out and walk the rest of the way in the snow.” As soon as Wallace had clambered aboard his plane, he snapped open his briefcase and took out the primary requirements. He studied them all the way back to Alabama.
Through the campaigns that followed-first Wisconsin, then Indiana, then Maryland-it all seemed a faintly desperate and hopeless adventure. “We started in Wisconsin with exactly eight hundred dollars,” says one Wallace staff member. “We couldn't even negotiate television time. I paid my own expenses.” Wallace says, “We didn't even know what town we were going to next half the time.” In many places they found that the hotels would refuse to accept them as guests. “I guess,” says one Wallace aide, “they were afraid we'd short-sheet 'em.” In Baltimore, they had planned to set up headquarters at the Lord Baltimore Hotel but were suddenly informed there were no rooms for them, so the party transferred to a motel in nearby Towson. “We had all these desks and typewriters we had to get out of the Lord Baltimore,” says John Pemberton, one of Wallace's national liaison men. “We called every mover in town and were told they couldn't get to us till the next week. I finally called up this moving company that was owned by a nigra and asked him if he could move us. 'I think you better know,' I told him, 'it's Guvnuh Wallace you'll be moving.' He said, 'I don't care if it's the KKK, as long as you got the money.' But he showed up faster than we'd figgered he would. Later that day, about eight of the biggest nigguhs you ever saw in your life walked into our suite at the Lord Baltimore dressed in these rough work-clothes with no markings on them, and one of them looked around and then said to another'n, Is this the place we supposed to clean out?' I thought they'd come in there ready to have at it. My mouth went dry, and I could see some of the others in our party, their eyes kinda buggin' out…”
In each campaign Wallace met with total rejection from the state's establishment-political, religious, and journalistic. In Wisconsin the editor of a Catholic newspaper, Mrs. Franklyn J. Kennedy, suggested that a vote for Wallace would be a sin. There were the natural accusations of racism. Quoted in one state as describing all non-Anglo-Saxons as “lesser breeds,” Wallace quickly dispatched someone back to Alabama to rummage up a congenial Syrian, Jew, Pole, and Greek, and trotted them out at subsequent appearances to declare their affection for him. But he moved through a constant weather of outrage and tension. His bodyguards carefully Scotch-taped the hood of his car at each stop so that, when they returned, they could check to see if anyone had wired it with dynamite.
For all the haphazardness of their expeditions, they accomplished a political mayhem in the primaries. In Wisconsin Wallace spirited away almost thirty-five percent of the Democratic vote. In Indiana he captured almost thirty percent. Then, in Maryland, the last campaign, he came chillingly close to actually taking the primary; leading in the early returns, he finished with about forty-five percent of the vote-and he now maintains that Maryland Governor Millard Tawes confessed to him privately that he did win, and that there was some feverish sleight-of-hand on the precinct level that night when it became apparent he would. There were, no doubt, domestic politics at work in each state which helped to enhance his showing, but it was also clear that Wallace had invoked, had discovered a dark, silent, brooding mass of people whom no one-the newspapers, the political leaders, the intellectuals-no one but Wallace had suspected were there. The effect was to transform his national hankerings to an obsession.
Charles Morgan, a liberal refugee from Birmingham who now heads the American Civil Liberties Union office in Washington, remembers that while he was following Wallace through Indiana trying to impart to citizens there some idea of the nature of the man who had ventured among them, the sudden cold realization struck him in a plane one afternoon, “My God. The galoots are loose.”
Back in Alabama, there still remained ahead of Wallace the mortal crisis of his political existence.
It finally occurred to him, sometime in the summer of 1965, that his term as governor was due to end in about a year. “Once he was inaugurated,” says one Wallace intimate, “he just seemed to forget the fact he would have to leave office in 1966. It was one of the few things that ever crept up on him.” The provision in the state constitution which confined governors to one term seemed to him an outrageous intrusion into his communion with the people, the arbitrary impediment of an abstract technicality to a marriage of true minds. He briefly considered running for the Senate and then dismissed it; for a politician of his nature, the Senate would have been a kind of gilded exile. Further, according to his closest associates, he had the touchingly naive suspicion that once he arrived in Washington, he might not be seated, or might be subjected to some other formal and official humiliation.
In September, 1965, he notified the state legislature that he wanted them to design and then submit for popular vote a constitutional amendment removing the constitution's one-term restriction. “To those so-called liberals who are voicing mock concern over what they call the growing power of tyranny and the washing tides of anarchy, I would suggest further that they are not concerned about me-but about the growing power of the people.” He then appealed to the people, in a state-wide radio and television address, to bestow on him their blessing- by letter, by wire, or in person. “I want to speak for you and champion what you would have me champion. I want to know that you are with me in our cause for the law and civilization. If you feel a need for me in the job I try to do, then I want you to know I feel a need for you.”
This gambit was the most audacious stroke of a political career that had always, since he had asked Folsom as a freshman legislator to appoint him speaker of the House, been characterized by startling audacity. To a number of state legislators it appeared that his brave and solitary ambition had now passed into a kind of giddy hubris. He had ventured beyond the pale. In private conferences with legislators before the succession session, he even reversed the astrology of an old Alabama political aphorism, “A setting sun gives off no heat,” to boast that his sun was giving off more heat than ever-that, in effect, he had arrested his sun at high noon.
Those legislators-most of whom were in the Senate-who
quickly decided to resist were, no doubt, acting out of their own individual political interests to a degree: many of them had already made investments in candidates who were preparing to run in the 1966 campaign. Whatever, they were also armed with legitimate reservations. When Wallace asked one of them for support, the senator replied, “I'll do it on one condition-you make it start with the next governor.” Wallace snapped, “What's the matter, you afraid to let the people vote on it?” The senator answered, “Hell, frankly, yeah.”
Sensing deeper complications than he had reckoned on, Wallace set out to carry the matter by sheer windy, breathless speed and momentum-simple kinetic energy being one of his basic political resources. Before the month was over, he called a special session. “He declared an emergency,” snorts one state senator, “a special emergency session so he could succeed himself. Now, isn't that something? An emergency”
His tactic was to open the session under public gaze by means of a televised evening address to a joint gathering of House and Senate members in the House chamber, with the necessary preliminary parliamentary procedures carefully choreographed to finish at the precise moment of his introduction, seven P.M. air time. Dissident legislators raised a flurry of parliamentary distractions, hoping to sabotage the timing. Before the opening prayer, one senator demanded that the floor be cleared of all but authorized persons, but the House speaker, a Wallace ally who was presiding over the session, barked, “All you're entitled to is what the chair gives you, and right now we're going to give you a prayer.” The tumult subsided for a moment to let the minister scamper through his remarks to the Almighty, but with his “Amen,” bellows for recognition erupted from succession opponents. The clamor became deafening. From the balcony, brimming with Wallace partisans, who sported “Wallace for President” buttons, rose an ominous rumble. The speaker recognized a pro-Wallace representative, and his resolution to invite Wallace to address the joint session was briskly hammered through after a voice vote. The representative was again recognized, and this time he proposed a resolution calling for a delegation to go fetch Wallace. The decibel outcome of this vote was more dubious, but it was hammered approved. With the clock ticking perilously close to air time, the same representative, amid almost berserk baying from the dissidents, introduced his third resolution to make the governor's address the first order of business, and Wallace came through the doors into the chamber just as the on-lights of the television cameras glowed red.
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