His address was short. He invoked his Northern primary expeditions and declared, “If you send me again … I will go again. The liberals say George Wallace wants to be President. What's wrong with that?” He insisted, “The issue is the right of the Alabama people to vote to amend or not to amend their own constitution. It is a precious right. I shall do all in my power to see to it that they do not lose that right.” And he challenged the assembly, again and again, “Let the people speak! … I say, let the people speak…”
Actually, before the session had even opened, the House Rules Committee had passed the bill unanimously, with no untidy discussion. There was a spatter of complaints from other representatives, though: one of them declared, “This is raw political power that you can see and feel and touch,” and another cried, “This is a banana republic!” When the bill reached the Senate, the Rules Committee there, also dominated by Wallace courtiers, cleared it with even more alacrity-it took them exactly twenty seconds to receive, approve, and pass it on. When the measure reached the Senate floor, though, it immediately ran into a filibuster, and it was at this point that Wallace had his first dark hint of disaster. While he needed only twenty-one votes to have the bill approved by the Senate, he first needed twenty-four votes to invoke cloture and extinguish debate; early in the maneuverings, he concluded he had twenty-three commitments and one other vote almost certain-miscalculation, as it turned out. With their first cloture challenge, Wallace's forces could muster only eighteen votes. Appallingly, somewhere along the line, six votes had melted away.
With a sense of alarm now, Wallace exercised all his political arts. Senators report, “He'd work on you this way-first he'd call you into his office and tell you how great you are and how much he likes you, all the while pattin' you, strokin' your arm, blowin' smoke up you. Then he'd start bringin' out all these letters-he had them in cardboard boxes sittin' on his conference table during the succession fight, with each box lettered county by county, and he'd dump them out on his desk and run his hands through them. Then he'd start on about how he was spit on in Wisconsin, how he suffered up there in the cold and how those mean people treated him ugly up there. Finally, if you're still just sittin' there lookin' at him and not sayin' anything, he gets to hollering and rantin' about how he's gonna take away everything in your county. There were three or four counties he actually stopped road construction in. In that last phase of his, he's out to destroy you completely-morally, physically, financially. His folks would put the finger on you back in your home community as aiding and abetting the demonstrators. They'd call your clients, they'd offer you all kinda personal considerations. He'd even call up and talk to your wife and children- he'd know you weren't there, but he'd ask for you anyway, and then just start up chattin' with your whole family for a half-hour or so…”
But it wasn't enough. He had met with other frustrations during his administration: in trying to get Communists banned from speaking on state campuses, in trying to abolish the board of trustees at the University of Alabama, in trying to change the process of selecting boards of registrars from one of popular election to gubernatorial appointment, and in a punitive maneuver to snatch from Richmond Flowers the authority to appoint attorneys for highway-condemnation proceedings. But those were only incidental irritations in which he had nothing really personal and vital at stake. The succession bill, however, was a politically mortal matter. Now only a maddening handful of minor politicians stood between him and what he knew to be the popular will, and that torment caused him to lose for a time the uncanny poise that had marked him all his political life, plunged him into his most graceless, blundering, ignominious hour. Everything he touched now seemed to topple down on him, to compound his hopelessness. It was as if, for a period, he was turned inside out.
“Our strength would have been diminished if he could have kept from making mistakes,” recalls Robert Gilchrist, one of the filibuster leaders. “We had to count on his making mistakes. And he made his first one immediately.” Confounded in his attempts to snuff out debate and in his efforts to lure more senators to his side, he set out to alter the Senate rules on the number of votes needed to override a filibuster. He failed. He then appealed to the state supreme court to do it for him, a garish proposition which they summarily dismissed. In the meantime, one recalcitrant senator, Julian Lowe, announced on the Senate floor that Seymore Trammell had phoned the president of a junior college in Lowe's district and told him the institution would not be receiving five hundred thousand dollars which Wallace had promised it. Lowe declared, “Trammell told him that he and the governor had found other uses for the college's capital-outlay money.” The reaction to this news among the other opposition senators was gleeful. “No man has the right to use public funds to corrupt a man in such blatant fashion,” roared one of them. “My God! Is the price of victory worth your morality?” Trammell, for his part, never denied the charge.
Such indications of ragged desperation served merely to fortify the resistance in the Senate. That resistance now-that perverse refusal to be intimidated by what Wallace regarded as the popular will, a defiance entered into by men with no evident longings for political suicide-was like an intimation that perhaps the popular will was not what Wallace had assumed it was, that he may have actually overreached himself. He had those letters in the cardboard boxes in his office, he seemed to feel a glow of popular empathy, but with each rebuff in Montgomery, the earth trembled under him a little anyway. For a while he pondered calling for a Selma-style march of his supporters to the capitol. But he finally decided to make a series of raids into the home counties of the opposing senators. “We are going to the people with this issue,” he declared. “I don't mind the people telling me where to go, but I'm not going to let a few senators tell me.”
One of those senators recalls, “He didn't announce his plans on this until one morning when he sends a telegram to my home and tells me he wants to debate in Florence at nine A.M. the next morning. He knew I was in Montgomery and not at home. My wife called me at three P.M. to tell me about it. There was no time to prepare-so I dictated some remarks to my wife on the phone, and then drove all the way up that night.” Wallace was met by cheering crowds everywhere. They were, he found, apparently as anxious to remove the senators and the constitutional technicality as he was. A state senator who showed up at one Wallace appearance in his home county barely escaped being mauled by the throng. “He got 'em all worked up, and then he turned and pointed straight at me down in the crowd and said, 'There. There he is.' They really converged on me-'You sonuv-abitch' and that sort of stuff. They had closed in all around me, but Wallace finally called them off.” Wallace's attitude at this point, reflects one state politician, “was a matter of If I'm ruined, by God, I'm gonna take all these sonuvabitches with me.'” But as his tour wore on, Wallace saw signs that it was beginning to backfire into resentment at a governor so conspicuously bullying local politicians, and he suddenly abandoned it.
The situation now, of course, was unsalvageable anyway. Actually, after the tactics to which he had finally resorted-one opponent even charged Wallace had threatened a senator with cancellation of funds to a school for the blind in his district-it was probably just as well he didn't win. His uncharacteristically clumsy and hectic intimidations would have made it a victory he could ill afford. One of his admirers, Grover Hall, later editor of the Richmond Post-Dispatch but then a kind of journalist laureate for the Wallace administration as editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, observed, “This must be a crestfallen and melancholy time for Wallace. To console himself over the loss of battle, he is entitled to reflect that it is remarkable that such a battle could even be fought… Simply, as is the way of daring, resolute men, Wallace overreached himself. He asked that he be reelected governor in order that he might run again for President. This was somewhat too outback for his supporters. It was an excess that generated just enough combined opposition to tip the balance…” Hall compared Wallace's succession maneuver with Fra
nklin Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court: “[Roosevelt] was diminished by attempting to pack the court and diminished by the defeat of the effort.” But the fact is, if Wallace was diminished by his defeat, he would have been diminished even further by victory.
The coup de grace was dealt on October 22, almost a month after Wallace had convened the legislature. Some three weeks of Senate filibustering came to an end, and the Senate voted on the succession amendment: Wallace missed by three votes. This final day of deliberations was the occasion for the most spectacular speech of the entire debate. Senator Kenneth Hammond, a burly former football player from the little northern Alabama mountain village of Valley Head, caused an abrupt hush to fall over the Senate chamber when he charged that Wallace had used “Nazi tactics,” and described him as “one of the greatest political manipulators this century has known.” Anyone who resisted Wallace, declared Hammond, was identified as “a nigguh-lover, a pinko, or a communist.” Wallace was out “to destroy democracy at its best” and had in mind “a dictatorship which would make Huey P. Long look like a piker.” Not only had Wallace confirmed Alabama as “a haven for hate-mongers,” but he had the same designs on the rest of the nation. “In order to pick up support, he is going to pit the white race against the minorities in this country,” Hammond prophesied, “the same way Adolf Hitler pitted the master race against the Jews.” By now a number of legislators, frozen in their seats, had paled noticeably, and the lieutenant governor had stalked out. Hammond suddenly produced a small package, wrapped in a paper bag, and clunked it down on the press table immediately in front of him. “When he came out with that little bag,” recalls one state senator, “mouths dropped open and eyes bugged out all over the place. That was when that chamber got sho nuff quiet. They just knew there was a pistol in that bag.” After a dramatic pause, Hammond pointed to the package and announced that it contained a tape recording. “It's got on it every damn promise the administration made to me. I understand the finance director wants to play rough. That suits me.” Legislators let out their breath, but only a little. Hammond concluded with the suggestion that he might be assassinated for voting against the succession bill- “The hate-mongers may kill me before I leave the capitol.”
Wallace, when asked about the speech sometime later that evening, after the defeat of his bill, replied with a silent glare and scurried out of the capitol into the chill October night.
After his desperate and profligate expenditure of energy and concentration in the succession fight, there followed for Wallace a period that was like a long and careful inhalation. On his way to some factory opening or graduation exercise outside Montgomery, he would ride for hours in absolute silence in the back seat of the car, pulling on his lower lip as he gazed out the window. In his office, he would pause in the middle of dictation and stare blankly off into a far corner, sitting very still behind his desk, as the minutes passed and his secretary waited with poised pencil. Facing him again-and more imminent than ever before-was absolute nothingness: the void.
Then, like a sudden small soundless concussion in his head, it came to him that he might run Lurleen.
She had remained, throughout her husband's four years in the governor's office, an obscure and rather lonely figure, pleasant enough on public occasions, but essentially a private person, unassuming and unprepossessing. A small, tidy woman with a fondness for blazers and turtleneck blouses, which made her look like the leader of a girls' college glee club, she was attractive in that hard, plain, small-faced, somewhat masculine way that Deep Southern women tend to be attractive-in fact, over the years, she had even acquired a certain resemblance to her husband.
When the last of her four children, Janie Lee, was born in 19 61, it was as if she went into a kind of private, resigned semiretreat, like so many other women approaching middle age-like the women, perhaps, for whom Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea. With her eldest daughter, Bobbie Jo, married and in college, and her son, George, Jr., and another daughter, Peggy Sue, absorbed in teen-age worlds of their own, she spent a lot of time by herself outdoors, hunting, swimming, water-skiing. She was happiest when floating in a tiny boat in shorts and a baggy shirt out in the middle of a wide lake on a drowsy afternoon, all by herself, fishing with a cane pole. “I'd just sit out there on the water, and if they bit, that was fine, and if they didn't bite, that was even better, that was the finest thing in the world. Because you could think then.”
As soon as they were married in 1942, when Wallace took Lurleen down to Clayton for a quick and humble honeymoon, he seemed already to have moved his attention, energy, and concentration to larger things. An old associate admits, “I guess he neglected his family pretty bad. It was always like he kinda felt Lurleen would get in his way…” They lived meagerly while Wallace was in the legislature. “The money just wasn't coming in for them back then,” recalls an old friend. “We'd visit the two of 'em in Clayton sometimes. We went over there one night, and Lurleen called my wife out of the room for a little while, and then when we got back home my wife told me that Lurleen had bought three new dresses on credit, and she didn't want George C. to know about it. She had 'em hid way back in some closet-the poor little girl was scared to wear 'em.”
In 1952, after Wallace had left the legislature and won his circuit judgeship, she wanted him to stop there, to settle for that. “I would have been content,” she delicately allowed, “for him to stay circuit judge from then on.” But almost immediately, he began pursuing the governorship. “He was making speeches all over the state,” said Lurleen, “and it was a matter, for me, of sitting home and waiting for George to get back.” She spent a lot of her time now in church work. One woman in Clayton remembers, “At Christmas, she would be Mary in the little church pageants. She would wear a shawl over her head, and she was so lovely, and she read her part so pretty…”
There are reliable reports that more than once during this period Lurleen was on the point of leaving George. A couple once close to the Wallaces recalls, “She wasn't well-looked awfully anemic-and she had a baby to care for, and she was alone most of the time. She really had thought that he'd settle down after he was elected judge; his salary would have kept them comfortably. She thought this was good enough. But, of course, he looked on it as just another stepping-stone on the way to becoming governor. This was the reason she wanted to quit him. She was bent on divorce. We tried to talk her out of it-one time we were at this fellow's house down there, one of Wallace's helpers-and we all tried to talk her out of it, but she just wouldn't hear anything we had to say.”
Finally, Wallace and his “helpers” managed to dissuade her-though, as one of them now admits, “It got a little hairy for a while there.” Lurleen then tried to enter into his life. “I started traveling with George,” she said. “I had this feeling, that if I campaigned with him, it would draw us closer together. But I was frightened every time I got near a crowd. Most of the time, I'd just sit in the car and wait for him.”
It was in the deep, long, silent winter after the succession bill disaster that he began to talk of running Lurleen. The first people to whom he posed that possibility, including Lurleen, thought he was joking. But he began to insist more frequently and seriously, “Why not, now?” He finally had a small delegation of his aides meet with Lurleen in an office at the capitol. Formally, gingerly, they proposed it to her, negotiations made all the more delicate by the fact that she was soon to undergo extensive uterine surgery. She balked, but only half-heartedly; she had no real choice, of course. With the approach of spring, he began taking heart that he might be rescued after all.
Though he finally won Lurleen's consent, he still hesitated. He sent informal emissaries over the state to check what the reaction might be to such a ploy, and the reports they brought back were inconclusive, at best. Probably the most troubling factor, though, was that Ryan DeGraffenried was planning to run again. He had been steadily and quietly building support throughout the state during Wallace's four years at
the capitol and had behind him the newspapers, big business, the city politicians, and educational leaders-the establishment coalition. One Wallace intimate says frankly, “George was scared to death of Ryan.” Several polls gauging DeGraffenried's potential with the general mass of voters were also disquieting. “It got right down to the lick-log,” says one Wallace aide. “One day he was gonna run her, and the next day he wasn't. He was gonna have to make a move now one way or the other.”
DeGraffenried was already making speeches in the state, winging from one stop to another in a small private plane. Then, at the end of one day's junket in the mountainous reaches of northern Alabama, he returned to the small local airport where his plane was waiting to fly him to his last engagement only a few miles away across a looming ridge. It was a dark and gusty evening, and the airport manager pleaded with him to make the trip by car. DeGraffenried turned to his pilot. “You think you can make it?” The pilot said he could, and the two of them scrambled into the plane and took off. They rose up into the night with a tiny diminishing winking of lights. Then, as the airport manager watched, the frail and weightless craft seemed to hover for a moment in the air just above the top of the ridge, almost over it, but suddenly, like a kite abruptly plunging in a crazy smack of wind, it dropped, was batted back, and he heard a small brief explosion. When they found the wreckage, both the pilot and DeGraffenried were dead.
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