Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  A month or so later Watson appeared in the basement cafeteria of the state capitol, where Wallace was sitting with a table of out-of-state visitors. With slow, fragile care, he made his way down the cafeteria line, Oscar Harper at his elbow to steady him, passing right by Wallace's table. Wallace didn't speak to him; Watson didn't speak to Wallace. He emerged from the line with only a glass of water and sat down with Harper at a table only a few feet away from Wallace. While Wallace talked to the visitors, Watson watched him vacantly, one hand wrapped around his glass of water, lifting it only now and then for a careful token sip. But Wallace, when he was through with the visitors, did not turn to greet him, though Watson's rheumy blank eyes stayed on him; he merely waved at a few people in the back of the room and was gone. Watson sat for a little longer at the table with his glass of water. Then Harper helped him get to his feet, and they made their way up to Wallace's reception room. Watson settled himself in a chair along a far wall, quiet and inert, with a dim little smile on his face, looking superfluous and isolated as people milled thickly past him. Wallace appeared in the room once but then vanished back into his office, apparently without having noticed Watson. After about an hour, Watson left.

  Only a few weeks later, flying north on one of the first forays of his 1967 presidential mission, Wallace abruptly announced to an Alabama reporter sitting across from him on the plane, “Bil ly's in the hospital, you know.” He gazed out his porthole a moment, his cigar stuffed in the side of his mouth, his hands folded between his knees. “Yeah, Billy's dyin'. He's about to die….”

  Lurleen sat up with him through his last night. While Wallace was greeting visitors from far corners of the country at the capitol the next morning, he received the call that Watson was dead. He stayed on at the capitol until late that afternoon, though one of his secretaries reported, “He's feelin' pretty low today. He just doesn't feel like doin' much. It hit him mighty hard…”

  Not long after Watson's death, it was discovered that Lurleen had suffered a recurrence of cancer. The word around the capitol and in the editorial offices of the Montgomery newspapers was ominous. Wallace, talking to a reporter in his office a few days after the news was announced, admitted, “Yeah, well, we were awfully shocked.” His face had a grave and almost reverent expression. “It a terrible thing, sho is. She's mighty sick, hurtin' awful bad and all…” With cigar in hand, he leaned back in his chair and described an earlier operation in which “she slung a blood clot. It was just a little ole bittly thing, 'bout like 'at”-his forefinger measured a small distance on his thumb-“but it got hung up in her heart here.” He pulled back his coat and began tapping, thunking his torso. “We had to bring her to Montgomery unconscious on a stretcher. She's sho had a lot of sickness in her life.” He described a gallstone operation she had also survived. “They had to cut her whole side here-” He pulled his coat even farther back, hitching it all the way back to his hip pocket, and twisting in his seat, traced a long arc along his shirt. When the reporter suggested that the spring and fall campaigns had been rather vigorous for someone who had just undergone massive surgery, Wallace quickly protested, “ 'Course, that wadn't what caused this thing now, you know. The doctors said it was a tonic for her. Said it was salubrious. Actually, it was a lot more rigorous on me than it was on her. But before we ever got into it, I went out to the mansion one night and told her, 'Honey, I don't think we should do it,' and she said, 'Well, I'll be mighty disappointed if we don't.' And anyway, we had already gone so far and all… But it didn't cause this thing now. 'Course, me, I just don't want to ever believe anything's there until I have to, but-uh, from what the doctors say-I mean, it sounds awfully serious. 'Course, Lurleen would want me to continue in this movement no matter what. That's always been her feeling all through. Oh, yes, I don't have any doubt she'd want me to go on. But I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see…”

  He got up from behind his desk and leaned on the conference table, pausing a moment to refire his cigar. “You shoulda seen that crowd we got up in Ohio the other day. Whole football field, and they were stretched back all the way past the goal lines. I'm tellin' you, folks in this country-now, all the others, they think they gonna switch around now and start talkin' like I do. You know, I was kinda a pathfinder. Well, I'm not gonna let 'em switch. All I got to do is tell the folks, 'Here's a fella who said this back yonder, and now he's sayin' this because he sees that's how the people feel. Well, I'm tired of all this switchin' back and forth, I'm tired of all these folks who're one thing today and sumpum else tomorrow!' Let 'em try it. I hope they do.” He was now as animated and ferocious as ever, one hand chopping in his open palm, light glinting off the lens of his glasses as he chewed savagely on his cigar. “That Ronald Reagan, he ain't nothin' but a sissy actor anyway. They say he's got a computer out there and all these punch cards, and he don't make a move unless that computer and them punch cards say move. Every statement, every single thing he does, they run it through that computer first. He just don't have much on the ball, you know.” He measured a space between his thumb and forefinger about the size of a B-B, daintily rolling his two fingers. “I watched him at that governors conference up at the White House awhile back. He was at a table with Volpe, Herndon, a few others. Everybody else was talkin', but he didn't say a thing. He just sat there watchin' everybody else talk. He didn't know what was comin' off. I sat there and watched him real close for a long time, I just wanted to see what he was like. He ain't much. Hell, I'd make him get off all those generalities of his, I'd make him come down to specifics. I'd make him say whether he was gonna turn folks' schools back to them or not. Johnson, now, he's the kind you could really be for. If he just believed some different things, boy, you could really be for him.” He swung his fist emphatically.

  Before the reporter left, Wallace touched his arm and said, “Right here, wait a minute, I want to show you-” and plucked from his shirt pocket that fat, well-thumbed packrat's wad of odd cards he usually carries. “I got folks in here all the way from Montana, Ohio, New York, writing me. I mean local officials, too.” He shuffled through the pack a moment, as if to make sure no one had gotten lost. “Yessuh. Oregon, Idaho, Missouri, Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin-Iowa, Indiana-New Hampshire.” He cradled the cards in one palm and extended it slightly. “I got lots of folks in there…”

  Three months after Lurleen's inauguration-on a bleary wet morning in late April-George set out on an expedition into New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, beginning his great national adventure. He was somewhat grave and subdued when he boarded the plane and did not wander from his seat much during the flight. Occasionally he would stroll down the aisle to the restroom in the back, winking at the newsmen he passed and proposing, with a rather extravagant sense of his own displacement, “I'm gonna unbalance the plane here…” If caught somewhere in the aisle during moments of bumpiness, he would scuttle back up front to his seat, clap his seatbelt together, and hang on with his hands gripping the armrests like two small claws, looking steadily out the window even while someone was talking to him.

  There was a brief refueling stop in Greensboro, North Carolina-the weather was still drizzling and messy, and reporters huddled in the small terminal building, eating cheese crackers and drinking Cokes, as Wallace, wearing a black raincoat and flourishing a White Owl cigar with a well-gnawed plastic filter, chatted happily with airport employees. “Yeah, I was through this country back yonder before the war, sellin' magazines. Yeah, I love North Carolina…” He was swigging a Coke himself as he talked, tilting it up high and quick, one elbow leaning on a counter. He motioned toward the reporters gathered around him and told the airport employees, “See all these fellas? We got the national press with us today-they came along on a distortion mission.” His face remained bland as the reporters laughed. “Well, fellas,” he said, “we gonna give you a good show, I hope.”

  He arrived in Syracuse late in the afternoon, and at twilight his cavalcade left his motel and journeyed to the Syracuse Uni
versity campus, pulling up before a fraternity house where Wallace was to eat supper before his address in the Syracuse Coliseum. Students were gathered along the sidewalk outside, some of them attired in sheets. They hooted as Wallace's party made its way through them. Forging up the steps, Wallace glanced back cheerfully at the reporters and cameras tumbling up after him, vibrant with that same buoyant schoolyard spirit of adventure with which he had promised them, back in the airport in North Carolina, “Well, fellas, we gonna give you a good show”-it was now as if he were asking them, “Well, fellas, how's this so far?”

  But once inside the fraternity house-old and dim and sparsely furnished with genteel but slightly sleazy Victorian furniture-Wallace seemed a bit uncomfortable among the clean-faced, dapper students with their Kennedy coiffures. (He asked a reporter once, in a low, earnest voice, “How come you reckon Bobby Kennedy wants to wear all that hair? I mean, I been wondering about it. You reckon that's why he's so big with all these college kids?” And unconsciously, he touched his own limp, oil-combed streaks with the heel of his hand, as if he were fleetingly considering whether he himself could muster a mane.) Running his finger around under his collar, he kept calling Glenn Curlee and Seymore Trammell to his side, addressing most of his remarks to them while the fraternity members crowded around him. “See those folks out there, Curlee?” he said. “I didn't know they had the Klan up here, did you?” When sirens pulsed faintly outside, he stepped over to a window, stooped, and peered out. Turning back to the room, he said, “What we done started out there?” and gave his short little gasping boyish snigger.

  Later in the trip, his plane passed over Washington, and the pilot called back to the passengers over the intercom, “As you look over the real estate, you might see something you'd like around 1968.” There were cheers and clapping. Wallace stopped in Richmond for a hotel session with his campaign workers there, and wound up spending the night. A cabdriver taking him to his plane the next morning chirped, “Now, I want to see you in D.C. in 1968.” Wallace said nothing then, but later, standing on the airport runway waiting for the plane to be fueled, he took a reporter aside and remarked in a low and earnest voice, “You hear what that cabdriver said? Lot of folks, you know, tell you stuff like that and have faith in you, but-” He was quite grave, quite pensive. “You know, that's an awfully big job, being President. You really wonder what you'd do. I don't think any man's big enough for that job until he gets there.” The congenial remarks of cabdrivers inspired him to such lonely speculation, and the increasingly palpable possibility that he might, by some convolution of fate, wind up in the White House seemed to leave him thoughtful and even vaguely philosophical. It's as if he were already trying to evolve, within himself, a profundity and soberness to meet the image he entertains of the office he has decided he wants most.

  He made one stop in Pittsburgh to address an evening convocation of “The Amen Club,” a fraternal assembly of Pittsburgh's industrial and social barons-described by one member of the group as “local products of excellent vintage.” The club represented the missing element so far in the coalition he hoped to strike, and as he drove into Pittsburgh from the airport to solicit their goodwill, the element of the coalition which was already his-workmen along the side of the road-saluted him as he went by.

  Outside the hotel where he was to speak, a massive stream of pickets circled the block in the cold late afternoon, marching with the quiet, steady deliberation of the children of Israel tramping around the walls of Jericho. A five-o'clock proliferation of junior executives was caught up in the current; faces studiously empty, they gingerly but briskly threaded their way with their attache cases through the flow of Negroes, priests, young white students. Waiters came out from one of the hotel's restaurants to watch, standing on the sidewalk in eighteenth-century livery, white napkins across their arms. The land then seemed full of such curious scenes. The quiet shuffling march continued on through dusk.

  Wallace, meanwhile, was up on the sixteenth floor of the hotel at a cocktail reception given by the club's executive board. His bodyguards, standing along the hall outside the suite, watched the tuxedoed club members file past with their expensive wives, and those coming out, leaving the reception a little flushed and unsteady-one lady, being irritably hustled back down the hall by her husband, grazing the wall at times and then wobbily negotiating the turn at the end of the corridor. “I guess this is the upper crust,” one bodyguard loudly observed to his companion. “You know what the upper crust is?” As another couple tottered past, his companion called back, “No, what's the upper crust?” The first bodyguard announced, “A few crumbs held together by a lot of dough.”

  At the party inside, Wallace too was wearing a tuxedo, but his temporary transition from old Folsom Populist to ally of the Big Mules was not quite total-the glass in his hand contained Royal Crown Cola. While the people there did not seem quite to know what to make of him, they were undeniably beguiled and even delighted by him (and later, during his speech, cheered him boisterously). One of the club's officers wandered over and, introducing himself, happened to mention that he had been born in Germany. Wallace quickly said, “Yeah, you know they maneuvered us into fighting the enemies of communism back during World War II. The Germans and the Japanese were a mighty brave people, they were mighty brave soldiers. All these organizations that are against our being in Vietnam now, some of them are the same organizations that were all for war back there in 1940. It just so happens that the war today involves Communists. I'm sorry it was necessary for us to fight against those anti-Communist nations. I thought that back then. Hell, we should have been in those trenches with the Germans, with yawl, fightin' them Bolsheviks…”

  Presently Wallace went to a window to see if he could see the marchers on the sidewalk down below. The windows were partly opened, letting in a chill breeze from the cold twilight outside, with the long white smokelike curtains tossing, milling, with a kind of soundless soft demented fitfulness, along the walls-and suddenly it seemed a certain wildness, a certain madness, was blowing through the room in the lamplight, marked only by the ghostly thrashing of the curtains. Like figures in some dream, the heavy, graying, flushed, bluff millionaires in their tuxedoes moved quietly about with their glimmering groomed ladies, their conversation muted, unfinished glasses of Scotch and bourbon standing on the marble tables, amber and pale gold and glinting delicately under the lamps. No sound whatever rose up from the march still circling below in the gathering night-but there was an uncanny sense of foreboding in that room, and Wallace, still at the window, all alone, leaning forward slightly with his Royal Crown Cola in his hand, was engulfed in the blowing curtains. They flowed and seethed around him in the night wind, and he seemed lost, captured in their midst, a vague, dark, dwarfish figure absorbed in the single changeless meditation of his life since its beginning, thinking, Well, now, I got something. But maybe I can get more. Maybe I can do a little better, maybe I am going to be able to do even better. …

  Then, that glaring May afternoon in Laurel, Maryland-it was 1972 now, and he had come far, he had gotten more indeed-when suddenly he was lying spilled on the pavement of a shopping-center parking lot, half-curled like a dropped and dying squirrel with his thin hair sprayed out like an aureole about his head, he had on his face that same oddly detached expression of remote, rapt wonder which he had worn all those times huddling in the back seats of cars amid the uproars and melees of his past when he had seemed on the point of being consumed himself by those spontaneous popular violences which had always enthralled him: as if only vaguely marveling now, recalls one of his bodyguards, Well, it's finally happened. … It has happened. “He didn't look at all startled,” the bodyguard remembers. “He had a very calm look on his face.” He never lost consciousness, his son has since recounted in a family memoir. He merely closed his eyes lightly for a few seconds, waiting to see what would happen now, if the sounds and heat and the sense of his own massy weight would wane on off into white hushed blankness.
But they held. The world held. And, even as they were lifting him into the ambulance, he had already begun talking again, kept up a fitful and eager chattering all the way to the hospital, as if it were only the sound of his voice, urgent and unabating, that was still holding it all together around him, and it did not subside, cease, until he finally sank into the ethers for surgery.

  Wallace at Laurel, May 15, 1972

  By now, such sudden, ransacking blurts of violence have so often intruded into the processes of power in the United States that violence itself has become something like the dark, abiding, phantom-arbiter of American history, the demonic and anarchic fourth-estate of American government. For Wallace, that ambush came almost precisely at the moment his sun had reached its highest solstice.