For the whole of his long, fierce, scrabbling political life, he had seemed no more finally than a stumpy, dingy, surly orphan of American politics, who could only effect in the end so much ill-tempered mischief. Between all his exertions and that ultimate inner magnitude of national power and consequence, there seemed to exist some final, lasting, immutable, almost mystic barrier, like another field of force, against which all his indefatigable skirmishing came to no more than a cat's endless swimming away at a locked glass patio-door. It was true that, as he proceeded on in 1968 as a third-party political nightrider, his candidacy began to be regarded as a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism-a strictly indigenous and generic American variety, ferociously respectable and righteous and patriotic, totally blank of the operatic Visigoth glares and blusters of the German precedent, having far more to do here with the Up With People Chorus and Jaycee luncheons on Wednesday afternoons at the local Holiday Inn, and so unrecognizable to the vast majority of citizens right on until its final consolidation. As a measure of that fascist order's potential constituency, the outcome of Wallace's 1968 campaign was not necessarily reassuring. He managed the formidable feat for a third-party enterprise of obtaining official status on the ballot of every state in the Union, and it was only in the last weeks of the campaign that his vitality began to dissipate-and that largely for oblique reasons. Nixon began to assimilate that part of Wallace's support which preferred a more conventional church-usher respectability in their spokesman. Also, Strom Thurmond, in the closest he has ever ventured to any authentic national significance, succeeded in sabotaging Wallace in some Southern states in exchange for certain polite considerations later on from the White House. In addition, workingmen outside the South were eventually persuaded to regard Wallace with suspicion-a triumph of propaganda over reality, actually, since Wallace, if nothing else, has always identified himself most fundamentally with the frustrations and sensibilities of the blue-collar middle class. Too, the heckling that attended his rallies became progressively more cunning, spectacularly disconcerting him on several occasions, and providing a series of ructions which hinted something of what the nature of his Presidency might be. Finally, there was the ponderous debacle of selecting General Curtis LeMay as his running mate-the general being about as politically graceful as an irate rhino in a game of ice hockey. Wallace's instinct, no doubt, was that LeMay would lend his outrider campaign a degree of dignity and legitimacy (he had always been peculiarly vulnerable to persons of any large consequence), but he made the uncanny mistake of associating himself with a Gold-water-like figure who had all of Goldwater's political liabilities and none of Goldwater's charms. Before long, it became obvious, particularly from Wallace's hasty and strenuous defensiveness on the subject, that LeMay afforded him profound unease. And significantly, it was when LeMay was announced as his running mate that his showings in the polls began to falter dramatically.
At the least, though, Wallace cast a certain chill on the adventurousness of the issues (it's hard to imagine, really, if there had not been a Wallace, the kind of issues and rhetoric that existed in 1969-as well as Spiro Agnew as vice-presidential candidate, who served as Nixon's more suburban-toned LeMay). Even at that, in the end Wallace drew some ten million votes. Actually, though his expectations in the beginning were somewhat minimal, the polls later exalted them headily and he finished about as he had originally and privately calculated he would. It had long been the tradition in Alabama's higher politics to first run for an office as an introduction and dress rehearsal for the more serious and meaningful second campaign-this had been the pattern of Wallace's own ascent to governor. Perhaps even before election night in 1968, then, he had already begun priming himself for the next one, in 1972.
By the eve of the 1972 primary election in Maryland, he had never seemed to impend so uncannily near to actually delivering himself through that mystic barrier, on into the truest and largest and most final national relevance, into serious reality at last. A few weeks earlier, he had accomplished a staggering 42 percent plurality in the Florida Democratic primary. The very day after that sudden quick chattering of shots in the shopping center, he actually claimed both Michigan and Maryland. And even though nearly extinguished by that instant of violence, he yet wound up with a popular count in the primaries out-bulking those of any other Democratic contender, including nominee George McGovern.
Since then, it has become Wallace's brooding conviction, despite intricate assurances otherwise by the FBI in at least two long private visits with him, that his mishap was all the machination of a conspiracy-a possibility which, considered retroactively now from the perspectives of Watergate, assumes a certain malarial plausibility. For that matter, the single common denominator of all those otherwise diverse figures edited by gunfire out of the nation's history over the last decade-Bob Kennedy, King, Wallace, even Jack Kennedy in his time (one tends to forget what a cold unsettling shock of loose windy adventure he visited upon the visions of the conventional estate of power in this country then)-was that all of them, in their deeply different ways, posed an authentic prospect of profoundly reordering the American system of interests and priorities. Perhaps none of them boded that, in fact, more radically than King and Wallace. Looking back over the long, reeling, bloody scenario of American politics since Dallas in the illuminations of Watergate, as one commentator has put it, “Anybody who isn't paranoid these days is crazy.”
In a way, it was only another instance of the almost supernatural luck that has attended Wallace throughout his political career that, in this berserk season of assassination, he would have been the only one of them all to survive. To be sure, when next glimpsed a few days after that sudden ravagement in Maryland, he seemed to have aged twenty years, to have become abruptly an old man-only a vague and incidental semblance of who he once was, with the drab and empty gaze in his once hotly crackling eyes of having been excavated of his vitals, scooped out inside. He managed to go through the motions, wanly and falteringly, as if on sheer lingering momentum, of finishing out his campaign. But it would be hard to exaggerate the hit he had taken. “He should have been dead,” one of his aides later declared. “Anybody else would have been dead.”
Six weeks after Maryland, a Southern delegate to the Miami Beach convention was summoned with a handful of his companions to Wallace's suite in a somewhat frumpishly gorgeous hotel “up the beaten track aways,” and as they waited in a large outer room for his appearance, the delegate remembers, “we all had this spooky sensation of having been fetched to meet somebody who'd actually already been assassinated. It was like waiting in a dream for Bob Kennedy to come walking through the door.” Wallace's brother Gerald presently appeared, a small, dry, raspy grasshopper of a man, unsubduably chipper, with a not totally unearned tinge of the raffish and furtive about him, and he assured them, “Now yawl, we really glad to have yawl here. He's in the bedroom in there talking to Senator Jackson right now, but yawl have yourselves a Co'Cola, and he'll be right out.” Recalls the delegate, “So we stood there, and I suddenly realized everybody was talking in hushed tones. There was this strange feeling of awkwardness and embarrassment-like we were standing around in the front parlor at a funeral for somebody who had not yet quite performed the last little formal tidiness of actually becoming a corpse yet, was still refusing to be finally deceased.”
Finally, Wallace emerged from the bedroom, wheeled in by Cornelia-“and every conversation in that room stopped all at once. Because it was like a shadow was sitting there in that chair. He was like an image dulling away on the screen of a television tube that had about blown.” Cornelia, standing tall and poised behind him, had on her face, the delegate also remembers, the grave, serene, translucent, ethereal look of an already widowed Southern duchess. Wallace spoke to them briefly, mustered the old doughty phrases, “I'm gonna be fine, we gonna go right on with this thing, fellas, nothing's been changed,” but produced these sounds with the dim canned static monotone, completely ab
sent of energy or inflection, or a talking doll with a wire pulled in its back, as if his voice had already begun receding away small and light and disembodied into the distances of the past. His hand, when shaken, was chill, leaflike, fleeting. Departing, the delegates exchanged in the corridor the discreet ceremonious Southern murmurations of family members leaving the bedside of a fading patriach: “He dudn't look well at all. Umh-umh. Dudn't look well atall”
Elegies, with Wallace, have always been notoriously treacherous propositions. More than once during his career, he has passed into what seemed final and irrevocable eclipse, only to flash forth again more hotly than ever. But even to those observers most familiar with his genius for self-regeneration, it began to appear almost certain that this time, after his long spectacular romp as an irrepressible and uncontainable poltergeist in national politics, though he had managed to survive even the astonishing mangling of those shots in Maryland, his day was at last done. No more than a husk of his former self, having to be repeatedly returned to the seclusion of hospitals for constant further repair, he seemed to be waning finally into the twilight of yesterday.
Not a year was out, though, before Wallace gave every sign of having yet again gathered himself out of blank ashes like some inextinguishable scruffy bantam-phoenix, of having hauled himself somehow by his own hands into the quick and heat and flare of life and political pertinency. But there seemed about his nature now an elusive but elemental difference, beyond the physical fact of his maiming. And it began to be widely posited that he had acquired over the months of his solitary ordeal of self-resurrection a certain inward dimension for the first time in his headlong, manic, furious political life-a measure of stillness and introspection and even gentleness, the beginnings of some personal reality after having existed for so long totally as a public creature only alive in the din and fray of campaigns…
The truth is, all those summers of outrage and blood and confrontation in the sun-glowered deeps of the South back during that high moral pageantry of the Sixties, in which Wallace was so centrally a grim fixture, seem now a sound and fury touchingly remote and diminished and archaic, belonging to some distant lost age of innocence. Already, the partisans and journalists who passed through those years tend to regard them with the softly panging nostalgia of, say, Lincoln Brigade veterans wistful for the bright long-gone days of Spain again. Breath, life, at least that once, truly hit the bottom of the lungs; the very air seemed more vivid with some brilliant fever of super-reality. Goodness and courage and evil and justice had then, however briefly, a marvelously clear certainty and palpability.
That swashbuckling moral saga, though, was soon assimilated without pause or intermission by the more expansive and complex anguish of Vietnam, while at the same time, the South's racial travail amplified gradually on over the rest of the nation, where it became somehow more diffused and abstract and elusive, and perhaps more vicious for that. As Wallace himself proposed in the late Sixties, not uncheerfully, “When they start catching this mess up North and everywhere else, then you gonna see this whole country Southernized, from Boston to Los Angeles. And when that happens, we gonna seem like a Sunday-school down here.” Indeed, when one pauses to ponder what has actually taken place in the South over the past few years, history seems somewhere to have tripped into fantasy. Since those smoldering summers of the Sixties-Wallace striking his sullen stubby pose behind a lectern in the doorway at the University of Alabama, all those grave processionals advancing with a slow immense dirgelike choiring and clapping of freedom hymns down bleak little flat-roofed main streets, the moil and bedlam of police dogs, flailing clubs-since those convulsions that became almost like ritual tableaus in a folk agony without end or progression, a whole century seems to have suddenly, quietly passed in the South. It has now become, bogglingly, the most massively and sedately integrated province in the whole country-if nothing else, leaving one with a suspicion of how ephemeral, after all, might be the old human implacabilities of intransigence, irrecon-ciliability.
At the same time, many have suggested that what has happened in the South also describes, to a degree, what has taken place with Wallace. Indeed, it would seem some novel metamorphosis of spirit has transpired since his first inauguration address that gaunt cold January day in 1963, when he blared against “a mongrel unit of one under a single all-powerful government,” and bayed, “From this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland … in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth … I say, 'Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!'” Among all those recent spectacles of racial detente in the South with a faery quality of the psychedelic about them, none have been more surreal than those lately involving Wallace-his mid-field crowning of a black Homecoming Queen at the University of Alabama ten years after his doorway stance there, his neighborly and almost expansive reception of Martin Luther King's father in his office at the state capitol, his buoyant appearance at a convocation of black mayors in Tuskegee recently, exuberantly and hectically snatching at hands with eager little nose-wrinkling grins and winks of cozy conviviality. At that particular gathering, Wallace chatted for awhile with the camellia-pale Southern-belle wife of the town's black mayor about their respective kinfolks in neighboring south Alabama counties, then gave her four-year-old son a quick tight hug and exchanged a jaunty soul-spank of palms with him. It was a moment-a light fleeting gesture-which nevertheless could have been considered as intimating the seismic shift and turn of a whole social age.
Wallace's own apparent private Reconstruction has been attributed, to no incidental degree, to certain recomputations prompted by a general and drastic alteration of all political equations in Alabama since blacks gained their proportionate heft of the vote. Like the titanic relinquishing ebb of the glaciers, that development has changed the political geophysics everywhere in the South. But beyond that, it began to become a kind of conventional popular sentimentality about Wallace's racial transmogrification, like a lambent auroral glow around the edges, that the touch of death had left him genuinely and permanently deepened in some way. Out of the assumption that suffering lends resonance and magnitude to all human character, Wallace seemed to have emerged out of it all, the blood and desolation and pain, actually reborn, profoundly reconstituted. At the least it had baptized him, finally, into a certain respectability, if not quite nobility.
In the spring of 1975, there appeared, almost unnoticeably, a volume of personal reminiscences by Wallace's twenty-four-year-old son, George Jr. Composed from his taped recollections by a West Coast free-lancer (after its publication, George Jr. remarked to an acquaintance, “You know, it was a really interesting experience-I'd like to write a book myself some day”), it is really little more than a family album of anecdotes and casual reflections, intended at its most ambitious for consumption by the Wallace faithful. For all that, in an oblique and unwitting way, it amounts to a peculiarly poignant testament.
George Jr. himself emerges as a rather quiet and muted and unassuming young man, fairly innocent of complication, resolutely polite and well-mannered. “If you're looking for cynicism, sophistication, or scandal,” he readily advises, as if they more or less came to the same thing in his mind, “you're reading the wrong book.” In fact, he would seem to answer to his father's own spare and meager vision of mankind's proper earthly lot: “Life isn't on a college campus. It's working and providing for your family and paying taxes.” While he was in school, he reports, “I made my grades, and that was it… I got along well with my classmates and teachers and conformed to every rule.” On the whole, in such recitals, he somehow evokes that rigorously respectful and pleasant and blankly grinning son of Haven Hamilton, the country-western overlord in the film Nashville.
Like his mother, Lurleen, who died in 1968, young George has wound up a conscientiously private personality, given to a feeling of vague harried unease and displacement whenever pitched into those larger public clangors in which his father has always abided. He admits to
being haunted by a discomfort that “some people thought that by being who I was, I should stand out more or something. But that wasn't me. I enjoyed school, but as far as the social scene I just didn't fit in.” Wallace himself, in a short foreword he contributed to the book, cannot resist a passing idle complaint, “He's really not an extrovert; he's more of an introvert. In fact, I wish he were a little more outgoing. But maybe that will come.” George Jr.'s solitary flourish of self-assertion, though, has been his devout and dogged aspiration to become a performing musician-writing his own songs, which he ventures as “intimate, highly personal,” modestly offering, “some might call it folk rock.” Whatever, he happily announces, “Music is my release, and that is why it means so much to me. In music alone do I find my freedom.” Against the continental swoop and roar of Wallace's rapacities, there is no slight win-someness to young George's proud report of how a teacher recently interrupted one of his classes so the room could hear a song of his on a student's transistor radio: “The whole class listened… It made me feel like I'd accomplished something.” But while he maintains about his father, “Today he leaves the guitar playing to me, and I leave the fighting to him,” one senses in Wallace's foreword-in which, always having been a bit uncomfortable and squirmish with the ordinary familial sentiments, he has a rather awkward and labored time of it-some lingering grudging disgruntlement in his indulgence of this slightly irregular and exotic fancy of his son's: “I hope that whatever he does, in whatever field, he will at least contribute something. … If you're just a no-'count who turns out to be a hophead, then you don't contribute anything to yourself or your fellowman.”
Immemorially, of course, fathers who are formidable public presences have tended, one way or another, to devour their sons-to leave them, at the best, dim unfocused ghosts of the men they could have been. Young George has at least preserved the wit to realize he is probably forevermore caught in the larger alien furies of his father's turbulent celebrity. He admits to usually meeting with both an enthusiasm and antipathy “that is really a reflection of my father's position… These two strong and conflicting responses, neither of which I have really evoked myself, are awfully hard to handle.” He has haltingly struggled against complete assimilation-one such modest extension landing him nevertheless in a considerable furor when, partaking in one of those “social experiments” so lustily hooted at by his father over the years, he posed with a black girl at his school as a young married couple applying for an apartment in Montgomery. About the resulting hooraw, young George protests a little wanly, “This happened during a primary election campaign in which [my father] was running for governor-I can't say that I didn't consider that… But really, while I'm for my dad and believe in what he's doing, at the same time I have to consider myself-my own being, my own consciousness, what I'm aware of, and what I have to learn… I have my own life to live.”
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