But there was still time. His determination to reclaim the high ground of asking for and receiving forgiveness kept him going. And that is the period of Daddy’s life that I hope Leigh and Burns will think of first when they think of their grandfather’s legacy.
“Daddy, we came to visit,” I said as we walked into his bedroom soon after he left office and moved back to the house on Fitzgerald Drive. Eddie waved at us from across the room.
Daddy’s room was very large, with a door opening onto a covered patio so he could sit outside. Most of the time, he lay in a hospital bed. He had a tray that he could roll up to the bed where he kept all his things—his billfold crammed with names and numbers but usually without cash, Garcia y Vega cigars, an always overflowing ashtray, and several lighters. After I visited with Daddy, I usually had to change clothes when I got home to rid myself of the smell of smoke. The curtains in the room were always drawn and the decor was bland.
The only personal picture on the wall next to Daddy’s bed was a black-and-white eight-by-ten photo of him in a boxing match in 1933. His opponent, a student at Tulane University, is in a defensive stand, his head turned to the right, eyes closed, and blood below his nose and on his arm. Daddy is untouched. His right arm is extended into his opponent’s chest.
Daddy spent most of his time paging through the morning and afternoon papers, sometimes talking on the phone, and seeing visitors from time to time. His forays of riding through the countryside, usually toward Clio and Clayton, became less frequent as time passed.
“Governor, put that cigar in your ashtray. You can’t smoke and hold a baby at the same time,” Eddie said. It was November 1988.
“Okay, sugah. Hand him over,” Daddy said as he raised his arms.
I hoisted our son Burns onto his bed.
“He’s got those bright eyes like Lurleen had. Can he talk?”
“Paw Paw, he’s only three months old!” ten-year-old Leigh said as he climbed up on Daddy’s motorized bicycle and turned the switch to high. The bike was supposed to help with Daddy’s blood circulation in his legs, but that required Daddy to ride, which I am sure he never did.
“You need to take that thing home if Leigh wants it,” Daddy said. “I don’t know why they put the thing in here by my bed in the first place. Can I smoke a cigar while the baby’s in the room? You know Eddie just had a baby. Was it a boy, Eddie? Sugah, hand me that channel-changer over there. Game’s on. When’s Christmas?”
“Daddy, we just got past Thanksgiving,” I said.
“Well, buy these babies a Christmas present from me. I’ll pay you back, just get me a copy of the bill. Don’t go and spend too much now. Just a little something.”
I looked across the room at Eddie and smiled. “Well, I guess it’s all about family after all,” I said.
Some months later, a state trooper assigned to Daddy called the house. He was new on the job. “Mrs. Kennedy, I hate to bother you,” he said. “But there’s a problem over here at the residence and I need some advice.”
I handed the phone to Mark: “This is for you to deal with.”
The trooper told Mark that Lisa Taylor Wallace and a young man had just pulled up in front of Daddy’s house in a canary yellow Mark IV Lincoln Continental. When Lisa stepped from the car, the trooper recognized her from a photo in the security office with an attached note that she was not allowed on the premises. So he walked up to the gate and asked her and her friend, who had stepped out of the car at that point, to leave.
“I asked politely several times,” he said. “But instead of leaving, she charged the gate and was attempting to climb over it. The young man was in the middle of the street screaming. I couldn’t call for backup because my radio was in the guard shack.”
“Well,” said Mark, “you obviously did something, because you are on the phone with us.”
“That’s the problem,” he replied. “I handcuffed her to the gate so I could call you.”
“And, let me guess, all hell has broken loose.”
“And then some,” the trooper said.
23
Stepping Down
Each person must live their life as a model for others.
—Rosa Parks
Daddy left the capitol grounds in January 1987 after serving four terms as governor. It was more than just the end of a political career. It was the end of a way of life for three generations of the Wallace extended family of friends, families, and supporters. The era of nighttime rallies in courthouse squares, of working in vacant storefronts scattered down the main streets of towns, of folding, stamping, mailing, and calling in three shifts a day and feeling moments of exhilaration when you shouted into the phone “Tell the governor we carried the county again” were gone. The shades were drawn on what many saw as the greatest moments of their lives. WE LUV OUR GOV bumper stickers were packed away for the last time.
On January 19, 1987, I watched as Daddy’s security team wheeled him off the inaugural platform as his successor, Governor Guy Hunt, succeeded him. Ten days after Daddy’s last day as governor in 1987, he and Lisa were divorced. Perhaps power is a simile for love.
Following Hunt’s inauguration, Mark, Leigh, and I visited Daddy at his house on Fitzgerald Drive. We sat by his bed, mostly silent, as the smoke from his red-tipped cigar began to fill the room.
“Sugah,” he said, “go crack that side door.”
Small talk seemed trite. What could we say? That he had had a great run? That now he could do whatever he wanted? Enjoy his free time? Go fishing? Daddy had no life aside from politics. So we sat, arms folded tight across our chests, directionless and numb with a sense of diminishment and loss.
Following several minutes of silence, Daddy refired his cigar, pushed himself up in his bed, and began to talk. We quickly had the sense that this was a historic moment, and Mark took extensive notes. Daddy covered many facets of his career. I think he was telling the truth as he knew and felt it. We were astonished: it was unlike him to reflect in this way.
ON SEGREGATION
I was never against the blacks. I never, in any of my speeches, made slanderous or derogatory comments about the blacks. Folks like Hugo Black, Ervin, Lyndon Johnson, Stennis, Faubus, all of them were staunch segregationists. While I was a moderate on those issues, those men had already preached separation of the races. Before 1957, Johnson was leader of the fight against the Civil Rights Bill in the Senate. One of Hugo Black’s campaign posters back in the twenties read, “Keep Alabama White, Vote Black.” I resent the continuing branding of me as a racist. All those folks have been rehabilitated. I outlasted them. Maybe one day I’ll be rehabilitated too. The issue that I felt so strongly about was the issue of the growing federal bureaucracy and how it would devastate the state’s sovereign power.
ON THE STAND IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR, JUNE 1963
We had privately conferred with the Justice Department and Civil Rights Commission and told them that the University of Alabama would be integrated on a timetable we had set for 1964. They said that would be unacceptable. That pushed the issue and we were backed into a corner. I was determined that we would not have the bloodshed that had occurred in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. I knew it was coming but I felt that I had a duty to the people who elected me. It was a mistake but I went to Tuscaloosa. I took the National Guard because I did not want agitators from out of state to cause a problem. They arrested a band of thugs right outside of Tuscaloosa on Highway 11 that were coming in from out of state and jailed them until the following week. There was not a bit of bloodshed in Tuscaloosa.
I staged four plainclothesmen outside that young girl’s [Vivian Malone] door for a week. I told [them] that they were to arrest anybody who went by that dorm and yelled obscenities or the like. After a few days they called and reported that all was quiet and wanted to come back to Montgomery. I let them. I went on statewide television the next week and told the people of the state that anyone who committed an act of violence or broke the law was not doing
anything but hurting the people of our state.
SELMA TO MONTGOMERY, MARCH 1965
Col. Lingo was a crazy and Bull Connor, he was a troublemaker who defied my orders. I had told him to stay out of Selma. Those folks had the right to march and I wanted them to do it. Lingo went over there and all hell broke loose. It was a terrible mess.
Several days after the march I received several of the organizers in my office, including Rev. Lowery. Before they left they all wanted and got an autographed picture of me, and one even leaned over me and whispered that he supported me and what I was doing for states’ rights.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
People say that I was an opportunist. Martin Luther King was as much of an opportunist as any man that I have seen. He became wealthy promoting his cause. He was young and inexperienced but smart enough to seize the opportunity to make a name for himself.
J. Edgar Hoover called me in 1964 and began discussing King. He told me that King would not buck his department and that he could be handled.
They say no one knows who you really are, deep down and all tucked away, hidden by obligations to those you want to please or wanting something they have that you don’t. It just might be better that way.
“George Wallace may have been a lot of things, but he was not insecure,” a friend of mine once said. “He’s got more gall in his little finger than most folks have in their whole body.”
“You’re right,” I replied. “That is, as long as you just look at the wrapper and not take a peek inside.” Daddy’s insecurity was the engine that added horsepower to his already forceful mind.
Most of my life with Daddy was spent looking at the wrapper. Seeing what others saw. His casual clothes were his work clothes, he ate and ran from our kitchen table leaving us behind, just like he did in cafés, unless strangers wanted to shake his hand and talk. He slept because he had to.
What was he running from? Being alone? When asked why he always needed to be surrounded by people, he’d say: “Might want something; might need to tell somebody something; might need a witness to say I didn’t say what someone else said I said. Besides, the more talking going on, the less likely we might say something worthwhile!” And he’d smile his tight smile, chomp down on his cigar, and pull on it, making its tip glow red.
I often asked myself what I was supposed to believe about everything that had been written and said about my father. I asked myself what obligations I owed to his memory. For me, there is no obligation other than the truth. My secret most important question was: Would Daddy be proud of who I am?
24
Benched
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
—Ralph Ellison
During the late fall of 1987, I was content. At the age of thirty-five, Mark, whom Daddy had appointed as a circuit court judge in Montgomery County, was already halfway to retirement with no real worries about the future elections he would have to win. And Daddy’s lifetime of politics was in the past.
The house we had always talked about building was soon to be finished. Leigh was nine years old. I could finally breathe. No more looking over my shoulder. The best days of my life were in front of me. Even the voice of “This is too good be true” had fallen silent.
That November, Mark decided to run for the supreme court of Alabama. Supreme court races in the past had been gentlemanly and restrained, with most advice on who to vote for coming from practicing lawyers. But the times were changing as big business and trial lawyers squared off against one another in a philosophical and financial battle relating to large civil judgments being handed down in courtrooms and most often upheld in the appellate courts. It was the era of tort reform. With significant stakes on the table, judicial races were about to change: high profile, big money, and perhaps a launching pad to the U.S. Senate or maybe the governor’s office.
On my thirty-eighth birthday, January 24, 1988, Mark and I stopped by Daddy’s house before meeting friends for dinner.
“You need to remind him today is your birthday,” Mark said as we walked through the kitchen door.
“Guess I should have bought a card for him to sign for the scrapbook,” I replied.
“Daddy, today is my birthday,” I said as we walked into his bedroom.
“That’s mighty fine, sugah,” he replied.
Daddy turned his attention to Mark. “Now about this supreme court race. I gave you a good job,” he said, referring to Mark’s appointment to the circuit court. “And you are going to stay there. You are not going to run for anything else. Put that out of your mind.”
“Well, Governor,” Mark replied. “I appreciate what you’ve done for us. But I think I can win, and if I’m elected, I think I can do a lot of good in the state.”
Daddy pointed his finger at Mark. “Folks are saying that all you have to do is get in with the Wallace crowd around the state, and you won’t have to do a thing. But there is a lot of difference between you and me and your last name is Kennedy, not Wallace.”
“Daddy, who told you that?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter who told me anything. You two do as I say.” And with that, he turned his attention back to the television. “Turn that volume up for me.” In Daddy’s mind the conversation was over.
I walked to the head of the bed. “You are going to listen to me,” I said. “I have been a Wallace longer than I have been a Kennedy, and I have enough of Mama in me to tell you that Mark is going to run for whatever he wants to and you can’t stop him. And if you try, I have enough of you in me to make your life miserable.”
Daddy looked at me. “Isn’t today your birthday?”
“Don’t you change the subject,” I replied. “You never knew when my birthday was before now.”
“Well, dahlin’,” Daddy said, “sometimes you have to say things because that’s what other folks want you to say. So now I can tell them I said it.”
As we were about to leave, Daddy said, “You do have a lot of your mama in you.”
In March 1988, when letters from Daddy wound up in Wallace folks’ mailboxes asking them to support Mark in his race for the supreme court, it wasn’t much, but at least it was reason enough to catch up with the old crowd.
In June, Mark won the Democratic primary, and in November he was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court. At the age of thirty-six, he became the youngest supreme court justice to be elected in Alabama history. And in between, on August 21, our son Burns was born.
“My dad does Justice.” —Leigh Kennedy. Justice H. Mark Kennedy on the Alabama Supreme Court (back row on the right), January 1989.
“You timed that just right,” Mark’s mother said.
“Well, that’s the least a politician’s wife should do!”
Mark’s 1994 reelection campaign will always be remembered as one of the dirtiest judicial campaigns in American history. Although he won, he would never be the same. His belief in the dignity of public service as a judge was gone. The politics of the election of members of the judiciary belied the character of what a judge should be, much less uphold.
Mark’s republican opponent, Harold See, was a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law and a professor at the University of Alabama Law School. His name recognition among average voters was, for the most part, zero. “Never heard of the man,” most said.
But Professor See’s campaign advisor was Karl Rove, who first had to crush the reputation of Texas governor Ann Richards, with a whisper campaign claiming that she was a lesbian, so that his client George W. Bush could win the Texas governor’s race and secondly crush Mark’s reputation, with a whisper campaign alleging that he was a pedophile, so that his client Harold See could win Mark’s seat on the Alabama Supreme Court. Karl Rove won one race and lost the other. And Rove’s “scorched-earth” style of politics would later be called “Make America Great Again.”
In 1983, the Alabama legislature passed the Alabama Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Act. The act established a new state a
gency, the Alabama Children’s Trust Fund, to address “the state’s growing problem of child neglect and treatment.” Mark was appointed as chairman of the board.
Most of Mark’s spare time was dedicated traveling the state to encourage nonprofit organizations serving women and children at risk for violence to embrace the philosophy of prevention rather than treatment after an incident occurred. He spoke what he preached when he was a juvenile court judge: “All of our resources are spent after the fact, when the abuse and neglect of children has already occurred. We need to be focused on programs that provide services, protection and hope for at-risk families who can be saved before the damage is done.”
Mark’s campaign material in his second race for the Supreme Court displayed photos of him with children, as a reminder of his work as chairman of the Children’s Trust Fund. But Karl Rove saw the photos in a different vein.
“This is an opportunity to create a whisper campaign. We can use law school students to spread the word back home that Mark Kennedy is a pedophile. No news reports, no ads. Just family talk mixed in with “How are you doing in law school?” Rove probably said. Because that is the way it happened. And it was all a lie.
Two years later, Harold See won his second race for the Supreme Court against a different incumbent and won. Every week, the justices gathered in the Supreme Court conference room to discuss pending cases. Harold See sat across the table from Mark.
Several months after See took office, he spoke to Mark in regard to the smear campaign he ran against him. When Mark came home that evening he told me Harold See said he had been totally unaware of “ ‘that whisper campaign,’ as he called it. ‘I would never have condoned such a thing.’ ”
“Was that all that he said?” I asked.
“That was about it,” Mark replied.
“So, he never apologized? Is that right?”
The Broken Road Page 18