by James Philip
Marija’s hand pressed on her husband’s settled comfortably on her right knee. Sleeping on an aeroplane or a train was never much like slumber in one’s own bed, and she yearned to curl up in Peter’s arms.
She put aside her weariness for a little longer; fascinated by Nicko Henderson’s peroration upon the US electoral machine. She said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
“Cutting to the chase, because the polls are so close, two things muddy the water,” Nicko Henderson explained, magisterially. “Firstly, California and Pennsylvania, either of which could go either way, and between them we are talking about ninety-one electoral college votes. Secondly, how badly can George Wallace and Curtis LeMay damage the Democrats. It is not just the fifty, probably more electoral college votes Wallace is likely to deny Ambassador Brenckmann in the Deep South, but it is whether he takes enough votes in other Southern states, like Florida, South and North Carolina, or even Virginia, and perhaps, in Kentucky, Tennessee or West Virginia, to allow President Nixon to steal two, three or four of those other, so-called battleground states. If that happens, Walter Brenckmann might carry the popular vote and still lose. And lose badly, what is more.”
Marija parsed the numbers for a few seconds.
“So, without George Wallace, the President would almost certainly lose? According to the latest polls, anyway?”
“Exactly. His personal approval ratings are in free fall. Apocryphally, every time that a certain anchor man says the word ‘Tsushima’, somewhere in American another twenty counties turn against the President.”
“That,” Peter grinned wanly, “must be Mister Cronkite, I assume?”
Nicko Henderson laughed, and nodded.
With any other house guests, he would have been quaffing Brandy by now; however, his friends were damned nearly teetotallers, their only real fault.
“Viewed from afar, this year’s presidential contest is fascinating,” he went on. “It is not inconceivable that Richard Nixon might emulate his 1860 predecessor, Abraham Lincoln. Insofar, that is, he might easily garner significantly less votes than his two putative ‘Democratic’ opponents combined: a century ago, Lincoln ended up with a tad less than forty percent of the popular vote, while his Northern Democrat and Southern democrat opponents, Stephen A. Douglas, a fellow native of Illinois, and John C. Breckinridge, a Kentuckian, hoovered up damned nearly forty-eight percent, and a fourth candidate, John Bell, running as a Constitutional Unionist, carried three states and twelve percent of the national vote. As I say, a three- or four-way contest in which two or three of the candidates are essentially competing for all, or part of the same constituency, are intolerably difficult things to call!”
Marija thought she was on the British Ambassador’s wavelength.
It paid to check, just to be certain.
“Okay, so, if Governor Wallace was to pull out of the race,” she posed, thoughtfully, “Ambassador Brenckmann would be the favourite, Nicko?”
“Oh, yes. By a proverbial country mile. But it is too late for anybody to pull out of the race. George Wallace’s name is already on the ballot paper in all bar a handful of northern states.”
“But if he stepped aside, and advised his supporters to vote for somebody else? That is possible, surely?”
“Possible but very unlikely. I doubt if his hard core of adherents would consider voting for anybody else; he could still win a whole pile of electoral college votes, in absentia, as it was. That might mean he became the king-maker.”
“He wouldn’t back Nixon, surely?” Peter queried.
“He might,” Nicko Henderson shrugged. “I can’t see Walter Brenckmann promising to bring back school bussing and segregation, or rowing back on eradicating the last of the old Jim Crow laws. There certainly won’t be any good old boy judges from the South appointed to the Supreme Court while he’s in the White House.” He paused, thought about it. “Whereas, Nixon – although I don’t believe for a moment that he shares any, or at least, not too many of Wallace’s antediluvian racist views or has genuine sympathy for any of his Confederate mantras – if push comes to shove, yes, I think he would try to make an accommodation with Wallace. If that was the only way to stay in the White House.” Another hesitation. “Politics is a damnably dirty business sometimes.”
Marija leaned against her husband’s shoulder.
He stretched an arm about her waist.
And she stopped worrying about the arcane vagaries of American democracy.
Chapter 52
Saturday 21st September, 1968
State Capitol, Montgommery, Alabama
The two candidates had been delighted by the size of the throng awaiting them as they marched in lock-step down the steps to the flag-festooned stage. Montgommery PD officers had to hold back the crowd, while state troopers stood around in clumps, watching. Everybody was relaxed; everybody knew that Governor George Wallace only talked to the converted, things were simpler that way.
The chanting white-faced men and women, many of whom had brought their kids to witness the rebirth of the Old South and the dawn of what they hoped would be a return to old-fashioned values. Their fervour held no threat to the Presidential and Vice Presidential representatives of the American Independent Party.
There was a party mood in the broad square in front of the Capitol Building; and not a black face to be seen, which was exactly the way most of George Wallace’s supporters liked it to be. Back in the bad old days of the Kennedy era that little shit Bobby had sent in the National Guard to allow the Reverend King’s followers to hold a separate, so-called ‘protest’ rally in one of the city’s parks. Richard Nixon’s people had never tried to step on his toes that way; even before the White House got itself mired up to its neck in its own shit.
The wave of anti-war demonstrations had stalled, halted in the lower South. Southerners were patriots and besides, the war in the Far East was DC’s war, the President’s war. In the South God-fearing folk marched on the streets for causes and beliefs closer to their hearts, not the preoccupations of the moment but of the ages immemorial.
Today, the Montgommery PD had baton-wielding patrols on every street corner for a mile around. The defeats at Selma, and elsewhere, the threat of desegregation in the State’s colleges had been partially frustrated, fought off, resisted and the status quo, God-willing would soon be restored. George Wallace was proud that the majority of counties in Alabama had never taken steps to implement the onerous, un-Christian demands of LBJ’s failed Voting Registration Act. Legislation like that was like pointing America down the road to perdition!
If states across the North had chosen to put their own versions of that abomination of a Bill into their legislation, that was their problem.
The South knew what was right!
It irked him that his running mate was not, and probably never would be as on board as ideally, he would have preferred, about how to deal with blacks. Wallace knew as well as anybody that the US military relied on coloured men to make up the numbers; heck, the Air Force had even let them fly its planes. Why the Navy had decided to allow blacks to serve a proper seamen was a mystery to him; it had worked well enough when those boys had been restricted to stewarding, mess and laundry duties. On the other hand, back in the Second War the Army had had the right idea raising segregated units, nowadays the regular forces stationed in the State were positively polyglot!
That said, having Curtis LeMay on the ticket sucked up a whole bunch of more liberal folk – the ones who hated the idea of letting the blacks get uppity but still thought they ought to get a break, now and then – and in election year every vote mattered.
Mounting the stage George Wallace counted the TV cameras, saw that there was a phalanx of photographers in the gap between the first rank of the faithful and the edge of the platform.
He had learned not to let LeMay ‘warm up’ a crowd.
The man’s idea of political persuasion was to bulldoze an audience into submission. The guy might be great firing
up his guys to go bomb the Japanese or the Russians; he was hit and mostly miss dealing with people who would not get shot if they disobeyed his orders. Oh, and he kept straying off message and that might make all the difference in November. It had not mattered when the assumption had been that he was going to be up against that crypto-commie-liberal McGovern; but Walter Brenckmann was a man some of his people could identify with.
If ‘the Captain’ was prepared to come down off his high horse long enough to listen to a little old-fashioned Southern good sense. That could still embarrass Wallace, cost him enough to electoral votes to weaken his hand when one, or both of his political enemies came, cap in hand to him…
The Democrat National Convention in Memphis had been a damp squib. The Reverend King – despite the rumours – had never shown up, and there had been none of the Civil Rights demonstrations, or Anti-War Coalition riots which had blighted the Republican Convention in Los Angeles, where tear gas and the smoke from burning buildings downtown drifting in from the street outside had several times halted proceedings.
Wallace had watched it all on TV, struggling to keep a straight face as that clown Ronald Reagan and the former President of the AMC – the American Motors Corporation – and Governor of Michigan, George W. Romney, had torn into their man.
Richard Nixon had not helped himself by staying away from the Convention until the last night, leaving Nelson Rockefeller to take the heat and make a pig’s ear of dealing with the networks. Even when Nixon accepted the GOP’s nomination – delegates had actually voted twelve-to-one for him despite Reagan’s, everybody agreed, surprisingly strong showing on the floor and impressive performance outside the Convention Hall in practically all the major TV interviews he gave – he had seemed haggard and angry. Especially, in comparison with Reagan: that guy was so patently personable, decent, and steeped in the values of a world that no longer existed – the 1950s – that he effortlessly endeared himself to Main Street, middle-of-the-road Americans.
Rockefeller had been like a jilted groom at a wedding and yet, he was still standing, still running with Nixon even though, clearly, he was holding his nose every inch of the way.
The American people were not stupid; true, they did dumb things sometimes but the last Gallup poll had Ambassador Brenckmann two points ahead of the President, forty-five to forty-three percent, with Wallace hoovering up most of what was left, almost exclusively in the Lower South.
The stalled, bloody stalemate in the Western Pacific, a war fought by the big carriers which, one by one were having to be rotated back into dry dock, their air groups worn down and their crews exhausted, the constant drip, drip, drip of losses – a Skyhawk one day, a Phantom another, most weeks a B-52 taken out by a surface-to-air missile battery already bombed ten times – and the Seventh Fleet having to operate farther and farther out at sea to avoid another Tsushima-like disaster, was slowly bleeding the GOP ‘base’ white.
Last week, news had emerged of a landing accident on the Constellation, a fire, a hundred guys killed and injured and the newly arrived super carrier had had to dock at Kobe – where the wreck of the Ranger was still partially blocking the deep water approach to the biggest graving dock at Sasebo – for repairs. According to Curtis Le May, that just left the Coral Sea and the Enterprise on station, both with depleted air groups and with lengthening lists of mechanical defects and the Air Force, flying out of the Marianas, the Philippines and now, despite the protests of their hosts, bases on Honshu and Hokkaido, with the Taiwan Strait still closed to navigation and Taiwanese domestic air space too insecure for daylight operations.
LeMay had heard that the Saratoga was being sent to Pearl Harbour; but she was still working up and only had half and air group because she had not been due to relieve the Constellation until January.
Meanwhile, the godammed British and their Commonwealth friends were making nice with the Commie’s over Hong Kong and Macao, and turning a blind eye to Chinese support for Ho Chi Minh’s regime in Hanoi.
The Soviets must be laughing all the way to the fucking Urals!
Well, that was what Curtis LeMay said but then diplomacy had never been old Bombs Away’s strong suit.
What was really hurting Nixon was that hundreds of survivors were back home now, and unlike in previous campaigns, the Navy had made no attempt to keep its returning people quiet. To a man, those guys had rowed in behind Walter Brenckmann. There were always a lot of uniforms in his crowds.
George Wallace had held out a great deal of hope for the Ambassador’s meeting with Doctor King in Atlanta last month. It ought to have been a kick in the guts to his campaign all across the South; instead, after the merest, barely perceptible blip in the polls, it seemed to have had no effect whatsoever on voting intentions, even here in Alabama.
He was left consoling himself with the thought that the South would still Walter Brenckmann down with it in November, if Nixon carried California and its fifty-eight electoral college votes! Or that, at least, was what George Wallace was telling himself, and anybody else who would listen.
He smiled in approval as most of the photographers moved aside to allow his people to press right up to the front of the stage.
There was something profoundly right and proper about the faithful standing at the feet of their leader.
He gazed out across the faces again.
When white, God-fearing America stood as one there was no power on earth that could stand in its way!
George Wallace signalled for Curtis LeMay to step forward.
The two men clasped hands, and raised them high as the bellow of applause and ripe approbation rose to a tumultuous crescendo.
From here on in the pair of them were going to tear up the South, making excursions to the north and the north-east – the West Coast was godless, wastrel country and there was no point throwing away time or money trying to convert those people – to tweak the beards of the GOP and the Democrats. Conventional wisdom said he was going to take votes mainly from the Democrats; that was hogwash, those votes had never belonged to Walter Brenckmann, or that crypto-commie McGovern, and it was only East Coast liberals who honestly believed most Southern Republicans did not secretly yearn for a return to the days of Jim Crow.
Some smart arse anchor man had suggested that by staying in the race he and LeMay were keeping alive the President’s hopes of clinging onto the White House and thereby, staying out of jail. That notion had tickled the Governor of Alabama’s sense of humour: he liked the idea of having the keys to Richard Milhous Nixon’s cell in his back pocket!
“My friends!” He declaimed, stepping up to the battery of microphones, a broad smile forming on his pugnacious, angry physiognomy as the heat of the day began to settle, heightening and thickening the pressure cooker atmosphere which so typified Wallace’s major campaign events. “You know why you are here today! You know what those people in the North are trying to do to our great country! You know why Nixon is sending all those brave boys from the South to die in Russia’s war in the China Sea! You know what will happen to our God-fearing way of life if the people the Democrats are running against those crooks in the White House, ever get into the Oval office! You know that everything that we, here in the South hold dear, everything that we fought for in the Great War of Succession a hundred years ago will be for nothing if we fail in our Christian crusade in November!”
Lately, Wallace had known he was hitting the right buttons by how quickly the applause was supplemented by rebel yells. Not that any two historians in the same room ever seemed to agree what an authentic ‘yell’ had sounded like back in the 1860s, which meant that there was an awful lot of discordant, shrill, ‘yahoo-ing’ and screaming, mingled with squawked racial slurs and epithets that now and then, had been known to give even George Wallace pause for thought, and often had Curtis LeMay scowling disgustedly. But then he was never really going to be a politician; at the ballot box a Klan vote counted the same as an evangelical’s vote, although to his mind, a negro’s bal
lot would never be worth the paper it was written on.
He let the whooping and cat-calling die down.
Now he had assumed his classic pose; hands gripping the lectern, leaning towards his people like he was standing on the deck of a ship with his face into the wind. The first beads of perspiration formed on his brow. Politics in the South was not the glad-handing, district by district animal it was elsewhere; down here it was feral and a man who did not sweat with his constituents understood nothing. A lot of his people were poor, and, God bless them, a lot of them actually thought the blacks ought to get a fair break. They were good people, hard-working, struggling people who knew those bastards in Washington had forgotten all about them, or if they remembered them at all, it was to dismiss them as rednecks, racists and bigots who wrapped themselves in the flag of the old Confederacy. None of that shit was right, stereotypes were just that, and meaningless. Nor was there any such thing as ‘the South’ any more than there was a ‘North’ or a ‘West’ or – although nobody in the crowd would have admitted it – an ‘East’; America was not, if it had ever been, that country anymore.