George Wallace’s Last Campaign Aims to Reshape His Legacy

Curled into fetal position in bed, his face pale, he grimaces when asked how he feels. “Bad,” he croaks. “I feel bad. The pain.”

The smell and haze of his cigar hang heavy in a pale blue room in the modest ranch-style home where George Wallace spends most of his time these days. A movie plays soundlessly on television. Wallace sips water through a straw, tugs the bedsheet up to his neck.

Little in the surroundings or appearance of this ailing, bed-bound 76-year-old man recalls the days when he dominated Alabama politics, drew national attention with a roar of “Segregation forever!” and thrust his magnetic, firebrand style and Populist, race-tinged message into four presidential races.

But even now--as he endures ailments that have accumulated from World War II service, Parkinson’s disease and 23 years of paraplegia caused by an assassination attempt--Wallace is in a final campaign.

It’s one to help shape a historical legacy that’s evolving, to turn it from that of a segregationist demagogue to that of a Populist visionary who atoned.

“The crowds,” Wallace replies when asked his favorite memories of his life in politics. “I remember the crowds.”

When able, aides say, Wallace enjoys picking through a box of black-and-white photos of presidential campaign appearances that drew tens of thousands to hear him.

“I outdrew all the other candidates,” Wallace says. “They said I was the best speaker who ever ran for president. . . . [The Rev.] Billy Graham said that.”

Wallace is now deaf. He receives questions written out in large black letters on a legal pad. As he warms to the interview, dark eyes grow intent, and his hand reaches impatiently for the next page and question.

“I didn’t have anybody for me but the people. I talked about the real issues, the issues that everyday citizens talked about,” he says.

“I might have been ahead of my time. But it was the issues that needed to be discussed.”

*

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!

--Wallace in 1963

inauguration speech

I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible, I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.

--Wallace in 1979 visit

to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

*

Nearly two decades after he departed the national stage as a political force, renewed attention appears to be focusing on George Corley Wallace. It has taken a variety of forms in the last couple years.

His “stand in the schoolhouse door” against integration showed up in the movie “Forrest Gump.” John F. Kennedy Jr., whose late father and uncle were political adversaries of Wallace, came here for an interview that highlighted the first issue of Kennedy’s magazine “George.” Wallace’s children and supporters have started a Wallace Foundation and a museum, and are raising money for a George and Lurleen Wallace Center for the Study of Southern Politics.

Two recent, thick biographies have appeared. One, “George Wallace: American Populist,” by former Newsweek correspondent Stephan Lesher, came out in 1994. “The Politics of Rage,” by Emory University Prof. Dan Carter followed last year. Carter’s book is sharper-edged than that of Lesher, with whom Wallace cooperated, but the authors share a conclusion--that Wallace was the “most influential loser” of his time.

As years go by, Carter predicts, Wallace’s role in modern American politics will be increasingly recognized. Both authors see Wallace’s influence on a succession of leaders from Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich, albeit in a more sophisticated style.

“They inherited a lot from him. But one reason his legacy is not fully appreciated is he didn’t have any [political] descendants who were proud of him,” Carter said.

Wallace’s outsider conservative Populism, with its railing against Washington, “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” taxes and welfare, along with calls for a strong military, tough law-and-order and nostalgic clean-cut values, has been incorporated into many campaigns since. But any self-proclaimed “Wallace disciple” also would be associated with his appeals to hidden fears and scapegoating, and his politically shrewd use of what’s now called the race card.

“Like the imagined indelible bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands, the stains of racism on Wallace’s reputation will never be washed away,” Lesher wrote.

But Lesher adds in his book that Wallace’s success couldn’t be tied solely to one issue, “certainly not from race-baiting. Rather, Wallace became the dominant and most important issue-maker of his time because of his political instincts, his sense of theater, his overpowering energy and magnetism, and his single-minded dedication to vote-getting.”

“He didn’t ever have an innate, visceral hatred of blacks,” Carter said. “But he made a conscious decision to manipulate the race issue. And in some ways, that’s even worse.”

After losing his first run for governor in a 1958 election in which he was portrayed as soft on segregation, Wallace vowed never again to let that happen. He didn’t. As governor, he made opposition to integration the centerpiece of his first inaugural address and staged his showy, if futile, “stand at the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama.

In the years that followed, the Wallace years, Alabama became synonymous with intransigence, bombings and brutality, all to do with race.

“Gov. Wallace never pulled the trigger or threw the bomb, but he created the climate for others to do it,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who grew up in Alabama and was a leader of the 1960s civil rights movement. “I think he in a sense provided cover for a lot of people.”

He also welcomed the national spotlight. He made strong showings in three Northern Democratic primaries in 1964, and in his third-party run for president in 1968 carried five states with 10 million votes.

He ran again in 1972, as a Democrat, and was the early delegate leader when he was shot in Laurel, Md. To this day, Wallace doesn’t believe that his assassin, Arthur Bremer (now serving a 53-year prison term), acted alone.

Struggling against near-constant pain, Wallace campaigned in a wheelchair in 1976. Fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter of Georgia upset him in Florida’s primary and went on to win the presidency.

No longer a national figure, Wallace at first faded into the background at home too. He made his 1979 trip to the Dexter Avenue Church, a shrine of the civil rights movement where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been pastor, to make amends.

Penitent and pitiable, he returned in 1982 to win, with crucial help from black voters, his fourth term as governor. (His first wife, Lurleen, who died of cancer in 1968, was elected Alabama’s first female governor in 1966 when Wallace was barred from succeeding himself.)

In his last term, Wallace tripled the number of minority appointees and put blacks on many state boards and commissions for the first time.

In interviews as he left office for the last time in 1987, Wallace worried that he still would be remembered for his segregationist past, and asked: “Why won’t they rehabilitate me?”

*

What do you want left behind? You want a great, big marble monument that says, “George Wallace: He built.” Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine lying there that says, “George Wallace: He hated”?

--President Lyndon B. Johnson to

Wallace in 1965 White House meeting

*

In September, Wallace made brief comments in his home county to highlight what had been billed as the opening of a campaign-style fund-raising tour for the Wallace Foundation. But his poor health forced cancellation of most of the events, and severe bedsores kept him homebound most of the last two months of the year.

When able, he dines at his favorite family-style restaurants and goes to the foundation offices several times a week. He greets visitors, signs books and, according to workers, sometimes spends tearful moments looking over memorabilia in the museum--such as crew photos of his World War II bomber, Sentimental Journey, and reminders of Lurleen. His two later marriages ended in divorce.

The initial fund-raising for the planned Wallace center and scholastic complex has gone slowly. Only a fraction has come in for a $12-million project aimed at breaking ground in the year 2000. Five acres overlooking the Alabama River in Montgomery have been donated.

His children, including son George Jr., a former state treasurer, and daughter Peggy, are leading the effort. Peggy’s husband, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy, is also on the foundation’s board.

“We’re not attempting to revise history by any stretch of the imagination,” Kennedy said. “We are sincerely trying to show all sides of the story. And there’s a lot of pain and heartache in the story of George Wallace. There’s also a lot of triumph and accomplishment.”

Proud of an honorary doctorate given him by historically black Tuskegee Institute, Wallace has continued to reach out to black leaders.

He participated last year in the 30th anniversary commemoration of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march that he had tried to block. This time, Wallace welcomed the old marchers and grasped black hands for a singing of “We Shall Overcome.”

Lewis had helped lead marchers on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965 when Alabama state troopers and a sheriff’s posse attacked them at the Selma bridge. Lewis laughed as he recounted how Wallace once had told him that the troopers were trying to stop the march for the demonstrators’ own protection. Lewis’ skull was fractured that day by his supposed protectors.

“I think he will be remembered more than anything else for his position on race and the role that he played in the civil rights movement,” Lewis said.

“But on the other hand, he will be remembered as a person who laid the foundation for some of the movement toward conservatism. He had an appeal to a certain sector of working families, people who identified with his ability to stand up and fight, to articulate some of their feelings and views.

“I like to give Gov. Wallace the benefit of the doubt,” Lewis said. “I think he’s had an opportunity since the attempt on his life to reflect on a lot of things. I think he’s been trying to get right with a lot of people, not just with his maker.”

Carter, the biographer, said the question he most often gets about Wallace is, “Did he change?”

In answer, he writes:

“We can never weigh with certainty the mix of calculation and contrition that have marked the last years of George Wallace’s life. . . . ‘Men’s hearts are concealed. . . ,’ Boswell wrote to his friend Samuel Johnson. ‘But their actions are open to scrutiny.’ ”