Wallace by Marshall Frady

Author:Marshall Frady [Frady, Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56105-3
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1968-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Wallace at Tuscaloosa, June 11, 1963

Wallace's political psychology essentially derives from the Southern romance of an unvanquished and intransigent spirit in the face of utter, desolate defeat. It has become a dogeared cliche about Southern leaders, but the fact is, the Civil War is still quite alive to Wallace. As he chatters about the days between 1861 and 1865, one is inevitably reminded of the Reverend Hightower in Light in August, whose gray head, as he sits by his window at dusk, is filled with the flash and roar of the old glorious doomed charges, the lifted sabers and bugles and grimy howling faces above gaunt, galloping horses. Wallace seemed to regard his career as governor merely as an invocation and projection of the old aboriginal glory and valor. It was all still happening to him. In fact, one got the feeling that, for him, what was happening was not quite as real as that great primeval conflict.

There is one moment in the history of that war which has for Wallace an almost religious meaning. “When it was about over, they captured Jefferson Davis down in Georgia and put him in jail, and one day several Union troops come around to clap him up in chains and manacles. He was sick and nearly starved to death by then, and old, but he told 'em he wadn't lettin' nobody put chains on him, he had been the president of a country, and that country might be beat now, and they might have him in jail, but he would not allow them to put him in chains. They grabbed him, and he started fightin'-that old man, weak as he was. It took a bunch of 'em to hold him long enough to get it done, and when they turned him loose again, he was still goin', still fightin'…”

It has not mattered to most Alabamians that in his series of confrontations with the federal government Wallace has met with consistent failure. What matters is that he fought, and continues to fight. He answers the romance of defeat. That role has been one of Wallace's central political inspirations: he seems personally to lust for chains. As the University of Alabama crisis approached in 1963, he proposed to a group of legislators in his office, “By God, you watch now, they gonna send federal troops all over this state. We gonna be under military occupation…”

While Wallace regarded President John Kennedy with a certain measure of awe, his attitude toward Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General, was one of bristling suspicion. When Bob Kennedy tried to contact Wallace at the governor's mansion one evening shortly before the University of Alabama confrontation, Ralph Adams, Wallace's old campus crony, happened to answer the phone. Wallace told Adams to inform Kennedy he didn't want to talk to him. “So I told Kennedy the governor was unavailable,” says Adams. “Kennedy kept saying, 'I don't see why he won't talk to me,' and Wallace-he was standing just a few feet away from me-kept whispering, 'Adams, just tell him I plain don't want to talk to him.

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