George Wallace - 18 September 1998

There are more things in heaven and earth, certainly in America and, short of some Constitutional catastrophe, I don't intend to talk about the thing any more, until it's resolved one way or another.

I want to talk now about a man, a Southerner, who ran for the presidency, never had a ghost of a chance of defeating the big boys, the Nixons, McGoverns, Carters, Johnsons, but had an effect on them and on popular feeling about relations between blacks and whites, more than anyone in the decades after the Supreme Court ordered the integration of blacks and whites in schools.

Could it be that I'm talking about that dreadful Alabama demagogue, that ranting bigot, that politician wading through swamps of trickery and fraud, to become, and remain, governor of his state four times? Who actually scared Nixon and even Jimmy Carter into, shall we say, moderating their heartfelt message, in order to accommodate the prejudices of large numbers of their constituents? The little frog-like man who finally scared many more people by using the vicious campaign literature of the Ku Klux Klan, to run for president? Yes, that's the man. He died on Wednesday and there is a theme in him, a spiritual theme, that is, I believe, relevant to our present discontents.

George Wallace was born, it strikes me now, like Bill Clinton – like so many of our current stars in politics, movies, popular music – was born in a broken or soon-to-be-broken home, in a small cotton town in Alabama. His father was a wastrel, his mother had been abandoned, as a young girl, to an orphanage. Young George was small, compact and a tough boy, street smart, as he had to be, to survive his miserable upbringing. The first time he ever got his name in a newspaper was for having won two boxing titles in high school.

When he was 15 he got a job as a page in the state legislature in the capital city of Montgomery and till the day he died, his proudest memory of boyhood was standing on the steps of the Capitol, standing on a gold star implanted on one step. It was where Jefferson Davis, the rebel leader of the Southern states in the Civil War, was sworn in as President of the Southern Confederacy. The knowledge that he'd stood on that spot ingrained in Wallace a fierce, some would say admirable, some others morbid, loyalty to the Confederacy, 70 years after its defeat. And there are many old Southerners alive today who bowed to the 1954 Supreme Court and have dutifully obeyed its orders but who, nevertheless, cannot purge from their senses, the feeling that Robert E Lee was the last American saint and that the famous battlefields are hallowed ground. George Wallace took in this faith in its most fervent, simple form.

A poor boy, he went, of course, to public school and on to the free, of course, state university of Alabama. A gregarious chap, he made lots of friends at a time, we ought to remember, the turn of the '20s, into the depressed '30s, when there was no such cause or crusade, either in the South or anywhere else, of the Negro, as we then said, of Negro rights.

There they were, in the barer soils of the countryside, the shabbier parts of town and here we were. The South, by long and indestructible custom, saw that by day the blacks worked for them, their children played with them, by night they retreated to their side of town, Darktown, and stayed there. In the North, there were no such family familiarities. Blacks were hired help you treated nicely, but housing laws and practices saw that they too lived in a more than less separate part of town.

Imagine that May night in 1954, the news coming in on the evening telly of the case of Brown versus Board of Education. Some town in Kansas where a little coloured girl had been given the right to go to a nearby white school and not walk a mile or two to a black school. Imagine what it would mean beyond schooling. It didn't occur to most of us but the Southerners grasped quicker than anybody that segregation would mean that Negroes could go everywhere – restaurants, hotels, bars, trains, swimming pools, buses, theatres. Waiting rooms and lavatories would no longer carry signs "Whites only". But the really intolerable thing, the Southerner's sense since birth that he was a superior being, was shattered.

Where was George Wallace when this thunderbolt was delivered from heaven or from the Supreme Court? We must go back a while. He'd spent his 20s waiting on tables, driving a taxi, collecting enough money to go to law school where he crammed up for exams by borrowing books he couldn't afford, When he was 23 he married a 16-year-old shop girl. It was bang in the middle of the Second World War and young George was drafted into the Army Air Force. His wife and baby followed him everywhere. When he was stationed in the New Mexico desert they rented what had been a chicken house. As a flight engineer, he flew bombing missions over Japan where an old buddy recalled in his off hours he gave impromptu lectures on the sense and need for segregation of the races in American life. Throughout that war remember, the black forces fought as separate units. His line on the Negroes then was, the coloured people are fine in their place but they're just like children, it's not going to change. It's worth remembering, whether you're old or not, that this was a perfectly intelligent worldwide view in the 1930s and '40s.

After the war he got quickly into politics. He became an assistant to the Alabama Attorney General, then an elected district judge. He planned to run for governor and he made it. We're in the early '60s now and already looming over the Confederate boy's ambitions was the shadow of Kennedy and worse, the larger one, of Lyndon Johnson, who was already going through a soul-searching and talking of mounting a grand new overall civil rights bill which would totally enfranchise the blacks. The only previous civil rights bill with any teeth came in Eisenhower's second administration but it was Lyndon Johnson's doing, as leader of the Democratic opposition.

Now Wallace, like millions of perfectly normal Southern whites felt a positive threat from the new status of the blacks. He lashed himself into a whirlwind of rhetoric, flaming, frightened stuff that used all the rancid, hateful language of the Ku Klux Klan. He was governor four times and it was fairly written that his era was one of unparalleled corruption.

What brought this little, squat, angry man to national attention were the racially-inspired killings, the bombings of coloured homes, but most of all the infamous incident when in 1963 he stood in the schoolhouse door, as he called it, to refuse the registration of two young blacks at the university of Alabama. I was there on that steaming day. It was 105º of sheer blaze and sweat and the great crowd of whites – the blacks were sensibly hidden away off, in town – were ringed with the National Guard. President John Kennedy, no less, had ordered the Attorney General to tell the bantam governor, that by order of the president he would have to admit the two blacks. There was a very scary, tense minute or two and Wallace gave in. At his funeral last Wednesday, his coffin was guarded by guards, half-and-half white and coloured, but Wallace's defiant, flaming message – segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever – rang around the country and the blacks responded with bloody demonstrations in Alabama, which moved President Johnson to force through a reluctant Congress that first great Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Through the following years the rumour gained force and fear that George Wallace would run for president and he did so in 1972 and the passion of his message and its reception by unlikely legions of whites everywhere caused, among other prudent acts, President Nixon to contribute $400,000 to Wallace's campaign. One day Governor Wallace was campaigning at a small country rally in Maryland. He waved aside the elbowing protection of the Secret Service, which all attested presidential candidates are given.

An old buddy pushed through and said "Hey George, let me shake your hand". He did so and then, at three feet from the governor, shot him, severed his spinal cord and paralysed him for life. That was 26 years ago. Wallace stood again twice for governor and was elected. For all that time he sat huddled in his wheelchair, in constant pain and for most of it he communed with himself. He hired more and more black assistants and in one or two ringing confessions, he told them and the country at large, if it cared to listen, that he'd done wrong, that his racial policy was wrong. He still said the New York Times and the eastern establishment never did understand that segregation wasn't about hate. "I didn't hate anybody, I didn't hate the man who shot me. When I was young, I played and swum with blacks all the time. They just had to live apart".

One of the two barred black students, way back then, was the spokesman at the funeral. He's 63 now. he said over the body, "Governor Wallace's true pain was that some people could not forgive him. I believe he made his peace with God. He once told me in an anguished moment, who the Gods destroy, they first make mad with power".

And this week the liberal editor of Mr Wallace's hometown paper, who remained a friend through the angriest of times, wrote, "The Governor we knew was a man of primal passion, a sincere champion of the working class, a cynical manipulator of their resentments, a sorcerer summoning the beast in our nature, also a man of deep insecurities, tenderness and finally, humility".

In a time when we're hearing much about repentance, whether it must come from the heart or can be manufactured by legal strategies, this crumpled, little, pain-ridden George Wallace, dead at 79, appears to be a true case.

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