"Who's Wallace?"

Alabama's Governor George Wallace flew into Indianapolis last week in a state-owned Lockheed Lodestar deco rated with a Confederate flag and the slogan STAND UP FOR AMERICA. He had, he said, come to run against Democratic Governor Matthew Welsh "because I want to let the people have an effective way of opposing some of the trends going on in Washington." For Welsh, who is a favorite-son stand-in for President Johnson in Indiana's May 5th presidential primary, Wallace had only kind words. "I have the highest regard for Governor Welsh," he allowed. "He is a fine man." But that feel ing was much less than mutual.

Still Seething. The night before Wallace arrived, handsome Matt Welsh, 51, blistered his segregationist opponent at a district Democratic meeting in Tell City, accused Wallace of "trying to wreck the Democratic Party." Cried he: Wallace's campaign "smells sweet, but it has the taste of death."

Back in Indianapolis, Welsh was still seething, issued as denunciatory a statement about Wallace as has been seen in U.S. politics in a long while. Said he: "This is the man who tolerated the presence of billboards in his state before the assassination which demanded: 'Kayo the Kennedys.' This is the man whose beliefs were responsible for the deaths of innocent children in the bombing of a Sunday school class. This is the man who stood by while dogs were set upon human beings and fire hoses were turned on groups of peaceful demonstrators. This is the man who even today is actively denying Negro children access to the University of Alabama. This is the man who is trying to destroy the political system of the United States as we know it, and who seeks to discredit President Lyndon B. Johnson. This is the man who flies the Confederate flag over the Statehouse in Alabama in place of the Stars and Stripes."

If such words dented Wallace's armor-plated skin, he didn't show it. In the only scheduled speech of his one-day campaign kickoff, Wallace told some 300 applauding Butler University students: "I'm not a racist. I'm against interracial marriages. I think the Negro race ought to stay pure and the white race stay pure. God intended for white people to stay white, Chinese to stay yellow and Negroes to stay black. All mankind is the handiwork of God."

Lame Duck. Before departing for Montgomery that night, Wallace promised to return to Indiana this week. He chortled: "Governor Welsh said a few weeks ago, 'Who's Wallace?' He's not saying that now, is he?"

He certainly is not. Wallace stands to do even better in Indiana than he did in Wisconsin, where he polled 264,000 against 512,000 for Governor John Reynolds, another Johnson-minded favorite son. One reason is that anti-civil rights feeling runs high in some industrial areas of Indiana. Another is that Welsh, a lame-duck Governor who cannot succeed himself, is suffering a popularity dip because of a state sales tax he signed into law last year.

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