Wallace Quits

Farewell to the "pointy heads"

When he returned home from the National Governors' Conference last winter, Alabama's George Wallace was downcast. He was a "has-been," he told reporters, no longer the center of attention.

That was hard to bear. For nearly two decades, Wallace had been an inescapable irritant in American politics, like a fly determined to become part of the ointment. He had first served as a state senate page at the age of 16, but he seemed to have few prospects then. He sold magazines from door to door. After a stint in the Army Air Force, he won a job as an assistant attorney general, then as a state legislator, always feisty, eager to speak his piece. Elected a circuit judge in 1953, he told the courthouse boys that he was going to run for Governor. Wallace was easily defeated in the Democratic runoff. His own judgment of the race was that he had been "out-segged" by his victorious rival, John Patterson. It would not happen again.

"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" Wallace promised when he won the governorship in 1962. He vowed to "stand at the schoolhouse door" of the University of Alabama to block its court-ordered integration, and he did. He had to step aside, but he had made his point, won his publicity. He was ready to run for President.

In his first foray into presidential politics in 1964, Wallace proved extraordinarily popular not only in the South but among disaffected whites in the North too. He asked them to "send a message to Washington." He promised to "shake the eye teeth of the . . . pointy-headed bureaucrats." He galloped along shouting "law and order" as a code term for anti-black prejudice, and although he lost the Democrat ic nomination to Lyndon Johnson, he captured 29% to 43% of the vote in the Indiana, Maryland and Wisconsin primaries.

In 1968, having installed his first wife Lurleen as Governor, he ran for President as a candidate of his American Independent Party. "It's the working folks all over this country who are getting fed up and are gonna turn this country around," he said. By carrying five states, he almost turned the electoral system around, coming close to causing a stalemate that would have given him the balance of power, but only close. This was Nixon's election.

It was four years later, 1972, when his message was perhaps most powerful, that he was tracked down and shot by the deluded Arthur Bremer while delivering a campaign speech in a Maryland parking lot. One of the bullets lodged near his spine, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. He had won Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina and went on to win in the Maryland and Michigan primaries, but his drive for the nomination was halted. So was his career. He tried yet again in 1976, with male nurses carrying him in his wheelchair, but the old enthusiasm had faded. The question of race, which overtly or covertly was a key part of his message, no longer dominated American or even Southern politics. And many others, including Jimmy Carter, had usurped some of his populist themes. Still, up until the March 1976 Florida primary, Wallace was a national political figure to be reckoned with, and part of Carter's support in that state came from those who wanted to stop the Alabaman.

The loss of the Florida primary and his subsequent release of delegates to Carter marked the end of Wallace's significance in American politics. But it was not until last week that Wallace made it official: in announcing that he was quitting his close race against Howell Heflin to succeed John Sparkman in the U.S. Senate, the 58-year-old Governor effectively ended his political career. The announcement came as a surprise to even his closest associates. He had made his decision while staying alone at a state-owned mansion on the Gulf Coast. The pain-ridden Governor refused to give any specific reason except that he did not want to live in Washington after all. Said he: "Thinking about being around that many pointy heads at one time, I couldn't take it."

The University of Alabama has reportedly offered Wallace a position that would allow him to write his memoirs, teach and lecture. His brother Gerald says that the lucrative lecture circuit could bring Wallace $250,000 a year.

One day a comeback? "I didn't say I was retiring from politics," Wallace insisted. "I just don't have anything to run for right now." It is not like George Wallace to give up, not even in defeat.

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