Flying High And... ...Low With Wallace

At 4 p.m. last Saturday afternoon, the Presidential campaign of George C. Wallace pulled in for lunch at the Ambassador Restaurant, on the outskirts of Covington, Kentucky.

Over plates of fried chicken, some reporters who had been traveling with Wallace talked about the campaign. They felt a little confused by what they had seen: the sources and meaning of Wallace's northern support were hard to assess, and they agreed that what they needed was to spend a little time in some northern cities in advance of a Wallace visit, talking to workers and union people, trying to find out what Wallace's "good folks" really have on their minds. But that means leaving Wallace himself for a few days, and this poses a problem.

"There's an element of deathwatch in this campaign that's never been there before," said an enormously fat newspaperman from New York. A thin, soft-spoken reporter from a Boston paper joined in. "That's just it," he said. "You don't want not to be there when he gets shot."

So in the meantime, until something happens, the press has to keep its eye on Wallace and not worry too much about his folks. For some reason--maybe because of the incompetence and laziness of Wallace's small, sinister-looking entourage, or more likely because of the very fact that Wallace's candidacy is the only one of the three that owes its existence to mass support rather than organizational backing--the Wallace campaign looks more chaotic and uninteliigible from up close than it does from a distance.

AS THE Wallace press bus rolled across the Pennsylvania countryside towards Harrisburg one night last week, a reporter from New York City sprawled out on the long seat at the back and started to drink. "Do you know what we're doing here?" he asked the television cameraman who was sharing the bottle of whiskey with him. "We're like a traveling minstel show, with no beginning, no conclusion. Oh, crap. Thirty-three straight days. No rest, no rest."

A busload of Wallace girls rolled by, and dozens of teenage faces peered out through the window and across the intervening darkness to the press bus. The reporters looked back and made rude gestures with their hands and yelled at the girls, and then settled back in their seats and waited for Harrisburg.

When Wallace got to the Holiday Inn at Harrisburg, a $25 dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner was just getting underway. The diners here, like the crowd which had welcomed him at Hershey a few hours before, were a very different group from the people who had turned out to see Wallace shortly before in New York and Trenton. Those people were predominantly blue-collar workers and their children. But in Harrisburg Wallace's supporters were of the older right-wing breed--used-car salesmen, small businessmen and farmers who used to be Republicans, not Democrats.

This is George Wallace's second constituency in the north, and one gets the feeling that it co-exists rather uneasily with his constituency of lower-middle class wage-earners in the big industrial cities. Although they affect the same concerns--one farmer from near Harrisburg told me that he was afraid that rioters were going to come and burn down his barn--they have little else in common, and the Wallace movement is related to them in different ways. It depends on the middle-class right-wingers for money, and on the blue-collar workers for the mass support which has transformed Wallace from a regional to a national figure.

EARLIER that day, about 100 people had been standing in the cold wind at the airport in Trenton, New Jersey. Wallace was nearly two hours late, and the people waiting for him clutched their signs and their flags and tried to keep warm under the heavy grey sky. A few high school kids waited at the front of the crowd. They said that the Negroes got off from school yesterday to go hear Dick Gregory, and so it was alright for them to take today off to see Wallace. Their high school was 55 per cent Negro, they said, and the white kids were pretty much all for Wallace.

A stubbly, sixtyish man in a wind-breaker that was all covered with Wallace buttons was agreeing with some friends that what America needed was "more of a police state." He said that there had been four robberies in the last two weeks in his neighborhood. "It's not against the Negroes especially," he said, "we just want a place to live where we don't need to be frightened."

When Wallace finally arrived, he didn't have time to shake hands with all the people who had been waiting, but he thanked them for being there and hoped that they'd come to the rally downtown. With that he went to his car and the small motorcade started off into Trenton.

The rally in Trenton was at the Civic Center, a dirty red brick building from around 1890 that now stands in front of a great expanse of bull-dozed wasteland covered with crab-grass and bits of broken pavement. The auditorium had about 3000 people in it when Wallace arrived, and the seats were arranged in a square with no one in the middle and no one behind the speaker's platform. This arrangement is designed to cut down on the risk of assassination, and also to reduce the contact between Wallace's supporters and the hecklers, who had turned out today in some numbers.

The hecklers were mostly black kids from the high school which was next door to the Civic Center, and as Wallace began to speak, they started to chant, "Wallace is a pig! Say it now!" They swayed and clapped rhythmically to the chant, and a few boys came to the back and danced to the beat of the chanting. From the other end of the hall, Wallace threatened the hecklers. "You'd better have your day now, because after November 5 you're through in this country." From both sides, the whites howled their disapproval, and shook their fists at the singing, clapping blacks.

After Wallace finished speaking, the crowd pushed forward to the foot of the platform, and he leaned over the edge to shake hands and to sign hats. Teenage girls with bad teeth came running out of the crowd yelling, "I got it," clutching a hat or a scrap of paper with Wallace's initials on it. And filing out slowly were the old people, with thin faces and flannel shirts buttoned up under the chin, and the middle-aged women, the wives of the men who were at work in the factories--shuffling toward the door and the street.

THE NEXT morning, in the air on the way to Terre Haute, Indiana, I introduced myself to Wallace and asked him if he had time to talk to me. Wallace, who was standing in the aisle at the back of the plane after conferring with a CBS man, paused and then said, "I reckon."

Then we shook hands, and Wallace said, "The Harvard Crimson. The Haaaaarvard Crimson. Now isn't that a fine name? Th' Haaaaarvard Crimson. 'Crimson,' now," he said, his brow furrowing, and his hand still holding onto mine in a dying hand-shake, "that red, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's sort of red," I answered.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," he said. "Now isn't that a fine name?" And with that he started walking back up the aisle to his seat at the front of the plane, still holding me in tow by my hand, while he repeated his joke to the reporters on either side of him, "The Haaaaarvard CRIMson. Now isn't that a fahn name?"

"Are you arresting me, Governor?" I asked, holding up my hand with his still holding onto it. "Yeah, ah'm gonna arrest you," he said, and let go. When we got back to his seat at the front, he slumped down in the window seat with his short legs leaning up against the cabin wall, and looked up at me from the folds of his black suit, his thick eyebrows raised, his lips in what seemed to be a sneer--but is really just the way he looks all the time.

"I was at Harvard in 1963," Wallace said. "I went out under the steam pipes, y'know. But the students there gave me a real good reception--it was some outside group that made trouble." I started to say something when he continued, "I filled the hall with thundrous applause, dija know that? That's what all the newspapers said, you go and look at them. I 'quickly converted an overwhelmingly hostile audience,' that's what they all said. You go look at them."

Then he asked me if he had any support at Harvard. I searched about for something to say, and remembered that some of my friends had distributed an idiotically hyperbolic pamphlet at the Wallace Rally in Boston, in which they urged the voters to sweep Wallace "to the White House and beyond," so I said, "Well, there is one small group which distributed a pamphlet for you at your rally in Boston last week..." and Wallace nodded gravely and said,

"Yes, we've got support from students on all th' campuses."

It seemed a characteristic remark--an absurd refusal to concede that the very people that he is continually attacking don't really hate him. Marshall Frady, in his new biography of Wallace, describes Wallace's pathetic efforts to convince Alabama Negroes to support him, or at least to convince himself that they did: at one ponit, Wallace is quoted as telling a group of Negro educators, just before the 1966 campaign for governor, "Now I get out speakin' to folks, don't pay any attention to what I say, 'cause I'm gonna have to fuss at y'all. But I don't mean any of it."

His single campaign speech includes some spurious statistics intended to show that Alabama's blacks were all for Lurleen. The insistence that no one can really be against him is at first rather touching, but it has an ominous quality to it: it is the small extension of Johnsonian consensus, the point where social unity becomes fascism.

Traveling in the wake of Wallace's chaotic crusade, however, it's hard to become terribly worried about things like this. The hopelessness of reporting Wallace's one disorganized, idiotic speech in any way that would stop his complaining about the fancy eastern press is the first thing that makes traveling with him so odd. Wallace's famous hatred of the press, combined with the reporters' bemused contempt for Wallace, has created a strangely jocular atmosphere between the press and the candidate.

Wallace is very accessible on his plane, holding press conferences while sitting sideways on an airplane seat and pausing between sentences to suck on an orange in which he had nibbled a small hole, or just wandering around chatting like it was Clayton, Alabama, and he was still running for State Representative.

For their part, the reporters address their questions to him with a thinly-disguised amusement, partly because they know that he has no chance of winning this election, but mostly because of the absurdity of a universe in