Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

George Wallace Jr.: The Loyal Son

George Wallace Jr. THE LOYAL SON A year after his father’s death in 1998, I visited with George Wallace Jr.—then in public office—to talk about fame, family, loneliness, and his famous namesake. He also shared excerpts with me of a memoir he was working on. Montgomery I can recall as a very young boy my father coming through our front door at our spacious home in Clayton, Alabama, and telling us that he would be a candidate for governor of Alabama . . . That was a moment when we were embracing a life that would have an impact on our state and country but also embracing those twins of joy and pain which have become our constant companions to this day. George Wallace Jr. — , from a memoir in progress I n his office high up in a stately, red government building downtown, George C. Wallace Jr., a public service commissioner for the state of Alabama , is remembering the man he calls “truly my best friend.” He has just returned from a hunt in Africa, where he shot an impala and read Hemingway , an author who inspires him as he works on a book, he reveals, about his family. A lean 47-year-old with his father’s arching brows and dimpled chin, he looks out at the capitol, where his father took the oath of governor four times, 142 WITNESSES TO THE MOVEMENT and his mother, Lurleen, once. In a voice reminiscent of his dad’s, although not as driving, he hearkens back to a year ago. It was Saturday night, September 12, and he’d tuned the television in his father ’s hospital room to CNN’s Larry King Live. On the show taped a few weeks before, George Jr. had been a guest, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and CBS news veteran Mike Wallace. The guests were discussing the legacy of the George C. Wallace Jr. stands by a window in his office with an autographed photo of his father. Photo by Mike Kittrell, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. GEORGE WALLACE JR. 143 80-year-old political figure who now languished in the bed, in chronic pain since his legs were paralyzed in 1972 by an assassin’s bullets, now progressively deaf and, with Parkinson’s, barely able to speak. The men debated whether George Wallace, in the 1960s, had truly been a racist, or, in fact, a populist attuned to a segregation-minded electorate. Interspersed were clips from Mike Wallace’s 60 Minutes interview of October 22, 1968, where the governor, both combative and funny, had teased the newsman as “Cousin Mike.” To communicate with his father, George Jr. had written out on a legal pad what everyone was saying on the show that Saturday night. (“Mike Wallace talked about how much he always liked George Wallace personally,” George Jr. says, thinking back. “Dad smiled and watched it.”) The next day, Sunday, after visiting his father again and heading home, he had a premonition. He’d sensed loss before: On a night in May 1972, he’d dreamed that his father, campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president, had been shot in the throat. Two days later, in Laurel, Maryland, three bullets ripped into Governor Wallace’s abdomen and arm, one lodging in his spinal cord. “It was a Secret Service man, Nick Zorvas, who was shot in the throat,” George Jr. says. Driving home that Sunday, September 13, 1998, George Jr. got the call on his car phone from a nurse to hurry back. He was with his father when he died. “Someone told me that when you lose your last parent, you have a real sense of being alone. Even at forty-seven, I understand what they mean,” he says. “I really have that sense of being alone.” $ I recall moving to Montgomery while in the fourth grade and the trauma this caused as it meant leaving all the familiar places and people behind. George Wallace Jr. — On the walls of Wallace’s office—“I’m actually ‘the 3rd,’ but I’ve been called ‘George Jr.’ all these years”—are photographs that tell the story of a family, and of a time: Lurleen, as a toddler, standing next to her brother Cecil in Tuscaloosa , Alabama; George Wallace as a tough young boxer at The University of Alabama; George Jr., at age 12, dancing with his sister, Peggy Sue, at their...