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129 TRAVELS WITH GEORGE george corley allace, the fiery Alabama governor remembered for boasting he would defend “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” harangued a lot of reporters over his long political career. But knowing that I was a native of Alabama and that I didn’t mind pressing him with thorny questions at press conferences, he relished singling me out at his political rallies for his own special brand of ridicule. As my friend Ray Jenkins, an Alabama Journal editor at the time who covered Wallace for years, once wrote of our relationship, “A few newsmen have so incurred the Governor’s wrath that he holds a permanent grudge. Nelson has written so sharply about Wallace, has pressed uncomfortable questions so relentlessly at press conferences, that Wallace is given to making savage jabs at him in public as well as private.” Ours was a complicated relationship. Wallace angrily resented what I wrote, but I think somewhere down deep he had a sneaking fondness for his fellow Alabamian. And he was always accessible to me. When I would show up at his office in the state capitol to interview him, he would say, “Come on in. I know you’re goin’ to distort what I have to say, but come on in anyway. You fellas always puttin’ things in the paper I don’t say.” Still, he didn’t hesitate to use me as a foil. At political rallies he would draw raucous laughter and sometimes muttered threats by pointing me out and shouting in his thick drawl, “Thay he is, out there from the Los A-n-g-e-l-e-e-e-s Times. Out there where they give blood to the Veet Cong, fly the Veet Cong flag! Look at him, ah made ’im get ’is hair cut!” After about the fifth time he repeated that I approached him after the rally and said, “Governor, how come you always tell folks you made me get a haircut? As long as you’ve known me I’ve had a flat-top haircut.” Chapter 21 130 travels ith george Wallace, always quick with a snappy retort, narrowed his eyes and said, “Well, let’s put it this way, about half what you write about me is so and about half what I say about you is so.” I always quoted Wallace in the vernacular, using apostrophes when he would drop the “g” from words like “getting” and “putting.” And I knew Wallace read my stories about his campaigning because E. C. Dothard, one of his beefy bodyguards, came up to me one day and said, “The guvner sho’ is mad at you.” “What have I done now, why’s he so mad?” I asked. The bodyguard looked at me, smiled wryly, draped a muscular arm over my shoulders, and said, “He’s getting’ goddamn sick and tired of you always usin’ them ’postrophes when you quote him.” At another rally Wallace teed off on me while some of his rowdier supporters began yelling threats like, “They ought to kill the little son of a bitch.” Floyd Jemison, another of his burly bodyguards, sidled up to me, winked, and whispered, “The guv’nor said not to worry, I’m to look out for you if the crowd gets too worked up.” I didn’t find it very reassuring. The state troopers who protected Wallace revered him and shared his view of the press. Once when several of us reporters were following Wallace into a roadside café, I was introduced as a Los Angeles Times reporter to a trooper newly assigned to protect Wallace. The trooper eyed me with loathing and, completely out of the blue, exclaimed: “Well, I can tell you one goddamn thing, there ain’t but three people can walk on water— Jesus Christ, [Alabama football coach] Bear Bryant, and George Wallace. And don’t you forget it.” For all of Wallace’s crowd-pleasing barbs, he spoke so angrily at times that he inflamed the emotions of supporters and hecklers alike. Along with other veteran political reporters I sometimes described audience reaction as “scary” and “chilling.” When Wallace first ran for president as the candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968, an atmosphere of hate permeated almost every political rally. His followers cheered lustily when he threatened to “run over” protesters or to appoint an attorney general who would “drag ’em by their long hair and put ’em under the jail.” He sneered...

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