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