Boy! Kelso’s illustration from the 1972 primary takes me back!
Note the “Ashbrook 9%” there. Congressman John Ashbrook was my boss on Captiol Hill. He ran in the Republican primary as a protest against Nixon’s leftward movement.
While I was working for John, National Review had a cover article attacking me. It noted that I was trying to get the “Wallace Vote” allied with the Republican conservative base to elect Reagan as president.
Eight years later, the “Wallace Democrats” did join with conservative Republicans to elect Reagan president. At that point they suddenly became “Reagan Democrats” and National review declared it had been for that strategy the whole time.
But what was interesting on a personal note was that I was working as Ashbrook’s senior staffer and I showed the article to him. The first quote National Review used in the article, “From the Nashville Station,” was from John Ashbrook! He had said in 1972 that Wallace was not a true conservative, which he wasn’t.
Can you imagine the coincidence? John hadn’t seen the article yet and his own senior staffer, the subject of the article, showed it to him!
I talked with George Wallace in Montgomery when he was on his feet and later when he was in his wheelchair in 1976. A couple of coincidences there, too.
I drafted a letter praising my book, and Wallace was kind enough to sign it. It gave Wallace credit for being the populist leader he was.
It happened that when I was visiting him was exactly when Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee for president, was arriving in Alabama for Wallace’s endorsement against President Gerald Ford. But Wallace, in his wheel chair and relegated to a minor role, was MUCH more interestedin what I had to say about his glory days than he was in Jimmy Carter.
So Governor Wallace’s wife kept interrupting our talk with calls, “Carter is HERE! Where ARE you!?” We kept on talking.
Finally the phone rang and Wallace didn’t even bother to find out who it was. He said, “I’M COMIN”!!”
Wallace had read my book and he said, “If I had had you when I was on my feet we’d be in the White House now!”
I didn’t have the heart to remind him that I HAD been in his office when he was on his feet. There was a struggle about which group would run the Wallace campaign in South Carolina in 1968. Maurice Bessinger and I went to Montgomery to ask Governor Wallacethat we, who had the actual workers on our side, should run it.
Tom Turnipseed, who said he represented, “All the finest people in South Carolina” and who had the country clubs on his side, managed to persuade Wallace to give the campaign to his group.
South Carolina was the only Deep South state Wallace did not carry in 1968.
Turnipseed is a solid leftist now.
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