Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (8 page)

People loved his bumptious sense of humor, the rockabilly growl in his voice, the way he shook his fist in defiance when he really got worked up. Wallace, a former Golden Gloves boxer, was battling forces no one else seemed to have the gumption to take on. At rallies around the country, he had a litany of phrases that he used over and over, lines calculated to get a lusty guffaw out of the crowds. When he won the White House, Wallace said, he was going to take all those "bearded beatnik bureaucrats" and hurl them and their briefcases into the Potomac. He railed against "liberal sob sisters" and "bleeding-heart sociologists." Wallace liked to say that whenever disturbances like the Watts riots swept the streets of America's cities, you could count on "pointy-headed intellectuals
⁹³
to explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old."

Though he was careful to moderate his most incendiary racial rhetoric, Wallace continued to preach states' rights and the separation of the races and said the recent gains of the civil rights movement should be overturned. At friendlier venues he went so far as to argue that blacks should not be able to serve on juries, noting that "the nigra would still be in Africa
⁹⁴
in the brush if the white people of this country had not raised their standards." He called the civil rights legislation that President Johnson had pushed through Congress "an assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty."

"Let 'em call me a racist,"
⁹⁵
he told a reporter in Cleveland. "It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me."

FROM THE START of his governorship, George Wallace had made white supremacy--sometimes cloaked in the more respectable veil of states' rights, but usually not--the centerpiece of his platform. In his 1962 inaugural speech, delivered in Montgomery on the gold star marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy, Wallace gave a stem-winder that was written by the speechwriter Asa Carter, a well-known Klansman and anti-Semite. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," Wallace said, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

If those words put Wallace on the national radar screen, his actions at the University of Alabama a few months later placed him on a historic collision course with the federal government. On June 11, 1963, flanked by state troopers, Wallace physically prevented two black students from entering an auditorium at the University of Alabama to register for classes. His "stand in the schoolhouse door" did not work, of course--two federal marshals dispatched by the Kennedy Justice Department immediately ordered him to stand down. But in the process Wallace had made himself the civil rights movement's most vocal and visible bogeyman.

Throughout the 1960s, Wallace had repeatedly focused his ire on one figure: Martin Luther King Jr.--in no small part because King had scored his sweetest victories in Wallace's home state. Wallace had called the Nobel laureate everything but the Antichrist, but in an odd way Wallace needed King, for the governor understood that great political struggles can exist in the abstract for only so long before cooking down to the personal.

Certainly Wallace's slights and epithets cannot be faulted for their lack of energy or brio. He called King "a communist agitator," "a phony," and "a fraud, marching and going to jail
⁹⁶
and all that, and just living high on the hog." He once said that King spent most of his time "riding around in big Cadillacs smoking expensive cigars" and competing with other black ministers to see "who could go to bed
⁹⁷
with the most nigra women." And yet, to Wallace's outrage and consternation, the federal government had consistently sided with King. Leaders in Washington, the governor said, "now want us to surrender the state to him and his group of pro-Communists."

On numerous occasions, King had lobbed invectives of his own. In a 1963 interview with Dan Rather, King called Wallace "perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today ... I am not sure that he believes all the poison he preaches, but he is artful enough to convince others that he does." When segregationist thugs bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963, killing four girls attending Sunday school, King sent the governor a withering telegram that all but accused him of the murder, saying "the blood of our little children
⁹⁸
is on your hands." Two years later, when King marched from Selma to Montgomery and gave a triumphant oration outside the Alabama state capitol, he aimed his message right at the governor's office. Segregation was now on its deathbed, King pronounced; the only thing uncertain about it was "how costly Wallace
⁹⁹
will make the funeral."

Still, through all his entanglements with Wallace during the 1960s, King had to confess a perverse admiration for his talents on the stump. "He has just four [speeches],"
¹⁰⁰
King once said of the governor, "but he works on them and hones them, so that they are all little minor classics."

Now, incredibly, this neo-Confederate was running for president--a development that King found immensely troubling. King remarked to a television reporter that he thought Wallace's candidacy "will only strengthen the forces of reaction in the country and incite bigotry, hatred, and even violence. I think it will arouse many evil forces in our nation."

Even so, Wallace's bid was already starting to show a vitality that America had not seen in an independent candidate since Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign of 1912. Pundits were projecting that even though he had no hope of winning, Wallace could potentially spoil the 1968 election, forcing the House of Representatives to decide the president for the first time since 1825. National polls indicated that his appeal was steadily climbing, from 9 to 12 to 14 percent of the American electorate. "In both the North and South,"
¹⁰¹
declared
Life
magazine, "Wallace appears to be tapping a powerful underground stream of discontent."

IN THE FALL of 1967, California became the heart of Wallace's fight for the presidency. In November, he began an intense effort to get his name on the state's unusually restrictive ballot for the June primaries. California election law required a new candidate from any unregistered party to gather sixty-six thousand signatures. It was probably the most onerous ballot requirement in the country, but Wallace's advisers felt that California, as the nation's most populous and influential state, represented the first crucial test of his nascent campaign.

So Wallace moved most of his staff to Los Angeles, and hundreds of devoted volunteers from Alabama soon followed him. In newly opened American Independent Party offices across California, drawling armies of phone workers, fresh from Mobile and Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, clogged the lines with their solicitation calls. Working in an extracurricular capacity, Alabama legislators, commissioners, clerks, and other government employees made the trek out to the West Coast to moonlight for the cause. Meanwhile, Wallace himself crisscrossed California, speaking at hundreds of rallies and fund-raisers, guarded by swaggering hosses who were usually out-of-uniform Alabama state troopers.

The Bear Flag State, it seemed, had become Dixie West. "The capital of Alabama
¹⁰²
is
not
Los Angeles," one
Wall Street Journal
political reporter noted, "but it might as well be."

What made the Montgomery decampment to Los Angeles all the more surreal was that "Governor" Wallace was not the duly constituted governor of Alabama. Because of a strict anti-succession statute, Wallace had been forced to step down, despite immense popularity, when his first gubernatorial term ended in 1966. He resented this brusque termination of his tenure, for he felt he needed political viability in Alabama as a base from which to pursue his national ambitions. Then, in a moment of craftiness, he realized that nothing in the Alabama statutes prevented
his wife
from running for governor.

So, in 1967, First Lady Lurleen Wallace, a perfectly put-together, and widely beloved, traditional Southern woman with scarcely any interest in political life, ascended to the state's highest office--on paper, at least. George Wallace became officially known as the "First Gentleman of Alabama," but few people in Montgomery labored under any misunderstandings about who was actually running the state's affairs. It was an unorthodox arrangement, to say the least, but Alabama voters had to hand it to their ever-resourceful governor for installing his own surrogate--and for pulling off what would later be called one of the most brazen acts of "political ventriloquism"
¹⁰³
in American history.

Lurleen Wallace occasionally ventured out to California to campaign with her husband, but she was quite ill and unable to exert herself. She had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer, had undergone an operation to remove an egg-sized malignancy, and was receiving cobalt treatments at a hospital in Texas. She was slowly, surely withering away. Her doctors believed she had only a few months to live.

George Wallace, in a fugue state of campaigning, carefully hid the seriousness of her illness from both his Alabama and his California publics--and kept to the hustings.

6
THE GRADUATE

ERIC GALT CLUTCHED his diploma and posed for the photographer. It was "commencement day" at the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard. Galt, wearing a borrowed bow tie and a black tuxedo jacket, stood in a softly lit room that was a mock-up of a cocktail lounge, with minimalist modern furniture and plush wall-to-wall carpeting that muffled the steady clinking of tumblers and collins glasses behind the test bar.

It was here, under the direction of a primly mustachioed man named Tomas Reyes Lau, that Galt and his fellow pupils had learned the mixologist's trade, assaying the chemical mysteries of Rusty Nails, mai tais, Harvey Wallbangers, sloe gin fizzes, and Singapore slings. Over the six-week course, which cost Galt $220 in cash, he had mastered the recipes of more than 112 cocktails.

Mr. Lau, an unctuous, precise man with a Latin American accent, was impressed with Galt and thought he had promise in the business. "A nice fellow,
¹⁰⁴
very intelligent, quiet and reserved," Lau judged him. "He had the ability to develop this type of service." Galt told people around the school that he had worked as a "culinary" on a Mississippi River steamboat, but that now he said he wanted to settle down--and, one day, open up a tavern in Los Angeles.

Lau had already succeeded in finding him a bartending job, but to Lau's surprise Galt turned it down. He planned to go out of town soon, he told Lau. "I have to leave to see my brother," Galt said. "What good would it do for me to work only two or three weeks? I'll wait till I get back, then I can take a permanent job." He said his brother ran a tavern somewhere in Missouri.