Wallace

On a cold, rain-flicked night in 1967 a rickety twin-engine Convair 240 began a blind and uncertain descent through low clouds, abruptly breaking out over the scattered watery lights of Concord, New Hampshire. It came in headlong, less by instruments and calculation than with a precipitous lurching optimism.
 
A damp huddle of greeters was waiting in the dark, and they waggled dime-store Confederate flags when he emerged from the plane—a stumpy little man with heavy black eyebrows and bright black darting eyes and a puglike bulb of a nose who looked as if he might have stepped out of an eighteenth-century London street scene by Hogarth. Wrapped in a black raincoat, he bobbed spryly down the steps as flashbulbs stammered in the rain. Someone held an umbrella over his head while he said a few words to the newsmen. Asked if he were offended because no local officials were there to welcome him, he answered jauntily, “Naw”—his voice rising just a bit—“Naw, ’cause it’s the workin’ folks all over this country who’re gettin’ fed up and are gonna turn this country around, and a whole heap of politicians are gonna get run over when they do.” With that, he was bundled into a car at the head of the waiting cavalcade, and, with a swift surge, everyone—he, his entourage, the reporters, his local supporters—vanished into the night. One had the peculiar fleeting impression that a squad of commandos or guerrillas, irregulars at any rate, had just landed in the dark and was now loose in the New England countryside.
 
At a press conference that evening in a crammed smoke-hazed motel room on the outskirts of Concord, he seemed—peering over a thicket of microphones that came up almost to his chin, perspiring and a little haggard in the harsh glare of television lights—an improbable apparition. His baggy dark suit was buttoned tightly over his paunch, with a tab-collar shirt hugging the bulky knot of an inexpensive tie. His breast pocket was bulging with plastic-tip White Owl cigars and scraps of paper on which were scribbled random notes, addresses, telephone numbers. He looked somewhat like a traveling novelty salesman. But what this chunky little man was occupied with, what had brought him out of the night from distant Alabama all the way to this New Hampshire motel room, was the election of the next President of the United States—an event now only a year away. He carefully affected, out of deference to this unfamiliar assembly, a subdued and amiable manner, with much congenial winking, and his grammar and enunciation were studiously precise, faintly stilted. (On the flight up, he had mused, “Them New Hampshire folks, you know, they a little more restrained and genteel than Alabama folks. They gotten kind of overbred up there.”) At one point, he announced, “Well, I’m mighty happy to be among all you very intelligent-lookin’ folks.” But later, when he interrupted a woman reporter, “What’s that, honey? Could you say that again? I don’t hear too good,” turning his head with his hand cupped behind his ear so that he had to look at her out of the corner of his eye, he seemed solemnly impervious to the ripple of titters in the room.
 
Morning revealed a landscape that had the tidy miniature quality of a model train set, with a trivial city skyline under washed drab skies. It was alien country. Though the month was April, the weather was wintry—not his kind of weather—as if the South and North described not so much regions as perpetual weathers, summerland and winterland. Syracuse, into which he had ventured the week before, had had a profoundly remote look about it, cold and wan under bare bleak trees, with junkyards, power lines, and oil tanks set out in wide weedy fields and cement trucks moving through a rubble of construction. All the towns in the North where he was appearing seemed generations older than those in Alabama, and over Concord’s streets there was a kind of static quiescence, a worn and antique quality. When he spoke that afternoon in the square downtown, he was regarded from the capitol lawn by an incredulously scowling statue of Daniel Webster, and his grits-and-gravy voice blared down a main street that was a turn-of-the-century tintype of stark brick buildings crested with Yankee brass eagles.
 
But it could have been a rally on a musky spring afternoon in Suggsville, Alabama. His finger stabbing downward, his eyes crackling, the microphone ringing under the impetuous barrage of his voice, he barked, “If one of these two national parties don’t wake up and get straight, well, I can promise that you and me, we gonna stir something up all over this country.…” Afterward he greeted people along the sidewalks with an instant, easy intimacy: “Honey, I ’preciate yawl comin’ on out here today in this cold, heunh? Tell yo folks hello for me, heunh?” When a small girl suddenly kissed him square on the mouth, he looked around him for a moment—at all the pleasant faces, at the moil of reporters, at the candy-green capitol lawn, the thin exquisite sunshine, the vast benign blue sky—and grinned almost blissfully.
 
Driving on to Dartmouth later for an evening speech, through Devil-and-Daniel-Webster country—weathervanes atop white wooden farmhouses, stone fences and apple orchards, birches and dark cedars sheltering small secret ponds the color of graphite—he removed his wetly chewed cigar to remark, “This sho does look like North Alabama, don’t it?” He found the thought cheering. “Yes, sir,” he murmured happily, “you go up there around Gurley, New Hope, Grays Chapel—country up there looks just like this,” and he leaned back in his seat and returned his cigar to his mouth, satisfied.
 
Two hours later, after nightfall, over the still, shadowed campus at Dartmouth, there pulsed a dull, steady roar from the auditorium where he was speaking. Scattered groups of students were hurrying toward the sound under the dark trees, but people were already milling under the windows and around the front steps. Inside, students were standing along the walls and sitting on windowsills and in the aisles, and the noise they were making was like a single continuous howl existing independent and disembodied above their open mouths. On the stage, while a student tried to read questions submitted by the audience, he paced restlessly, exhilarated by the violence heavy in the air. Occasionally he spat into his handkerchief and then plunged it back into his hip pocket. When he pounced to the microphone to answer a question, it was as if he were deliberately lobbing incendiary pronouncements into the crowd. He would crouch, looking up, his left arm gripping the lectern and his right swinging and whipping with pointed finger, as if he were furiously cranking himself up: “I’m not against dissent now, but I believe anybody that stands up like this professor in New Jersey and says they long for a victory by the Vietcong over the American imperialist troops, and anybody that goes out raising bluhd and money for the Vietcong against American servicemen, they oughtta be drug by the hair of their heads before a grand jury and indicted for treason, ’cause that’s what they guilty of, and I promise you if I—” And then he would step back and spit into his handkerchief again, shooting it back into his hip pocket as the roar rose around him.
 
At one point there was a charge by students down the center aisle, led by a young professor with fine-spun hair and a freshly scrubbed cherubic complexion—but his mild face was now flushed, his tie askew, his eyes manic and glaring as he tried to flail his way through campus police and plainclothesmen, bellowing with a crack in his voice, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You are an outrage!” That berserk charge—anarchic and hopeless, an abandonment of fairness, proprieties, all civilized approaches, a retreat to simple brute action—testified not only to despair and fury over the fact that this man could be speaking there at all, but to a sinking of the heart over the absurdly serious import of that figure’s audacious aspirations, a dread that something sinister and implacable was afoot in the land. As he was hustled offstage during the short melee, he glanced quickly back over his shoulder at the furor with a curious, bemused, almost awed expression.
 
Outside, after his speech, his car was engulfed. White and Negro students kicked the fenders and hammered on the hood, and one policeman was hauled back into the maw of the crowd and disappeared into it, his crumpled cap reappearing a moment later in the hand of a student, who waved it high in the air in triumph. And it seemed as if he, too, this stubby little man, might be on the point of vanishing, consumed whole by the kind of popular violence he so savors. As the crowd seethed around his car, there were glimpses of him sitting in the back seat, his face not worried, but just empty whenever the reeling TV lights washed over it, huddling behind the rolled-up windows with his cigar, all of him as small and still and inert as a rabbit in a burrow while hounds swirl and bay in the grass around it. The car began to ease forward, slowly nosing through the mob—he still not moving, looking to neither the right nor the left—and then, rapidly, it was gone.