Volume 11, Number 8 · November 7, 1968
Mr. America
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Wallace
by Marshall Frady
New American Library, 246 pp., $5.95
George Wallace is one of those leaders whose destiny and strength are not to be larger than life, but small and mediocre, cut to the very scale of their followers, exceeding them only in shrewdness and energy. The idea is not to disguise the smallness, the meanness even, but to make of it instead the very moral and intellectual center of the appeal. This is what they have in mind when they speak, these Wallace people, so feelingly of 'courage' and honesty. When you see Wallace, short and plebeian and unvarnished, coming out of his plane or mounting the platform for The Speech, the limits of his charm and grace are apparent. Strangely, you do not feel relieved that he should seem so—so nothing—and you do not feel gratefully superior. Instead all his lacks are immediately disturbing, threatening. It is unsettling to see that the usual bribes and corruptions of public life and power do not interest him. It is the harshness of power Wallace seeks, not its comforts. Nixon in his Fifth Avenue co-op, his family shopping at Saks, the slow and steady rise of a young man from hardship to country club, the apotheosis of a great Wall Street firm: here at least is a man with an investment to protect. We are all familiar with the coldness, rigidity, and calculation of an acquisitive spirit. But Wallace seems something new: he seems to ask nothing of life except the prospering of his sordid ideas.
Review, 2478 words
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