Carter writes extremely well, and he knows his ground intimately. His favorite speechwriter was a KKK organizer, and by 1968 when he ran for president, he pretty well personified all that was most reprehensible about his country. He was a natural, a denizen of the smoky rooms where deals were cut.

Wallace grew up in a dead-end Alabama town, married a five-and-ten store clerk named Lurleen, and climbed the greasy pole of Alabama politics. One of the angriest of these politicians, one of our very basest rhetoricians, was George Corley Wallace, segregationist governor of Alabama, presidential candidate, white trash rabble-rouser, glad-hander, bad-mouther, echt southern bigot, and, after an assassination attempt, the most familiarand somewhat contriteparaplegic of the early '70s. In giving voice to the demotic opinion so beloved of democracy, politicians have uttered our most noble and our basest rhetoric. Wallace, four-time governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. When the War Was Over, 1985, etc.) tackles racist demagogue George C. 'I sent him a message,' Johnson told Carter, 'that if he wanted forgiveness, he'd have to get it from the Lord.'.Historian Carter (Emory Univ. Others, such as Frank Johnson, a white federal district judge who attempted to enforce the law, cannot put aside the personal injuries he and his family suffered at the hands of Wallace, an old college friend. Many of these people have been willing to forgive, if not entirely forget. Wallace aided the cause by begging the pardon of those he had once attacked: African Americans and white southern moderates who had urged accommodation to the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. By leaving him permanently disabled-indeed, consigned to a life of unrelenting misery-this blow encouraged public forgiveness of the mean-spirited words and actions that had animated his political career. Wallace's redemption also rests on the assassination attempt that occurred during his 1972 presidential campaign. Thirty years after he preached 'Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!', Wallace has won grudging respect as the prophet of the antigovernment, antiliberal politics of the 1980s and '90s. As Carter, a professor of history at Emory University, admits in this fine biography, Wallace has gained historical redemption of sorts. George Wallace, five-term governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate, is a case in point. In time (to paraphrase Emerson), every scoundrel becomes a hero-or at least a sympathetic figure.

The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter