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No Part Of The Nation HasftMonopoly On Crazy PeopleWASHINGTON — George Wallace is a fatalist and his shooting ought lo make us resolve that he need be the last. He talked many times about being shot, not — I hasten lo add — inthe sense that ‘cowards die many times”; George Wallace is a trave man. He talked about being shot in a sense that ought to horrify Americans and never seems to horrify ibem enough; that isr in the sense that any man who seeks the Presidency of the United States has to consider being shot in the same manner that most Americans have to consider that it might be a good idea to keep a first-aid kit in the house.Who did it? is the first question everybody asks. George Wallace knew that it didn't matter. “When President Kennedy was killed, he once remarked in conversation, “we had all these folk savin’: it must have been some Southern redneck that killed him.’ You take the New York Times. They said right away it must be some poor, demented Southerner. Then they found out il was some poor, demented Northerner. They’s no part of the country got a premium on crazy people.'*And when Robert Kennedy was killed in California. George Wallace was fatalistic again. “1 sal up half the night and 1 4 thought about his mother. Two of them. 1 was just sorry tt had lo hr him.”Wh.il a horrify mu knowledge is implied in that phrase, it had to be WALLACE NEVER advocated gun control though in private he would admit that the purchase of handguns bothered him He traveled always with a bodyguard of stale troopers in civilian clothes. II they packed guns, the\ never showed them. They had seen him through some tough spnis like the one at Dartmouth Co!Wo in l%7 where a young professor led ananarchic and berserk charge of students down the center aisie, bellowing insanely, “Get out of here; get out of here; you are anoutrage.” And the ensuing riot nearly overturned the Wallacecar.He sat there as the car moved away, impassive, staring straight ahead and as the crowd finally parted and the car picked up speed, he said to Clyde, the short powerful man in the front scat, “You get your shoulder hurt?” He never said anything more.George Wallace knows he evokes emotion, His wife, Cornelia, thinks he is a faultffe when he doesn't. *'He had that crowd in the palm of his hand. I told George he went on just too long and was sort of yammering, you know? But Hubert Humphrey evokes emotion: even George McGovern evokes emotion, though McGovern always seems to draw back and stop when he senses that the crowd is about to get on its feet. It is unreasonable to presume that Americans can decide their future without emotion, artd George Wallace has as much right to stir up a crowd as Bobby Kennedy had.SO WE CAN’T DO something about the shooting of George Wallace by restricting what our candidates say. We can’t tell them not to stir up a crowd, and we ought to know now that we can’t protect them with bodyguards. They all have Secret Service protection and George Wallace had more protection than most. In Baltimore, a week ago he faced a roaring crowd of students, some of whom threw missiles which turned out to be cardboard. The Wallace bodyguards were knocking them down in ihe iwr, bul nobody can knock down a bullet.
Newspaper Details
Derrick
Oil City, Pennsylvania, US
Sat, May 20, 1972
Page 2
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 15 Jul 2019
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