Alabama: The Lurleen Gambit

Even George Wallace’s best friends tried to persuade him last week that the Lurleen gambit would backfire. Lurleen is Wallace’s wife, and the Governor’s latest scheme to beat the state constitution’s provision that he cannot succeed himself is to run Lurleen instead. “If sanity overcomes, and Wallace leaves Mrs. Wallace free to be a mother and a housekeeper,” counseled the Montgomery Advertiser, Wallace’s most faithful journalistic supporter, George could take a profitable sabbatical from public office and return to power later.

Wallace calculates nonetheless that he needs the statehouse as a power base from which to launch a third-party presidential bid in 1968. After he lost a marathon legislative battle to amend the constitution in his favor last month, most people concluded that he would go after John Sparkman’s U.S. Senate seat next year instead. This is still a possibility, though Wallace has let associates know that he prefers to “continue the fight from here.”

Meanwhile, the putative candidate, whom Wallace wooed and wed when she was a 16-year-old dime-store clerk, was already practicing for the role she may have to play as campaigner and chief executive—not to mention George Wallace’s helpmeet. Lurleen was keeping her mouth shut.