Alabama: The Pains of Loyalty

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Lurleen Burns was a poor man's daughter, and all she could bring as her dowry was loyalty. In 1943, when she married George Wallace, a young truckdriver who talked of being Alabama's Governor, their wedding breakfast was a drugstore chicken-salad sandwich and soda pop. Then the pretty 16-year-old blonde, whom he had found selling cosmetics in a Tuscaloosa dime store, dutifully followed Wallace to wartime Army bases, once making him a home in a converted henhouse. As his political fortunes prospered, Lurleen mothered his four children, remaining in the background when they settled into the Governor's mansion in Montgomery in 1963. And in 1966, when Wallace, barred from succeeding himself, set his eye on the White House, Lurleen loyally conquered her own tongue-tied shyness and hid the pangs of advancing abdominal cancer to win the governorship in her own right.

Last week Lurleen Burns Wallace, 41, died in her sleep. She had served 16 months as her husband's standin, executing orders that he dictated from a desk across the hallway. She was buried in Montgomery amid military pomp, while a tearful Wallace interrupted his demagogic third-party campaign to mourn. From her deathbed, Lurleen had urged him to keep up his quest for the presidency, though public life as Governor's lady and then as the nation's only lady Governor was never to her taste. "Politics," she once recalled, "was something Daddy discussed at our house with other people, not with me."

No More Freeloading. His wife's death cost Wallace much more than Lurleen's loyalty. While she was Governor, Wallace had been unquestioned master of Alabama, free to conscript dozens of administration cronies to work full time in his campaign; 16 state troopers shielded him from hecklers when he went speechifying. Now, with campaign cash dwindling and April's Gallup poll showing his nationwide popularity down four points to a meager 10%, those days are numbered. Alabama's ambitious new Governor Albert Brewer, 39, is expected to fire state jobholders who stay away from work to stump for Wallace.

Brewer swiftly shucked the lieutenant governor's obscurity when he succeeded Lurleen. Within hours of taking office, he was seeking to revitalize a state administration left sagging by Wallace's neglect and alleviate a major economic crisis. Although Brewer earlier supported Wallace, he is no sycophant. A conservative segregationist, Brewer shuns public talk of racism and has no stomach for Wallace's stem-winding battles with Washington. As his own man, Brewer enjoys statewide renown, could prove a formidable opponent to Wallace if, as expected, they square off in 1970 for the governorship.