POLITICS: George and Teddy Harmonize

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My brothers believed in the dignity of man. How can those who stood with them support a man whose agents used cattle prods and dogs against human beings in Alabama?

The words were those of Senator Edward Kennedy, spoken in 1968 about George Wallace, then a spoiler candidate for President. Last week, at a remarkable political hoedown in Decatur, Ala., a more conciliatory Kennedy delivered the principal speech at a ceremony honoring Governor Wallace with a patriotism award. The sight of Wallace and Kennedy sharing a Fourth of July platform bedecked with plastic bunting gave the bitterly divided Democratic Party at least a momentary illusion of unity not seen since the early Lyndon Johnson era. "A Democratic love fest," was the description gleefully offered by Democratic Party Chairman Robert Strauss, a self-invited guest who, in his ice-cream white suit, looked the part of a riverboat gambler whose luck was about to change. His opposition seemed to agree: the Republican publication Monday called Kennedy's trip "Operation Turncoat."

The occasion was Decatur's annual "Spirit of America" jamboree, a kind of down-home Independence Day folk fair started in 1967 to provide conservative counterpoint to antiwar demonstrations north of the Mason-Dixon line. It had all the trappings of a traditional Southern political gathering.

The idea of putting Wallace and Kennedy on the same platform grew out of a spat between the local Jaycee president and his wife, who claimed Decatur could not attract big-name speakers. But what brought together the man who became famous for his segregationist stand in a schoolhouse door a decade ago and the brother of the President who ordered him out of it? It was compelling political necessity. Wallace wants a major voice for his conservative style of "little folks" politics in Democratic Party forums. Kennedy wants to reunite the McGovernite left with the center of the party and recapture the South for the Democrats.

For Kennedy, the trip was an encouraging foray into the region of the country where he might expect the greatest hostility as a presidential candidate in 1976. The Kennedy charisma worked its usual magic on a crowd of some 10,000 mired in ankle-deep mud following torrential rain at Point Mallard Park on the Tennessee River. His speech, an attack on President Nixon, a low-key reference to the race issue and an appeal for more equitable taxation, was frequently interrupted by applause.