Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

George Wallace Essay, Research Paper

Former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who built his political career

on segregation and spent a tormented retirement arguing that he was not a

racist in his heart, died Sunday night at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery.

He was 79 and lived in Montgomery, Ala.

Wallace died of respiratory and cardiac arrest at 9:49 p.m., said Dana

Beyerly, a spokeswoman for Jackson Hospital in Montgomery.

Wallace had been in declining health since being shot in his 1972

presidential campaign by a 21-year-old drifter named Arthur Bremer.

Wallace, a Democrat who was a longtime champion of states’ rights,

dominated his own state for almost a generation. But his wish was to be

remembered as a man who might have been president and whose campaigns for

that office in 1968, 1972 and 1976 established political trends that have

dominated American politics for the last quarter of the 20th century.

He believed that his underdog campaigns made it possible for two other

Southerners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, to be taken seriously as

presidential candidates. He also argued ceaselessly that his theme of

middle-class empowerment was borrowed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and then

grabbed by another Californian, Ronald Reagan, as the spine of his

triumphant populist conservatism.

In interviews later in his life, Wallace was always less keen to talk

about his other major role in Southern history. After being elected to his

first term as governor in 1962, he became the foil for the huge protests

that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to destroy segregation in

public accommodations in 1963 and to secure voting rights for blacks in

1965.

As a young man, Wallace came boiling out of the sun-stricken,

Rebel-haunted reaches of southeast Alabama to win the governorship on his

second try. He became the only Alabamian ever sworn in for four terms as

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