Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

borrowed books. Frank Johnson’s wife, Ruth, was worried by Wallace’s habit

of chasing innocent high school girls, although she thought him more

interested in the adoration than sexual conquest. Finally in 1943, at the

age of 23, he decided to marry one of his naive admirers, a 16-year-old

dime store clerk named Lurleen Burns.

It was wartime and Mrs. Wallace and their baby daughter, Bobbi Joe, born

in 1944, followed wherever Wallace’s flight training in the Army Air

Forces took him. He shipped to the Mariana Islands as a flight engineer in

the spring of 1945, assigned to fly bombing missions over Japan.

The biographer Dan Carter found fellow crew members who remembered

Wallace’s barracks lectures defending segregation in Barbour County. “I

don’t hate them,” Wallace was reported to have said. “The colored are fine

in their place. But they’re just like children, and it’s not something

that’s going to change. It’s written in stone.”

Wallace had been through nine combat missions by the time the war ended.

He was discharged with a 10 percent disability for combat-induced

“psychoneurosis,” diagnosed after he refused orders to fly dangerous

training missions when his unit returned to California after the Japanese

surrender. Years later, Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., disclosed Wallace’s

wartime psychiatric history. Wallace responded that unlike his liberal

attacker, he could prove that he was 90 percent sane.

After the war, Wallace began climbing up the political ladder with

remarkable speed. Using his Barbour County connections, he was named an

assistant to Alabama’s attorney general in 1946. The next year he won

election to the Alabama legislature. He allied himself with the racially

moderate populist Gov. James Folsom and prevailed on Folsom to appoint him

as a trustee of all-black Tuskegee Institute.

As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Wallace

refused to join the walkout by segregationist “Dixiecrats,” a move that