George and Teddy Harmonize

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.

Olive Branch. The Watergate scandal has sufficiently disillusioned even pro-Nixon Southerners to give Kennedy a convenient text to lambaste the President and the current Administration without necessarily alienating voters in a state that overwhelmingly supported Nixon in 1972. Kennedy accused Nixon's White House guard of "dismembering the spirit of our Revolution and the protections of the Constitution." Echoing Wallace's brand of populism, Kennedy blasted the Administration for "imposing a heavy burden of taxation upon every workingman, permitting a wealthy few to withhold their fair contribution to the costs of the nation." On race, the Senator extended an olive branch: "Let no one think I lecture you about that racial injustice which has proven to be as deeply embedded and resistant in the cities of the North as in the counties of the South." But he added: "We are no more entitled to oppress a man for his color than to shoot a man for his beliefs."

Wallace drew an enthusiastic ovation when he pulled himself up from his wheelchair to stand on the podium. He welcomed a Kennedy to Alabama, saying, "No other family in the U.S. and across the world has suffered so much or lost more in public service." He drew a line between himself and Kennedy only in his hawkish stand on the U.S. military posture: "The U.S. must remain No. 1 offensively and defensively."

Some of Kennedy's liberal following was outraged at his new-found friendliness with a man they consider a racist demagogue. Alabama Author William Bradford Huie publicly denounced the Senator's trip in a three-page open letter to Kennedy claiming that Wallace was re-elected Governor in 1970 "only by intensifying racial hate and fear." "For Christ's sake," exploded another liberal Alabama Democrat, "there are thousands of good Democrats in this state who have fought Wallace and all he stands for all their political lives. Now this."

Yet while there were few blacks in the crowd, and Black Leader Joe Reed encouraged blacks to boycott the meeting, a growing spirit of pragmatic cooperation with Wallace was signaled by the presence of three black Alabama mayors and a black probate judge on the platform. Black Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford said to Wallace, "God bless you, we are with you, our great Governor." Added A.J. Cooper Jr., chairman of the Alabama Conference of Black Mayors: "Whether the Governor likes it or not, black people in Alabama are a political force to be reckoned with. And whether we like it or not, the Governor is a political force in this state and the nation." The last proposition is one with which Edward Kennedy clearly agrees, and would like to employ to his advantage should he run in '76.

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