Whatever Happened to George Wallace?

Political memories are sometimes short. A year before the election, it seemed that it would be easy for any one of several Democrats to defeat the man who pardoned Nixon. What seemed difficult was for any of them to defeat George Wallace, lock up the nomination, and thus avoid a brokered convention in which Wallace would play a powerful role. Wallace was a specter that had haunted the Democratic party ever since the 1964 Wisconsin primary, in which he got 34 percent of the vote; his growing strength in 1968 and 1972 suggested that in 1976 he might finally succeed in destroying the dwindling New Deal coalition that had been an organizing focus of American politics for 30 years.

George Wallace is the man who proclaimed in 1962, R...