The Lurleen Wallace Of Our Time?
Many commentators have made the parallel between Argentina's election of its First Lady as its next president and Hillary Clinton's run for the office in this country. Others have taken it a step further and recalled the Peronist history where Peron was succeeded at his death by his third wife, Isabel (not the one the musical was about).
But there's another history closer to home which is worth recalling as we consider the historic step of electing a First Lady-- and thus possibly returning a term-limited former president to office by other means. It's the tawdry and tragic tale of Lurleen Wallace.
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In the ignominious tradition of Southern racist demagogues, Alabama Governor George Wallace had risen to national prominence as a fiery, oily opponent of federally-enforced integration. Though a Democrat, he planned to run against the Democratic nominee for president in 1968 on the American Independent Party ticket, hoping to force the election into the House of Representatives-- where he could wheel and deal with the eventual president on a truly national scale to roll back desegregation.
There was one obvious problem though: thanks to Alabama's term-limits law, Wallace would not be governor by the time the election rolled around, reducing his stature. So he adopted a not unfamiliar tactic: putting his wife, Lurleen, up as the candidate to replace him. Everyone knew, of course, that the modest and high-school-educated Lurleen would merely hold the office in title for her husband.
As it happened, there was another problem, however, much less well known to the public and, it appears, unknown even to Lurleen: she was dying of uterine cancer. Though a doctor had observed the signs of cancer as early as 1961, he had told George, not her, and George had failed to see that she was treated appropriately.
A hysterectomy and radiation treatments were performed during the campaign, while the Wallace organization lied to the press about her obvious declining condition. A few months after her inauguration, in May 1968, an emaciated and pathetic Governor Lurleen Wallace died at the age of 42. Though she had requested a closed casket, her husband insisted that she lay in state for all to see. He was running for president, after all, and a dead wife and grieving husband and children would prove to be the kind of publicity a campaign can't buy.
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There is nothing so gothic about Mrs. Clinton's run for office. And she is obviously a very different sort of person than a semi-educated housewife with no political ambitions of her own. It is entirely plausible that she wants the office herself, for her own reasons.
But Lurleen's ghastly tale is a reminder of the drastic extremes to which hugely ambitious men will push their families in pursuit of office. And given the legendary opaqueness of the Clintons' marriage, we simply don't know what the equation of ambition and desire for office is between the two of them. I'm not attempting to advance a particular view of it here-- Bill as Svengali to her Hillby-- but to make the point that, we have no idea. None of us. Your guess is as good as mine.
So far the primary season has evaded the question, treating Bill as some figure of the past, as irrelevant to Hillary's term as Tom Cruise is to Nicole Kidman's next movie. At most he'll be a pleasant resource to draw upon, ready to add glamor and star power to state funerals (making one wonder what exactly Vice President Richardson is supposed to do for four or eight years).
But of course it isn't like Tom and Nicole at all, because the Clintons are still married. As Charles Krauthammer observes, "The cloud hovering over a Hillary presidency is not Bill padding around the White House in robe and slippers flipping thongs. It's President Clinton, in suit and tie, simply present in the White House when any decision is made." When she holds Cabinet meetings, he will likely be there. When she meets with foreign dignitaries, he will stay where Laura or Nancy would have gone. When she has to make a decision, we will always wonder if she did-- or he did.
Bill Clinton will have circumvented the 22nd amendment-- or we'll think he may have. We will have a co-president possibly fighting with the actual president over final decisions-- or not, depending on which ex-aide's tell-all book you read. Disappointed that his first eight years didn't give him the kind of big historical stage on which to be an FDR, Bill will join FDR as the only president with two more terms in which to make his mark by some outsize, self-dramatizing act in the post-9/11 world.
Or will he? The point is, we just don't know. We don't know what really goes on between them. All we know is the spin. Yet we don't seem to be willing yet to really think through the consequences of allowing a former president to pull a Lurleen Wallace and put himself back in office through his wife-- or the consequences of a former president who thinks he's doing that, only to learn that his Mrs. was no Lurleen Wallace after all. Who knows which alternative will turn out to be the case? Who's willing to ask the question-- before it's too late?
