Lurleen Wallace - Governorship and Illness

Governorship and Illness

The 1966 results showed that George Wallace, strengthened at the time by his opposition to desegregation, could have easily won a second term had he been constitutionally eligible to do so. In Alabama (as in most southern states at the time), governors were not allowed to serve two consecutive terms, a position still maintained in Virginia. This provision was incorporated in 1901 in the current state constitution.

When Wallace failed in 1965 to get the constitutional ban on his candidacy lifted, he devised a plan in which Mrs. Wallace would run for governor while he continued to exercise the authority of the office behind the scenes, duplicating the strategy in which Miriam Wallace Ferguson won the 1924 election for governor of Texas, as her husband James E. Ferguson remained the de facto governor.

Wallace eventually succeeded in getting the term limit repealed, and he would serve three more terms, two of them consecutively. In those days, the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election in Alabama, and despite the Jim Martin challenge, Mrs. Wallace was inaugurated in January 1967. To assuage voters who might have been concerned about the transfer of power, she stated that her husband would be her "No. 1 assistant".

Mrs. Wallace made her gubernatorial race carrying a tragic secret: she had been diagnosed with cancer as early as April 1961, when her surgeon biopsied suspicious tissue that he noticed during the cesarean delivery of her last child. As was common at the time, her physician told her husband the news, not her. George Wallace insisted that Lurleen not be informed. As a result, she did not get appropriate follow-up care. When she saw a gynecologist for abnormal bleeding in 1965, his diagnosis of uterine cancer came as a complete shock to her. When one of her husband's staffers carelessly revealed to her that Wallace had discussed her cancer with them, but not her, during his 1962 campaign three years earlier, she was outraged.

In order to facilitate his plan to use her as a surrogate candidate in 1966, Mrs. Wallace cooperated with a campaign of dissimulation and misdirection as she began radiation therapy in December 1965. This was followed by a hysterectomy in January 1966. Despite her ill health, Mrs. Wallace maintained a brutal campaign schedule throughout 1966 and gave a 24-minute speech – her longest ever – at her January 1967 inauguration.

Early in her term, Mrs. Wallace's condition began to deteriorate. In June 1967, an abdominal growth was found. During surgery on July 10, this proved to be an egg-sized malignancy on her colon. She endured a second course of radiation therapy as a follow-up. In January 1968, after extensive testing, she informed her staff (but not the public) that she had a cancerous pelvic tumor which was pressing on the nerves of her back down through her right hip. Even with the prior surgeries on her uterus and colon and despite the radiation treatment, the cancer spread.

Her last public appearance as governor was at the 1967 Blue-Gray Football Classic, followed by a campaign appearance for her husband's presidential bid on the American Party ticket on January 11, 1968. Her illness was obvious and worsening. The pelvic tumor was removed in late February. This was followed by surgery to treat an abdominal abscess, and in late March 1968, more surgery to dissolve a blood clot in her left lung. By April, the cancer was in her liver and lungs, and she weighed less than eighty pounds.

Her husband, George Wallace, persistently lied to the press about her condition, claiming in April 1968 that "she has won the fight" against cancer. He continued to make campaign stops nationwide during her last weeks of life, but her doctors warned him she was in unstable condition on May 5, the day he was to leave for a Michigan appearance. At her request, he cancelled a television appearance on May 6, when she was too ill to be moved back to the hospital. Lurleen Wallace died in Houston, Texas, at 12:34 a.m. May 7, 1968, with her husband beside her and the rest of her family, including her parents, just outside her room.

Lurleen Wallace lay in state in the Capitol building on May 8, and 21,000 mourners waited as long as five hours to view her silver casket. Despite her emphatic pre-need planning request for a closed casket, her widower insisted that her body be on view, with a glass bubble over the open part of the coffin. The day of her funeral, May 9, all public and private schools closed, all state offices closed, and most businesses closed or had abbreviated hours. She was interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Montgomery.

At the time of her funeral, George Wallace had moved out of the governor's mansion and back to a home that they had purchased in Montgomery in 1967. He did not take his children, ages 18, 16, and 6, with him. They were sent to live with family members and friends. (Their eldest daughter had married and left home.) George Wallace had two subsequent marriages to the former Cornelia Ellis Snively and Lisa Taylor, both of which ended in divorce.

Mrs. Wallace's most notable independent action as governor was her attempt to get her husband to increase appropriations for the Bryce Hospital and the Partlow State School, a residential institution for the developmentally disabled. She had visited both institutions in Tuscaloosa on her own initiative in February 1967 after reading a news story about overcrowding and poor staffing. She was horrified by what she saw in the filthy, barracks-like settings.

Mrs. Wallace was succeeded by Lieutenant Governor Albert Brewer, a one-time ally of her husband who soon showed a strong interest to govern in his own right and to retain the office in the 1970 election. Brewer gained a seemingly unlikely ally in this quest in President Richard M. Nixon, who wanted to neutralize Wallace as a presidential adversary for a second time. Wallace beat Brewer in the Democratic primary and returned as governor in January 1971, having remained in office for two consecutive terms. George Wallace also secured and served a fourth term from 1983 to 1987.