LESTER MADDOX AS GOVERNOR: PLAYING BATMAN IN GEORGIA

...After our interview, when I called the governor's press secretary to fill in details and dates of his past experience—skimmed over in campaign literature and official biographical sketches—Maddox himself got on the phone and offered the answers...

...he said to me...

...The inner sanctum looks like a reception room to an inner sanctum...

...To the inevitable question of who is behind this governmental neophyte, pulling the strings to keep Georgia going while he plays Batman, the answer seems to be: nobody...

...There are several ash trays placed strategically around the room, including one on his desk, but no ashes in any of them...

...Maddox sees his decision-making from-the-hip as a virtue...

...Wallace's springtime Southern governors' summit but did not fall in behind her...

...The referendum approach is seen by many as a device by Maddox to pass a hot potato to the people, since consolidation is in many cases just another word for integration—closing small and inferior Negro county schools and moving the students into a better white school...

...Nobody really imagined, of course, that it wouldn't, but the expectation was that by now Georgia would be Alabama-bound in the Land of Oz style, along the yellow brick road to the mythical land of Interposition, with OF Lester playing The Cowardly Lion to Lurleen Wallace's Dorothy...

...By the same token, his call for a "Committee of One Thousand" to advise him reportedly was made without consulting anybody, and the immediate result was an outcry against what many saw as a public spy system...

...He simply doesn't do the hard, deliberate thinking the job requires, critics say...

...But part of his strength was in managing to turn his lack of public experience into a virtue among Georgia's bureaucrat-haters...

...But then Rockefeller probably would not be asked because he is in Who's Who, with all dates and details listed...

...Picture, if you can, Governor Nelson Rockefeller doing that...

...For Lester Maddox, restaurant owner who was only second choice of the people last fall but still became governor of Georgia, all things are possible...

...His biggest weakness," a colleague in the state government told me, "is that he speaks before he thinks things through...

...But it seems to fit this unhurried governor, who by his own admission finds life easier now than when he was running the Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta and chasing-off would-be Negro customers with ax handles...

...The Bureau thereupon telephoned Maddox, who called the sheriff and ordered him to release the prisoners, lest the governor fly down and post bond himself...

...You can't make chicken salad out of chicken feathers...

...The reason I'm able to do that is that I don't think of the political implications...

...It happened that the Yale boy had been supplied with some beer and that the girl was under drinking age...

...I make them in a matter of minutes...

...Why, sir," he said to me in his manner of looking past his interviewer as he talks, "the way I'm conducting myself is the way I've always conducted myself...

...He opened his new business, Pickrick Furniture, in 1965 and now leaves it to his wife, son, and a fulltime manager while he is off governing...

...One explanation insists that Maddox appeared to be getting faint and the Vice President merely intended to steady him...

...This kind of Robin Hood conduct has boosted Maddox' stock with the voters to the point where most politicians say he would win an election outright if it were held today...

...I don't worry about them, I just do what I think is best for the people...

...He's performed a lot better than I expected, but more for what he hasn't done than for what he has...

...He's setting himself up for a lot of trouble...

...He was a supervisor in a steel plant at age nineteen and in a bridge plant at twenty-five...

...Maddox' only experience in public affairs before this year was in failing to attain it...

...In fact, he went along with substantial increases for the state university system for the next two years, though first he attempted a reduction...

...He has an innate ability to get on the right side of things," another capitol associate said to me, "but he sure embarrasses a lot of people in the process...

...Maddox says it just won't happen...

...The distinction does not seem to have been lost on Maddox...

...They were turned loose...

...There always is an open ear, too, for the "little people" who can't make it to Atlanta on their day...

...If something goes wrong, he just goes back there and cleans it up himself...

...But the governor reiterates that he wants no part of George Wallace's third party either...

...But it is inevitable that something will happen that will reveal his flaws," Weltner continued...

...Among the reported goals of Vice President Humphrey in his recent Atlanta visit was to persuade Maddox that defiance of the Federal Government in dealing with racial issues is a dead end, whereas compliance offers a flexibility that will enable him to adjust the degree and pace of integration...

...They're used to waiting for decisions...

...Some counties already want to go ahead, but Maddox insists that the people have a chance to vote on it...

...His background is so appalling, and he is so totally unqualified to be governor," Weltner said, "that everybody is amazed that he's been able to strike a few responsive chords, and that the blatant racism that has marked his past hasn't asserted itself...

...His most prominent callers so far have been the Negro escaped convicts who turned themselves in for a chance to complain about prison conditions...

...Maddox isn't...

...he, along with Mississippi's Paul Johnson, attended Mrs...

...When a group of Carroll County officials accused him in May of blocking their plan to consolidate their county schools, in a fit of temper he threw them out of his office...

...He even has found himself escorted along this unfamiliar path by the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, Hubert H. Humphrey, in an arm-in-arm shot seen with disbelief around the political world...

...But if it does, he adds, local police will handle it, with the state ready to move in if necessary...

...Everybody wants on it," he told me...

...Maddox also has been a one-man integrity squad...

...But the press insists that playing Robin Hood is no way to run a state government...

...If there's trouble," he insists, "it will have to be supplied from the outside...

...One thing nobody is deprecating is Maddox' ability to reach and hold the "little people...

...This do-it-myself style sometimes extends to minutia...

...In spite of his cozy pose with Humphrey, it is "doubtful," he told me, that he will support President Johnson unless the President names some Maddox-type conservatives to his Cabinet—and to the Supreme Court, no less...

...if no other racial issue smokes him out before then, this one could do it...

...Next year, Maddox is expected to push for a referendum by counties on school consolidations required to meet Federal school aid guidelines...

...Maddox himself says he never gave a thought to the political impact, but that as far as he can tell it turned out favorably...

...Another development that might force the real Lester Maddox to choose between support of the moderates who have been pleasantly but uneasily surprised by him, and the rednecks who have been his mainstays in leaner days, would be racial violence in Georgia cities before the summer is out...

...Exactly, say some of those around him...

...This incident triggered a Maddox-ordered investigation of the state penal system on the spot—and more surrenders at the capitol, to a point where Maddox finally expressed the hope the convicts would use more orthodox avenues in the future...

...He lost the popular vote to Republican Representative Howard "Bo" Callaway by a few thousand ballots but was selected by the Democratic-controlled legislature when no candidate had a clear majority...

...His success story," Maddox' campaign literature proclaimed, "unlike others who seek the high office of governor, came from individual initiative, dedication, determination, and hard work under the American Free Enterprise System, rather than all or part of his success coming from living off the taxpayers...

...Every other Wednesday is "Little People Day"—a throwback to the Andrew Jackson era—when folks can just walk in, tell him their troubles, and get action...

...He spends his time greeting Boy Scouts and 'little people' and the administration of the state just drifts...

...Few academicians in the field of government would challenge either Weltner's characterization of Maddox' background as "appalling" or his judgment that the man is "totally unqualified" to be governor...

...I think the people today are seeing the real Lester Maddox...

...Politically, Maddox must make up his mind what to do about supporting the national Democratic Party in 1968...

...In my business, I've had to be governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and treasurer all myself...

...When a New England couple recently called a Better Business Bureau after a shakedown in a South Georgia shop, the local sheriff reacted by arresting them...

...Citizens who have had their water shut off— sometimes for not paying the bill—¦ are likely to receive gubernatorial intervention, to the dismay of public utilities officials...

...His articles have appeared in The New Republic, Esquire, and The Reporter...

...I think this is what surprises people," he told me...

...he was defeated for mayor of Atlanta and lesser offices prior to his astounding showing of 1966...

...He said he did, but thinks it is just a matter of time before some crisis forces Maddox to revert to form...

...Friends and enemies alike say he really is the governor, the decision-maker...

...Georgia is relatively stable now, but three and a half more years is a long time to endure one demonstrably unstable man...

...Lester has surprised a lot of us," a professional Democratic politician told me at the state capitol...

...The real Lester Maddox, round-faced, tight-lipped, milquetoastish, sits in his own office as if he were in Sunday school—erect, hands folded on his lap, expressionless as he drones in a monotone...

...The image of Lester Maddox that some folks had was the image my opponents in the news media, politics, and business wanted to build...

...When his executive secretary, Morgan "Bucky" Redwine, lent his ear to a visiting Yale student and fixed him up with a date with a girl in the governor's office, he found himself, along with the girl, fired by Maddox...

...His desk is clean and neat, with only one pile of papers, two small American flags, and some trinkets on it...

...But, since he came into office literally on the eve of a new legislative session, there is little to take a reading on yet...

...I asked former Representative Charles L. Weltner, who quit the Georgia Democratic ticket last fall when Maddox won a primary runoff for the right to head it, if he agreed...

...So far Maddox has backed away from the all-out defiance of the Alabama Wallaces on Federal guidelines...

...Unlike Ronald Reagan in California, Maddox has not meat-axed the budget...

...Maddox meets criticism of his style by turning a deaf ear—and opening the doors of his office wide...

...Maddox himself, now a little fatter and sassier in his red-carpeted Capitol office, expresses bafflement over the reaction to his first months...

...another holds that Humphrey's ingrained, comradely exuberance momentarily got the best of him...

...that's the scary thing about it, in his foes' view...

...a Navy inspector of engine materials, a supervisor of production controls and teacher of blueprint-reading for an aircraft company, and a real estate salesman before opening "Lester's Grill" in Atlanta in 1944, the forerunner of the Pickrick Restaurant that made him a millionaire between 1947 and 1964, when he closed it rather than serve Negroes...

...The woodwork characters around the capitol have crawled out again and it won't be long before they get their hands in the coffers...

...Instead, to the considerable surprise of friend and foe, Maddox has taken a fork in the road, toward a moderation that always had been off-limits to him in the past...

...When Maddox listened to the prison convicts and promptly ordered an investigation, critics say, he put his director of prisons in a corner unfairly...

...If we're strong enough to win with a third party, we're strong enough to win in the Democratic Party," he insists...

...Maddox quit school at seventeen to help feed a family of nine, and his only formal training thereafter was in correspondence courses in accounting and engineering...

...He goes about being governor the way he ran his restaurant...

...Other "little people" calls have produced less dramatic stories, but have underlined the same Maddox penchant for personal action...

...Lester Maddox as Governor Playing Batman in Georgia by JULES WITCOVER Atlanta Qix months after the inauguration ^ of ax-handle segregationist Lester G. Maddox as governor, the state of Georgia survives...

...I just have to be governor now," JULES WITCOVER is a Washington correspondent for the Newhouse papers...