The Most Powerful Politician in America

1974

27min

Alabama governor George Wallace made his name as a segregationist remembered for standing “in the schoolhouse door” of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an attempt to stop the enrolment of black students. John Pilger subsequently interviewed Wallace on the campaign trail during two general elections.During the second, in 1972, Wallace was shot in an assassination attempt, leaving him paralysed and in a wheelchair. In The Most Powerful Politician in America, made in 1974, Pilger looks at the likelihood that a reinvented Wallace will run for the White House two years later, manipulating contemporary American passions and exploiting his influence in the powerful “Dixie” states controlled by the Democratic Party.