Insight

MONTGOMERY — In the kindly, craggy face of John Patterson can be seen the New South governor our Alabama never had.

Pull back the layers of a not-so-musty history of pre-civil rights, Deep South-politics and root around a little. There, you'll see it: The reformer, the rural highway builder, the opener of credit to the poor, the man of the people, the populist, the leader of the vanguard of the New South — except he wasn't.

Therein lies the tragic reality of Alabama's youngest governor. Though he was most of the above, he also was the segregationist governor.

He was initiated by fire into Alabama politics when he was appointed to the office of attorney general after his crime-busting dad was assassinated in Phenix City in 1954.

He cleaned up Phenix City and went on to the governor's mansion in 1958 to clean up much of the rest of the state. Then he went about trying to fix other ills of Alabama by using an ideology more at home with today's liberal left.

Yet, he is not our early-day William Winter or our Jimmy Carter, all because of something called gradualism. Or, put more commonly, the slow-walking of integration. It was a mistake for him, and for Alabama.

Because John Patterson was not a hero prepared to ignore real politik, Alabama lived through the anguish of the confrontational policies of George Wallace.

The casual observer of John Patterson sees that. But that same observer notices Patterson as the man who oversaw Alabama's disastrous response to the Freedom Riders' tour through the state, first in Anniston, then in Birmingham, and finally in Montgomery.

The populist is underneath that version, and here dwells his true being: The one who has uttered 1,000 times how wrong he was, how sorry he is, and how remorseful he feels for not fighting for enfranchisement.

You see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. There is no equivocation on the importance of blacks being able to vote.

Today, he comes awfully close to telling you which candidate he will support in the Democratic presidential race. "Obama (Obama) is running a good campaign … (Hillary) Clinton is not..." he told this reporter.

Now, that underlying, differing layer of John Patterson is in the pages of a new book, Nobody But The People, published by New South. It's a biography by Warren Trest, a military historian and author of numerous works.

Trest has an engaging style and a way of pulling the reader along, not only with Patterson's yarns, but also with the mere telling of history. There are clunky attempts at Southern dialogue of the day; the details of the Freedom Riders in Anniston — and especially in Montgomery — need more explanation. But his achievement is to convey to Alabama, and possibly to our sister states, the essential goodness of a once-flawed man who lived on Goat Hill.

A man of the people, as Patterson likes to think of himself, first has to know the sufferings of the people. At least that came natural.

Former state Sen. Gerald Dial talked about that part of the former governor's life after listening to Trest and Patterson speak at the State Archives here on Wednesday.

"He had that rural background," Dial said, while waiting for Patterson to sign a copy of the book. "His environment early on was dirt roads, running barefoot through the countryside. His family wasn't bad off, but when you grow up among the poor and the wanting, you just don't forget that. You don't forget the people who still suffer from it."

Yes, the governor made mistakes, Dial said, "but here's the truth: Had he been an integrationalist in 1958, they would have burned his house down."

History understood in context. But history also is littered with the sacrifices for greater, future good.

From the comfortable observation point of 2008, it is impossible to miss the obvious. If anyone could have led Alabama out of the darkness of segregation before it became our nightmare, it was Patterson, a strong, youthful reformer.

He knew better — the book makes that clear — and was raised to respect people, no matter their religion (he endorsed John Kennedy, a Catholic, for president in 1960) or color. Yet he failed to be a leader or accomplice in the greatest movement for social change in the 20th century.

Was it for pragmatism's sake, for gradualism? Or was it instead because of a lack of realization of the enormity of a moment?

Nobody But The People makes it clear that rarely has a more decent man occupied the governor's office. So perhaps the question falls to us.

With the knowledge of history, with our self-righteousness during a week when we remember the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr., comes a question: Would we do differently? To do the right thing, especially when it's not in your interest, is to be truly courageous. We should all ask more of ourselves and pray that we have it when the time comes.

That's already happened for Patterson. No one can change the past, but you can admit the essential wrongness of your actions and that of your society at the time.

That means something.

One of the few black faces in the crowd on Wednesday belonged to Joseph Caver, an archivist with the U.S. Air Force. Afterwards, he spoke of the darker side of Patterson's administration, before pushing the positive.

"He was a great man, a statesman," he said. "I can respect people like Patterson, even Wallace, people who step forward and admit they were wrong. He was a Machiavellian who regrets what he did.

"Today, he's a statesman. We need more people like him," he said.

Nobody But The People is a good but sad story. You see Alabama's chance to join the enlightened and escape the coming storm slip away during Patterson's rule. You see glimpses of what we could have been.

But the truth is more tragic.