Everyman

Maddox watches a 1997 videotape of Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club" in which Carter, between a smile and a grimace, confesses that God has abandoned him twice during his life. Once following his father's death, once after he lost Georgia's 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary.

"The guy that beat me," Carter explains, " was Lester Maddox, a racist who won the race because he would stand in front of his restaurant with a pick handle and anybody who came up that was black, he would beat him over the head with it."

Maddox shakes his head. In a quiet voice, his eyes still focused on the TV, he says, "Nobody ever got hit with a pick handle at my restaurant." "Nobody ever swung anything", he says. Not him, not his friends, not his 20 white employees, not his 40 black employees. A racist? "Would a racist hire 40 African-Americans?" he asks. Would a racist appoint more blacks to state government during his term in office than any Georgia governor before him? Would a racist, asks Bob Short, Maddox's former press secretary, join up with a black musician and play nightclubs for 20 months under the headline of 'The Governor and the Dishwasher"?

"There are two Lester Maddoxes," says the former governor, who often refers to himself in the third person. "One created by God - one created by the media." If he believed all the cruel things said about him over the years, he wouldn't have voted for himself either. So why would Jimmy Carter, after all he's been through - globetrotting for peace and human rights, all that nasty business with the 62 American hostages in Iran - still be bothered by a little guy named Lester Maddox?

Maddox is slightly bewildered and more than a little tickled. He's always enjoyed his role as political outsider, the thorn in the side, the mouse who stampedes elephants. Maddox has been a burr under the saddles of many Georgians, black and white, ever since he ran for mayor of Atlanta in 1957 and lost, then ran again and lost, then ran for lieutenant governor and lost, then ran for governor in 1966, and - to the surprise of everyone but God and Lester Garfield Maddox won.

I recently spent an afternoon with Maddox at his home in Marietta. I was curious to see if the "ardent segregationist" of the 1960s had mellowed with age. Or if he had become more acidic. Or, perhaps, politically correct like conservative politicians Bob Barr and Trent Lott, who got into hot media water recently by hanging out with the pro-white Council of Conservative Citizens and later said they had no idea who they were sitting down to chicken dinner with.

Over the telephone, Maddox sounds frail but sharp. "I'm alive, thank God," he says. "I've got a bad aorta valve, cancer in my ear, a bad colon, two cancer operations, and I lost my precious wife." His voice cracks at the mention of Virginia Maddox, who died 21 months ago. Maddox has lived on Johnson Ferry Road since 1978. The farm and pastures across the street