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He sustained an injury during the game at the University of Mississippi — which brought cheers from the crowd. He says returning to the court after half time couldn't have taken more than 15 seconds, but it felt like a lifetime: "It's like the comedian Dick Gregory said, 'Yeah, I spent four years in Mississippi one night.'"

Games like these took a tremendous emotional toll. Wallace says if he hadn't given himself time to heal, there would have been terrible consequences.

"I would have committed suicide," he says, "like Henry Harris, the second black athlete who played in the SEC, who ran and jumped off a building a few years later. Like Nat Northington, who was the first athlete, period, who just left after about a year or so. But there's no question about it — if you don't think you have to heal after getting beat up, you don't know the basics."

Wallace didn't really have the support of his teammates. Those games, those experiences he survived on his own.

After graduation he went up north — he needed a break, he said. Law school and work with the Justice Department followed before he settled in Washington, D.C.

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Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C. Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean hide caption

itoggle caption Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean

Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C.

Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean

But his storied season with Vanderbilt and the SEC? Glance around his office and you'd never know it. Wallace doesn't display a single memento from that time — no trophies, framed jerseys or even newspaper clippings.

Maraniss says "it's not the formula story that you might expect" but there is one moment in Wallace's story that he admits has that Hollywood feel.

"In Perry's last game, which was against Mississippi State in Nashville, his last basket of his college career is a slam dunk, which was illegal at the time," Maraniss explains. "It was a game that Perry dedicated to his mother, who had just passed away about a year earlier. And Perry saved the best for last, in many ways, in this game."

"Yeah, that's what I wanted," Wallace adds: "To make a statement. And I had made a promise to my mother, and I kept it best that last game. So I scored — what was it? — 28 points and 27 rebounds. Nobody's ever heard of that. And the pice de la resistance was the dunk at the end. ... The illegal dunk. And that basically said, well, these segregation laws were illegal laws. They were the law, but they weren't just. And so this is what I think of all those unjust, illegal rules. There it is. Slam dunk."

Read an excerpt of Strong Inside

Most books about President Richard Nixon focus either on his foreign policies or on the crimes and misdemeanors that forced his resignation under threat of impeachment.

Not Stephen Hess's new book, The Professor and the President.

Hess, who has been writing about government for decades out of Washington's Brookings Institution, was witness to a rare partnership inside the White House.

The president – Richard Nixon — was a Republican who felt obliged to do something about welfare.

"Government can do a lot of things for men. It can provide a man shelter, and it can provide him food, and it can provide him a house. It can provide him clothing, but it can't provide him dignity," Nixon had said.

The professor — Daniel Patrick Moynihan — was a Democrat, a Harvard sociologist, whom Nixon recruited to the White House staff.

Moynihan went on to be a four-term senator from New York, and Hess says he managed to persuade Nixon to embrace a much more liberal approach to welfare than most of his White House team would ever have done. He gave NPR's Robert Siegel a peek into Nixon and Moynihan's relationship, which he refers to as "the oddest couple that you could imagine."

Interview Highlights

On appointing Moynihan to White House staff

It was really quite fascinating because after he appointed Moynihan, the liberal Harvard Democratic social scientist, he appointed Arthur Burns, the Columbia conservative economist. And they went at it at the highest level in the highest fashion for the mind and the heart of Richard Nixon.

On Nixon giving Moynihan a blank slate

When Pat Moynihan came to the hotel Pierre, where the transition was, in New York and met with the president-elect and then came downstairs to have dinner with me, he said, "he's ignorant!" Meaning, he doesn't know anything about domestic affairs. I knew Richard Nixon; I had been his speech writer when he ran for governor. I said, "Oh no, he's disinterested. He is fascinated and overwhelmed in his interest in international affairs and our place in the world." But what it meant for Pat Moynihan was he had an open slate to write upon.

On treating Nixon as an intellectual, and some artful flattery

The next thing [Moynihan] found out was that Richard Nixon was very smart. Once he could get to him, they developed an interesting relationship, because, almost from the get-go, Richard Nixon started to be treated by Pat Moynihan as an intellectual. Nobody had ever treated him as an intellectual before, and Nixon was fascinated by it.

What Pat was doing was trying to convince Nixon to be a great president. You don't go in and say, "you should be a great president." You could say a "great athlete," a "great actor" — you don't say a "great president."

So the word he used was "historic." Everything that Nixon was doing, even some little thing about moving the boundaries of regional agency – "historic!" No president had ever done it before. And that's what he was trying to do. Remember, Pat Moynihan was born in 1929. All of his youth was FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. That was the model of a president. And that's what he was trying to sell to Richard Nixon.

On Nixon leaving his feelings aside

August 8, 1969, [Nixon] went on television to announce his [welfare] program and said to the American people, "this is gonna cost more than the present program." For a president to say that? And, of course, that was very offensive to Arthur Burns, whose whole theme was to bring down the cost of government.

Gasoline prices are at their lowest level in four years. The price at the pump in many states is almost a full dollar cheaper than it was last spring.

So some politicians think this is a good time to raise gasoline taxes. Several states are tired of waiting for Congress to fix the federal highway trust fund, so they're considering raising gas taxes themselves to address their crumbling roads.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is trying to sell that state's legislators — especially those in his own Republican party — on raising the state's motor fuel tax to fund long neglected infrastructure needs.

"Do you know of anyone who says we have good roads in this state? Nobody," said Snyder at a recent speaking engagement after touring a crumbling retaining wall along the Lodge Freeway in Detroit.

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Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is one several lawmakers pushing for a higher gas tax. Carlos Osorio/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Carlos Osorio/AP

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is one several lawmakers pushing for a higher gas tax.

Carlos Osorio/AP

Snyder is calling on lawmakers to roughly double Michigan's gas tax over time, to raise more than $1 billion.

"The money I'm talking about is to get us to fair to good roads. They're not even going to be great roads, folks. We can't afford to have great roads in this state given what we need to invest," he continued.

Snyder is one of a growing number of Republicans across the country who see the need to spend big to improve infrastructure, and who are looking to increase gas taxes to pay for it.

"There's kind of been a switch that's been flipped," says Carl Davis, a senior analyst with the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Davis says gas tax increases are now on the table in states across the country, from New Jersey to Utah to South Carolina to South Dakota. Democratic governors in Delaware, Vermont and Kentucky, and other states are also looking to possibly raise gas taxes, as has been done in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire and Wyoming in the last two years.

"There have been overwhelming infrastructure needs for quite awhile and now that gas prices are lower, it's a little bit more politically feasible to talk about raising the gas tax," he says.

Davis says states are looking to raise their own gas taxes because the federal highway fund is lacking.

"The federal gas tax hasn't gone up in over 21 years and the states don't have the luxury of just sitting around and doing nothing on this issue. They have to find a way to keep their bridges from falling down and keep their roads from developing too many potholes," he argues.

With the federal gas tax stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 and construction costs rising, the Highway Trust Fund nearly went broke last summer before Congress came up with a short-term fix that will only last until May.

“ The federal gas tax hasn't gone up in over 21 years and the states don't have the luxury of just sitting around and doing nothing on this issue. They have to find a way to keep their bridges from falling down and keep their roads from developing too many potholes.

- Carl Davis, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

While there is some support among a small, but growing number of Republicans in Congress for raising the federal gas tax, including retiring Wisconsin Rep. Tom Petri, and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, Congress appears unlikely to act before the end of the year.

And despite poor road conditions, there is little enthusiasm for a gas tax increase among many drivers.

At a Mobile gas station and mini-mart in Chicago's south suburbs, customers are overjoyed by the recent sharp drop in pump prices here.

"Oh, I love it. I love it. I have extra money to spend," says Cheryl Press of Chicago.

Press says she wants to spend her extra cash on Christmas presents, not a higher gas tax.

She and others don't expect gas prices to stay this low for long, and fear the impact of higher gas taxes when prices rise again.

"The prices [are] a whole lot better than what they were right now," says Thomas Harden, as he fills up his pickup truck. "What's the good in raising the tax?"

He'd rather see an income tax increase for the wealthy to fund highway repairs. "Let the rich folks fix the roads and give people like us a break. That's the way I see it."

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Vehicles wait in line at a gas station in Turnersville, N.J., last Thursday. Tom Mihalek/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Tom Mihalek/Reuters/Landov

Vehicles wait in line at a gas station in Turnersville, N.J., last Thursday.

Tom Mihalek/Reuters/Landov

But not everyone is against the idea. Ted Bonau says he'd support an increase in the gas tax to fix the roads.

"Yeah, I would. I mean the roads are pretty bad," the Chicago resident says.

So a gas tax increase might be a tough sell, but not an impossible one.

Congress

For months, Liberia was the country worst-hit by the Ebola outbreak. But the wards in Liberia's Ebola treatment units now stand virtually empty. The number of newly reported cases fell from almost 300 cases a week in mid-September to fewer than 100 by mid-October.

But that doesn't mean it's time to take it easy. In fact, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has just announced a new campaign, Ebola Must Go, which focuses on the role of the community.

Liberia still records 12 new cases each day, says Kevin De Cock, the doctor leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Ebola effort in Liberia. At least half are in the capital Monrovia, a city of more than a million. There are also pockets of the virus in the countryside.

Goats and Soda

Startling Statistic: Only 8 Patients In Largest Ebola Hospital

With Ebola Cases Down, Officials Worry Liberians Aren't Worried Enough Dec. 8, 2014

"We cannot rest until Ebola is eliminated," De Cock says. "Great progress has been made, but elimination of the disease is not yet in sight."

DeCock spoke to me about what still needs to be done. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Liberians seem to have a growing sense of optimism. What about you?

There's a great danger of complacency and accepting this [disease] as the new normal when, in fact, we are now at the same stage [in intensity of the outbreak] we were in late June, early July. Just a year ago, this situation would have been completely unthinkable.

What do you mean by complacency?

Well, one of the effects of this epidemic has been that it's transformed the way the world thinks about Ebola. We've always considered this an important infection, but a kind of isolated and exotic one. It was something one read about in tropical medicine textbooks.

All of a sudden this disease [is] being discussed at the highest levels of international and U.S. governments, on the floor of the United Nations, at the Security Council. Really, it's a crisis in global health.

And yet ... there's a danger that when the epidemic becomes more invisible again, this [continual presence of Ebola] becomes accepted as the new normal. We cannot allow that to happen.

How worrisome are the pockets of transmission in rural areas?

Goats and Soda

As Ebola Pingpongs In Liberia, Cases Disappear Into The Jungle

What we're seeing are clusters erupting in different counties, somewhat unpredictably. About a third to a half [are] apparently initiated by somebody from Monrovia, having traveled — and then local spread.

The country, with all of the international [agencies and organizations], is getting better at responding to these clusters, but they're all their own mini-outbreaks and each of them needs to be addressed and extinguished. And this is continuing to happen. So this is an ongoing epidemic.

How realistic is Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's target of no new Ebola cases by Christmas?

Goats and Soda

Liberian President's Ambitious Goal: No New Ebola Cases By Christmas

It's an aspirational target, and such aspirations are to be encouraged and supported. We follow the data, [which] show that there is substantial transmission of Ebola still ongoing. And Christmas is pretty near, but we'll see what happens.

The state of emergency has been lifted. There's discussion of reopening schools. All this is very positive, but one has to balance that with a false sense of security that this is all over. And it's not over.

The president's new initiative, Ebola Must Go, shifts the focus from building Ebola treatment units to mobilizing the community. Is this the right time for such a change?

It's a balance now between continuing to address the acuteness of the situation [and] the longer term commitment as the health system reopens. Hospitals begin to focus on the problems that have been neglected in these last few months — you know, maternal health, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, etc.

I think what the president is aiming at is that [the community] has to want a society that is free of Ebola. That it's not just a job for the Ministry of Health or the government or the external partners. Communities have to be involved.

I personally believe communities have played a substantial role in the impressive decline in the epidemic, particularly in Lofa County [northeast, near the Guinean border]. We need that across the whole region. It's encouraging that the president is committed to this and is really trying to mobilize the people.

What's been different about the Liberian response vs. the response in Sierra Leone, where cases are still rising?

That's an interesting question because there was this perception that something special happened in Liberia. [The answer is] yes and no.

Liberia did what we know needs to be done, which is you isolate the sick, you provide best treatment and safely bury the dead. You protect health care workers, base your response on data and do contact tracing. In some parts of the country, communities played an active role, particularly rural areas. So there's nothing special.

And yet on the other hand, the fact that they did it in a country that is amongst the 10 poorest in the world is encouraging and impressive.

I think in Sierra Leone, they're very reassured to hear that they're doing the right things but they accept that there needs to be increased intensity. And what I think has happened in Freetown [the capital] perhaps is that there's been somewhat of a slowness in isolating the sick [and] waiting for the right facilities to be in place when actually you can't wait. You have to use what you've got to do the best you can.

What's your advice?

Press on. We need to continue with a vigorous response based on addressing Ebola as we know how to do it — with case finding, isolation of the sick, treatment and care of the sick and very, very importantly at this stage, contact tracing. And, as the healthcare system reopens, protection of healthcare workers.

Ebola Must Go

Monrovia

ebola

Liberia