“Madly For Adlai” read a campaign button from the two Eisenhower-Stevenson Presidential campaigns, and it has since become apparent that those who wore it meant it. One might like Ike, but if one was for Adlai Stevenson, one was for Adlai madly. Not since William Jennings Bryan had a Presidential candidate found so devoted a following; not since Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson had a national political figure so thoroughly captured the fancy of American intellectuals. The quality of this appeal was extraordinary, as, in many ways, was Adlai Stevenson’s whole career. He possessed the very reverse of “charisma,” a term first hauled into the arena of political discourse to denote the magical capacity of leaders to mold large crowds, or even whole nations, into a passionate community of the faithful. Hitler had charisma; Ghandi had it; Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt each had a touch of it. Stevenson’s magic was of a different order; his appeal was of a subtler kind. In what did it consist? Except for those fortunate few to whom politics is an unending string of moral certitudes, this remains a puzzle, as does Adlai Stevenson himself.

There is, however, no doubt that he did manage to evoke an astonishing degree of adoration. The aura of special feeling that enveloped John F. Kennedy only after his death in Dallas, surrounded Adlai Stevenson for a substantial stretch of his adult life. Alongside the warmth and determined elegance with which his friends and admirers have written about Stevenson, the eulogies to President Kennedy read as though spoken by a clergyman who did not know the deceased while he lived. Nor can there be any doubt that Adlai Stevenson’s personality had a profound effect on the people who knew him; he seemed to elevate all of them and somehow make them feel good. As for the rest of his admirers, it is already a cliché to say that he struck a chord of affection in people in a way few other American political figures have ever managed to do. As Hans J. Morgenthau, not a notably sentimental man, has written: “His promise was ours, and so was his failure, and the tears we shed for him we shed for ourselves.”

Adlai Stevenson’s personality was always at the center of his political career and now, only three and a half years after his death, the career is beginning to recede and the personality to take over altogether. Adlai Stevenson was a politician—his admirers would insist on the word “statesman”—whose influence appears to have outweighed his achievements. Moreover, what he had to say seems in many respects to be a good deal less striking than the way or the time he chose to say it. Because of these and other factors, interest in Adlai Stevenson as a political figure has already begun to evanesce. Yet the meaning of his political career seems to offer so many clues to the riddle of American political life, to raise so many important issues and problems, that it is worth examining that career more closely before Adlai Stevenson is permanently laid to rest in the Westminster Abbey of the American liberal consciousness.1

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Adlai Stevenson’s Early Upbringing

Adlai Stevenson was born in 1900 into a family that, if it was not excessively wealthy, seemed to want for very little. They summered at Charlevoix, Michigan, then the Midwest version of Newport, Rhode Island, and Adlai’s sister was able to study in Switzerland under Carl Jung. Adlai Stevenson was said to have had an almost Confucian regard for his ancestors, and in his case such family piety was not without justification. His paternal grandfather, the first Adlai Ewing Stevenson, was Vice President of the United States during Grover Cleveland’s second administration; his grandmother, Letitia Adlai Stevenson, played a prominent part in the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution. But the most important influence on the young Adlai Stevenson, according to friends and biographers, was the memory of Jesse Weldon Fell, his maternal great-grandfather. Fell is credited with having suggested the idea for the Lincoln-Douglas debates; he was Lincoln’s floor manager at the 1860 Republican Convention; and he later served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the executor of Lincoln’s will.

Adlai Stevenson’s boyhood in Bloomington, Illinois, seems to have been essentially tranquil. Since his father was active in national Democratic politics and for a brief time served as Secretary of State of Illinois, the pleasures of small-town life were occasionally heightened by an important political visitor. In 1912, for example, his father introduced Adlai Stevenson to Woodrow Wilson, who was later to become one of his political heroes. In the same year, the tranquility of Adlai Stevenson’s life was interrupted, catastrophically. At a party, a gun he was playing with went off and killed a female cousin—an incident that doubtless would have unstrung a less finely balanced boy. (In later years, commentators with a taste for psychoanalysis attempted to make something of this sad incident, but without much success.) In school Adlai Stevenson seldom rose above a Gentleman’s C, favoring the social and extracurricular life. In fact, after a rather mediocre record in the public schools of Bloomington and Springfield, he failed the college board examinations for Princeton. In preparation for a second try, it was arranged for him to attend Choate, where “habits of efficiency and industry” were instilled along with an “understanding of the enduring values and of the spirit of public service.”

Finally admitted to Princeton, Adlai Stevenson proceeded to achieve the kind of success there that F. Scott Fitzgerald dreamed about. Moreover, he achieved it in the best patrician manner: quietly, casually, without seeming to strive for it. He became an officer of Quadrangle, one of the school’s most desirable eating clubs; managing editor of the Daily Princetonian; and a member of the prestigious Senior Council (class of ’22).

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Adlai Stevenson’s Life Post Princeton

Princeton had a lasting effect. It can plausibly be argued that a good part of the Adlai Stevenson style, as well as many of his important political decisions—or, as the case may be, indecisions—derived from Princetonian notions of good form. Princeton also enabled Adlai Stevenson to set out his first lines to the cultivated and politically powerful East. Later, his Eastern connections, like a letter of credit, were there for him to draw on when needed. In the spring of 1946, for example, when Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. resigned as head of the American delegation to the UN, Hermon Dunlap Smith, Adlai Stevenson’s longtime friend, launched a campaign to secure the post for him. Since Truman promptly appointed Warren Austin to the job, that effort came too late, but the manner in which it was begun is of some interest. “The group I was able to approach,” Smith wrote in a memoir of his late friend, “was augmented by the fortuitous circumstance of my going east to my twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, where, in the locker room of the Essex Country Club, I solicited the support of three classmates who represented an incredible combined circulation and influence: Roy Larsen, executive of Time, Life, and Fortune; John Cowles, of the Cowles newspaper-magazine family; and Ralph Henderson of Reader’s Digest.” This is not what the boys at ward headquarters would call grassroots support.

After Princeton, Adlai Stevenson attended Harvard Law School but he did so with less than enthusiasm, for his mind was not yet set on a definite career, and he found Harvard not at all to his tastes: “Everything is concentrated, work, play, exercise.” Toward the end of his second year there, upon the death of a relative who had been the publisher of the Bloomington Pantagraph, a newspaper owned in part by the Stevensons, Adlai returned home to work as an editor and to look after his family’s interest in the paper. Two years later, however, he returned to law school, this time at Northwestern University, where he took law more seriously, earned his degree, and passed the Illinois Bar. In the summer of 1926, before settling down to practice law, he set off on one last journalistic fling. Having secured the credentials of a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Herald-American, he sailed with two friends for the Soviet Union. There he hoped to acquire a scoop of sorts by interviewing Grigori Vasiliev Chicherin, then Foreign Minister of the USSR and an extremely inaccessible man. Though he failed to get his interview, he was to remark in later years: “I’ve always been very thankful for that trip. After what I saw there, I could never believe, as so many did in the early 1930’s, that Soviet Russia’s way was a good way for any state to go.”

Upon returning from the Soviet Union, Adlai Stevenson became, through a Princeton connection, a law clerk in the old and prestigious Chicago firm of Cutting, Moore, and Sidley. He moved into a bachelor apartment along the City’s fashionable Gold Coast, and from there conducted a life commensurate with his social position and by now well-developed gregariousness. Although he was said to be putting in a 50-hour week at his law firm, there was time in the summer to play tennis, shoot, and ride in the lush suburb of Lake Forest; during the winter, there was the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, squash, and a regular round of dances and parties. In 1928, Adlai Stevenson married Ellen Borden, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago real-estate man. After a honeymoon in North Africa, the couple moved into another apartment along the Gold Coast. Single or married, Adlai Stevenson’s life during these years was extremely circumscribed, spent almost entirely among the well-born and the well-to-do.

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Neither the kind of life he was leading nor his first-hand experience of the Soviet Union was calculated to prepare Adlai Stevenson for any involvement in radical politics. And the 30’s, whatever they may have meant to most Americans, were to be an extremely good decade for Adlai Stevenson. He was neither unaware of, nor insensitive to, the ravages of the Depression, but he was not hit hard by it personally. He retained his interest in the Bloomington Pantagraph, and after his mother’s death he came into real-estate holdings. While his active social life continued after his marriage—vigorous sociability was to be a hallmark of his life—he now also began to take an interest in civic affairs around Chicago. He became interested in Jane Addams’s Hull House, of which he was later to become a member of the board of trustees, and he joined the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, of which he was later to become president. After Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Adlai Stevenson, along with a great many other young lawyers, found himself caught up in the excitement of the New Deal, and a few months later he went to Washington to work as a special assistant to the General Counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. (A fellow staff member at the AAA, who was later to prove of consequence in Adlai Stevenson’s career, was Alger Hiss.) For a brief time, he was also with the Federal Alcohol Administration.

Returning to Chicago in the fall of 1934, Adlai Stevenson was appointed government member of the code authorities of two different industries—wine and flour. The following year he was made a partner in his law firm. Branching out now, he became president of the Legislative Voters League in Illinois, finance director of the Democratic National Committee during the 1936 Presidential election campaign, and Illinois chairman of the National Council of Roosevelt Electors. He was beginning to acquire a modest but solid reputation.

After turning down several offers from Washington, all for jobs considerably more glamorous than those he had held earlier, Stevenson did return to the capital in 1941 to serve as personal assistant to Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. Knox had been impressed by Adlai Stevenson for some years, especially by the latter’s work as chairman of the Chicago chapter of the William Allen White Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies—a job which required courage in the heavily isolationist Middle West. Adlai Stevenson was similarly impressed by Knox, who had ridden with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who was strongly opposed to the New Deal, and who in his late sixties nevertheless accepted a strenuous bipartisan political assignment that he must have known was destined to shorten his life. There began to be talk of Adlai Stevenson’s running for the Senate in 1942, but Pearl Harbor put an end to that. Instead, he continued to work for Knox until the latter’s death in 1944, with time out only for a brief stint as head of an emergency mission to Sicily and Italy for the Foreign Economic Administration.

By now, Adlai Stevenson had begun to develop a reputation as an expert on international affairs. Less than a year after leaving Washington, he was called back once more, this time to work with Archibald MacLeish, then the Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for postwar international organizations. During this period, Stevenson served as press spokesman for the American delegation to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco. Later, he was a member of the American delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission meeting in London, and when Secretary of State Stettinius fell ill, Stevenson was appointed chief of the delegation. This was the first government assignment which allowed him to shed his anonymity, and everyone who witnessed his performance agreed that he handled things masterfully.

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Years later, with what had by then become characteristic resignation, Adlai Stevenson would say that he was “doomed” to a political career. For the time being, however, he chose to forestall that doom. After his stint with the American UN delegation in London, he turned down, among other offers, embassies in South America, the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and an Assistant Secretaryship of State. Personal considerations may have played a part in Stevenson’s reluctance to continue in government service: He was now forty-seven years old, his three sons were growing up, and it was an open secret among his friends that his marriage was going badly. More likely, he was thinking about the Senate. He certainly made what sounded like senatorial noises when he spoke, inevitably on foreign policy, to various organizations around Chicago—the Council on Foreign Relations, the University of Chicago audience for the 1946 Walgreen Lectures, the Jewish Welfare Fund Campaign. Asked about his ambitions for the Senate, he told a Chicago reporter: “There is no sense being disingenuous about these things. My mind is open. Naturally, I’m interested.” This may be the closest he ever came to candor about his interest in political office.

As it turned out, of course, Adlai Stevenson was placed on the 1948 Democratic slate as the party’s gubernatorial candidate. The reason he was denied the chance to run for the Senate was that the Republican incumbent, one C. Wayland (“Curly”) Brooks, had a distinguished war record, and the Illinois Democratic machine felt that a senatorial candidate was needed who could match Brooks battle for battle. The man it came up with was Paul H. Douglas, who in his fifties had enlisted as a private in the Marines. It did not matter that Douglas was an expert on state financing and was said to be interested in the governorship; nor did it matter that Stevenson’s one abiding interest was foreign affairs and that his only governmental experience had been at the federal level. The smart money had spoken, and Adlai Stevenson, after agonizing over the decision in a manner that was to become habitual and greatly intensified in later years, finally chose to listen.

This was Stevenson’s first encounter with the Democratic machine in Illinois, and it illustrates, all too unhappily, R. H. S. Crossman’s contention that “American liberalism . . . is still sundered, both emotionally and practically, from the everyday world of machine politics.” Stevenson never felt altogether comfortable among the Democratic party pros, and his relationship with the Democratic machine was characterized by a kind of political schizophrenia. On the one hand, he required the machine’s support on a number of occasions; on the other hand, his career seemed to hold out the hope that maybe one day the machine, with all its parochialism and lack of idealism, might be smashed. That hope was, of course, to prove naive.2

For the most part, Stevenson campaigned for governor on a bipartisan platform of good government against a Republican incumbent who had finally scandalized even the scandal-hardened Illinois voters once too often. Adlai Stevenson won by the largest plurality in the history of the state.

On balance, Stevenson proved a good governor. It is true that he failed to achieve the three items to which he himself had assigned special priority: a revised constitution, a network of bills to improve the quality of criminal justice in the state, and a Fair Employment Practices Commission. But he did make every effort to cut down on the corruption endemic in Illinois, and in good measure he succeeded. There were only three minor scandals during his governorship—the most flamboyant involved the discovery that horsemeat was being used to adulterate hamburgers—and these, comparatively speaking, were mere pigeon droppings in the Augean stables of Illinois politics. Moreover, before he agreed to run for office, Stevenson extracted from the party pros the promise that he would be entirely free to make his own major appointments, including, if he so chose, Republicans and independents; and he did in fact bring men of exceedingly high caliber to state government. (Three of the better-known among them today are W. Willard Wirtz, William McCormick Blair, Jr., and Newton Minow.) He also doubled state aid to education, streamlined the state’s financial system, improved the quality of its welfare programs and mental institutions, and launched an extensive road reconstruction program.

But Adlai Stevenson’s real distinction lay in what he refused to do. He registered more vetoes of appropriations bills than any Illinois governor before him. To the extent that he felt he had the political muscle to do so, he refused to go along with the state’s patronage system, and the most decisive damage he did to this system was to remove the state police force from political control and to subject it to the merit system. His most notable refusal came with his veto—during the ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy—of the Broyles Bill, an extremely moronic piece of legislation that would have imposed an anti-Communist loyalty oath on all candidates for public office, all public officers, and all state employees, including teachers. Stevenson vetoed the measure on precisely the right grounds: “I can see nothing but grave peril to the reputations of innocent people in this perpetuation of rumors and hearsay. . . . I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our ancient rights as free men. . . . We will win the contest of ideas . . . not by suppressing those rights, but by their triumph.”

The major casualty of Stevenson’s years as governor was his marriage; late in 1949 Ellen Borden Stevenson sued for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Reporting the news of the divorce, the Chicago Daily News noted: “Mrs. Stevenson never made any secret of the fact that she considered a political campaign disrupting of home life and that she found political banquets boring.” The failure of his marriage lent support to the view of Stevenson as a tragically lonely figure, for it now appeared that he had paid for his devotion to public life with the shattering of his private life. In any event, from this point on, an aura of the sad conflict between the public and the private life clung to his career, investing it with an extra dimension of poignancy.

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It is not easy to determine precisely when Stevenson began to be considered for the Presidential nomination. In his Memoirs, President Truman contends that Fred M. Vinson, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was his first choice. After Vinson demurred, Truman began canvassing the country for possible candidates. His criteria were certainly straight-forward enough: “Now if we can find a man who will take over and continue the Fair Deal, Point IV, Fair Employment, parity for farmers and consumers protective policy, the Democratic Party can win from now on. It seems to me that the Governor of Illinois has the background and what it takes. Think I’ll talk to him.”

On the night of January 23, 1952, Truman and Stevenson met for about two hours. According to Adlai Stevenson’s account of the meeting, he told Truman he was honored by his consideration, deeply honored, but that he was not interested in the nomination at this time because he very much wanted to complete the ambitious program he had launched in Illinois. In Truman’s account, Stevenson was “apparently flabbergasted” by the offer. The story of their meeting was leaked to the press, and the following day there was speculation that Truman had in fact offered Stevenson his support for the nomination. Shortly thereafter Time picked up on the rumor in a three-page cover story on Stevenson. In February an independent group was organized as the “Illinois Committee, Stevenson for President,” whose hope, in the words of Walter Johnson, one of its co-chairmen, was “to set fire to the Stevenson talk around the country.” These were but the first steps in what would prove to be one of those rare occasions when a Presidential candidate was really drafted by his party—it had happened only twice before, with James Garfield in 1880 and Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. And it was to be the first such draft in which private citizens without official assignment exercised a major influence.3 In a sense, it was all out of Stevenson’s hands.

But only in a rather restricted sense. Later, Stevenson remarked that both the Democratic nomination and the office of the Presidency were “unwanted” by him and that he felt “no sense of adequacy.” In fact, however, he could have stopped the draft movement on his behalf any time he chose to. All he had to do was follow General Sherman’s example and say he would not run even if nominated. Despite his protestations, his feelings of inadequacy, his proclaimed ambitions for Illinois, Stevenson refused to make a statement of this kind; he said everything else but that. He said he was a candidate for reelection in Illinois and could not in good conscience “run for two offices at the same time.” He said he would discourage anyone from trying to gain the nomination for him, and he attempted to do so, writing to Walter Johnson: “I do not want to embarrass you and I am grateful for your good will and confidence but my attitude is utterly sincere and I desperately want and intend to stay on this job [the governorship], with your help I hope.” Right up to the point of his actual nomination he insisted he could not run for the Presidency, but he never said he would not.

In retrospect, it seems a bit much to believe that the sole reasons for Adlai Stevenson’s hesitancy were his sense of inadequacy and his desire to be re-elected governor of Illinois. One underrates him as a politician if one does not assume that he also must have sensed that the Democrats had very little chance of electing a President in 1952. They had been in power for twenty years; an unpopular war was being fought in Korea; the Truman administration was beset by charges of corruption; and finally there was the extraordinary popularity of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who looked, as he later proved, unbeatable. In the summer of 1964, Stevenson was to remark to Lillian Ross of the New Yorker: “Both times I ran it was obviously hopeless. To run as a Democrat in 1952 was hopeless, let alone run against the No. 1 War Hero.”

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It was largely due to the events surrounding the 1952 Convention that Stevenson became subject to the charge of indecisiveness. It was a charge that greatly bothered him. “The more decisive you are in not seeking an exalted office,” he told Miss Ross, “the more they say you’re indecisive.” Even today, many of his friends and admirers are sensitive about this point. Yet all attempts to explain away Adlai Stevenson’s indecisiveness pretty quickly run aground; more interesting are the attempts to explain it. Beyond doubt, it was connected with Stevenson’s relationship to power, which was ambiguous at best. Hans J. Morgenthau has cited Stevenson as the very opposite of the Machiavellian politician whose first concerns are the attainment and the maintenance of power; he considers him one of that rarer breed, in the tradition of the biblical ideal of the good ruler and of Plato’s philosopher-king, who is willing to subordinate his “pursuit of power to transcendent intellectual and moral values.” After Stevenson’s death, Morgenthau wrote about his last years as UN ambassador: “What could already be discerned in 1952, 1956, and 1960 now became almost pathetically obvious: the conflict between intellectual and moral awareness and the pursuit of power, spoiling both.”

Plato remarked that the philosopher-king was always hesitant to accept power, but Stevenson carried hesitancy to the borders of the ludicrous. He was the exact antithesis of Bismarck, who, upon being sent with relatively little training to serve as Prussia’s delegate to the German Federal Diet in 1848, commented: “I shall do my duty. It is God’s affair to give me understanding.” In his acceptance speech to the 1952 Democratic Convention, Stevenson evoked the Lord in very different terms:

I have asked the Merciful Father—the Father of us all—to let this cup pass from me. But from such dread responsibility one does not shrink in fear, in self-interest, or in false humility.

So, “If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.”

Among those who took exception to these remarks was General Eisenhower, whose initial regard for Stevenson was such that he claimed he would never have gone into politics if he had known that Stevenson would be the Democratic nominee. The General listened to the speech while he was on a fishing trip with friends. “Then it happened,” Eisenhower later recalled to Emmet John Hughes. “He got to that part. . . about having debated with himself about the nomination—and ‘wishing that this cup might pass’ from him. Right there I snapped off the TV set and said: ‘After hearing that, fellows, I think lie’s a bigger fake than all the rest of them.’”

Notwithstanding the General’s reaction, Morgenthau is certainly justified in attributing a keen appreciation of the responsibilities of power to Stevenson. It is also true, however, that Stevenson had an equally keen propensity for self-dramatization, of which the acceptance speech in Chicago was but one example. Another came after he had won the nomination: Back in Springfield, he went off by himself to spend an hour of contemplation in Abraham Lincoln’s home. Again, after the drubbing he took in the 1956 election, he told John B. Oakes of the New York Times: “The responsibility of being Chief Executive of this country is humbling and frightening. I have often wondered how a man can presume to seek from his party so exalted a position. . . . To say to your party, . . . ‘I am the best man to be President,’ seems to me inconsistent with the grandeur of the office, and I’ve never quite made the reconciliation in my mind.”

One might, of course, argue that such remarks betray less of self-dramatization than of self-deprecation, and there is no doubt that the latter quality was very much an element of Stevenson’s personal style. But it went along with a very precise idea of his own worth. When scanning the list of potential candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960, for example, he found himself hard put to come up with anyone who was better suited than himself. Like a good many American patricians before him—Henry Adams, a man of incomparably greater intellect, comes to mind-Adlai Stevenson was a strange mixture of arrogance and humility.

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It now appears evident, as Stevenson himself was to note, that not even the Messiah could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. Stevenson’s only hope lay in the possibility that the General, through a series of monumental blunders, would defeat himself. On more than one occasion, Eisenhower came close to obliging. No one will claim that the ’52 Presidential campaign set new marks for heightened political dialogue. As Richard Hofstadter was later to write, “Stevenson’s hopeless position might more readily have been accepted as such if the Republican campaign, in which Nixon and McCarthy seemed more conspicuous than Eisenhower, had not struck such a low note as to stir the will to believe that such men must be rejected by the public.” In this context, many came to see Adlai Stevenson as the best of men in the worst of times.

His attraction to his followers, however, went deeper than the immediate political context. For one thing, his urbanity seemed especially appealing, and—in contrast to the terse style of Harry Truman and the bumbling cliches of General Eisenhower—well suited to America’s preeminent position in the postwar world. That Stevenson was a patrician who also could sound like an intellectual when the occasion called for it, was even better. His wit endeared him to many, even while it may have cost him more votes than any single stand he took during the campaign. There was also a nostalgic element to his candidacy; Stevenson’s obvious and fundamental decency, as well as his insistence on appealing to reason, had something of the 19th century about them. Finally, he was, as Irving Howe has pointed out, “The first of the liberal candidates in the post-Wilson era who made no effort to align himself with the plebeian tradition or with plebeian sentiments.” And therein, perhaps, lay the greatest single attraction of all—Adlai Stevenson seemed simultaneously to be in politics and above politics. His insistence on good form, which was not only a matter of style but also a matter of temperament, set him apart from the hustlers and operators, the wheelers and dealers, who have given American public life its dominant tone. It was also, in part, what finally brought Stevenson down.

But in 1952, there were still reasons for optimism. Despite repeated Republican claims that Stevenson was a “captive candidate,” no one in recent times has gone into a Presidential election owing fewer political obligations. While it is difficult to believe that Stevenson’s indecisiveness about accepting his party’s nomination was a deliberate strategy, it nevertheless had a definite strategic advantage. Owing his nomination to no one, not even to the incumbent President, Stevenson could afford to be his own man.

Despite this enormous freedom, Stevenson’s 1952 campaign did not signify much of a substantive change in Democratic politics. During the Convention, Walter Lippmann noted: “Governor Stevenson’s position is unique in that he alone is not certain to alienate any of the major factions of the party.” Nor was Stevenson about to do so in the course of the election campaign. It was not his way to swim too far out of the mainstream; however distant he may have felt from Democratic machine politics, he did not really make any waves within the party.

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In reviewing the 1952 campaign, one is easily led to the conclusion that in an America with a saner political life Adlai Stevenson might have led an eminent government of enlightened American Tories—a government characterized by a mature conservatism, a serious regard for the importance of tradition as well as change, and a strong sense of decency. One is tempted further to fantasize that such an administration might have included George F. Kennan as Secretary of State, George C. Marshall as Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury. Stevenson’s own rather special conception of the role of tradition in the Democratic party does no damage to this fantasy:

The strange alchemy of this [tradition] has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country—the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations. . . . Our social security system and our Democratic party’s sponsorship of social reforms and advances of the past two decades are conservatism at its best. Certainly there can be nothing more conservative than to change when change is due, to reduce tensions and wants by wise changes, rather than to stand pat stubbornly, until like King Canute we are engulfed by relentless forces that will always go too far.

There was little in the 1952 campaign, surely, to contradict the image of Stevenson as the mature conservative. His campaign resembled his governorship in being distinguished less by any strong originality than by what he refused to do. Most admirably, he refused to be cowed by Senator McCarthy and Richard Nixon. In a speech on “The Nature of Patriotism,” delivered before the American Legion, Stevenson said: “The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-Communism.”

One is reminded of the extent of this climate of fear when one rereads another of Stevenson’s speeches, “The Hiss Case.” To reinforce their charge that Stevenson was soft on Communism, Nixon and the McCarthyite wing of the Republican party used against Stevenson the fact that in the spring of 1949 he had testified in behalf of Alger Hiss. Stevenson’s testimony, Lord knows, had been innocent enough. All he had said was that during the time he had worked with Hiss—in 1933 in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, between 1945 and 1946 at the State Department, and in the fall of 1947 at the UN—his reputation, as far as Stevenson knew, was “good.” He had not testified on Hiss’s innocence or guilt, and indeed he never doubted the verdict of the jury that convicted Hiss. In “The Hiss Case,” Stevenson struck back at McCarthy, at Nixon, and at Eisenhower, who, despite his pretensions of running a Crusade, stood by while this sort of muck was being spread on his behalf. Angry and really lashing out for the first time in the campaign—the speech was delivered less than two weeks before the election—he said in his peroration: “For I believe with all my heart that those who would beguile the voters by lies or half-truths, or corrupt them by fear or falsehood, are committing spiritual treason against our institutions. They are doing the work of our enemies.”

Although Stevenson was a staunch enough anti-Communist—not an unreasonable thing to be while Stalin was still alive and the Communist world gave the impression of being an indestructible monolith—he was also perhaps the first major American political figure of the 50’s to talk about the Soviet Union as if its leaders and people were of human, rather than demonic, proportions. By informing the American people of the inevitable attraction of Communism to the underdeveloped countries, he fulfilled his pledge to talk sense to them. He did no less by informing them also of the hard truth—hard for a people whose tastes in such matters were attuned to complete and unconditional victory—that coexistence was the only feasible foreign policy for America.

Most other aspects of Stevenson’s campaign were quite conventional. It was, surely, conventional for him to select Senator John Sparkman of Alabama as his running mate, and for the standard reason of balancing the ticket with someone palatable to Southern voters. Apart from Stevenson’s greater efforts to placate business, his domestic program called for no more than a continuation of the New and Fair Deals. It would be good to be able to report that on civil rights he spoke as forcefully in the South as in the North, but, alas, he did not. In “The New South,” a speech delivered in Richmond, Virginia, he extolled the virtues of the South, with special praise for its political genius, before finally getting around to Topic Number One, the Negro. When he did get around to it, it was on tiptoe, referring to it ever so delicately as “the problem of minorities—a problem which I have had occasion to think about a good deal, since my own state also has minority groups.” In one passage he even explained the “problem” away and predicted its imminent demise:

The once low economic status of the South was productive of another—and even more melancholy—phenomenon. Many of the lamentable differences between Southern whites and Negroes ascribed by insensitive observers to race prejudice, have arisen for other reasons. Here economically depressed whites and economically depressed Negroes often had to fight over already gnawed bones. Then there ensued that most pathetic of struggles: the struggle of the poor against the poor. It is a struggle that can easily become embittered, for hunger has no heart. But, happily, as the economic status of the South has risen, as the farms flourish and in the towns there are jobs for all at good wages, racial tensions have diminished.

Attacking this fragile statement would be like taking a sledgehammer to an egg.

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But let us pause for a moment to consider the phrase “hunger has no heart” in the above passage. Stevenson’s speeches are filled with such elegant little touches. Before he was drafted as a Presidential candidate, he told a friend that the only way he would possibly run would be on his own terms, with everything he said and did bearing his own imprimatur. That imprimatur consisted largely of his style. Stevenson had the usual corps of speechwriters—though unusual in distinction, including as it did John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Bernard DeVoto. Although he tended to deprecate it publicly, he obviously had a high regard for his own prose style, and is said to have detested the idea of ghost-writing. The various writers on his campaign staff have conceded that those speeches Stevenson did not write himself he more or less made his own by editing them generously, or even by rewriting them.

It was on the basis of his speeches in 1952 that the cult of Adlai Stevenson went national. In large part, their appeal was due to Stevenson’s deliberate intention to eschew pomposity and condescension. He had set out, it will be recalled, “to educate and elevate the people.” What is more, it is doubtful he ever said anything he wholly disbelieved. “For years,” he wrote in the introduction to the collection of his Major Campaign Speeches, published after the election, “I have listened to the nauseous nonsense, the pie-in-the-sky appeals to cupidity and greed, the cynical trifling with passion and prejudice and fear; the slander, fraudulent promises, and all-things-to-all-men demagoguery that are too much a part of our political campaigns.” Although his own speeches avoided all these traps, they also avoided greatness; they were certainly better said than read; and they do not, as some have claimed, stand alongside those of Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Disraeli, Abraham Lincoln, or even Wood-row Wilson as political oratory of the highest order. Read today, Adlai Stevenson’s campaign speeches have an oddly familiar ring, and this familiarity has little to do with one’s having heard them before. For the Stevenson style, refreshing though it may have been when first brandished in the early 50’s, has by now come to seem quite stale.

More is involved in this than the mandarin flourishes, though these are certainly in frequent evidence. If “hunger has no heart,” Adlai Stevenson, never one to let a good thing go, would later remark of Communism that it cannot “satisfy the hungry heart.” He seemed incapable of enunciating the word “world,” preferring on various occasions “this shattered globe,” “this blood-soaked, battered globe,” “this small vulnerable planet,” or even “our little spaceship, earth.” In an elegant aside, Stevenson could say of the migrant labor problem that “it certainly invites our compassionate attention.” He could also be a master of the rhetorical fast switch, seeking support for a foreign policy “which recognizes the principle of compromise and rejects the compromise of principle.” With this statement we are, of course, only a short hop from “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” and the Great Society cannot be far behind. As Richard Goodwin noted after Stevenson’s death: “It is hard to overstate the extent to which he helped shape the dialogue and hence the purposes of the New Frontier and then the Great Society.” One of the reasons Stevenson’s style seems so stale today is that it has become the dominant official liberal rhetoric.

The style, it is said, is the message. But in the case of Adlai Stevenson, the style seemed sometimes to persist in the absence of any clear message whatsoever. He preached sanity; he preached reason; his very person seemed to exert a pull toward decency in public affairs. Yet there is little evidence in any of his speeches or writing that he had a very precise idea of how American society was, or ought to be, organized. His understanding of the American political process was less than perfect, as can be seen from his predilection for the bipartisan approach to so many of the issues of his time. One might almost say that Stevenson tried to set up shop as a modern, disinterested Pericles, but that he failed to realize that the America of the 50’s was a long way from the Golden Age of Athens. It is unjust to dismiss Stevenson as a utopian liberal, as some have done, but his general view of politics was indeed hopelessly utopian to the extent that it did not allow him to take into account the great role of vested interest in American life, and it prevented him from realizing with sufficient clarity that some conflicts among men are not reconcilable by reason alone. Nor did he ever succeed in overcoming a kind of gentlemanly distaste for the practice of politics itself. In the 60’s, assessing the political career of his son, Adlai III, he said: “I don’t know whether he’s got the stomach for the crudities of politics.”

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The outcome of the 1952 election could not have done much to improve Adlai Stevenson’s own stomach for politics. Toward the end of the campaign, he apparently came to believe that he stood a chance of winning. Senator Sparkman has told how, on election eve, on their way to deliver a final television broadcast, Stevenson began to discuss possible members for their prospective cabinet. And Kenneth Davis reports that in a private pool among his immediate campaign staff Stevenson predicted he would win by an electoral vote of 381 to 150. When the returns were in, of course, Eisenhower had defeated him by a vote of 442 to 89.

But Stevenson’s admirers put the 1952 election defeat—and, indeed, all his setbacks—to good use. In their view, losing only seemed further to ennoble him. Americans are said to be preoccupied with success; but they also have a taste for failure if it takes place on a grand enough scale. As a testament to this rather special taste, Stevenson received a great many letters congratulating him on his campaign. As he noted, “Thousands even wrote gracious, flattering letters, after the election, explaining why they did not vote for me.”

One letter to Stevenson—printed in The New Republic—came from John Steinbeck, and the fulsomeness of its praise might have brought a blush to the cheek of Mao Tse-tung. “You have given us a look at truth as a weapon,” Steinbeck wrote, “at reason as a tool, at humor as a method, and at democracy as a practical way of life. We would be crazy if we let you go.” Urgently pleading that Stevenson remain in public life, Steinbeck ended on a note which brought the Adlai myth into full flower:

We offer you the highest gift of the people—work beyond your strength, responsibility beyond your endurance, loneliness to freeze you, and despair and vilification. Quite contentedly, we propose to take from you most of the sweet things of a man’s life—privacy and companionship, leisure and gaiety and rest. We offer to cut your heart out and serve it up for the good of the nation. And the terrible thing is—I don’t think you can refuse. Your greatness is the property of the nation, but to you it is a prison.

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After his defeat, Stevenson remained the leader of his party, and in that job he was eminently successful. By extensive speaking engagements, he eliminated the debt acquired by the Democratic National Committee during the campaign and his efforts were instrumental in bringing about the Democratic election triumph of 1954, which enabled the party to attain a majority in both houses of Congress as well as a number of new governorships. When the subject of the 1956 Presidential election arose, he expressed the inevitable hesitancy about running again—there was talk about his returning to private life. Yet later, when he found himself opposed by Estes Kefauver, and thereby forced to run in primaries, Adlai Stevenson was openly resentful, intimating to friends that he felt the party in effect owed him the nomination.

After finally deciding to run in 1956, Stevenson also decided that this time he would stage a much different campaign. He had become convinced “through rather sad experience,” as he put it, “that real issues cannot be developed, nor even effectively presented, during a political campaign. They must be sharpened and clarified largely through the legislative process between elections.” At first it seemed that Stevenson was in a stronger position in 1956 than he had beeen in 1952. He was no longer hampered by any admiration for Eisenhower, an admiration that had been one of his stated reasons for his reluctance to run in 1952. Nor was he any longer hindered by having to defend an incumbent Democratic administration; this time he could go on the attack against the party in power. Finally, there seemed to be in Stevenson a new determination to win. “I’m not going to run again for the exercise,” he said. “I’ve had all that kind of exercise I need. Another race like the last one and I will really have had it.”

In point of fact, 1956 turned out to be worse than 1952 in every respect. In a wretched piece of luck for Stevenson’s candidacy, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in September 1955, thus forcing Stevenson into a moratorium on criticism of the sick President. Then Adlai Stevenson found himself not only strongly opposed by Kefauver in the primaries, but also by Harry Truman at the Democratic Convention. Announcing for Averell Harriman, Truman called Stevenson a “conservative,” charging him with following the “counsel of hesitation” and with lacking the “kind of fighting spirit we need to win.” Far from having the nomination thrust upon him as in 1952, Stevenson now had to engage in a certified struggle to achieve it.

Fatigued from his efforts during the primaries and the Convention, Stevenson was vastly over-scheduled for the regular campaign. This took its toll. His indecisiveness, formerly reserved for grand decisions, now intruded upon petty matters. Crowds of supporters and important politicians would be kept waiting at airports, while Adlai Stevenson’s plane circled aloft, the candidate within endlessly touching up his speech. Among his campaign staff, according to James A. Finnegan, his campaign manager, the politicians insisted on acting like intellectuals and the intellectuals like politicians. The result was that on substantive issues Stevenson tended to be vague, ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory. Thus he came out for a reduction in the draft, when it would have been more in keeping with his attacks on John Foster Dulles’s reliance on massive nuclear retaliation to call for a build-up of conventional forces.

Admirers who would salvage something from the debacle of 1956 point to Stevenson’s proposal to end nuclear testing, which, they hold, came to fruition with the nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963. There is an element of truth in this, but one must add that Stevenson was more than a little unclear about how to effect a cessation of testing. At different times, he spoke about America’s undertaking the action unilaterally, about its leading the West into taking such an action collectively, and about its taking the initiative in persuading the Soviet Union to enter into a joint treaty.

There was also a certain amount of sheer carelessness involved in the 1956 campaign. For example, Adlai Stevenson attacked the Eisenhower administration for extending financial help to the Peron regime in Argentina—when, in fact, it was the Truman administration that had done so. But the lowest point of the campaign was saved for the end. On election eve, in Boston, Stevenson made an issue of Eisenhower’s health: “I must say bluntly that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard M. Nixon would probably be President of this country within the next four years.” On the next day, Stevenson was defeated even more crushingly than in 1952. He won 73 electoral votes to Eisenhower’s 457.

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Even today, many people view Stevenson’s two defeats as symbolic of America’s rejection of the intellectual in public life. Such a view, however, is far from accurate. It is extremely doubtful whether Stevenson’s two Presidential campaigns augured a distinct change in the substance of American politics but it is beyond doubt that they inaugurated a new tone in public life. Writing after the 1958 Congressional elections, Karl E. Meyer called this change “The Triumph of the Smooth Deal.” By Smooth Dealer—a term meant to be descriptive rather than pejorative—Meyer had in mind those civilized moderates who came to national prominence from 1952 on. These were men who were not ashamed of their breeding, who had a certain amount of gentlemanly learning, and who were notable less for their passion than for their reasonable, if somewhat bland, manner. Joseph Clark, Eugene McCarthy, Frank Church, Clifford Case, Henry Jackson—the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats among them was negligible—such men began to appear in the Senate and as governors in ever greater number after Stevenson’s emergence on the national political scene.

Meyer was premature in hailing the triumph of the Smooth Deal in 1952, for its ultimate victory came only in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy, the smoothest of the smooth. Ironically, this final triumph also meant the gradual eclipse of Adlai Stevenson. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who switched over from Stevenson to Kennedy in 1960, marked the watershed. Comparing the two men in A Thousand Days, Schlesinger noted: “Kennedy was in the school of Roosevelt. He did not wish cups to pass from his lips. He displayed absolute assurance about his capacity to do the job; and he had a hard and sure instinct about how to get what he wanted. . . . One watched the changing of the guard with a mixture of nostalgia and hope.”

An even greater irony is involved in the fact that John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, the two political figures most intensely admired by American liberals over the last two decades, were far from attractive to one another. Their first confrontation, if it could be called that, came at the 1956 Democratic Convention, when Kennedy opposed Estes Kefauver for the Vice-Presidential nomination. Although it was customary for the Presidential nominee to name his running mate, Stevenson chose not to do so in 1956, preferring instead to allow the Convention delegates to make the choice on their own. Kennedy, of course, lost a close contest to Kefauver, and it seems doubtful that he appreciated Adlai Stevenson’s Periclean stance above the battle. Whatever its other virtues, the Kennedy family has never been noted for its keen appreciation of disinterestedness.

A confrontation of a more direct kind began to take shape with the approach of the 1960 Presidential election. Kennedy wanted Stevenson’s support. “He is the essential ingredient in my combination,” he remarked to Schlesinger in May of 1960, “I don’t want to have to go hat-in-hand to all those Southerners, but I’ll do that if I can’t get the votes from the North. . . . I want to be nominated by the liberals.” It was not yet clear, however, whether Stevenson himself wasn’t seeking the nomination—or, to be more precise, a draft for the nomination. In December 1959, he had declined to say he would refuse a draft. “I hope I will always do my duty to my party and country,” he commented, somewhat ambiguously.

After the Oregon primaries, Kennedy stopped off for a visit at Stevenson’s Libertyville farm. He asked Newton Minow if he should offer Stevenson the post of Secretary of State in exchange for his support, but Minow told him this would be a mistake. Stevenson described his meeting with Kennedy as satisfactory, though he later wrote Schlesinger that Kennedy “seemed very self-confident and assured and much tougher and blunter than I remember him in the past.” Toughness and bluntness were not complimentary terms in the Stevenson vocabulary, and on more than one occasion he made it clear to friends that he thought Kennedy a brash young man. For his part, Kennedy found the meeting with Adlai Stevenson less than satisfactory. Stevenson told him he intended to remain true to his pledge not to come out for any candidate before the Convention, adding that he would not participate in any stop-Kennedy movement, or do anything to encourage the various draft-Stevenson movements then underway around the country. On the plane back to Boston, according to Schlesinger, Kennedy said to William Blair, Adlai Stevenson’s longtime associate, “Guess who the next person I see will be—the person who will say about Adlai, ‘I told you that son-of-a-bitch has been running for President every moment since 1956’?” Blair answered correctly, “Daddy.”

As the Convention drew nearer, Stevenson’s friends split in their advice. Some told him to announce for Kennedy, others to announce his own availability for the nomination. He would do neither. The ambiguity of his position grew daily; it reached extravagant proportions in the course of an interview on the television program, Face the Nation. Asked whether there was any way he could be made to say he was a candidate, Adlai Stevenson replied, “If they want me to lead them, I shall lead them. I have indicated that many times. I don’t see why it is so complicated . . . for one to say he will not seek nomination, who has enjoyed the greatest honors that his party can accord to anyone, not once but twice, to step aside and say, ‘Now it is time for someone else,’ and likewise to say that if called upon I will serve.”

Adlai Stevenson’s inability to get his tongue around the phrase “I want it” finally made the nomination unavailable to him. At the Convention, he hedged and squirmed and quoted Robert Frost and made sad little jokes—and must have felt something go dead inside him as he realized he was saying too little too late. It was becoming clear that there was no stopping Kennedy. At the eleventh hour, Adlai Stevenson nonetheless tried to do just that by telephoning Richard J. Daley, whom he had helped elect as Mayor of Chicago and who now headed the Illinois delegation. Daley at first avoided answering. When he finally did, Adlai Stevenson said that he hoped that the Illinois delegation wouldn’t take the fact that he had not actively sought the nomination to mean that he didn’t want it, or that he wouldn’t campaign against Richard Nixon with everything he had. (The latest poll of the Illinois delegation was 59½ for Kennedy, 2 for Stevenson.) According to Theodore H. White, Adlai Stevenson then asked “whether he had no support period, or whether he had no support because it was the delegates’ impression he was not a candidate. Daley replied that Stevenson had no support, period.”

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With Kennedy’s election as President, Stevenson’s life began its final—and saddest—phase. Relations between the two men seem permanently to have soured. It is said that Kennedy lost all respect for Stevenson’s political acumen because of the latter’s behavior before and during the 1960 Convention, and shortly before the election Stevenson told William Attwood, now editor-in-chief of Look, “How could I ever go to work for such an arrogant young man!” Nevertheless, he campaigned vigorously for Kennedy, and it is clear that he wished to be asked to serve as Secretary of State. But that was out of the question: Kennedy intended to supervise his own foreign policy; and besides, he owed Stevenson nothing. It was evident that he preferred someone whose gifts were more clerical than rhetorical; a good gray type like Dean Rusk was adequate.

Yet Kennedy obviously needed to find a place for Adlai Stevenson, who was therefore sounded out on the jobs of attorney general and ambassador to the UN, and said he preferred the latter. The UN ambassadorship was especially padded for Adlai Stevenson: it was raised to Cabinet rank and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Stevenson’s longtime friend, was made liaison between the White House and the UN Mission in New York. “I have satisfactory assurances from the President-elect and the new Secretary that I shall have an adequate voice in the making of foreign policy,” Adlai Stevenson announced after accepting the appointment. At first it seemed that service at the UN was in every way ideal for Adlai Stevenson. There he would be above the petty squalor of domestic politics and deal exclusively in international relations, the field he loved most; there he would work for world peace, the goal that had long been the name of his desire.

After less than three months in the job, however, Adlai Stevenson learned that the U.S. was planning to sponsor an invasion of Castro’s Cuba by Cuban exiles trained and armed under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was said to have been dismayed by this news, to have thought the plan an egregrious mistake, but since the decision had already been made, he agreed to defend it as best he could. From this point on, however, he was not kept very well informed about the invasion. He thus denied on the floor of the UN that the United States was responsible for the attack on three Cuban airfields on April 15, thereby swallowing the CIA cover story that the attacking planes were manned by pilots defecting from Castro’s air force. After the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, he found himself unable to deny the charge, leveled by the Cuban delegate at the UN, that the invasion was “by a force of mercenaries organized, financed, and armed by the government of the United States.” All he could offer in rebuttal was the lame reply that no American troops were directly engaged. He had in effect lied to the UN and been caught at it. He felt that his integrity was partially destroyed, and that his stature had been cruelly exploited. Yet any impulse he might have had to resign then and there was tempered by the fact that Kennedy himself had been badly misled by the CIA and his own military advisers.

But the Bay of Pigs was only the first in a long chain of humiliations endured by Adlai Stevenson at the UN. There was, to name but one other, the annual indignity of having to lead the fight to keep Red China out of the UN—this must have been especially painful since Adlai Stevenson had previously been a prominent advocate of a reexamination of our China policy. To humiliation was added insecurity. One of the aftereffects of the Bay of Pigs debacle was Kennedy’s radical revision of the Chief Executive’s decision-making machinery, a revision that involved greater influence for the White House staff and tighter State Department controls over foreign policy. Many saw in this a diminution of the status of Adlai Stevenson’s Cabinet rank. Henceforth his UN speeches were read in advance by State Department men, who saw fit not only to question their substance but also—much to his irritation—to tamper with their style.

Increasing both the insecurity and the humiliation, there was the vigorous gossip being pedaled back and forth between the White House and the UN Mission in New York. Herbert J. Muller reports that Adlai Stevenson found out that Kennedy referred to him as “my official liar.” Conversely, it turned out that many of the less than flattering remarks Adlai Stevenson made about Kennedy were somehow getting back to the White House. In his biography Kenneth Davis reports that Stevenson told his sister: “It’s something like Orwell’s 1984, if you please. Big Brother is watching you. Informers seem to be everywhere.”

This and other aspects of his experience at the UN led Stevenson in 1962 briefly to consider running for the Senate in Illinois against Everett Dirksen. Chicago’s Mayor Daley had queried him about the possibility. When Stevenson mentioned it to Kennedy, the latter initially acted as if he couldn’t care less, though later, when the idea of Adlai Stevenson’s leaving the Kennedy administration got a bad press, Kennedy did announce that he was “delighted” Stevenson had decided to stay on at the UN. But Adlai Stevenson was said to be hurt by Kennedy’s initial response; his vanity seemed to rise as his personal prestige fell.

It was, however, the Cuban missile crisis that most undermined Adlai Stevenson’s prestige and confidence and served to cloud even further his relationship with Kennedy. When informed of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Stevenson sent a note to Kennedy stating that the U.S. could not “negotiate with a gun at our head,” but adding that it must be made clear “that the existence of nuclear bases anywhere is negotiable.” At the White House meetings called to determine the U.S. reaction to the missile crisis, Adlai Stevenson argued his case for the political moves the U.S. ought to be prepared to make in addition to its military plans. He suggested the U.S. be prepared to withdraw from Guantanamo and that the Jupiter missile bases in Turkey and Italy might also be used for negotiation. He was at once attacked by the hard-liners in the room; and later, in writing out his views, he eliminated the Turkish and Italian bases as bargaining counters, but retained Guantanamo.

After this, it seems that Adlai Stevenson was not altogether trusted to present the American case about the missiles to the UN. In any event, Kennedy called in John J. McCloy to aid Adlai Stevenson in New York. Arthur Schlesinger maintains that he did so to give the UN presentation a bipartisan flavor, but this appears less than credible. It is belied by, among other things, the account Schlesinger offers of the instruction he received from Robert Kennedy before leaving to join Adlai Stevenson. “We’re counting on you to watch things in New York,” Kennedy told Schlesinger. “We will have to make a deal at the end, but we must stand absolutely firm now. Concessions must come at the end of negotiations, not at the beginning.” Adlai Stevenson, however, was very staunch at the UN, especially when he said to Ambassador Zorin:

You are in the courtroom of world opinion. You have denied they [the missiles] exist, and I want to know if I understood you correctly. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over. And I am also prepared to present evidence in this room—now!

Many people remember this as Stevenson’s finest hour at the UN. He himself, however, had doubts, for he did not fancy himself as UN District Attorney, and he was fearful his prosecutor’s tone had destroyed his objectivity in the eyes of the Russians.

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Shortly after the missile crisis, Adlai Stevenson underwent a new personal crisis, when an article, written by Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop and published in the Saturday Evening Post, accused him of having advocated a Caribbean Munich. Since Bartlett was known to be a personal friend of the President, it was natural for Adlai Stevenson to believe that Kennedy had planted the piece. He thereupon told Schlesinger that if Kennedy wanted to get rid of him, he needn’t go about it in so tortuous a manner. In Schlesinger’s account, Kennedy denied having anything to do with the article, claiming—with plausibility—that if he wanted to get rid of Adlai Stevenson he could find a less obvious way of doing so. Kennedy told Schlesinger to tell Adlai Adlai Stevenson to keep cool, and that the whole matter would die down in forty-eight hours. He also issued a statement expressing full confidence in his UN ambassador. “If not a forty-eight hour wonder,” Schlesinger notes, “the furor died away in the next few days.” But it is hard to believe it ever died in Adlai Stevenson’s mind.

Perhaps the most telling effect of the off-and-on battering Adlai Stevenson’s ego suffered under the Kennedy administration came in connection with Adlai Stevenson’s trip to Dallas in the fall of 1963. While there, he was booed, spat upon, and struck over the head. “Are these human beings or are these animals?” he asked about the Dallas mob that attacked him. Afterward he warned Schlesinger against Kennedy’s visiting Dallas four weeks hence, as planned. “I was reluctant to pass on Stevenson’s message,” Schlesinger has written, “lest it convict him of undue apprehensiveness in the President’s eyes. In a day or so Adlai called again to ask whether I had spoken to the President and expressed relief when I said I had not.” The point worth making here is not that Adlai Stevenson could have prevented Kennedy from going to Dallas—it is unlikely that he could have—but that Stevenson’s confidence was at this stage so badly shot that he was rendered incapable even of warning the President that his life was in danger.

Adlai Stevenson’s personal relations with Johnson were considerably smoother than with Kennedy. When Johnson became President, he made it clear he wouldn’t hear of Adlai Stevenson’s resigning. His flattery was persistent and vociferous. Yet, under Johnson, Adlai Stevenson had even less influence on foreign policy than under Kennedy. If during his time with Johnson, Adlai Stevenson rethought any of his old ideas on foreign policy, he kept the fact to himself. The word on him from his days with the Kennedy administration was that he was “soft” on Communism, and he was not about to do anything to lend credence to this charge. To his friends he might quibble about various aspects of Johnson’s handling of foreign affairs, but he resented the charge that he was saying anything on the floor of the UN that he didn’t really believe.

Lillian Ross has left an account of Adlai Stevenson’s social life during his last years that seems—though it undoubtedly was not intended as such—a veritable portrait of self-destructive vitality. He had always been extraordinarily active, but now, according to friends, he was overeating, his drinking had increased, and he played tennis with a ferocity that was madness for a man in his middle sixties. His death in London on July 14, 1965, came as a shock; but that he died of a heart attack should have surprised none of his friends. Harry Ashmore, a member of his campaign staffs and a friend, noted that it was somehow appropriate that Adlai Stevenson died in London, for London, the most civilized city in the world, became him. But it is depressing to recall that he was there to make an appearance on the BBC program, “Panorama,” an appearance the State Department hoped would reduce the force of the teach-ins against American involvement in Vietnam then being conducted at Oxford. Style and substance have rarely been further apart.

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A special feeling continues to surround Adlai Stevenson’s name even after his death. His claim to be remembered as more than a period politician surely rests on the striking effect he has had on a large segment of the American electorate. Adlai Stevenson is inextricably tied up with the aspirations of a great many Americans for a better world in which America will have an honorable place—and rightly so, for these were also Adlai Stevenson’s aspirations. He was a fundamentally decent man in a political climate where decency was a rare commodity. Yet these same qualities, because unalloyed with any strong political vision or original political program, finally ended in crippling him. Plutarch’s epithet for Aristides the Just might stand as Adlai Stevenson’s own:

But Aristides walked, so to say, alone on his own path in politics, being unwilling, in the first place, to go along with his associates in ill-doing, or to cause them vexation by not gratifying their wishes; and, secondly, observing that many were encouraged by the support they had in their friends to act injuriously, he was cautious; being of the opinion that the integrity of his words and actions was the only right security for a good citizen.

This was the same Aristides whom the citizens of Athens were supposed to have ostracized because they finally grew tired of always hearing him called The Just.

1 There is now a growing literature on Adlai Stevenson’s career. An “authorized” biography by John Bartlow Martin, the journalist and diplomat, is in the works; Walter Johnson, a historian and a close friend of Adlai Stevenson’s, is in the process of editing the Collected Papers; and the inevitable The Stevenson Wit has been out for some time. As We Knew Adlai, a collection of twenty-two personal reminiscences by friends and associates—in Stevenson’s case, the distinction between the two was usually nonexistent—was published in 1966. And last year there appeared The Politics of Honor by Kenneth E. Davis (Putnam, 543 pp., $10) and Adlai Stevenson: A Study in Values by Herbert J. Muller (Harper & Row, 388 pp., $6.95). In both these books, the two most ambitious studies to date, the critical spirit is held well in rein (though somewhat less so in Mr. Davis’s case than in Mr. Muller’s); but the positive tone ought not to be too surprising, for as Murray Kempton put it: “To write [Stevenson] off is somehow to say that you have surrendered hope.” More recently, Richard J. Walton, in The Remnants of Power (Coward-McCann, 255 pp., $5.95), has undertaken a critical study of Adlai Stevenson’s years at the UN.

2 Its full naiveté was brought home once again with crushing—and heavily ironic—force in February of this year, when Adlai Stevenson III was denied a place on the Illinois Democratic slate of candidates, presumably for expressing the most minor reservations about Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy.

3 The best account of Adlai Stevenson’s nomination in 1952 is in Walter Johnson’s How We Drafted Adlai Stevenson.

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