Fifties (36 page)

Ironically, Stevenson had been launched by one of the toughest, most unsentimental political organizations ever put together in American politics, the Cook County machine in Chicago. The machine had been looking to upgrade its image, and Jake Arvey, its most enlightened leader, had come back from World War Two determined to bring a higher tone to Chicago politics. Stevenson himself had worked in the Roosevelt administration in the early days of the New Deal and as an aide to George Marshall during the war and had been a delegate to the conference that founded the United Nations after the war. Arvey first heard of Stevenson from James Byrnes, then secretary of state. “Why don’t you grab this fellow Stevenson—he’s a gold nugget,” Byrnes said.

At around the same time, Stevenson was examining his life and was not satisfied. He wrote in his journal: “Am 47 today—still restless; dissatisfied with myself. What’s the matter? Have everything. Wife, children, money, success—but not in the law profession. Too much ambition for public recognition; too scattered in interests; how can I reconcile life in Chicago as a lawyer with consuming interest in foreign affairs—public affairs and desire for recognition and position in that field?”

Arvey was intrigued by the idea of a high-gloss candidate, but he checked further and was appalled to hear that the candidate, in addition to being wealthy, had allegedly gone to
Oxford.
Word of these misgivings reached Stevenson, and he cabled Arvey: “Never went to Oxford, not even to Eton.” It was Arvey’s first taste of the candidate’s wry and often self-deprecating wit. When they met, Arvey was enormously impressed and sensed not only that he would add significant prestige to the ticket but that he might be a formidable candidate as well, attracting not only the usual Democratic votes, but those of upper-class Republicans as well. Initially, Stevenson believed he was scheduled to run for the Senate, while Paul Douglas, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, a city councilman, and a highly decorated Marine hero from World War Two, would be governor. But suddenly the roles were switched and the machine decided to put the energy behind Douglas, who was something of a maverick, for
Senate
(where he could not do anything to damage the machine) and Stevenson for the more delicate job of governor.

Stevenson worried that he had no particular qualifications to be
governor of Illinois, but the machine did not clear its decisions with the candidates. When Arvey came by, Stevenson asked him, “Jack, I’m a little worried about this governor thing. What’s expected of me? Everybody says you don’t trust Douglas on patronage.” That, of course, was true. For a time Stevenson hedged on Arvey’s offer; it was Stevenson’s friend Herman (Dutch) Smith, a formidable figure in Chicago business circles, who convinced him: “They need you this year. If you say no when they need you, they won’t take you when they don’t need you.” Stevenson was from the start a stunning success. When Arvey read Stevenson’s first speech—the candidate had tried to get a professional speechwriter to do it for him but had ended up doing it himself—Arvey told his colleagues, “Don’t let anyone change a word of it.”

He was forty-eight when he ran for his first office in 1948. He was bright, funny, and literate, and he seemed incapable of uttering a sentence that did not sound polished. He seemed immune to the clichés of professional politics; if canned, warmed-over thoughts did not offend his audience, they most certainly offended
him.
He was a snob about many things—particularly in his choice of friends and in his social attitudes (there was a touch of covert anti-Semitism to him). He was quick to give credit to others, except in the area of speechwriting; there, he became highly irate when other Democrats even so much as suggested that their words had come from Adlai Stevenson’s mouth. He had a bitter break with the writer Bill Attwood, a close friend, because he believed Attwood had claimed to write one of his speeches.

Stevenson’s ancestors were part of Illinois’s landed gentry and no strangers to politics. His great-grandfather Jesse Fell had been Lincoln’s campaign manager, and the first Adlai Stevenson had served as Vice-President of the United States. The current Adlai was the adored son of parents who were somewhat disappointed in themselves; Lewis Stevenson, his father, had never quite lived up to his own ambitions or those of his rather wealthy wife, and there was considerable tension in the marriage. During one fight Lewis had said to Helen Stevenson, “Well, you took me for better or worse,” and she had answered, “Well, you are worse than I took you for!”

For all his self-effacing qualities, Adlai Stevenson had a certain sense of political entitlement, thanks to his privileged background. A typical political beginner might run for a spot on the city council or for assemblyman, yet Stevenson seemed to think it perfectly normal when the people in charge of the political process tapped him for the important job of governor. George Ball, one of the bright young men
in politics of the era, thought Stevenson had an exceptional quality for self-dramatization: “The thing that fascinated me about Adlai was that he accepted so early the idea that he was a great historical figure moving back and forth on the scene,” Ball said. “I think he always had Abraham Lincoln on his mind ...”

For much of his adult career, Stevenson practiced law in Illinois, but foreign policy was his first love, and he liked to dream of the day when he hoped to make enough money—$25,000 in those preinflation days—to hand to the head of the Democratic National Committee and say, “Here’s $25,000. I want to be an ambassador.” As he ran for governor, though, he had to be careful about his interest in foreign affairs and his earlier experience at the United Nations. Chicago was the base of Colonel McCormick, and the colonel was more than delighted to represent such experience as a political liability. Arvey’s management of the Stevenson campaign for governor was brilliant: He and the other pros held on to the hard-core Democratic voters, who still voted their pocketbook and their ethnic alienation, while Stevenson, with his appeals for a higher civic virtue and his wariness about overemphasizing economic issues, was unusually successful in cutting into Republican and independent votes. Underdog at the start, he won by a plurality of
572,067 votes,
some 170,000 more than Douglas and over half a million more than President Truman, who carried the state by only 33,000 votes. The dimensions of the victory instantly made him a national figure and a contender for the 1952 Democratic presidential candidacy.

He became quickly sought after as a speaker for large fund-raisers. He was funny, unpredictable, irreverent, and self-deprecating. Going into a Cook County fund-raiser, he once said: “Ah, the deep, rich smell of democracy in Cook County.” Asked about the role of America’s newspaper publishers, later, when they opposed him editorially, he answered, “Their job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and then print the chaff.” When Drew Pearson wrote that Stevenson would marry Dorothy Fosdick, one of a series of prominent women to whom Stevenson was linked after his early marriage ended in divorce, Stevenson issued a statement: “The newspapers have married me to three ladies in the last three months. I guess they think the plural of spouse is spice—and now Mr. Pearson has added still another. It is all very flattering to me—if not to the ladies! I apologize to them for any embarrassment the writers may have caused them.”

Slowly and relentlessly, the pressure built for him to run for President. As early as 1951 every time that Arvey talked to Truman
about political matters, the President would ask, “How’s your governor doing?” Essentially, Stevenson had walked into a vacuum. Truman’s popularity was at a low ebb. The other candidates were marginal. Richard Russell, a Southerner, was a segregationist; Averell Harriman was a formidable figure in foreign policy but had little popular appeal; and Estes Kefauver, who was doing very well in the polls, had enraged the party machinery by dint of his crime investigations. In addition, he was a poor public speaker.

After Supreme Court justice Fred Vinson rejected the President’s offer of the nomination, Truman decided to tap Stevenson. He was the most reluctant of candidates; he liked being governor of Illinois, had promised the voters he would serve a second term, and tended to agree with his Republican friends that the Democrats had been in power for too long and that a change of parties in the White House was probably a good thing. Early on, he suspected that the Republican candidate would be not Robert A. Taft but Dwight Eisenhower, whom he thought might make a good President and who was self-evidently an internationalist, and he did not think he could beat Eisenhower. He wanted to run for the presidency one day, but he wanted to wait.

When the President offered the governor the nomination, the governor told him he did not want it. At first the President tried to convince him. “Adlai,” Truman said. “If a knuckle-head like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated, smart guy could do in the job.” But when it became clear that Stevenson truly did not want the job, Truman became enraged. Here he was, not merely the President, but a devoted man of the party, offering the highest position in the country to a mere one-term governor and he was being rebuffed. Arvey later reported: “He couldn’t understand it. How a man could dillydally around with a thing like the presidential nomination.” When Scotty Reston,
The New York Times’
most influential Washington reporter, talked to Stevenson right after he had met with Truman, he found the noncandidate both stunned and irritable, certain that he had botched a critical moment in his career, but believing it was not his fault. “What are you trying to tell me?” he asked Reston. “That it’s my duty to save Western civilization from Ike Eisenhower?” But the pressure did not abate. If anything, his reluctance made him even more attractive. Suddenly, he was the candidate everyone wanted. Wherever he went he was asked whether he was going to run. In late March he went on one of the early
Meet the Press
shows, and Ed Lahey of the Chicago
Daily News
asked him: “Wouldn’t your grandfather,
Vice-President Stevenson, twirl in his grave if he saw you running away from a chance to be the Democratic nominee in 1952?” “I think we have to leave Grandfather lie,” Stevenson answered.

Curiously, Stevenson was now able to have it both ways, to campaign without campaigning, to be the candidate produced by the party professionals who nonetheless excited the independents and reformers. If he ended up with the nomination, it would be not as the candidate of the Truman administration but a candidate in his own right. He was not unaware of the process he had set in motion. His strategy was simple: He would not enter the primaries, but if the party so decided, he would accept its nomination at the convention. In fact, that was pretty much how it turned out. Estes Kefauver came to the convention with the largest number of delegates, 340, but in addition he had by far the greatest number of powerful sworn enemies. Truman had switched his allegiance to Alben Barkley, but in the end, to the annoyance of the sitting President, the convention nominated Stevenson on the third ballot.

He had been spared the bruising fight in the primaries, but unfortunately, that played into his weakest side as a politician. As he was nominated as an independent, he came to believe himself one, implying that there was no need to court the various groups and blocs that made up the Democratic party. He had never had to do it in his apprenticeship within the party; indeed, he hated the part of politics that called for the candidate to court special-interest groups, and later in his career he liked to joke about the many times he had “bitterly denounced that Japanese beetle and fearlessly attacked the Mediterranean fruit fly.”

One of the biggest problems, remembered Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian and an early speechwriter for Stevenson, was moving him left, toward the traditional Democratic voters and away from his conservative social circles. If Stevenson attacked the Republicans, Schlesinger thought, his close friends would reproach him the next day for unseemly partisanship. As far as Schlesinger was concerned, Stevenson was the most conservative Democratic candidate since John W. Davis. The biggest job was getting him to overcome his patrician upbringing.

SEVENTEEN

T
HE PEOPLE AT BATTON,
Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBD&O) were appalled by Eisenhower’s initial failure to come across well on television. Ben Duffy, the head of the agency and a close personal friend of the general, was particularly unhappy. BBD&O, then the third-largest advertising firm in the country, was more or less the Republican house firm. Duffy decided that they had to recast Ike. He was stiff and awkward in his formal presentations; therefore it was important to show him in commercials and in quasi-spontaneous appearances, reacting to other people, becoming more like the attractive, magnetic Ike everyone knew and loved. In addition they had to change the harsh television lighting, which was generally set up by the newsreels people, who still dominated the technical logistics. It made Ike look old and gray. The word went out that no Eisenhower television appearance was to be scheduled without BBD&O clearing it.

Since every good advertising campaign needed a theme, BBD&O decided to develop one: It wanted to maximize the idea of Ike the returning hero, welcomed home by a grateful nation, in order to minimize Ike the political candidate, who had a responsibility to speak on his own behalf. His thirty-minute television specials would not be thirty-minute speeches, as campaign specials in the radio era had been. In television, drama was as important as ideas; images were as important as substance. That was fortunate for Ike, because he could never be a better speaker than Adlai Stevenson. In fact, when the Democrats purchased television time that fall, Stevenson seemed so much a prisoner of his own speeches that he was generally in midsentence when his time ran out. By contrast, Eisenhower’s appearances were scripted: Ike arrives at the hall, with flags everywhere; the crowd starts cheering; people stand on their seats in order to see him—then shots of Ike going to the rostrum, then shots of Mamie, properly proud, then cut to a brief segment of the speech, then at the end, the hero’s departure amidst the adoring crowd: he had come, he had seen and been seen, and he had conquered. This signaled the emergence of television as a force in American political campaigns—much to the regret of both candidates, it turned out.