Almost President Read online

  But like FDR, Eisenhower insisted on cultivating an everyman image and dispelling any notion that he had intellectual pretensions. He let it be known that his preferred reading material was Western pulp fiction such as the work of Zane Grey. Perhaps recognizing he could not match Stevenson’s soaring rhetoric, Eisenhower also found it useful to speak in bland phrases, uttering thoughts usually no more provocative than, “The great problem of America today is to take that straight and narrow road down the middle.” If, by chance, Ike used a phrase like “status quo” in his remarks, he would apologetically add, “’Course, I’m not supposed to be the educated candidate.”

  To those who did not understand Ike’s true character, he simply sounded boring. But Eisenhower believed that if he stuck to platitudes he would prevent controversy, shield his true intentions from too much scrutiny, and avoid committing to a course of action he was not yet ready to take.

  There was method, too, in Nixon’s relentless portrayal of himself as an average American. His famous televised “Checkers speech,” in which he confronted allegations that he had a secret slush fund provided by rich donors, may have been painfully maudlin to his enemies, but it was also extraordinarily effective. Nixon self-consciously identified with the average American saddled with a mortgage, car payments, and self-pity at being able to afford only a “good Republican cloth coat” for his wife rather than one of mink. If Stevenson was calling young American couples to a higher purpose, Nixon was sharing their middle class struggles, a pose he would continue through his own successful 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns when he still professed to identify with the “silent majority.” Of course, just as Ike graduated in the top half of his class at West Point and became president of Columbia, the supposed anti-intellectual Nixon graduated from Duke University School of Law and, over the course of his life, wrote ten generally well-reviewed books.

  Stevenson despised Nixon—and he despised television. He thought both were vulgar. Even though 1952 was the first year television factored in a presidential election, Stevenson was loath to accommodate the new medium. He would not edit his speeches to fit within the thirty minutes of purchased airtime, so he was often cut off in mid-sentence. Ike, by contrast, mimicked Nixon’s everyman appeal and adapted to the ways of Madison Avenue, appearing in commercials in which he ostensibly answered questions from average Americans with answers such as, “Yes, my Mamie gets after me about the high cost of living. It’s another reason why I say it’s time for a change.”

  Eisenhower accepted and used the power of television. Stevenson felt obliged to critique it. In an article for Fortune magazine published shortly after the campaign, Stevenson worried that television was corrupting the ability of the body politic to think critically. “The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discriminations of our minds, since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to discover whether we think something is good or bad, right or wrong,” he wrote.

  In critiquing television, Stevenson was also taking aim at Nixon, whose “Checkers speech” had underscored the power of the new medium. Stevenson liked to think of himself as one who bucked popular opinion if for no other reason than to challenge the status quo. He thought Nixon’s moral compass was no more than the “needle on a dial” that always pointed where the opinion polls told it to point. Nixon was “the kind of politician,” Stevenson said, “who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.” It was a bon mot typical of what came to be known as “the Stevenson wit,” and there were those, including members of his own staff, who said it was Stevenson’s risky sense of humor, not his intellect, that turned off some voters.

  One of his quips became a stock line in many campaigns: “If Republicans stop telling lies about us, we will stop telling the truth about them.” He added for good measure, “The Republicans have a ‘me, too’ candidate running on a ‘yes, but’ platform, advised by a ‘has been’ staff.” Those were zingers prepared ahead of time, but Stevenson also had a wonderful spontaneous humor. When a young mother walked out of a speech to quiet her crying baby, Stevenson called out, “Please don’t be embarrassed. I agree with you, if not my opponent, that it is time for a change.” There was also his charming response in 1960 to the Protestant clergyman Norman Vincent Peale’s attacks on Kennedy’s Catholicism: “I have always found the gospel of Paul appealing, but I find the gospel of Peale appalling.”

  Some of Stevenson’s advisors worried that his humor too often seemed to be “inside” jokes between him and his intellectual admirers, while some of it was simply mean-spirited and unfunny. Eisenhower and the Republicans complained that seeking the presidency in a time of global crises was no laughing matter. Stevenson responded, “My opponent has been worried about my funny bone. I’m worried about his backbone.”

  And it was Stevenson’s backbone, as much as his beautiful words, that attracted intellectuals to his campaign, for it was not just the content of his speeches, it was also the courage to give them within context that was so impressive. Far from being a time of triumphalism following the American and Allied victories, the first few years after World War II were a time of deep anxiety. Instead of a world free and at peace, nations were engaged in the Cold War. China had been “lost” to the Communists, much of Europe was in chaos, the Soviets had the hydrogen bomb, and the United States was fighting a war in Korea with uncertain aims and an unforeseeable end. Many Americans—led by demagogues like Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy but with strong support from men like Nixon and Indiana senator William Jenner—began to ascribe the course of world events to a large and sinister conspiracy, aided and abetted by traitors here at home.

  Unlike the “Red Scare” after World War I, when it was presumed that would-be American Bolsheviks came from the working-class immigrant community, the favored targets for Communist witch-hunting in the 1950s were the intellectual elite. The greatest fear was no longer those inciting revolution among the masses, but espionage facilitated by educated people in positions of authority.

  An example of Nixon’s attempts to link alleged disloyalty with higher education was his charge that “Stevenson holds a PhD degree from [Truman’s secretary of state Dean] Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” As a congressman, Nixon had led the investigation into whether a State Department official from a prominent family with an Ivy League education named Alger Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party. Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury but not espionage.

  Stevenson had worked with Hiss when both were employed in the State Department, so during Hiss’s trial Stevenson provided a favorable deposition in which he testified that, as far as he knew, Hiss was an honest and honorable man and that he had never heard any rumors about his former colleague being a Communist. Stevenson said he knew the deposition would be used against him politically, but he felt an obligation as an attorney to provide an honest account when it was requested.

  Stevenson had taken a stand against Communist witch-hunting as governor of Illinois, when he vetoed legislation that would have required state employees to take a loyalty oath. “Does anyone seriously think that a real traitor will hesitate to sign a loyalty oath?” he asked. “The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a natural characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. . . . We must not burn down the house to kill the rats.”

  In perhaps his finest speech of the 1952 campaign, he chose the national convention of the American Legion to attack McCarthyism as the very antithesis of patriotism—and received a warm and enthusiastic ovation when he did. Stevenson told the legionnaires that patriotism “is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. . . . For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.”

  These words and gestures seemed remarkably courageous at the time, especially when contrasted with those of
his Republican opponent. In what was certainly the low point of his career, Eisenhower had declined to forthrightly defend his mentor, General George C. Marshall, from attacks by McCarthy and Jenner that Marshall, of all people, was a disloyal American. Marshall, who had been Army chief of staff before becoming Truman’s secretary of state, had made Eisenhower’s career by appointing him Supreme Allied Commander. Ike never apologized to Marshall for this lapse in loyalty and was so embarrassed by the episode that he refused to discuss the incident or mention it in his memoirs.

  McCarthy and others of his ilk, of course, repeatedly implied that Stevenson, too, was a disloyal American, with McCarthy snidely referring to the Democratic nominee as “Alger—I mean Adlai.” When speaking of McCarthy and Nixon, Stevenson quoted Aristotle: “History shows that almost all tyrants have been demagogues who gained favor with the people by their accusations of the nobles.” When McCarthy and his allies upped the ante and began to make crass insinuations that the divorced Stevenson was a homosexual—the New York Daily News referred to Stevenson as “Adelaide”—Stevenson tackled the issue of Communist witch-hunting head on, telling a crowd in Cleveland, “I believe with all my heart that those who would beguile the voters by lies or half-truths, or corrupt them by fear and falsehood, are committing spiritual treason against our institutions. They are doing the work of our enemies.”

  Moved by such stirring words, liberal intellectuals were prone to overlook the fact that Stevenson was neither as intellectual nor as liberal as they assumed. While Stevenson enjoyed the company and help of scholars and thinkers, his friend and confidant, Alistair Cooke, said that he was skeptical that Stevenson “ever read any books at all”—he didn’t have the time. Cooke added that while Stevenson’s speeches “were invariably eloquent and noble,” they were also “tantalizingly vague about what to do here and now. In fact, I have to admit that much, if not most, of Stevenson’s political thought adds up to a makeshift warning to avoid all quick solutions while trusting, in the meantime, to a general outbreak of courage, tolerance, compassion, and universal brotherhood.”

  This is a too glib assessment, but it is true that Stevenson lacked an aggressive liberal domestic agenda for two reasons: First, he paid far less attention to domestic policy than he did his true love, foreign policy, and second, he was just not that liberal. Stevenson, who had complained that Truman was too liberal for his tastes, had, for example, alienated organized labor by refusing to pledge to repeal the hated Taft-Hartley Act. Stevenson even opposed public housing, which actually put him to the right of conservative Republican senator Robert Taft on that issue. Schlesinger himself ruefully acknowledged that the man he was writing campaign speeches for was the most conservative Democratic presidential nominee since John W. Davis in 1924.

  Stevenson was a Democrat primarily by inheritance. His grandfather, also named Adlai Stevenson, had been vice president in Grover Cleveland’s second administration and he had also been William Jennings Bryan’s running mate in 1900. 13 Stevenson’s father, Lewis, pursued a more modest and less successful political career in Illinois after having worked for the Hearst family, first as manager of some of their mining interests and later as assistant general manager for the Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner newspaper. Adlai Stevenson II was born February 5, 1900, in Los Angeles, California, before the family returned to their home in Bloomington, Illinois.

  Stevenson’s childhood was marred by tragedy when, at the age of twelve, he accidentally shot to death a teenage girl during a party thrown by his older sister. A teenage boy who had been attending military school was eager to show the manual of arms, and so a gun was retrieved from the Stevenson attic. The children thought the rifle was unloaded, but when Adlai took the gun to put it back in the attic, he either (accounts differ) tried to mimic the older boy’s manual of arms or he playfully pointed it at the girl, a fifteen-year-old cousin. In either case, the gun went off, a bullet hidden in the chamber having gone undetected because of a rusty spring in the ejecting mechanism.

  When reporters doing background on Stevenson uncovered the incident during the 1952 campaign, Stevenson told them he had never been asked about the incident nor had he spoken of it for forty years. It is impossible to fully know the impact of such an event on a man’s life, but one clue was revealed when, in 1955, Stevenson learned of a similar shooting accident involving a family he did not even know. He took the time to write the boy’s mother with the advice, “Tell him that he must live for two.”

  Further belying his intellectual reputation, Stevenson was a mediocre student most of his academic life. He failed in his first attempt to enter Princeton and was sent to the exclusive Choate preparatory school to improve his grades. There, he discovered that out of a student body of two hundred, he was one of only three Democrats. Finally admitted to Princeton, Stevenson maintained the classic “gentleman’s C” grade average but enjoyed working on the school newspaper and, later, on a family-owned newspaper.14

  Colleagues thought Stevenson was a great natural reporter, but his father insisted he pursue a legal career and so Stevenson went to Harvard Law School, dropped out, and completed his law degree at Northwestern University. After graduation, Stevenson traveled to Europe, visiting fascist Italy and the Soviet Union where, belying future Republican charges that he was soft on the Reds, he said, “I felt that I had seen at first hand what communism meant, in terms of terror and brutality.”

  When he returned from Europe, he married the beautiful and ebullient Chicago socialite Ellen Borden, ten years his junior, who would grow to detest political life and, twenty years later, despite having three sons with Adlai, divorce Stevenson shortly after he was elected governor. It became increasingly clear that Ellen was suffering from mental illness. Time and again she went out of her way to publicly embarrass Stevenson, leading her own mother to write Stevenson to ask if she should issue a public statement about her daughter’s condition. “You must do nothing,” Stevenson replied, “except to love her.”

  In morbid moments, Stevenson would complain that his family history had “doomed” him to a life in politics, but in truth Stevenson yearned for public service. When FDR was elected in 1932, Stevenson jumped at the chance to be one of the young New Dealers, working first in the Department of Agriculture, and spending most of the war years as Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox’s “principal attorney.”

  When Knox died in 1944, Stevenson finagled an opportunity to work in the State Department, becoming a deputy to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. In that capacity, Stevenson was sent to London as part of the American delegation to the committee planning the first general session of the new United Nations organization. Stevenson later served as an alternate American delegate to the first session of the UN, and it was in that role that he forged a close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Stevenson’s interest in foreign affairs drew the scorn of the conservative Chicago Tribune, which charged in an editorial that Stevenson “and his kind profess an interest in foreign affairs only because they wish to get away from America and associate with foreigners, to whom they pay fawning obeisance.” The kind of opposition that Stevenson would face his entire political life was taking shape even before he had run for office.

  On his forty-seventh birthday, Stevenson wrote in his diary that he was “restless, dissatisfied with myself.” Despite having “everything”—a wife, children, career—he professed he had “too much ambition for public recognition.” He strongly believed public service was honorable and was dismayed when a survey conducted after the war found seven of ten American parents would disapprove of their children going into politics. “Think of it!” Stevenson exclaimed. “Boys could die in battle, but parents did not want their children to give their living efforts toward a better America and a better world. It seems sad to me that ‘politics’ and ‘politician’ are so often epithets and words of disrespect and contempt.”

  Given his background in fo
reign affairs, Stevenson thought the U.S. Senate was the obvious place to pursue his ambitions, but the leaders of the Illinois Democratic Party had other ideas. They already had an excellent 1948 Senate candidate in Paul Douglas, and they wanted Stevenson to run for governor—once they confirmed that Stevenson had never, contrary to rumor, studied at Oxford, a presumed kiss of death in Illinois politics. “Never went to Oxford, not even to Eton,” Stevenson cheerfully telegrammed.

  For his campaign announcement, Stevenson was told by party leaders to draft a few notes that would be revised and polished by a party professional. When they read Stevenson’s draft, they decided not to change a thing. “We knew then this was a new style of political speaking and it was bound to make an impression upon all those who heard him,” said “Colonel” Jacob Arvey, the head of the Cook County Democratic machine.

  In his announcement, Stevenson demonstrated that his approach to campaigning would be different from that of the typical pol. “I say simply that our system is on trial; that our example in the years immediately ahead of us will determine the shape of things to come; that unless we continue healthy, strong, and free we will not win many converts; that unless we can lift the hearts of men, unless we can reawaken the hopes of men, the faith of men, in the free way of life, we will be alone and isolated in a hostile world.” An old bull of a precinct committeeman, impressed by the high tone of Stevenson’s address, turned and whispered to Arvey, “We can go with him. He’s got class.”

  With substantial Republican support, Stevenson won the governorship by the largest plurality in Illinois history. Truman, by contrast, had carried the state by barely thirty thousand votes. Only the third Democratic governor in Illinois since the Civil War, Stevenson focused on cleaning up corruption in state government. He also cracked down on illegal gambling, launched a one hundred million dollar highway program, and nearly doubled state aid to the public schools.