Almost President (25 page)

Stevenson himself was a fine writer, extremely sensitive to anyone taking credit for the content of his speeches. He was immeasurably helped, however, by a campaign staff that included four speechwriters who either had won or would win the Pulitzer Prize, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith. And if Stevenson needed further assistance in word-smithing, he could turn to other advisors such as the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Archibald MacLeish, theologians Henry Emerson Fosdick and Reinhold Niebuhr, diplomats George Ball and George Kennan, or the British expatriate journalist (and future host of public television's
Masterpiece Theater
) Alistair Cooke.

Perhaps no other campaign in history could boast such an array of intellectual firepower. It is not surprising then that Stevenson is the only presidential candidate in memory whose campaign speeches were bound together as a best-selling book—twice! The first edition came during the 1952 campaign, when publication of such addresses was a common campaign practice. But these and other Stevenson speeches were repackaged a full year after the campaign had ended and once again the collection became a best seller.

Among Stevenson's readers was the novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, who wrote the foreword to the first book of speeches and said he could never recall reading a political speech for “pleasure” until Stevenson came along. It was solely the power of Stevenson's speeches, he said, that convinced Steinbeck to switch his allegiance from Eisenhower to Stevenson. “As a man, I like his intelligent, humorous, logical, civilized mind,” he said. Steinbeck also expressed amazement that the Republicans or anyone else would suggest Stevenson's speeches were too cerebral. Said the author of
The Grapes of Wrath
and
East of Eden,
“I can understand them and I don't think I am more intelligent than the so-called ‘people.'”

Stevenson sealed his nomination with an eloquent speech before the Democratic National Convention in 1952, just as a future Illinois politician named Obama would evoke the Stevenson tone at another national convention more than fifty years later.

Having won a landslide victory to become governor of Illinois in 1948, Stevenson seemed a logical candidate for president in 1952 once Truman announced he would not seek re-election. Truman himself actively recruited Stevenson, seeing qualities that he hoped might make voters overlook all the problems of his administration and keep the Democrats in power. “Adlai,” Truman said, “if a knucklehead like me can be president and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

Stevenson, however, angered Truman and disappointed admirers by resisting calls to become an active candidate. He preferred, he said, to serve a second term as governor of Illinois. (He also thought he would have a better chance at the presidency in 1956.) But in a bit of serendipity that had also benefited the first Illinoisan who was a candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, the 1952 convention was held in Chicago. Because Stevenson was the host state's governor, he was charged with giving a welcoming speech to the Democratic delegates. This pro forma task on the first day of a convention is usually a sparsely attended affair, but delegates knew Stevenson's reputation for oratory and the Chicago Amphitheater was packed.

“Here, my friends,” Stevenson told them, “on the prairies of Illinois and of the Middle West, we can see a long way in all directions. . . . Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and to aspirations. We want none; we want not shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid pattern of thought, and no iron conformity. We want only the faith and conviction that triumph in free and fair contest.”

Twenty-seven times Stevenson's brief address was interrupted by wild applause, even for sentiments that would not seem to be obvious crowd pleasers, such as, “What America needs and the world wants is not bombast, abuse, and double talk, but a somber message of firm faith and confidence. St. Francis said, ‘Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor worry.' That might well be our text.”

Stevenson's was a new style of political oratory that was learned and poignant. Rapt delegates began to believe that they had found the miracle candidate who could overcome the unpopularity of the Truman presidency and maintain the Democrats' twenty-year hold on the White House. Two days later, even though he had actively discouraged the modest draft movement that had been afoot, Stevenson was nominated for president. Because he had not entered a primary, he had no campaign organization in place. He had to start from scratch.

In his acceptance speech, Stevenson famously promised to “talk sense to the American people.” He would later complain that most politicians treated American citizens as “fourteen-year-olds.” His acceptance speech did not. He was trying to fulfill his pledge to “tell them the truth”:

Let's tell them the victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity. For it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and mistrust, which do not fall before the trumpets' blast, or the politicians' imprecations, or even a general's baton. They are, my friends, walls that must be directly stormed by the hosts of courage, of morality, and of vision, standing shoulder to shoulder, unafraid of ugly truth, contemptuous of lies, half truths, circuses, demagoguery . . .

It was a sterling beginning to what Stevenson hoped would be a campaign conducted upon a high plane. His speech was marred by a gaucherie when Stevenson compared his own deep reluctance to accept the nomination with Christ's prayer at Gethsemane: “If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.” Upon hearing Stevenson utter what many Christians would consider a sacrilege, Eisenhower turned off his television set and said, “After hearing that, fellows, I think he is a bigger faker than all the rest of them.”

Ike was a rare skeptic that day, however. Liberal columnist Mary McGrory, then a young book reviewer at the
Washington Star,
said Stevenson's acceptance speech was “politically speaking . . . the Christmas morning of our lives.”

Before Stevenson's campaigns, intellectualism had not been considered the province of any single political party, and the very phrase “anti-intellectualism” was hardly heard. Certainly, America had seen debates between those who claimed to represent the common people against an economic elite, and this sometimes took on cultural overtones, such as this bit of doggerel from the 1828 presidential campaign, which said the contest was between:

John Quincy Adams who can write

And Andrew Jackson who can fight.

But learned men who did not mind being known as learned men could be found in either party, though to the degree there was a cultural elite in America before World War II that disdained popular culture, it was identified with wealthy, conservative Republicans, not liberal Democratic college professors and writers.

Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard man and the author of serious works of history, attracted the support of numerous intellectuals as a Republican, but then so did Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a professor of political economy who first gained national attention as president of Princeton University. Franklin Roosevelt was celebrated for his “brain trust” of bright young men who came to shape and guide the New Deal, although FDR himself was notoriously charged by Oliver Wendell Holmes with having “a second class intellect.” And Roosevelt's Republican opponents—Herbert Hoover, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Dewey—were hardly anti-intellectuals. For that matter, neither was Eisenhower.

Ike may have lacked Stevenson's irony, but he was a shrewd and extremely intelligent man who had, as Supreme Allied Commander, successfully managed such egos as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George Patton, and Bernard Montgomery in leading the Allies to victory in Europe. After the war, he had briefly served as president of Columbia University, and his wartime memoir,
Crusade in Europe
, which he wrote without help from a ghostwriter, is considered among the finest in the genre.

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.