Almost President (27 page)

During the 1952 presidential campaign, he tried to appear equally sympathetic to the sensibilities of white Southerners and African Americans and ended up pleasing no one. Four years later, worried about Southern reaction to the Supreme Court's
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision to integrate public schools, Stevenson had suggested in a meeting with liberal supporters that civil rights activists take a one-year moratorium on any further agitation. Stevenson believed prejudice could only be addressed by changing minds, not laws—a position very similar to Barry Goldwater's. After the meeting, Schlesinger sadly wrote in his diary, “It seems evident that he does not feel any strong moral issue in the civil rights fight; that he identifies instinctively with the problems of the Southern white rather than with the sufferings of the Southern Negro.”

Stevenson also had a maddening belief that he was somehow above the usual give and take of politics. When Texas governor Allan Shivers asked Stevenson to at least remain neutral in what was then a heated debate on whether the federal government or the coastal states owned offshore mineral rights, Stevenson refused and said he opposed the coastal states' position. Shivers warned Stevenson that such a position could cost him Texas and even the presidency. “But I don't
have
to be president,” Stevenson replied loftily.

Whatever his faults, the reluctant candidate Stevenson was the class of the Democratic field when Truman announced he would not seek another term in 1952. But after twenty years of Democrats in the White House, Stevenson thought Eisenhower might make a fine president, and he was skeptical any Democrat had a chance to beat a war hero so popular that he was almost like a “household commodity—the catsup bottle on the kitchen table.”

And he was right. Stevenson's campaign was gallant and inspiring, but it never had a chance. While communism and corruption within the Truman administration were millstones for the candidate, his biggest weakness was the Korean War. Stevenson was as baffled as anyone by how to extricate the United States from a conflict whose goal was not total victory. He toyed with the idea of promising to travel to Korea if elected, but dropped it as being too transparent a ploy to win votes. Instead, Stevenson offered this hard truth: “I promise no easy solutions, no relief from burdens and anxieties, for to do this would be not only dishonest, it would attack the foundations of our greatness. I can offer something infinitely better: an opportunity to work and sacrifice that freedom may flourish.”

Eisenhower, the nation's most trusted and beloved general, trumped that and the eloquence of all of Stevenson's speeches with five simple words he uttered a week before the election: “I shall go to Korea.” If the result had been in doubt before, Eisenhower won the election with that simple declaration in late October. That was the assurance voters were looking for, that the man who engineered America's victory in Europe would find a way to end what seemed an endless war.
15
Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and carried all but nine Southern states.

At first, confronted with the bleak prospect of facing Eisenhower again, Stevenson planned not to run for president in 1956, but in 1955 Eisenhower had a heart attack and Stevenson thought Ike might retire. Stevenson relished the thought of running against Nixon, so he announced plans for a second campaign and won the nomination in a hard-fought contest with Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, made famous by his televised hearings on organized crime. But Eisenhower did not step down.

The 1956 campaign was essentially a replay of 1952, although Stevenson no longer seemed like a fresh, new voice and Ike's health was an issue. Stevenson's speeches were not quite as stirring, perhaps because the times were not so dark. The war in Korea was over. McCarthy had been discredited and would soon be dead from the ravages of alcoholism. Then, in the final weeks of the campaign, there were two foreign crises—the uprising against Soviet domination in Hungary and the Suez Crisis in the Middle East—that reminded voters how reassuring it was to have a general in the White House.

Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that Stevenson did as well as he did. Given that popular incumbent presidents with the approval rating enjoyed by Eisenhower usually win re-election with 60 percent or more of the popular vote, Stevenson's 42 percent showing (just two points less than he received in 1952) indicated he was still widely admired—though not by every Democrat.

One of the most memorable episodes during the 1956 campaign was Stevenson's decision to let the Democratic convention choose his running mate for him. Among those who competed for the prize was young Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, who was passed over in favor of Kefauver but who made a most favorable impression in his national debut. To appease Kennedy admirers, Stevenson hired Kennedy's brother, Robert, to work on the campaign, but RFK found Stevenson so uninspiring that he quietly voted for Eisenhower.

A few Stevenson acolytes, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, hoped he would make one more try in 1960. Stevenson did not want to actively seek the nomination, but he clearly hoped the Democrats might turn to him once more. As the national convention convened, in a sign of how much he continued to want the presidency, he made a humiliating last-minute call to Chicago mayor Richard Daley to determine if the Illinois delegation might drop its support for Kennedy and lead a convention stampede to Stevenson once more. It was too late—and his effort simply angered the Kennedys.

Stevenson had hoped his stature within the party would make him secretary of state in the Kennedy administration. Instead, he was made ambassador to the United Nations, where he learned to his chagrin that his role was only to enunciate policy, not formulate it. Still, he was an articulate spokesman for the United States in world affairs and earned the country considerable goodwill by treating diplomats from the emerging Third World nations with the same courtesy as that shown to those from the great powers. He also continued to advocate for one of his pet causes, a ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which he had first proposed in 1956, and which was finally approved in 1963.

Kennedy did not particularly like Stevenson; he had bought into the Republican line that Stevenson was not tough enough for realpolitik. When Stevenson was deliberately kept out of the loop on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he was placed in the position of unintentionally espousing lies before the UN. He was also kept at arm's length during the Cuban Missile Crisis, although it appears one of his suggestions—to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey to help the Soviets save face—was ultimately adopted by JFK.

In the wake of such humiliations, friends kept urging Stevenson to resign and lead a liberal uprising against the perceived conservatism and hard line anti-communism of Kennedy. Stevenson's own conservative nature made it impossible to be a rebel. “That's not how the game is played,” he said. Plus, he enjoyed his role at the UN, even if it only provided the appearance of power.

Since his divorce, and with his sons now adults, Stevenson enjoyed the international partying that came with his job and a series of relationships with adoring women. Diplomacy was “one-third protocol, one-third alcohol, and one-third Geritol,” Stevenson was fond of saying. Some said his “sybaritic” lifestyle was the cause of the massive heart attack that killed him while walking on the streets of London. He was sixty-five.

On election night in 1952, a supporter told Stevenson, “Governor, you didn't win, but you educated the country with your great campaign.” To which Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course!” Many agreed with his grading system. Hofstadter said “his political fate was taken as a yardstick by which liberal intellectuals measured the position of intellect in American political life.” But that is a false measurement.

Certainly some, then and now, believe Stevenson's intellectual appeal was a handicap. Truman, who privately called Stevenson “a country-club, tweedy snob,” had worried that Stevenson lacked the common touch. During the 1956 campaign, when Stevenson came to him for advice, Truman remembered taking Stevenson to a hotel window, pointing down to a random citizen walking on the street below, and saying, “The thing that you have got to do is learn how to reach that man.”

As recently as the 2008 presidential campaign, then Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell publicly expressed his concern that Obama was “a little like Adlai Stevenson. You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer. And the six-minute answer is smart as all get out. It's intellectual. It's well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it's a lousy soundbite.”

The author Garry Wills has suggested that Stevenson represents the “antitype” of an effective electoral leader, as exemplified by FDR. Where Roosevelt “grappled voters to him,” Stevenson believed in the “Periclean” model of leadership, where a virtuous man above the pressure of base politics tells the people uncomfortable truths and then waits for the voters to “flock to him.”

But perhaps just as Stevenson's intellectual comrades were too hard on the voters for preferring Ike and his supposed blandness, subsequent analysts have been too hard on Stevenson and his supposed elitism. No one can win twenty-seven million votes, as Stevenson did in 1952 (the third-most by a presidential candidate in history), and not reach quite a few so-called common voters—a concept that perhaps carries far more condescension than anything Stevenson ever said.

Some supporters of Stevenson may have, at the time, found it “literally inconceivable . . . that a rational electorate would prefer Ike to Adlai,” but given the circumstances of the time—the war in Korea, weariness with Democratic rule, Eisenhower's own shrewd political instincts—it is hard to see how the eventual result could have been different. Further, perhaps the voters' judgment should not be faulted, for Eisenhower is now consistently ranked, even by some of the same scholars who supported Stevenson, as one of our ten best presidents.

After the Soviet Union launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, intellectualism was in fashion again as Americans worried about keeping pace in the space race. So they elected Kennedy, who had won (with help from his aide, Theodore Sorensen) the Pulitzer Prize for his own book,
Profiles in Courage
. Kennedy, who had hired Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to serve as a sort of in-house intellectual as well as a host of other Ivy Leaguers to run the government, deliberately maintained a highbrow image. There was even a Stevenson mark on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, not seemingly an intellectual, but who eschewed the more earthy and colloquial sobriquets like the “New Deal” and the “Fair Deal” to label his own domestic program the Stevensonian-sounding “Great Society.”

Whenever Americans believe that the occupant of the White House should possess the intellectual curiosity necessary to meet the current challenges, they have turned to men who wear their intelligence well, whether they were men who did graduate work in nuclear physics, like Jimmy Carter; who studied at Oxford, like Bill Clinton; or who edited the
Harvard Law Review
before becoming a successful and acclaimed author, like Barack Obama. These were all Democrats, and it remains an oddity that Republicans remain resolutely hostile to nominating a candidate whose qualifications include an overt intellectual curiosity.

Stevenson's style could be easily mocked. Peter Sellers reportedly based his character of the balding and cerebral president Merkin Muffley in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film,
Dr. Strangelove,
on Stevenson. It was a hilarious but devastating portrait of a public official so devoted to rational thought and good manners that he is unable to summon the necessary action to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.

But being easily mocked is not the same as being easily mimicked, which is why Stevenson's appeal has endured. Thousands of young voters in post-war America, many educated on the GI Bill, found something immensely appealing in Stevenson's “fundamental decency.” He helped the Democrats shed their image of a party run by big city bosses and Southern reactionaries. As Goldwater would open the South to the Republicans in 1964, Stevenson won Democratic converts in places like New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast where the party had not been very strong before. They were untroubled that Stevenson asked so many questions and provided so few answers because they thought he was asking the right questions. What kind of country do you want this to be? And what is your role as a citizen in making it that kind of country?

Despite what was said about him during his campaigns and since, Stevenson did not look down on American voters but tried to talk to them eye-to-eye and convince them that they, too, shared the burden of leadership with those whom they put in political office. “I get so sick of the everlasting appeals to the cupidity and prejudice of every group which characterizes our political campaigns,” he said. “There is something finer in people; they know that they owe something, too. I should like to try, at least, to appeal to their sense of obligation as well as their avarice.”