Flaming Arrows to the Sky: A Memoir of Adiai Stevenson

THE ATLANTIC

BY GEORGE W. BALL

ADLAI STEVENSON and I both arrived in Washington at the outset of the New Deal, he a refugee from a Chicago law firm, and I fresh out of law school. Roosevelt’s inauguration made Washington an irresistible lodestone for young lawyers with a mission.

The air was yeasty and rarefied. It seemed to offer little resistance to forward motion, and we were, all of us — to a greater or less extent — guided by two operational principles. We were convinced that our predecessors had made a mess of it and that nothing done up to that point in history was much good. And we had the satisfying feeling that there was nothing we could not do.

Exposure to New Deal Washington left its mark on both of us, less perhaps on Adlai than on me, since he was ten years older and had more sense. But when we returned to Chicago at the end of two years, we both found the practice of law rather sterile, at least during the initial period of decompression.

For Adlai no activity could be sterile very long, since he had a remarkable sensitivity to the great issues of the time. For the first four years after our Washington interlude, he and I practiced in different Chicago firms. By 1939, when I had become an associate of the firm of which he was a junior partner, he was already deeply engaged in persuading a skeptical Middle West that isolationism was a ridiculous policy for a nation destined to lead the world.

In 1940 Adlai was commanding the barricades for William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. By this time he had established an extraordinary local reputation by the wit and authority with which he presided over the proceedings of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The council was a vital place in Chicago during that period of great national debate. It was an oasis of discontent in a complacent society brainwashed each morning by Colonel McCormick’s insistent xenophobia. We watched with growing delight as leading citizens came in droves to overflow luncheons of the council, to expose themselves to views that were not confined to the admonitory passages of Washington’s “Farewell Address.” The attraction for many — the more cynical of us suspected — was hardly the wisdom of the speakers so much as Adlai’s wise and scintillating introductions.

In those days Adlai was well on the way to becoming a respected local institution. Clearly that could be only a transient phase. The isolationist Middle West could not long hold a man who saw with clarity that the forces of evil were threatening the civilized world, and who believed passionately that America could not sit idly by. In June of 1941 he became assistant to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.

From the moment he arrived in the Navy Department, Adlai became a one-man recruiting office for the United States government, exhibiting an unflagging zeal for helping even casual acquaintances find appropriate assignments in the public service. This was not merely an expression of his fondness for people, and it was certainly not the politician’s instinct for patronage. It sprang from his deeply held conviction that the government needed and deserved the best talent the nation could produce.

At Adlai’s suggestion — but with little need for urging — I followed him to Washington when the United States entered the war, and we worked together during the last months of 1944. For some time thereafter, our paths crossed only infrequently. He was in London for preparatory work on the United Nations; then he returned to Chicago while I remained in Washington. After his election as governor in 1948, we kept in touch but did not meet except for an occasional long evening of communion.

EARLY in January, 1952, our paths again converged. I received a visit in my Washington law office from David Lloyd, who at that time was working in the White House as an assistant to the President’s Special Counsel Charles Murphy. Lloyd told me that he and Murphy had talked with President Truman regarding the possible candidacy of Adlai Stevenson for the presidency. The President had not yet decided whether he would run himself. He had not commissioned them to sound out Stevenson but had indicated that he would interpose no objection if they cared to do so on their own initiative.

After several further conversations, Lloyd called to say that he hoped I could arrange for Stevenson to come to Washington for a talk with President Truman. I telephoned Adlai in Springfield but found him totally cold to the idea. Only a short time before, he had announced his candidacy for a second term as governor. Running for President would be, he believed, an act of bad faith. He felt he had much unfinished business that he wished to complete during his next term. Above all he was not going to let down his friends and supporters, many of whom were Republicans. He was not going to behave “like the garden variety of opportunistic pol.”

After several telephone calls and considerable persuasion on my part, he did, however, concede that he had official business in Washington that could provide the occasion for a visit. He wanted to meet with John L. Lewis and with the Secretary of the Interior to support proposed measures for federal inspection of coal mines in light of the recent mine disasters. I talked further with Lloyd, and an appointment was made with the President for Tuesday evening, January 22. It was understood, of course, that the meeting must be kept secret.

Stevenson was late in arriving in Washington from New York, where he had made a speech the night before. He came to my house for dinner and found to his dismay that Carleton Kent of the Chicago Sun-Times had been calling and was already aware that something unusual was afoot.

Dinner was hasty, and Adlai was droll but preoccupied. How could he best explain to President Truman that he wished to remain governor of Illinois without seeming ungrateful or disrespectful of the office of the presidency?

I drove Adlai to Blair House, where President Truman was then in residence. I waited while he argued with the guards, who had never heard of him.

Adlai telephoned me the next morning. He had, he said, “made a hash” of his talk with the President, who had not understood his feelings at all, and no doubt thought him a complete idiot. He was satisfied that President Truman had written him off as hopeless and that the incident was closed. It was not an accurate appraisal, for I immediately began receiving calls from newspaper correspondents who had been alerted by the White House that Stevenson had spent the previous evening with the President.

During the weeks that followed I telephoned Springfield every few days, pressing the point that he should stop trying to resist the logic of history that made him the necessary Democratic presidential candidate. Meanwhile, I attempted as best I could to maintain uneasy communications between the White House and the governor. I was not notably successful. Lloyd and Murphy were as convinced as I of Adlai’s great qualities, but they knew the outer limits of the President’s patience, and Stevenson was not behaving in a manner that made any sense to a seasoned man of politics.

Pursuant to his promise to discuss the subject further — and prompted, I suspect, by my persistent nagging — Adlai came to Washington toward the middle of March to try to explain his position more fully to the White House. Using an assumed name to avoid reporters, he flew in with his son John Fell on their way to Florida. They joined Murphy, another of the President’s assistants, James Loeb, and myself for dinner at my house. One of my sons took John Fell to the movies while the rest of us talked late into the evening. The discussion did not go well. Murphy told me afterward that he was deeply discouraged — reflecting, I assume, President Truman’s own view of Stevenson’s continued obduracy. Adlai spent the night with us, then took off the next morning. In the plane bound for Florida he wrote my wife a note, reporting wryly that “now we’re approaching Jacksonville the miseries are melting away.” Nevertheless, “the noose still feels uncomfortably tight about my neck and I wish I could see where the paths of self-interest and family interest converged with paths of duty.”

But if the President was growing impatient, the country was becoming rapidly aware that a new political personality was emerging from Illinois. To catalyze the process, I wheedled Stevenson into letting me set up a small center of information in my law oflice. He reluctantly agreed but only if I made it clear that I was acting purely on my own initiative.

I raised several thousand dollars and hired some people to work up copy about Stevenson which we could begin to feed to the news media. I also sent a man to Springfield to review the governor’s papers, talk to his staff, and try to develop some material that would bring out the achievements and dimensions of the man — stories about his family, his work as governor, his principles and philosophy. In all of this, I was greatly aided by friends, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., particularly. On one occasion, I took another old friend, Bernard De Voto, to Springfield, where he stayed with Adlai for several days preparing an article for Harper’s.

All of this activity began to worry the governor, as “publishing” friends in the East let him know that they were being approached to print articles about him. He sent me several admonitory messages, addressing me teasingly as “The Earl of Warwick.”

By that time, of course, a great number of people were starting to play a Warwick role, calling, writing, and telegraphing to urge that he declare for the nomination. My principal anxiety was not that he needed to assert a positive intention, but that he would shut the door so tightly as to make it impossible for us to keep his candidacy alive. Whenever he considered drafting what might be interpreted as an irrevocable statement, I would insist that he hold off until I could talk to him on the spot.

I am not sure how many times during the spring and early summer of 1952 I rushed to Springfield for long and searching talks in the governor’s mansion. Those talks ranged widely over the whole problem of his possible candidacy. Occasionally, I could induce him to talk of what he would do “if he should be drafted.” More than once he said to me, “If I do have to run, I must run on my own, with no one telling me what to do or say. I’m going to be myself — and the poor unfortunate electorate will have to take me for what I am, every word I write or speak during the campaign must be mine. It must bear my own imprimatur.”

He was always prepared to talk about the issues — particularly the great life-and-death issues of foreign policy. But to my knowledge, even after his nomination, he shied away from any talk about how he would organize the government. He recognized quite clearly that one of the most difficult tasks for a President is to find the right people for the right jobs, and he worried about it. But he avoided the discussion of any specific appointments since he feared that any names he mentioned might become public knowledge and lead to the suspicion that he was promising jobs to gain support. I recall only one exception, when, during a conversation with him in Springfield, he told me that he regarded John J. McCloy, a distinguished Republican, as the best man for Secretary of State.

During the months prior to the Republican Convention in July, it became clear that if Taft were to receive the Republican nomination, Stevenson’s choice would be made a great deal easier. He could campaign against Taft with the conviction that the issues were sharply defined. Taft meant a turning back toward pre-war isolationism. But General Eisenhower was something else. He was an internationalist, and Stevenson thought he might not make a bad President. Moreover, after twenty years of uninterrupted Democratic power, “one could make a strong case for giving the Republicans a taste of responsibility.”

But these doubts did not persist after July. Once the Democratic Party had made its decision Stevenson tackled the job of “educating the country” with zest and energy.

THE 1952 campaign, not only for those who took part in it but for many Americans who played a merely passive role, was, I think, the highest achievement in Adlai Stevenson’s career. He sent up flaming arrows to light the sky, lifting political discussion to a level of literacy and eloquence, candor and humor that tapped unsuspected reflexes in the American electorate. Most of us who participated in it had had no experience before in a national political campaign, and we loved every minute of it.

Adlai Stevenson loved it, too. Although he had no taste for the tedium of “political talk,” by and large he liked the “pols” that he met in his campaign travels throughout the country. He admired their single-minded devotion to the business of getting votes and was amused by their total lack of interest in the issues involved. They were technicians plying a trade, displaying a cynical detachment he delighted to observe. He could not stand candidates who pretended a pious concern for the issues that they did not feel.

Once the campaign got under way he gave it his whole heart. The draft at the convention absolved him from any remaining doubts about his obligations to the people of Illinois. The measured respect in which he held his opponents before the campaign was quickly dispelled by the handling of the Nixon fund and the soap-opera character of the Checkers speech. He was shocked and outraged at Eisenhowers refusal to defend General Marshall in the presence of Senator McCarthy, who had vilified the general, Ike’s former commanding offficer. Adlai was in a fight. He had no doubt about the rightness of the policies he was advocating. He had a deep faith in the good sense of the American people — provided they were told the truth.

It has often been remarked that Franklin Roosevelt could have added a further dimension to his political effectiveness if, great actor that he was, he had had the use not only of radio but of television.

In many ways I think that Adlai Stevenson would have been a more effective politician if he could have fought his two presidential campaigns when only the radio was available. The 1952 campaign was the first in which television played an appreciable role, and for Adlai that was just bad luck. There was a vibrant eloquence in his words and in his oddly cadenced voice, but he obstinately refused to master the skills of the effective television performer. I know this well because I was, for my sins, director of public relations during the 1956 campaign. And while such brilliant virtuosos as Ed Murrow went to great trouble to teach Adlai the tricks of an intimate television style, he resolutely persisted in reading speeches from a manuscript. “If they don’t like me as I am, tant pis! I won’t pretend to be anything else.” His only concession to the susceptibilities of the television audience was an occasional nervous grin which, at intervals, he would turn on and off too quickly.

Adlai’s insistence upon working on his speeches to the last minute has become part of the legend. We used to tell him that “he would rather write than be President.” On more than one occasion he completely missed press coverage by withholding his speeches for further polishing until after it was too late to make the morning newspapers.

And he could never learn to keep his speeches within the Procrustean limit of thirty minutes. For those of us who followed a text of the speech in the studio or at campaign headquarters, the anxiety was always intense that Adlai wouldn’t finish on time. The problem arose not only from the fact that he insisted upon inserting additional words, phrases, whole paragraphs at the last minute, but also from the curious circumstance that he had no established speaking pace. We never knew whether he was going to start slowly, then begin racing at the end of the speech when he discovered he was far behind, or start speaking quickly and then suddenly slow down. The greatest disappointment came on election eve in 1952, when he failed to finish on time and anguished friends frantically arranged to buy five additional minutes later in the evening so that the peroration of his speech would be known to the American people.

A constant quarrel that I had with him was his refusal to give his speeches a clear structure. “You are,” I told him on more than one occasion, “a fine poet, but a lousy architect. You say the right things and say them eloquently, but you don’t let the structure of your speeches show through. Consequently, your listeners cannot recall what you have said or that you have recommended anything specific.”

People, I insisted, think in schematic terms. Eisenhower’s speech writers regularly inserted in each speech eight, ten, or twelve points, which the General would solemnly enumerate as the ultimate solution to a particular problem. Adlai would go to the heart of the matter but never tick off his recommendations in systematic form.

This kind of advice always annoyed Stevenson, and certainly he never accepted it. He had contempt for the pretentious pronouncement of obvious points as though “a list were a concept or a litany a program.” That was, he felt, a cheap political device, and he would have none of it. Besides, it offended his sensibilities as a writer.

IN SPITE of the problems, the failures, the heartaches, the testimony of the polls, and the logic of circumstances, Adlai never doubted in 1952 that he would win. He believed in the rightness of what he was saying and drew confidence from his ability to “talk sense to the American people.” An incident near the end of the campaign illustrates his conviction that victory would be his. Wilson Wyatt, his campaign manager, and I insisted that when on a visit to a certain city, he must pay a call on a powerful leader of a minority group who he thought was a charlatan. He reacted with annoyance and indignation. “Don’t you characters believe,” he asked, “that we are going to win with such a big vote that that kind of noxious business isn’t necessary?”

As the campaign wore on neither Wyatt nor I shared Adlai’s faith in the outcome. The polls were too consistently running against us. His opponent was a great war hero, who had promised, if elected, to go to Korea and put an end to a war of which the American people had become tired. Besides, it was time for a change.

In the afternoon of election day, when the crescendo pace of the campaign had come to a shuddering and unnerving halt, Wilson and I took a long walk along the back streets of Springfield. In the intimacy of the gathering dusk we each confessed to what neither had up to then been willing to admit, that we were not going to win. Wilson was, as usual, clearheaded and honest.

“It hasn’t worked. We haven’t had time. We haven’t been able to turn it around,” he said. But we were in accord even at that final hour that Adlai still believed he would win and win roundly.

Yet, though he expected victory, he looked defeat in the eye with a dignity and style few other men could have shown. Adlai in defeat was the gallant champion. His thoughts, as usual, were of others. Those of us who had helped and worked with him were sustained by his grace under that hardest of pressures for a public man. He would have been just as fine in victory.

Late election evening a small group of old friends gathered at the Governor’s Mansion, We were, all of us, in a state of shock. Though we had known in our hearts that victory was unlikely, the fact and magnitude of the defeat were bewildering and deeply daunting, especially when we contrasted the magnificent expression of American purpose set forth by our man with what we regarded as the pedestrian and opportunistic performance of his opponent. We were physically and spiritually exhausted, and troubled in our souls about the future of our country.

On that occasion as on others the stiff-upper-lip Stevenson tradition was fully maintained by the Stevenson sons, even by John Fell, who was at that time no more than fifteen. Once only in the evening did he betray his disappointment, wistfully observing to one of the women present that while for himself he didn’t much mind his father’s defeat, “It would have been nice to have been the President’s son just for a little while.”

Adlai was remarkably composed and serene, the only blithe member of a doleful group. He had no taste, he said, for political wakes — “especially when I’m the corpse.” He consoled us as though we, not he, were the losers, at one point disappearing into the kitchen for a jeroboam of victory champagne someone had sent him. Always the Scotchman, he insisted on not wasting it. Always the considerate host, he insisted on pouring it himself.

Finally he announced that since he had lost the election, the least he could do was to make the toast. And so, with Adlai, we all raised our glasses while he offered a tribute to “Wilson Wyatt, the best campaign manager any unsuccessful politician ever had.”

He described himself wrongly, of course, as we all knew. He was no “unsuccessful politician” but a brave leader who had given a whole generation of Americans a cause for which many could, for the first time, feel deeply proud — a man of prophetic quality who, in Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase, “set the tone for a new era in Democratic politics.”

Only one person present that evening would have dared to call Adlai Stevenson “unsuccessful” — and we loved him for it. For we had each of us, at different times and in different ways, discovered that sense of decency and proportion, humility and infallible good manners which led him so often to understatement, particularly when he spoke of himself. And we would not have had him otherwise.