DEMOCRATS: Everybody’s No. 2

(See Cover) Behind wailing police sirens, a cream-colored Cadillac sped into Abbeville, La. from the dusty airport, rolled on past the white-columned courthouse, and pulled up in front of the Candlelight Restaurant. Missouri’s Senator Stuart Symington unfolded his long (6 ft. 2 in., 183 lbs.), well-tailored frame from a rear seat and, ringed by Louisiana politicos, strode inside to start shaking hands. As photographers flashed away, Abbeville’s Mayor Roy Theriot bounced forward to get his picture taken with Symington and Louisiana’s own Senator Allen Ellender. “I’m going to pose with two Senators,” cried Theriot. “One may be the next President.” With a quick laugh, Symington turned to Ellender. “Congratulations, Allen,” he said. Everybody within earshot laughed too, for Missouri’s Symington was a long way from home and running for President for all he was worth, on his own special road to the White House.

One of the Good Guys. After a fried-chicken lunch and a short press conference, Presidential Hopeful Symington boarded the Cadillac again, rode to the courthouse square to do his speechmaking bit as guest of honor at Abbeville’s yearly Dairy Festival. Atop a speaker’s platform adorned with red, white and blue bunting and “Symington for President” signs, he smilingly endured the Missouri Waltz played on an electric organ, then permitted photographers to snap away as Dairy Festival Queen Laurie Lee Broussard, 17, planted a decorous kiss on his cheek.

Mindful that his audience was made up largely of farmers, Speaker Symington fired on one of his favorite targets, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. “I don’t know who he represents,” said Symington, “but I know who he does not represent—the farmers.” But it was not what Symington said that impressed the citizens of Abbeville. What impressed them was Stuart Symington himself. Standing straight and tall on the platform, a frown of earnestness stamped on his strong-jawed, ruggedly handsome face, the lingering trace of boyishness nicely balanced by the thick silver streaks in his hair, he looked every inch a potential President. Anybody conditioned by the movies could plainly see that here was one of the Good Guys, brimful of courage and determination to put the Bad Guys to rout.

Party’s Choice? Of the five men who, according to the pols and the polls, have at least an outside chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Stuart Symington is the least widely known, the least colorful and the least eloquent. But he has a lot going for him. He has had more high-level administrative experience in the Federal Government than Massachusetts’ Jack Kennedy, Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey and Texas’ Lyndon Johnson put together. As a Midwesterner of Southern ancestry, who was born in Amherst, Mass, and raised in Baltimore, Md., he has an enviably broad and safe geographical base. And if he is one of the more pedestrian orators in U.S. Senate history, he partly makes up for it with platform earnestness.

But Symington’s hopes of emerging as his party’s choice in Los Angeles next summer rest largely on his negative assets and the appeal they might have to professional politicians. At 58 (last June), he is neither too young nor too old. As an Episcopalian, he does not have to worry, as Kennedy does, about the widespread conviction that a Roman Catholic cannot be elected President. As a politician who has run for high public office twice and won twice, he does not carry Adlai Stevenson’s stigma of past defeats. Though he has voted a straight liberal line in the U.S. Senate—certified and approved by Americans for Democratic Action—he has escaped the 200-proof-liberal label that afflicts Hubert Humphrey. And while Southern ties make him tolerable to many delegates from the South, he is not burdened with Lyndon Johnson’s probably fatal handicap of being thought of as a Southerner.

The Soft Sell. The hope of the Symington camp is that the other hopefuls’ handicaps will keep any No. 1 choice from grabbing off the nomination on the early ballots, and that the deadlock-menaced convention will turn to just-about-everybody’s No. 2, Stuart Symington, the man with no serious political scars or scabs.

Meanwhile, Symington’s strategy is to race while seeming to drift. He plans to delay any announcement of his candidacy until well along in 1960. Aware that Jack Kennedy could trounce him in mano a mano popularity contests, Symington is determined to stay out of primaries, and to do no campaigning in the Oregon primary, in which his name can be put on the ballot by petition without his consent. . If he loses in Oregon next May, he can explain that, after all, he was not even trying to win.

In his travels around the country to show himself to local Democratic politicos, Symington uses a soft and amiable sell, makes no effort to wring promises of convention support. The hard selling of Stuart Symington as presidential timber is done by his backers. This week, Missouri Congressman Charles (“Charley”) Brown, longtime Springfield adman and television executive, sets out on a 15-state trip to drum up support for Symington. Around the end of November, Missouri’s Governor James Blair will depart on a similar missionary trek to sell the Symington cause, especially to Democratic Governors. Symington’s behind-the-scenes strategy board, made up of five Missourians headed by Washington Lawyer Clark Clifford and Congressman Brown, is convinced that any head-on push for the nomination would hurt rather than help Symington’s chances of winning it.

A Special Poverty. Behind the posture of serenity, his friends and backers are convinced, Senator Symington burns with a longing for the White House every bit as intense as Senator Kennedy’s. In everything he ever took up, whether business, politics, tennis, golf or bridge, Stu Symington has been a fierce competitor—keeping his surface unruffled but seething underneath with a wild hatred of defeat. “If Stuart were playing marbles with a six-year-old,” says a St. Louis lawyer who has known Symington for many years and admires him intensely, “victory would still be a matter of life or death. He plays everything to win.”

Stuart Symington’s will to victory traces back to a special kind of poverty that he endured in childhood—not the numbing poverty of the slum poor but the stinging poverty of the semi-broke genteel. At the time of Stu’s birth, his father was a teacher of Romance languages at Massachusetts’ Amherst College. But he soon quit as a result of a quarrel with the college president, moved his family to New York, where he studied law at night, scraping a living by translating documents for export-import firms. A few years later, the family moved to Baltimore, where the elder Symington practiced law, winding up as a county judge.

Even after ex-Professor Symington started making money, at law and in business ventures, the flow was erratic. To supplement the family income during lean spells, young Stu got a paper route. One summer he sold bottled spring water from a wagon pulled by his dog. At eleven he attended his first presidential nominating convention—the historic, tumultuous Baltimore Democratic Convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson in 1912—as a vendor of peanuts, popcorn, tobacco and chewing gum.

Minus Mathematics. William Stuart Symington III (he trimmed the name to W. Stuart Symington as a businessman, dropped the W. when he got into politics) was an “extravagantly beautiful” child, recalls his doting sister Louise. Absorbing the household’s bookish atmosphere—adorning the mantle was a Latin motto that translates as “Life without literature is death”—little Stu read so avidly that the family called him “the professor.” As his Christmas present when he was ten, he asked for and got a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For all his reading, young Symington was an indifferent student in both high school and college days. A stubborn refusal to take a required mathematics course kept him from getting his Yale A.B. with the rest of his class in 1923 (Yale finally relented and gave him his degree 22 years later).

Early in life, Stu manifested the luck that was to stay with him over the years. He totally escaped the eye affliction, deterioration of the retina, that has given all three of his brothers faint vision. While playing tag in the framework of an unfinished house at age 9, he fell two stories to the concrete foundation, suffered nothing worse than a fractured and permanently stiffened left elbow. A natural southpaw, he had to learn to write with his right hand; but he played left-handed tennis well enough to star on his high school team and make the varsity at Yale. Despite his damaged arm, he enlisted in the Army in 1918, lying about his age to get in, won a field-artillery commission at 17 (the war ended before he got overseas).

Stu was especially lucky at wooing. At a charity ball during his sophomore year at Yale, he was stricken by the blue eyes and golden hair of pretty Evelyn Wadsworth, daughter of New York’s wealthy Republican Senator (1915-27) James Wadsworth, granddaughter of Secretary of State (1898-1905) John Hay, great-granddaughter of General James Samuel Wadsworth, whose First Division held heroically firm on Gulp’s Hill during the Battle of Gettysburg (where Symington’s grandfather, William Stuart Symington I, fought on the Confederate side as a youthful captain).

Stu and Evie were married in March 1924 in Washington’s most glittering society wedding of the year, with President Calvin Coolidge and the First Lady among the array of guests.

Feat of Clay. The Symingtons’ first home was a two-room apartment in Rochester, N.Y. Stu went to work in an iron foundry owned by his father’s brothers. Starting near the bottom, as a chipper and then a moulder, he used to come home black with grime. At night he studied mechanical engineering at the Mechanics Institute, electrical engineering through the International Correspondence School. The year after he got married, Symington borrowed $250,000 from his uncles and started a business of his own, Eastern Clay Products Co., specializing in bonding clay for foundry molds. By its second year, it rolled up a profit of $150,000.

From there Symington branched into radio loudspeakers, then, in 1930, bought from Sears, Roebuck a controlling interest in Colonial Radio Corp., using $500,000 borrowed from his uncles. Weathering the Depression by a combination of luck, good management and driving energy, Symington finally sold his interest in 1935, netting a small fortune.

Evie, too, was doing pretty well at moneymaking. Gifted with a rich contralto, she frequently sang, without thought of fee, at society charity events. Singing at a heart-clinic benefit at the Place Pigalle nightclub on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street in 1934, she so impressed the manager that he offered her a paying job. So began a four-year career as a torch singer, which took her into the spotlights of Manhattan’s flossiest nightclubs, brought upwards of $1,000 a week. Symington, a lot less famous in those years than his wife, followed her nightclub trail, building up an undeserved reputation as a playboy.

Streak of Respect. In 1938, after two years as president of Baltimore’s Rustless Iron & Steel Co., followed by a year of semi-retired dabbling in various ventures, Symington was looking around restlessly for something to do. At the urging of Wall Street Investment Banker David Van Alstyne Jr., he agreed to go to the rescue of St. Louis’ ailing Emerson Electric Manufacturing Co. (fans, small motors) in return for $24,000 a year, plus a stock-option deal. Emerson was deep in the red and battered by labor troubles, had barely managed to survive a bitter, 53-day sitdown strike in 1937. Taking over as president in unpromising 1938, Symington new-broomed away most of the old management, set about winning over his workers. William Sentner, Midwest boss of the United Electrical Workers, was an avowed Communist, but Symington got along fine with him. Symington wooed and won the workers with a union shop, dues checkoff, union-management committees and a hefty profit-sharing plan.

The inner-circle businessmen who gathered at St. Louis’ plush Racquet Club grumbled bitterly about Symington’s “sellout” to labor, and to this day some of them remain convinced that his romance with U.E.W. was a bit of cynical expediency, however well it may have worked for Emerson Electric. The accusation overlooks Symington’s authentic streak of respect for labor, which stems from his grimy days as a chipper and moulder in his uncle’s foundry. Over the years, Symington has won the warm respect and esteem of the Electrical Workers’ high-voltage President James Carey. “I have extremely high regard for Stuart Symington,” says Carey, “and for extremely good reason—his record.”

A Load of Coal. After the U.S. got into World War II, Symington set out to make gun turrets for U.S. bombers. During the harried months of the switchover at Emerson, with the Air Corps’ General “Hap” Arnold calling him up to plead for “just one turret, just one,” Symington worked around the clock. When exhaustion dragged at him, he flopped on a cot in his office. When he woke up, often in the middle of the night, he went back to work. General Arnold got turrets aplenty.

As head of a wartime Senate committee investigating defense production, Missouri’s Senator Harry Truman looked closely at Emerson and “could never find anything wrong with it,” as he put it. Impressed with Symington and his performance at Emerson, President Truman summoned him to the White House in mid-1945. “Stu,” said Truman, “I want to dump a load of coal on you.” He asked Symington to serve as head of the Surplus Property Board (later Surplus Property Administration), charged with setting policies for disposing of some $30 billion worth of Government property left over from the war, ranging from shoe polish, bayonets and bombers, to oil pipelines and complete aluminum plants. Symington sold his Emerson stock at a capital gain of around $1,000,000, took on what he calls “the roughest job I ever had.”

When a House select committee investigated surplus disposal in 1946, after Symington had moved on to the War Department, its report rapped him for “chaotic administrative conditions” and “favoritism if not downright corruption” in sales of surplus property. But Symington’s SPA, as he pointed out to the committee, had only a policymaking function; actual sales of surplus property were handled by other agencies, mainly the Commerce Department and the Reconstruction Finance Corp. Symington had no operating control over sales, no way of seeing to it that his policies were carried out. After half a year of frustrations, he went to Truman and urged him to wrap policymaking and selling into a single agency. Truman abolished Symington’s SPA, set up the War Assets Administration, with Lieut. General E. B. Gregory as boss. To Symington’s great relief, he was out from under the coal.

“Absolutely Relentless.” After killing off SPA, Truman named Symington Assistant Secretary of War for Air. When the Air Force split off from the Army in the defense reorganization of 1947, Symington became the first Air Force Secretary. Like all strong Air Force partisans, he had fought fiercely for a strong unification of the services, which both the Army and Navy believed would undercut their traditional independence. In the battle, he tangled with his old Wall Street friend, Navy Secretary James Forrestal. When Forrestal became the first Defense Secretary and Symington’s boss, Symington fought him again to try to get more Air Force funds—fought with a tenacity that Forrestal’s friends will never forgive. “That damn guy never lets up,” Forrestal complained to White House Counsel Clark Clifford. “He is absolutely relentless.”*

After Forrestal’s death, Symington fought a continuing battle with his successor, Louis Johnson, to keep up Air Force group strength against the pressures of shrinking, pre-Korea defense budgets. Symington kept insisting that the U.S. needed 70 air groups for minimum safety, but he saw the Air Force dwindle to 50-odd. Early in 1950, when the new budget trimmed the Air Force to 48 groups, Symington resigned in protest.

Truman persuaded Symington to stay on in Washington as head of the National Security Resources Board. In April 1951, in the midst of the influence-peddling scandals that rocked the Administration, Truman asked Symington to take one more “load-of-coal” job for him: tidying up the scandal-ridden Reconstruction Finance Corp. Symington opened up RFC records to goldfish-bowl scrutiny by the press, fired employees tangled in the influence-peddling web. It was dreary, thankless work. In early 1952, his cleanup chores done, he resigned and went back to St. Louis, intending to get back into moneymaking.

On the Main Streets. A band of influential Missourians led by St. Louis Lawyer Jacob M. Lashly, sometime president of the American Bar Association, urged Symington to run for the Senate in the 1952 election. “I don’t think the world is in as bad shape as you do,” Lashly told him. “But if it is, you have no right to go back to the pleasure of making money.”

Symington hesitated warily before going into politics, but once he decided to run, he ran hard. He shook hands on wide and narrow Main Streets all over Missouri, made 22 speeches in one grueling day. To help woo the voters, he took along the other members of what is one of the most personable families in U.S. politics: Wife Evie, Elder Son Stuart Jr. (now a lawyer in St. Louis), Younger Son Jim, an accomplished singer who entertained voters with folk songs, accompanying himself on the guitar.

After trouncing a Truman-backed rival in the Democratic primary by a margin of 2 to 1, Symington went on to unseat Old Guard Republican Senator James Kem by more than 150,000 votes, while Eisenhower was carrying Missouri by close to 30,000.

Running for re-election last year against a woman lawyer, Shoo-In Symington ran a lot harder than he needed to, racked up the most lopsided victory (66.4% of the votes) ever recorded in a Missouri senatorial election. His hard race seemed proof that the Symington-for-President boomlet in 1956, when Missouri’s convention delegation voted for him as a favorite son, had set presidential ambitions astir.

One Voice in 100. Measured against his earlier careers as businessman and Government administrator, Symington’s performance during his nearly seven years in the Senate has not been spectacular. He has wielded little influence, fathered no important legislation. He works hard, putting in upwards of twelve hours a day, but effort has not translated into results that can be labeled as his own. In the Senate world of committees and compromises, his executive talent and experience are wasted: his is only one voice out of 100, and there is nothing for him to decide except where he himself stands.

On one big issue—national defense—Symington has made it abundantly clear where he stands. He stands for more: more air defense, more brush-fire war strength, more civil defense, more missiles. In his first Senate floor speech, in June 1953, he assailed Republican plans to trim airpower, charged that the Administration was apparently planning to use a “firmly balanced budget” as its weapon in case of Soviet air attack. Since then, he has remained Capitol Hill’s most outspoken critic of Eisenhower defense policies, and most persistent warner that the U.S. was dangerously underestimating Soviet military and technological strength.

Grey Flannel Mind. While Symington has followed the straight liberal line in his floor votes on domestic issues, he has hedged his A.D.A.-approved record by sometimes sounding so much like a conservative that many Bourbon Democrats count him as one of their own.

This failure to pin an unmistakable ideological label on himself has damaged his standing with liberals and the Washington press corps, brought upon him accusations that he is empty of genuine convictions, a man with a grey flannel mind. Only last week Symington set out to contradict that judgment by canceling his scheduled speech at a state Democratic dinner in Little Rock, Ark. when he learned that Negroes present would be seated at segregated tables. It was quite a decision for a man who depends heavily on palatability to the South to help him capture the presidential nomination.

Well aware that his. Senate career has not brought him the headlines that it has brought his rival colleagues, Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey, Symington has embarked on a strenuous schedule of speechmaking trips around the country to get himself better known. Mid-October found him in Thomasville, Ga. for a speech to the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. From there the trail led to Cairo, Ga., his native town of Amherst, to Danbury, Conn., Painesville, Ohio, Gainesville, Fla. Last week, back from Abbeville, he spoke at Democratic meetings in New Castle and Easton, Pa., at St. Louis’ Washington University, and at a Kansas City meeting of the Missouri Press Association. This week, after a speech at McKendree College in Lebanon, Ill., he heads for Alaska. Toward year’s end he will take off for

Africa and the Middle East to add a foreign relations touch to his image.

Executive Drive. By working hard at it, Symington has managed in recent months to improve his performance as a speechmaker. He still flops sometimes, but in New Castle last week, speaking without notes, he got himself across, livening his talk with touches of humor and personal history that rarely show up in his written speeches. Facing an audience sprinkled with steelworkers, he pointed to his days in the foundry: “I’ve poured my share of iron. I’ve stoked open hearths.” Said a steelworker: “The guy’s O.K. He’s been in the mills. He knows what it’s like.” Added a housewife: “He would make a good President.”

In nearly every state, Stuart Symington has a few devoted, eager backers who are ready to pledge faith and funds to his cause. Most have helped him fight his battles through administrative Washington, or watched from neutral corners while his intense drive brought stale government alive. The quality of executive drive is a tough one to merchandise from a political platform, no matter how handsome the driver. But a man who is already endowed with the negative assets and the positive cause of defense, and who is already the professionals’ second choice, could reasonably see a chance to wind up in the driver’s seat by the time the Democratic Convention has ended.

* In the midst of his Air Force battles in 1947, hard-driving Secretary Symington had to undergo a major, nerve-severing operation for high blood pressure.