National Affairs: THE OTHER ADLAI

Offstage He Is More Like Himself

In the fading light of a hot summer day last week, Adlai Stevenson and a few friends left the Chicago Yacht Club, got into a taxi, and headed back to his living quarters at the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel. Three days before, Harry Truman had struck. Stevenson was still crowding his hours with visits and visitors, handshakes, receptions, whisperings, conferences. Yet the crucial matters of the moment now seemed strangely suspended, like a mural of some bygone battle posted on a restaurant wall. It was a lovely yacht club, Stevenson mused; the new terrace was a perfect place for outdoor entertaining. Had anybody noticed the large number of yachts moored near by? How did the Chicago Cubs make out (Cubs 0, Redlegs 2)? When the taxi stopped at his hotel, an aide turned Stevenson’s attention to a car flying a “Stevenson for President” banner. Stevenson gave a perfunctory look, blinked, appeared to do a double-take as he realized that he was the subject of the unfurled admiration. “Hello!” he shouted. “Thanks−thanks a lot!”

The curious self-detachment of Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 5−mortared with solid ribs of shyness, intellectualism, and an abiding sense of correctness−is the base of his perplexing personality, and still puzzle of the politicos.

“Observe, Persist, Learn.” The personality was nourished by a quiet, perceptive, Quaker-bred mother, an outgiving father, Lewis Green Stevenson (business manager for 45 Midwestern farms, Illinois Secretary of State, 1914-1916), and a wealth of family pride. Great-grandfather Jesse Fell was a close friend of Lincoln’s, suggested the Lincoln-Douglas debates, worked for Lincoln’s presidential campaign. Adlai’s Democratic paternal grandfather and namesake was Vice President in Grover Cleveland’s second Administration, and the old campaign posters still decorate Adlai’s den in Libertyville. Adlai’s birth naturally prompted his Grandfather William O. Davis (a Republican) to pronounce himself delighted at the “launching of this little presidential craft.”

In the old Stevenson home on Washington Street in Bloomington, Ill. Adlai absorbed the family sense of duty, his mother’s intense intellectual curiosity. She read him the classics (Dickens, Scott), pumped him with such copybook admonitions as “Observe, persist, learn.” “Keep pacid and cheerful, knowing all things come to those who love the Lord and do His works.” After prep school (Choate) came Princeton. To the list of heroes that included Lincoln. Great-grandfather Fell and Grandfather Stevenson Adlai added a new one: Princetonian Woodrow Wilson, whom he had met in 1912. Of all the figures in the Democratic pantheon, Idealist Woodrow Wilson is still Stevenson’s personal favorite.

He’d Ratker Be Writer. Stevenson’s family-fanned sense of security and political destiny is strangely balanced by a sense of self-deprecation. He is at his warmest and liveliest among friends and in small informal groups. He likes spirited conversation on nearly every subject, dislikes stuffed shirts and other people’s academicism. He can ham up a game of charades, dance smoothly, charm a pretty girl. He is also one of the most artful dodgers of a restaurant check in public life, affects a studied carelessness about his appearance. The famous 1952 photo of Stevenson’s worn-out shoe sole was no contrivance; neither was the pair of eyeglasses he carried last spring−they had been mended with a brass safety pin.

Adlai is tireless while traveling. In Africa last year, he wore out his companions by wading into market places to ogle wares, customs, people. (Once in Malaya, he wrapped his arm around the shoulder of an ancient village chief, cooed: “Hello, Boss. How’s the precinct?”). When he campaigns before small groups, Stevenson can be warm and witty. But in preparing a major speech for a major audience, the Stevenson personality abruptly changes.

He will pore for hours over his speech, writing, switching, scratching (quips a friend: “He would rather be writer than President”). When he steps before his audience, he tightens up, his throat constricts and his voice rises. His gestures and his smile become mechanical. The speech comes from cerebration, from Choate and Princeton and Plato, from Seneca and Government reports−rarely from the heart. Even in his studied attempts to be down to earth, he sounds like a professor laying down the day’s lecture for the class.

The Otter Ego. Stevenson’s approach to politics has the same kind of intellectual detachment−a detachment that few working politicos will ever comprehend. What was taken for vacillation in 1952 when Harry Truman offered him the presidential nomination was, to Stevenson, an agonizing awareness of his earlier promise to run for re-election as governor of Illinois, pitted against a desire for service on the national scene. His humility and lack of confidence upon nomination (“Let this cup pass from me”) signified mostly that he had not yet thought his way through to seeing himself as President of the U.S. In his new campaign last spring, he personally thought out his decision to call for an end to H-bomb tests (TIME, April 30), and nothing that his friends or advisers could say would dissuade him. On another occasion, he disagreed with some Democrats on a campaign tactic. The tactic, his friends insisted, would be a factor in winning the nomination. “But,” replied Stevenson, ending the discussion, “I don’t have to win.” In this, or in any other discussion of a subject on which he has made up his mind, Stevenson can rise to battle with what a friend has called a “Dean Acheson kind of testiness.”

Though he has now won his first big fight, one worry still dogs his partisans: Stevenson is almost totally devoid of the special brand of egotism that drives the professional politician. From the Happy Chandlers of the world he turns in shuddering dismay, shrinking from their presumptuousness in presenting themselves to the people as great leaders. Adlai’s is another type of egotism: the bloom of a seed planted in Bloomington. Looking at candidates and parties coldly, he has now convinced himself that he can perform the duties of the presidency competently, with public benefit and personal integrity. As Stevenson himself might explain it to his audience, “As Polonius said, in all his parental wisdom, ‘This above all . . .’ ”

* Cleveland’s first: Thomas A. Hendricks, who died after eight months in office.