DEMOCRATS: Foreign Policy: Adlai

At Louisville, Adlai Stevenson’s campaign took on a new tone. In bitter terms, the usually restrained Stevenson expressed his growing anger at the opponent he had once admired.

“The opposition,” charged Stevenson, “. . . is laying down a barrage of ugly, twisted, demagogic distortion.” Immediate cause of the Illinois governor’s wrath was Ike’s accusation that the Administration had “bungled” the U.S. into the Korean war. If the Administration had underestimated the Soviet threat, declared Stevenson, so had Ike. “In November 1945 [Eisenhower] even told the House Military Affairs Committee: ‘Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the U.S.’

Shaky Ground. Eisenhower was on equally shaky ground, Stevenson continued, when he condemned the Administration for the rapid demobilization of U.S. military forces after World War II. “Although the general warned against too rapid demobilization, he later said—in September 1946—that ‘Frankly, I don’t think demobilization was too fast.’ “

To Eisenhower’s criticism of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea in 1949, Stevenson countered: “The general acts as if this were the result of some secret White House decision. I would call his attention to the fact that while he was Chief of Staff of the United States Army, the Chiefs of Staff advised that South Korea was of little strategic interest to the U.S. and recommended withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

“Next, my distinguished opponent has recently begun to parrot the charges of the Republican irresponsibles that the Administration abandoned China to the Communists . . . But he still must know in his heart, even if he does not admit it, that in the past six years nothing except the sending of an American expeditionary force to China could have prevented ultimate Communist victory.”

Indignantly, Stevenson echoed a complaint by Dean Acheson that Ike had unfairly accused the Secretary of State of “writing off” Korea in a 1950 speech. “I am frankly astonished that my opponent stooped … to the practice of lifting remarks out of context’. . . Why did he skip the Secretary’s further pledge that if there should be an attack on these countries, ‘the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations’?” Far from “writing off” Korea, said Stevenson, Acheson’s speech had served notice that the U.S. “would seek United Nations action against aggression.”

Tough Talk. Then Stevenson turned to the offensive. Ike, he said, “has now adopted the theory of Senator Taft, who unsmilingly states that the greatest threat to liberty today is the cost of our own Federal Government.” Later Stevenson described the Taft argument as “the dreary obsession that we must fear above all, not the Kremlin, but our own Government.” This theory, he went on, implies a defense effort adjusted to an arbitrary budget, and by accepting it Ike had reversed Teddy Roosevelt’s advice to speak softly and carry a big stick. “The new advice is to talk tough and carry a twig” —a policy which “would demoralize the free world, embolden the Soviet Union to new military adventures and, in the end, pull down the world into the rubble and chaos of a third world war.”

Returning to his attack on Eisenhower “distortions,” Stevenson urged: “Let us not place victory in a political campaign ahead of national interest, and let’s talk sense about what we have gained … in Korea.” The outstanding results of the Korean war in Stevenson’s eyes: the setback to Communist plans for conquest of other Far Eastern nations, the strengthening of U.S. defenses around the world and the growing ability of the R.O.K. army to take on the burden of South Korea’s defense.