The Graceful Loser

In the U.S. embassy in London, Adlai Stevenson taped an interview for the BBC defending his nation's foreign policy. "There has been a great deal of pressure on me in the United States to take a position--a public position --inconsistent with that of my Government," he said. "Actually, I don't agree with those protestants. My hope in Viet Nam is that resistance there may establish the fact that changes in Asia are not to be precipitated by outside force. This was the point of the Korean War, this is the point of the conflict in Viet Nam."

Minutes later, Stevenson, accompanied by Mrs. Marietta Tree, an old friend and a fellow member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, stepped out of the embassy onto Grosvenor Square. Stevenson obligingly paused to pose for a photographer. Then he and Mrs. Tree strolled down the street. About 200 yards away, in front of the International Sportsmen's Club, Stevenson staggered slightly, grabbed his companion's arm, and said, "I feel faint." Then he collapsed. Mrs. Tree cried to the club's doorman: "Quick, come! Could you come at once and help?" She knelt over Stevenson and tried to revive him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. An ambulance arrived, but by the time it reached St. George's Hospital, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 65, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was dead of a heart attack.

He was one of the most admired men of his time--and one of the most perplexing, a paradox within himself. Twice he sought his nation's highest office; yet he always thought of the presidency as a "dread responsibility." He was a politician without a politician's ways; instead of grinning gamely when, during one of his campaigns, a little girl handed him a stuffed baby alligator, Stevenson could only gape and exclaim, "For Christ's sake, what's this?" He was a man of rare humor, often expressed in self-deprecating terms. Responding to criticism that he was too intellectual, that he talked over the heads of the voters, he tossed out a Latinism: Via ovum cranium difficilis est (The way of the egghead is hard). He loved people and in his later years was one of New York's most inveterate partygoers; yet even when surrounded by admirers he somehow seemed lonely. He was a completely sophisticated citizen of the world; yet he was at home only on his Libertyville, Ill., farm, chatting with friends in the library or expertly driving a tractor over his 70 acres. "I know every blade of grass and every tree," he once said. "I like to watch them grow, and I hate to be away from them."

Trauma. Adlai Stevenson was born to affluence and influence. His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was Vice President during Grover Cleveland's second term. His maternal great grandfather, Jesse Fell, was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, helped arrange the Lincoln-Douglas debates. His mother's family owned the prosperous Bloomington, Ill., Daily Pantagraph, and his father managed the Stevenson family's vast farm lands, later became Illinois' secretary of state.

When Adlai was twelve, he suffered one of the most traumatic experiences that could befall any boy--an experience which, according to some friends, was to affect him for the rest of his life. Among several guests in the Stevenson home one night was a military-school student who offered to perform the manual of arms. Excited, young Adlai ran to get a .22-cal. pump rifle, watched wide-eyed while the cadet went through the ritual. When it was over, Adlai took the rifle, began to mimic the performance. The weapon accidentally fired, killing Adlai's 15-year-old cousin, Ruth Mary Merwin.

Reluctance. Educated at Choate, Princeton and Northwestern University Law School, Stevenson joined one of Chicago's top law firms. In 1928 he married Heiress Ellen Borden, whose family made a fortune in oil and taxicabs. Adlai and Ellen had three sons: Adlai III, now 34, Borden, 32, and John Fell, 29.

Stevenson's true calling was public service, and Ellen detested the political life. In 1949, while he was Governor of Illinois, she insisted on a divorce. It was a bitter blow to Stevenson, who, as recently as 1960, said wistfully: "I would rather be married than President." To day, Ellen Borden Stevenson, 56, lives as a recluse in a dingy greystone Chicago house on which the mortgage was recently foreclosed; she has gone through most of her family fortune, and her three sons have filed suit to supervise her financial affairs, charging that she is incapable of managing them herself.

During the early years of the New Deal, loyal Democrat Stevenson worked as a lawyer for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Federal Alcohol Control Administration. He served as an aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox during World War II and later wrote of that period: "They used to say that if you worked in wartime Washington, you would get one of three things: galloping frustration, ulcers, or a sense of humor. I guess I got them all, and I also got a great education in war, the world, our Government and my fellow man under every sort of trial and tension." In February 1945, Stevenson moved over to the State Department, where, as an assistant to Secretary Edward Stettinius, he helped in the creation of the United Nations. "After years of preoccupation with war," he said, "the satisfaction of having a part in the organized search for the conditions and mechanics of peace completed my circle."

Of course his circle was far from completed. In 1948 he was chosen by Illinois' Democratic leaders to run for Governor against Republican Dwight Green, whose administration had been splotched by scandal; Stevenson won by a record 572,000 votes and set about riding close herd over a heavily Republican legislature; in 1951 alone, he vetoed no fewer than 134 bills.

His circle widened far in 1952. Harry Truman had decided not to run again, and the winner of most Democratic presidential preference primaries was Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver, a lone-wolf liberal who was unacceptable to most national party leaders. Casting desperately around for someone else, they were drawn to the able, attractive Governor of Illinois. Stevenson was genuinely reluctant; the night before the national convention in Chicago, he sat up until 2 a.m. in Cook County Boss Jake Arvey's kitchen, suggesting alternative names and insisting that he wanted only to run for re-election as Governor.

Acceptance. When he was nominated anyway, Stevenson accepted with a speech that was memorable for its eloquence, but still betrayed his inner doubts. He had not sought the nomination, he said, because the burdens of presidential office "stagger the imagination." He continued: "Its potential for good or evil, now and in the years of our lives, smothers exultation and converts vanity to prayer. I have asked the Merciful Father--the Father of us all --to let this cup pass from me. But from such dread responsibility one does not shrink in fear, in self-interest, or in false humility. So, 'If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.' "

In his campaign, Stevenson insisted only upon trying to talk "sense to the American people" and avoiding what he called the "nauseous nonsense, the pie-in-the-sky appeals to cupidity and greed, the cynical trifling with passion and prejudice and fear, the slander, the fraudulent promises, and the all-things-to-all-men demagoguery." He didn't have much hope that he would win over Dwight Eisenhower. "You know," he said to a friend, "you really can't beat a household commodity--the catchup bottle on the kitchen table."

He took the beating he had expected, and he was a graceful loser. In his concession speech to weeping admirers in Springfield, Ill., he said in a somewhat halting way: "Someone asked me, as I came in, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh."

In 1956, by now notably critical of the Eisenhower Administration and all its works, Stevenson campaigned actively for the Democratic nomination, won it again, and launched a campaign in which he called Eisenhower a "part-time President," charged Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with applying "the power of positive brinking" to foreign policy. He also had some unkind words to say about Republican Vice President Richard Nixon: "He is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation." All the while, Stevenson's doubts showed through. Spotting children in an audience, he would ask: "How many children would like to be a candidate for the President of the U.S.?" Almost all the kids would raise their hands. Then Stevenson would ask: "And how many candidates for the Presidency of the U.S. would like to be children again?" At that point, he would raise his own hand.

His defeat was even worse than in 1952. Conceding, he told his supporters: "Be of good cheer, and remember, my dear friends, what a wise man said, 'A merry heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit dryeth the bones.'"

At the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, Stevenson was placed in nomination by Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy ("Do not reject the man who has made many proud to be Democrats"), and the mere mention of his name brought storms of applause from the gallery. But John F. Kennedy already had a majority of the delegates sewed up.

Humiliation. Actually, that was just as well with Adlai: what he really wanted to be was Secretary of State, and he thought he had an excellent chance of achieving that office under Kennedy. Instead, Kennedy named him Ambassador to the United Nations, and for one of the few times in his life, Adlai Stevenson turned bitter. When a friend congratulated him on his appointment, Stevenson said acidly: "You must be kidding!"

Political Philosopher Stevenson did not fit very well into the highly pragmatic Kennedy Administration, and he suffered his greatest public and personal humiliation during the Bay of Pigs crisis. Speaking to the United Nations, he vowed that the U.S. had no active role in the abortive invasion of Castro's Cuba. Since he had not been accurately informed of the part the U.S. did play, he thought he was telling the truth--and when the truth came out, Stevenson arrived at the nadir of his many years in public service.

To the dismay and disappointment of many of his staunchest admirers, he stayed on the job, and had one of his finest hours during the U.N. debate over 1962's Cuban missile crisis. There were critics who thought Adlai Stevenson was soft but that criticism could not apply as he confronted the Soviet Union's Ambassador Valerian Zorin. Asked Stevenson: "Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium-and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba?" Zorin sat silent. Stevenson, knowing full well that Zorin understood English, demanded: "Yes or no? Don't wait for a translation. Yes or no?" Zorin, flustered, tried to temporize: "You will have your answer in due course." Cried Stevenson: "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over!"

In the Shade. In the Johnson Administration, Stevenson felt somewhat more comfortable than he had under Kennedy. President Johnson sought Stevenson's advice about foreign policy--although in fact he seldom accepted it. Stevenson disagreed in degree with some of the Administration's foreign policy moves, and his public support of the Dominican Republic and Viet Nam policies pained many of his liberal followers. This caused a good deal of chatter among journalists, including some talk immediately after his death that raised questions of journalistic ethics. Radio Reporter David Schoenbrun claimed that Stevenson, in a personal conversation the week before, had called President Johnson's intervention in the Dominican Republic a "massive blunder."

In recent months Stevenson some times spoke of retiring. CBS-TV's Eric Sevareid quoted Stevenson as having said only two days before his death that he wanted to quit: "For a while, I would just like to sit in the shade with a glass of wine in my hand and watch people dance." But before he accepted President Kennedy's offer to be Ambassador to the United Nations, Stevenson had indicated that he intended to stay with the job as long as he was wanted. "If I accept this appointment," he told a friend, "I am committed to support the President this side of treason or madness. There is no way for a man as prominent as I am to quietly step down."

As Adlai Stevenson lay in state in Washington's National Cathedral prior to final funeral services in Illinois this week, millions around the world mourned him, and eulogies poured out by the score. Perhaps he wrote his own epitaph when, on the evening of Nov. 3, 1952, before the presidential ballots had been cast, he summed up: "I have said what I meant and meant what I said. I have not done as well as I should like to have done, but I have done my best, frankly and forthrightly; no man can do more, and you are entitled to no less."

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