Two Candidates Admired

HOWE, QUINCY

WRITERS and WRITING Two Candidates Admired By Quincy Howe Author and ABC news commentator President Eisenhower's wartime mess sergeant and Adlai Stevenson's sister have put their names to two...

...But there were a lot of little people like me who believed that if General Eisenhower got into the political war he would not only win it but could clean it up...
...By Elizabeth Stevenson Ives and Hildegarde Dolson, Morrow...
...Two women did much to shape his early years-a mother of singular nobility and force of character and a sister of remarkable energy and determination...
...4.00...
...The man who rhapsodizes on the rostrum about the land and people of central Illinois and brooded in Lincoln's chair at Springfield attended Choate School in Connecticut, Princeton College in New Jersey, and studied at least one year at the Harvard Law School...
...First, the lady protests a shade too much, laying unseemly stress on her brother's pedigree-and her own...
...Frederick Fell, 237 pp...
...Ives has told so much -more, indeed, than she perhaps intended-it is too bad she did not take a deep breath and tell more...
...For several years, it was an army of one-me...
...So we formed our own army to force him into it...
...Peter Viereck in the February 27 New Leader has lumped together the two Roosevelts, Stevenson, Ave-rell Harriman, Governor Christian Herter and Senators Flanders, Watkins, Saltonstall and Lodge as "squires incognito...
...It is this lack of any inside information or, indeed, any practical political experience that makes this tribute by one extrovert to another so shallow...
...To be sure, millions of Marty Snyders furnished the votes needed to nominate and elect Eisenhower...
...But, like those other millions, Marty Snyder had little contact with certain professional politicians who have liked Ike longer and known him better than Marty Snyder did-and perhaps better than Ike knows himself...
...It is all to the credit of Mrs...
...But when Mrs...
...My Brother Adlai raises two doubts about Stevenson's qualifications for membership in this select group...
...My Friend Ike...
...By Marty Snyder, with Glenn D, Kittler...
...My Brother Adlai is less a campaign biography than it is the kind of family memoir which is usually prepared for private distribution, replete with the letters Maw and Pop and Buff and Ad exchanged during Ad's happy childhood, boyhood and young manhood...
...WRITERS and WRITING Two Candidates Admired By Quincy Howe Author and ABC news commentator President Eisenhower's wartime mess sergeant and Adlai Stevenson's sister have put their names to two hero-worshipping books.* Marty Snyder describes in detail his postwar war to make General Eisenhower President of the United States...
...The Second World War, during which Stevenson served as an assistant to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, jolted him from his Chicago rut and started him on the way to public life...
...Sergeant Snyder underestimates the size of that army as much as he overestimates its importance...
...Perhaps that is why what Mrs...
...The account of Stevenson's political experiences since 1948 tells little we do not know and glosses over certain unpleasant facts, notably the horseburger and counterfeit cigarette-stamp scandals that marred his four years as Governor of Illinois...
...But his sister does him a poor service with her silly version of what, in his own words, must have been a humorous account of how he brought a wartime message to President Roosevelt...
...The 20 middle years he spent married to Ellen Borden vanish behind a satin-coated iron curtain...
...It was a war he [Eisenhower] sincerely tried for six years to avoid because he did not like the traditional weapons of dishonesty, deception, smear, exaggeration, deals, bribery, fraud and character assassination...
...Ives and her brother that she has not written a conventional campaign biography...
...Ives chooses not to tell about her brother reveals more than what Sergeant Snyder does choose to tell about his friend...
...The American voter," he writes, "is experienced enough to support conservative and aristocratic leadership, but only when it humors his Jacksonian conditioning by never, never calling itself conservative and aristocratic...
...My Brother Adlai...
...Then came twenty years of law practice in Chicago, married to a wife who makes no appearance in these pages but who surely influenced his life as much as his mother or sister did...
...More important, however, Stevenson himself emerges with a more sharply split personality than the successful aristocrat turned reformer can afford...
...308 pp...
...Ives has with the uninhibited Sergeant Snyder...
...83.50...
...The introverted Adlai has no more in common with the extroverted Ike than the discreet Mrs...
...The subject does not lend himself to such treatment nor has the author attempted any such task...
...Their story, if and when it is told, will supply much that is missing here-not only, for instance, the events leading up to General Eisenhower's meetings with Senators Jenner and McCarthy during the 1952 campaign, to which Marty Snyder makes brief, shocked references, but other episodes in which Ike himself surely participated and his friend Marty clearly did not...
...He has also seen to it that his three sons have all received their secondary-school and college educations in the East...
...The split in the Stevenson personality goes deeper than the internal conflict that afflicts certain Mid-westerners...

Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 11


 
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