The Education of Adlai Stevenson
BURNS, JAMES MACGREGOR
The Education of Adlai Stevenson A Prophet in His Own Country. The New America. Reviewed by James MacGregor Burns By Kenneth S. Davis. By Adlai E. Stevenson. Professor of political science,...
...Eisenhower was a pragmatist whose test of truth was whether or not an idea 'worked' toward some practical end in tho immediate situation which called it forth...
...Especially interesting are the program papers and the way in which Stevenson and his aides converted these meaty documents into brilliant campaign speeches...
...But the author knows what he is about— he wants to show the deep roots of Stevenson's family in the black soil of the Illinois Lincoln country...
...on the contrary, it made him, like Lincoln, a shrewd and effective politician...
...In 1952 events drifted beyond his control: Eisenhower took now a Taft, now a liberal Republican, position...
...Here surely is a great intellectual arsenal for the Democrats and for all liberals...
...It's been an amazing experience, and I've come to wonder how anyone can presume to talk about 'America' until he has done some campaigning...
...author, "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox" These two books nicely complement each other...
...It never happened...
...I'm in an automobile driving from Danville, where we spoke last night, to Decatur to resume this fantastic ordeal...
...Professor of political science, Williams College...
...The first is a full-scale, sympathetic and highly readable account of Stevenson's background and life, ending with his concession of defeat in 1956 ("I have won a grandchild...
...the Nixon affair boiled up...
...Stevenson had to defend a Democratic record part of which distressed him...
...4.50...
...Perhaps political planning—operating in terms of a planned pattern of action and principle—is impossible in the hurly-burly of American politics...
...for example, who needs to know the name and home town of the minister who preached at his mother's funeral...
...I would myself have preferred less detail in the early pages about his family background...
...They seem even more relevant today than when delivered—• perhaps naturally so, as so many chickens Stevenson warned of have come home to roost...
...We learn much about Stevenson's Democratic forebears, of his school life at Choate (where he was one of three Democrats), of his accidental rifle-killing of a young girl with its wrenching effect on his whole life, of his years as a "real Princeton man" and as a student of law at Harvard...
...The experience left him uncorrupted and uncompromised...
...But his fullest education came in the maelstrom of political campaigns...
...Stevenson was desperately anxious that the 1952 and 1956 Presidential contests serve as illuminating debates that would face the voters with sensible choices...
...Harper...
...All the time, in his humorous, self-deprecating way, Stevenson was educating himself...
...He seemed actually to study war and international organization...
...Perhaps it's the secret, perhaps the curse, of American political success —the illusive business of finding your way to the heart of the average man —when there is no such thing—and, unhappily, the human heart is often an organ encased in a pocketbook, and not a Bible or a textbook...
...510 pp...
...Yet if pragmatism won out in '52 and '56, at least Stevenson has left us a magnificent political legacy in the form of his "New America" speeches...
...While driving to a rally during his campaign for Governor of Illinois in 1948, he wrote a letter to his sister on motel stationery that revealed the educational process at the same time that it suggested the literary power of the man even under such trying conditions: "It's Sunday morning...
...The Presidential primary fight wrecked this plan by diverting Stevenson into a hand-shaking campaign that left him near nervous exhaustion when the big fight got under way...
...A last-minute entrant in 1952, he decided in 1955 that he would campaign the following year on carefully and thoughtfully planned issues...
...While not a case precisely of the egghead in politics, certainly this is an example of a keen, sensitive, mildly irritable, high-minded person coming in contact with the noise and vulgarity, the anti-intellectualism, the corruption and compromises of American democracy...
...Also a realistic one—for example, he refused to join the draft-Ike movement staged by such professionals as Jack Arvey (it's not "Jake," the author says) ; he learned how to deal with the Republican legislators in Springfield...
...285 pp...
...But intelligence and good will had their handicaps...
...The author, an earlier biographer of Eisenhower, presents a fascinating contrast between Stevenson and the General...
...Stevenson was, in philosophic bent, an idealist who tested the truth of an idea by its consistency with other true ideas...
...The political education of Adlai E. Stevenson is the theme of Davis's book...
...and, when cornered, he could fight back fiercely, as Kefauver learned in early 1956...
...But whether Stevenson's education of America will ultimately be as successful as his education by America is one of the ominous questions for the future to decide...
...5.00...
...Then came the real education— the years of law practice in Chicago, the steadily widening sphere of activity as Stevenson got involved in Chicago civic affairs and especially the Council on Foreign Relations, his early married life (the later separation and divorce are beautifully handled by the author), his brief months with the early New Deal, his fight against isolationism within the very fortress of the Chicago Tribune, his long and surprisingly rich and varied career as a wartime aide to Secretary of the Navy Knox, as an investigator of overseas military and economic problems, and as an organizer of the United Nations...
...The first relates Stevenson's long education by America...
...The other is a collection of Stevenson's speeches and "program papers" in the 1956 campaign, well edited by Seymour E. Harris, John B. Martin and Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Doubleday...
...The second concerns his education of America...
...In the campaign itself, issues were lost in Ike's personal popularity and in the flare-ups of foreign crisis...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 49
