Advantages of Opposition

...Such questions go to the heart of Presidential leadership in the United States and suggest, in turn, that that much-discussed subject is still far from exhausted...

...Conversely, the case of Stevenson suggests that on certain transcendent matters, at least, the narrower base of political partisanship may provide effective means for making decisions which answer to the imperative requirements of a historical moment...

...On many foreign problems Stevenson would have had to compromise, as he has unquestionably had to compromise with his own conscience this past year in the United Nations...

...Still, the main theme of this book is not what we missed as a result of the 1952 election...

...Thus an opposition leader—even a badly defeated one—may, in the event, provide a leadership the victor cannot exercise...

...On civil rights, in contrast to Eisenhower, he clearly endorsed the 1954 desegregation decision of the Supreme Court and thereby lent it the added moral backing the President withheld...

...As such, it is as relevant to the '60s as to the '50s...

...Because Brown deals with the distinctions between following one's conscience while in office and while out of office, his book is much more than a study of one man in opposition...

...On nuclear testing, Quemoy and Matsu, Middle Eastern crises and NATO, Stevenson's views, much disguised, finally won out...

...Only Truman seems to have enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of speaking his mind and —usually—getting away with it...

...Conscience in Politics appears at a time when some liberals are already impatient with President Kennedy for not moving on all fronts as quickly and forcefully as they would like...

...that breadth of popularity may lead to the blurring of issues and the diminution of a man's available power to make the difficult decisions —which are always the divisive decisions...

...It is also a commentary on the extent to which the American political system frustrates or encourages leadership in both the Presidency and the opposition...

...On most matters—certainly on the crucial issue of McCarthy—he would surely have acted on his conscience...

...Stevenson, it will be remembered, was not even restrained by the Democratic party in Congress...

...There is another broad theme to Conscience in Politics, and no one could state it better than Brown has in his preface: "A study of Stevenson's leadership, contrasting inevitably with that of his successful opponent Dwight Eisenhower, raises profound questions about the nature of popularity, of partisanship, and of the relations between both and a man's ability to lead a free people...

...The book reminds us that leadership is not a matter simply of a man's conscience and courage, but also of the web of circumstance in which he finds himself...

...And, too, would President Kennedy have found foreign problems far more tractable if he had come to the White House in the wake of eight years of a President who—whatever mistakes he might have made—would have anticipated problems rather than follow the Eisenhower technique of action by fits and starts...

...Even stronger Presidents like Wilson, FDR and Kennedy have spoken and acted cautiously...

...Doubtless it was both...

...During Senator McCarthy's long campaign against both Democrats and Republicans in the White House, Stevenson categorically denounced McCarthyism for what it was—slander, deceit, intimidation, an attempt at political fratricide and extermination...

...The party leaders, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, refused to join the Democratic Advisory Council, and cut themselves off from any responsibility for Stevenson's pronouncements...

...The author shows his own objectivity by suggesting the many restraints inherent in the Presidency that would inhibit even a bold incumbent from taking the stand he might privately prefer...

...The flaccid body of a democratic nation requires at times the taut toughness of conscience...

...It may also serve to remind the White House that the tough decisions ahead may demand the harshest sacrifice a politician can make—a willingness to narrow the breadth of his popularity in order to act on conscience...

...On civil rights, though, where he was clearly caught between the wings of his party, Stevenson was generally more cautious, less willing to follow his conscience, than on foreign policy and civil liberties...

...The acid test, of course, would have been Stevenson's conduct as President...

...Was this essentially a failure of the man or a failure of the office...

...For the question arises, if Stevenson was as effective as he turned out to be in opposition, what would he have been as President...

...The evidence here offered suggests that it may be more than mere hypothesis to hold that there is an inverse ratio between wide, unpartisan popularity and leadership...

...In the fight against McCarthyism, in foreign policy, in defense and disarmament, Brown demonstrates that Stevenson, lacking an office, an organized following or even much recognition from Eisenhower, was able to influence national policy mainly through the sheer force of his ideas and his ability to articulate them...

...Brown, who is Maxwell Professor of American Civilization at the Maxwell Graduate School at Syracuse and a long-time friend of his subject, fully documents Stevenson's role as the nation's conscience in politics...

...Yet it is to the author's own basic question, quoted above, that one returns as he grants Brown's point that Stevenson spoke up far more boldly and farsightedly than did the President...

...It is what we were able to salvage with Stevenson as leader of his majesty's opposition...

...As President he would have come under pressures from allied governments, from old hands in the State Department and in our embassies, from foreign policy overlords and from the fiscal committees in Congress...

...Not all issues, however, provide the sharp moral imperatives of McCarthyism...

...author, "John Kennedy: A Political Profile" Those of us who have not yet conceded the election of 1952 will relive our hopes and heartaches in Stuart Gerry Brown's study of Adlai E. Stevenson in the 1950s...

...Of course, Stevenson always had to keep in mind the possibility that he might seek the Democratic Presidential nomination again, but that possibility was usually too remote, and its implications for foreign policy too hard to estimate, for him to be much inhibited by it...