ADLAI STAVENSON
NYE, RUSSEL B.
Adlai Stevenson My Brother Adlai, by Elizabeth Stevenson Ives and Hildegarde Dolson. Morrow. 308 pp. |4. What I Think, by Adlai Stevenson. Harper. 240 pp. $3. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye THESE...
...politics completely aside, they are valuable for just plain reading...
...It is easier, certainly, to understand the mature man in terms of the adolescent who earnestly speaks of "polishing his style" and reads Shakespeare for the light it throws on human behavior...
...Ives' volume, allowing for a bit of sisterly pride, is a revealing and perceptively-drawn portrait of what is certainly one of the most unusual and interesting personalities in American public life...
...Stevenson's own book, What I Think, ranges over a variety of issues, from foreign policy to education to free speech to medicine...
...It is plain from Stevenson's speeches that he has thought long and hard about what is probably the central issue of our times, the relation between individual and state and the functions of each within our society...
...Stevenson is on the side of the individual, where, he feels, the real hope of progress lies...
...The first, the work of Adlai Stevenson's sister, is an accurately subtitled "affectionate portrait...
...The reader is struck first of all by the influence on Stevenson of his close-knit family, particularly of his mother, whose letters to her son over the years are gems...
...The speeches are in a sense less political pronouncements than simply the opinions of a well-informed, thoughtful man on topics of current interest...
...Ives' account of her brother's development...
...One is also impressed with the young Stevenson's intellectual curiosity...
...Whatever one's partisan political preferences, the book should make for good reading and good thinking...
...The second, comprised of Stevenson's speeches and writings on major issues since 1952, both helps to explain and is explained by the first...
...There is so much contemporary political writing through which a net could be drawn without catching a thought or phrase of importance that reading this book is a refreshing contrast...
...Ives treats rather lightly the years between college and the beginnings of Stevenson's political career, which undoubtedly were important years in his thinking...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye THESE BOOKS naturally pair...
...Few men in our day have ever stated the American dream so eloquently and precisely as he did in his talk at Columbia University in 1954...
...The reflective bent, the careful weighing of courses of action, the attempt always to establish perspectives in judgments, the attention to values—these and other characteristics of the Stevensonian point of view appear in Mrs...
...Were Stevenson not a candidate, the books would still be interesting and stimulating, possessing about the same relation to ordinary politics that Elmer Davis' writings do to ordinary journalism...
...It is a pleasure to read political prose that carries something besides the suave falsity of Madison Avenue rhetoric...
...Her brother's interest in politics, as the book makes clear, began at an early age in a family whose political tradition stretched back to Lincoln's time...
...The open mind, the free society, the integrity of the individual mind—these run through the book as a theme, whether he is talking about foreign aid, public health, or Congressional elections...
...With his roots deep in Midwestern politics, and his own bent for thought combined with action, it is not surprising that Adlai Stevenson turned to politics in the manner that he did or that he practices it as he does...
...There are a few creamed-chicken-and-peas speeches from the party dinner circuit in the book, but for the most part the level and quality of the collection are remarkably high...
...it seems that as a boy he learned from everything, from books to mountain climbing, something about himself or the world about him...
...Much of the explanation of how Adlai Stevenson became what he is, and why he thinks as he does, is explicit or implicit in his sister's account of his life...
...Mrs...
...The style and wit are always there, and so are the overtures of the two men, Wilson and Lincoln, from whom Stevenson obviously draws much of his personal inspiration...
...Unfortunately, Mrs...
Vol. 20 • May 1956 • No. 5
