EGGHEAD'S END
Mayer, Milton
A Pacifist's Protest Egghead's End by MILTON MAYER 1HAVE HERE in my hand (as Senator McCarthy used to say) a document which purports to be the text of the speech delivered by Adlai E. Stevenson...
...His complaint that the Five Star General didn't want enough troops was, even for campaign pur-: 26 poses, egregious folly, concocted, I suppose, on the false assumption that a fully militarized America would vote against a Five Star General and in favor of a college graduate who was still more militaristic...
...He does not want to fool the people...
...A droll fellow, no doubt about it...
...A few weeks before the Risk of War Doctrine was propounded in San Francisco, the director of Civilian Defense was there on a trip...
...It had...
...Out of Adlai's literate wit emerged the same promise, but Americans like their ham without egghead, and Adlai was whupped...
...You never can," said my friends, and I suppose they were right...
...What would they— surely Adlai would bring them and the rest of the wordmen back to Washington—do there...
...What had he learned...
...unfortunately, it was also socialist doctrine...
...It sounds enough like Adlai to be a true and exact copy...
...America had a big fire brigade, the biggest in history...
...Who had ever before talked their kind of talk in politics...
...He no longer rocks and rolls 'em...
...I'm still gonna sock him...
...Dulles is frightening, but Stevenson is terrifying...
...he wants to educate them...
...The professors, who had been drifting back from Washington since 1942, would return, but the good they did in their Washington decade was now established...
...Which way will you have it— to die in your rocking-chair, over your washing-machine, at your desk -—or to live on your knees while the Russians perpetrate ill-judged actions where the English and French perpetrate them, in the Middle East...
...This is the man who dealt so devastatingly, and still deals, if less devastatingly, with "our frightening Secretary of State," who has brought us "perilously close to disaster...
...There is an alternative to peace...
...He calls upon you—certainly upon you who supported him in 1952 and 1956—to join him...
...Between 1952 and 1956, Adlai, like everyone else, went around the world...
...The one thing it wasn't, in America in 1952, was time for a change...
...The choice, for non-pacifists, is a hard one...
...How could he—or anyone—touch all that butter without reforming capitalism internationally as Roosevelt had reformed it nationally...
...Maybe appeasement is disaster...
...He announced that if the United States would spend twenty billion dollars on hydrogen bomb shelters right away, as many as 65 per cent of the American people might be saved in the next war...
...We want foreign policy conducted for the nation's advantage and security," he said in San Francisco...
...National survival," unqualified as Stevenson unqualifies it, was the last refuge of the late scoundrels of Germany...
...What was missing in the candidate was greatness...
...He had learned, according to his 1956 campaign, that the Republican Administration should be defeated because it had weakened America militarily...
...He represented them, the way The New Yorker, and only The New Yorker, represented them...
...But it took Stevenson to say it...
...My friends were not administrators...
...So droll that William O. Douglas, who wasn't droll, was instantly forgotten...
...Administer...
...There's the savoir dire that nobody running for public office has had since—since when...
...They threw parties, not to raise money or recruit votes, but just to see and hear Adlai on television...
...It was uninspiring to the enchanted, and distressing to the un-enchanted...
...But two beatings have taken the edge off...
...Boiled well down, without starch, Adlai's word was the same old New Deal...
...Half the world starved and grew desperate...
...Both of them join my little boy Dicken, who says, "I don't care if he kills me...
...and so, because strength is a consuming preoccupation, and generosity an intermittent gesture awakened by the preacher on Sunday mornings, we could not be so generous...
...here, at last, in American politics, was somebody who was talking to them...
...We must help each other," he concluded, "to break this new path to the new world...
...I pay Adlai Stevenson the high compliment, which I am sure he deserves, of supposing that he writes his own speeches...
...When Eisenhower says, "There is no alternative to peace," he is fooling (only himself, perhaps...
...Not Lincoln...
...When I got to New York, in October of 1952, after a year and a half abroad, my friends, all of them word-mongers like me, were really madly...
...If the third choice is unavailable to you, you must choose between national dishonor (which now consists of "losing" Saudi Arabia the way Owen Lattimore "lost" China) and national death...
...Even at the risk of war...
...The combination was uninspiring...
...He saw everything, talked to everybody, and came back...
...Maybe this—that the choice is a hard one—is the reason our foreign policy is so inadequate...
...with stations all over the world...
...the most he dared was to tell the nation afterward where it had been, with the implication that that was all past...
...What is this disaster to which the Eisenhower Administration has led us perilously close...
...He now joins forces with the antediluvian Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who says, "They can't do anything worse to us than we can do to them...
...Meanwhile, of course, the immediate 30 per cent tax increase would have wiped out the other 110,-500,000 Americans through inflation...
...Adlai Stevenson, no longer running for office, has undertaken to arouse from its pacifism the most heavily and far-flung garrisoned state in history...
...The Formosa-Pescadores doctrine of Eisenhower was the risk of war...
...Speaking their language, Adlai enchanted them...
...But only just enough...
...Not Roosevelt...
...All the rest is a clarion call to a nation of pacifists to take the risk of the third, and last, world war...
...We had to be strong and generous—but strong...
...He doesn't say because his "risk of war" doctrine strips the term "disaster" of meaning...
...Roosevelt had reformed capitalism...
...Stevenson wants to risk war...
...I couldn't see, myself, what all the murmuring was about...
...My wordmonger friends didn't care...
...What was present, in the excess that word-mongers always think is just right, was the mot, or word...
...which is just as well...
...Stevenson is proposing a course...
...To the very brink of war...
...Could the Communists of Russia want anything more...
...Stevenson, no longer running for office, prefers the end of the world by war to peace with dishonor...
...in history, under comparable circumstances to ours, it has always meant war...
...Now that the campaign was over, the campaign oratory would be over...
...Stevenson poses the question now: the risk of war, when war will destroy the whole world...
...And he satisfied their liberal standards, which, in the New Deal pattern, now old, were readily satisfied...
...They were pitchmen and poets, mildly reformistic, criers in the just-a-little-bit-left-of-center wilderness...
...The difference between Dulles and Stevenson is now the difference between the brink and the risk...
...Always strong, first of all...
...Nobody...
...thus enchanted, as people who live by the carefully chosen word always are, they were proof against the fact that he was not speaking their piece at all...
...Stevenson's news was that he would keep it reformed...
...Will you help him break this new path of all the dead Caesars to the new world of ashes...
...five per cent of the world glutted behind its guns...
...When a man isn't running you can see where he stands...
...Stevenson said, in San Francisco, "Behind the ill-judged action of our friends"—when our friends the English and the French do in Egypt what the Russians did in Hungary, it's an ill-judged action, not a wicked one— "was the pacifism of the United States...
...When he says, "I think we have had enough of this rock-and-roll diplomacy," his auditors burst into a cheer for the gag, but the cheer comes harder, just as the gag does...
...He makes a passing reference—one casual reference—to "the real economic and political problems" which we have got to face before we will be "on the road to stability...
...But maybe war is disaster, too...
...Adlai's generalities glittered, but you can't eat even good generalities...
...The risk of war means the risk of war...
...So the people chose Eisenhower, who promised, with the show of earnestness that the unsophisticated make, to keep things as they were...
...But every time it put out the fire, the fire spread...
...What Eisenhower meant, when he said, "There is no alternative to peace," was that the alternative to peace was the end of the world by war...
...But the news of the day was the world on fire...
...Stevenson, like Eisenhower, said that we had to do something about all this...
...Which will it be, my friends, the surrender to the Russians' "ill-judged actions," wherever they occur, or the risk of the war which will bring the world to an end...
...The third choice, which happens, like socialism, to be the Christian choice, is not yours, unless you believe, with all your hearts, that there is a way of fighting which is not killing and a way of appeasement which is not surrender...
...He is honest enough—almost—to say so...
...A hard choice, my countrymen...
...This, then, is your blue-eyed boy, oh my friends who went into the trance in October of 1952...
...If it's a thrill you want to feel, I am sure that you feel a bigger thrill without bomb shelters...
...The fire continued to spread...
...But I am not sure that Adlai Stevenson has to face it, because I am not sure that he would want us to bother spending the twenty billion dollars...
...In Europe and, I suppose, in Asia and Africa, Stevenson was leaving the hungry people cold and hungry...
...I have studied his speech very carefully, because I could not believe that the press had reported him fairly...
...But I could not see the correlation between the well-turned quip and the well-turned statesman, and Stevenson, as governor of my own state of Illinois, had been a shade, and only a shade, above ordinary...
...The uninspired enchanted, fighting off their own disenchantment, explained that this Big Stick stuff was only campaign oratory, that, after all, he had to get into office— and then you'd see the Old Adlai...
...He had learned, in addition, to try to be less literate...
...Here, on February 16, 1957, is where Adlai Stevenson, the last best hope of the smart liberals, stands: "I would make it perfectly clear that we propose to pursue these objectives"—the opening of Suez to all nations, the establishment of peace between Israel and the Arabs, and the prevention of Russia's domination of "anyone"—"even at the risk of war, and call on all like minded nations who want peace, national independence and economic progress in the Middle East to join us...
...He wants to educate them beyond the "all aid short of war" stage...
...Stevenson doesn't say...
...It is war...
...This was their boy...
...This stance compelled him to play the Red Menace for all it was worth, and even when, as a last-minute gesture to the enchanted, he raised the question of conscription and the bomb tests, he did it on military, not moral, grounds...
...Dulles did not take the nation to the brink while the nation was looking...
...The Middle East doctrine, which Stevenson condemns as "another example of Madison Avenue diplomacy," is also the risk of war...
...The Party of the People, which had become the Party of the Liberal People, was the Party of the Smart People now...
...He condemns "appeasement," like Roosevelt before him...
...To each according to his need" is Christian doctrine, to be sure...
...By this time they had forgotten that the Old Adlai was a funny man and that things were, on the whole, not funny...
...Stevenson is the first great statesman publicly to contemplate national death, and to choose its risk for the sake of preserving King Saud's Saudi Arabian slaves from Russian slavery...
...You don't have to condone Israel's defiance of the General Assembly," he said, condoning Israel's defiance of the General Assembly, "to feel a thrill that somebody is ready to risk life itself for national survival...
...What the director was saying was this: With an immediate 30 per cent tax increase we might lose only 60,500,000 lives in the next war...
...A Pacifist's Protest Egghead's End by MILTON MAYER 1HAVE HERE in my hand (as Senator McCarthy used to say) a document which purports to be the text of the speech delivered by Adlai E. Stevenson at the Democratic National Conference in San Francisco, February 16, 1957...
...America also had five hundred million pounds of surplus butter, and some other edibles in comparable quantity, and the storage price on these surplus items was a million dollars a day...
...In the 1956 election he was elevated, unwillingly, to the post of Elder Statesman...
Vol. 21 • April 1957 • No. 4
