ADLAI STEVENSON EMPLOYED
Kempton, Murray
Adlai Stevenson Employed by MURRAY KEMPTON The General Assembly, reconvened without Nikita Khrushchev, is no longer a tent show, but a long, slow pull and tug—now desperate, now lethargic—over the...
...He has little time to think about himself these days, and he may not have revised the feeling, which oppressed him when the year began, that he had fallen out of history...
...we are again grateful, as we have been in the past, that they have been given to no one else...
...Such was the dreary end of a session in which the United States had been barely a presence...
...And, since this condition depends more on Adlai Stevenson than anyone else except possibly Nikita Khrushchev, this General Assembly will be Stevenson's or it will be no one's...
...Adlai Stevenson Employed by MURRAY KEMPTON The General Assembly, reconvened without Nikita Khrushchev, is no longer a tent show, but a long, slow pull and tug—now desperate, now lethargic—over the survival of the United Nations as a reality...
...It seems always the man's destiny to be assigned the impossible tasks...
...but the only final disaster would be the collapse of the United Nations there, and this for a while he had forestalled...
...No American politician out of power has ever had the devotion of as broad and deep and stubborn a following as Adlai Stevenson's...
...At the end, Stevenson had a resolution giving Hammarskjold more power in the Congo than he had had before the Soviet assault on him as assassin...
...He began "in my halting French" and his victim stopped him: "Give up, Governor, I used to be a precinct leader uptown...
...The difference, the startling difference, was that we were seeing an Adlai Stevenson most of his votaries had never seen, an Adlai Stevenson employed...
...The vigor of his reaction to Soviet tactics seems to have surprised almost everyone who will report a conversation with him...
...Yet, now employed again, there is an iron in him which we on our side had also forgotten...
...It was an Asian-African resolution conceived by an American statesman, and Zorin did not feel it safe to veto...
...But the mere existence of grounds for exaggeration in Stevenson's case is an unexpected event in the history of this century...
...The informed view had to be that Stevenson would bring to the United Nations little except grace in ceremony and weary rectitude in debate...
...yet they were as right in this case as they were wrong in the romantic conception that their hearts, throats, and bodies alone were enough to hold back the Kennedys...
...in the autobiography of Henry Adams, John Hay is a larger character than Theodore Roosevelt...
...The General Assembly can have met and had its ritual quarrels and arisen, and, at some distance from it, the United Nations, as a force in history, can have expired in the Congo...
...he aims—it would be too much to say he hopes— only to end the interference of foreign powers...
...This spring's could belong to Adlai Stevenson...
...The simple persons who rallied to the touching scene of the last effort to nominate Adlai Stevenson at Los Angeles alone thought of him as undamaged and intact...
...He began his time of trial surrounded by temptations for miscalculation and unfortunate accidents of environment...
...And that is why we cherished him so long...
...That judgment is perhaps exaggerated...
...He invites the Ambassador from Senegal to lunch and is amazed to find that his guest knows the year and the office for which Adlai Stevenson first ran...
...he has been there so often that he has passed blessedly beyond those tourists' questions which always afflicted the travel reports of Richard Nixon and made us grateful that he had never been sent to observe Benito Mussolini...
...United Nations' observers have been struck most by Stevenson's boldness...
...But that is too much to say...
...But then the voice for which they had all been waiting so long would certainly differ from the others in boldness as much as anything else...
...The last Eisenhower delegation closed its tenure by abstention from voting on an anti-colonial resolution passed overwhelmingly...
...Last spring, the better informed a politician was, the more likely he was to have given up on Stevenson and to think of him as broken to the custom of defeat...
...Stevenson had been talking to a fellow American student of African affairs...
...Stevenson is as free of false pride about this first achievement as he is free of false optimism about its potential as final solution...
...Stevenson on the Congo, while doing his proper duty, is measurably harsher about the Soviets than he is about the Belgians...
...President Kennedy is reported to have said that Stevenson, in the United Nations, has the nerve of a burglar...
...He has a delighted passion with Africa...
...Simple faith is not a particular virtue of the informed and the sophisticated...
...He will belong to those historians who create other historians...
...and Kennedy thought Stevenson soft and indecisive...
...The essential spirit of the feeling he aroused was captured best by Senator Eugene McCarthy when he asked the last Democratic convention not to reject this man who had "made us all proud to be called Democrats...
...Adlai Stevenson forebore to complain about the material at hand...
...He has performed an incalculable elevation in our station at the United Nations in the briefest of periods because he has come here, not as mere representative of a national state, but as embodiment of the agony and determination of Western man...
...and there was never the sense that he was our man or anyone else's...
...This posture resulted from the limp acquiescence of a weary President...
...One friend who came out from a conference with him during this period said that, for the first time, he had noticed that Stevenson has thick, stubby farmer's hands...
...There seems to be no reception in whatever tiny warren the city of New York provides for the Ambassador of a new African state where Adlai Stevenson is not present, a voyager continually refreshed by discovery...
...Stevenson locates his situation precisely when he says he has come to the United Nations at a juncture when, at just the same time, it is entering into crisis and the long-range plans of the Soviets are coming to fruition...
...It was less than his friends had counted on...
...and he worked for days with the uncommitted nations...
...At breakfast in March, he talked longest of all about his night before as a guest in the Washington Square South apartment of Ambassador Guir-ma of the Upper Volta...
...he could expect us to move from disaster to disaster in the Congo...
...Stevenson came to the United Nations and was seen first in the posture familiar to anyone who had watched him long in former times—the pose of a man leaning forward cupping his right hand to his ear to hear the better...
...The keenest critical description of him has come from Joseph P. Lash, one of the wisest of the United Nations' permanent party of journalists...
...Prime Minister Macmillan asked President Eisenhower to support Britain in abstention, and the President accepted his request...
...There was the explanation that, alone among the figures of our politics, he understood history...
...In the same way, the more realistic and informed an observer was, the less promise could he see in Stevenson's appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations...
...Those doubts and regrets have all become memory now and are without relation to the present, but they MURRAY KEMPTON is a featured columnist and roving correspondent for the New York Post...
...It is not a quotation historically certified, but it is artistically identifiable as the President's style of compliment...
...Stevenson must almost have forgotten, in his neglect at home, that he is a mythic figure abroad...
...One watches him here cheerful and involved, committed to four years of holding back the dark...
...It is assiduous, to be sure, but it is also delighted...
...It is not a place to which a man can any longer be sent as a pensioner and go as a castoff...
...Stevenson came at a time when, for all the best efforts of Ambassador Wadsworth, the United States was at the lowest point it has ever known at the United Nations...
...He accepts the condition that the world is unlikely to be either ours or the Soviet Union's but rather the heritage of unpredictable strangers...
...The sophisticated who stayed with him were mainly persons who cherished him too much to desert him...
...The issue these weeks and months is the United Nations' survival...
...Stevenson and the President, for all the fine temper of their manners, can be almost brutally outspoken men...
...He is the first ambassador of a great power to stand forth as representative of the best of the future and not merely a fragment of the past...
...His first month at the United Nations gleamed and glistened, all style, all substance...
...He was never lucky, after all...
...Stevenson knows that the United Nations cannot solve the Congo's interior problems...
...He knew that his resolution was only a little better than a prayer...
...Watching him, the point seems rather that Adlai Stevenson accepts history and engages it unafraid...
...It was seldom easy to explain why so many of us melted in the presence of Governor Stevenson...
...This is the distaste, not of an Imperial American, but of a man who conceives himself as guarding the future...
...The Congo remained a horror for the next two weeks...
...But there are other histories than the high school ones...
...For Stevenson plays with his back feeling the wall...
...The United Nations does not owe its life to Adlai Stevenson...
...The substance of that change has carried over to the style of what Stevenson calls his "assiduous" cultivation of the Africans...
...But he enjoys these strangers, and they enjoy him...
...Their differences had passed, it seemed, from the political to the dangerous ground of the personal...
...He remains, for the time being, the American official to whom diplomats come for purposes deeper than ceremony, because he is the Administration figure whose name they know best...
...And Stevenson faced an African assemblage which, divided by personal ambition, seemed almost ready to let the Congo sink into a civil war sponsored by international adventurers...
...After the introductions, he had entered into conversation with another guest whom he had assumed to be the representative of another French African state...
...There was the vision of America sitting beside the bedside of dying empires...
...The delight, of course, is not total identification...
...He seems to ask every visitor the flat, emergent question whether the United Nations can be saved...
...Last fall's General Assembly belonged to Nikita Khrushchev...
...President Eisenhower addressed the General Assembly in tones of detachment he would hardly have used with the American Bankers Association...
...without telling he somehow came through to us as a venturesome man...
...He has come to know that the Kennedy Administration will be judged, by time if not by popular favor, by the condition of the United Nations at its end...
...And there was the feeling, more consequential than personal sorrow, that neither Stevenson, by reason of having wanted so many other things so long, nor Kennedy, by limitation of experience, understood the importance of the United Nations...
...they thought it a shabby substitute for the portfolio of State, and said so...
...Friends of both who talked to both came away dreadfully saddened...
...His first long speech to the Security Council—a daring experiment in being anti-Soviet without being self-righteous—was obscured by its interruption by a pitiable gallery demonstration of a few American Negroes crying that Secretary-General Hammarskjold had murdered Patrice Lumumba...
...should be offered as reminder of how often access to what is known as inside information can be a serious handicap to the understanding of men and events...
...The manner remained the same...
...Stevenson, they reported, thought Kennedy indifferent to promises...
...But it does owe him in great measure its chance to live a little longer...
...Stevenson had hardly arrived when he said, with that boldness United Nations correspondents find incredible in his briefings, that the United States must, of course, be unequivocally anti-colonial, and that the more mature Western powers would, of course, agree that there was no place for them in Africa...
...who understands history...
...A man watching Stevenson, weary and spiritless, before the House Foreign Relations Committee studying his appointment, came away remembering Shakespeare's great funeral song: "Thou thy worldly task has done/Home art thou and ta'en thy wages...
...I know now," says Lash, "why I was for Adlai Stevenson three times for President of the United States...
...On the same day, Soviet Ambassador Zorin made what almost seemed an appeal to the United States over the head of Hammarskjold, and there was in it the hint that, for the price of Hammarskjold, we might have easement of all our problems...
Vol. 25 • April 1961 • No. 4
