Fifties (38 page)

When Reeves had finished the spots, he showed them to David Ogilvy, one of the few Stevenson loyalists on Madison Avenue. He thought they represented the worst abuse imaginable of the advertising man’s skills. “Rosser,” Ogilvy said. “I hope for your sake it all goes well and for the country’s sake it goes terribly.” The spots were typical of Rosser Reeves’s style—primitive and effective. They showed Ike as a good, ordinary heartland American. Stevenson (brand X in this case) was never mentioned at all.

It was pioneer work, Rosser Reeves liked to say, in the art of penetrating a specific market with a high-density campaign and yet using a minimal amount of time and money. The campaign spent $1.5 million on the spots in those states where the campaign was perceived as being close. The Democrats were furious. George Ball, then a young Stevenson speechwriter, said the Republican crisis was that they had all the money but no real candidate. “Faced with this dilemma they have invented a new kind of campaign—conceived not by men who want us to face the crucial issues of this crucial day, but by the high-power hucksters of Madison Avenue.” Marya Mannes, writing in the liberal
Reporter,
had mocked this new marriage of Madison Avenue with the American political system: “Eisenhower hits the spot/One full General, that’s a lot/Feeling sluggish, feeling sick?/Take a dose of Ike and Dick./Philip Morris, Lucky Strike,/Alka Seltzer, I like Ike.” By chance the executive editor of the
Reporter,
Harlan Cleveland, lived next door to Reeves. One day Reeves asked Cleveland what his magazine’s objection was. “It was selling the President like toothpaste,” Cleveland answered. Reeves answered that the essence of democracy was an informed public. “Is there anything wrong with a twenty-minute speech? Or a ten-minute speech? Or a five-minute speech?” “No.” “Then what’s wrong with a one-minute speech or a fifteen-second speech?” Reeves replied. “‘You can’t say anything in a fifteen-second speech,’” Reeves quoted Cleveland as saying. Then Reeves dissented: “As a man who had been responsible for five hundred million dollars’ worth of advertising I know more about this than you do.” There was a pause in their conversation; Reeves was sure he had his man now. “Harlan,”
he asked. “Do you remember that old radio speech of Franklin Roosevelt—his first acceptance speech?” Cleveland said he remembered it. “And the phrase about the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” Again Cleveland assented. “Harlan,” Reeves said, locking the trap. “That’s a fifteen-second spot.” Now he pushed forward. “Do you remember the speech that Churchill gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri? What did he say there?” “That an Iron Curtain had descended on Europe,” Cleveland said. What else did he say? Reeves pushed. Cleveland could not remember. “That was a fifteen-second spot from Churchill,” Reeves said, “just like the one during the war about ‘never have so many owed so much to so few.’ That was a Churchill spot, too. He was very good at spots.” Reeves remembered Cleveland as being very uncomfortable. “This can lead to demagoguery,” Cleveland said. “An uninformed electorate can lead to demagoguery faster,” Reeves said, confident that what he was doing was helping to inform the electorate.

If Ike adapted, albeit somewhat uneasily, to the new communications technology, Stevenson did not. He hated the idea of using advertising with the political process. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of,” he told Lou Cowan (a CBS executive on loan to the campaign) when he heard of the Eisenhower spots, “selling the presidency like cereal. Merchandising the presidency. How can you talk seriously about issues with one-minute spots!” Though there were already 17 million television sets in the country, Stevenson essentially refused to recognize the medium. Ironically, he was quite good at it: The medium caught him as he was—his lack of false airs, his natural grace and, above all, his charm. Because he did not seek television exposure, and did not take it seriously, he was not stilted when he went on. In early September, John Crosby, then the premier daily critic of television, wrote, “To both Republicans and Democrats it is now fairly obvious that Gov. Adlai Stevenson is a television personality the like of which has not been seen before.” Still, he did not like speaking to an invisible audience of millions. No amount of pressure and cajoling from his staff could convince him of the new medium’s importance. He did not watch television himself—he bore it the snobbery of the elite class.

It was hard for the men around him to get him to change. Part of the reason was generational and part of it was snobbery. Many of the people in his circle refused to admit that they even watched television, let alone owned one. On one occasion when Stevenson was scheduled to give a major televised speech, Lou Cowan came up with an idea on how to soften the troubling issue of Stevenson’s divorce. How about,
he suggested, having the camera pan to his three loyal sons, onstage. Just before a speech, they would say something nice and folksy, like “Good luck, Dad.” Stevenson quickly rejected the plan. “Lou old boy, we don’t do things like that in our family.” The network correspondents assigned to him tried to humanize him by suggesting informal shots. Perhaps he would allow their cameras into his car as he was campaigning or into his workroom as he was writing a speech. His answer always the same: “Certainly not.”

Yet Stevenson’s very resistance to such attempts to focus on things other than the issues and the seriousness of his speeches lent the campaign its special dignity. Years later his enthusiasts would remember his speeches as eloquent, fearless, and forceful. Curiously, when they took the time to go back and read them, they were often disappointed. The speeches were good, there was no doubt about that, but what had made them seem so exhilarating was their context. For here was a courageous man in a bad time. He was speaking at the very height of the McCarthy period and the terrible fear generated by nuclear peril and the postwar confrontation between the two great powers. Public discourse in America at that point was at its nadir. The chemical formula for victory, Karl Mundt had said, was KC
₂
: Korea, Communism, and corruption. Many politicians of the period gave speeches that were crude and accusatory. Others simply waffled on the issue of individual liberties, so much under assault by McCarthy. Eisenhower was, regrettably, silent. But Stevenson remained calm and unafraid; he seemed to find strength in America where others saw only decline, vulnerability, and, indeed, betrayal.

A speech he gave at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in mid-October was typical. He was tired after a long day of traveling and he had argued with his assistants over whether or not he had to go to the reception that preceded the speech. He preferred to sit in his room and work on his speech, shortening it so he would not once again run over the allotted time. In the end, he went to the reception and then returned to his room. He was so tired that he said he decided to have a second drink. “I won’t know what I’m saying tonight,” he joked.

That night, fatigue or no, he was at his best. He began: “Tonight I want to talk to the great confident majority of Americans, the generous, and the unfrightened, those who are proud of our strength, and sure of our goodness and who want to work with each other in trust.” Regrettably, he said, that confident majority did not include the Republican speechmakers in the campaign. How did they see America? “They call sections of us dupes, and fellow travelers, a man
without a purpose and without a mind. But at all times they picture us as unworthy, scared, stupid, heartless. They thus betray the hopeful, practical, yet deeply moral America which you and I know.” He then spoke about the danger of McCarthyism. There was, in a society like ours, he said, a rightful division between what was the province of God and what was the province of Caesar. The freedom of the mind and of conscience, the freedom from attempts of the state to impose thought control, was God’s province; things like minimum wage, farm prices, and military spending were under the jurisdiction of Caesar. “Those among us who would bar us from attempting our economic and social duty are quick with accusations, with defamatory hints and whispering campaigns when they see a chance to scare or silence those with whom they disagree. Rudely, carelessly, they invade the field of conscience, of thought, the field which belongs to God, and not to senators.” The Founding Fathers, he claimed, thought of government as a benign force, not a force of bullies, and as such they permitted great freedoms to those who would govern us. “So if their conscience permits, they [McCarthy and men like him] can say almost anything, and if my opponent’s conscience permits, he can try to help all of them get reelected.” In this most conservative state, he was interrupted again and again by thunderous applause.

In no small way, there were certain new class lines forming during the campaign. Stevenson was immensely popular with the new emerging postwar intellectual elite, what writer Michael Arlen years later termed “the new G.I. Bill intellectuals.” It seemed for the moment as if the country were dividing along intellectual lines. On the night of Stevenson’s nomination, Eisenhower had watched his opponent’s acceptance speech with his friend George Allen at a ranch in Colorado, and when it was over, Allen turned to him and said: “He’s too accomplished an orator; he’ll be easy to beat.” The general appealed to the squarer America—the traditional wealthy Republicans and the good, solid citizens of the small towns. If Stevenson was the candidate of the readers of
The New Yorker, Harper’s,
and the
Atlantic,
then, as Arlen added, Ike was the candidate of the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Reader’s Digest.

There was a belief in certain parts of the country that Stevenson was not manly enough to be President; indeed there was a good deal of carefully orchestrated background noise about his sexuality. The New York
Daily News,
staunchly conservative, referred to him as Adelaide. On the contrary, he had a number of passionate affairs, both as governor and as candidate. He seemed to be surrounded by so many adoring women that they came to be known as Adlai’s harem.

The difference between the two men’s appeals to the electorate was shrewdly caught that fall by CBS commentator Eric Sevareid in a letter, which clearly reflected the elitism of class and education that had surfaced during the campaigning: “In his almost painful honesty, he ... has been analyzing, not asserting; he has been projecting not an image of the big, competent father or brother, but the moral and intellectual proctor, the gadfly called conscience. In so doing he has revealed an integrity rare in American politics, a luminosity of intelligence unmatched on the political scene today; he has caught the imagination of intellectuals, of all those who are really informed; he has excited the passions of the
mind;
he has not excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, nor among these has he created a feeling of Trust, of Authority, of Certainty that he knows where he is going and what must be done. Eisenhower does create that feeling, or that illusion, because, God knows, he is empty of ideas or certitude himself.”

The Republicans were hardly bothered by Stevenson’s appeal to intellectuals and journalists. That September columnist Stewart Alsop called his younger brother John, a powerful figure in the Connecticut Republican party, to suggest that Stevenson was doing well among the people he ran into. “Sure,” answered John Alsop. “All the eggheads are for Stevenson, but how many eggheads are there?” Thus Stevenson became the candidate of the eggheads.

It was nonetheless a handsome campaign in a bad time. For all of the squalid background noise of McCarthyism (the Wisconsin senator, expert in all forms of democratic behavior, said he would like to get on the Stevenson campaign trail with a club and thereby make a good and loyal American out of the governor) (and Nixon working the Republican right wing), Eisenhower was a decent man and Stevenson an elegant campaigner who elevated the political discourse. Right-wing accusations against George Marshall, Stevenson noted, reflected a “middle of the gutter approach.” Among some who thought Stevenson the superior candidate there was a feeling that the country needed to elect Eisenhower in order to make the Republican party accept responsibility for McCarthy. Others feared that if the Republicans remained out of power very much longer, the two-party system would be in jeopardy. No one articulated it better than the columnist Joe Alsop in a letter to Isaiah Berlin. The campaign had convinced him that Stevenson was admirably qualified to be President and Eisenhower was not, and yet, Alsop added: “I find myself constantly blackmailed by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for a change in this country arises, not from
the decay of the Democrats, but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.”

If Stevenson had thought he had even the smallest chance of winning, he might have been more tempted to compromise. Right after he gained the nomination, he was told by his advisers to make some kind of accommodation with Texas conservatives on the issue of offshore oil rights; otherwise, he was warned, he would probably lose Texas and the election. “But I don’t
have
to win,” he answered. Instead, he went before the American Legion, a citadel of jingoism and political reaction, and told the audience that McCarthy’s kind of patriotism was a disgrace. Besides his own inevitable defeat, the result was that at a moment when the Democratic party, having been in power for more than twenty years, should have been in complete disrepute, Stevenson reinvigorated it and made it seem an open and exciting place for a generation of younger Americans who might otherwise never have thought of working for a political candidate.

“When an American says he loves his country,” he said in one memorable speech, “he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, or the wide, rising plains, the mountains or the seas. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.” In a speech he gave to the Liberal party, he spoke of the right-wingers who hoped to ride into power with Eisenhower, “the men who hunt Communists in the Bureau of Wild Life and Fisheries while hesitating to aid the gallant men and women who are resisting the real thing in the front lines of Europe and Asia.... They are finally the men who seemingly believe that we can confound the Kremlin by frightening ourselves to death.” Stevenson’s gift to the nation was his language, elegant and well crafted, thoughtful and calming.