Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  I said I couldn’t, hardly, and he told me that the rest of the party would soon be back from the Chief Minister’s. I decided to wait in the hotel’s air-conditioned dining room. Providentially, Stevenson had just returned with the same thought, and as I entered I found him with the others at a little table near the bar. It was dry Tuesday, Calcutta’s concession to Gandhi’s enthusiasm for prohibitionism, and so the group was just sitting there in wilted cord suits, panting, perspiring, and waiting for lunch. Blair was crew-cutted and equine, Bingham was dapper and handsome, and Johnson, who had been the founder of the Draft-Stevenson movement in Chicago, had the crinkly face of a puckish boy.

  Of course, my chief interest was in Stevenson. This is what I saw:

  A bald, slumped man in his early fifties with spectacles perched on the end of his rather hawkish nose, poring over a thick sheaf of mail. He was conspicuously pallid. His head was cocked, in that way he had, and though he was unsmiling now, obviously he had laughed a lot in his life; parenthetical lines of humor ran from midpoint on the sides of his nose to the ends of his full-lipped mouth. Despite his critics, he was no more egg-headed than the rest of us, but his torso was egg-shaped; I guessed, correctly, that he was worried about his weight and that he was, in fact, a worrier by habit—his brow had those telltale furrows. The hair he had was dark and silky. It suggested virility.

  One had the instant impression that he wasn’t comprehending much of the content in the letters he was dropping, one by one, into lap. His pudgy hands moved in slow motion, his shoulders sagged, his eyes were lusterless, the lids were puffy with fatigue. Attwood was right. He was exhausted. My first thought was that it was just as well the bar was closed. One gimlet, or even a shandy, and this man would be Out.

  I greeted Blair, and he introduced me to the others, beginning with their leader: “Governor, this is Mr. Manchester.” The Governor looked up dully. Under the circumstances it would have been cruel to remind him of our correspondence; doubtless he had received bales of letters like mine. I chatted with the others while he returned to his somnambulant movements with the mail. Attwood appeared, having just filed his copy at the cable office, and I was invited to lunch with them. We were about to rise when a wizened Indian in a dhoti ran up. “Mr. Stevenson?” he asked. Stevenson gave his head a defensive, if-you-insist nod. The man reached down, wrung his hand, and fled without another word. The Governor watched him go with astonishment. “Gosh, I didn’t think I’d get off that easily,” he said, thrusting his letters into his suit pocket. His voice lacked that dramatic, reedy quality which had marked it during the campaign. It was slurred, almost drugged by weariness.

  On our way to the table I asked whether encounters of that sort were common, and Blair said they sure were. “We were in the interior of Cambodia, looking at a temple, when we heard a female shriek, ‘Adleee!’ We looked around, and here came this woman in a mother hubbard, carrying a camera and running across a field.” “Just an American tourist gal” Stevenson explained “She said, ‘I’ve only got one shot left,’” Blair went on. “‘I was saving it for a water buffalo, but I’d rather take you.’” “It was a most engaging experience,” Stevenson said, reaching for his chair and managing a low chuckle. “We changed it to Manila for the purposes of the article,” Attwood said. Bingham said, “We arrived in the Philippines the same day as Miss Universe. There was a wind, and it blew her skirts up to her neck, and she was wearing striped pants. The crowd broke right through the police lines. They weren’t interested in us. Stevenson just hollered, ‘I’m not Miss Universe,’ and there wasn’t any trouble.”

  I had more or less assumed that the Governor would retire to his suite after lunch for a long nap, but his agenda didn’t allow it. Hardly had we bolted chicken sandwiches when Calcutta’s U.S. Consul General arrived to drive us to the headquarters of the Damodar Valley Corporation, Northeast India’s TVA. There I witnessed what was to become a familiar spectacle: Stevenson trying to act as a journalist and being defeated by his celebrity. We sat in a semi-circle of chairs around the desk of the corporation’s chairman. The Governor produced a little notebook and an automatic pencil. He was poised for the reply to his first question when the door opened and an Indian darted in, hand outstretched. That happened seven times. We were just beginning to study a wall map of the project when it was time to go. Stevenson cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “that’s quite a little dam you’re building up there, it seems to me.” An eighth Indian bounded in and thrust an enormous package of printed Damodar matter at him. He shrank away. “I’ll take it,” Johnson said easily. “In a couple of months you’ll be writing about this, and you’ll want it.”

  The next call was at the official home of H. C. Mookergee, Governor of West Bengal, who presented Stevenson with a card board cutout of an Indian saint. There was a gap in the schedule then, and Stevenson could have returned to the Great Eastern, but he said he was determined to do some reporting. He asked me where he might get a glimpse of a seamier side of Calcutta, and at my suggestion we headed for Howrah railroad station, on the far side of the Hooghly River, one of the mouths of the Ganges. The station, the most unsavory sight in the city, had become a camping ground for hundreds of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan, and as we entered they were everywhere we looked, cooking, sleeping, and nursing babies on the concrete floor. Stevenson moved slowly through the human wreckage, a short bowed figure half obscured by the guttering flambeaux of makeshift stoves, carefully lifting his polished loafers over the litter of arms and legs of men shuddering on the rack of famine; of frail little children with distended bellies; of the sick and diseased and helpless. The smell of smoke was almost overpowering, and under it there was a sharper, human odor. “Can’t something be done about this?” the Governor asked an Indian official. The man explained that homes had been found for many of them in nearby Orissa, but they kept returning to the station, insisting that they wanted to live in Bengal. “Well, it seems they could do something,” the Governor said, his face puckering in a frown. “Look at that old man! He doesn’t look like he’s ever going to move. And look at that!” Toward the end of an immense corridor—it is the very enormity of Indian interiors which strikes visitors from the West; all rooms, halls, and foyers are outsized—a dozen naked little boys were huddling together. He said heavily: “That would make a picture, wouldn’t it? The Boys Club of Calcutta.”

  The Howrah station is all the slumming most Calcutta visitors can take in one day, but Stevenson had seemed more at home there than in the Damodar office. I was beginning to observe in him a quality I had seen in other politicians—Churchill, Naguib, U Nu, Nehru—who seemed to gain strength from tours of public places, as though they could actually draw vitality from the masses they, or other politicians, sought to represent. When we returned to the Great Eastern he said to me, “Let’s see a little more of India,” and headed down a swarming sidewalk.

  We edged past two cows blocking the way and turned down a street named Waterloo, toward a square called Chowringi. Here and there turbaned men in loincloths were sleeping on the pavement. Most of those on their feet seemed to be beggars who thrust clawlike hands at us as we passed. Stevenson appeared to be looking for something. Farther down the street, opposite the stall, he found it: a Communist bookstall. “Let’s see what they’ve got,” he said, stepping up briskly. The racks carried such titles as The Life of J. Stalin, New China Forges Ahead, American Shadow Over India, and as he inspected these a lean young Indian clerk, taking him for a potential customer, held one out to him: Why is the Korean War Being Dragged Out? Stevenson, who after all had been asking for it, recoiled, flushing. “Isn’t that shocking?” he spluttered. “Look at that stuff! Marx! Stalin! He tried to sell me that stuff!” He was indignant, I was indignant; we were a couple of touchy Cold Warriors.

  We turned down a side street, past a funeral parlor which advertised that it was open twenty-four hours a day, past a horribly twisted youth who pawed us in a gesture of supplication, past swea
ting, teeming gangs of women towing little children who were weeping in the bitter heat, and Stevenson was silent all the way back to the hotel. Unlawfully, the Great Eastern served us drinks in his suite, but the Governor’s martinis didn’t do much for his spirits. In the dining room the others in the group turned to their food with zest, but Stevenson didn’t eat his. He toyed with it for awhile and then put his spoon aside. “I’d enjoy this more if I hadn’t seen all those starving people,” he said finally. “It’s the children, the little children, that get me.” The rest of us looked down guiltily at our empty plates.

  ***

  I became accepted as a temporary member of the party until Stevenson left India two and a half weeks later. There were no other applicants—few American correspondents lived in Asia then—and the Governor had a special reason for wanting me by his side. After a quick courtesy call on Shiekh Abdullah in Kashmir, and another on Nehru, he was going to tour South India. He needed a reliable guide and decided that I qualified. Meanwhile the rest of the group around him was shrinking. Attwood felt ill, and Johnson wanted to pursue some inquiries in the Punjab. Therefore just four of us—Stevenson, Blair, Bingham, and I—took off in shirtsleeves for an extended journey to Nagpur, Hyderabad, Madras, Bangalore, Trivandrum, the Malabar Coast, Cochin, Mangalore, Bombay, and then New Delhi—about 17,000 miles, most of it by plane, but some by car and once, across a river, by raft.

  The patterns which I had first seen in Calcutta continued. There was just no way for Stevenson to escape his fame. Seen from Springfield, Illinois, our caravansaries in the southern tip of India were literally on the other side of the globe, yet privacy eluded him even there. Autograph hunters hid in shrubbery and ambushed him at airports, even at zoos. Villagers dissatisfied with their conditions presented him with petitions. Dark youths lined streets to stare as his car passed. Local panjandrums turned out bands to honor him by tooting western tunes. (The favorites were “Swanee River,” “Marching through Georgia,” and, though it had no relevance for him that month, “Happy Birthday to You,” which was always played as though it were a John Philip Sousa air, with martial brasses and all the percussions clanging.) Americans who had worked for his election at home, and were now employed here in consulates or on aid projects, lurked outside his hotel rooms. I was in no position to criticize them—in a sense, I was a lurker myself—but toward the end of the first week I began to appreciate his frustration.

  Aboard planes, Stevenson and Blair had worked out an effective defense against curious fellow passengers. The Governor would take a window seat and plant his briefcase beside him. Blair would sit directly across the aisle, so that, if an intruder bothered Stevenson, they could ostentatiously peer around him at each other until he was made to feel very much in the way. Nevertheless, there were a few presumptuous admirers who stayed anyway.

  At Nehru’s direction the government did what it could to help. Mostly unknown to Stevenson, agents of India’s Criminal Investigation Department accompanied us everywhere. Twice we swam on a magnificent beach of white sand studded with coconut trees in Travancore-Cochin; watching us were three CID inspectors and twelve of their men, all disguised as fishermen. When we drove seventy miles to an industrial exhibition at Quilon, the route was patroled by bomb experts. (Stevenson heard about that afterward. He said miserably, “Gosh, you don’t realize the trouble you make.”) In all this unwanted hoopla, I remember just one comic incident. The landing field at Mangalore was new. It had been formed by shearing off the top of a mountain. As we entered our glide pattern, we saw a huge mob staring up at us, and Stevenson moaned. But when we taxied up to the terminal, the crowd was melting away. We inquired and were told that the engineers had built a very short runway; a pilot who put his wheels down a few feet from one end would just stop a few feet from the other end. The people had come, not to see a celebrity, but in anticipation of a possible crash. Stevenson was delighted.

  The local press was a special problem, arising from the veneration which they, like intellectuals everywhere, felt toward him. (John Foster Dulles visited India the following month and was virtually ignored.) Being human, they often brought their wives and children just to touch him, or be touched by him, and it all added to the congestion. An example was R. Satakopan, a husky, amiable Indian and a friend of mine. When he was not serving as correspondent for the Associated Press, Satakopan was a professional photographer. Stevenson had rebelled at the suggestion that he be trailed around the world by Look cameramen, so Attwood was hiring local men in each country. In India it was Satakopan, who, at three successive stops, introduced the Governor to his elder brother, his younger brother, and a college classmate, and photographed each of them at the Governor’s side.

  Normally Stevenson was adroit at fielding reporters’ questions, but his Look contract had put him in a bind. It specified that he could not anticipate his magazine material in newspaper interviews. Therefore he was obliged to be very general with journalists and, now and then, a trifle inane. He told one in Nagpur that he had “enormous respect” for the Indian people, that he was hopeful that relations between America and India would become “better and better and better,” and that he thought a third world war was “very far away.” At a Malabar ferry he told a journalist in a jibba and dhoti that he was impressed with the government’s five-year plan, and thought the rice fields very pretty. A Hyderabad newspaperman learned that the Governor was interested in the granite formations around the airport, and that in Stevenson’s opinion the day was a pretty hot one.

  Under the circumstances he could hardly be expected to put in a stunning performance as a reporter himself, and he didn’t. After awhile he stopped trying. His notebook appeared less and less frequently. “God, I envy you newspaper guys, the way you get everything down,” he said to me in Quilon, gazing out the car window as a scene of coir carriers, Mobilgas stations, mayflower trees, and Communist flags swept by. “I haven’t taken a note for two days. I get too interested in people.” That was half of it. The other half was their abiding interest in him. He was incapable of tuning them out, of growing a thick skin and rejecting the more outrageous trespasses on his privacy. Three times during one evening in the guest house of Trivandrum’s rajpramukh he tried to cope with a long-distance call from California. Apparently someone wanted him to sign up for a speaking engagement there. The operators couldn’t clear the line. All he heard was static. There was no possibility that he could accept any such invitation—his schedule would be full when he got home, too—yet he wouldn’t let anyone else handle it for him. I remember the rest of us sitting around the dining table, admiring a white elephant standing just outside in the warm moonbright night, while down the hall Stevenson was bellowing hoarsely into the phone, trying in vain to make himself understood.

  Often with him one had the feeling that he would never come to terms with his immense popularity. Evidence of it, which appeared daily, merely bewildered him. Once on a verandah overlooking the Indian Ocean Blair appeared with news that Stevenson’s book of campaign addresses was on the Herald Tribune’s best-seller list. I predicted that it would stay there a long time. Stevenson gave me a look of disbelief. “You really think so?” he asked. “After all, they’re just speeches.” Several days later I was seated directly across from him at a state dinner given by the Governor of Bombay. En route I had learned that the photographer who had taken a picture of Stevenson’s shoe with a hole in it had just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. I told him over soup. He didn’t believe me. Turning to Shri Shantilal Shah, who was seated at his right, he said, “Mr. Manchester is ribbing me.” “Ribbing?” repeated the Indian, clearly baffled. “Teasing,” said Stevenson. “Ah!” sighed Shantilal.

  It had happened, just the same. In defeat he had become a world figure, with all that that implied—the eminence, the ceaseless scrutiny, the adoration of liberals everywhere, and the vexations of being a great celebrity. What he needed was an entourage, a shift of Secret Service agents, or at the very least a personal serva
nt to deal with the trivia and the nuisances besetting him. I particularly recall one sultry evening at the Connemara Hotel in Madras. At Stevenson’s request, I had brought to his room an irascible old English colonial administrator with an exceptional knowledge of South Indian politics and absolute mastery of all the local languages. For nearly two hours the Englishman rattled on, prodded now and then by a question from Stevenson. The night thickened around us with no slackening of the heat—there were no air-conditioned rooms in the Connemara then—and from time to time a bearer, aware that Stevenson would be there only one night and eager to be tipped now, would come in and fuss needlessly with the furniture. At length the Briton and I departed. Stevenson thanked us, a damp, pudgy figure waddling slightly as he stripped to his undershorts. We three debated the value of mosquito netting, which was available but which would block any night breezes that might spring up. “You don’t need a net if your punkahs are on,” the Englishman said, pointing to two big-bladed ceiling fans overhead. “They blow the bugs away.” “That so?” said Stevenson, and we left him struggling with the fan controls.

  His struggles, I learned the next morning, had been only partially successful. When we met in the lobby at 6:30 A.M. I asked him how he had slept. “I didn’t,” he said hollowly. “The fan over the bed didn’t work, so I crawled up on the sofa, under the one that did. Four bearers kept running in and out, telling me they wouldn’t be here in the morning, so I finally gave them ten rupees. It was the smallest I had. They went away and then the bugs started to bite. They didn’t bite me on the side where the fan was, but they got me on the leeward. I tried to fetch one of the bearers to help me with the bed fan. They’d all disappeared with the rupees. I ran up and down the halls looking for them, but they weren’t around. So I went back and got bitten. God, what a night.”