The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Marshall and I were driven by Calhoun, the man who had met us on our arrival, back to our dormitory at Atlanta University. We didn’t talk much. A few minutes after we got there, two N.A.A.C.P. attorneys from Virginia arrived—Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. Earlier, they had arranged with Marshall to meet him in his room after the meeting and work out the strategy for two school-segregation lawsuits they had pending, and this still had to be done. They looked drawn and exhausted. Robinson, a former law professor at Howard University, fell asleep in an armchair a few moments after he had sat down, but he roused himself immediately, shook his head, and began fumbling in his briefcase for the legal papers he had brought with him. “All right,” Marshall said, “let’s start with the Prince Edward County case and go all through that before we take up the other. And I guess we’d better get going on it because we’ve got a lot to do tonight.” I left them and went to bed.

  Richard H. Rovere

  AUGUST 25, 1956 (ON THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION)

  DLAI STEVENSON IS, as just about everyone knows, a man much given to self-doubt and hesitation. He has sought the Democratic nomination for almost a year—putting more time and energy into a preconvention campaign than any candidate before him—but there has always been a part of him that didn’t want it at all. In 1956, this part of him has clearly been a small one, and if he were to be judged entirely by his public manner and his public words, it might be possible to say that he has suppressed it altogether, or at least reduced it to politically negligible dimensions. Nevertheless, it exists, because it has to; if a man has a sense of the melancholy powerful enough to serve as the basis for a wit as formidable as Stevenson’s, he cannot destroy it by an act of will or reason. In any case, this aspect of Stevenson’s nature is still sensed and frequently deplored by a number of Democrats, and there are some people, among them Harry Truman and Averell Harriman, who have argued against Stevenson as a candidate because he reckons too much with the chance of defeat and disappointment and finds it difficult, though not quite impossible, to join his party colleagues in their chesty displays of euphoria and confidence. During this past week in Chicago, however, it became clear that Stevenson’s ambivalence was a political asset—at least in the circumstances he found himself in when the Democratic Convention opened. It would be going too far to say that his ambivalence won the nomination for him, but it would not be going too far to say that it helped mightily to gain him the nomination on the most enviable terms. If Stevenson’s yen for the nomination had been as large and consuming as Governor Harriman’s, he would probably have emerged from this gathering not as a candidate who had met and defeated his antagonists on all sides but as a candidate who had won by meeting his antagonists and doing a certain amount of business with them. In the Stevenson camp, there were many advisers who at the start of the week wanted him to engage in an elaborate traffic with Senator Estes Kefauver, Senator Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Truman, and anyone else who might have been worth trafficking with, over the Vice-Presidential nomination, the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, planks in the platform, and anything else that might have been negotiable.

  The story went the rounds that it was the serious thinkers and the advanced liberals in the Stevenson camp who were the most eager to guarantee a speedy victory by these means, but the stories that go the rounds at political conventions are notoriously unreliable, and anyhow it scarcely matters who counselled compromise and who discouraged it. Stevenson assuredly was given the opportunity to make deals; that, after all, is what conventions are about. The point is that in the days before the convention, and even through the first day it was officially in session, there was a good deal of panic and fright in the Stevenson headquarters, and all during the convention the possibility of total defeat for Stevenson was very gravely calculated by the sort of people who are constantly working over tally sheets and believe that men like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson have some rare instinct that prevents them from ever behaving unwisely in political matters—particularly in those political matters that affect their own status. It may be that Stevenson, who has never advanced any serious claims for his own gifts as a strategist, shared the feeling that it was at least conceivable that all his campaigning had been a waste of time. It would certainly have been out of character for him not to have entertained this thought, but in any case he made—as far as it is now possible to tell—not a single one of the deals that were being urged upon him. He determined to let events take their own risky course and to tender Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, and other master politicians nothing but the courtesies to which he felt they were entitled. In consequence, he is a candidate free of contractual ties and as free as a loyal Democrat can be of any onus that attaches to the Truman administration. He may again be accused of being Truman’s man, but he will have a ready answer. He is free of obligation to Lyndon Johnson or to any of the Southern Democrats. As much as a politician or statesman can ever hope to be, he is today his own man.

  It could be argued—and it certainly will be—that it was Stevenson’s purity of spirit that triumphed over political baseness. No doubt he will be widely advertised as the man who would rather be right than President. Perhaps he would, and perhaps he is indeed pure of spirit, but the theory that his strength became as the strength of ten because of moral superiority will not bear close investigation. For one thing, there is nothing necessarily base about political trading; alliances are as necessary in the world of party politics as they are among nations. For another thing, Stevenson has made plenty of deals in the past, and he will undoubtedly make plenty in the future. From his point of view, it would have been morally a great deal more defensible and in every respect far more appetizing to promise Senator Johnson control of the Democratic National Committee, which was the main thing Johnson wanted, than to go begging in Georgia, as Stevenson once did, for the approval and support of Herman Talmadge. All that can be said is that at this convention Stevenson gave none of the hostages to fortune that he was being asked to give—and that at one stage or another it might have been prudent to give if he had been determined to eliminate the possibility of defeat. By this course of action, and by having luck from start to finish, he came out stronger and freer than he probably ever thought it was possible for him to be, and he tumbled his opponents in such a way as to cause the political “realists” to rewrite their texts on realism.

  The conclusion is almost inescapable that Stevenson was able to gamble in Chicago and to outsit all his opponents because his desire for victory, while great, is not a governing passion. He wants very much to be President of the United States—enough, at least, to lead him to fraternize with Herman Talmadge and with Governor Frank Clement, of Tennessee, and that is quite a lot—but the side of him that resists, the side that dreads the entire prospect of being President and gives him his sombre view of the office, makes it impossible for him to pant for it as Governor Harriman did. Governor Harriman became so desperate in his quest for the nomination that he practically destroyed the rationale of his campaign by coming to terms with people who, on the issues he said he cares most about, stand as far to the right of President Eisenhower as Eisenhower stands to the right of Harriman—the prime example being Governor Gary, of Oklahoma, who placed Harriman’s name in nomination. Harriman, of course, gambled more heavily than Stevenson did; in fact, his whole effort was a spectacular race against odds that always seemed long and now seem incalculable. To overcome them, he put in what had every appearance of being a frantic campaign. Stevenson at no point became frantic. It is said that he was deeply troubled by the phrases Harry Truman used in announcing his support of Harriman and his opposition to Stevenson, but he could not be persuaded to make any hasty arrangements with anyone to offset the Truman move. His behavior was clearly that of a man who can tolerate the thought of losing and knows that he can find certain consolations in defeat. It was not necessarily that he would rather be right than President but that he saw an engrossing chance to be both right and Pre
sident, and was willing to take it as a calculated risk. He appears to have been the only man at this convention, apart from Harry Truman, who took a gamble that wasn’t dictated by necessity.

  Stevenson’s luck was better than most people expected it to be. There were a few hours at the start of the convention when it looked as if Harry Truman might have inadvertently delivered his party over to those in it who like him least; no one here, that is, ever thought that Averell Harriman had a prayer, but it did seem to many that Lyndon Johnson’s chances would be vastly improved in the event of a deadlock, and that a deadlock was what both Truman and Johnson were promoting. (There are some who insist that Truman does nothing by inadvertence, but they have produced no plausible explanation of why he should want control to pass from the hands of his friends to the hands of people who have never supported him.) One man who thought Lyndon Johnson’s chances were excellent was Lyndon Johnson; for somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours on Monday, he waged a perfectly serious and purposeful campaign for the nomination, and he is reliably reported to have thought it more likely than not that he and Senator Russell, of Georgia, could gain control of the Democratic Party and make it a medium for the expression of their views. In that period, a great many people in the Loop hotels and in the International Amphitheatre, where large numbers of obscure Democrats were being given free television time in order to enable them to overcome their obscurity, forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatever. For many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders (Carmine De Sapio, of Manhattan, being a striking exception this year), and the governors and urban politicians seldom see things as senators do. And, of course, many people also forgot another general principle, which is that political conventions almost always end the way that logic dictates at the outset. Before the conventions of 1952, it seemed reasonable on the basis of all available evidence to expect the nomination of General Eisenhower by the Republicans and of Governor Stevenson by the Democrats. It was plain from the start that these men were the strongest candidates of their parties, and parties normally nominate the men who appear to have the best chance of winning. At both 1952 conventions, there were periods when the favorites seemed on the point of being rejected, but in the end the suicidal impulses were brought under control and the expected developments developed. This year, all political logic pointed to the renomination of Adlai Stevenson by the Democrats, and the reasoned view of most reasoning observers was that the Party would serve itself best by pairing Estes Kefauver with Stevenson, the theory being that each man has an appeal to precisely those voters who are insensitive to the appeal of the other. As it turned out, Kefauver’s nomination was a very chancy thing indeed, and would never have occurred but for a series of altogether unexpected happenings. The fact that he finally made it cannot be used as an argument in favor of the theory that logic generally prevails. Nevertheless, the result was the expected one, and the principle has survived another convention—as it will undoubtedly survive next week’s gathering in the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

  It is probably a good thing that people tend to cast aside the wisdom of history in the midst of conventions, since to put much stock in it would, for one thing, make the conventions far duller, and, for another, inhibit the attempts to face down the odds that provide all the suspense. This convention has been moderately suspenseful, and hardly ever as thunderously dull as certain conventions of the past. To be sure, the oratory at the International Amphitheatre now and then broke new ground in oppressiveness and witlessness, and the few feeble efforts that were made to hold the attention of the television audience—most notably, the documentary movie on the past glories of the Party—were not marked by brilliance. But while a convention, for most of its participants, is an exercise in histrionics, its drama, when there is any, is not of the sort that can be taken in by the eyes and ears alone. This convention had one scene—the balloting for the Vice-Presidential nomination—that was primarily a theatrical scene, and a very good one, but it seldom happens that things are as compact and vivid as that. The extraordinary interest of this convention has derived from the effect it has had, or seems likely to have, on the biographies of half a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party. Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Averell Harriman are today very different men from what they were a week ago. It is the strong, though possibly unjust, feeling of most observers that Truman and Harriman are considerably diminished in stature by their defeat, and especially by the way they met defeat. Adlai Stevenson is measurably larger, for he has won a great political victory and sacrificed nothing in the process. Lyndon Johnson’s reputation as an uncommonly astute Senate leader remains unimpaired, but the fact has been established—as it was not before—that in the jungle of a national convention he cannot employ the gifts he uses in the Senate. Carmine De Sapio’s importance as a figure in national politics is in shreds for the moment, and it has been made clear through his failure that the New York governorship is not quite as formidable politically as it was when it was held by Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thomas E. Dewey. Before the convention, it was thought that De Sapio was not too serious about Governor Harriman’s Presidential aspirations but was using him as a personification of New York’s political power, which is so great that it has almost given the state political sovereignty. New York’s political power did the state no good, or at least it did De Sapio no good; he got nothing he wanted from this convention.

  · · ·

  The Truman-Harriman movement here has been one of the most interesting spectacles in recent political history, and there has been an endless amount of conjecture about what led the two men, along with many of their friends, to become involved in so hopeless an adventure. On the surface, at least, the case of Governor Harriman is simpler than that of the ex-President. In the last few years, Harriman has developed an enormous political ambition and a great capacity for political bitterness. The mere fact that he wanted the Presidency is not surprising; most men who get as close to the White House as he got under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and who meet the constitutional requirements for the office begin to fancy themselves occupying it. It is only his zeal and the passion of his desire for the Presidency that distinguish Mr. Harriman from most men who have held important jobs in the executive branch for any length of time, but this zeal and passion constitute a distinction that is quite extraordinary. It would not surprise anyone who has seen him here this week if they lasted over the next four years and brought him back for a third try in 1960, when he will be sixty-nine. He said the other evening, after his defeat, that he intended to stay in politics and that he looked forward to retaining his present office for “many, many years.” His seeking of that office two years ago was itself an index of the intensity of his itch for the Presidency, since it was neither an office that could add much to his stature nor one for which his interests or his impressive talents seemed to qualify him. In order to get it, he pushed out of the way a promising young Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., whose career would have been greatly advanced by the experience of Albany, and he had been in it only a few months when he began to act like a Presidential candidate. This suited Carmine De Sapio down to the ground, and early this year the State of New York was in business, as it almost always has been, with a candidate of its own.

  The team of Harriman and De Sapio now seems never to have had much of a chance, but it might have done a bit better than it did if Harry Truman had not intervened in its behalf. It wasn’t until two days before the convention that the ex-President announced his support of Harriman’s candidacy, but it had been clear almost since the last election that Truman took a poor view of Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 campaign and would find it hard to support him in 1956. Truman may have had some of the techni
cal and professional objections to Stevenson’s methods that he wrote about in his memoirs, but his deepest grievance was caused by Stevenson’s repudiation of large parts of the Truman record. Frequently in private (though never in public), Stevenson showed both his willingness to concede point after point to critics of the Truman administration and his eagerness to have it thoroughly understood that he had never been part of it. This got back to Mr. Truman, who took it hard, and it was not strange that he should prefer the candidacy of an old associate like Averell Harriman. (He could never, under any circumstances, have turned to the third candidate, Estes Kefauver, who made his reputation by harassing prominent Democrats during the Truman years.) It has happened time after time in American politics that former Presidents and former party leaders have resented and fought against their rightful heirs, and it is possible that even if Harry Truman had not been miffed at Stevenson for disowning large parts of the Fair Deal, he would have opposed him, in tandem with someone like Harriman, for the simple reason that Stevenson is a younger man with a different set of friends and with no need or desire to enlist the talents of such veterans as Judge Samuel Rosenman, the speech writer, and Frank McKinney, the strategist. The only other living ex-President, Herbert Hoover, has often intervened in behalf of the Hooverites in his own party. What was astonishing about the Truman performance was its ineptness and its destructiveness. Truman did positive damage to Harriman by the kind of support he gave him, and thereby contributed to the forging of a coalition behind Stevenson, who had come into the convention with a powerful movement of his own but without benefit of allies. It is most unlikely that Stevenson would have won on the first ballot if Truman had not generated so much hostility by the intemperateness of his anti-Stevenson campaign. Herbert Hoover, though he has consistently opposed the liberals in the Republican Party, has never made a mistake of this magnitude. He has always acted in such a way as to maintain a role for himself not only in his own party but in the government, even when it has been under opposition control.