Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  At the beginning of August, Schlesinger traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to spend a few days with Stevenson and his campaign manager, Wilson Wyatt. Although Wyatt was the founding chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, Schlesinger was startled to discover how conservative his candidate’s positions were. “Adlai was probably even more conservative than I had thought,” Arthur complained, “perhaps, indeed, at this stage, the most conservative Democratic candidate since John W. Davis [in 1924].” Issues that would appeal to labor unions, liberals and minorities were all played with a “soft pedal”; instead the target audience was “high-minded’ Republicans and voters in the South. Schlesinger left Springfield wondering whether he would even be able to get Stevenson to mention the New Deal at all. But Schlesinger by this time was enough of an operative to understand that in politics you had to fully commit when switching from one team to another. “Eisenhower utters the cliches of the right, Harriman the cliches of the left (with which I agree),” he noted. Only “Stevenson promises the possibility of adjourning the tired old debates, moving beyond them and ushering us into the post-Rooseveltian era, toward which we are groping.” It was an important shift: if Schlesinger was going to write for the candidate, he may as well believe in him.34

  When the speechwriting team convened on August 12 in Springfield, however, “my heart sank as the discussion proceeded.” Stevenson’s beliefs “were so remote from my beliefs,” he decided, “that I had better confine myself to a technical role in the campaign and stay out of policy discussions.” That might have been a soulless experience had it not been for the excitement of being at the center of a national campaign and the quality of the speechwriting team. As well as Schlesinger, the writers in the core team included his Harvard friend and neighbor, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith; the Saturday Evening Post reporter and Stevenson biographer, John Bartlow Martin; Northwestern law professor (and future Kennedy labor secretary) Willard Wirtz; Harper’s editor John Fischer; and Truman aide (and later JFK budget director) David Bell. “We almost never had fewer than four Pulitzer Prize winners in residence,” Wyatt recalled. “It was probably as accomplished a group of writers as has ever participated in a presidential campaign.”35

  The quality of that team did not come without its complications. As Richard Hofstadter points out in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “Stevenson became the victim of the accumulated grievances against intellectuals and brain-trusters which had festered in the American right wing since 1933.” It was Stewart Alsop during the campaign who gave Schlesinger and his group the name that would forever stick to public intellectuals by describing them in his Matter of Fact column as “eggheads.” To compound the image, he would soon devise his “cookout” test (the forerunner to the “who would you have a beer with?” test) about Stevenson—“Eisenhower’s the kind of guy I’d like to invite over for a cookout,” Alsop remarked, despite the fact that he voted for the Democrat. “Can you imagine inviting that Adlai for a cookout?”36

  From the outset, the campaign was extremely sensitive about jibes that northeastern liberal intellectuals had assumed control. Occasionally events turned to farce. No sooner had John Kenneth Galbraith arrived in Springfield to join the team than he was greeted by a frantic call from Schlesinger ordering him to stay in his hotel room until further notice. “The reason,” Galbraith recalled, “was that at a press conference a day before, Stevenson had been asked if his campaign wasn’t being taken over by radicals, specifically by dangerous figures from the Americans for Democratic Action.”37

  Stevenson had been a character witness for Alger Hiss, which meant he was, as Hofstadter points out, “especially vulnerable to the common tandem association between intellect and radicalism, radicalism and disloyalty.” Schlesinger and his Harvard friends were vulnerable to similar charges. During the campaign the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial under the headline, “Harvard Tells Indiana How to Vote,” citing Schlesingers Senior and Junior as exhibit one. Added to radicalism and disloyalty was the associated charge of effeminacy. “Adelaide” Stevenson’s speeches, said the New York Daily News, were filled with “fruity . . . teacup words” more suggestive of “a genteel spinster who can never forget that she got an A in elocution at Miss Smith’s Finishing School” than a president of the United States. And it was no wonder when the candidate was surrounded by “typical Harvard lace-cuff liberals,” who were no more than “pompadoured lap dogs.” In September, Eleanor Roosevelt stepped into the debate with a withering defense of Schlesinger and the writers around Stevenson. The Chicago Tribune, she wrote, “is frightened about Governor Stevenson’s advisors and says they are a Socialist brain trust. Somehow, I never thought of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as Socialist. Did you?” Arthur was delighted with the intervention, writing to thank her for “your generous defense.” But he was in no doubt that it was “obviously going to be a very dirty campaign.” Attacks on Schlesinger would culminate a week before the election when Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of being pro-Communist because the Harvard professor “thought Communists should be allowed to teach your children.”38

  It was into this kind of fevered atmosphere that Schlesinger released Galbraith from hotel captivity, going on to explain another difficulty to his friend: the candidate liked to maintain the illusion that he wrote his own speeches. Wilson Wyatt later claimed that for all their talent, the writers were like “reporters covering a police beat,” providing the governor with information “because of their conviction that Adlai Stevenson was a master of prose himself and that they were not writing his speeches but simply enabling him to extend himself in the preliminary drafting.” A New York Times story about the campaign bought into the myth, reporting that the writers were in reality “research staff to dig out facts and figures and ideas for speeches.” When Stevenson himself was asked whether he wrote his own speeches, he replied, “I am blushing—appropriately I hope.” It was a misleading answer that reflected the dying embers of a certain approach to political speechmaking. High-minded observers agreed with Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Robert H. Jackson that “ghost-writing has debased the intellectual currency in circulation here and is a type of counterfeiting which invites no defense.” At heart, Stevenson believed that too. “He really feels very sensitive to any suggestion that he does not write his own speeches,” Schlesinger groaned during a September campaign trip to Colorado, irritated by the candidate’s constant fiddling with texts. “He [Stevenson] spent most of the trip reworking the main Denver draft . . . protest[ing] plaintively about how his own best phrases were always cut out.”39

  The speechwriters, who met on the third floor of the Elks Club building on South Sixth Street in Springfield, soon became known, inevitably enough, as the Elks Club Group. They worked in a 650-square-foot, sparsely furnished main room—the bullpen—dominated by a long central table that ran most of the length of the room. Off this room were four bedrooms, where writers could crash when pulling an all-nighter. Long hours and no exercise were the norm in a punishing regime. It quickly took its toll. David Bell and Bill Tufts both collapsed from exhaustion; Schlesinger had to be hospitalized briefly after his knee swelled up like a balloon. Their day would usually start at 10 a.m. with a group meeting. They would then work until 3 or 4 a.m., with breaks only to drink at Sazerac’s dive bar or eat at the local diner, where Schlesinger’s principal complaint was the absence of chocolate sauce for his ice cream (a lifelong obsession). All the while, they worked amid the cacophony of clattering typewriters, ringing telephones, and visiting staffers. Schlesinger’s sangfroid impressed John Bartlow Martin. “He could, seemingly, simultaneously hold a telephone conversation, write a speech, read source material, and talk to somebody across the desk. He wrote rapidly and well. He wrote basic drafts on major speeches, did heavy rewrite on other people’s drafts, and, from his friends around the country, obtained dozens of drafts.”40

  These qualities soon meant that Schlesinger, along w
ith David Bell, was given responsibility for running the Elks Club Group. That put Schlesinger in a bind with Harvard. Most of the academics such as Galbraith returned to their universities once the academic year began, but Stevenson asked Schlesinger to stay on in Springfield. Paul H. Buck, provost of Harvard, was approached about a leave of absence and, as a close friend of Arthur Sr. going back to Ohio in the 1920s, he readily assented, albeit with the vaguely patronizing air of one who could hardly believe that Young Arthur, whom he had known as a small child, was now advising the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. It was a real “opportunity both to serve and to learn,” Buck wrote. “I do not know what other participants may get out of this campaign,” replied Stevenson laconically, “but I can assure you that my own education is proceeding apace.” Either way, “I cannot tell you how much I value” the “willingness to grant a leave of absence to Mr. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.”41

  What made Arthur stand out from most of the other writers in the room, his brilliant prose style, matched his ability to think about the political effect of a speech. Martin remembers learning that latter skill from him. “I began by worrying about the prose and soon learned to worry more about the politics,” he said. Initially shocked to hear Schlesinger talking about sections of speeches being aimed at particular voting blocs such as African Americans or Catholics, he quickly “came to see that in a diverse pluralistic democracy like ours, a politician can approach the electorate in no other way.”42

  The writers took turns in accompanying the candidate around the country, when they were often called upon to turn out an instant speech. On the final train trip of the campaign, someone remembered that the next day, October 24, was United Nations Day. That left Schlesinger writing “desperately from midnight to 2:30 the night before” in order to turn out “a sharp speech on the UN and Korea” for delivery in Rochester at 9:30 the next morning. “It proved a great success,” he recorded proudly, “so much so that the newspapermen immediately demanded texts and made it their lead for the next day.”43

  Stevenson kept a distance from his writers, usually referring to Arthur as “Mr. Schlesinger” and barely concealing his irritation with him. “A little more sobriety about the difficulties” of peace and prosperity, Stevenson tersely demanded of him that October, “a little more ‘sense’—than the continued flat assertion that we Dems can & will continue prosperity and win the peace—a little more challenge to the people to understand the difficulties and help us solve them for their benefit etc.”44

  Moments of success, however, became fewer and fewer as the campaign went on and Stevenson failed to rise to the challenge. Occasionally persuasive, he was rarely compelling and, unlike Eisenhower, he lacked any kind of rapport or common touch with large crowds. He also failed to respond quickly enough to Eisenhower’s pioneering use of TV. Both candidates resisted the new medium at first, but Ike relented sooner. He used “Mad Men” advertising executive Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency to create brilliant thirty-second TV spots. Ironically, Stevenson came across well on TV, but his highfalutin nature caused him to minimize it in the campaign. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of,” he scoffed, “selling the presidency like cereal!” That attitude left him behind the curve.45

  Ignoring his speechwriters compounded the failure. For a major address in St. Louis in October, the team had worked up a powerful speech, with overtones of The Age of Jackson, outlining Stevenson’s “New Frontier” for America. (Eight years later Schlesinger would be on the team of speechwriters that recycled the idea more successfully for Kennedy.) But when the speech was timed, Schlesinger, on the road with the candidate, realized it was too long for the TV coverage. He produced a shorter text, but Stevenson refused to use it, on the grounds that he liked the original better. Inevitably, the networks cut him off halfway through, amid scenes of the large crowd looking bored and passive. Similarly at one of the final large-scale rallies of the campaign in Madison Square Garden, Stevenson performed woefully. The arena was packed with a large crowd and a smattering of famous faces from stage and screen. “At 10:30 p.m. the Governor came on,” Schlesinger wrote. “The excitement was by now overwhelming, and the ovation tremendous.” Once again, though, the performance was underwhelming and “the speech itself was unfortunately something of a flop.” Only in his home state of Illinois did Stevenson manage to pull off a great performance, leading Schlesinger to comment drily, “The Governor even finished on time.”46

  Flush with the success of the last speech, and from sharing a car ride into town with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (“What a beautiful—and delightful—girl Lauren Bacall is!—even more attractive in the flesh than on the screen”), Schlesinger returned to Cambridge “still completely certain that we would win.” Within hours of the polls closing on November 4, it quickly became apparent that all his efforts had been for nought. “Tuesday night was sad,” he wrote. “I knew as soon as I heard the results from Connecticut (about 8 p.m.) that we had lost. . . . Melancholy settled more heavily on all of us as the evening moved on.” Schlesinger had already helped Stevenson with a concession speech, using an anecdote about Lincoln, despite having “assured him he would not have to tell the story.” In the end, the result was a landslide, Eisenhower winning 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89.

  “One consolation about being beaten 56 to 0,” Schlesinger wrote stoically, “is that there is no point wondering whether you would have done better if you had had a different left tackle—or a different quarterback.”47

  CHAPTER NINE

  POLITICS IS AN EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

  After the presidential election campaign, an exhausted Schlesinger and his family immediately took off for a vacation in a wealthy enclave north of Palm Beach, Florida, courtesy of Averell Harriman. “I cannot say how grateful the Schlesingers are to you for the Hobe Sound interlude,” he wrote Harriman afterwards. “I feel a new man as a result of the sun and the surf and the rest. In fact I feel almost capable of coping with the New Era.”1

  Most Americans found they really did “Like Ike.” Eisenhower’s cheerful reassuring manner, pledge to balance the budget, and decisive Cold War rhetoric played out well on TV sets, which by 1955 would be installed in three-quarters of all American homes. For Schlesinger, however, back in “gray New England” and pointlessly resistant to owning a television set, the period after the election would be an emotional struggle. Like many veterans of an intense campaign, he missed the action. “My new year’s toast: To hell with 1953,” he wrote to Joseph Rauh, adding “glasses to be thrown in the fireplace.” And to Marietta Tree (his Paris crush, by this time Adlai Stevenson’s lover), he wrote on Inauguration Day, “I feel so depressed today.” Yet his reaction to the disappointment of the election was less extreme than others’. Schlesinger only had to look across the garden fence to see the impact that defeat was having on some. John Kenneth Galbraith, already struggling with the grief of losing a son to childhood leukemia, fell that winter into a dangerous cycle of drink and prescription drug addiction. Soon he would be treated for latent manic depression, something, he noted, that was kept “a beautifully guarded secret,” even from neighborhood friends.2

  Yet with both men in various degrees of distress, each helped the other by focusing not on a past defeat, but on the practical application of ideas going forward—in effect, thinking themselves away from the trauma of a losing campaign. In November 1952, Schlesinger wrote to Stevenson urging him to remain engaged. “Roosevelt, as a private citizen and an invalid, managed to make himself a powerful national figure within the Democratic Party by the simple process of correspondence,” Schlesinger reminded him. “I know you will do this anyway,” he said, “and I think it could be a valuable technique.” Now in the spring of 1953, Schlesinger and Galbraith began to develop something altogether more ambitious. “As the party of the well-to-do, the Republicans do not hesitate to make use of their dough,” Galbraith explained. “As the party of the egg-heads we should similarly
and proudly make use of our brains and experience.”3

  Their idea was to create an elite venue for policymakers and intellectuals to formulate fresh ideas for Stevenson; “to help him,” as Schlesinger put it, “to overcome his [patrician] upbringing.” A subtext of the move was an attempt to orientate Stevenson and the party towards the more progressive Northeast, particularly New York, where Averell Harriman was considering a run for governor. The hope, Schlesinger explained to journalist James Wechsler, was to establish “New York as a powerful liberal voice in the national Democratic Party.” To move the project forward, Schlesinger and Galbraith now approached Thomas Finletter, a close Stevenson friend and former secretary of the Air Force under Truman, who was considering his own run in New York for a US Senate seat. “He was older than [we],” Schlesinger recalled, and “he was identified with air power and hard nosed things like that. This gave weight to his views that Ken Galbraith and I did not have with Stevenson.”4