Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Eisenhower’s health scare presented Schlesinger with an awkward personal dilemma. By the fall of 1955 he had “written some 350,000 words” of The Age of Roosevelt, but still had “a considerable distance to go.” If the first volume was to be completed on time, he understood only too well that he must “subordinate everything else to bringing this to completion.” And yet the political calculus had changed, and Schlesinger did not want to miss the Stevenson boat. With Eisenhower still bed-ridden, Schlesinger wrote to Bill Blair to pitch his own case. “Now that 1956 begins to look serious,” he explained, “I thought I had better write and set forth my situation.” He had a sabbatical coming up in 1957–1958, so he would be “free for full time labors from the convention (and before) to the election.” In the meantime, he offered to write for Stevenson (“speechwriting is a congenial diversion for me”) and to help Finletter “in every way I can on the research side of things.” There was, of course, he protested (too much), no sense in which “this letter of mine [should] be construed as an attempt to impose myself on the campaign!” Instead, it was just the thought that “it might help if I could let you know exactly what my availability is.” For all that he wanted to “get the manuscript out of the way,” this was Schlesinger putting politics first. The result, inevitably, was that The Age of Roosevelt was delivered late.22

  Schlesinger need not have worried about whether Stevenson wanted him. When the core team met in early November to formulate a campaign strategy for 1956, Schlesinger joined the inner circle. Stevenson accepted the need for a fresh approach this time around. “My speeches must be more simple, vivid, concrete,” he told Schlesinger, quietly conceding the problems of 1952. “In the past they have been too abstract and philosophical. I’ve always tried to cover too much. Now I must work hard to get specific instances and examples which will carry over to people and mean something to them.”23

  Before Schlesinger began the process of honing Stevenson’s message, starting with his presidential announcement that November, there was one difficult conversation to be had. Averell Harriman, now governor of New York, had been Schlesinger’s first entrée into Washington’s elite circles. When it became clear that Harriman intended to run in 1956, it soon became equally clear that he expected Schlesinger to help him. It was a sign of Schlesinger’s growing confidence that he felt able to resist Harriman’s overtures, and of his ruthlessness that he did not hesitate to use his inside knowledge about Harriman to help Stevenson knock him out of the race. What made Harriman an unexpected threat was his support from former president Harry Truman. “As HST begins to get the word around, there is likely to be a definite check to the Stevenson surge,” Schlesinger warned, “especially among the pros, unless counteractive measures are undertaken.” Schlesinger had worked for Harriman long enough to know that he was often wooden and ineffective on the stump, could appear detached from the concerns of ordinary people, and was perceived as a northeastern liberal too narrowly focused to win a national campaign. “The private Stevenson line on Harriman,” Schlesinger advised, “should be that he is just too weak a candidate.”24

  Once the primary season got underway, however, it was not Harriman, but Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee who raced ahead of the pack, defeating Stevenson in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. By April, Kefauver looked unstoppable. Schlesinger, summoned to Illinois for an emergency summit after Stevenson’s loss in Wisconsin, found the candidate “exceptionally tired; sad, gentle and charming in manner; and the total impression was rather heartbreaking.”25

  In 1952, Schlesinger had been in awe of Stevenson; now in 1956, older and more experienced, he did not hesitate to hand out forthright advice to save the campaign. In a private note to Stevenson, he gave no quarter, instructing him on how to be a better candidate. First, Schlesinger wrote, “Don’t say that problems are intricate and complicated. Everyone knows that they are.” Second, “Don’t profess ignorance on questions, or say that you don’t know enough to give a definite answer. If you are running for the Presidency, people expect, not necessarily a detailed technical answer, but a clear and definite expression of the way you would propose to tackle the problem.” Third, “Don’t hesitate to give a short answer. . . . Having taken a stand, you then seem to introduce a number of other factors which have the effect of diluting your own position and baffling your audience.” And last, “Do not think that all this is in any sense a counsel of dishonesty. Politics, at its best, is an educational process. . . . The great educators (and statesmen) are the men whose oversimplifications correspond to correct principles.” Summing up, Schlesinger demanded that “You, like Lincoln, Wilson and the Roosevelts, should forget the refinements and concentrate on plain statements of what you think essentially is right.”26

  Stevenson accepted the need for recalibration. “I think it is time to change my methods,” he admitted to Schlesinger. The question was how to achieve that objective. In the end it was John Bartlow Martin who made the breakthrough, coming up with a new system that put Schlesinger’s four points into action. For each whistle stop, a page or two of “editorial advice” was prepared for Stevenson that outlined the setting, a few historical facts, the expected composition of the crowd, which points to hit and which to avoid, and a few zingers appropriate for the occasion. These notes struck just the right balance between giving Stevenson enough freedom to feel in control while keeping him on message. Before each stop, Martin noted, Stevenson “read them, then turned them over and scribbled notes in longhand, making the pages his own, and he used them, speaking, in effect, extemporaneously from notes, and the crowd liked it.” The press began to write about a “new” Stevenson. “He learned to talk with roughhewn notes,” Time reported, “and in so doing, he freshened his delivery.” The effect was immediate. Crowds grew bigger and more enthusiastic. And primary voters followed suit. On June 5 Stevenson wrested back momentum in the race with a huge win in California, and other victories in Washington, DC, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, and Florida. By the time he arrived at the Democratic convention in Chicago that August, Stevenson was the clear front-runner and won easily on the first ballot.27

  The 1956 convention was another dramatic one for the Democrats, mainly because Stevenson turned the selection of a vice presidential running mate over to the delegates. “This was the most exciting thing I have ever seen at a convention,” Schlesinger recorded afterwards. Estes Kefauver and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts duked it out, with Kennedy at one stage coming within eighteen and a half votes of securing the nomination, before eventually Kefauver won. “I was strongly for Kennedy until the moment of climax in the second ballot,” Schlesinger wrote. “Then I was suddenly seized by an unexpected onrush of emotion and found myself shouting wildly for Kefauver. On reflection, this seemed to me right. Jack, who made himself a national political figure in this convention, will have more chances. Estes has earned this chance, if anyone has.” Schlesinger, too, would have more chances with Kennedy. Writing to the senator afterwards, he reassured him, “You are bound to be in everyone’s mind from now on in any future consideration of national candidates,” and urged him to use the forthcoming campaign as the best way “for you to get to know political leaders in all sections—and for them to get to know you.”28

  The vice presidential vote, fully covered on prime-time national television, generated great excitement at the convention. Democrats began to think they really could win back the White House from a popular but sickly president, whose own running mate and potential midterm successor, Richard Nixon, was not widely liked. Everything was set for Stevenson. Former president Harry Truman gave a brilliant, terse speech that fired up the hall. Kefauver’s address was, Schlesinger said, “third rate,” but as he had seen at Madison Square Garden with Harriman in 1952, a brilliant warm-up act often threatened to steal the thunder of the main event. When the presidential nominee emerged, it was to a fervent ovation. “Stevenson never looked more forceful, and his voice, when he began to speak, was sure and
confident,” Schlesinger wrote hopefully. “Here seemed the moment to cap the convention by giving the emotional surge of the last 24 hours a fitting expression. Instead there came a diffuse mass of words. After a few moments, the sense of excitement was trickling away.”29

  Schlesinger could hardly contain his fury. The speech “had not benefitted at all from the work done on it or the criticism levelled against it.” Revisions had been “nearly all ignored.” The lessons learned in the primaries had disappeared into the ether. “One felt that the image of the new Stevenson, this grim, masterful figure, had suddenly disappeared,” Schlesinger moaned, “and in its place appeared the old Stevenson, the literary critic, the man obsessed with words and portentous generalization.” Running into Phil Graham afterwards, the publisher of the Washington Post confirmed the worst. “You know, I thought that the Democrats really had a chance to win,” he told Arthur, “until Adlai began to speak.”30

  The 1956 campaign never achieved the optimism of 1952. With the “Elks Club” writing team now relocated to the Stevenson headquarters in Washington, DC, Schlesinger and John Bartlow Martin reprised their roles as full-time speechwriters and were joined by the lawyer W. Willard Wirtz, who later became labor secretary under Kennedy and Johnson. They worked well together as a team, writing speeches that hit Eisenhower hard, but found themselves in constant opposition to Stevenson’s political advisors. “The conflict was never really resolved,” Martin recalled, surprised that he and Schlesinger were pushing “hard-nosed political views,” while the professional politicians like campaign manager James A. Finnegan and his assistants Hyman Raskin and James Rowe were pushing the “lofty idealistic position.” The result was a series of speeches that unhappily straddled both approaches, with the candidate constantly “stepping on applause lines, uttering strong lines without conviction, diluting them in delivery.” Schlesinger could barely conceal his frustration. “One trouble is the Governor’s own split between his desire to win and his desire to live up to the noble image of himself which exists in the minds of such people as Barbara Ward [who campaigned on third world issues] and Eugenie Anderson [the first woman US ambassador],” he complained at the midway point of the campaign. “When they tell him he should take the high road and educate people about the issues of destruction and survival, he then begins to feel ashamed of his attacks on the Republicans as the party of big business interests”—the very theme that Schlesinger had been developing in his delayed Age of Roosevelt.

  With just over two weeks left before election day, Schlesinger reluctantly agreed that Stevenson “had to get foreign policy out of his system.” No sooner had the switch been made than the Hungarian Uprising started, which triggered a Soviet invasion; and then Israel, soon joined by Britain and France, invaded Egypt, unleashing the Suez Crisis. For a brief moment, Stevenson hoped that world events might tilt the election his way; instead most wavering voters seemed to conclude that the experienced soldier, General Eisenhower, was best placed to keep the United States safe in a world in crisis. On the eve of the election, a desperate Stevenson resorted to a nasty personal attack on Eisenhower’s health. “Distasteful as this matter is,” he declared at a final rally in Boston, “I must say bluntly that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean Richard M. Nixon would probably be president within the next four years. I say frankly, as a citizen more than a candidate, that I recoil at the prospect.”31

  Many staff and friends watching the speech back at Stevenson’s hotel gasped at the personal nature of the attack. Schlesinger was not one of them. As part of the senior speechwriting team, he would certainly have contributed to such a major address. Twenty years later he would go so far—but only that far—as to admit that Bill Wirtz had shown him the passage and asked his opinion. “I’m afraid I said, ‘It’s true, and the people should know it,’ or something like that.” He then quickly added, “I wish I had said that it was wrong—because I thought it was. But I gave some terrible answer like that.” The fact that Schlesinger was talking at this later point to the third member of the speechwriting team, John Bartlow Martin, who was by then Stevenson’s official biographer, only compounds the sense of general buck-passing. “Where the passage originated is not clear,” Martin concludes, honoring some kind of speechwriters’ code. And no wonder, for the remarks, he concludes, “alienated some of Stevenson’s . . . friends and tarnished his reputation.” If the matter was a question of judgment, then it is worth adding that when Schlesinger and Martin had attempted to persuade another speaker that night, John F. Kennedy, to launch a personal attack on the Republicans, including Nixon’s role in McCarthyism, the senator had refused point blank.32

  The election resulted in a landslide for Eisenhower. Stevenson won only seven states, with just one (Missouri) from outside the old Confederate States. He carried not a single northern state, putting all Schlesinger’s work in the Finletter Group to the sword. Even Louisiana turned Republican for the first time since 1876. Eisenhower gained the highest popular vote in history and a plurality only outstripped by FDR in 1936. “It hurts so badly,” Stevenson told Marietta Tree, “even worse than 1952.”33

  The results hardly surprised Schlesinger. He had gone into the campaign fearing that the “old” Stevenson had replaced the newer model, and then been disappointed by the candidate’s belated willingness to go for the jugular in addressing Eisenhower’s health issues. But defeat also left him in a difficult personal position. He had now been involved in two losing presidential campaigns, in charge of the very part of those campaigns, no less, that observers cited as the reason for successive landslides. If Stevenson was a poor speechmaker, then the speechwriters, it surely followed, were as much to blame as the speaker. To redeem themselves, Schlesinger and Martin, along with the Harvard economist Seymour Harris, began to put together an edited collection of Stevenson’s 1956 campaign speeches for publication as The New America. Stevenson promised to write a foreword “expressing some views about primaries, the campaign, the successes and failures, etc.,” but in this endeavor, as so often, he disappointed. “I suppose it is actually more inertia than pressure, but the period is totally sterile!” Stevenson wrote in response to a letter from the editors in April 1957. “Moreover, I think the material that Arthur and Seymour [Harris] have prepared covers most of what I could have said anyway, and doubtless better.” His speechwriters would have been justified in reflecting that their lives would have been much simpler if Stevenson had been so accepting of what they had written on the campaign trail itself.34

  If The New America was about restoring Stevenson’s reputation as a thoughtful public speaker, the defeated candidate’s “inertia” also pointed toward another difficulty. Stevenson once again said he did not want to run, and this time he even freed those who had worked with him previously to find other contenders. “I have told all my friends who have asked, to go work for ‘the candidate of their choice,’ ” he wrote to Schlesinger. “I think I told you that sometime ago. If I didn’t, I do herewith!” That release would, once 1960 came around, turn out to be disingenuous; in the aftermath of the 1956 defeat, however, Stevenson’s declaration that his race was run freed Schlesinger to look for a new horse in the political stakes.35

  Past failure did not create a shortage of takers for Schlesinger’s political advice. The most important of these new potential clients was Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate majority leader. On February 1, 1957, clearly irritated by the historian’s critique that congressional Democrats were too conservative given that they held a majority in both houses, Johnson wrote a “put up or shut up” style letter to Schlesinger. “From what I have heard, I am inclined to think that you are not convinced that I am going about it in the right way,” he wrote. “As Majority Leader of the Senate, I have some problems which I do not think you are too aware of. I hear that you come to Washington quite often. I would appreciate it if you would . . . talk over some of these pro
blems. I suspect that you will find I will go a long way toward convincing you that it is not as easy as you think.”

  Schlesinger took a full two weeks before replying to this vaguely threatening note, telling Johnson that he would “welcome indeed a chance for a discussion,” but adding that while “grateful for your interest in my views,” they were “of no importance, however, except as they reflect misgivings prevalent among northern Democrats.” The two men met in March 1957, when they talked alone in Johnson’s Senate office for an hour and a half. “I found him both more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected,” Schlesinger wrote of the man with whom his fortunes would later become entwined. The senator’s blunt language was “vivid and picturesque but unforced.” Clearly he was a “virtuoso in senatorial operation,” existing “almost completely in the realm of tactics,” and yet “with a nostalgic identification of himself as a liberal and a desire, other things being equal, to be on the liberal side.”36

  Johnson, employing a tactic that Schlesinger had become accustomed to working for Stevenson, assured the younger man that he was “a sick man,” had “no interest at all” in the presidential nomination, and did not even mean to run again for the Senate. Thus being “entirely disinterested,” the leader only wanted to do what he could for the party and the nation. “One almost heard violins in the background,” Arthur smirked, before adding, “yet he may well have been perfectly sincere.”37

  Either way, Johnson now asked Schlesinger to send a memo setting out a future agenda for the party. A week later, Schlesinger wrote, saying he had “greatly enjoyed our conversation the other day, and I much appreciate your suggestion that I send along any thoughts I might have.” His principal focus was the budget, taking aim at those who believed that the Democratic Party should follow the Republican lead by promising retrenchment and economy. “For Democrats to take this position is really madness,” he explained. “It will persuade nobody. It is contrary to the historic position of the modern Democratic Party and to the public welfare: it makes neither political, moral nor economic sense.” Obviously the Democratic Party should “stand strong against waste and extravagance in government.” But the party should not fall into the trap of promising to cut “vital public services in the name of ‘economy.’ ” The nation was richer than at any point in its history, yet spending in the public sector had not kept pace. “Our great historic position as the party which believes in the use of government to promote the general welfare will,” Schlesinger told Johnson loftily, “continue for a long time, I believe, to be the main source of our political strength.”38