National Affairs: Stevenson Comes Ashore

Absence not long enough to root out

quite

All love, increases love at second sight.

—Thomas May, Henry II

Back from a nine-week swing through South America came a thinner, tanner, more relaxed Adlai Stevenson last week, and seldom have loyal troops given a more resounding cheer to a general splashing ashore. Enthusiastic correspondents dogged his footsteps. Columnist Marquis Childs hailed him as a "brilliant, complex, resilient individual" torn "between dread and desire." Prestigious Pundit Walter Lippmann urged Candidate Jack Kennedy to solve the problem posed by his Roman Catholicism by accepting second place on a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket. Across the U.S., the scattered but sizable and zealous band of supporters who had given up Stevenson for lost suddenly began finding reasons why he could be found again—in the White House.

Split in the Party. What had changed? Not Stevenson. He was still disclaiming any real desire for the nomination, and many thought that his hopes were now centered on becoming Secretary of State. But the situation had changed. After Wisconsin, the stormy issue of religion threatened to shake the Democratic boat (TIME, April 18), sink the two presidential aspirants whom Stevenson supporters might find acceptable—Massachusetts' Kennedy and Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey—and buoy up those whom they like least, Texas' Lyndon Johnson and Missouri's Stuart Symington. And Stevenson, who long ago had planned to be away during the Wisconsin battle, was unscarred and obviously available.

"I neither seek the nomination nor hope for it nor expect it," said he at a jampacked, hour-long homecoming press conference in Manhattan. Would he accept a draft? Cracked Stevenson: "If I seemed to reject it, I'd be a draft evader."

Thorns in the Ivy. At midweek, in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson at the ivy-colonnaded University of Virginia's decidedly nonpartisan Founder's Day, Stevenson launched a thoroughly partisan attack on the President. (Such is his prestige in academic circles that he is probably the only politician who would try and not be condemned for such daring.) In his text, sent ahead by special delivery to Washington correspondents, Stevenson also made three barbed references to his prime personal and political foe, Richard Nixon. But at the last moment he edited out Nixon's name, referred to him instead as "the Vice President." He also cut such tough lines as "Our leadership has been hesitant and half-hearted," and "Our leaders talk of freedom and embrace dictators."

But he left in plenty. "The people have a right to know," said he in the passage that drew the loudest applause from the capacity audience of 3,300, "why we have lost our unquestioned military superiority; why we have repeatedly allowed the Soviets to seize the diplomatic initiative; why we have faltered in the fight for disarmament; why we are not providing our children with education . . . why we spend billions of dollars storing surplus food when one-third of humanity goes to bed hungry . . . why millions of Americans lead blighted lives in our spreading urban slums."