National Affairs: THE OTHER ADLAI

• Share

Offstage He Is More Like Himself

In the fading light of a hot summer day last week, Adlai Stevenson and a few friends left the Chicago Yacht Club, got into a taxi, and headed back to his living quarters at the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel. Three days before, Harry Truman had struck. Stevenson was still crowding his hours with visits and visitors, handshakes, receptions, whisperings, conferences. Yet the crucial matters of the moment now seemed strangely suspended, like a mural of some bygone battle posted on a restaurant wall. It was a lovely yacht club, Stevenson mused; the new terrace was a perfect place for outdoor entertaining. Had anybody noticed the large number of yachts moored near by? How did the Chicago Cubs make out (Cubs 0, Redlegs 2)? When the taxi stopped at his hotel, an aide turned Stevenson's attention to a car flying a "Stevenson for President" banner. Stevenson gave a perfunctory look, blinked, appeared to do a double-take as he realized that he was the subject of the unfurled admiration. "Hello!" he shouted. "Thanks−thanks a lot!"

The curious self-detachment of Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 5−mortared with solid ribs of shyness, intellectualism, and an abiding sense of correctness −is the base of his perplexing personality, and still puzzle of the politicos.

"Observe, Persist, Learn." The personality was nourished by a quiet, perceptive, Quaker-bred mother, an outgiving father, Lewis Green Stevenson (business manager for 45 Midwestern farms, Illinois Secretary of State, 1914-1916), and a wealth of family pride. Great-grandfather Jesse Fell was a close friend of Lincoln's, suggested the Lincoln- Douglas debates, worked for Lincoln's presidential campaign. Adlai's Democratic paternal grandfather and namesake was Vice President in Grover Cleveland's second Administration, and the old campaign posters still decorate Adlai's den in Libertyville. Adlai's birth naturally prompted his Grandfather William O. Davis (a Republican) to pronounce himself delighted at the "launching of this little presidential craft."

In the old Stevenson home on Washington Street in Bloomington, Ill. Adlai absorbed the family sense of duty, his mother's intense intellectual curiosity. She read him the classics (Dickens, Scott), pumped him with such copybook admonitions as "Observe, persist, learn." "Keep pacid and cheerful, knowing all things come to those who love the Lord and do His works." After prep school (Choate) came Princeton. To the list of heroes that included Lincoln. Great-grandfather Fell and Grandfather Stevenson Adlai added a new one: Princetonian Woodrow Wilson, whom he had met in 1912. Of all the figures in the Democratic pantheon, Idealist Woodrow Wilson is still Stevenson's personal favorite.