Eleanor (36 page)

Mrs. Roosevelt defended Stevenson. She thought he was a world statesman with the potentiality of the wartime leaders—if only he would develop greater self-confidence.
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The Democratic defeat in 1952 had one compensation—her discovery of Adlai. Exhilarated by his wit, eloquence, and integrity, held by the grace and glow with which he illuminated a problem, she came out of the campaign believing he should have another chance:

I am really worried about this new administration, but I hope Governor Stevenson will really take the leadership of the Democratic party and keep doing a constructive job of criticism.
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The more widely she traveled abroad after leaving the United Nations and sensed the extent to which the United States of the McCarthy period was on trial before the world, the more strongly she felt that it was Stevenson who most clearly understood the dimensions of the problem and, being held in the highest esteem in foreign capitals, was best equipped to deal with it. Somehow he always had an apt word to meet every situation, she reported while trailing him around Europe in 1953 and hearing of the enthusiasm he had aroused.

Stevenson was reluctant to criticize American policy while abroad, and she agreed with him on that. Henry Wallace’s willingness to do so had shocked her. But she also felt Stevenson had to speak up—forcefully—at home.

I think Stevenson has a difficult position. He must not give the impression that we are a divided country on most issues but he must disagree enough with the Administration to have some points of difference in the campaign. I don’t think he is in full swing as the leader of the party and I hope he gets there soon.
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She encouraged him to accept speaking engagements. He was a great orator, but she felt he did not know how to communicate with the man in the street. She had hinted at this in her column during the 1952 campaign. At the time she thought it was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was giving Stevenson’s speeches “too much of the academic touch.” She felt they were “not simple enough.” She came to realize later that this was Stevenson’s, not Schlesinger’s, doing. She thought he fussed too much over his speeches, wanting to make each a polished gem. “I wish I had mastered the speech preparation problem like you have,” he once remarked to her,
confessing that he was already quaking with anxiety at the prospect of having to address the Columbia Bicentennial Conference. It was, at that time, more than six months away.
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Stevenson came to ask Mrs. Roosevelt for advice on whether to run again. Did she not feel there were others better able to lead the party? She did not. There was something else on his mind, she learned. He came from a patrician background very much like hers and President Roosevelt’s, he said, yet they both were always “much more at home in talking with people” than he was. She liked his modesty and his ability to view himself with critical detachment. She explained some of the circumstances that had given FDR his ability to “feel” his way into how people felt and thought, an explanation that, of course, said little about her own contribution to her husband’s education.

She urged Stevenson to don an old suit, get into a jalopy, and travel about the country talking to farmers, gas station attendants, housewives, and not leave an area “until you can ‘feel’ what they are feeling.” Stevenson did not take her advice, and this troubled her. But whatever her reservations, she considered him the ablest man in Democratic ranks. “I don’t agree with you that Averell [Harriman] is going to be our next President,” she cautioned David Gray, “because I believe Stevenson is by far best equipped and so far ahead in the nation.” “You might like to know,” she informed Al Lowenstein, who was with the Second Armored Division in Europe, “that I saw Adlai Stevenson recently. He is announcing his candidacy and he is prepared to fight.”
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Her relationship to the 1952 campaign had been peripheral; in 1956 it was central. Stevenson consulted her on the setting up of his Stevenson for President Committee. She helped raise funds for his preconvention drive. As she traveled about the country on paid lecture trips, she sent back the names of contacts and political intelligence to Barry Bingham and Thomas K. Finletter, heads, respectively, of the national and New York Stevenson committees. At Hobcaw, she spent a night with Baruch, who seemed more interested in Stevenson than he had been before.

In devious ways Mr. Baruch will give you money when you want it in cash for specific things. If you sigh a little and say you haven’t enough to meet a specific need, I think you will find it forthcoming.

“Among these women,” she reported from Dallas, after having addressed a Democratic women’s group,

were at least two who were admirers of Kefauver but who would be satisfied with Kefauver as Vice President and were somewhat impressed with my reasons for Stevenson’s being President.
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To her old friend Lord Elibank, who kept her advised on British politics, Mrs. Roosevelt confided:

I don’t know what is going to happen in the next nine months but I am doing what I can to get Mr. Stevenson the nomination. Many of my friends tell me there is no question but that Eisenhower will be nominated and Nixon will be Vice-President. If that is the case the Democrats will have to work harder than ever because I doubt if Eisenhower can stand a second term and I doubt if the country can stand Nixon as President.
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It was a period when Dulles was speaking of the “art of brinkmanship,” an added reason to change pilots as quickly as possible:

Mr. Dulles has just frightened most of our allies to death with a statement that there is an art in actually threatening war and coming to the brink but retreating from the brink. He certainly is a strange Secretary of State and I shall feel relieved if we can elect a Democrat in the next election and change the State Department attitude.
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Eleanor Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to Stevenson’s preconvention drive was the fact that she, who continued to be the woman most admired by Americans, favored his candidacy and campaigned
for him in the primaries. Although ahead in the polls, Stevenson decided he had to go into the primaries because most of the party’s politicians, including that key figure, Harry S. Truman, were not for him. Minnesota was the first important primary, and she agreed to go out to Minneapolis and the Iron Range. Mrs. Roosevelt was the best campaigner she had seen, Jane (Mrs. Edison) Dick, national cochairman of the Stevenson committee, testified afterward, but except for the two congressional districts in which Mrs. Roosevelt campaigned, Kefauver carried the Minnesota primary. It was a serious setback for the Stevenson forces.
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“You are often in my thoughts,” she wrote Stevenson on April 2, in an effort to buoy up his spirits, “and I know you are going through the hardest part of your struggle just now. Once the primaries and the Convention are over, the campaign will seem very easy in comparison!” Yet Minnesota showed that “it is going to be hard to get him elected,” and the more she thought of the significance of Stevenson’s defeat there, the more strongly she felt it was not enough to bolster Stevenson’s morale—he had to change his approach. “Dear Adlai,” she wrote him a week later,

I am really worried about one or two things that I think I should say at the present time. It seems to me that it is unwise to be attacking Mr. kefauver as much as you have been doing. The things that need to be attacked are the issues that need to be made clear to the man in the street in the simplest possible terms. The people need to feel that you have done all the agonizing over how to meet situations, that you are sure of what you would do if you were starting in today. . . .

The problems of today are serious enough. Nobody knows the answers but the people must feel that the man who is their candidate knows where he is going to begin, that he is not so tortured by his own search that he can’t give them reassurance and security. . . .

This is not meant to be a discouraging letter but an encouraging one. If I did not think you could win, it would not be worth doing a good job.
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She admired doers, men of action who carefully considered the options open to them, chose one, and if it did not work, tried another. That had been Franklin’s way, she often said. It was also her own. “I don’t really have more energy than many, many people,” she had once explained to novelist Edna Ferber, “but I never use up any energy in indecision or regret. If I make a speech and know it isn’t very good, I get on the plane and say I’ll do a better job next time. But I am never undecided about anything and never have time for remorse or regret about the decisions I make.”
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Yet Stevenson’s weaknesses may have added to his attractiveness. She could help him. He needed her. Women stuck to Adlai, Dorothy (Mrs. Samuel I.) Rosenman would later tease her. They either wanted to marry or protect him. Nonsense, Mrs. Roosevelt would reply. Adlai did not interest her as a man. It was the thrust and sparkle of his mind that appealed to her. But her interest in Stevenson was not simply political. It rarely was when she worked as hard for a man as she did for him. There was a personal involvement with Stevenson of the kind there had been with Harry Hopkins before he had moved into the White House and, in Tommy’s words, had “dropped” her. She was his protectress, and if, at times, he seemed to rely too much on her, that, too, was not unflattering. The worst thing was not to be needed.
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She had reason to be concerned over the Minnesota defeat. The professionals were gloating. William Benton, former senator and publisher of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, had chatted with Truman while in Kansas City and reported to her that the former president thought Stevenson was going downhill and by the time of the convention will be finished as a presidential possibility unless he did well in the California primary. Truman was strongly opposed to Kefauver, but Benton was unable to find out whether his candidate was Harriman or Stuart Symington of Missouri.
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The next primary was in the District of Columbia on April 30. Few convention votes were at stake, but a delegate slate pledged to Kefauver was entered and a poor showing by Stevenson might be fatal. The Stevenson Club begged Mrs. Roosevelt to come down.
Afterward, its head, Nancy Davis, wrote her: “I realize that Saturday was an awful day for you—hectic and exhausting—and I hated to put pressure on you to fly down here. Nevertheless it was necessary and your strong endorsement of Governor Stevenson was the strongest single factor in the area. Senator Kefauver told the press that your appearance turned the tide in Adlai’s favor.” Stevenson, campaigning in Portland, Oregon, sent her his thanks. “Wait till it is over and we can sit down quietly and rejoice,” she replied.
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The California primary in June proved to be a 2 in 1 triumph for Stevenson. “Thanks for the good wishes on Mother’s Day,” she wrote Al Lowenstein:

I have been running around so madly speaking for Adlai that I had forgotten that I was a grandmother, and a great-grandmother at that!—but the victory in California is certainly satisfactory and I have more hope than I have had in a long time.

Again her contribution was central: “The local leaders were all in agreement that your stay there was the most helpful thing that happened during the campaign,” Finletter reported.
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She had been particularly helpful in the Negro precincts, which Stevenson had carried by the surprising margins of 4.5 to 10 to 1 in spite of NAACP opposition. The Negro vote elated Stevenson because Harriman’s bid for the nomination—and he was emerging as Stevenson’s real rival—was based on the argument that only an aggressive champion of New and Fair Deal principles could win in November. This, in his view, ruled out Stevenson, whom he charged with “moderation,” especially on civil rights. Mrs. Roosevelt did not question Harriman’s liberalism, but having known him since he was a little boy, tidings that she always managed to convey in a motherly tone of voice that suggested he was still in pantaloons, she doubted that there was any real difference between Stevenson and Harriman on civil rights. She saw his militancy as a tactical maneuver, the purpose of which was to divide
Stevenson’s support in the North or, if he was forced into a more militant position, to lose Stevenson the support of the South.

He had heard from responsible newspapermen, Stevenson informed her, that the Republican press, having failed to dispose of him in the primaries through Kefauver, would play in with the Harriman strategy. “Your analysis of the Republican attitude is, of course, correct both on what they did for Kefauver and what they will undoubtedly do for Averell,” she replied. The civil rights issue was the key. “They,” the Republicans,

would like to see the party completely divided and I don’t know that there is any way one can hold it together and live up to one’s convictions, but somehow I think understanding and sympathy for the white people in the South is as important as understanding and sympathy and support for the colored people. We don’t want another war between the states and so the only possible solution is to get the leaders on both sides together and try to work first steps out.

I have been asked by Mr. [Paul] Butler [Democratic National chairman] to come down to Washington in an effort to get a Civil Rights plank developed for the Convention which will not mean the South will walk out of the Convention. I don’t look forward to it because I have spent endless hours in the UN discussing over the value of words and I think that is what we will have to do in this case.

It is essential for the Democratic party to keep the colored vote in line, so you can’t take away the feeling that you want to live up to the Supreme Court decision and go forward, and that this can’t be done in one fell swoop. Desegregation of schools in the South must follow a number of steps. Even in the North we have to desegregate housing before we can desegregate schools. . . .