Eleanor (43 page)

Stevenson’s chance would only come if the convention deadlocked, meaning that the front-runner Kennedy had to be kept from getting a majority on the first or second ballot. By the end of May her views had crystallized sufficiently that she agreed to the request of the draft-Stevenson people to write “please wait” letters to Reuther and Gov. G. Mennen Williams of Michigan:

Someone has told me that you plan to come out shortly for Senator Kennedy for President. I have a feeling, judging from the mail which comes in each day, that there is a greater and greater demand for Adlai Stevenson—the feeling being that we need a more mature man with more knowledge of the world in the next four years.

I wonder if you would not consider waiting until the Convention to find out what Stevenson’s chances are before making your decision.

I know this is perhaps difficult for you to do but I thought I might suggest it since it seems to me that a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket is probably the strongest ticket we can have in the fight against Nixon, or, if the situation should change in the Republican Party, against Rockfeller.
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Mrs. Roosevelt was becoming more involved in the draft-Stevenson movement than she had intended. The dangerous state of the world after the collapse of the summit conference moved her to do so, but an equally powerful motivation was the apprehension with which she viewed Kennedy’s winning the nomination. That feeling came out on Memorial Day in a conversation with Rep. Richard Bolling, an outstanding House liberal and Kennedy supporter. He came to Hyde Park to speak in the rose garden. She knew the sins of the father should not be visited on the sons, she explained apologetically to Bolling, but she had to admit she was strongly affected by her feeling about Joe Kennedy. Just as she found
it difficult to forgive the son for his equivocation on McCarthyism, so she had not forgiven the father for his prewar defeatism. She recalled how the ambassador had come to Hyde Park and had angered her husband with his defeatist talk about the overwhelming German air force. FDR had called her, and his tone was glacial as he told her to take Ambassador Kennedy and feed him lunch at her cottage and then see him to the train. She had not known what was up until Ambassador Kennedy began to talk with her. Then she had understood FDR’s fury.
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Yet a few days later a Stevenson breakthrough still seemed so unlikely that she decided not to go to the convention in Los Angeles. “If there is a chance that Adlai might be nominated,” she wrote Mary Lasker, who was pressing her to come, “and that I could help on that, I will certainly come at once.” An additional factor in her reluctance to go to Los Angeles was a desire not to be ranged against her sons, who were all going to Los Angeles to work for Kennedy. Perhaps she sensed the inconsistency in a position that, since 1945, had urged the younger generation to take over but was so strongly opposed to a representative of that generation.
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Anna Rosenberg refused to accept Mrs. Roosevelt’s decision not to go to Los Angeles as final:

Today Anna Rosenberg called me & reasoned with me! She said I couldn’t interfere with the boys if I didn’t come till Wednesday. Paul Butler wanted me to speak towards the end if we had trouble on the platform & I could help on that, I cd leave Friday p.m. so this I will do.

I don’t know whether Stevenson
or
Kennedy can be elcted. S. & K. can I believe but Paul Hoffman [former administrator of the Marshall Plan and a Republican] said to-night “the Democrats have a genius for defeating themselves”! He thinks it will be Nixon & Rockefeller.
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That was on June 7. The same day in a column datelined Pittsfield, Massachusetts, she said flatly, “I am not coming out for any candidate
until the national convention. This is the stand I have taken from the very beginning and it would take some very compelling reasons to make me change this.” The “compelling reasons” became evident the next day when she picked up the
New York Times,
whose front page carried a story that such longtime Stevenson supporters as Schlesinger, Commager, Galbraith, and Rauh were planning a formal endorsement of Kennedy. He would have supported Stevenson, Commager was quoted as saying, but Stevenson was not a candidate. This indication that the traditional Stevenson bastions were crumbling came hard on the heels of Michigan’s endorsement of Kennedy. If the lines were not bolstered, Kennedy would have the nomination clinched even before the Democrats assembled in Los Angeles. The draft movement would have to be invigorated; Stevenson would have to indicate his availability. The organizers of the draft felt that this was a job for Mrs. Roosevelt, and she agreed to do it.

“I am about to exercise the prerogative of a woman and change my mind,” her statement issued on June 10 began:

Up to this time I have been firmly saying I would come out for no one as the Democratic nominee for the presidency until the convention and now I am going to join some of my friends in a plea to the convention delegates to nominate as the standard bearer of the Democratic party Adlai E. Stevenson. . . .So far he has been unwilling to become a candidate and I can well understand how a proud and sensitive man would be unwilling to offer himself as a candidate for a third time when he has been twice defeated.

Without any question the leading candidate for the nomination is Senator Kennedy who has worked hard and I admire him for the way in which he has worked and campaigned. Up to the time of the Summit conference my political mail hardly mentioned any of the other candidates. I was either being berated for not coming out for Kennedy or I was being berated for fear I would come out for Kennedy. As a matter of fact, I had made up my mind that the time had come for a
woman of my age to leave the active effort to nominate a particular candidate to the younger members of the party. Since the Summit conference, however, I have not had a letter in my political mail mentioning anybody but Governor Stevenson and in my many personal contacts more and more people talk to him. The reasons given are that the position in the world now requires maturity, it requires experience, and that the only man meeting these requirements since the failure of the summit is Adlai E. Stevenson. . . .

It was not going to be an easy campaign to win, her statement continued. “If Mr. Nixon is nominated on the Republican ticket you can look for a tough and unscrupulous campaign.” The Democrats had to nominate “the strongest possible ticket and there is no question in my mind that this ticket is a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket.” It was asking “a great deal of Mr. Kennedy” to be willing to take second place. But it would give him “the opportunity to grow and learn and he is young enough yet to look forward to many more years of public service.”

Stevenson, who had been informed by Mary Lasker that Mrs. Roosevelt did not plan to go to the convention, heard about her statement while he was writing her that as a Democrat he considered her presence in Los Angeles most important, although he doubted very much that he would become involved out there. Her statement, he added, had left him shaken.
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The next day she followed up her call for a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket with an announcement that she was asking Mr. Stevenson “to clarify his position on being a candidate” in view of the declaration by Schlesinger, Commager, and Rauh that they were coming out for Kennedy because of Stevenson’s nonavailability. His reply and Mrs. Roosevelt’s reaction to it were issued in the form of a release by the draft-Stevenson office in Washington. He had taken no part in presidential politics during the past three years, Stevenson noted. He would not engage in any stop movement against any candidate. He would not lift a finger for the nomination. But his letter ended,
“I think I have made it clear in my public life, however, that I will serve my country and my party whenever called upon.”

That was enough for Mrs. Roosevelt’s purpose. “From this statement I think you will find it clear that Mr. Stevenson is a candidate,” she said.
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Reporters called Stevenson at Libertyville, Illinois, and read him Mrs. Roosevelt’s interpretation of his statement. Was he a candidate? they wanted to know. “My message to Mrs. Roosevelt speaks for itself. I reiterated the position I have taken for several years that I will not seek the nomination for President at the Democratic convention. Therefore, I am not a candidate.”

When the reporter for the
New York Times
read this statement back to Stevenson for confirmation, the governor murmured as though to himself: “Oh, dear, I suppose this will get me into it with Eleanor, won’t it?” She would stand on her statement, Mrs. Roosevelt said when apprised of Stevenson’s renewed affirmation of noncandidacy. “That’s how I interpret Mr. Stevenson’s statement, regardless of how anyone else—including Mr. Stevenson himself—may interpret it.”
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Privately, Stevenson wrote her that he had not meant to appear ungracious in declaring he was not a candidate but he could not say anything else and remain true to his position of the previous three and a half years. The confusion arose because there was a difference between seeking and availability if drafted.
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But the veteran analyst Arthur Krock, as astute an observer as any of the ambiguous ways of politicians, wrote that Mrs. Roosevelt was right in her classification of Stevenson as “a candidate.” Krock cited
Webster’s Dictionary
, which says that a “candidate is one who offers himself, or is put forward by others. . .” for an office. Stevenson’s statement, “I will not seek the nomination for President at the 1960 Democratic Convention—therefore I am not a candidate,” added Krock, represented a challenge to “the highest authority in etymology as well as Mrs. Roosevelt, a combination against which mere intrepidity cannot possibly prevail.”
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Stevenson clipped the Krock column, underlined the sentence about “intrepidity,” and attached a note:

My dear Mrs. R—

I surrender!!

With love——

Adlai

Reuther had spent the week end of the eleventh with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park:

Walter feels we are lost unless Stevenson & Kennedy agree before the convention that whichever one can’t win will throw his votes to the other, which means if Kennedy starts a band wagon he’ll win. Walter’s argument is that unless they are agreed, they will elect the Republicans as Johnson will swing his disciplined votes & Symington’s to Adlai & a Rep. victory. Petitions are being circulated now in every state for Adlai. Finally I’ve agreed to go out Monday a.m. July 11th & if I have to I’ll stay till Friday.
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A great many of Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends were Stevenson loyalist—Lehman, Benton, Finletter, Agnes Meyer, the
New York Post
people, Ruth Field, Mary Lasker, Anna Rosenberg, Robert Benjamin. Senators like A. S. Mike Monroney and Eugene McCarthy were in the developing Stevenson drive. Some, like Mrs. Roosevelt, favored Kennedy in the event Stevenson could not make it; some, like Mrs. Lasker and Mrs. Rosenberg, had Johnson as their fallback candidate.

Overnight, as in 1956, she became a pivotal figure in the Stevenson camp. She wrote Governor Edmund Brown of California, “I know that in California there is a good deal of support for Governor Stevenson and therefore I thought you might like to see what I had written.” “Dear Governor DiSalle,” she wrote the Ohio executive,

I know that your state is bound in the first ballot for Jack Kennedy but if by chance he is not nominated on the first few ballots I hope that you may decide to join some of the rest of
us who believe that Stevenson is our best nominee, and hope for a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket.
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Key questions of convention strategy were submitted to her—whether Stevenson’s name should be presented before the first ballot at the convention. “Dear Agnes,” she wrote Mrs. Eugene Meyer:

In thinking over my conversation with you and Mike Monroney, I think it would be better if Adlai’s name was not put before the Convention until it is clear that the votes are beginning to change. I did not realize that the galleries would be so controlled, as the Senator told me last night, by Mr. Butler’s having carefully issued tickets to the big subscribers. This will certainly make a complication and it is better that the first few ballots should go by. There is, of course, a chance that Kennedy will be nominated, but if that is a really good chance it is going to happen in any case, I think, and it would be a mistake to put Stevenson’s name in nomination and then have a very poor showing even from those who are not delegates, and as this is going to be so carefully controlled we had better not take any chances. This is going to be a convention where one is going to have to work by ear all the way through and I hope that wiser heads than mine will be directing it!
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As the convention neared, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke at several local Stevenson rallies. “We do talk to ourselves I fear,” she commented on one such meeting, “but perhaps some wobblers come!” She grasped at straws. Joe Alsop came to see her at Hyde Park, “which made me wonder if Adlai had more of a chance than I thought.”
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The Johnson people were trying frantically to stop the Kennedy bandwagon:

We all listened to Truman’s press conference in which he charged the convention was rigged for Kennedy & resigned as a delegate. I got a feeling he wouldn’t mind having it rigged for Lyndon Johnson & he listed 10 possible candidates & never
mentioned Adlai! Yesterday Kennedy answered in a press conference. He did very well. Firm about not giving up but most courteous to Pres. T. I have a feeling he did himself good but H.S.T. did himself harm.
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The night before she flew out to the convention, accompanied by David Gurewitsch, she wrote her young friend Gus Ranis:

I doubt very much whether I can do anything and I am not too hopeful of Stevenson’s nomination, but certainly we will not give up, and we will try hard to persuade Mr. Kennedy that his future will be benefited if he will run with Stevenson and run later in first place himself.
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