Buffie on Adlai

MY BROTHER ADLAI (308 pp.)-- Elizabeth Stevenson Ives and Hildegarde Dolson--Morrow ($4).

Although he lost an election, Adlai Stevenson is a fortunate man, and not the least of the good graces attending his life is his sister Elizabeth. In her account of his youth, he seems a little like Frank Merriwell. Adlai could swim across large lakes (two miles in the creditable time of 1 hr. 16 min. 21 sec.), climb a Swiss mountain quicker than almost anyone (so the guide said), and play the mandolin. In her diary his sister recorded: "Today the girls [at camp] saw Adlai!! Tonight one of the girls fainted."

My Brother Adlai is the kind of book that might give a campaign manager a few uneasy moments. Some may well be disturbed by the recollection of young Adlai in an Eton collar--though it is carefully explained that he did not like it. And yet, on the whole, Mrs. Elizabeth ("Buffie") Stevenson Ives. wife of Career Diplomat Ernest Ives (now retired), has managed to avoid both sisterly gush and campaign-year platitudes. Author Ives was helped by a professional magazine writer. Hildegarde Dolson, but the book shows an authentic freshness. Buffie also displays a wry humor, as when she tells of the Republican friend who suggested she call the book The Egghead & I.

Lost World. The reader first meets Adlai as a child sharing a platform with his grandfather-namesake (Vice President under Cleveland) and William Jennings Bryan. Like many another born orator, Adlai had no taste for the rhetoric of others, and he slept soundly through Bryan's bombinations.

Author Ives (two years Adlai's senior) evokes that lost Midwest world before the first of the great wars, where peace, prosperity, honor and family love composed the air the children breathed. In the big, chestnut-shaded house in Bloomington, Ill., with its adjoining pasture and quiet stream, the blue Dresden kerosene lamps were lit when distinguished guests arrived, and roses stood in silver bowls. It was also a high-minded, rather literary world (Adlai's maternal grandfather was publisher of the Bloomington Pantograph). Young Adlai played charades--once he enacted "a sunbeam on a rug"--and listened to his father's serial stories about two characters called Whangdoodle and Whiffenpoof. The saddest moment of Stevenson's childhood--the tragic death of a young girl when a gun Adlai was carrying went off accidentally--is told by Author Ives with great kindness and candor. For the rest, tragedy is absent.

Republicans, suspects Author Ives, would like to hear that as a child he "tortured frogs." No such thing. Though he twice got his nose broken in fights, Adlai loved bunnies and stray dogs, and moved a family friend to exclaim: "Why, that boy was an angel--just an angel."

From his prep school (Choate) to Navy boot training to Princeton, Adlai was followed by his parents' extraordinarily protective love. When, in summer camp, Adlai seemed to be going in for athletics too much, Pop wrote: "I want you to stop this right away. The purpose of your being there [is] to get you in good physical condition so you can have your tonsils removed without any harm." And when Adlai reported that he had taken up smoking, Mother wrote: "My Laddie Boy ... I hope I can show you the futility of getting the tobacco habit." (Today Stevenson is a mild smoker.)

After Adlai entered Princeton, mother took a house there--which he thought "the cruelest thing a parent could do."

Father to the Man. The book follows Stevenson through the 1952 presidential campaign. But it is the section on Stevenson's early years that is noteworthy, because there the reader finds the first traces of now familiar traits.

There is the quipping that always went on in the house: Father would say, "You took me for better or for worse," and Mother would reply: "Well, you're worse than I took you for." There is the Democratic Party, treated like an old friend of the family ("President Wilson is a dear!!!" Buffie noted in her diary). Above all, there is the whole warm, clubby, and highly articulate atmosphere of a fortunate class and generation. Its only gnawing worry, perhaps, was to reconcile a sheltered and comfortable existence with the conscience pangs of the 20th century.

And so, inadvertently, Author Ives gives a clue to her brother's political personality. Despite the devotion he inspires in those near him, the book once more conveys his unhappy faculty of creating distrust in the common man he seeks to champion. The cause is, perhaps, less his often-criticized highbrow manner than a certain remoteness springing from that remarkably sheltered and unruffled life. It was a life that appears today somehow divorced from a reality larger than family, Illinois or Princeton.

Despite its chatty frankness, Buffie's picture of Adlai may be often carefully retouched. It is nonetheless an instructive picture, which shows the child who was father to the man.

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