The Issue of Softness

"This fellow." said New York's Governor Averell Harriman, waving a bony hand at a picture of Dwight Eisenhower that chanced to be hanging on the wall, "has been as naive as any person in history about the true nature of the Communist conspiracy."

Then, warming up to his task--a breakfast speech one day last week before freshman Democrats of the House and Senate--Ave recalled that in 1945 Ike had "expressed the view" that Russia and the U.S. could work together in saving the peace. "And what did he do at Geneva last year? Put his arm around his old pal, General Zhukov, and said they both had the same desire for peace.''*

"That Smear." If anyone believed (and many had) that softness to Communism would not be an important issue in the 1956 campaign, William Averell Harriman shattered all doubts. And as Harriman outlined the problem, it did not appear to be just a Democrat v. Republican issue. He was, he said, "the only fellow in the position to be a candidate for President" who was never "soft on Communism. No one can pin the soft-on-Communism label on me." Did Harriman mean to imply that he was less vulnerable than Adlai Stevenson or Estes Kefauver? "That smear, if it starts," he retorted heatedly to a National Press club luncheon, "is a lie and untrue. In no sense was [the statement] a disparagement of these two fine Democrats, Stevenson and Kefauver."

Having left one fuse sputtering, Harriman took steps to stamp out another. Journeying south to be principal speaker at a dinner meeting of North Carolina's Stevenson-minded Young Democrats in Asheboro, he vigorously denied the oft-repeated statement that he had advocated the use of federal troops for enforcement of desegregation. "Such a suggestion is repugnant to everything that I believe in."

"Campaign of Hate." But he did undertake a Daniel-in-the-lions'-den role, told his undersized Southern audience (of 250) that the Supreme Court's segregation decisions are the law of the land and must be enforced as such. If the U.S. is to win its struggle against Communism, he said, "we must recognize that two-thirds of the free people have colored skins" and that the Reds are "using racial discrimination in America for part of their campaign of hate against us."

As the polite patter of applause died away, one of the Young Democrats sighed: "I'm glad it's over. Now he can go back to New York, and we can vote the way we were going to anyway."

* Not entirely a new Democratic line. In 1948, Harry Truman called the Republican Party the unwitting ally of U.S. Communists, asserted that the Reds wanted a Republican Administration "because they think that its reactionary policies will lead to the confusion and strife on which Communism thrives."

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