Through the East

Where, came a voice out of a crowd in New Jersey, had the Democratic candidate for the presidency picked up his suntan? "Not from playing golf," grinned Adlai Stevenson, "but from preaching the Democratic gospel in public places." Other voices sounded out of other crowds: "We like Ike!" Stevenson replied: "I'd trust him with anything but public office." In Morristown, N.J. he spotted a picture of Eisenhower behind a window grille across the square. "Surely," he cracked, "there must be a more appropriate place for the President than behind bars."

Thus last week Adlai Stevenson brought his campaign back to the populous, prosperous, vote-heavy states of the industrial Northeast. Everywhere he hitched on gently to the coattails of local Democratic candidates who were manifestly more popular than he; everywhere he besought the voters to choose come November not between men but between parties; everywhere he fingered meticulously for the soft spots of the U.S. economy, talking and implying class struggle.

Rising Tide. "The Republican managers," he said to large and enthusiastic crowds in Springfield, Mass., "see America as a big, well-oiled company controlled by men who, because they run the big corporations, think they ought to run the country." Again and again he cried: "It is time to take the government away from General Motors and give it back to Joe Smith." But somewhere beneath his genteel belligerency there still lurked the elements of the enigma of 1952. "The tide is rising," said he in Newark, after a day of small and disappointing crowds in Democratic sections of New Jersey. "I only hope I don't get in the way."

Moving westward through Pennsylvania in The Federal, the private railroad car in which Woodrow Wilson rode to victory in 1912, he proclaimed out of the past that the Democrats had beaten the Republicans to social security, the minimum wage, federal aid to the farmer. Meanwhile, his managers had arranged for a national TV hookup so that he could reply to Eisenhower's speeches in Cleveland and Lexington. At Pittsburgh Stevenson stepped before the TV cameras for a speech billed as a "turning point" of the campaign, but his sharp thrusts at Eisenhower and the Republican social-welfare record were dulled by his halting delivery. And after it was all over, some Stevenson advisors had misgivings about the tactic of attacking the President anyway.

Last-Minute Qualm. Misgivings or no, the attack was on. One day last week Stevenson charged that the President, amid the economic distress, was claiming credit "for every good thing in the country from the American flag to fried chicken"--including the New Deal and Fair Deal; this reminded Stevenson of how the Russians had claimed credit for inventing the telephone and TV. Eisenhower's cabinet were "men of wealth and position," and the President himself, Stevenson added in the distributed text, "has not known or cared what was going on." At this point in the tactic, however, Stevenson, who fusses endlessly over his speeches, had a qualm; on delivery he toned down the last line of the attack to read "has not been fully informed."

Through overcast and heavy skies he flew on to New York City for the high point of his week of campaigning. With Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Herbert H. Lehman, Governor Averell Harriman, Senatorial Candidate Robert Wagner and Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio, he sped in a motorcade from one end of Manhattan to the other, praising public housing and declaiming against filth and squalor (Stevenson pronounced it "squay-lor"). Beneath gleaming floodlights in Harlem he struck hard, eloquently and effectively in favor of civil rights, "the great, unfinished business of the U.S. . . ."

Next day Stevenson went down to Borough Hall in Brooklyn, where he donned an Indian war bonnet before a roundup of Brooklyn Indians (who dubbed him "Big Chief Joe Smith"). He took in the second game of the World Series, where he got a polite and informal reception, posed for photographers wearing a Dodger cap atop a Yankee cap. Then he swirled < to the Yale campus in New Haven, Conn, to deliver a speech designed, so said his managers, to reassure his old disciples that he had not changed. When his motorcade turned into College Street past the freshman dormitories, he was greeted by shouts of "We like Ike!" from curb and window. Outside Woolsey Hall some 2,000 students howled in derision as he was escorted inside to deliver his speech.

"This is a point in the campaign,' said Adlai Stevenson, "where it seems worthwhile recalling the ground rules of political responsibility--and I mean in terms of self-reminder as much as criticism, because I don't consider myself by any means blameless . . . Perhaps there is too much of the commonplace in the old injunction that victory is after all not an end in itself. Yet I often think that the single greatest difficulty about running for responsible public office is how you can win without, in the process, proving yourself unworthy of winning." Then he added determinedly: "Don't misunderstand me. I mean to win in November!"

When Stevenson reappeared outside on the balcony, he was greeted with more uproarious student cries of "We like Ike!" Stevenson, though calm and trying to be good-natured, was obviously nettled. He chided the boys about the good manners of Princeton and the merits of the two-party system ("Oh, please don't boo that!"), and he was reminded of how 30 years ago that night he had been in Russia as a touring newspaper correspondent. "I remember very acutely," he said, "there were no public meetings like this. Good night." Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

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