No, No, No

As he headed West last week to speak at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Portland, Ore., Illinois' Governor Adlai Stevenson suddenly looked, to wistful brigades of Administration Democrats, like a presidential candidate all over again. He was not only on the ballot in Oregon, but he was traveling 1,900 miles to speak to the voters of the Pacific Northwest. No, cried Adlai, no, no, no, no. This line of reasoning was all a horrible mistake. He had agreed to make the speech months ago, and somebody had slipped his name on the ballot without his consent.

As soon as he got to Portland, Stevenson began urging the citizenry not to vote for him. He was not, he said, "participating" in the Oregon primary and would have long since withdrawn from the ballot if the law had allowed him to do so. "At the time you invited me, you may have thought you were getting a candidate for President. Instead all you got was a candidate for governor of Illinois. I hope you don't feel . . . deceived and defrauded." Almost 600 delighted Democrats, who had paid $10 apiece to attend the dinner, cheered him lustily and decided he was a pretty smooth article.

The Mind Readers. The louder Stevenson shouted no, the more certain everyone seemed to be that he was really trying to say just the opposite. When newsmen asked him if he would consent to a draft he replied: "I cannot speculate about hypothetical situations. But I don't believe there has ever been a genuine draft movement of an unwilling man for the presidential nomination by either party. I doubt if such a thing is possible."

If he had a majority of the delegates at the convention, would he turn them down? Adlai refused to comment. That was all that was needed. By the time he had left Oregon--where he apparently won more votes by refusing them than most candidates get by asking for them--Democratic bigwigs all over the U.S. were reading his mind by remote control, and deciding that he had just hit upon a new method of saying yes.

Supra-Political Plane. "I think I understand the governor," said Chicago's Democratic Boss Jacob Arvey. "He is not a candidate ... If, however . . . the nomination [were] given him . . . then no man could say no." Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey announced that Adlai was still "susceptible." New York Post Correspondent William V. Shannon explained that Adlai was just saying no to boost himself up to a "supra-political plane."

This week in California--he had only driven down from Oregon, Adlai kept saying, to see a review of the Illinois National Guard at Camp Cooke--he stubbornly kept saying he was NOT a candidate for President. But for some reason it seemed to make his backers everywhere feel more convinced than ever that the political difference between a no and a yes might be no greater than a maybe.

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