"He Can't Say No"

As the Democratic Convention began, the leader in the race for the presidential nomination was a man who kept insisting that he was not a candidate. All week long, the pressure on Illinois' Governor Adlai Stevenson steadily increased. On Sunday, when the governor attended Chicago's fashionable Fourth Presbyterian Church, he was the target of a sermon against indecision by the Rev. Dr. Harrison Ray Anderson. Dr. Anderson's theme was "How Men Know God's Will"; his conclusion: "One must act, act, act."

Heaven or Hell? Apparently unmoved by the pleas of one & all, Stevenson stuck to his now familiar story. While avid newsmen lay on the floor of an adjoining room eavesdropping under a heavy curtain, Stevenson told a "secret" session of the Illinois delegation that he was not "temperamentally, physically or mentally" equipped for the presidency. Insisting once again that all he wanted to be was governor of Illinois, he recalled the story of the man who had been asked whether he wanted to go to heaven or hell. The answer: "I want to stay right here."

When Stevenson had finished, chipper Chicago Boss Jack Arvey got up, undertook to answer the unspoken $64 question: Would the governor accept a draft? Said Arvey: "I've never spent one 3-c- stamp or made a telephone call asking anyone to vote for Stevenson . . . But I'll say as long as I live that if the Democratic Party nominates Governor Stevenson, I know that in the light of his background he can't say no."

Arvey's speech made it clear that the Illinois delegation was prepared to ignore Stevenson's avowed wishes and vote for him anyway. It was a move likely to have immense psychological impact on other delegates, who were sure to feel that canny Illinois politicians would not go so far out on a limb unless Stevenson would accept the nomination. It bore its first fruit the same evening when 32 Pennsylvania delegates announced that the Illinois governor was their candidate; Kefauver had 14 votes in the Pennsylvania caucus, Truman 11, Harriman only 1.

Candor & Confession. In his speech welcoming Democratic delegates to Illinois on the convention's opening day, Adlai Stevenson said nothing to clarify his own status, concentrated on mocking the Republicans who had left Chicago a week and a half before. Said he: "For almost a week, pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress [under the Democratic Party] were the misbegotten spawn of bungling, corruption, socialism, mismanagement, waste and worse. They captured, tied and dragged that ragged idea in here and furiously beat it to death . . . But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First [the Republicans] slaughtered each other and then they went after us. And the same vocabulary was good for both exercises."

Stevenson urged his audience: "Where we have erred, let there be no denial; where we have wronged the public trust, let there be no excuses. Self-criticism is the secret weapon of democracy, and candor and confession are good for the political soul. But we will never appease, we will never apologize for our leadership in the great events of this critical century."

It was a strong and effective speech. The delegates, who had cheered for six minutes straight before letting Stevenson begin, interrupted him repeatedly with applause and roared their enthusiasm when he had finished. But it had taken more than speeches to put Stevenson in his powerful opening-day position. By avoiding the label "Truman's candidate," he had made himself more acceptable to the anti-Truman wing. Truman had cooled toward him, but not enough to oppose him actively.

Some thought that Stevenson had planned it that way because he wanted to run as the candidate of a united party. Others were certain that Stevenson had planned nothing, had only told the simple truth when he said he "did not want to be President.

If the latter was the case, he had got himself in quite a spot.

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