The Final Swing

Adlai Stevenson set off on his final campaign trip, a 14-day rail swing through the Central and Northeastern states. Throughout his campaign Stevenson had labored at a dual task: impressing his own character on the public mind and articulating his fear of the consequences of Republican victory. Now, with only a few days left until Nov. 4, he was trying to put across the two concepts simultaneously. As a result his public personality altered sharply from speech to speech.

In a televised speech from Chicago early in the week, he was once again the eloquent, almost dispassionate Stevenson of the early campaign. Said he: "The free world expects leadership of us--its fate and our fate depend upon our leadership. The life or death issue of war or peace hangs upon it. We are 155 million strong. We are industrious, inventive, restless with the fires that burn within us ... All our immense troubles, all our difficulties now and in the future can, I say, be solved, if we have the will, the courage, the boldness to face them, face them squarely."

In Buffalo the following night, Stevenson "poured it on" Truman style. He delivered a slugging political speech before a shouting, stomping crowd of 12,000 in the memorial auditorium. "In our party," cried the governor, "the presidential candidate doesn't go around the country endorsing candidates who violate the fundamental decencies . . ." Excoriating the "do-nothing, care-nothing, know-nothing mumbo jumbo" of the Republican Old Guard, Stevenson hammered away at one of his major campaign themes: "It is a tragedy that the Old Guard has succeeded in doing what Hitler's best generals never could do: they have captured General Eisenhower."

Stevenson was thrown on the defensive by Eisenhower's Korean speech and the General's promise to go to Korea. As the Stevenson campaign train pushed across New York and Massachusetts, worried Stevenson strategists put their heads together to devise a counterblow. The result of their deliberation was a passage added to Stevenson's Boston speech on Communism less than an hour before it was delivered. Said the Democratic candidate : "The root of the Korean problem does not lie in Korea--it lies in Moscow. If the purpose of the general's trip is to settle the Korean war by a larger military challenge, then the sooner we all know about it the better.

"The Korean war must end, and it will end, as we all know, only when Moscow is convinced that the people of this country--Republicans and Democrats alike--are united in unshakable determination to stand firm--which is the only background against which honorable and final settlement can ever be reached."

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