Into the Background

While the big cameras and spotlights followed the victor, the defeated candidate was quietly moving into the background. Last week, accompanied by Campaign Manager Wilson Wyatt and Administrative Assistant Carl McGowan and their wives, Adlai Stevenson left Springfield in a private plane and flew off to Tucson, Ariz. Stevenson's old friend Dick Jenkins, a rancher, greeted them at the airport; within a few minutes the party was driving south through the desert to Jenkins' La Osa ranch on the Mexican border.

There Adlai Stevenson was put up in a restored, 200-year-old building which had been converted from a church into a cottage. For the next five days he planned to sleep, lie in the sun, ride, play some tennis ("I'm also an ex-tennis player," he quipped), and hunt duck and deer across the border. When four reporters and two photographers showed up for a press conference two days after his arrival, he was asleep. They waited until he appeared, still looking a little drawn and weary, dressed in a five-gallon hat, sport shirt, blue jeans, brown loafers.

Gnawing on an apple as he talked, Stevenson affably reported that he fell: "more rested than when I arrived, but I haven't had enough sleep." The three-month campaign for the presidency, said Stevenson, was not so strenuous as his ten-month campaign for governor of Illinois in 1948. But, he added, "defeat is not a shot in the arm." As for his and his party's future: "I should hope very much that the Democratic Party will take a position of positive and intelligent opposition. To the extent that I can help make the party a useful instrument to the nation, I will be glad to do so."

Other than that, said Stevenson, he had no plans to announce until he finishes his job as governor of Illinois on Jan. 12. This week he flew back to Springfield to finish that job.

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