Two Heads for Everybody

As he quipped his way through the friendly political climate of Georgia and Alabama last week, Adlai Stevenson showed some of his old form. Arriving in Atlanta, Stevenson announced that he

"should have brought his golf clubs, then hurried to add: "I hope you don't construe that as an announcement for the presidency. We Democrats can break 90, but 108 is the figure we're interested in--out in '52, back in '56." At a news conference, he perched on a television set, and cracked: "I'm really on TV now. I'm glad Arthur Godfrey isn't here. This doesn't look like humility." After chuckling through breakfast with Stevenson, Mrs. Herman Talmadge, wife of the

Georgia governor, glowed: "Even at 8 o'clock in the morning . . . the quips just sort of rolled off."

"The Red Shirt." But Adlai Stevenson had gone south to do some serious talking. He stood on a yellow Coca-Cola crate behind a tall lectern and told 10,000 Georgians gathered in front of the state capitol that the Republicans are waving "the Red shirt" now just as they waved "the bloody shirt" after the Civil War.

Without naming Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., he said the Harry Dexter White case had been brought up "by the same politician who engineered the ruthless, reckless attack on the ethics of Senator Taft and his followers in the last Republican Convention." Apparently untroubled by taking the side of the Republican element he had often condemned as "the Old Guard," Stevenson went on to define his stand on the exposure of Communists in Government. "Root out, I say. agents .of this satanic worldwide conspiracy, disclose the mistakes and failures of the past, assess the responsibility, let the chips fall where they may. But for the love of heaven let us do it with dignity, objectivity and justice, and with some better motive than partisan strife."

He observed that President Eisenhower had said he hopes that Communists in Government will not be an important issue next year, while G.O.P. National Chairman Leonard Hall had predicted that it would be the main issue. Cracked Stevenson: "And they laughed when I stood up last year to talk about a two-headed elephant."

"I Wouldn't Tell." As Stevenson spoke, the second head of the Democratic donkey was staring right at him. Governor Talmadge had recently proposed a constitutional amendment to place Georgia's school system in private hands if the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws segregation in public schools (TIME, Nov. 30). That attitude would hardly be acceptable to the

Northern civil-rights Democrats, but Stevenson avoided the issue. He "always believed that we should comply with the decisions of our highest judicial tribunal." He was happy that the lot of the Negro has "enormously improved."

When he moved on to Alabama, Adlai Stevenson was greeted by a genuine Stevenson-in-'56 balloon. Said white-maned Governor Gordon Persons:* "If I were to attempt to tell the Democratic Party, as I am going to, whom to nominate in 1956, I would say that this great American we have here today is our All-American, and he would be the man I would build the team around."

After that ringing piece of syntactical confusion, Adlai Stevenson flew out of the South still using his stock answer as to whether he is running for President in 1956: "I don't know, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you."

* Brother of Major General Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, President Eisenhower's assistant in charge of congressional relations.

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