Together Again

The Democratic week began in California, with an argument over whether Harry S. Truman had called Vice President Richard Nixon a "son of a bitch." It moved on to Alabama, where New York's Governor Averell Harriman bagged a wild turkey, and to New Orleans, where Harriman found the political hunting not so good. It covered the Florida peninsula, where Adlai Stevenson, fishing for votes, landed a sailfish and a pair of skin divers. It ended in Oklahoma City, where Democrats converged for the explicit purpose of skewering Republicans.

A Sprinkling of Blanks. Arriving in Los Angeles to speak at a fund-raising dinner for his Independence memorial library, Harry Truman was met at the airport by newsmen who asked what he thought about the chance that the Republicans might nominate Nixon for President. Truman's exact reply is a matter of controversy. The Los Angeles Times, with a liberal sprinkling of blanks, reported that Truman had said: "I don't like the -- -- ---, and I don't care who knows it." The Los Angeles Examiner, with equal delicacy, quoted Truman as saying: "I don't even want to discuss that -- -- ---. Don't even mention his name to me." Later, through a spokesman, Truman issued a deadpan denial. "I would never," said he, "say a thing like that about the Vice President of the U.S."

While past-President Truman was generating heat in California, Presidential Hopeful Harriman was setting forth on a chilly, overcast morning in Mclntosh, Ala. (near the spot where New Yorker Aaron Burr was captured in 1807), for a day of hunting with his host, Democratic Representative Frank Boykin, and Alabama's Governor James Folsom. Before breakfast Harriman had shot a 22-lb. turkey; after a quail breakfast, the huntsmen took off to try their skill against the deer on Boykin's 100,000-acre preserve. Although he tried three different stands, Harriman had no luck. That afternoon Harriman spoke to some 500 who had been invited to meet and greet him at a barbecue. He was introduced by Boykin as "the next President of the U.S.--I hope." In turn, Harriman declared that Dwight Eisenhower "wasn't made for the presidency of the U.S."

Next day Harriman flew to New Orleans for a speech before the New Orleans Foreign Policy Association in the half-filled International Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. Harriman charged President Eisenhower with responsibility for the fact that "the lines of the great alliance of free people have been seriously breached" by the Soviet "breakthrough" at the Summit conference in Geneva last summer. When Harriman arrived in New Orleans, he had no known Louisiana supporters for President. When he left, observers could still find none.

From Jacksonville to Gainesville to Ocala to De Land to Sanford to Orlando to Miami, Adlai Stevenson was politicking in Florida and shaking hands with all the pumplike precision, but not the gusto, of an Estes Kefauver. In Gainesville he wandered about the University of Florida campus, answered questions from students, replied manfully when a fixed-up coed asked: "Mr. Eisenhower, may I have your autograph?" Grinned Stevenson: "How do you spell it?"

In a country store near Gainesville, Stevenson posed for campaign photographs while shaking hands with an old man who drawled: "Well, I voted for Ike in '52 and I guess I'll vote for him again in '56." Murmured Stevenson to aides: "I hope he changes his mind." As his motor caravan crossed the Marion-Alachua county line, Stevenson spotted a crew working on the highway, popped out of his car to shake hands all around. Near Ocala, he was riding in a glass-bottomed boat when two skin divers bobbed up alongside. Stevenson helped them aboard, shook hands, and asked: "How are things down in your precinct?"

Everywhere he went, his reception was at least cordial, at best encouraging. Only once did he commit a bobble of sorts. That was at a Gainesville press conference, when he was asked why he thought Florida had gone for Eisenhower in 1952. Said he: "Because of Yankees and ignorance." He spent the rest of the week trying to explain that he had not meant it as it sounded--but it did give his critics one of those small talking points that presumably make campaigns interesting. Cried G.O.P. State Chairman Harold Alexander: "There must be a lot of Yankees and ignoramuses in the country." Gruffed the New York Daily News: "What Adlai told these hotbloods in effect was that they either (a) have been seduced into Republicanism by a passel of Yank carpetbagger descendants of the Yanks who won the Civil War, or (b) are just a mob of ignorant clunks."

In Miami Beach, Stevenson stayed at the Rivo Alto Island home of fading Chicago Democratic Boss Jake Arvey, went deep-sea fishing and returned with a 6-ft. sailfish. The fish did not jump much, he explained later (hooking his finger into his own upper lip), because it had been hooked in the upper instead of the lower lip. It was not, said Stevenson, the biggest fish he had ever landed; he once harpooned a 500-lb. bluenose shark off the New England coast. "I was pretty well exhausted when the battle was over," he recalled.

He was pretty well exhausted, too, by the time he appeared in Miami's Bay-front Park Auditorium for a speech to the American Municipal Association. He stumbled in un-Stevensonian fashion in delivering his prepared text, often had to backtrack to get in words he omitted. The speech itself bore down heavily on his charge that the Eisenhower Administration had failed to meet the need for low-cost public housing.

The War that Never Was. It was in Oklahoma City that the peripatetic Democrats--with the exception of Harry Truman--finally came together. At the national convention of the Young Democrats Inc., Tennessee's hard-running Senator Estes Kefauver was the keynote speaker, while Stevenson, Harriman and Michigan's Governor G. Mennen Williams, who has hopes of his own, also had a turn at the rostrum.

Kefauver's reception in the Oklahoma City Municipal Auditorium was featured by a mass of gas-filled balloons carrying the slogan: "I Like Estes Bestes." He had prepared a brief speech, planning to rush through it and catch a plane for Washington. But his flight was canceled because of inclement weather, so Kefauver stretched his talk out to considerable length. Excerpt: "We will point to the lack of imagination, the lack of resourcefulness in meeting new conditions in world affairs. We will point to the bumbling, the vagueness, the indecision, and in many cases the sterile inflexibility, which has come to characterize the conduct of our foreign affairs."

Michigan's Williams used the Oklahoma City meeting as an occasion to retreat a bit in his recent bitter criticism of Stevenson's "moderate" approach to politics (TIME, Dec. 5). Stevenson is his friend, said Williams, and "I was not in a state of war at any time." Then he added: "I disagreed with his policy and still disagree."

Adlai Stevenson, who spoke only briefly at the convention, was delighted to hear that Williams had gone even that far toward a truce. "I'm glad he's not at war with me," said Stevenson. "I'm not at war with him." All of which simply went to show that whatever their conflicting personal ambitions may be, the Democratic presidential possibilities at least for the present see their real war as being against the Republicans--instead of against each other.

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