The Candidate Thaws Out

Adlai Stevenson halted his political tour of the Northwest long enough for a two-day breather last week at snowbound Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Washington's Mt. Hood. On his last day he and five friends ventured out for a quick tour of the area in a Sno-Cat tractor. Half a mile from the lodge, the tractor suddenly crashed over the brink of a 35-ft. snow canyon, turned completely over, dented its aluminum top and landed on its tracks on a snowbank. By great good luck, nobody was scratched.

Later, on his way back to Seattle, Stevenson was marooned on the mountainside when his car stalled. By the time he had walked back to the lodge again, his right ear was painfully frostbitten. The next morning, at Seattle's Boeing Field, his plane screamed to a stop on the runway as it was bowling toward a takeoff. Back to the hangar rolled the plane, with a defective engine, and Stevenson transferred to another airliner. By that time, said an aide, "the governor was taking odds we'd never make it."

Higher Spending. Despite the hazards the candidate picked up steam as he traveled. In Kennewick, Wash. he lashed out at the Republican claim of curbing inflation and restoring economic stability to the country. "Which arrested inflation most--the Truman Administration, which reduced the national debt $12 billion in six years," he asked, "or the Eisenhower Administration, which has increased it $12 billion in three years? Should they boast about reducing expenditures when nondefense spending under Eisenhower is higher than at any time under Truman and the total cuts have been at the expense of national defense?"

In Boise, Idaho, after Vice President Nixon had claimed G.O.P. credit for the Supreme Court's desegregation decision (see above), Adlai shifted his fire to the Democrats' favorite target. Nixon, he said acidly, "is an all-purpose politician who can proclaim an old Democratic program as good when it wears a new Republican label, and denounce it as socialism at the same time.'' In Salt Lake City he said: "Warren is no more a Republican Chief Justice than the seven members who were appointed under previous Administrations are Democratic Justices. These nine men jointly performed their duty according to their consciences and convictions as judges and as interpreters of our Constitution when they reaffirmed the principle of genuine equality for all our citizens . . . That was a judicial act. an American act, and I say it is deeply disturbing to find a high public official, the Vice President of the United States himself, treating it as a partisan act.''

"Hatchetmen Smear." To a thunder clap of applause Stevenson declared that "Main Street cannot prosper while the back country is in trouble." On the outlook for peace: "We are spending $40 billion a year for peace, and there is none. Our situation is more perilous than ever . . . While the President smiles, the hatchetmen smear; while the President talks earnestly of peace, the Secretary of State brandishes the bomb and threatens atomic war."

As Stevenson's oratory warmed, so did his audiences. By the end of the week he was packing them in and leaving them cheering. From all appearances the week that began in a snowbank wound up with the candidate not only well-thawed out, but glowing brighter than he had at any time thus far in his 1956 campaign.

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