"Let There Be No Tears"

It had been a quiet evening. Gathered in the presidential suite of Chicago's Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, the Stevenson party of 20--family members and close friends--ate a leisurely buffet dinner, then settled back to watch the returns on television. Even when Cam paign Manager James A. Finnegan came in at 10:40 p.m. to confirm what had already become obvious, there was no change in the calm, genteel atmosphere. Shortly after midnight, Adlai Stevenson picked up a carefully drafted statement, and for the second time in four years made his way to the microphones to concede to Dwight Eisenhower.

Against the Thunder. Behind him were weeks, months, years of hopes and dreams, plans and works. But of all the weeks during which he had fought for the world's greatest elective prize, none was more hectic, none was more strange than the one before Election Day. In that week Adlai Stevenson became a grandfather, was shaken by the violence which erupted across the seas, and was tarnished by his own performance.

Faced with the task of making his voice heard over the thunder of events in the Middle East and Hungary, he lashed out with mounting violence against the President and his Administration. The at tack reached its peak on the day before the election in Minneapolis and again that night in Boston. Harshly, he charged that Dwight Eisenhower neither knows nor cares what goes on about him in Washington, that he "holds forth in the pulpit while his choirboys sneak around back alleys with sandbags." He described Richard Nixon's campaign role as that of a man who "has put away his switch blade and now assumes the aspect of an Eagle Scout."

And his Boston audience gasped as he said: "Every piece of scientific evidence, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be President of this country within the next four years," i.e., Ike would not finish his term in office. Unfortunately for Adlai Stevenson and his place in U.S. political history, the charges he flung in the closing hours of the 1956 campaign may be remembered just as long as his stubbornly defended, politically disastrous arguments on ending the draft and calling off H-bomb tests by agreement with Russia and other atomic powers.*

Trail's End. But now it was over. Now the long years since the first defeat, the raucous primary fight with Estes Kefauver. the glittering first-ballot victory which brought him his party's nomination at Chicago (and marked, perhaps, the pinnacle of his political career), the frustrating campaign itself--all these were behind him.

Before 1,000 stunned but still loyal Democrats in the Conrad Hilton Hotel's Grand Ballroom he stood, waving and smiling. Behind him, weary but proud, stood his sons, John Fell and Borden, and his sister, Mrs. Ernest Ives. Turning with true style to that strange ordeal expected of a loser in big American political battles, Stevenson thanked his supporters "for the confidence that has sustained me'' during the time "I have been privileged to be your leader."

Then, while some of his audience wept, he counseled against downheartedness, "for there is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see, we have only to look.'' The voters of the U.S. had made their choice "in a vigorous partisan contest," and partisanship "is democracy's life blood." Ultimately, "our cause will prevail"; until then, "there are things more precious than political victory--there is the right to political contest." And, said he with a wry grin, "as for me, let there be no tears. If I lost an election, I won a grandchild." (see MILESTONES ).

Of his own political future, he said nothing. There was no need. The answers, as far as Adlai Stevenson was concerned, had already been written that day in the ballot box.

* Among those who weighed out the H-bomb argument and found in Ike's favor: scientists :md other residents of the Atomic Energy Commission's laboratory town of Los Alamos, N. Mex.

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