Eleanor Read online

  Yet a few days later a Stevenson breakthrough still seemed so unlikely that she decided not to go to the convention in Los Angeles. “If there is a chance that Adlai might be nominated,” she wrote Mary Lasker, who was pressing her to come, “and that I could help on that, I will certainly come at once.” An additional factor in her reluctance to go to Los Angeles was a desire not to be ranged against her sons, who were all going to Los Angeles to work for Kennedy. Perhaps she sensed the inconsistency in a position that, since 1945, had urged the younger generation to take over but was so strongly opposed to a representative of that generation.27

  Anna Rosenberg refused to accept Mrs. Roosevelt’s decision not to go to Los Angeles as final:

  Today Anna Rosenberg called me & reasoned with me! She said I couldn’t interfere with the boys if I didn’t come till Wednesday. Paul Butler wanted me to speak towards the end if we had trouble on the platform & I could help on that, I cd leave Friday p.m. so this I will do.

  I don’t know whether Stevenson or Kennedy can be elcted. S. & K. can I believe but Paul Hoffman [former administrator of the Marshall Plan and a Republican] said to-night “the Democrats have a genius for defeating themselves”! He thinks it will be Nixon & Rockefeller.28

  That was on June 7. The same day in a column datelined Pittsfield, Massachusetts, she said flatly, “I am not coming out for any candidate until the national convention. This is the stand I have taken from the very beginning and it would take some very compelling reasons to make me change this.” The “compelling reasons” became evident the next day when she picked up the New York Times, whose front page carried a story that such longtime Stevenson supporters as Schlesinger, Commager, Galbraith, and Rauh were planning a formal endorsement of Kennedy. He would have supported Stevenson, Commager was quoted as saying, but Stevenson was not a candidate. This indication that the traditional Stevenson bastions were crumbling came hard on the heels of Michigan’s endorsement of Kennedy. If the lines were not bolstered, Kennedy would have the nomination clinched even before the Democrats assembled in Los Angeles. The draft movement would have to be invigorated; Stevenson would have to indicate his availability. The organizers of the draft felt that this was a job for Mrs. Roosevelt, and she agreed to do it.

  “I am about to exercise the prerogative of a woman and change my mind,” her statement issued on June 10 began:

  Up to this time I have been firmly saying I would come out for no one as the Democratic nominee for the presidency until the convention and now I am going to join some of my friends in a plea to the convention delegates to nominate as the standard bearer of the Democratic party Adlai E. Stevenson. . . .So far he has been unwilling to become a candidate and I can well understand how a proud and sensitive man would be unwilling to offer himself as a candidate for a third time when he has been twice defeated.

  Without any question the leading candidate for the nomination is Senator Kennedy who has worked hard and I admire him for the way in which he has worked and campaigned. Up to the time of the Summit conference my political mail hardly mentioned any of the other candidates. I was either being berated for not coming out for Kennedy or I was being berated for fear I would come out for Kennedy. As a matter of fact, I had made up my mind that the time had come for a woman of my age to leave the active effort to nominate a particular candidate to the younger members of the party. Since the Summit conference, however, I have not had a letter in my political mail mentioning anybody but Governor Stevenson and in my many personal contacts more and more people talk to him. The reasons given are that the position in the world now requires maturity, it requires experience, and that the only man meeting these requirements since the failure of the summit is Adlai E. Stevenson. . . .

  It was not going to be an easy campaign to win, her statement continued. “If Mr. Nixon is nominated on the Republican ticket you can look for a tough and unscrupulous campaign.” The Democrats had to nominate “the strongest possible ticket and there is no question in my mind that this ticket is a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket.” It was asking “a great deal of Mr. Kennedy” to be willing to take second place. But it would give him “the opportunity to grow and learn and he is young enough yet to look forward to many more years of public service.”

  Stevenson, who had been informed by Mary Lasker that Mrs. Roosevelt did not plan to go to the convention, heard about her statement while he was writing her that as a Democrat he considered her presence in Los Angeles most important, although he doubted very much that he would become involved out there. Her statement, he added, had left him shaken.29

  The next day she followed up her call for a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket with an announcement that she was asking Mr. Stevenson “to clarify his position on being a candidate” in view of the declaration by Schlesinger, Commager, and Rauh that they were coming out for Kennedy because of Stevenson’s nonavailability. His reply and Mrs. Roosevelt’s reaction to it were issued in the form of a release by the draft-Stevenson office in Washington. He had taken no part in presidential politics during the past three years, Stevenson noted. He would not engage in any stop movement against any candidate. He would not lift a finger for the nomination. But his letter ended, “I think I have made it clear in my public life, however, that I will serve my country and my party whenever called upon.”

  That was enough for Mrs. Roosevelt’s purpose. “From this statement I think you will find it clear that Mr. Stevenson is a candidate,” she said.30 Reporters called Stevenson at Libertyville, Illinois, and read him Mrs. Roosevelt’s interpretation of his statement. Was he a candidate? they wanted to know. “My message to Mrs. Roosevelt speaks for itself. I reiterated the position I have taken for several years that I will not seek the nomination for President at the Democratic convention. Therefore, I am not a candidate.”

  When the reporter for the New York Times read this statement back to Stevenson for confirmation, the governor murmured as though to himself: “Oh, dear, I suppose this will get me into it with Eleanor, won’t it?” She would stand on her statement, Mrs. Roosevelt said when apprised of Stevenson’s renewed affirmation of noncandidacy. “That’s how I interpret Mr. Stevenson’s statement, regardless of how anyone else—including Mr. Stevenson himself—may interpret it.”31

  Privately, Stevenson wrote her that he had not meant to appear ungracious in declaring he was not a candidate but he could not say anything else and remain true to his position of the previous three and a half years. The confusion arose because there was a difference between seeking and availability if drafted.32

  But the veteran analyst Arthur Krock, as astute an observer as any of the ambiguous ways of politicians, wrote that Mrs. Roosevelt was right in her classification of Stevenson as “a candidate.” Krock cited Webster’s Dictionary, which says that a “candidate is one who offers himself, or is put forward by others. . .” for an office. Stevenson’s statement, “I will not seek the nomination for President at the 1960 Democratic Convention—therefore I am not a candidate,” added Krock, represented a challenge to “the highest authority in etymology as well as Mrs. Roosevelt, a combination against which mere intrepidity cannot possibly prevail.”33 Stevenson clipped the Krock column, underlined the sentence about “intrepidity,” and attached a note:

  My dear Mrs. R—

  I surrender!!

  With love——

  Adlai

  Reuther had spent the week end of the eleventh with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park:

  Walter feels we are lost unless Stevenson & Kennedy agree before the convention that whichever one can’t win will throw his votes to the other, which means if Kennedy starts a band wagon he’ll win. Walter’s argument is that unless they are agreed, they will elect the Republicans as Johnson will swing his disciplined votes & Symington’s to Adlai & a Rep. victory. Petitions are being circulated now in every state for Adlai. Finally I’ve agreed to go out Monday a.m. July 11th & if I have to I’ll stay till Friday.34

  A great many of Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends were Stev
enson loyalist—Lehman, Benton, Finletter, Agnes Meyer, the New York Post people, Ruth Field, Mary Lasker, Anna Rosenberg, Robert Benjamin. Senators like A. S. Mike Monroney and Eugene McCarthy were in the developing Stevenson drive. Some, like Mrs. Roosevelt, favored Kennedy in the event Stevenson could not make it; some, like Mrs. Lasker and Mrs. Rosenberg, had Johnson as their fallback candidate.

  Overnight, as in 1956, she became a pivotal figure in the Stevenson camp. She wrote Governor Edmund Brown of California, “I know that in California there is a good deal of support for Governor Stevenson and therefore I thought you might like to see what I had written.” “Dear Governor DiSalle,” she wrote the Ohio executive,

  I know that your state is bound in the first ballot for Jack Kennedy but if by chance he is not nominated on the first few ballots I hope that you may decide to join some of the rest of us who believe that Stevenson is our best nominee, and hope for a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket.35

  Key questions of convention strategy were submitted to her—whether Stevenson’s name should be presented before the first ballot at the convention. “Dear Agnes,” she wrote Mrs. Eugene Meyer:

  In thinking over my conversation with you and Mike Monroney, I think it would be better if Adlai’s name was not put before the Convention until it is clear that the votes are beginning to change. I did not realize that the galleries would be so controlled, as the Senator told me last night, by Mr. Butler’s having carefully issued tickets to the big subscribers. This will certainly make a complication and it is better that the first few ballots should go by. There is, of course, a chance that Kennedy will be nominated, but if that is a really good chance it is going to happen in any case, I think, and it would be a mistake to put Stevenson’s name in nomination and then have a very poor showing even from those who are not delegates, and as this is going to be so carefully controlled we had better not take any chances. This is going to be a convention where one is going to have to work by ear all the way through and I hope that wiser heads than mine will be directing it!36

  As the convention neared, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke at several local Stevenson rallies. “We do talk to ourselves I fear,” she commented on one such meeting, “but perhaps some wobblers come!” She grasped at straws. Joe Alsop came to see her at Hyde Park, “which made me wonder if Adlai had more of a chance than I thought.”37

  The Johnson people were trying frantically to stop the Kennedy bandwagon:

  We all listened to Truman’s press conference in which he charged the convention was rigged for Kennedy & resigned as a delegate. I got a feeling he wouldn’t mind having it rigged for Lyndon Johnson & he listed 10 possible candidates & never mentioned Adlai! Yesterday Kennedy answered in a press conference. He did very well. Firm about not giving up but most courteous to Pres. T. I have a feeling he did himself good but H.S.T. did himself harm.38

  The night before she flew out to the convention, accompanied by David Gurewitsch, she wrote her young friend Gus Ranis:

  I doubt very much whether I can do anything and I am not too hopeful of Stevenson’s nomination, but certainly we will not give up, and we will try hard to persuade Mr. Kennedy that his future will be benefited if he will run with Stevenson and run later in first place himself.39

  She arrived in Los Angeles on a Sunday—“swooped” was the way one columnist described her descent upon the convention city—made her first speech for Stevenson within an hour after leaving the plane, attended the party dinner where she was cheered lustily, and then prepared for a Monday press conference during which her associates hoped she might be able to repeat her devastating 1956 performance when she had stopped the Harriman bandwagon dead in its tracks. But circumstances were considerably different. Kennedy—not Stevenson—was the front runner and, in fact, was almost sure of first-ballot nomination. The politicians did not want a two-time loser, and Stevenson himself was a reluctant candidate, whose emissaries, according to Franklin Jr., were bringing word to the Kennedy people that he was embarrassed by the whole movement in his behalf, but that he could not let down his most devoted followers.

  Stevenson escorted Mrs. Roosevelt to her press conference. “For an articulate man, Stevenson seemed embarrassed in introducing her,” commented N. R. Howard, contributing editor to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He spoke of her as “Ambassador to the world. . . .I saw people in London take off their hats as she rode by. . .,” and ended, almost precipitately, “Sorry I cannot remain, another engagement takes me instantly away.”

  She arose and embraced the crowd of reporters in the smile that suggested there was no other place she would rather be. At that smile, wrote Howard, “the applause became a roar of welcome.”

  “Now, the first question,” she began. Three about Kennedy were immediately shouted at her, “and she set forth to plunge the tomahawk which for so many years she has wielded so prettily.” She admired and respected Kennedy. She had said all along the perfect Democratic ticket for a great Democratic year would be Stevenson and Kennedy. It would combine age and youth, wisdom and heroism. But—as a candidate for president, well, she was doubtful Kennedy could command Negro support, and without the Negro vote could the Democrats win? The doubts really troubled her.

  Then she answered the question about the impact of the Catholic issue on Kennedy’s candidacy. So far it had not worked to Kennedy’s disadvantage, she began in an allusion to the strong organizational support that had rallied to him just because of his Catholicism. But she could not say what would happen when the opposition, with its well-known ruthlessness, began to exploit it in the rural areas and in the South. “Just six sentences,” commented columnist Howard, “spoken almost like a grandmother, and Senator Kennedy had been hatcheted twice.”

  She was asked about her Kennedy-supporting sons. Her answer, wrote Howard, suggested “the plight of a mother who knows best but who like all mothers must sigh and sit back at the idiocies of youth.” She had asked James and Franklin Jr., “Isn’t this really too much of a jump even for a brilliant young man like John Kennedy?” They had refused to argue with her, she went on, although she was unable, however, to suppress a flash of pride over Franklin’s foray into West Virginia. “He did a very good job for Senator Kennedy there.”

  “President Truman? I am sorry Mr. Truman isn’t here. A Democratic convention each four years is a religious thing and he should be at it. . . .”

  After she had exhausted the reporters’ questions, she thanked them, took off the heavy spectacles that contained her hearing aid, shook some hands, and left. “Eleanor Roosevelt, 75,” wrote Howard, who as a “kid reporter” had covered Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on their arrival in Cleveland in the 1920 campaign, “might not see another Democratic convention. . . .She was a tall pillar of some quality no one else in our time has produced. . . .”40

  The Stevenson movement had few delegates but it put on a great show. Delegates were inundated with telegrams. There were wild pro-Stevenson demonstrations in the streets outside the convention hall and pandemonium within when Stevenson entered. Eugene McCarthy made a memorable speech placing Stevenson in nomination. The Kennedy camp was nervous. Reuther came to Mrs. Roosevelt and said if Stevenson came out for Kennedy it would cinch his appointment as secretary of state and keep Johnson from slipping in. He made a plausible case, she told him, but it was up to Stevenson, not her. She would continue to fight until Stevenson himself asked her to desist. Reuther went to Stevenson, as she had urged him to do, but she heard nothing further from him, from which she concluded that he had not persuaded Stevenson to withdraw.41

  The night before the balloting she went to eleven state caucuses, ending up at the makeshift Stevenson headquarters, where a rip-snorting, enthusiastic rally led by Bill Benton was under way. “There was Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hard-worked like ivory,” reported Norman Mailer. “Her voice was almost attractive as she explained in the firm, sad tones of the first lady in this small town why she could not admit Mr. Kennedy, who was no doubt a gentleman, into her politi
cal house.” The Stevenson candidacy alone was stirring delegates’ emotions, but demonstrations were not indicative of the delegate count. The smoothly functioning Kennedy organization had the nomination locked up. She was as popular and beloved as ever. When she came into the convention hall, all heads turned, people stood up and there was an ovation. She quickly took her seat and began fiddling with her purse. David nudged her. “It’s for you. You have to get up.” Under protest she did, but sat down quickly. It was rude to interrupt the speaker on the platform, she said, and later wrote him an apology.42

  The steam roller could not be stopped. Unlike 1956, this time her prestige and authority, the reverence in which the party held her, did not change votes. When Nannine Joseph congratulated her on her convention performance, she commented, “Didn’t do much good, did it?” As soon as Kennedy scored his first-ballot victory, she decided there was nothing more for her to do in Los Angeles. She called her old friend Tiny (Mrs. Hershey Martin), with whom she had left her bags, and asked her to bring them out to the airport. She was cross and resentful. David Lilienthal thought she had left the convention hall “almost in tears.” Rank-and-file Democratic sentiment, she felt, had not been accurately reflected by the delegates. In the New York caucus Lehman and Finletter were able to muster only 4.5 votes for Stevenson. She was sure that a much larger proportion of New York Democrats preferred him, but De Sapio had held the other delegates “captive.” But there was more to her discontent than that. She was exasperated with Stevenson’s indecisiveness in neither telling her to stop nor ever saying clearly to go ahead. She had not wished to be in opposition to her sons. She was also upset with herself. Perhaps in her distrust of Kennedy she had pushed Adlai into a position he did not wish to occupy and hurt his chances of becoming secretary of state. Moreover, just as she had observed that Truman had done himself harm with his press conference, so she knew that she had weakened her influence by her Los Angeles performance, and she cared about her influence.43