Adlai Arguments

As a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson in the spring of 1960, I particularly enjoyed Tom Morgan’s perceptive recollections of what you called on the cover “The Heartbreak Convention” (August/September issue). But I also feel impelled to add a few recollections of my own if only to emphasize that had the effort on behalf of Stevenson succeeded in July, the result would probably have been a heartbreak election in November.

Three weeks before the convention, I met with Kennedy and his wife at Ben Bradlee’s home in Washington. Having recently offered to make Stevenson Secretary of State in exchange for his support—and been rebuffed—Kennedy was understandably curious about “what Adlai was up to.” I told him Stevenson did not regard himself as part of a stop-Kennedy drive but simply wanted to remain available if the convention deadlocked with only Johnson and Symington as the alternatives. In that event I suggested that Walter Lippmann’s advocacy of a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket might make sense.

Kennedy shook his head. “I’m running for the Presidency, period,” he replied in a flat, hard voice.

Jacqueline was more vehement. “I will slash my wrists and write an oath in blood that Jack will never run for Vice-President!” she cried. “We’d let Adlai go down to defeat alone!”

She was very convincing.

So what would have happened had Stevenson’s noisy and nostalgic commandos managed to stampede the convention? Kennedy’s forces would have sat out the campaign, the Democratic party would have been perceived as anti-Catholic, and Stevenson would have been beaten once again, not this time by likable Ike but by Richard Nixon, a man he thoroughly detested. Talk about heartbreak!

But the outcome was a lot happier for us Democrats. There was no blood on the floor of the convention, Kennedy and Stevenson met soon after the nomination, and the old candidate agreed to make ten major speeches on behalf of the new candidate. He asked me to assemble some material in July, which I did before joining Kennedy’s campaign staff.

By September it was clear that Stevenson’s loyal legions (cultists, as some Kennedyites called them) were not yet fired up, and Stevenson’s tenspeech schedule ballooned to more than seventy-five over a period of six weeks in thirteen states. I accompanied him on most of these travels, along with Bill Blair and Bill Wirtz, his law partners, and you could tell that the crowds who turned out for him wanted to hear it from Adlai himself that Kennedy was okay.

In retrospect I think Stevenson’s active campaigning (which mobilized the liberals for Kennedy), along with Kennedy’s Texas speech to the Protestant clergy (which defused the Catholic issue), his phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King (which crystallized the black vote), and the first debate (when many voters were able to compare him, favorably, with Nixon for the first time) were the factors that together produced his narrow margin of victory.

So while the July convention may have been emotionally heartbreaking to many, it nominated the one man who could unite the Democratic party and delay, at least for eight years, Nixon’s capture of the White House.

William Attwood
New Canaan, Conn.

Adlai Arguments

Thomas B. Morgan replies: I feel a new respect for Arthur Schlesinger’s tears, but what am I to make of the rest of his letter? My premises that Stevenson would win if Kennedy lost, that McCarthy was no Johnson man, and that the ticket was not immaculately conceived seem amply supported by political history, common sense, and recent interviews with key witnesses, including Schlesinger. Neither the nastiness attributed to Reuther and Rauh nor the belated bow toward McCarthy change anything. And, among other sources, Schlesinger’s own book about Robert Kennedy tells us it is no canard to conclude that the Johnson vice-presidential nomination was “already in the works,” put there—for one—by Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. After all these years it seems that the tragedy of Johnson still haunts Schlesinger, as it must any man who says he was right to support Kennedy over Stevenson in 1960.

Pro-Cool and Anti-Cool

Re “The Air-Conditioned Century” in your August/September issue: J. Frank Dobie, that great Texan man of letters, once wrote: “Air conditioning ruined Texas. It made it possible for Yankees to live down here.” How true, how true!

Earl Yeakel
Austin, Tex.

Pro-Cool and Anti-Cool

In his article about air conditioning, Robert Friedman pointed out that before conditioning, attendance at movie houses and concert halls would decline dramatically during the summer heat and particularly so in cities like Washington, D.C., a city officially classified by the British Foreign Office as “subtropical.” My native city of St. Louis was similarly classified, and British consular officers received special subtropical pay for service there.

St. Louis beat the summer heat theatrically by various expedients. She offered spectacular outdoor theater at Forest Park’s Municipal Opera, the “Muni” having begun in 1917. In the 1930s the city became the permanent home of one of the last of the showboats, Captain Bill Menke’s Goldenrod. The first-run downtown and midtown movie palaces were “refrigerated.” But a unique Depressionera operation was the outdoor movie house. Many a neighborhood house had an adjoining outdoor area to provide “theater under the stars.” Such spaces enjoyed various names, including skydomes, airdomes and even airdromes.

Clifford Reutter
Detroit, Mich.

Wrong Bull

As a student of railroad history I was delighted to see the charming folk art of David Matthew so nicely reproduced in the August/September issue. Unfortunately a serious error occurred in the commentary on page 69. The locomotive Robert Fulton did indeed become John Bull after being modified with the addition of the four-wheel Jervis bogie truck. However, it was not/is not the same John Bull now residing in the Smithsonian. That Bull was built in 1831 in England by Robert Stephenson and also, after being modified, served for many years on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, a line contemporary with the pioneering Mohawk and Hudson. The C & A John Bull recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. The subsequent history of the M & H John Bull is not so clear. After being modified as mentioned above, it apparently served well enough until 1845. At that time that road’s master mechanic, Walter McQueen, rebuilt the engine a second time and renamed it the Rochester. It probably lasted until the Civil War in that form, but its final history is unknown.

John H. White, Jr.’s masterful A History of the American Locomotive is the best reference for this.

David R. Gould
New York State Museum
Albany, N. Y.

Watergate Reactions

Your excellent pair of articles called “The Triumph of Watergate” brought to mind so many of the issues Americans faced in the early 1970s. I was a college student then at a small moderate-to-liberal campus where it seemed that only a few major issues penetrated the cocoon of college life.

There was a minimum of active interest in the 1972 presidential election, because most people concluded that Nixon would be reelected no matter what was said or done. This concerned some students who thought about the possible implications of the Watergate break-in, but, generally, people saw the Watergate incident as just something that had happened eight hundred miles away and as a small-time operation not worth the space the media gave it.

Shortly before the election I asked a friend if it bothered her to vote for someone who might have betrayed America’s trust by involving himself in the cover-up of an illegal act. The answer surprised me, although I suppose it should not have. She told me that “they all do it. Nixon was just the one who got caught. He should have been more careful. He’s no better or worse than anyone else in politics, and they have no right to persecute him and drag him through the mud.” I mentioned this to other people who in varying degrees seemed to agree. I was frightened for the nation.

Late on election night, my roommate and I returned to the dorm after putting the college newspaper to bed. There was a sign on our door that said, “Hurray Four More Years!” I remember taking down the sign and writing on the bottom, “and God help us all.” We hung it on the door of the neighbors who gave it to us.

It was almost a year to the day later when people began to understand the depth of the President’s involvement in the whole affair, and that it was a serious breach of his oath. And the system worked! President Nixon resigned, bowing to intense pressure, before he could be impeached.

I again stand in awe of what the founders of this nation have wrought. They gave us a frame of steel on which to build a society, shaped to the needs of the day. They would probably be pleased to see that their frame works as well today as it did in their time, perhaps better because time and struggle have tempered it.

Ruth A. Sheets
Arlington, Va.

Uniform Strategy

There is an item in the article about the court-martial of Lt. Jackie Robinson (August/September issue) that raises a question. On the first page of the article there is a picture of Lieutenant Robinson in Class A uniform with a branch insignia of the cavalry misplaced on his left lapel. The credit on the photograph is the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the date is November of 1944. On the sixth page of the article is another photograph of Lieutenant Robinson signing his contract with the Montreal Royals in October 1945, almost a year later, and the cavalry insignia is misplaced in the same fashion.

The usual placement of the brass is as it appears on Robinson’s other lapel. And what was he doing in uniform in the signing picture, which was a year after his discharge? Is it possible that both photographs were taken at the same time?

Dennis R. Gibb
Lafayette, Calif.

Oath or Affirmation

If there is a certain amount of confusion in the Supreme Court’s handling of the church-state separation question in various cases, there is even more confusion—and some downright distortion of fact—in Professor Morris’s “The Wall of Separation” (August/September issue).

Professor Morris, in mock perplexity, cites inconsistencies in public policy and asks “what we are to make” of a government which, while “being scrupulously careful to keep God out of the Constitution,” nevertheless employs chaplains to pronounce invocations and has “established a tradition by which each incoming President must take an oath of office on the Bible.…” As this reputable historian should know, no incoming President “must” take an oath of office on the Bible, any more than an incoming President “must” be a man. What is prescribed by the Constitution is an “Oath or Affirmation.” All our Presidents have taken the oath—and all our Presidents have been men—but it is wrong to say that the President or Vice-Président “must” be a man. The recent election campaign, with its Mondale-Ferraro ticket on the Democratic side, made more vivid the prospect of having a woman in the Oval Office some day soon. Before long we may see a campaign in which the prospect of an atheist in the Oval Office, a practicing Quaker, or some other kind of oath-refuser may also become more vivid.

The Founding Fathers, in choosing to make the oath optional, were making a revolutionary departure from the practice of previous governments around the world. To cite the oath (and ignore the affirmation) provision as a precedent for government support of religion is to turn American history on its head.

Stan Lichtenstein
Bethesda, Md.