Word: adlai
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...their accumulated success. "The New Deal and Great Society programs worked a lot better than people think," says Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. "A lot of people left poverty and joined the middle class. We lost a lot of traditional coalition Democrats in the process." Says former Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois: "We cannot win any more with just the old core constituencies. There aren't enough of them. They've moved...
...daughter of a rich, mercantile Hawaiian clan and the wife of a dashing Democratic Senator who wants to be President. In her daily life, Inez must contend with a randy husband, his groupies ("Girls like that come with the life") and standard-issue disaffected children (Jessie shoots heroin, Adlai maims people in car crashes). The harsh glare of public scrutiny, it turns out, means that Inez is so frequently photographed that she thinks of most occasions in life as photo opportunities. In an antic interview, she tells a reporter that the major cost of political life is not loss...
...campaign train to an impromptu crowd of fellow ordinary Americans. Rovere's political analyses-about the Truman Administration's crippling venality, John Foster Dulles' domination of the Eisenhower Administration, John Kennedy's lack of specific goals-are often sharply unconventional. Unlike other liberal admirers of Adlai Stevenson, for instance, Rovere concludes that the Democrat would have been a "disaster" as President, unable to control the military, the McCarthyites and his party's ward heelers...
...from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality of an act. After the Bay of Pigs, Bowles wrote: "The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well-intentioned as President Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point...
Determined exploitation of humor by politicians probably started after Adlai Stevenson and then John Kennedy used quips to charm the press and public. "In America," said Stevenson, who lost the presidency twice, "any boy may become President, and I suppose that's just the risk he takes." During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy used a joke to defuse criticism that he was a spoiled rich man's son. His father, Kennedy said, had sent him a telegram: "Don't buy one vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide...