Word: barkley
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Four Day Campaign. The Barkleys-the Veep, Mrs. Barkley and her daughter Jane Hadley-rolled into Chicago three days before the convention, and the candidate's first act was to pin a lightning button to his lapel. Then, to prove how young he still was at 74, he led a procession five blocks through the sultry heat to his headquarters in the Conrad Hilton Hotel. At a full-dress press conference that afternoon, his eyes looked a little tired, and his pink face seemed slightly drawn with lines of weariness. But as the Veep went through his catalogue...
Whenever he walked outside, Democrats crowded around him. All of them -including his five leading rivals-were glad to see him, and couldn't help showing it. They felt that he was somehow on their side. Alben Barkley was really on everybody's side: he was Mr. Democrat, the personification of a kind of comradeship that binds together the dissident bundles in the Democratic Party. There was a half-truth, but a deep half-truth, in the campaign placard: "North, South, East, West, all agree Barkley best." All would have agreed, at that point, that Barkley was second...
...that agreement rested Barkley's slim hope for the nomination. It was not good enough. Too many of the party leaders knew that the Democrats are facing the fight of a generation against the G.O.P. ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon...
...Pain. Barkley's candidacy and withdrawal will not damage the widespread affection in which he is held. His age has only mellowed the robust geniality that has always been his political stock in trade. He combines a strong Methodist sense of personal honesty, loyalty and principles with a belief that U.S. politics is a process of compromise rather than an instrument of doctrinaire philosophy or a weapon of personal ambition. And he discovered early in the game that a sense of humor could ease the process for everybody, including Alben Barkley...
...Alben gets his way," said a fellow Kentuckian, "but he does it so you never feel it hurt." In 1949, while Barkley was presiding over the Senate, he ruled against his Southern friends in an attempt to cut off a Southern filibuster. But he lost not a friend thereby. He set the tone by reaching for one of his ageless stories. "I feel," he said, "somewhat like the man who was being ridden out of town on a rail. Someone asked him how he liked it, and he said that if it were not for the honor of the thing...