Word: stevensonism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Stevenson bandwagon in 1952. During that campaign, says a friend, "he got a glint in his eye that never left." But two straight crushing defeats nearly dispirited him. "Stevenson came along too soon," he lamented in 1957. "Americans, after a generation's buffeting by depression and war, had to have a breathing spell. Even by 1956 they had not had their fill of inertia...
...pragmatic instinct, distrustful of liberal intellectuals, his chief preoccupation domestic politics and the domestic economy. He liked football; he liked Casablanca and Spartacus-- "nothing too arty or actionless." Schlesinger's Kennedy is instinctively broadminded; he actually opposed the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger thinks. Where Sorensen never mentions Adlai Stevenson's name without irritation, Schlesinger sees in Kennedy a bit of an old Stevensonian. Though their personal relations were marred by "a slight tinge of mutual exasperation," Kennedy had "an essential respect and liking for Stevenson," and politically they were almost soul brothers...
...utopians a never-to-be-realized ideal against which they can measure Kennedy's fallible successors. One of the most valuable things Schlesinger does is to remind his readers of the antipathy towards Kennedy that grew up in the year before his death. "He used to say that Adlai Stevenson could still beat him in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, California--perhaps even in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
Because the Pacific Coast was conspicuously underrepresented in the Cabinet word went out to dig up a California businessman. Someone suggested J. Edward Day of Prudential Insurance. Day, a man of rollicking humor, had been Adlai Stevenson's Insurance Commissioner in Illinois, before moving to the West. His credentials appeared good, and his rather hasty appointment on December 17 completed the Kennedy Cabinet...
There are, of course, plenty of white hats. It seems to help greatly in these books to be a friend of the author's. Adlai Stevenson is an ever-valiant fighter, winning commendation from the President every chapter or two. Of Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger writes that "I do not know of any case in contemporary American politics where there has seemed to me a greater discrepancy between the myth and the man." Averell Harriman is the lone guerilla fighter standing up for truth in the State Department...