Duel in the Sunshine

As a chartered plane bearing Adlai Stevenson rolled up to the Sacramento airport administration building, a crowd of 250 supporters, carrying placards that read "Let's Have Another 20 Years of Treason" and "Stevenson Clicks in '56," was waiting to welcome him. Smiling and confident, Stevenson stepped off the plane, kissed a baby and was photographed while the crowd, prompted by a photographer, waved a welcome. Grinned Stevenson: "They're a well-trained bunch."

Four days later, after a commercial plane taxied to a stop at the Fresno airport, a tired, hungry Estes Kefauver trundled out after sleeping fitfully across the U.S. Only a few supporters were there to handshake. By sheer coincidence, Attorney General Edmund ("Pat") Brown, the most important elected Democratic official in California, had just flown in from San Diego and was waiting for his luggage. "Why hello, Pat," said the unshaven Kefauver. "You need a shave." Brown, who had been called a Stevenson "boss" by Kefauver's supporters, grinned and cracked: "When you're a boss spending a lot of time in a smoke-filled room, you always need a shave."

"Eggheads, Arise!" From those dissimilar starts, Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver last week began their duel in the sunshine--the preferential primary fight for California's 68 votes at the Democratic National Convention. At the beginning it did not seem much of a fight. Almost all of the party leaders and Democratic money in California are pledged for Stevenson. Kefauver's supporters could only resort to an appeal over the heads of the leaders; they had to cancel a scheduled television show at week's end because they did not have enough money to pay for it.

For Stevenson, the trip around California was the jog of a man running well ahead. He went to bean dinners, box suppers and strategy lunches. At Sacramento he was serenaded to the tune of Love and Marriage with:

You and Adlai

You and Adlai

When your vote is counted won't do badly

If you'll back him, brother,

Democracy won't have to smother.

Later, at a meeting in the Oakland municipal auditorium, Stevenson found it necessary to calm the frenzied crowd of 3,600 after it interrupted his talk repeatedly with applause, cheers and stomping. Raising a hand, he said: "You must not get so excited. This is just a primary. The main bout will be next November."

The Oakland meeting, heavily attended by students and faculty members from the University of California, was probably the most enthusiastic of all. In the invocation Dr. Fred Stripp, a speech teacher who is acting pastor of the South Berkeley Community Church, pronounced a prayer that indicated inside information: "We believe Adlai Stevenson to be Thy choice for President of the United States."

The mood of the crowd communicated itself to Stevenson. "I am one of those who does not believe all students are dangerous or even that all professors are subversive," he said. "In this era marked and even scarred by a new form of anti-intellectualism, I say, eggheads of the world arise--you have nothing to lose but your yolks." As Stevenson left the hall one group of University of California instructors and staff members broke into another serenade, to the tune of Clementine:

I'm an egghead, I'm an egghead,

I'm an egghead happily.

And I'd rather be an egghead

Than a bonehead G.O.P.

An Underdog's Day. The main target of both Stevenson and Kefauver, however, was the annual convention of the California Democratic Council at Fresno at week's end. The council, made up of 450 Democratic clubs all over the state, is the most important Democratic organization in California. An overwhelming majority of the 3,000 delegates and alternates was believed to be for Stevenson. His strategists had even urged the powers in the council not to endorse Stevenson publicly, because they feared that would only add fuel to Kefauver's "boss" charge.

When Kefauver entered the council meeting shortly after noon, he got a polite, 48-second greeting. As he stepped to the rostrum, he sized up the situation, abandoned his prepared text, and took off in sweeping, ad-libbed generalizations. When Stevenson walked into the hall some three hours later, he got a noisy, 3 1/2-minute ovation, complete with banners, placards, pictures, campaign hats, bells and horns. He stayed close to his prepared text, which he read in his light, professorial style.

The two candidates took the same line of attack. They eliminated prepared, oblique cracks at each other, and spent their time charging that the Eisenhower Administration has failed the farmer, lost ground in the world struggle and turned the U.S. over to greedy special interests.

On farm policy:

ESTES: "They used to accuse us of plowing under the corn and little pigs. This crowd is plowing under the little farmer. [They have] liquidated one million small farmers, as a matter of policy."

ADLAI: "Which are we to take seriously? An election-year Republican promise or three years of Republican performance during which all of their 1952 campaign promises were broken and the farmer's share of the national income dropped by $4 billion?"

On foreign policy:

ESTES: "We were promised a dynamic foreign policy, and I guess it has been dynamic. It has shot forward and then backward and up and down . . . The only trouble is that we don't seem to have gone forward. I wish Mr. Dulles would think more about bringing us to the brink of peace."

ADLAI: "I think almost the best example of intemperance in public life that we have lately witnessed is the Secretary of State's recent magazine advertising of his peculiar talent for rattling the saber and brandishing the bomb ... If the Eisenhower Administration has to brag some more about something, I wish it could boast instead about resolute marches to the brink of peace instead of to the brink of war . . . And another thing--the sudden Soviet pressure for a treaty of friendship implying that any agreement on Germany depends on the U.S. accepting this treaty calls for most careful consideration. We must not appear to the free peoples of the world either to reject offers of friendship or to submit to blackmail."

On domestic policy:

ESTES: "The big-money boys, the monopoly boys in Washington, are trying mighty hard to keep the trough they've been eating out of for the last three years."

ADLAI: "President Eisenhower has blandly and proudly now presented a new legislative program, largely designed to reverse the policies he so proudly proclaimed three years ago when the Republicans came into power. It looks as though our Republican friends had not so much pursued Democratic policies as been pursued by them. And in these days the typical Republican document proclaims that America has no problems--and then goes on to propose Democratic solutions for them. Why is this? Well, 1956 is an election year, and from intimate personal experience and from my reading of Republican history I am reminded again of what Disraeli said of his opposition, Robert Peel: 'The right honorable gentleman uses two languages: one during his hour of courtship, another for his years of possession.'"

When the speeches were over, reporters totted up, and with some surprise found that Estes Kefauver's ad-libbing had been interrupted 43 times by applause, cheers and stomping, while Stevenson's speech had been interrupted only 23 times by applause and laughter. They concluded that the underdog from Tennessee had done better than anyone had expected him to do--and that Adlai, nonetheless, was still ahead.

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