One Man's Meat

After the great defeat in Minnesota, Adlai Stevenson said he was "just plain mad"; before last week was out, it became increasingly doubtful that Stevenson could be either plain or mad. Against the wishes of some of his California campaign chiefs, he canceled his planned vacation in the South and flew west to head off Estes Kefauver. By the time he landed in Los Angeles, just 18 hours after Kefauver had finished a six-day swing down the state, Adlai was talking his version of Estes' language. "I'm an underdog," he said, "who has come back to his native city to do some barking."

Thereupon he began barking up the Tennessean's tree. One day at noontime, Stevenson made his way along four blocks of Los Angeles' bustling Eighth Street, stopped strangers on the sidewalk, reached up to shake hands with truck drivers who had stopped for traffic lights, dropped in at a barbershop, paused at a fruit stand to buy an apple, which he munched as he moved on. In the garment district he crawled up on the back of a truck and spoke to the crowd, then sat at a diner counter and had a corned beef on rye, with mustard.

Early in the attempt to copy the Kefauver technique (see following pages), it was clear that Adlai Stevenson was not enjoying it. His irritation at his unusual role kept breaking out. When newsmen crowded into a dressing room as a makeup man powdered his face and pate for a Los Angeles telecast, Stevenson snapped at a pressagent: "Do we have to have all the photographers here now?" A day later, in San Francisco, when someone pushed a bewildered four-year-old girl into his arms and told her to kiss him, Adlai looked terribly embarrassed. The girl gave him a basket of Easter eggs ("Tell him he's a good egg, honey!" cried someone), and photographers tried to get him to run through the scene again. "No," he cried. "I'm not really in this kind of competition."

As he Kefauvered along, Stevenson used a defensive offense. He abandoned his difficult technique of making a different speech at every stop, and stuck to one line. Its main point was a denial of the Kefauver argument that Stevenson is the candidate of party "bosses." Stevenson called the charge "false and divisive nonsense" (which is not exactly Kefauver talk). "I have come to California," he said, "to express my indignation of things said of my friends. I never thought I would see the day when Democrats would denounce each other in such an unfair and unfounded manner."

In his new approach, Stevenson did not hesitate to denounce his opponent. He complained that Kefauver had "outbid" him on farm support prices and aid to schools. "I will not promise anything I don't believe in or that I don't think is reasonable or possible," he said. At a meeting with California Negro leaders,

Stevenson's staff handed out a series of quotations from Kefauver's past utterances selected to show that the Tennessean has taken the Southern Democrats' side on the race issue. At one point.

Stevenson said that his own position "will not be changed to meet the opposition of a candidate who makes it sound in Illinois as though he opposed federal aid to segre gated schools, in Florida as though he favors it, and in Minnesota as though he had not made up his mind." Down & Up. While Adlai Stevenson was descending from the high road he had planned to travel before he accepted the Democratic nomination, Estes Kefauver moved up a level. Confronted by the new Stevenson attack, he replied that he had never used the word "bosses," but has spoken only of Stevenson's support among "powerful political leaders." He drawled softly: "I have had only kind words to say about my competitors, and so far as I could control it, I have insisted that my workers speak kindly of Stevenson and Harriman. I'm sorry Stevenson is putting the campaign on a personal basis."

Swinging back from California, Kefauver campaigned wherever he stopped. In Phoenix he hinted that he and his wife Nancy, as President and First Lady, would make Arizona their vacation ground. This went over so well that he tried it again in Albuquerque. "I am coming back," he said, "and I am bringing my wife Nancy on my next trip. Some Presidents go to Key West. Some Presidents go to Denver. When I am President, I may wind up spending my vacations in the beautiful sunshine of New Mexico."

Kefauver's supporters were seeing new rays of sunshine in many a state. His name was entered in primaries in Nebraska and

Indiana, where no other candidate has filed. In New Jersey, where a slate of Kefauver delegates will oppose an uncommitted slate headed by Governor Robert Meyner in the April 17 primary, Kefauver men were laying out a busy, five-day campaign schedule for their candidate. Governor Meyner, who has been reported leaning to Stevenson, but is anxious to escape the fate of Minnesota's Stevenson-supporting Governor Orville Freeman, invited the Senator from Tennessee to lunch.

From Kefauver's campaign manager, F. (for Florence) Joseph ("Jiggs") Donohue, came the snubbing reply: the Senator just couldn't fit it in.

A Political Radar. There were rumors that some important Stevenson supporters were about to switch to Kefauver, but no real evidence of major changes. The only noteworthy shift came in Stevenson's own

Illinois, where Democratic State Central Committeeman John R. Asher, of downstate Paris (pop. 9,700, and 150 miles south of Chicago), announced that he was switching to Kefauver after checking sentiment in 30 downstate counties. Some excited chattering began after Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had staked his organization on Stevenson and had gone down to defeat in Minnesota, stopped in to see his "old friend" Kefauver. The old friend strolled out, clasped Humphrey's hand and cried: "Hello, cousin Hubert!" Burbled Humphrey: "Good to see you, brother Estes." Then they threw an arm around each other, and vowed that they represented "unity" in a party that has been noted for love among its leaders.

At week's end Tennessee's Kefauver dropped into Nashville to tighten the wires on his home fences. Asked why he had refused to sign the Southern congressional manifesto (TIME, March 26) condemning the Supreme Court decision on desegregation of the public schools, Kefauver said evenly: "The Supreme Court decision is the law of the land. I could not sign or agree with the Southern manifesto; we cannot secede from the Supreme Court. The manifesto can only result in increasing bitterness and hard feelings and adding confusion to an already difficult situation. The matter must now be resolved by the intelligent people of both races at the local level." Estes Kefauver's stand and statement on the segregation issue, punctuated by a handshake with the Negro elevator operators and a kind word with the Negro bellhops in Nashville, formed a capsule of his appeal to the U.S. voter. No great thinker and no great orator, he nevertheless has a kind of political broadcasting power that gets him over to the voters as a man who speaks his mind.

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