The Great Boz-Woz

In the political circuses that the U.S. calls presidential primaries, there have been many spectacular performances through the recent years. But seldom before have two candidates made as great a leap as Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver tried last week from Florida, where the program called upon them to be "conservative," to California, where the aim was to be "liberal."

Adlai Stevenson's float through the air pointed up the serious problems involved in negotiating such political acrobatics. His strongest support in Florida's primary came largely from the violently segregationist Third Congressional District in the northwest (Tallahassee). There, Stevenson's supporters, including veteran (eight terms) U.S. Representative Robert L. F. ("Daddy") Sikes, campaigned hard for their candidate as a man the South can trust on the race issue. The locals called in Mississippi's Political Strategist Sam Wilhite, who was a key manager in U.S. Senator James Oliver Eastland's campaign, to help Stevenson's cause; they gave wide circulation to a newspaper editorial that branded Kefauver as a "leftwing integrationist" and a "sycophant" for the Negro vote. As Florida's ex-Governor Millard Caldwell put it with some approval, they sold Stevenson as a "more conservative person than Senator Kefauver."

Out of Daddy's Hands. In California Adlai Stevenson's supporters had to sell him as more liberal than Kefauver. To ward that end, they imported an entirely different breed of Democrat than the Floridians brought from Mississippi. From New York they summoned onetime (1944-50) U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas and Eleanor Roosevelt to testify as "character witnesses" for Stevenson's liberalism, particularly on the civil-rights issue. As any performer in the political circus knows, flying cross-country from the hands of Sam Wilhite and Daddy Sikes to the trapeze platforms of Helen Douglas and Eleanor Roosevelt is a catch act that calls for expert political kinking.

In the difficult process of trying to pull the poles of the Democratic Party together, Stevenson was clearly having more success than Kefauver. He won a waferthin victory in a somewhat bored Florida (a margin of 12,000 votes in a total vote of 430,000), but it gave him 22 of Florida's delegates to the Democratic National Convention and left only six for Kefauver. With that momentum, Stevenson landed in California shaken, but on his feet.

Into the Maneuvers. Estes, who had waved his way through many an empty street in Florida, kept on spinning in California. He wound up the primary season with a spiel of half-baked charges against Stevenson's position on the race issue, his record on old-age pension legislation and his activities as a lawyer for Radio Corp. of America. Retorted Stevenson: "He has apparently decided that if he cannot win, he will destroy."

This week, with the last of the Stevenson-Kefauver contests out of the way, the primary circus of 1956, with all of its boz-woz, came to an end. Now the Democrats could get down to the serious political maneuvers that will produce a nominee for the presidency.

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