The politics of honor: A biography of Adlai E. Stevenson, Davis, Kenneth Sydney

Description

THE POLITICS OF HONOR is the first — and only — full-length biography of Adlai E. Stevenson to appear since his death. With its appearance, it now becomes possible to measure the true greatness of the man — as a human being and as the single most influential American on world affairs since the end of World War II.

The book is essentially the growth into greatness, and as befits a man who included Abraham Lincoln and a Vice-President among his ancestors, the story of Stevenson’s growth serves to illuminate the America in which he lived. In turn, his deep-rooted sense of an American tradition enabled him to show an awareness of the flow of history unparalleled among contemporary political figures.

Brought up as the privileged son of a well-to-do Midwestern family, Stevenson showed few early signs of the stature he was to attain later in life. There was no dramatic turning point that marked a violent change. His years at Princeton in the F. Scott Fitzgerald era, his acceptance into Chicago society, his years as an associate in a respectable Chicago law firm, his marriage to the wealthy and artistic Ellen Borden — all these were predictable events for a young man born to his station in life.

Yet it was perhaps inevitable that the tradition of his family should turn him to public service and carry him to Washington, first as a fledgling in the New Deal, later as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War II, and finally as a vital participant in the founding of the United Nations. Called by the Democratic Party to run for the governorship of Illinois, he waged a successful, uphill fight against an incumbent administration and so ably performed his executive duties that he became his party’s choice for the presidency in 1952.

Although he was twice defeated for the highest office in the land, time has suggested that his influence was greater and more durable than that of the man to whom he lost, is creation of a while new style of politics made a Kennedy possible, and his views on one issue after another — civil rights, disarmament, McCarthyism, colonialism — although often unpopular at the time, became adopted as the official attitudes of his country with the passage of a few years, in large part because of his stands.

The story of how he had the 1960 Presidential nomination all but in his grasp and then let it slip away, his ambivalent attitudes as United Nations Ambassador during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the real story of his role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco reveal the two sides of this extraordinary man — the idealistic and the practical — that, never completely reconciled, may have kept him from the popular recognition he deserved but that nonetheless assure him of a place of permanent greatness in the future.

It is only fitting that Kenneth S. Davis should be the author of this biography. His earlier life of Stevenson, A Prophet in His Own Country has, until now, remained the most comprehensive study of the man, one that the New York Herald Tribune said, no future historian “will dare to overlook as a source book.” At the time Davis was aided by Stevenson himself, who gave freely of his personal memories; facilitated interviews with friends, family, and associates; and provided access to his diaries and scrapbooks. Now, drawing on his intimate knowledge of Stevenson, the man and statesman, Davis has produced a monumental and vitally important biography of one of the great figures of the twentieth century.