Adlai E. Stevenson

Adlai Stevenson was greater than the sum of his accomplishments.

There was always something in him that could rouse the noisier Republicans to fits of righteous indignation. In the end, too, some of the liberals who had followed him for so long began to revile him. How, they asked, could he stay in the United Nations and defend policies in Angola, in Cuba, in Vietnam, polices they knew were wrong and that he too must have been dissatisfied with. So they joined the politicians who had long since written him off as a man who could not make up his mind, who agonized over his every decision, wavering to one side and then to another and often deciding, finally, that no decision could be made at all.

History will remember his decisions, not his indecisiveness. His ideas wormed their way into national policy after they had become dissociated from his name. There is no Stevenson Doctrine, no Stevenson Act to remember him by. But history cannot ignore the first man to call in a national campaign for a halt to the exploding of nuclear bombs and to suggest that the cold war was not a permanent state of nature. History will bear witness to the reentrance of American intellectuals in to political life, a phenomenon often credited to John Kennedy but begun before him by Stevenson. Perhaps history will make of him, finally, a human sacrifice to American complacency in the 1950's, a prophet whose honor we now realize only dimly.

Yet his human role had an even greater dignity than the record he left behind, for he was a thoughtful man who grappled with the overwhelming issues of this most overwhelming of times. There are epitaphs more ignoble that that pinned upon him by his enemies: that in the age of the trigger-happy and the tough-minded, in the age of Hiroshima and of Cuba, he thought about the issues his people faced, and hesitated, unwilling to make up his mind.