The Trouble With Adlai

Newsmen assigned to cover Adlai Stevenson's quest for the Presidency were noticeably discontented last week. Half-way between the August conventions and the November election, they had reached the state where "everybody has a gripe about something and their little piques are all coming out at once," as one veteran reporter commented.

Their gripes reached print on Friday last week when Richard L. Strout wrote a satirical piece in the Christian Science Monitor entitled "Boss: Anybody Seen That Adlai?" Stevenson, Strout wrote, "is an agreeable fellow to have around, because he makes entertaining comments. But he isn't around very much so far as newspapermen go." He maintained that little things have been going very wrong in Stevenson's campaign which more efficient organization could easily eliminate. And the next day a more serious column appeared in the New York Herald Tribune dispelling the initial August optimism that surrounded the announcement of Stevenson's organizational plans.

The Tribune article purported that Stevenson himself is disappointed with the momentum of his political odyssey. His speeches, the Tribune hinted, are not inspiring the voters as they should, and the crowds that are turning out to hear his attacks on Eisenhower have been smaller than hoped. Reportedly, the blame for this failure has been placed on Clayton Fritchey, Stevenson's press secretary. Fritchey, accordingly, would soon be fired for his own "failure to Jim Hagertize his way through this campaign" with sufficient effectiveness. These rumors, however, were vigorously denied the next day in Springfield by campaign manager Jim Finnegan.

But the Tribune story does point to the tremendous organizing skill and attention to detail that running a political campaign requires. For the Republicans, the technical problems are less complex, but nonetheless extensive. They have chosen to rely more heavily on electronics than on bringing their candidates to the people, although the Vice President is getting in his own licks at barnstorming. And as the party in power, with virtually unlimited campaign funds, they have the added benefit of Presidential prestige when comes to making the necessary travel arrangements for speeches and press coverage.

As Nixon's well-planned appearance in western Massachusetts last week showed, it is virtually inconceivable that the Republicans could ever lose a campaign train. But that is just what happened last Wednesday in Sunbury, Pa., to Stevenson's special train with the private car that carried Woodrow Wilson to victory in 1912. Stevenson's party had left the train and arranged to meet it in Sunbury, but the engineer was delayed half an hour while Adlai wanted around the station. And every day, reporters said, their buses were severed from the candidate's open car cavalcade. On Saturday, the buses twice crossed across the Blackstone River in Woonsocket, R.I., while the Governor unconsciously moved on to Uxbridge. As a result, they arrived late for several speeches.

"The wire service men were most unhappy," Strout wrote. "They are not supposed to let a candidate out of sight. And we had a return Union man on board, but no place for columnists and assorted journalists to throw off copy."

Not only do reporters have some difficulty filing their stories, but they sometimes have trouble getting them on time. "Stevenson will not let any paragraph go through in an advanced text that he doesn't approve of completely," one reporter said, "so we sometimes miss our deadlines by having to wait for his speeches." The President's press secretary, Jim Hagerty, on the other hand, has always been able to meet the reporters' times, even resorting to threats of quitting if the President did not accept what he had written.

For Stevenson, however, the process of preparing one or two long speeches every day is hellish. His three secretaries who sleep as best they can on cavalcade tours, begin work usually after Stevenson's evening speech continuing into the early morning. But Stevenson, who is looking more each day like a 20-hour-a-day candidate, works harder and longer than any of his staff, reporters say. "If he breaks down," one newsman commented, "there'll be a real health issue in this campaign."