Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [66]
One interesting fact about Adlai which most people don’t know is that, somehow, he had never come to the attention of our local political leaders until Jack Arvey “discovered” him in 1947. At that time, Arvey was seeking “blue-ribbon” nominees for the Illinois State ticket in the crucial 1948 election. At a Washington luncheon arranged for him by former Senator Scott W. Lucas, Arvey talked with James Byrnes, then Secretary of State, who said, “You people in Illinois know you’ve got a gold nugget out there, don’t you?” “Who do you mean?” asked Arvey. When Byrnes answered, “Adlai Stevenson,” Arvey had to confess, “I don’t know him.” Back in Chicago, Arvey quickly made it his business to get acquainted. The late Judge Harry M. Fisher, arranged the introductions. Attorneys Louis Kohn and Stephen Mitchell (later Democratic National Chairman), and businessman Hermon Dunlap Smith quickly formed a committee to promote Stevenson for public office. His 1948 election plurality of 572,000 for governor was the largest in Illinois history.
Stevenson’s eloquence and wit are comparable to that of Illinois’ greatest statesman, Abraham Lincoln. (Stevenson’s great grandfather, Jesse W. Fell, was an intimate friend of Lincoln’s. It was he who first proposed the Lincoln-Douglas debates.) Adlai is one of the few politicians who has no need for a ghost writer. As a writer, I admire his prose style. And as a newspaperman, I am even more impressed by his ability to write under the pressure of a deadline. When he boarded the train that was to take him Downstate to accept endorsement of the Central Committee of the Illinois Democratic Party for the nomination for governor, he had not finished his acceptance speech. He did so on the train, in less than an hour. And when he handed it to Jack Arvey, who was traveling with him, Jack was moved to exclaim, “Don’t change a word of it! Don’t let anyone ever change a word of anything you write.”
To me, the mark of Adlai’s character is that he can maintain his sense of humor in bad times as well as good – not only in the face of bitter political reversals, but also in moments of purely personal loss. Shortly after he moved to the Libertyville farm, the house was destroyed by fire. A friend recalls Adlai’s refusal to become perturbed: Picking up a still glowing piece of wood from the wreckage, he nonchalantly lit a cigarette with it, then confided: “As you can see, we are still using the house.” It is also a tribute to the man that his divorce from his wife, Ellen, in 1949 (an amicable one resulting from the conflict of his interest in public service with his wife’s preference for a quieter life centering around art and the theater), left no appreciable scar on his relationship with his three sons, and seemed to be no impediment to his ascendancy in public life.
As a Chicago newspaperman, it has been my good fortune to meet every President who has occupied the White House in the past twenty years, starting with the great man who remembered Chicago as the site of his three renominations to the nation’s highest office. From our very first personal contact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made an unforgettable impression on me – as he did on almost everyone he met. It was in 1944, at a press conference in his office at the White House. In those intimate surroundings, the President could establish a personal