BY “OUT THERE,” Alicia meant Los Angeles, site of the Democratic National Convention, already by mid-July its usual sun-bright, high-Fahrenheit, otherworldly self, the nation’s recently tabulated Second City, lately edging past Chicago in population, though struggling through one of its periodic slumps, with the Big Studios in various stages of collapse and with Big Television not yet ready for prime time.
As it happened, the Stevenson campaign was also not ready for prime time, with its candidate still not publicly declared, and thus with no official status despite an influx of hundreds of bright-eyed Stevenson Volunteers, who swarmed the lobby of the stodgy downtown Biltmore Hotel (Democratic Party headquarters), where party managers, politely and otherwise, declined to provide office space for a noncandidate. By the Saturday before the convention opened, a solution of sorts had been found by the Volunteers, who took over the top floor of the abandoned Paramount Studios building, right across from the Biltmore on Pershing Square, and due to be demolished in a month’s time, from whose grimy windows they unfurled a one-hundred-foot-long, hand-painted banner proclaiming “Stevenson For President” for the benefit of party stalwarts and conventioneers assembling at the Biltmore. Stevenson himself flew into town that weekend, accompanied by his eldest son, Adlai, Jane and Edison Dick, and Marietta Tree, all of whom put up in the pink-and-green, palm-and-stucco fineness of the Beverly Hills Hotel (a fair distance from the dreary downtown), with Stevenson himself installed in one of the hotel’s famous poolside bungalows, where on Sunday afternoon he gave tea to Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s eighty-four-year-old widow.
With the indomitable Mrs. Roosevelt (“the Conscience of the Party,” as everyone was always describing her) out poolside in Beverly Hills—doing her earnest, queenly best to light a fire under Stevenson, urging him to at least offer himself as a possible draft candidate to the convention delegates—some twenty miles away, in her cluttered hotel room in the Biltmore, Patterson was getting herself up to speed at what she’d long considered one of the great kicks of the newspaper business: working a convention, as it was called back in the days before those once shambly, sweaty, smoky, loosey-goosey political assemblies became sanitized and tightened up for television, when convention floors, hotel rooms, and corridors provided an unscripted, often rowdy, garrulous mass of delegates and mostly print reporters, on the prowl for stories, not sound bites. Patterson had brought Newsday’s political editor, three reporters, and a photographer with her to Los Angeles, whose assignments she was trying to sort out and orchestrate in the hit-or-miss fashion of those days before cell phones. She was also trying to figure out what, if anything, she might be able to do, at this late stage in the drama, to help her friend Adlai.
The truth of the matter, as she understood it, was that weeks before the convention opened, despite all the chanting Stevenson Volunteers, despite gallant Mrs. Roosevelt, despite the sentimental loyalty of some party elders, pretty much every poll and delegate count pointed to an almost certain Kennedy nomination, probably on the first ballot. Patterson herself had gamely stayed loyal to Stevenson through much of the spring, no matter how strongly Kennedy performed in the primaries. As late as May 31 she had signed an editorial endorsing Stevenson for president on the grounds that he was “most qualified to stand up to the totalitarian powers.” But two days before the convention she had bowed to the inevitable, and without explicitly endorsing Kennedy (or ditching Adlai), she had signed another editorial, this time suggesting that “the ideal Democratic ticket would contain a promise of Adlai E. Stevenson for Secretary of State.”
Stevenson “at State,” a senior member of the new cabinet, wasn’t such an unexpected or farfetched proposition. He and Patterson had discussed it often over the years, on their walkabouts in Georgia, in the course of long travels overseas, more notably since his last signal defeat in 1956, when it began to appear as a kind of theme in their endless chatty correspondence, with his finding a variety of thinking-out-loud ways of saying that State was a prize he would be happy to receive, not the Great Prize he had been vainly seeking for a decade but still a worthy satisfying substitute. After all, this was still the heyday of American internationalism, when foreign affairs, foreign policy, foreign news, foreign anything-and-everything was where the action was, the moral goal and career destination for so many of the nation’s best and brightest. The question was, Could Stevenson now be realist enough, sufficiently decisive, to seize the chance if it was offered?
Granted, it hadn’t yet been offered, but Patterson thought she had a plan, a way of moving the idea along in a manner of speaking. The Kennedys at the time were down the street, two blocks away, in the businesslike Roosevelt Hotel, all of them, Father Joe and Mother Rose, all the brothers, daughters, in-laws, assistants, advisers, a mighty army, taking up most of one of the big hotel floors. One of the Newsday reporters out in Los Angeles, Bob Greene, supposedly was on friendly terms with Kennedy’s tough-guy younger brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy.
Late Sunday afternoon Alicia reached Greene by phone, asked him to find Bobby Kennedy in person, and find out on her behalf what it would take to guarantee the State Department job for Stevenson. Greene made his way to the crowded Kennedy suite at the Roosevelt, found Bobby Kennedy, and asked him Patterson’s question. Neither then nor afterward was Bobby Kennedy much of a fan of Adlai Stevenson; moreover the Kennedy camp sensed victory, probably on the first ballot. And yet the Kennedys knew there might be problems: A Draft-Stevenson motion could gather momentum; Stevenson himself might siphon off some of the Illinois delegates. As narrated in Robert Keeler’s book, Kennedy told Greene that the campaign could make no firm commitment to Stevenson, but if Stevenson swiftly and decisively withdrew his name as a potential nominee, then threw his support behind JFK, such a decision would certainly be viewed favorably by his brother.
Call it preference or habit, nature or nurture, Patterson was a woman who believed firmly in getting on with it, especially if it was something that so obviously needed decision. No sooner did she hear back from Bob Greene as to Robert Kennedy’s response—not a definite yes, though not a no, apparently a serious maybe—than she lost no time in sending Greene out again into late-afternoon Los Angeles, now in a taxi speeding down the freeway to the Beverly Hills Hotel, with a hastily handwritten note for Stevenson, the gist of which was that she had just been in contact with Bobby Kennedy, and if Adlai still wanted a chance to be secretary of state, as she knew he did, he needed right then to get out of the race and back John Kennedy, and to do this soon, now.
But of course Stevenson’s own temperament, equally well honed over the years (as was Alicia’s), inclined him just as surely in an opposite direction, toward a determined (and what some had come to see as an almost pathological) avoidance of choice, an avoidance often made easier by the language of high-minded indecision. By the time Greene reached Stevenson’s poolside bungalow, the governor was out or inaccessible, and so he left Patterson’s letter in the care of a senior aide, with pressing instructions that Stevenson read it immediately when he came in. Then he returned to the Biltmore, where the lobby and corridors were buzzing with the increasing certainty of Jack Kennedy’s nomination, and upstairs to where Patterson was waiting, if not for some personal response from Adlai, then at least for some indication on the nightly news that Stevenson had finally terminated his quixotic noncandidacy.
However, by the next morning, Monday, when the Democratic National Convention officially opened for business in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, it was clear from newspapers and news channels, by omission as well as commission, that there had been no change in Stevenson’s position. Toward noon a letter was delivered to Patterson from “A.E.S.” saying simply, “I know that Kennedy has the votes but in the end I couldn’t disappoint Eleanor and Herbert who still think I have a chance, although I know I don’t. I’m sure that Bobby and the Kennedy crowd will appreciate my situation.”
To the extent that people remember the 1960 Democratic convention, they remember it first for the acclamation of the youthful, glamorous John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with beauteous Jackie beside him, and the whole Kennedy family entourage), and perhaps also for the Kennedy brothers’ tough, offstage horse-trading that brought Lyndon Baines Johnson aboard as vice president. But then, in that zone between not quite forgotten and not really remembered, save as a strange elegiac footnote, was Adlai Stevenson’s final appearance on the big political stage. On Tuesday night, in the lull before the nominating speeches, with nothing still theoretically decided, when Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois was introduced and stepped onto the platform, there erupted in the auditorium a literally unprecedented twenty-seven whole minutes of applause and cheers and waving placards and parading in the aisles; no one could remember the equal of such a demonstration, and the fact is there’s never been one since. And then the Guv stepped to the microphone, almost hesitantly so it seemed, with the huge crowd expectantly hushed (with Patterson looking on from the press section, with the Kennedys in their hotel room watching on TV), and said in effect…nothing: a few softly graceful words of thanks, how touched he was, how undeserving and so on, and then made a small mild joke, and was gone, without so much as a murmur about the Kennedy tsunami that everyone knew was about to overwhelm the convention. Back in the Kennedy suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, Robert Kennedy was heard to say: “My God, the man still can’t make up his rabbit-assed mind.”