Schlesinger and Bell shared responsibility for the speechwriting operation, and passed on completed drafts to Carl McGowan, a member of Stevenson’s staff as governor and a key part of his presidential effort, who forwarded them on to Stevenson for his changes. The candidate spent a lot of time “fussing and fiddling” with speech drafts, sometimes staying up in his hotel room until 3:30 a.m. in the morning “turning it [the speech draft] around, writing new paragraphs, until the final product, in a sense, was really a Stevenson-written speech,” McGowan noted. Fischer agreed with McGowan’s assessment, saying that none of the candidate’s speechwriters tried to put “alien words” in his mouth. Fischer compared his task, and that of the other speechwriters, as serving as “literary tailors” for Stevenson, cutting and stitching material to fit his known measurements and according to a pattern and style on which all could agree.
Schlesinger impressed Martin, and the two men became lifelong friends. “He could, seemingly, simultaneously hold a telephone conversation, write a speech, read source materials, and talk to somebody across the desk,” Martin said of Schlesinger. “He wrote rapidly and well. He wrote basic drafts on major speeches, did heavy rewrite on other people’s drafts, and, from his friends around the country, obtained dozens of drafts.” The tall, affable Bell, who had been in Truman’s Bureau of the Budget and had written some speeches for the president, rarely wrote first drafts for Stevenson’s speeches himself, but did rewrite almost everybody else’s first drafts, “to the dismay of some writers,” said Martin. Bell had been told by McGowan that he had been selected for the assignment because of his “broad experience in the various elements of [Truman’s] legislative program,” and therefore was the natural person for liaison duties in the many different areas in which Stevenson would have to take a position on during the campaign, including foreign and domestic policy, labor, agriculture, and education.
The writers who were gathered at the Elks Club seemed to know exactly what they were doing, Martin said, and what they were doing was something he also knew something about—revising a manuscript. “I remember being somewhat surprised that you go about revising a speech manuscript just about the same way you go about revising an article: With a pencil and scissors, straightening out kinks in the line of thought, improving diction and syntax, getting rid of soft and dull spots and ambiguity, etc.,” he said.
Some of the writers at the Elks Club mainly worried about the quality of their prose, while others, including Schlesinger and Bell, possessed greater political instincts and worried instead about a speech’s political effectiveness. “I began by worrying about the prose and soon learned to worry more about the politics,” Martin said. He recalled being shocked at first when he heard Schlesinger and Bell talking about people—Jews, Catholics, African Americans, farmers—as voting blocs, as he considered such talk the language of political hacks in ward headquarters. “I came to see,” Martin said, “that in a diverse pluralistic democracy like ours, a politician can approach the electorate in no other way.”
Under the tutelage of Bell and Schlesinger, Martin began to translate his emotions, instinct, and feeling for people, especially the disadvantaged in American society, into a rational system of liberalism that could be applied to writing speeches for a politician. “What I brought to liberalism and to the Elks Club was, in addition to writing, a life’s experience and instincts,” Martin said. Liberalism came almost automatically to him, and Martin cited such influences as his underdog feeling in his childhood growing up in Indianapolis, the influence of his liberal-minded friends and the books he read in high school, and what President Franklin D Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies had done for his family. He noted that when he worked for the Indianapolis Times and reported on a strike, he was “instinctively on the strikers’ side.”
Before the campaign began, Stevenson had informed a friend that he intended to keep his literary effort “on as high a level as I can.” As he traveled around the country touting his candidacy, there were many, said Martin, who by mid-September began accusing Stevenson in his speeches of “talking over the heads of the people.” Martin himself received this complaint from people he knew in New York publishing circles, who were quick to add, “Of course I understand him.” Years later, on another campaign, a tired and tense Stevenson admitted to Martin, “Oh, damn it, I never can say anything simply.” Local Democratic candidates used to being coddled and pampered by their presidential candidates in the past grumbled that Stevenson spent too much time polishing his speeches when he should have been spending time with them, and others were put off by his sometimes biting humor.
Perhaps influenced by Stevenson’s baldness and both his and his staff’s intellectual background, conservative columnist Stewart Alsop came up with a word to describe Stevenson, “egghead,” that was quickly picked up by other journalists. “It became, as Senator McCarthy and Senator Nixon increased their attacks,” said Martin, “a word of opprobrium, well suited to the anti-intellectual climate of 1952.” Stevenson’s speechwriters and other staff worried about this issue, but, as McGowan once told Martin, “You can’t change the Governor.”
As each week’s campaign schedule became available, the speechwriters met to divide the schedule, taking an assignment if they were familiar with the location to be visited or had knowledge about a topic. When a writer received his assignment, said Martin, he usually made telephone calls to people in the community for their advice on local issues (being careful to weigh the validity of the information they provided), did further research, produced a speech draft, and turned it into Bell, who rewrote the draft and gave it to another speechwriter for his comments and revisions. “If it was a major speech, several Elks would gather around . . . and work on it collectively,” Martin noted. “It was not unusual for a speech to go through half a dozen drafts, and some went through more. Rewriting sometimes merely honed language; sometimes it changed policy.”
Although Schlesinger had never met Martin before the 1952 campaign, he had known him through his writing, especially his work on the Centralia mine disaster, and the two men “hit it off at once,” according to Schlesinger. “The brilliant reporter turned out to be a diffident, quizzical, humorous man whose gentleness of manner concealed a sardonic toughness of mind.” Schlesinger and Martin developed a method of writing rough drafts of speeches together, with the Harvard academic writing the substantive center of the speech, while the magazine writer handled the “pleasantries and setup at the beginning and the rising rhetoric at the end; then we would trade drafts and mark them up, and put them together,” Martin recalled. He discovered that he particularly enjoyed writing “rollicking rally speeches” for use before large, enthusiastic Democratic crowds. “They had a gay, rollicking quality,” Schlesinger said of his friend’s speeches for these occasions. Although Stevenson also seemed to enjoy delivering such talks, afterward he seemed apologetic about their partisan nature, no doubt, said Martin, because the governor’s “friends in Republican Lake Forest chided him.”
One or two of the Elks Club speechwriters usually accompanied Stevenson on his campaign trips, and Martin soon became a familiar figure on these visits because, as McGowan noted, he was a professional writer and “could knock it [a speech] out fast at the last minute, particularly for short things, and a lot of these things came up, you know, at the last minute, unscheduled appearances here and there.” The Elks rarely had the opportunity, however, to meet with the candidate as a group—not surprising considering how painful it was for Stevenson to rely on ghostwriters to help him with his speeches. “The Elks got instructions on policy by osmosis,” according to Martin. “‘Ghost candidate’ seemed a better phrase than ghostwriters, from the Elks’ viewpoint. They rarely knew, except by a cryptic sentence from McGowan, what subject Stevenson wanted to talk about or what he wanted to say on it.”
It was McGowan who often came to the Elks Club to pick up the speeches before heading out on the campaign trail, going over the major ones with the speechwriters before returning to the Governor’s Mansion. There, noted Martin, McGowan edited the speeches, sometimes doing substantial rewrites before giving them to Stevenson. “More than any other single person, McGowan shaped the substance of the campaign,” said Martin. According to McGowan, there existed a minimum of personal jealousy among Stevenson’s campaign staff, particularly when it came to the writers at the Elks Club, a fact he found “quite amazing since they have all this pride of authorship that professionals have.” The speechwriters were able to submerge those feelings, he added, and were amenable to the changes he suggested on their speech drafts. “They were wonderful—it was a wonderful performance,” McGowan said.
For Stevenson’s part, he preferred to ignore his speechwriters’ very existence. The best theory as to why Stevenson felt this way, said Martin, was because he “really wished the writers weren’t there. He was proud of his own writing and once told a friend he wished more than anything else he had been a writer.” Martin believed that the candidate subconsciously resented the speechwriters, and “so seemed to take the attitude that if he would just close his eyes we would just go away.” On campaign trips the writers literally slipped their drafts under Stevenson’s hotel room door in the middle of the night for him to find when he awoke. The governor took the anonymous drafts, rewrote them, and made them his own. “It was his way,” said Martin.
Members of the Elks Club Group had a big, bare room, about 650 square feet in size, in which to ply their trade. A long table ran down the middle of the room and on top of it were laid out the typed speech drafts and any incoming documents. Adjoining the workroom were four hotel-like bedrooms that some of them, including Martin, slept in for most of the campaign. During the day Schlesinger, Tufts, Bell, and Martin could be found scribbling in the workroom, while Wirtz, Fischer, and others preferred doing their writing in the back bedrooms. Scattered around the workroom were copies of such magazines as Newsweek, Time, Foreign Affairs, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as issues of the New York Times, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, and several Chicago newspapers.
For research help, the speechwriters could also turn to such basic documents as the Democratic Party’s platform, Stevenson’s messages to the Illinois legislature, the Illinois state budget, the voting records of Nixon and McCarthy, and even a Stevenson family genealogy prepared by Fran. Early in the campaign, upon returning from a weekend home in Highland Park, Martin brought back to Springfield with him briefcases full of research material from his own files, including hundreds of pages of his typewritten notes on the Midwest he had collected a few years before for a Life magazine assignment. “I found these mid-west notes particularly useful and put a great deal of material into various speeches from the notes,” said Martin. The speechwriters also depended upon Martin’s book on Stevenson, finally published in early September. According to Martin, his publisher had wanted to “play it safe,” and waited to release the book until after Stevenson had won the nomination, which might have contributed to its poor sales (about 9,000 copies). It proved to be a valuable trove of information for the speechwriters, so much so that Martin wished the book had included an index.
When he started working as a speechwriter, Martin attempted to follow the same schedule as he had during his freelance days, working from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with no actual writing being done in the evening, maybe only some light rewriting. Such a schedule lasted only a day or two before he started to work as the other speechwriters did. On a typical day Martin awoke at about 9:00 a.m. or 9:30 a.m. and walked down the street to a drugstore for a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, and a roll before returning to the Elks Club.
The other speechwriters usually started work at 10:00 a.m. or a little later, and the group broke for lunch together at around 2:00 p.m. Most of the time they ate at the Sazerac, located at 229 South Sixth Street, a small, dingy bar equipped with a row of booths, a jukebox, and near the jukebox a big round table at which they sat. Sometimes a patron strolled over to drop a nickel into the jukebox to play a song, which blasted in the speechwriters’ ears at the nearby table. On one occasion, Elks Club Group member John Kenneth Galbraith, hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch, told a patron about to drop his coin in the jukebox, “I’ll give you a dime if you don’t play it.” A waitress named Mona, too young to vote, often took the speechwriters’ orders and had to put up with continued complaints from Martin, Schlesinger, and Tufts that there was no chocolate sauce for their ice cream sundaes. They finally paid for their own private can and peace was restored.
As they waited for their food (“always pretty bad,” according to Martin) each day, the speechwriters discussed forthcoming speeches or talked about the campaign. “Sometimes at lunch we talked general opinions,” Martin said. “We were growing to hate [GOP presidential candidate Dwight] Eisenhower, mostly for his embracing of McCarthy and [William E.] Jenner [a conservative U.S. Senator from Indiana], for his cynical rapprochement with Taft, for his obvious vote-seeking by any means, including promises of the most contradictory sort. . . . He seemed willing to scrap any principle, to do anything for a vote.” To them, Eisenhower may have been “dollar honest,” as Martin said, but the GOP presidential candidate was “intellectually and morally dishonest.”
After they finished eating, the speechwriters used to stop by the offices of the local newspaper, the Illinois State Register, to read the news bulletins written with crayon on sheets of newsprint hanging in its office window and review the newspaper’s latest edition. “Sometimes we’d thus see where the Governor had just delivered a speech we’d sweated over; whoever wrote it got kidded about reading it now,” Martin remembered.
After lunch the Elks Club Group returned to their craft, working on their assigned speech drafts the rest of the afternoon. The noise in the workroom was constant, with ringing telephones, usually long-distance calls, and the clatter of typewriters. “I was the fastest typist and sometimes I guess I made so much noise at it that it disturbed phone conversations; once Dave [Bell] asked me to wait, he couldn’t hear,” Martin said. He also earned a distinction as the group’s fastest writer and “a master of the whistle-stop speech,” according to Galbraith, who added that nobody on the speechwriting staff could “say so much on two pages of triple-spaced typescript.”
When he reached an impasse in his work, Martin took to pacing around the large workroom. Fearing he might be disturbing the other writers, he switched to pacing around the corridor outside that ran in a square around the floor of the building. “This seemed to amuse the others,” Martin noted. The speechwriters took a dinner break at about 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m., making their first stop at the Elks Club bar downstairs next to a bowling alley for drinks. “Every time we went in Dave Bell always stopped and looked longingly at the bowling alleys but I don’t think he ever got time to bowl,” Martin said. For dinner, the writers usually ate at the Leland or Lincoln hotels, a nearby restaurant, or sometimes shared taxis for trips to Stevie’s, a steakhouse with the best food in town, according to Martin.
After dinner, where they talked almost exclusively about the campaign, the speechwriters returned to the Elks Club, working at their assignments until midnight or two or three in the morning. Although Martin said that the Elks toiled “in remarkable harmony,” the relentless pace took its toll. Most of the speechwriters became ill at one time or another; Schlesinger injured his leg during a campaign trip and Martin did not get over a cold he had caught while working for Stevenson until well after the election was over. One day Martin noticed Bell did not look well, and he later collapsed and had to be put to bed. A local doctor paid a visit and gave as his diagnosis overwork. Tufts suggested that the doctor give Bell an antibiotic; the physician agreed and gave Bell a shot of penicillin. Thereafter, Tufts became known around the Elks as Doctor Tufts, said Martin.
The press, numbering about a hundred by October, flew in separate airplanes that took off after Stevenson’s plane and landed before it did “so that if he [Stevenson] crashed they would be on the ground to report the accident,” Martin noted. Stevenson sat in the rear of the cabin in an office area with a desk, while the speechwriters with him on the trip rode in front near the typewriters and mimeograph machines. Martin always had a fear of flying, but he got over it during the campaign, that is, as long as he was on a plane with Stevenson. “When the Governor was aboard,” he said, “everything was all right.”
There existed a curious family atmosphere among those on the plane, said Martin, almost as if “we were all a bunch of relatives of the Governor, here to try to help him get elected.” The atmosphere changed when Stevenson had to approve a speech draft while still in the air, and it was up to the secretarial staff to type his remarks on the speech typewriter, equipped with oversize type. A stencil had to then be cut to run off approximately 200 copies on the mimeograph machine for distribution to the press. Frequently, the secretaries were still assembling the speech when the plane landed, and visiting congressmen and even a U.S. senator were pressed into service to get the job done.
After the plane landed at the scheduled airport, staff members were the first to disembark, followed by Stevenson, who “always looked surprised at the people being there somehow,” said Martin. “Sometimes he had to say a few words over a PA [public address] system and usually came off pretty well, though in the confusion of the crowd and handshakers and people thrusting microphones at him he always looked confused and harried and terribly alone among hungry strangers.”
On brief visits, Martin usually stayed behind at the airport, finding desk space at airline offices surrounded by teletype machines and busy clerks. He had to do this because he wanted to smoke a few cigarettes while he worked on upcoming speeches and could not stay on the Stevenson plane because of the danger of a fire while the aircraft was being refueled. “Very often I saw nothing of the town but the airport and a desk there,” he recalled. On an overnight stop, Martin’s only introduction to a community would be what he could see from the window of a speeding car or from the window of his hotel room. “We really made, during the campaign, an astonishing journey across the nation—yet saw really almost nothing, learned almost nothing,” said Martin.
One incident stuck in Martin’s mind. He recalled looking down from his room as the Stevenson motorcade returned to a hotel late one night to be greeted by a cheering crowd while a band played. “Strange feeling of power,” Martin reflected, “looking over city under these circumstances; strange feeling of intimacy with the candidate, a satisfaction that though he belongs to the crowd of strangers on the street, they don’t really know him at all; but I do. Must be somewhat like father feels toward famous son. Pride, possessiveness, power, etc.”
Those who have been part of a national presidential campaign have sometimes compared it to being inside a giant bubble, whereby the staff is insulated from what is really happening in the outside world. Good news and bad news are magnified, and victory seems assured. It was that way on Stevenson’s final whistle-stop train trip through Ohio and Indiana and on to Chicago the final weekend of the campaign. Stevenson’s campaign staff was united in the belief that he would win the election, and appeared to be “enthusiastic as well as very tired,” remembered Martin, who got off the train when it stopped in Gary, Indiana, to hear Stevenson’s remarks. “I have a clear recollection,” he said, “of a working man from I would judge the Gary steel mills standing in the cinders by the railroad track holding up his small child to see the Gov and saying to him, ‘There’s the next president.’” An October 25 Gallup poll had given Eisenhower 52 percent and Stevenson 48 percent, and Newsweek magazine had reported, “The guessing is closer, and the ‘experts’ are more genuinely confused than in any other election of our times.”
Many from Stevenson’s campaign staff made their predictions and chipped in $5 to a pool predicting the results in the Electoral College. Martin guessed that Stevenson would garner 400 electoral votes, while Tufts had about 450 and Schlesinger 330. “In general I gave away the farm states, claimed Illinois, New York, California, Minnesota, the South, and Massachusetts,” Martin recalled. “I gave the Republicans Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan . . . Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin.”
On Election Day, Tuesday, November 4, Martin and his wife Fran awoke early at their Highland Park home and voted at a nearby high school. The local precinct captain told Martin that turnout had been heavy at the polling place and believed it was a good sign for the Democrats’ chances of victory. “It was a bright, beautiful election day,” said Martin. They returned home; bid farewell to their daughter, Cindy; picked up their guests, including Tufts, Bell, and his wife, Mary; and drove to O’Hare Airport for a flight to Springfield to watch election returns at the Governors Mansion.
That afternoon Stevenson's staff began hearing reports of heavy turnout all over the country, but nobody knew what to make of the report. McGowan knew it would not be the Democrats’ night when he heard disappointing voting results from usually Democratic precincts in Connecticut while still tying his tie before going over to the mansion from his home a few blocks away. He commented to his wife, “We don’t need to go over there, we can go to bed.” (Eisenhower won 55.7 percent of the vote in Connecticut.)
By 7:00 p.m., with the early returns already coming in and the news all bad for Stevenson, a grim mood hit staff members gathered in the ballroom at the Leland Hotel. A surge of Democratic votes from Minnesota and other farm states raised hopes of a miracle come-from-behind victory for a time, but when Martin asked Bell, the political veteran, about this, he “just smiled in a kind of patronizing way. Looking back, I don’t blame him.”
About 10:30 p.m. the Martins and others, about fifty in all, people who were Stevenson’s personal friends or his close associates in the administration, gathered at the mansion. “I just went and sat in a corner with a small radio and listened to the returns,” Martin remembered. “Other people would come and stop and listen a while and shake their heads and go away. It was more like a wake than anything else.”
About 12:30 a.m. word drifted through the crowd that Stevenson had written his concession speech, which most of them watched on a television with poor reception. A composed Stevenson strayed from his prepared text and ended his concession with the same humor that had marked his campaign. He noted: “Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell—Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.”
Although Stevenson had received the second largest number of votes for a Democratic candidate in history, 27,314,992, he had been swamped by Eisenhower’s total of 33,936,234; Eisenhower carried thirty-nine states with 442 electoral votes, while Stevenson had captured only nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia) and 89 electoral votes. McGowan attributed Stevenson’s defeat to a “very strong tide running for change” throughout the country. “Stevenson was not perfect,” said Martin. “He made mistakes; lots of them. He wanted to be both the candidate and the campaign manager; as a result nobody managed the campaign.”
The landslide defeat crushed the spirits of those who had worked so hard for Stevenson’s election, but the candidate himself tried to raise their spirits. The Martins and others, mainly from the Elks Club Group, were preparing the leave the mansion, thinking Stevenson would want to be alone with family and close friends. Seeing them leave, he stopped them and said, “Come on upstairs and have a drink; let’s celebrate my defeat.” He gave the first glass of champagne to Fran. Several Stevenson’s Lake Forest Republican friends, who had voted for Eisenhower, were also there, and one said to him, “Governor, you educated the country with you campaign.” Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course.”
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