The Biographer and the Governor: John Bartlow Martin and Adlai Stevenson

On July 14, 1965, Adlai Stevenson II, two-time Democratic presidential candidate and diplomat, was in London following a speech in Geneva, Switzerland. During his stay, Stevenson had met with British prime minister Harold Wilson and visited friends. That day after lunch he and Marietta Peabody Tree, his confidante and lover, went for a walk in Grosvenor Square near the U.S. Embassy as he wanted to show her the house he had lived in with his family while working on the UN Preparatory Commission following World War II. The house, however, had been torn down and replaced with a modern building, which caused Stevenson to sigh and comment, “That makes me feel old.”

The duo walked on toward Hyde Park, but Stevenson asked Tree to slow down before uttering his final words, “I am going to faint.” He fell over backward, hitting his head on the pavement, unconscious. Although passerbys, including a heart doctor, tried to help, and an ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital, Stevenson died, the victim of a massive heart attack.

The news about Stevenson’s death reached John Bartlow Martin, who had worked as a speechwriter in his 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, while he and his family were vacationing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That night he and his wife, Fran, took a train to Chicago, where they spent time in Adlai Stevenson III’s office working with Newton Minow and others on funeral arrangements before taking a flight to Washington, DC, to attend a service for Stevenson at the National Cathedral. There, offering his condolences to Martin on the loss of his friend, President Lyndon B. Johnson said of Stevenson, “He showed us the way.” Flying back on the presidential plane taking Stevenson’s body home to Illinois, Martin fell into a conversation with his friend and fellow Stevenson speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who told Martin he should write a biography on the two-time Democratic presidential candidate.

At first, the Stevenson family turned to another person close to their father, Walter Johnson, a longtime University of Chicago history professor, as its choice to write the definitive Stevenson biography. Johnson certainly had the knowledge to accomplish the task, as he had been national cochairman for the movement to draft Stevenson as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and became a close friend of the former governor.

Instead of tackling a biography, however, Johnson decided to serve as editor of a collection of Stevenson’s letters, writings, and speeches. “I felt it was time to get the solid material out,” Johnson later said. “When I began I was thinking of two or three volumes. But there was so much good material, and it soon became evident that it would require several more volumes.” The Papers of Adlai Stevenson, published from 1972 to 1979 by Little, Brown and Company, grew to eight volumes under Johnson’s editorship, assisted by Carol Evans, Stevenson’s secretary for many years.
 
According to Martin, Adlai III, a few months after his father’s death, had sought his advice about the biography, asking him if any writer the family selected might be willing to share royalties to help support the establishment of a Stevenson Institute. “I told him that I myself had never split royalties but that in these circumstances, to help the institute and because of my feelings for his father, I probably would,” Martin recalled. He suggested names of several writers as possibilities, but none of them panned out, and after a time Adlai III asked Martin to take on the project. “I’ve always been a fact writer and I’ve always written about people. These two elements come together better in biography than in any other form,” Martin noted.
 
In October 1965 Martin wrote Ivan Von Auw Jr., one of his agents, along with Dorothy Olding, at Harold Ober Associates, that he had been in talks about the biography with Adlai III and Minow. “They’re for me, and so are most others, but I think two important people [Martin did not name them] are not; and while Adlai and Minow seem to be all but certain that I will be anointed, I’m somewhat less so.”
 
Fran had counseled her husband to reject the assignment, as she considered doing the Stevenson biography as “going back,” and she wanted him not to “relive the past but to move forward.” She added that to do a proper biography on Stevenson’s life would take a long time and the family might prove to be difficult. Fran’s reservations had some validity in the end, but Martin decided to forge ahead and with the biography on someone he considered to be “an extraordinarily appealing civilized human being.” Martin also realized that he had always been a fact writer and written about people, and those two elements “come together better in biography than in any other form.”
 
Doubleday and Company, the publisher of Martin’s Overtaken by Events, which highlighted his time as U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, agreed to back the project, offering financial support of approximately $200,000, with a due date for the book of January 2, 1969. Martin approved splitting his royalties with Stevenson’s sons, and gave Adlai III, acting for the family, the right to review the manuscript before publication. They also established a procedure to follow if they could not reach agreement on suggested changes, with the issue going for binding arbitration to Carl McGowan, a federal judge and Stevenson’s former chief of staff, or, if McGowan was unavailable, to Minow, Stevenson’s former law partner.
 
The legal precautions were spelled out ahead of time to avoid the problems William Manchester had experienced with Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in writing about John Kennedy’s assassination in The Death of a President, eventually published in 1967 after long, tense negotiations and a lawsuit prompted by Jacqueline Kennedy. Martin later said he did not like the idea of the book being Stevenson’s “official” biography, as the word conveyed the “idea that the [Stevenson] family controlled the manuscript, and therefore the book cannot be trusted entirely. That’s not the situation."
 

Martin started his work on the Stevenson biography in December 1965. For a few months, he and his family rented and lived in Stevenson’s farm in Libertyville, Illinois, where Martin had visited him often during his lifetime, finding the place to be “light and airy, filled with sunshine, cheering.” Martin kept expecting to see Stevenson’s “dumpy figure waddling up the sloping field from the Des Plaines River, picking up dead tree branches as he came; to enter through the sun porch, blue eyes wide, cross the living room and, looking slightly perplexed, hesitate by the fireplace; then, grumbling about ‘this appalling task,’ go into his study to work on a speech.”
 
With the assistances of his old friend, Francis Nipp, who worked for a time as his research assistant, Martin catalogued Stevenson’s library and discovered that it contained reference books, bound copies of Stevenson’s speeches, family histories, and numerous items on Abraham Lincoln and Illinois. “He was a man of Illinois, always; even after he belonged to the world,” Martin said of Stevenson, “Illinois history, the Illinois prairies, and above all these seventy acres held him.” Scattered about Stevenson’s office were a bust of President Kennedy, “gorgeous” pictures of a cruise Stevenson had taken on a private yacht during his United Nation years, an autographed picture of President Johnson, a collection of plaster donkeys (the Democratic Party’s symbol), and mementos of Stevenson’s travels around the world. “Under his desk blotter was a scrap of paper containing in his handwriting a notation that Artie, his Dalmatian, was buried by a tree outside his study window,” Martin recalled.
 
The biographer found that his subject had been “a string saver; he almost never threw anything away.” On the wall of the basement stairs Martin saw a lithograph from the 1892 presidential campaign, when Stevenson’s namesake had been elected vice president as the running mate of Grover Cleveland, plus one from 1900 when the elder Stevenson lost with Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The basement also included an old filing cabinet with one drawer stuck tight. “I finally pried it open—and found Stevenson’s daily appointment books covering his entire four years as Governor,” remembered Martin.
 
In addition to the items he uncovered at Stevenson’s home, Martin explored materials at the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield; the State Department in Washington, living for a time in a rented house in Georgetown; the U.S. Mission to the UN in New York; and Princeton University, where Stevenson had graduated in 1922. Martin also received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to work on the book while staying with Fran and his son Fred at the foundation’s Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como in Italy. Fran brought with her seventeen footlockers crammed full of items on Stevenson.
 
During his search of what Martin called Stevenson’s “enormous” archive, he found not only the longhand first drafts of the presidential candidate’s famous speeches, old love letters, campaign contribution lists, and income tax returns, but such minutiae as ticket stubs to Princeton football games and old dance programs. 

Martin and Nipp copied several hundred thousand pages of Stevenson’s papers, placing the copies into looseleaf binders, each containing upwards of two hundred pages. They numbered the binders and gave each one a special symbol designating whether it contained correspondence, speeches, or other material. “We indexed the copies, making an average of perhaps a thousand 5-by-8-inch cards on each of the sixty-five years of his life, and arranged them chronologically,” said Martin, who used the cards to write the rough draft, as they guided him to material in the binders. “I write from the actual documents,” he noted. Martin acknowledged that there was “a certain amount of accountancy to this type of research,” but it was the way he worked. “It’s clumsy, it’s awkward, it’s slow—it takes a lot of time—but you don’t make many mistakes this way,” he noted. “And that’s the whole purpose.”
 
To fill in any gaps in the information, Martin interviewed, in all, nearly two hundred people involved in Stevenson’s life, dictating his interview notes and indexing them in binders as well. The interviews included some he did in the summer of 1966 in Bloomington, Illinois, with Stevenson’s family and friends. These were especially important because Martin believed nobody could understand Stevenson unless they understood the town where he grew up. “It was there that I discovered that Stevenson’s childhood, far from the happy time usually pictured, had been a horror,” said Martin, including a tragedy in which Stevenson accidentally killed a young friend with a rifle.
 
In the fall of 1966 Martin and his family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and it was there that he realized the “generous” royalty advance, which he had invested “for my future,” and research grant he had received from Doubleday would not be enough to finish the book (Martin had originally estimated it would take him three years to write; it ended up taking a decade to accomplish).
 
Looking for supplementary income (he estimated it would cost him $30,000 more in research funds to complete the Stevenson biography), Martin thought of writing once again for the national magazine market, writing Olding that he did not mind borrowing “more money from the bank to carry expenses if there seems a good chance of writing pieces that will sell for enough to repay the loans and keep me going.” Martin, however, had the good fortune to receive a one-year appointment as a visiting professor in public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “After that, Arthur Schlesinger had me appointed visiting professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he himself now taught,” said Martin. He commuted to CUNY from Princeton to teach his seminar, which dealt with the limits of American power in foreign policy.
 
When he began his work on the book, Martin expected it should take him three years to finish. It took him far longer than that because of the great volume of material he had uncovered about Stevenson. “I have to say that I came away from the whole exercise admiring him more than I had when I began,” Martin said of his subject. “I always knew he had political courage—I was with him when he attacked [U.S. Senator Joseph] McCarthy and President [Dwight] Eisenhower wouldn’t,” said Martin. “But I didn’t know how miserable, how horrible his private life had been. I learned he also had private courage.”
 
Stevenson had to deal with a sometimes traumatic childhood, “a foolish father, a pretentious and suffocating mother, a domineering older sister, a disastrous marriage, and, despite all the friends and comings and goings, an essentially lonely life,” Martin said. His subject never complained about these hardships, assuming, Martin noted, that a person’s private life was supposed to be torture.
 
On June 5, 1970, Martin, who averaged writing fifty pages a day, finally finished the rough draft of his manuscript, which ran more than 16,000 pages and contained some two and a half million words. “I write a long, awkward—and lousy—rough draft,” Martin noted. “It’s simply an attempt to get facts down in some order.” For the next year and a half, he spent his time in cutting and rewriting the manuscript into a semifinal draft of approximately 3,200 pages, or nearly a million words.
 
Martin spent another three years clearing the manuscript with people he had promised to show it to in return for their cooperation (among them George Ball, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore White, Jane Dick, and Newton Minow), and obtaining clearances for quotations from letters other people had written to Stevenson, including such important figures in his life as Jacob Avery, Agnes Meyer, Carl McGowan, Dore Schary, Wilson Wyatt, Louis Kohn, John Kenneth Galbraith, and many others.
 

Although some biographers paraphrase letters written to their subject in an attempt to avoid the trouble of seeking permissions, Martin wanted to include verbatim quotes from the letters, especially those from Stevenson’s female admirers, in order “to preserve the flavor of their friendships.” 

Final approval also had to be obtained through negotiations with Stevenson’s eldest son, Adlai III—meetings that included Minow as potential arbiter, and sometimes included Martin’s editors from Doubleday, Samuel S. Vaughan and Ken McCormick. There were times when Martin lost his patience and wondered if he was in danger of writing a book by committee. “If we make this Stevenson book so that it pleases everybody,” Martin wrote his agent Dorothy Olding, “we will not have a book worth reading.”
 
The storm passed, however, and Martin believed he had endured the troubles for a good cause. “He [Adlai III] raised numerous objections, but we never were forced to arbitration,” Martin said. Most of the younger Stevenson’s protests involved the book’s explorations of his father’s relations with his female friends, some ill-timed statements Stevenson had uttered about Jews, and his feelings about African Americans. “I must say I thought young Adlai behaved well; I am not sure I would want to read a candid biography of my own father,” Martin said. “In any case, he did not gut the book, nor did I falsify it.”
 
When he wrote the rough draft, Martin had, he confessed, been too keenly aware of his status as a Stevenson partisan, and, consequently, to be objective, “had been hypercritical of him,” focusing too much attention on his subject’s flaws and weaknesses. This caused a reader of one of the drafts to tell Vaughan that he believed the author did not like his subject. Adlai III’s critical comments and suggestions for changes, which were adopted in the final draft, helped to restore balance to the book, Martin said. It had not always been possible to unravel all the complexities of Stevenson’s life in writing the biography of this “sometimes ambiguous man,” but Martin believed he had answered all the important questions.
 
The manuscript for the Stevenson biography proved to be too long to publish in one book, so Doubleday released the book in two volumes: Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (1976), covering his life from birth to his first presidential campaign in 1952, and Adlai Stevenson and the World (1977), exploring Stevenson’s career after the 1952 campaign up until his death in 1965 and published just twenty-five years after Martin had first met him; together the books became known as The Life of Adlai Stevenson.
 
No stranger to biography, Schlesinger praised the books as “superb” and complimented his former speechwriting partner for his ability to combine “affection, insight, and objectivity” into what he regarded as “one of the greatest American political biographies of the [twentieth] century.” Taken in full, the more than 1,600 pages produced by Martin represented, noted Jeff Broadwater, a subsequent Stevenson biographer, one of the “most impressive pieces of detective work in the history of American biography,” an opinion, with some reservations about the books’ relentless amount of detail, that was shared by many other reviewers. 

As John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his review of the first volume in the New York Times Book Review, Martin had been able to organize the vast amount of material on Stevenson into “a far more coherent and interesting story than anyone would think possible. Some writers take many words to say little; John Bartlow Martin takes many words, but fewer than would be supposed, to say everything.” There was no malice or meanness of thought in the book, and Galbraith said that Martin never allowed his friendship with Stevenson to affect his narrative.
 
Although not always flattering to a man Martin unabashedly considered to be one of his heroes, the books represented an honest and unflinching look at one of the leading U.S. politicians and statesmen of the twentieth century. The striking and rigorously documented biography demonstrated to all who read it that Stevenson’s polished speeches, his candor, and his forthrightness had worked together to elevate the tone of America’s politics, according to a review in Time magazine. “He [Stevenson] set a standard that later presidential aspirants have yet to match,” the reviewer for Time concluded. Martin’s former hometown newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, gave him the highest compliment a biographer could receive when its reviewer noted, “After reading Martin’s book, one can say with some degree of satisfaction that he knows Adlai Stevenson—knows him, in fact, about as well as he could have been known as a living person.”
 
Martin had started work on the Stevenson biography while still in his fifties—a time, he said, when a person is expected to earn his highest income and do his most important work. He spent this vital period of his life immersed in writing about Stevenson, and never had any regrets about his decision. “I’ve heard it said that some writers who spend so long on a biography become bored with their subject, or, worse, come to resent him for taking so much of their lives to write his,” said Martin. “Luckily I escaped both infections.”
 
After the dissatisfaction he had experienced while working as a speechwriter for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Martin had been inspired in writing his book by the pleasant memories of his days with Stevenson during the Illinois governor’s 1952 run for the presidency, marked as it was by “a sort of ebullience, a freshness, a verve” not seen since in politics. Stevenson took politics “out of the gutter,” Martin said, and believed it to be “a high calling, and that showed through in the way he handled himself as a politican. I think that was the thing that attracted all of us to him in the first place.”
 
Martin’s experience with the Stevenson biography had its setbacks. Both volumes were “widely and favorably reviewed,” but sales were only modest, Martin noted. He also shared Fran’s disappointment that neither volume won a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award. Martin came to believe that if he had written the biography fast and it had been published in one volume shortly after Stevenson’s death, it probably would have become a best-seller and won at least one major honor. “On the other hand,” Martin said, “it would have been a very different book.”
 
The enormous amount of documentation he uncovered contributed to the biography’s length, but it did not overwhelm him, Martin said. He always tried to remember that he, alone, had complete access to all of Stevenson’s papers and he owed an obligation to history to provide a complete view of the former governor’s life. “Adlai Stevenson was one of the most important figures in my life,” Martin said. “In life, he gave me a great deal, and I like to think I helped him.”