The Long-Distance Runner
From MURRAY KEMPTON UNITED NATIONS, NY N old inhabitant has observed that many
A
riambassadors to the United Nations are there for no better reason than for having been inconveniences at home.
! Adlai E. Stevenson, lodged though he is just
across the street from his own country, must ; often feel the sense of exile so common among
his colleagues. President Kennedy sent Mr. Stevenson here after rejecting him for Secretary of State. This adverse decision reflected, but only in part, the President's assurance that he was young and bnld and Mr. Stevenson weary and uncertain. This verdict cannot conceal a difference far deeper, more personal and essentially unchange- able by act or word of Stevenson's. For Ambassador Stevenson has to be the one adviser Mr. Kennedy has who never yields to the temptation to anoint him with oil. Mr. Stevenson would very much like to have been President himself; he observes Mr. Kennedy's Performance with the wary approval of an uncle casting his eyes upon a nephew. They argue almost as equals argue. Mr. Stevenson gives the President high marks for energy and concen- tration. But he wonders why Mr. Kennedy is so sensitive about his popularity, so obsessed with What the newspapers say about him, and so eoacerned with the appeasement of hostile domestic elements.
These are the observations of elder to junior. If not the President, certainly his incense-bearers !IS1 Washington think of Mr. Stevenson as an indecisive man; it is strange, remembering this judgment, to notice that Mr. Stevenson's first complaint about Mr. Kennedy as President was that be wanted self-confidence, and Mr. Steven- son's greatest encouragement has been his obser- vation that the President is developing it. Mr. Stevenson talks to the President with what Scott Fitzgerald called the authority of failure, which is no less consequential because it rates low with political realists. He has twice lost ational campaigns for the Presidency; and he a tbles with a man who seems likely to win as 111_ any as the Constitution permits him. But the rexPerience of defeat has had its uses. No man as endured bombardment by more dead cats Oflt , _ver the last decade; Mr. Stevenson has come tlew to treat those instant historians who con- „lue to pursue him with entire personal in- ,J,I.Lierence. His spirits are raised no higher by a hostile press than they are cast down by a liaostile 0,..e. u Two weeks ago, the Saturday Even- i_ng Post accused him of having wanted a Munich ” Cuba; last week, the Luce magazines, after tyeears f'1- P Contumely, rose suddenly to his de- fence. . lice- Mr. Stevenson was not gratified. 'They're F Just after Kennedy,' he said. 1 The President did not want to see Mr. Steven- Still,the slow way he respond to the newest attack on his ambassa- dor indicated a tolerance which, if it could not be ; 4 said to approve, certainly half-enjoyed. But , failed to have been an enjoyment which entirely Eed to understand its target; petty humiliation has as come, with time to be the lightest of the
wounds to which life can subject Adlai Stevenson.
He must, by now, be resigned to winning the arguments and losing the conversations after- wards. He won the argument over Cuba; now the most conspicuous, if least profound, judg- ment offered in journalism is that he was an appeaser, whose advice, if taken, would have meant capitulation. The United States must be the first nation ever to win a victory, and then search for a peace criminal. Yet whatever his- tory of these events we have insists that Mr. Stevenson's advice was that the President keep the door open to the Organisation of American States, defer an air invasion of Cuba until there was no other course, and, in firmness, be flexible with Chairman Khrushchev.
That is precisely what the President did. In that delicate week, he had to resist the intem- perance of other advisers who wanted, not just to render Castro inoperative as a potential ag- gressor, but to destroy him as a force of dark- ness. The Central Intelligence Agency is a focus of these elements; and the best evidence indi- cates that the most damaging words about Stevenson came, if not from John McCone, its director, at least from a subordinate who echoed Mr. McCone's frustrations as a holy warrior. The target in person was Ambassador Stevenson; the target in history seems to have been the settled foreign policy of the United States.
In a recent conversation with the President, Mr. Stevenson is said to have touched on the subject of his troubles with that particular de- tachment from personal intimacy which charac- terises their relationship. He had, Stevenson said, listened with patience to these administra- tion advisers who were for an immediate strike against Cuba. He did not, he said, agree with their advice, but he had considered it, under then existing circumstances, a defensible one. But now, after the attacks on him, he wondered just what these people had wanted then and might want still. The most important lesson he could offer the President from this incident was that it would be perilous to disregard the existence of a war party.
But, whatever Mr. Stevenson's fears, the record persuades that he holds the ascendancy in every important feeling of the President's except his affection. And Mr. Stevenson does not expect that affection; he is, after all, not merely Mr. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, but its ambassador back to a United States whose general attitude towards the UN alternates be- tween dependence and distrust. Mr. Kennedy's heart still misses the national sovereignty whose diminution his head long ago conceded. It is not an easy thing to be President of the most power- ful nation alive and always to have to remember the opinion of Mr. Sekou Toure. Mr. Steven- son comes to him embodying all the com- plexities, unsatisfiable demands and petty annoy- ances inevitable with acceptance of the claims of a human family; and, because Mr. Stevenson comes boldly, there can never be real affection between them.
The hards blame Mr. Stevenson essentially
for what Mr. Kennedy has done; the President could hardly fail to blame Mr. Stevenson for some of what he has had to do. Still, the result has been what Mr. Stevenson has wanted in the main; his own summary of the last two years' performance of the United States delegation here is full of reminders of his own pressure on the President: 'Mr. Kennedy, at our insistence, has been closer to the United Nations than any President before him.' We have kept the ad- ministration's nose to the line on the Congo.'
He seems likely to sit in this lonely outpost he established two years ago through whatever future an ordinary man can predict. What is important to him now is the ultimate lesson men can learn from their disasters: what counts is that you are heard, not that you are loved.
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