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Adlai's frustration: who wants to hear about ideas?

ADLAI E. Stevenson III brought with him to the U.S. Senate something few of his colleagues possessed: a name already known round the world. By most standards, his service in the most media-saturated of all capitals has been of superior quality. He has been a good senator for Illinois.

Despite these advantages, his relations with the news media in Washington and in Illinois have been a constant frustration. His stiff, frumpy image and his inability to command media attention or to communicate effectively when he does were as responsible as any other single factor for his decision not to run for reelection next year.

Long before the energy crisis was the topic-of-the-month, Stevenson was discussing possible solutions without deigning to oversimplify what are very complicated issues. Most of the time he found himself talking into a rain barrel.

"His problem," says the senator's press aide Hal Levy, "is that he tries to deal in ideas. That isn't easy in this era of the 10-second film clip on television news." The practice in Washington is for television crews to summon selected senators for filmed interviews at the Capitol. This happened often to Stevenson. But rarely were the editors able to pick out of the five or ten minutes of film the succinct 10-second segment that could be fused into the news show. Little of Stevenson made it onto the air. "He's one of those rare guys who talks in complete sentences," Levy explains, "Some of them rather complex sentences. He is not given to the catchy phrase."

"When he comes to Springfield his press conferences are more like lectures," says Mike Lawrence of the Quad City Times. "When it's over you have a vague feeling that something important had been said, but for the life of you you can't put your finger on what is was."

This tendency to wander off into conceivably profound but eminently unquotable remarks lay at the heart of Stevenson's media problems. Customarily, when he thought he had something important to say in Washington, he would hold a press conference and tick off his points with lawyerlike thoroughness. Sensing the futility of trying to melt that down into something they or their audience could grasp, the reporters usually threw in some political questions of their own -- familiar stuff that was both easy to interpret and more likely to get in the paper or on the air. "He's very intelligent," remarks Arthur Siddon, a congressional reporter for the Chicago Tribune. "But he tends to pick nonsexy subjects and sometimes he hardly makes any sense trying to get his thoughts across."

As night follows day, such notoriety brought an invitation to the Godfrey Sperling breakfast, the early morning gathering of the pencil press elite named after its organizer, the bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor. Stevenson thought it amusing that the only way he qualified for such high-level attention was by "saying something outrageous." He cooperated, nonetheless, calling Carter "embarrassingly weak" and the White House staff a "bunch of bush-leaguers." Outbursts like that are routinely attributed by cynical reporters to patronage disappointments. What the performance was, most of all, was out of character. Levy says the senator knew it and quickly regretted his remarks.

It is not easy to "personalize" a report about fuel reserves — and that's where it's at today in the news business. Readership studies tell editors that newspapers are considered too impersonal, too removed from the everyday lives of their readers.

Stevenson's experience suggests that an elected official who is unwilling or unable to undergo a charisma transplant will have trouble living with personalized journalism. Crowded in among the celebrity trivia, the outlandish activities of media "figures," and the tantalizing revelations of scandal, the ideas of an Adlai Stevenson will not often be given front page attention or prime time exposure.

August 1979 / Illinois Issues / 34