The Prince Who Could Not Act: Adlai Stevenson, Tiresias, and the Tragedy of the Superior Mind

There is a peculiar species of political tragedy that does not fit comfortably within the categories American culture generally makes available for understanding defeat. We have the tragic hero brought down by a single fatal flaw, the Shakespearean model, and we have the good man destroyed by circumstance, the model preferred by those who wish to salvage something consoling from a life that ended badly. Adlai Ewing Stevenson II fits neither category with any precision, and the discomfort of that ill-fit is, I think, where the real interest of his story begins. He was not destroyed by a fatal flaw, at least not in the usual sense, and he was not simply a victim of bad timing or hostile circumstance. He was, rather, a man whose very qualities constituted his undoing; whose intelligence, honesty, and self-awareness were simultaneously the things that made him worth caring about and the things that made it impossible for the electorate to choose him. That is a rarer and more interesting form of tragedy than the ones we are accustomed to, and it deserves a more searching examination than the historical record has generally provided.

Stevenson has been fading from American political memory at a rate that would have surprised the people who mourned his passing in 1965, and who believed, with considerable justification, that they were mourning something more than a man. He was twice the Democratic nominee for president, in 1952 and 1956, and twice he was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower in circumstances that felt, to his admirers, less like ordinary electoral politics than like a referendum on whether the American electorate was capable of choosing wisdom over reassurance. He served as Ambassador to the United Nations under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, a posting that satisfied neither his ambitions nor his considerable abilities, and he died at his post in London in July of 1965, having spent the last years of his life in a role he had not sought and could not fully inhabit. The obituaries were generous. The historical neglect that followed was perhaps not surprising, but it is worth examining.

To understand why Stevenson matters, it is necessary to understand what he was, which requires saying something about what American political culture in the 1950s was and what it demanded of the people who sought to lead it. The decade has acquired, in retrospect, a reputation for comfortable consensus, for the placid satisfaction of a country that had won a great war and was now enjoying the material rewards of victory. That reputation is not entirely wrong, but it conceals the degree to which the consensus was purchased at a specific price: the suppression of complexity, the reward of simplicity, the elevation of the reassuring gesture over the honest assessment. Eisenhower was, in many respects, genuinely admirable; he was also the perfect political figure for a culture that had decided, after the traumas of depression and war, that it deserved a rest from difficult thinking. Stevenson was constitutionally incapable of providing that rest, and his career is in large part the story of a man who kept offering the country something it had already decided it did not want.

The Hamlet parallel announces itself almost immediately when one begins reading seriously about Stevenson, which is part of what makes it both irresistible and slightly treacherous. Hamlet is the figure of Western literature most thoroughly associated with the paralysis of the over-refined mind, the consciousness so aware of its own complexity, so capable of seeing every side of every question, that decisive action becomes nearly impossible; and Stevenson's political career exhibits this quality with a fidelity that is almost literary in its precision. He agonized over his decision to seek the presidency in 1952 in ways that struck his supporters as maddening and his opponents as disqualifying. He was capable of producing, in a single speech, a joke that delighted intellectuals and an honest admission of uncertainty that terrified campaign managers. He revised his positions not out of political calculation but out of genuine intellectual restlessness, because he actually changed his mind when the evidence warranted it, a habit that democratic politics has never found particularly useful and that the electorate of the 1950s found actively alarming.

There is a famous story, perhaps apocryphal in its details but true in its essence, of a supporter who approached Stevenson after a particularly brilliant campaign speech and told him that every thinking person in America would vote for him. Stevenson's reported response, that he was afraid that would not be quite enough, has been repeated so often that it has acquired the quality of legend; and indeed it has the shape of legend, the compressed wisdom of a man who understood his own situation with painful clarity. That understanding is precisely where the Hamlet analogy begins to strain, because Hamlet does not understand his situation with clarity. Hamlet's problem is excess of reflection leading to paralysis; he thinks too much about acting and therefore cannot act. Stevenson's problem was different in a way that matters. He thought clearly, saw accurately, spoke honestly, and acted, in the sense of running for office and making his case; the tragedy was that the culture around him was incapable of receiving what he was offering, which is a different and in some ways darker situation than the one Hamlet inhabits.

This is where Tiresias enters the story, and why I find the Theban prophet a more precise and ultimately more illuminating frame for Stevenson's career than the Danish prince. Tiresias, in the various traditions that accumulated around him across centuries of Greek literature, is the figure of complete prophetic clarity; he sees what is happening and what will happen, he says so with unmistakable directness, and he is either disbelieved or believed too late or believed by people who lack the power or the will to act on what he has told them. In the Oedipus, he tells the king exactly what the investigation will reveal, is accused of conspiracy and political manipulation, and withdraws; the truth he spoke arrives on its own schedule regardless. In the Antigone he tells Creon that the city is spiritually polluted by the unburied dead, that the gods are turning against Thebes, that the king must reverse himself while there is still time; Creon temporizes, as powerful men do, and the consequences Tiresias described arrive with the inevitability of everything he has ever predicted. Tiresias is not paralyzed. He is simply not believed, or believed at the wrong moment, and the curse of his clarity is that he must watch the catastrophes he described unfold exactly as he said they would.

The application to Stevenson requires some care, because Stevenson was not a prophet in any supernatural sense and the historical record does not offer the clean causal lines that tragedy demands. What it does offer is a series of moments in which Stevenson said things that were accurate and important and were received with the particular mixture of appreciation and dismissal that the politically inconvenient truth tends to generate. He understood, earlier and more clearly than most of his contemporaries, that the Cold War consensus was producing a national security apparatus whose long-term implications for democratic governance were genuinely troubling. He raised questions about nuclear testing in the 1956 campaign that were treated as naive and dangerous by his opponents and as politically suicidal by his own advisers, and that the subsequent history of radiation research has largely vindicated. He spoke about poverty and racial inequality and the limits of American prosperity with a specificity and a seriousness that the comfortable consensus of the Eisenhower years found deeply unwelcome. He was appreciated, celebrated even, in the way that serious people are appreciated when what they are saying can be admired without being acted upon; and he was set aside when the setting aside became necessary.

The Kennedy episode is perhaps the most painful chapter in the Stevenson story, and it is the chapter that most clearly illuminates the Tiresias dimension of his tragedy. Stevenson wanted the presidency in 1960, or wanted it in the way that a man who has twice been its nominee and has spent eight years as the pre-eminent figure of his party's intellectual wing is entitled to want it; and what he received instead was a demonstration of how thoroughly the Democratic Party had moved on from what he represented. Kennedy was, in many respects, Stevenson's heir, drawing on the same coalition of liberal intellectuals and urban professionals, using a rhetorical sophistication that owed something to the standard Stevenson had set; and Kennedy was also, in a way that Stevenson understood with characteristic clarity, precisely the figure whose emergence made Stevenson's own moment definitively past. The glamour, the youth, the forward momentum, the studied avoidance of the kind of melancholy self-awareness that had always marked Stevenson's public persona; all of these things were what the party and the country wanted in 1960, and Stevenson, watching from the wings at the Los Angeles convention, knew it.

He was offered the United Nations ambassadorship with the implicit understanding that it was a consolation prize of considerable prestige and limited actual influence, and he accepted it with a dignity that his admirers found admirable and his more cynical observers found slightly heartbreaking. The role suited him in some respects; he was a genuinely gifted diplomat, multilingual in his sympathies, comfortable with the kind of patient multilateral negotiation that American unilateralists have always found frustrating, and he brought to Turtle Hill a seriousness of purpose that the position had not always attracted. It did not suit him in the sense that matters most, which is that he was effectively removed from the center of American foreign policy decision-making at precisely the moment when the decisions being made were the ones he had spent his career preparing himself to influence.

The Bay of Pigs is the episode that crystallizes this displacement most painfully. Stevenson was sent before the United Nations to deny American involvement in the invasion of Cuba on the basis of information he had been given by the Kennedy administration, information that was false, and he did so with the conviction of a man who had not been told the truth by the people he served. When the truth emerged, as it did almost immediately, Stevenson was left having made the case for a policy he had not been consulted on, having defended an operation he would have opposed had he known of it, having traded on the personal credibility he had spent a career building in order to advance an enterprise that embodied everything he believed American foreign policy should not be. He was, in that moment, Tiresias in the most complete sense: a man of genuine prophetic clarity reduced to mouthpiece for the very failures he had warned against, his voice borrowed for purposes that dishonored what his voice had always stood for.

There is a quality to Stevenson's intelligence that the historical record captures only imperfectly, which is its peculiar combination of breadth and melancholy. He was genuinely funny, in the way that only people who have thought seriously about the absurdity of human affairs tend to be funny; his speeches contained jokes that worked as jokes rather than as the performed approximations of humor that political speechmaking usually produces. He was also genuinely sad, in a way that his public persona mostly contained but never entirely suppressed, sad about the state of public discourse, sad about the gap between what democratic politics could theoretically be and what it actually was, sad, one suspects, about his own repeated failure to close that gap. The combination was unusual in American political life, where the acceptable emotional register runs from cheerful confidence to righteous indignation with very little room for anything more complex; and it may be that this combination, as much as any specific policy position or political miscalculation, is what ultimately made him unelectable.

The American electorate has historically been suspicious of visible intelligence in its political leaders, a suspicion that is not simply anti-intellectualism, though it contains elements of that, but also a reasonable inference from the observation that intelligent people are often wrong in interesting ways while less reflective people are sometimes right in boring ones. Eisenhower's greatness, such as it was, rested partly on a kind of practical wisdom that had very little to do with the kind of intelligence Stevenson possessed; Eisenhower knew how to manage large organizations, how to hold coalitions together, how to present a reassuring face to a public that wanted reassurance, and these are genuinely valuable skills that Stevenson's admirers were sometimes too quick to dismiss. The truth of the matter is that what the country needed in 1952 and 1956 is a more open question than Stevenson's supporters have generally been willing to entertain, and the honest examination of his career requires acknowledging that the electorate's rejection of him was not simply a failure of democratic discernment.

And yet. The question that persists, and that gives the Stevenson story its lasting resonance, is what was lost when the country chose as it did; what the Democratic Party lost when it moved toward Kennedy's forward glamour and away from Stevenson's backward-looking seriousness; what American political culture lost when it decided, in those two elections and in the decade that followed, that the kind of intelligence Stevenson represented was not quite what the moment required. The answer is not simple, because Stevenson was not simple, and the counterfactual history in which he wins in 1952 or 1956 is not obviously a history in which things go better. He might have been a genuinely great president, or he might have been paralyzed by the same qualities that made him a genuinely great candidate; history does not allow us to know. What we can say is that the tradition he represented, the tradition of democratic politics as genuine intellectual engagement, of public life as a space for honest complexity rather than performed certainty, was diminished by his defeats in ways that have not been fully recovered.

Tiresias, in the Oedipus, withdraws after delivering his prophecy. He has said what he came to say; whether it is believed is no longer his responsibility, and the consequences of disbelief will arrive on their own schedule regardless of anything he does afterward. There is something of that withdrawal in Stevenson's later years, the sense of a man who had made his case as fully as he knew how to make it and was now simply watching the consequences of its rejection unfold. He remained engaged, remained articulate, remained the figure that serious people in the Democratic Party turned to when they wanted a certain kind of gravity and historical perspective; but the center of political energy had moved, as it always does, toward youth and forward motion and the confident assertion that the future was manageable, and Stevenson was no longer at that center.

He died in London on a July afternoon in 1965, having collapsed on a street in Mayfair while walking with a friend. He was sixty-five years old. The eulogies were considerable and the mourning was genuine, particularly among the writers and intellectuals who had found in his candidacies something they had not often found in American political life, the sense that public discourse could be conducted at a level adequate to the complexity of the problems it was addressing. Jacqueline Kennedy, who understood this dimension of American political culture with unusual clarity, said of him that he had educated a generation; and that is, perhaps, the most honest epitaph available for a man whose greatest contributions were made not through the exercise of power but through the demonstration of what political intelligence, at its best, could look like.

The Hamlet reading and the Tiresias reading of Stevenson's career point, in the end, toward the same territory from different directions. Hamlet is how Stevenson experienced himself, one suspects: the man who saw too clearly, qualified too honestly, and could not perform the simplified certainty that political success required. Tiresias is how history allows us to see him now: the figure who was right about things that mattered, who said so in terms that were not unclear, and who was appreciated and set aside and vindicated too late for the vindication to be of any use to him. The gap between those two readings is itself a kind of argument, an argument about the difference between a life as it is lived from the inside, with all its hesitations and self-awareness and private reckoning, and a life as it appears from the outside, in the retrospective clarity that only time and distance can provide.

There is a further dimension to the Tiresias parallel that deserves a moment's attention before this essay closes. Tiresias, in the tradition, is blind; his prophetic sight comes at the cost of ordinary vision, and he moves through the world dependent on a guide, seeing everything except what is directly in front of him. Stevenson was not blind in any comparable sense, but there is something in his career that rhymes with that image: a man who could see the large contours of history with unusual clarity and who was, simultaneously, unable to see himself with the same clarity, unable to understand fully why the gifts that seemed to him most valuable were the ones that the voters found most difficult to embrace. He knew, in the abstract, that he was too complex for the political culture he inhabited; he could analyze that complexity with the same intelligence he brought to everything else; and yet he kept running, kept believing that the electorate might this time be ready to receive what he was offering, in a way that suggests the self-knowledge was incomplete in some crucial respect. Tiresias sees what he sees and says what he says and does not expect to be believed. Stevenson kept expecting to be believed, kept being surprised when he was not, and that expectation, that persistent faith in the democratic capacity for serious engagement, was both his most admirable quality and, in the end, the quality that made the tragedy complete.