S and K
Adlai Stevenson may have managed to create an issue between the parties. He did it by taking a distinctive line on foreign policy and by persuading much of the Democratic leadership to follow his lead. In the early days of the crisis, at the Conference on World Tensions in Chicago, he called for an end of “ideologies” and a fusion of the free and Communist worlds in a “human city.” The day Khrushchev blew up the Summit, Stevenson volunteered that the U-2 incident had given the Kremlin “no choice but to protest.” The day after K had defamed America at the Paris press conference and repeated that he would deal only with a more congenial U.S. government, S accused the present U.S. government of giving the Kremlin the tools to wreck the conference. It seemed for a while that Mr. Stevenson—at least among Americans—might stand alone on his strange platform. Then, one by one, such party leaders as Humphrey, Symington, Kennedy, Williams and Mansfield gathered at or close to his side. By week’s end, the left-wing-dominated Democratic Advisory Council had declared it a Party Matter. Because the Administration permitted the Summit meeting to collapse, the Council said “the Eisenhower-Nixon foreign policy is in shambles.”




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