Walter Shapiro: The Real McCoy

Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

...Since the days when Mario Cuomo played Hamlet on the Hudson, political reporters have bristled with impatience whenever indecision stands in the way of presidential ambition. But there is scant evidence that voters share this enthusiasm for candidates who exude a lust for power that would make Richard Nixon envious. Dwight Eisenhower, the most reluctant elected president in more than a century, hit on an enduring truth when he told friends urging him to become an active candidate in 1952, “The seeker is never so popular as the sought. People want what they think they can’t have.”...

It was Stevenson (the egghead icon who made liberals and, yes, The New Republic swoon) who personified a stubborn refusal to stroll down the corridors of power. During the run-up to the Democratic convention, Stevenson acted as if his commitment to run for reelection as governor of Illinois was an unbreakable obligation on par with a pledge to donate a kidney. As Stevenson said in Oregon, after he refused to allow his name to be placed on that state’s primary ballot, “I don’t believe there has ever been a genuine draft of an unwilling man for the presidential nomination in either party.” His let-this-cup-pass-from-my-lips reluctance did little to prevent the delegates from going madly for Adlai as they put him over the top on the third ballot in Chicago....

In the end, American politics probably will never replicate anything like 1952’s march of the Reluctant Dragons. But looking back over the electoral choices in the television era, it does seem hard to equal the caliber of the two bald men—Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson—who had to be dragooned and drafted into running for the highest office in the land.