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His speech—elaborately phrased, rich with allusions—sounds like another language amid the staccato din of the New Frontier's verbal shorthand. With his ironic, self-deprecating wit, he often appears to be some misplaced elfin uncle among the intense young men who laugh at their well-worn house jokes only rarely—and hardly ever at themselves.
A lonely man, he seems even lonelier in the forced togetherness of New Frontier society. In a group that sees conversation as a necessary delay between acts, he relishes talk for its own sake. In a group that venerates the quick decision, he is a ponderer. He remains an introspective man among the professionally outgoing, a paunchy tennis player in the midst of a touch-football squad, an elder statesman in a society whose main concession to age is to switch the oldtimer from pass-catching end to blocking back.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 62, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, is the very antithesis of the New Frontiersman. Two years a member of a team, he was never a member of the club. And it was the difference between Stevenson and most of his colleagues, the conflict between his ways and theirs, the obvious fact that Jack Kennedy would not be exactly brokenhearted to see Adlai go home to Illinois, that last week placed Stevenson in the biggest, noisiest family fight so far during the Kennedy Administration.
A. Munich? Like so many family fights, it was over a silly issue—a three-page article in the Saturday Evening Post. Time was when the Post was known for homey cover pictures and short stories in which boy and girl always managed to meet, spat, resolve their differences and legally wed within 2,500 words. Now the Post goes in for hurry-up, behind-the-scenes exposés—such as last week's "In Time of Crisis," a panting account of the Cuban confrontation by Charles Bartlett, Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times, and Stewart Alsop, the Post's Washington editor.
The Bartlett-Alsop piece was notable for only one thing: it charged that Stevenson, alone among the President's advisers, dissented from the firm-action consensus on Cuba, that only Adlai was willing to trade American bases abroad for the removal of the Soviet missiles. It quoted, an anonymous source as saying that Stevenson "wanted a Munich."