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Yet, after the Young Turks had been put down at the convention and the South had been placated, he got the nomination. In his acceptance speech he coined his own campaign slogan. "Let's talk sense to the American people," he said. "Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions ... The people are wise—wiser than the Republicans think." The speech made listening newspapermen, jaded with the stale insincerities of convention orators, look at each other: here was something different. What kind of campaign would a man like that make?
Time to Refresh? Excitement, enthusiasm and confusion greeted him when he returned to Springfield. He picked his own personal campaign manager: Wilson Watkins Wyatt, onetime president of the A.D.A. and onetime Fair Deal Housing Expediter, and made it clear that his campaign would be run from Springfield, not from Washington. He named a new chairman of the Democratic National Committee: Stephen Mitchell, a little-known Chicago lawyer who had been, like Stevenson and Wyatt, a Washington operator (a Washington name for smart young lawyers in Government bureaus). Stevenson held several press conferences, some of them on a not-for-attribution basis, to permit reporters to become acquainted with his current views. Some of them: he hadn't the "faintest idea" whether or not he would drop Dean Acheson as Secretary of State; he foresaw the day when East-West power will come into some kind of balance and it may become possible to negotiate with the Kremlin; and he bespoke his determination to put his "own stamp" on the campaign but acknowledged that he was for a "refreshened Fair Deal."
Can Stevenson refreshen the Fair Deal? Democrats of course say he can; Republicans of course say he can't. Wrote Harvard Professor McGeorge Bundy, collaborator on Henry Stimson's autobiography and editor of Secretary Acheson's papers, in the October Foreign Affairs: "Fatigue-and stalemate beset the groups on which Stevenson must rely. However much he himself may be a symbol of refreshing change, his party, and even his part of his party, are symbols of the status quo. Except where, it has had Republican help, the Administration has been stalemated for several years, both at home & abroad. The much-debated Fair Deal is still a set of paper promises, and in foreign affairs the great achievements of the last four years are precisely those of which General Eisenhower is a symbol (except for the defense of Korea, which is surely not a one-party triumph). Moreover, in the sham battles over the past which have so often passed for Great Debating in the last two years, roles have been set and lines of contest fixed in a way which might make it hard for Mr. Stevenson to fulfill his promise of a change in tone. His friends say that this is an easy task for a determined man with the White House as his base; his opponents will assert that the inertia of the loyal partisan is a most formidable force."