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His main group of speech writers is quartered in Springfield (on the third floor of the Elks Club). Head of the speech writers is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian, Harvard professor, onetime vice president of the A.D.A., and apologist for Dean Acheson. All speeches, in fact almost all information intended for Stevenson, clear through Carl McGowan, Northwestern University law professor, who is Stevenson's closest adviser. Stevenson headquarters also receives memoranda and phrases from such professionals as Poet Archibald MacLeish, Playwright Robert E. Sherwood, Samuel I. Rosenman, Authors Eric Hodgins and Bernard De Voto.
However, Stevenson's is the guiding and the finishing hand in the composition of his speeches. None of his staff doubts that Stevenson is a better speechwriter than any of his writers.
Good Governor. Stevenson's record as governor has hardly entered the campaign. It was, in most respects, an excellent record. He improved highways, got additional millions for schools, improved social-welfare services (especially in state mental institutions) and put the state-highway police on a nonpartisan basis. The record was marred by two scandals: the counterfeiting of cigarette stamps in the state revenue department and the bribery of state officials who permitted horse meat to be sold for hamburger ("Adlaiburgers," the Chicago Tribune hastened to call them). Six state employees were indicted for bribery and malfeasance in the horsemeat scandal; in the counterfeiting case there were no indictments, but three state employees were dismissed because they refused to take a lie-detector test.
He has himself cited his record as governor to support his argument that he can deal with corruption; he tells audiences that he knows about corruption because he followed "eight years of magnificent Republican rascality." He has never so much as slapped the wrist of the Cook County Democratic organization, the most corrupt and powerful of existing big-city machines, but he was not, like Truman, a machine-made man.
The Hiss Case. One other act of Stevenson's as governor was lugged into the campaign last fortnight by Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for Vice President: Stevenson's deposition as a character witness for Alger Hiss. Stevenson first met Hiss in 1933 as a young lawyer in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Washington, where, as he has said, "our contact was frequent but not close." He was with Hiss again at the first United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945, at a U.N. session in London early in 1946, when he and Hiss had "offices near by each other and met frequently at delegation meetings and staff conferences," and at the U.N. session in New York in 1947. On June 2, 1949, two days after the first Hiss trial began in New York, Stevenson testified before a United States commissioner in Springfield that Hiss's reputation for integrity, loyalty and veracity "is good."