MR NIXON’S CAMPAIGNS

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27961, 7 May 1956, Page 13

MR NIXON’S CAMPAIGNS

Charges By Mr Stevenson (Rec. 9 p.m.) LOS ANGELES. May 5. Mr Adlai Stevenson yesterday accused Vice-President Richard Nixon of ‘‘poisoning” four election campaigns. Mr Stevenson, candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, fired the broadside in Mr Nixon’s home area of California. He also accused the Vice-President of “irresponsibility” in his statements on foreign affairs. Mr Stevenson read his statement on Mr Nixon to a press conference a few minutes after he returned to California to resume his campaigning for the State’s 68 delegates in the June 5 primary election. “The principal measure of man’s qualifications for high office in a democracy is his basic sense of responsibility,” Mr Stevenson said. “Mr Nixon has shown, in my opinion, manifest irresponsibility. “He has poisoned four successive election campaigns. He talks little about the issues. He slanders and impugns the loyalties and even the motives of those who oppose him. “That distasteful technique has worked three times. It did not work in 1954 and it will not work again in 1956.” lie said. Mr Stevenson apparently referred to Mr Nixon’s Congressional campaign, his Senatorial campaign against a former member of the House of Representatives. Mrs Helen Gahagan Douglas, and the 1952 Presidential contest as the occasions when Mr Nixon’s “technique worked.” Mr Stevenson cited as an example of Mr Nixon’s “irresponsibility” his statement on April 17, 1954, that the United States should send troops to Indo-China. Mr Stevenson said that within a few days Mr Nixon was saying “the opposite to people around the world.”

Mr Stevenson cited as the latest example of “irresponsibility” Mr Nixon’s claim that the Supreme Court’s ruling on school desegregation was a Republican triumph. He called that “a grievous affront, not only to the nation and the Supreme Court, but to another Californian, Chief Justice Earl Warren.”