fortuitous circumstances...................

 

In the spring of 1946, when Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. resigned as head of the American delegation to the UN, Hermon Dunlap Smith, Stevenson's longtime friend, launched a campaign to secure the post for him.  Since Truman promptly appointed Warren Austin to the job, that effort came too late, but the manner in which it was begin is of some interest.  "The group I was able to approach," Smith wrote in a memoir of his late friend, "was augmented by the fortuitous circumstance of my going east to my twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, where, in t he locker room of the Essex Country Club, I solicited the support of three classmates who represented an incredible combined circulation and influence: Roy Larsen, executive of Time, Life, and Fortune; John Cowles, of the Cowles newspaper family; and Ralph Henderson of Reader's Digest."  This is not what the boys at ward headquarters would call grassroots support.

-Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography, Adlai Stevenson