The Road to Springfield

Abstract

I have stood in awe and been moved down deep in my soul by the music of great symphonies, by Carl Sandburg reciting some of his beautiful poetry with deep-voice inflections, before some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces in Italy, by the sheer beauty of Yosemite Park in California, and the breathtaking majesty of the world’s great cathedrals; yet, I have heard no one who could use the English language to such perfection as Adlai Stevenson (only Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, in the recent past, were comparable).

Donald C. Campbell was employed by the General Electric Co. as an employee and public and government relations manager after graduation from Northwestern University and working on the Stevenson campaign in 1948, service in the Army as head of the central news agency, and a period with the International News Service. He had many special assignments at GE, during which he came to know future and past Presidents Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover. He retired from the company in 1987 and since has been a consultant to a number of major firms, board chairman of a Portsmouth Veterans Affairs hospital and member of several foundation boards. The pages that follow about the Stevenson years after 1935, with his permission, are taken from columns he wrote in the Ohio Ashland Times-Gazette (1952).