Smart and Lucky, but He Lost : ADLAI STEVENSON His Life and Legacy <i> by Porter McKeever (William Morrow: $25; 544 pp.) </i>

Counseling the precariously perched politicians of his age, Niccolo Machiavelli explained that their success depended upon two qualities: virtu and fortuna, or skill and opportunity. These ingredients are no less vital to success today. Where politicians must navigate an uncertain world of elections and others’ ambitions, none can succeed without a fair measure of both.

Some careers, of course, have been more endowed with opportunity than others. Walter Mondale bounded up the career ladder by being appointed to fill vacancies of unexpired terms. At the other extreme is Lyndon Johnson, who left little to chance. But without John Kennedy’s death, L.B.J. may never have succeeded in throwing off the yoke of being a Southern politician and winning the Democratic nomination on his own. The individual doses of virtu and fortuna that make each career unique offer a basis for political biography.

This “first one-volume, popular biography of Adlai Stevenson” by friend and associate Porter McKeever is less interested in unraveling the forces that propelled the career of this unusual politician than in telling one more admiring, personal story. This is unfortunate since Stevenson’s ascent in politics proved, at least to this reader, to be more interesting than his private life. It was as though fortuna had to collar Stevenson and cast him upon the public stage.

Stevenson’s initial launching into politics as a gubernatorial candidate in Illinois in 1948 followed a pattern repeated four years later in his nomination to the presidency. In both instances, he was wooed by party leaders for an office he did not seek. What precisely made Stevenson so attractive for the governor’s race to Chicago boss Jacob Arvey is not altogether clear from the facts presented here. Perhaps, being the namesake of a grandfather who served as vice president sufficed to make young Adlai candidate material. (We know from long-term friend George Ball that Stevenson occasionally entertained such thoughts, but more revealing, Ball considered these ruminations idle fantasy.)

President Truman had a more concrete basis for enthusiasm in 1952. Stevenson had not joined the loud chorus of Democratic leaders urging Truman to step down in 1948. Moreover, he had run ahead of the President in Illinois that year, thereby demonstrating his vote-getting potential in an important swing state.

None of these facts would have mattered much, however, had the circumstances for Democrats been more favorable. In both instances, Stevenson became the choice of leaders who had few alternatives. Their party was facing repudiation at the polls, and more seasoned politicians with greater career investments at risk had already passed up the “opportunity” to lead the party into near certain defeat. Arvey and Truman needed someone who would be willing to make the gamble, which meant someone with little to lose. Moreover, these leaders sought a candidate from outside their immediate orbit, an individual who would not suffer from association with the incumbent Administration. Stevenson satisfied both criteria.

One can appreciate his indecisiveness and reluctance. He understood as much as anyone the probable outcome in November. “I’ll be damned if I want to be a caretaker for the party,” he declared to a friend. But in the end, of course, he accepted the nominations in 1948 and 1952 that more established politicians spurned. Whatever his ambivalence, Stevenson could simply not afford to pass up these opportunities.

Was his upward ascent based solely on circumstance, and once nominated, did he serve merely as a sacrificial lamb? No on both counts for the same reason. This political neophyte had one extraordinary skill--the gift of rhetoric--that distinguishes him from other “also rans.” Writing his own material, he typically spoke with intelligence and inspiration, equal to the best-- and more memorable--efforts of John Kennedy’s speech writers. In both 1948 and 1952, in fact, a speech helped him make a strong first impression on those who were asked to nominate a man they did not know. The more famous of the two instances, well told here, is the apparently unanticipated, tumultuous response to Stevenson’s welcoming address at the 1952 Democratic Convention in Chicago. After the speech with its 27 interruptions for extended applause and demonstrations, most observers on the scene conceded that Stevenson had locked up the presidential nomination.

An equally impressive display of Stevenson’s forensic prowess occurred four years earlier, when Arvey had him make a few remarks to an assemblage of nearly 30 state party leaders who controlled the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Reading from hastily jotted notes, Stevenson delivered his first campaign speech. To these “veterans of Illinois’ grimy battlefields,” he urged reform in a manner that would have befitted Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“How else can we insure the survival of our free institutions when the winds begin to blow? If the people are cynical, suspicious and abused, if their confidence in their heritage is undermined by corruption, greed, excessive partisanship, we cannot be sure they will withstand or even identify the demagogues and false prophets of a better way who always march in the forefront of reaction . . . when the winds blow, and blow they surely will if we stumble much further down this path of inflation . . . and corrosive, insensitive materialism.”

“He’s got class,” judged one ward committeeman. “We can go with him.” Over the next decade, a generation of party faithful would hear Stevenson and agree.

In the end, Stevenson’s singular virtu failed to yield victory. Television proved an unfriendly medium: He was clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera, and he complained to producers that television made him look like a gargoyle. And, of course, standing in his way was Eisenhower, whose formidable presence had made it possible for him to receive the party nomination in the first place.

McKeever’s sympathetic portrait proceeds at a steady pace. Rarely does it pause to reflect. Instead of probing his subject’s intellectual development, we are presented with perhaps too many excerpts from speeches and magazine articles. Similarly, the author makes little attempt to assess Stevenson’s widely claimed impact on the next generation of Democratic party activists and leaders. A quarter of a century after his departure Adlai Stevenson still awaits his historical appraisal.