Leadership Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Stevenson lands the line like a debonair blade: polite on the surface, wicked in implication. By pairing “accuracy” with “virtue,” he raids the era’s gendered moral code to expose how reputations are managed rather than earned. A “lady’s” virtue, in that old social logic, is fragile, publicly policed, and once “lost” effectively irretrievable. Accuracy, he suggests, should be just as central to a newspaper’s standing. Then he twists the knife: unlike a woman’s reputation, a paper gets an escape hatch. It can “always print a retraction” - a procedural, often inconspicuous ritual that launders credibility without fully undoing the damage.

The subtext is a critique of asymmetry: the press can harm with the splashy first draft of history and then perform accountability in small print. Stevenson is also poking at institutional self-regard. Newspapers like to present accuracy as an inherent virtue, a kind of moral identity. He reframes it as branding: a paper can violate the ideal and still keep the costume, because the retraction functions as absolution, not repair.

Context matters. Stevenson, twice the Democratic presidential nominee in the 1950s and a major figure in Cold War political life, lived under an intense media spotlight when television and mass-circulation papers could set narratives quickly and correct them slowly. The quip reads as both warning and negotiation: he respects the press’s power, but refuses its claim to moral infallibility.