Losing candidates have sage words

To the editor:

In reflecting upon what might be the thoughts of the candidates who went to bed knowing they were not going to win, it seems appropriate to listen to what a few other also-rans had to say.

Adlai Stevenson, when greeted with news that Dwight Eisenhower was swamping him, said upon inquiry by the press: "It hurts too much to laugh, and I'm too old to cry." Was Stevenson a wimp and a whiner? No way. He was just caught on the immediate rebound when the roof had fallen in.

Another political aspirant who both won and lost, Theodore Roosevelt, also said it well in a prepared speech in 1910 at the Sorbonne in Paris: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, of where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

SAM DRUSCH, Cape Girardeau