Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Overview

Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) was an American politician and diplomat. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Bloomington, Illinois, he came from a prominent Illinois political family: his grandfather Adlai E. Stevenson was vice president of the United States and his father Lewis Green Stevenson was Illinois secretary of state. He took a B.A. at Princeton in 1922, entered Harvard Law School but withdrew after failing classes, earned a J.D. at Northwestern in 1926 and was admitted to the Illinois bar the same year, then worked at Cutting, Moore & Sidley in Chicago.

Governorship and the Red Scare

In 1948 he defeated incumbent Dwight H. Green to become governor of Illinois, serving from 1949 to 1953. He removed political considerations from state police hiring and instituted a merit system, cracked down on illegal gambling and improved the state highways; his 'con-con' constitutional convention proposal failed, but the 'Gateway' alternative was approved in a 1950 referendum. Sources number his governorship differently: the McLean County Museum calls him 'the 31st Governor of Illinois' in one passage and, in another, says he was elected 'the thirty-third governor of Illinois on November 2, 1948'.

He vetoed a Red Scare bill making membership in a subversive group a felony and requiring loyalty oaths of public employees and candidates, writing that dangerous subversives would be caught by 'careful, constant, professional investigation, not by pieces of paper' and that 'loyalty inquisitions' were 'a natural characteristic of the police state, not of democracy.' On June 2, 1949 he privately gave a sworn deposition as a character witness for Alger Hiss; per biographer Porter McKeever, senators Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon later used it in 1952 to attack him as soft on communism.

The 1952 and 1956 campaigns

Nominated on the third ballot at the 1952 Chicago convention with the slogan 'Let's talk sense to the American people', he lost to Eisenhower 55 percent to 45 percent and 442 to 89 in the Electoral College, carrying only nine states. Renominated on the first ballot in 1956, he campaigned on a 'New America', called for a ban on above-ground nuclear tests and an end to the draft, and lost more heavily. In 1960 he declined a third nomination but then accepted a draft; Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley told him he had no support, Kennedy won on the first ballot with 806 delegate votes and Stevenson finished fourth with 79.5. After his 1952 defeat he made a well-publicized 1953 tour of Asia, the Middle East and Europe and in 1954 campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates.

UN ambassador and the missile crisis

Kennedy offered Stevenson a choice of posts, though Stevenson had wanted the State Department; amid strained relations he was named U.S. ambassador to the UN on January 23, 1961 and served until his death. He 'worked tirelessly to support U.S. foreign policy, even when he personally disagreed with some of President Kennedy's actions', though he was seen as a bit player in the administration.

In the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion he was skeptical but kept on the fringes of the operation and received only an 'unduly vague briefing' from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the CIA nine days before the invasion. Unaware that the exiles were armed and assisted directly by the CIA and U.S. Navy, he repeated a CIA cover story before the UN, and his credibility was compromised. He seriously considered resigning but was persuaded to stay.

On October 25, 1962, day ten of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he pressed Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin at the emergency Security Council: 'Don't wait for the translation: yes or no?' When Zorin said he was not in an American courtroom and would answer in due course, Stevenson said he was 'prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over', then had U-2 photographs of the missile sites shown on an easel in the televised chamber. His interlocutor was Zorin, not Khrushchev.

Assessment and death

Late in life he spearheaded the movement for the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed on August 5, 1963 by the United States, the United Kingdom and the USSR; he was a member of the American delegation to the Moscow negotiations but did not sign it. With Barbara Ward he advocated 'sustainable development', and days before his death he gave a 'spaceship Earth' speech in Geneva. On desegregation he urged caution on Brown v. Board, warning against aggressive enforcement 'in deference to the South's long-held traditions' and opposing the use of armed personnel; his companion Marietta Tree later said that 'he thought of all Negroes as being loveable old family retainers and not as individuals like you and me.'

He died of a heart attack in London on July 14, 1965, aged 65, having traveled there after the annual UN Economic and Social Council meeting in Geneva. He was interred in the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Bloomington.

Disputed points

The governor ordinal (31st versus 33rd) and the 1948 margin are counted differently: Wikipedia gives 572,067 votes, a record margin, while the museum gives 570,000 votes, 58 percent. On the settlement terms, the museum states that under the publicly unacknowledged agreement the United States removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in April 1963, while Wikipedia records that Stevenson attended EXCOMM meetings and proposed swapping the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey for Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba, and that the administration removed the Jupiter MRBMs from both Italy and Turkey about six months after the crisis.