Adlai Stevenson II

Adlai Stevenson was born in Los Angeles in 1900 but grew up in Bloomington, Illinois, where his family owned the local paper and his grandfather had been vice president under Grover Cleveland. He took a degree in literature and history at Princeton, tried Harvard Law and left without finishing, then went home for a law degree at Northwestern instead. He practiced corporate law in Chicago through the 1920s and wrote for the family paper on the side. In 1928 he married Ellen Borden. The couple had three sons, including a future U.S. senator, before divorcing in 1949. He never remarried.

Stevenson spent the New Deal years in Washington law jobs, helped draft the charter of the United Nations in 1945, then won the Illinois governorship in 1948 by more than half a million votes and used it to desegregate the state National Guard and veto a loyalty-oath bill during the Red Scare. Drafted reluctantly for president in 1952, he lost twice to Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, and picked up the nickname "egghead" for running an intellectual campaign against a war hero. Kennedy sent him to the United Nations in 1961, and in October 1962 he did the thing the job is now remembered for: laid reconnaissance photographs of Soviet missile sites in front of the Security Council and told the Soviet ambassador he was prepared to wait for an answer until hell froze over.

Three months before his UN triumph, the same administration made him a liar without telling him. During the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Kennedy's inner circle kept Stevenson deliberately uninformed and let him repeat the CIA's cover story to the General Assembly as fact. He learned the truth from the newspapers and wrote afterward that he had taken the job expecting to be consulted, not used. He also proposed, quietly and before anyone else in the administration would say it aloud, trading American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the same trade Kennedy and Khrushchev made in secret weeks later, after Stevenson's version had already been dismissed inside the White House as capitulation.

He died on a London sidewalk on July 14, 1965, of a heart attack, at sixty-five, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Bloomington, the town his family's newspaper had covered for three generations. President Johnson attended the funeral. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had written speeches for him, later called him the man who "turned the Democratic Party around in the fifties and made JFK possible," the two-time loser credited with training the party that finally won. What survived is mostly rhetorical: the wit, the eloquence, the intellectual campaign style that lost twice to a general and then became the model for how Democrats were supposed to sound.

Adlai Stevenson II's life against the full span of the corpus.

• United Nations Charter mission
  Served on the U.S. delegation drafting committee under Secretary of State Stettinius 1945
• Illinois state police merit-system reform law
  Replaced patronage hiring with a merit system as governor 1949
• 1952 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech speech
  "Let's talk sense to the American people" 1952
• Address to the UN Security Council on Soviet missile sites in Cuba speech
  Presented reconnaissance photographs and confronted the Soviet ambassador 1962

• February 5, 1900 aged 0 Born in Los Angeles, California
• 1922 aged ~22 Graduates Princeton
• December 1, 1928 aged 28 Marries Ellen Borden
• 1945 aged ~45 Serves on the delegation that drafts the United Nations Charter
• 1948 aged ~48 Elected governor of Illinois by more than half a million votes
• 1952 and 1956 aged ~52 Loses the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower twice
• 1961 aged ~61 Appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by Kennedy
• October 25, 1962 aged 62 Confronts the Soviet ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis
• July 14, 1965 aged 65 Dies of a heart attack in London at 65

• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. defeated by
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. appointed by
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. allied with
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. opposed
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. backed by