Illinois' machine-hardened Democrats quivered with trepidation last week when their gentlemanly candidate for governor, Lawyer-Diplomat Adlai E. Stevenson (TIME, Jan. 12), trundled off to Bloomington to open his primary campaign. They needn't have been so nervous.
Stevenson, a novice at campaigning, was completely at ease in Bloomington, where he spent his boyhood and where his family has long published the Daily Pantagraph. At a reception in the high-ceilinged Stevenson homestead on elm-lined East Washington Street, he bore up like a veteran through two dinning hours of handshaking, reminiscing with boyhood friends...