(2 of 7)
"The Headsman." Meanwhile, Stevenson's paternal grandfather was busy campaigning against Lincoln. Grandfather Adlai Ewing Stevenson, who walked into Illinois beside a wagon in 1852, was also a lawyer, but an avid Democrat. As Grover Cleveland's First Assistant Postmaster General, he became known as "the headsman" when he swept some 40,000 Republican postmasters off the payroll. In Cleveland's second term, he was Vice President. Lewis Green Stevenson, his son, was Illinois' secretary of state in 1914-16. (Another relative in politics: Vice President Alben Barkley, whose grandmother was Grandfather Adlai's first cousin.) Father Stevenson tried to warn his son Adlai away from politics. "Don't ever get mixed up in that dirty game," he said firmly.
While Governor Stevenson was born a Democrat, his inheritance includes some stoutly Republican forebears. "If it's true that politics is the art of compromise," he says, "I've had a good start; my mother was a Republican and a Unitarian, my father was a Democrat and a Presbyterian. I ended up in his party and her church."
A Broken Nose. The present Adlai Ewing Stevenson was born Feb. 5, 1900, in a rented house in Los Angeles, where his father was assistant general manager of a Hearst paper, the Los Angeles Examiner. When Adlai was six years old, the family returned to Bloomington, Ill., where both Mr. & Mrs. Stevenson had grown up. There Adlai and his sister Elizabeth ("Buffie"), three years his elder (now Mrs. Ernest Ives, wife of a wealthy, retired U.S. diplomat), grew up in a big Victorian house at 1316 East Washington Street.
Mrs. Stevenson was a possessive mother. She watched closely over her son, and used to read aloud to him—mainly Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. He was not a very sturdy little boy, but he was determined not to be considered a sissy, and often got into fights at public school to prove his point. His nose was broken two or three times in that good cause.
"Rabbit." In school, young Adlai was bright, but no scholar. He went to an eastern prep school (Choate) and then to Princeton, where he graduated in 1922. At Princeton he was known as something of a politician and was a moderate success: managing editor of the Daily Princetonian. A Princeton roommate recalls Stevenson as "a nice, harmless, pleasant guy" whose personality got him the nickname "Rabbit."
He wanted to be a newspaperman, but his father prevailed on him to go to law school. Within two years, he dropped out of Harvard because of low grades. He did better at Northwestern University law school, and passed the Illinois bar examinations in 1926.
Between Harvard and Northwestern, Stevenson worked for 18 months as a reporter and editor on the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph, owned by his mother's family. He still owns a quarter-interest in that prosperous county paper, and gets most of his income from it. After he got his degree from Northwestern, he went to Russia in an effort to interview Russian Foreign Minister Chicherin, who had refused to talk to foreign correspondents. No interview, but an interesting trip.