In the U.S. embassy in London, Adlai Stevenson taped an interview for the BBC defending his nation's foreign policy. "There has been a great deal of pressure on me in the United States to take a position—a public position —inconsistent with that of my Government," he said. "Actually, I don't agree with those protestants. My hope in Viet Nam is that resistance there may establish the fact that changes in Asia are not to be precipitated by outside force. This was the point of the Korean War, this is the point of the conflict in Viet Nam."
Minutes later, Stevenson, accompanied by Mrs. Marietta Tree, an old friend and a fellow member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, stepped out of the embassy onto Grosvenor Square. Stevenson obligingly paused to pose for a photographer. Then he and Mrs. Tree strolled down the street. About 200 yards away, in front of the International Sportsmen's Club, Stevenson staggered slightly, grabbed his companion's arm, and said, "I feel faint." Then he collapsed. Mrs. Tree cried to the club's doorman: "Quick, come! Could you come at once and help?" She knelt over Stevenson and tried to revive him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. An ambulance arrived, but by the time it reached St. George's Hospital, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 65, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was dead of a heart attack.
He was one of the most admired men of his time—and one of the most perplexing, a paradox within himself. Twice he sought his nation's highest office; yet he always thought of the presidency as a "dread responsibility." He was a politician without a politician's ways; instead of grinning gamely when, during one of his campaigns, a little girl handed him a stuffed baby alligator, Stevenson could only gape and exclaim, "For Christ's sake, what's this?" He was a man of rare humor, often expressed in self-deprecating terms. Responding to criticism that he was too intellectual, that he talked over the heads of the voters, he tossed out a Latinism: Via ovum cranium difficilis est (The way of the egghead is hard). He loved people and in his later years was one of New York's most inveterate partygoers; yet even when surrounded by admirers he somehow seemed lonely. He was a completely sophisticated citizen of the world; yet he was at home only on his Libertyville, Ill., farm, chatting with friends in the library or expertly driving a tractor over his 70 acres. "I know every blade of grass and every tree," he once said. "I like to watch them grow, and I hate to be away from them."
Trauma. Adlai Stevenson was born to affluence and influence. His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was Vice President during Grover Cleveland's second term. His maternal great grandfather, Jesse Fell, was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, helped arrange the Lincoln-Douglas debates. His mother's family owned the prosperous Bloomington, Ill., Daily Pantagraph, and his father managed the Stevenson family's vast farm lands, later became Illinois' secretary of state.