Following the sad news Wednesday that former Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, D-Ill., died at 90 on Sept. 6, 2021, Illinois pols and the punditocracy began to ponder an obvious question: why did “Adlai-Three,” namesake-son of a much-loved two-time Democratic presidential nominee, never even come close to seeking the presidency himself?
To listen to most of the Adlai-watchers we talked to, the answer was quite simple: for all the assets Stevenson had, he lacked one of the most important traits of someone who wants to be president: the fire in his belly.
From his election to the Illinois state legislature in 1964, to his stints as state treasurer (1966-70) and then as senator (1970-80), the younger Stevenson was inarguably helped by carrying one of the most illustrious names in the Prairie State.
When he asked Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley advice while running for the Senate in 1970, the mayor famously told Stevenson: “My advice to you is don’t change your name.”
A distant memory today after such Democratic dynamos as John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who did get elected president, Adlai Stevenson, II was for many years recalled for his eloquence, inspiration, and championship of liberalism — a hero on the left after one term as governor of Illinois much as Ronald Reagan became a hero of the right in his first term as governor of California.
“Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be Democrats,” declared Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D.-Minn, as he placed Stevenson’s name before their party’s convention for a third nomination for president.
The elder Stevenson was actually drafted for a presidential nomination he didn’t want in 1952 and actively sought and won the nomination in 1956. He could never defeat the popular Republican Dwight Eisenhower and failed to pull off a draft against the up-and coming Jack Kennedy in 1960. But he went on to serve as Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, where he famously confronted Russian Ambassador Zorin over the issues of missiles in Cuba in 1962.
“Hiya, Governor,” is how people inevitably greeted Adlai, III when he was campaigning, believing the young lawyer was his late father (who died of a heart attack in 1965 at age 65). It didn’t hurt that the younger Stevenson shared the elder’s balding hairline and resonant, professorial voice.
But as much as Adlai, III looked and sounded like his father and shared his commitment to liberalism, old friends agree that he lacked the drive to run for president.
“He just didn’t have the passion to run,” Bobby Juliano, longtime lobbyist for restaurant workers and a friend of Stevenson’s from his days in Chicago, told Newsmax, “It’s all consuming to run for president and if you aren’t passionate about it, you can’t do it.”
“He really valued public service but he kind of hated politics — the artifice of politics,” is how media maestro David Axelrod characterized Stevenson for the Chicago Sun-Times, He hated courting donors, he just didn’t like any of that and yet he had a very successful career.”
Axelrod added that Stevenson “had politics in his blood but in many ways, [he] was unlike his Dad.”
Several friends pointed out that Stevenson worshipped his father and, two years after leaving the Senate in 1980, he sought the governorship once held by the elder Stevenson. In the closest-ever race for governor of Illinois, Stevenson lost to Republican Gov. Jim Thompson by just over 5,000 votes.
In 1986, with polls showing him winning the job that had so narrowly eluded him, Stevenson was again nominated for governor. But three followers of political fanatic Lyndon LaRouche won nominations for other statewide offices. Rather than remain on the ticket with them, Stevenson and lieutenant governor running mate George Sangmeister bolted to run as independents and lost.
In later years, Stevenson threw himself into the work of the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy and traveled to more than 80 countries. He also worked on the family farm in Hanover, Illinois.
The first of the four children of Adlai and wife Nancy was, to no one’s surprise, Adlai Stevenson, IV. Eschewing the family business of politics, he went on to be a popular television newscaster in Chicago and financial services planner. Having frequently joked that he would be “Adlai the Last,” Adlai, IV became a father in 1994 and nevertheless named his son Adlai Stevenson, V.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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