The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family

Cultivated, witty Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900-1965)--Illinois governor, two-time Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. ambassador to the U.N.--is portrayed in this engrossing, often surprising revisionist biography as a moderate conservative (not a liberal) who ``dramatized the complex feelings of educated elites.'' Framing AES II's life with the saga of four generations of Stevensons, Goucher College history professor Baker (Mary Todd Lincoln) attributes his sense of unworthiness and diffidence to his unstable upbringing by a doting, overzealous mother who stifled his initiative and an absent, frequently unemployed farm-manager father whose health never recovered from a hunting accident at the age of 14. Beginning with the family's Scotch-Irish ancestors who became slaveholding pioneers in North Carolina and Kentucky, Baker moves ahead to AES II's indefatigable grandfather, Adlai Stevenson I (1835- 1914), who was Grover Cleveland's Vice-President, and closes with AES III, born in 1930, a disillusioned former U.S. senator from Illinois who now runs a merchant banking firm. Photos. (Feb.)