There's one I've heard of Klydon!
To Klydon, SC or anyone more in the know on this topic than I (which is everyone
).. Adeli (sp) Stevenson? He ran for VP with whom??? And, wasn't there some kind of scandal associated with him????? Or, am I thinking of someone else?
TIS
I dont know who ran with Stevenson in 52, but in 56 it was Kefauver (referred to by Hyman Roth in GFII). To my knowledge there was never anything Stevenson did that brought any scandal on him while he was in office. Apparently JFK disliked him and he resisted pressure to name him Secretary of State. Instead he sent him to be Ambassador to the UN which Stevenson considered beneath his station, but he served anyway.
Shortly after he retired, he dropped dead on a London street of a massive heart attack. Supposedly he was having an affair with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post at the time.
Stevenson's running mate in '52 was Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama.
JFK and Stevenson disliked and distrusted each other intensely. Stevenson told JFK he wouldn't run for the Dem nomination in '60, but he didn't discourage his followers from attempting to "draft" him. A last-minute demonstration for Stevenson on the convention floor in LA nearly derailed JFK's nomination. JFK told him, "I like you, Adlai. But if you get in my way, I'm just going to have to s**t all over you."
After the election, liberals, who distrusted JFK, demanded that he name Stevenson Secretary of State. Since Stevenson was far better known and respected around the world than JFK at that point, he could easily have depositioned his President. So JFK named him UN Ambassador and elevated the post to "Cabinet rank." This was a great political ploy on JFK's part: Liberals were ecstatic because they regarded the UN as the Taj Mahal of international affairs. But as Ambassador, Stevenson had no real policymaking power--his job was to read speeches written for him by State Dept. and White House functionaries. "Cabinet rank" was meaningless, too: he was still subordinate to Secretary of State Dean Rusk; and JFK seldom held Cabinet meetings anyway and never discussed anything important at them.
JFK humiliated Stevenson more than once. During the Bay of Pigs brouhaha, JFK neglected to tell Stevenson that the clapped-out WWII bombers that hit Cuban airfields before the invasion were flown by CIA operatives. So Stevenson unknowingly spread the lie at the UN that they were flown by "Cuban patriots," and his prestige took a huge nosedive. During the missile crisis, Stevenson repeatedly demanded proof that JFK prove to him that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were really offensive, not defensive, units.
After the crisis was over, JFK told favored newsmen "off the record" that Stevenson had proposed trading American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba; when in fact Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had made that proposal.
The differences twixt JFK and Stevenson were personal, too. JFK, a gold-medal womanizer, constantly resented Stevenson for the attraction he held for young, good-looking women. JFK could never accept that balding, paunchy, middle-aged Stevenson could be almost as much a Lothario as he was.
