The Sudden, Shock Death of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson II

"While walking in London with Marietta Tree through Grosvenor Square, Stevenson suffered a heart attack on the afternoon of July 14, 1965, and died later that day of heart failure at St George's Hospital. Marietta Tree recalled:

"[After leaving the Embassy] [w]e walked around the neighborhood a little bit and where his house had been where he had lived with his family at the end of the War, there was now an apartment house and he said that makes me feel so old. Indeed, the whole walk made him feel very not so much nostalgic but so much older. As we were walking along the street he said do not walk quite so fast and do hold your head up Marietta. I was burrowing ahead trying to get to the park as quickly as possible and then the next thing I knew, I turned around and I saw he'd gone white, gray really, and he fell and his hand brushed me as he fell and he hit the pavement with the most terrible crack and I thought he'd fractured his skull."


That night in her diary, she wrote, "Adlai is dead. We were together."[13] Following memorial services at the United Nations General Assembly Hall (on July 19, 1965), and in Washington, D.C.; Springfield, Illinois; and Bloomington, Illinois, Stevenson was interred in the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois. The funeral in Bloomington's Unitarian Church was attended by many national figures, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.


Stevenson had been hit by an anti-United Nations protester in Dallas, Texas, on October 24, 1963, one month before the assassination of Kennedy in that same city. A woman carrying an anti-United Nations sign hit Stevenson in the head with the sign. A man spat on him and on a policeman. Amid the furor, Stevenson said of his assailants: "I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school."

After President Kennedy was assassinated Stevenson continued to serve in his position as Ambassador to the UN under the Johnson administration.

As the country progressed toward the presidential election, Vietnam became an important campaign issue.

The Republican contender, Senator Barry Goldwater, advocated victory in Vietnam—a rollback strategy that Johnson denounced as tantamount to nuclear war.

Stevenson was not a major player on Vietnam issues.

He did support Johnson publicly and in private because he believed in containment, but he also wanted to start negotiations with North Vietnam through the UN, which Johnson rejected."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTz6t0i6JC0