I knew someone who got clean in Stevenon.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Adlai would have been a horrible President. JFK spent some of his time in the Senate pissing and moaning about the increasing but still low-level US involvement in "Lay-OS" and the rest of "French Indo-China" after Dien Bien Phu, yet as candidate he complained about bomber gaps and missile gaps and spoke about the future of "brushfire wars". It's not unlikely that, having missed the VP nomination with Stevenson -- JFK joked that, had he won the VP nom, his political career would have been over -- he'd have fallen in line with escalation, but would likely never have been President.
Instead, the Soviet-driven "anti-war" movement and other bowel activity fell on LBJ, who claimed Goldwater would dig us in deeper, but after it was clear that waving the bloody shirt was working and 1964 was going to be a Republican disaster, he pushed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through nearly three months before the election, then won in a landslide.
OTOH, Stevenson was glib. During an outdoor stump speech, a big gust of wind tore away a bunch of his pages (no teleprompters then) and without missing a beat, he got a laugh with, "that's a break for you".
I remember an anecdote from someone pointing out his intellectual elitism: “Vote for Stevenson. He’s better than you.”
Another one showed Stevenson onstage with a notable hole in the bottom of his shoe. “See, he’s just like the working class.” Someone else saw it and said, “Don’t let this happen to you.”
As you know, I have a poor opinion of Eisenhower as President. He had 20 years of destructive Dem policies to roll back and he did nothing. The confiscatory tax rates alone (which had to wait for JFK). The Communist infiltration of the government and institutions, et al. Ike could’ve been a Dem and differed little in his governance, only that it left the GOP so weak that it would take until 1980 for the Senate to come back and 4 decades for the House. I’d have rather risked Stevenson to have prevented a ghastly decades of uncontested Dem legislative and state control.
IIRC, Stevenson had probably the second most dramatic death not involving an assassination of Presidential candidates or VPs (behind Rockefeller’s dying in delicto flagrante with his newly-installed penis pump keeping him saluting his mistress after he shuffled off our mortal coil). He dropped dead in the street of a massive heart attack supposedly after nights of passionate sex with Katherine Graham. Well, at least Rocky had better taste in girls.