Former Governor of Illinois, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and twice unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Adlai Stevenson played a key role in American politics through out much of the middle of the twentieth century. This collection of essays from Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Adlai Stevenson III, Ambassador George Bunn, Brian Urquhart, Arthur Schlesinger, and others, looks at Stevenson's past and current societal significance.

Abbott Joseph Liebling was one of the greatest of all "New Yorker" writers, a colorful figure who helped set the magazine's urbane tone and style." Just Enough Liebling" gathers in one volume the vividest and most enjoyable of his pieces. Charles McGrath (in "The New York Times Book Review") praised it as "a judicious sampling-a useful window on Liebling's vast body of writing and a reminder, to those lucky enough to have read him the first time around, of why he was so beloved." Today Liebling is best known as a celebrant of the "sweet science" of boxing, and as a "feeder" who ravishes the reader with his descriptions of food and wine. But as David Remnick observes in his fond and insightful introduction, Liebling is "boundlessly curious, a listener, a boulevardier, a man of appetites and sympathy"-and a writer who, with his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell, deftly traversed the boundaries between reporting and storytelling, between news and art.

Adlai Stevenson's Lasting Legacy consists of a dozen interrelated chapters by statesmen, scientists, and compatriots who worked and served with Adlai E. Stevenson II of Illinois. He was its 31st Governor, twice the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 56, a founder of the United Nations in 1945, and from 1961 to 65 (inclusive of the Cuba Missile Crisis), the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN. Included is an essay by the Governor revealing why he had urged a ban on further hydrogen bomb testing during his presidential campaign of 1956. In 1963, with Stevenson's help at the UN, a treaty banning all above ground nuclear testing was finally signed, then a non-proliferation treaty in 1968, and a comprehensive treaty in 1996 (not yet ratified). He knew that in a nuclear age peace was "a condition of human survival;" if ignored, as others also were concerned, that nuclear matters could sooner or later get out of hand. And that in a position of preeminent strength, we needed to lead by example and assistance and with patience collaboratively pursue negotiation, not unilateral action and preemption. In the Epilogue, former Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland and Senator Adlai Stevenson III urge a return to the diplomacy and politics of the Stevenson years and those that followed, until recent years.