On a World-Scale Roller Coaster: Adlai Stevenson at the UN, 1961–65

Abstract

I had long admired Adlai Stevenson from afar and voted for him when he first ran for President in 1952. I had even crossed his trail in the 1940s during World War II: after he had surveyed Italy’s postwar economic needs for the Truman Administration, I became responsible for helping the Italian economy during and just after World War II—working first for the Allied Control Commission and then for the UN.

Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, was closely associated with Adlai Stevenson during the four and a half years (1961–65) that Stevenson served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in New York. During that time, Cleveland was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In government, he has also served in the Allied Control Commission in Italy during World War II, as a UN relief and rehabilitation administrator in Italy and China, as a top official of the Marshall Plan, and from 1965 to 1969, as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia, he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota) and as President of the University of Hawaii. During the 1990s, he was President of the World Academy of Art and Science. He lives with Lois, his wife of 66 years, in Falcons Landing, Sterling, Virginia. His e-mail address is: harlancleve@falconresidents.org.