Stevenson in Popular Culture
Stevenson has been referenced in television episodes of The Simpsons (in the episodes "Lisa the Iconoclast" and "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"), The Golden Girls, Happy Days (in the January 28, 1975, episode "The Not Making of the President") and Mystery Science Theater 3000's presentation of Manos: The Hands of Fate (a Stevenson lookalike buys a car and one of the MST3K characters comments on it). Murphy Brown briefly names her newborn son 'Adlai Stevenson'.
Stevenson has also been referenced in films. Most notably, Peter Sellers claimed that his portrayal of President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove was modeled on Stevenson. Stevenson's legendary "Don't wait for the translation" speech to Russian ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis inspired dialogue in a courtroom scene in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The historical speech itself is depicted in the 2000 film Thirteen Days with Michael Fairman playing Stevenson, as well as partially depicted in the 1974 television play The Missiles of October by Ralph Bellamy. Stevenson is also referenced in Wayne's World 2 ("Waynestock" is held in an Aurora, Illinois park named for Stevenson), Plain Clothes (the high school is named for Stevenson), Annie Hall (Woody Allen's character tells a standup joke about the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign) and Breakfast at Tiffany's.
In John Frankenheimer's 1962 cold war thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the conniving Mrs. John Iselin (played by Angela Lansbury) makes a reference to Stevenson in a conversation with her son (played by Laurence Harvey): "Mr. Stevenson makes jokes. I do not."
Stevenson comes close to being assassinated by a 12-year-old in James Patrick Kelly's Hugo Award-winning novelette, "1016 to 1" (1999).
In Robin Gerber's novel Eleanor vs. Ike, Stevenson suffers a fatal heart attack as he approaches the podium to accept the Democratic nomination in 1952.
In the alternate history short story "The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson" by David Gerrold included in the anthology Alternate Presidents, Stevenson was elected in 1952 after Dwight D. Eisenhower mades the mistake of accepting Joseph McCarthy as his running mate instead of Richard Nixon. He successfully ran for re-election in 1956, once again defeating General Eisenhower. However, he proved to be an extremely unpopular president.
In Michael P. Kube-McDowell's alternate history novel Alternities, Stevenson is mentioned as having been elected president in 1956 and serving for two terms, though he is quoted as describing his second term as a curse.
In the alternate history novel Dominion by C. J. Sansom, World War II ended in June 1940 when the British government, under the leadership of the Prime Minister Lord Halifax, signed a peace treaty with Nazi Germany in Berlin. Franklin D. Roosevelt was steadfast in his opposition to the Nazis and the Treaty, which resulted in him losing the 1940 to his Republican opponent Robert Taft, who became the 33rd President. He was re-elected in 1944 and 1948 but Stevenson defeated him in 1952, becoming the 34th President. Shortly after his election in November 1952, The Times, which was owned by the pro-Nazi British Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook, speculated that Stevenson would follow in Roosevelt's footsteps and pursue an interventionist foreign policy when it came to European affairs. Several weeks later, President-elect Stevenson gave a speech indicating that he intended to begin trading with the Soviet Union upon taking office on January 20, 1953.
The Avalanche, an album by acclaimed folk artist Sufjan Stevens, contains a song called "Adlai Stevenson".
Adlai Stevenson was quoted in the legal drama, Boston Legal. While Alan Shore defends a client who had withheld her taxes to protest the current state of America, he quotes Stevenson's Nature of Patriotism speech. "The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to the freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism." What has changed now, he argues, is the cloak has morphed into anti-terrorism.
In Pioneer One, a crowd-financed TV series published under a Creative Commons license, one of the Characters introduces himself as "Adlai Steve DiLeo", named after Adlai Stevenson, "someone who ran three times for president unsuccessfully".
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Famous quotes containing the words stevenson, popular and/or culture:
“And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)