The day after Adlai Stevenson died, Lillian Ross began to write the rare and durable memoir that, together with the photographs she later selected, makes up this book. For a year, she had been preparing a Profile of Stevenson for The New Yorker, and in the course of her work she had had many long talks with Mr. Stevenson and had accompanied him on a number of official errands. Now, abandoning her Profile, she composed in its place a tribute for the magazine's Notes and Comment section consisting of a series of glimpses of Stevenson that stood out with particular radiance in her memory. They turned out to be the right glimpses. Somehow or other, they seemed to contain the essence of the Stevenson character and temperament; they seemed to catch the shape and texture and coloration of the Stevenson spirit. Miss Ross suspended time for a moment here and a moment there, and Adlai Stevenson was again in our presence, in life—the tone of his voice, the ring of his laugh, the play of his mind, the very arc he described as he spent himself on behalf of us all.
