Politics: Familiar Names

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Emerging from the White House last week after a foreign policy talk with President Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson had a tidbit for waiting reporters: he is considering running next year for the Illinois Senate seat now held by Republican Senate Leader Everett M. Dirksen.

Adlai said that he had been asked by Chicago's Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley if he was "interested in running," and that he had discussed the possibility with President Kennedy. Stevenson plans to announce his final decision, to be "guided by the best interests of my party and the Administration," by the end of this year.

Stevenson's news—which came a day after he had raised his domestic political stock with a strong speech in the United Nations opposing the admission of Communist China (see THE WORLD)—gave many Democrats hope for unseating Dirksen. In Illinois, where his grandfather once served two terms as a U.S. Representative before becoming Grover Cleveland's Vice President, Adlai Stevenson served as Governor, after a 572,000-vote plurality over his Republican opponent. But wrhen he became the Democratic presidential standardbearer, he lost the state by heavy margins in his two unsuccessful bids against Dwight Eisenhower.

Last week two other political hopefuls with familiar names and forebears also decided to test their vote-drawing strength in statewide 1962 elections:

> In Cincinnati, State Representative Robert A. Taft Jr., 44, son of the late Republican Senate leader, grandson of President William Howard Taft and an avowed Nixon-type Republican, announced that he will run for Congressman at large in Ohio next year. His father also began his political career in the Ohio legislature—and "Young Bob" hopes to follow him to Washington with a hard campaign stressing "individual liberty" and criticizing President Kennedy's foreign policy.

> In Massachusetts, Harvard Business School Lecturer (and ex-Assistant Secretary of Labor) George Cabot Lodge, 34 and the father of six children, filed for the Senate seat previously held by both his father, Henry Cabot Lodge, and his greatgrandfather. In the renewal of an old family rivalry, he may find himself facing Edward Kennedy, 29, the President's youngest brother, who would love to run for the Democratic nomination.