IF the somberly reflective Adlai Stevenson that his friend Ben Shahn portrays on the cover can be said to capture the ambassador's mood during the past week (as we think it does), it must be put down to prescience.

Shahn actually did the sketch some time ago, in the spring of 1960, to accompany an article written by Stevenson for a new magazine. But the magazine never got off the ground, the article never appeared, and Shahn's sketch now reaches print for the first time.

Stevenson did not sit for his portrait, and Shahn mostly relied on his own memory of him. "One has a multiple image of a person seen so often in public, in the press and on TV," says Shahn, who then set out to catch in a few strokes a likeness faithful to that multiple impression that existed in his mind's eye.

TO Washington Bureau Chief John Steele, who did most of the reporting on this week's cover story, Adlai Stevenson is a fascinating and familiar subject. "I remember him first during the 1952 campaign, when he abandoned it to deal with a prison riot back in Illinois. From a hilltop I could see him, a somewhat incongruous figure in a brown Brooks Brothers hat and a Chesterfield coat, walk into the prison courtyard and calmly sway a frenzied mob into returning to their cells with a warning that he would order the guards to fire once at the ceiling and then to fire directly at the rioters. The fusillade aimed at the ceiling was enough; the strike was over."

This first impression kept Steele from ever accepting a too easy view of the man as weak. In the years since, Steele has seen Stevenson often, and in many circumstances--enchanted, impatient, harried, exhilarated or disappointed--and concludes, "One doesn't really know Stevenson, but he's a man mighty easy to like."

POLITICS has its nuances, the arts require discrimination, and science has its complexities. It becomes the business of journalism such as ours to treat of all of these subjects in a way that will hold a reader's interest without insulting his intelligence. In fields of specialized knowledge, we aim to render an account that is plain and simple, yet does no violence to the difficulty of the subject, so that the uninformed reader can understand us while the expert cannot fault us. We try to keep in mind a saying attributed to Einstein--that everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

For an example of how well Science Editor Jonathan Norton Leonard pursues this double responsibility, we commend his comprehensive report this week, accompanied by four pages of color, on how radio astronomy has created "a second window in the sky."

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