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National Affairs: Cap Above the Ring

3 minute read
TIME

Among all the presidential campaign hats flying through the air last week was an odd furry model with a long floppy tail. It was the coonskin campaign cap of Tennessee’s well-tailored Senator Estes Kefauver. The Kefauver-for-President boom was still hardly more than a boomlet. But in separate press conferences last week, two leading Democratic Senators gave the boomlet another boost. Illinois’ Paul Douglas, who still wants Eisenhower for President, still hopes Harry Truman will just go quietly away, noted “increasingly favorable sentiment for Senator Kefauver.” Minnesota’s Fair Dealing Hubert Humphrey, who still owes his first loyalty to Harry Truman, also dropped the word that Kefauver would make “an excellent candidate.”

The Dauntless Hero. Kefauver-for-President talk first began last spring after Kefauver led his Senate Crime Investigating Committee around the country. When the committee hearings went on TV, millions of viewers saw the chairman as a dauntless hero fighting the bad men. He wrote a bestselling book, Crime in America, reporting on the committee’s work. Suddenly in demand as a lecturer, he stumped across the land, at first discussing crime, then taking up international relations. While he always smilingly shushed talk about the presidency, there was little doubt that his steady eyes were beamed at the White House.

The Kefauver-for-President drive still centers in Tennessee, with clubs springing up on every other hill. Governor Gordon Browning and two of the state’s Democratic Congressmen, J. Percy Priest and Albert Gore, are already out for him. Paper replicas of his political trademark, the Tennessee mountaineer’s cap, have started drifting around the state, and Tennesseans are beginning to raise money to put the campaign on a national basis.

Some “spontaneous” movements have already sprung up in other states. In Virginia and Arizona, Kefauver clubs are organized. In California and Oregon, steps have been taken to put his name on the primary ballot. At a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Seattle last month, Northwest Democrats cheered when his handsome red-haired wife Nancy was introduced as “the first lady of Tennessee who might one day be the First Lady of Washington, D.C.”

A New Attitude. Most of the Kefauver-for-President talk is based on the fact that he is strongest where the Democrats need strength most: he is the party’s best-known foe of corruption. There have been numerous suggestions, including one from Maryland’s Democratic Senator Herbert R. O’Conor, that Harry Truman name Kefauver to head the proposed Government housecleaning commission.

Members of Harry Truman’s staff have been inclined to sneer at Kefauver as an upstart who let TV spotlights, headlines and fan letters go to his head. Harry Truman himself has been cool toward his potential rival. Recently, however, as the Washington scandals began to hurt, a presidential staff member expressed a new attitude toward Kefauver: “Well, now, maybe Vice President.”

But Estes Kefauver has already made it clear that he is not running for Vice President, that he will make up his mind without regard to what Harry Truman does. Before taking off for the Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans this week, he announced that he would make his plans known early in 1952. His close friends are sure that he will let his cap drop into the ring—for President.

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