Democrats: No One’s Pet Coon

Tennessee’s Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver was a glad-hander who never managed to look really glad. He was a campaigner who achieved a kind of glum sincerity even when his head was smothered under an outlandish coonskin cap. He was given to platitudes that put him foursquare in favor of “the best interests of the plain people of this nation” and “an even break for the average man.” Some of his Senate colleagues insisted that there was a vacuum in the space between his ears. And he was a loner who became anathema to the national Democratic hierarchy.

Yet for all his critics, and for all the sophisticated sorts who jeered at “The Keef,” he was a great vote-getter with a vast store of plodding energy and a vaulting ambition. He wanted to become President of the U.S. He never made it — but even in his failure Estes Kefauver, by the time of his death last week at 60. left his mark on U.S. politics.

The Oak. Born to a prosperous Tennessee family, he grew up to be an oak of a man (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.), played tackle at the University of Tennessee, got a law degree from Yale in 1927 and came home to be a successful corporation lawyer in Chattanooga. In 1939 he won a special House election and went to Washington, where he was a fervent liberal Democrat and a devoted inter nationalist who attracted some small notice by his support of the dreamy Atlantic Union plan that proposed a constitutional federation of free nations. But mostly, he was distinguished by his silence.

He ran for the Senate in 1948, tangled with Memphis Boss Edward H. Crump, who labeled Kefauver a “pet coon.” Kefauver laboriously replied, “I may be a pet coon, but I’ll never be Mr. Crump’s pet coon.” At his next campaign appearance he clapped a coonskin cap on his head, pointed to the tail and said, “A coon may have rings around his tail, but this coon will never have a ring through his nose.” He beat the Crump machine, and more important than the ridiculous cap was Kefauver’s decision to shake at least 500 hands a day during that campaign. It became the Keefs patented technique, worked so well that such less folksy types as Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy later found themselves forced to clutch hundreds of sweaty hands in their efforts to outdo him.

Crime & the Keef. Once in the Senate, Kefauver voted the party line, authored no major bills. But in 1951 he catapulted to fame and, thanks to national television, built himself a real political image. As chairman of a special Senate crime investigating committee, he dragged such diverse and unsavory characters as Greasy Thumb Guzik, Virginia Hill and Frank Costello into the bright lights for a classic lesson in morality. Gentle but relentless, Kefauver questioned them with painful sincerity, became to millions a pillar of log-cabin courage and small-town mores because of the contrast between his stolid ruggedness and the squirming, shifty-eyed hoodlums he confronted. From those hearings came no important legislation, few arrests, nothing very concrete. But his investigation did center national attention on big-time crime—and on Estes Kefauver.

In the course of his investigation, Kefauver also made some important Democratic enemies. His probe into corruption in Illinois cost Majority Leader Scott Lucas his Senate seat.

Yet despite his enemies, Kefauver was riding high—and he knew it. Late in 1951 he told a friend, “Right today, I have a better chance of becoming President than I had of becoming Senator when I decided to run.” Shaking hands and pleading for help (“I am Estes Kefauver; I’m running for President of the United States and I hope you’ll help me”), he plodded tirelessly through the New Hampshire primary campaign in March 1952, astonished everyone by getting more votes than President Harry Truman. The Keef kept on, sewed up 14 of 17 primaries, went into the Democratic Convention in Chicago with 275 delegates—well ahead of Adlai Stevenson who said he didn’t want the nomination anyway.

Sundry Other Evils. On the first two convention ballots, Kefauver held solid leads, sat drinking beer in a hotel room and said, “I’ve never been more delighted in my life.” But that was the crest of his career. On the third roll-call ballot, the big-city Democratic leaders ganged up on him. Kefauver was whipped. He trudged into the convention hall, tried wearily to get to the platform to pull out of the fight. He was ruled out of order, sat down sheepishly to watch as the convention rolled on to nominate Stevenson.

Kefauver tried to rev up a campaign again for 1956—largely through a spate of investigations into Dixon-Yates, pornography, black market babies, juvenile delinquency, and sundry other sins. He lost again to Stevenson. But in a dramatic tussle for the vice-presidential nomination, the gawky Tennessee lawyer managed to produce a razor-thin victory over Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy after a thrilling roll-call fight. But when the Democratic ticket went down to crashing defeat that November, Estes Kefauver’s great days were over.

He returned to the Senate, managed to win a few headlines with investigations ranging from the drug industry to steel pricing to boxing and baseball. In 1962, when Justice Charles Evans Whittaker retired from the Supreme Court, Kefauver’s name was mentioned as a replacement, but the New Frontier didn’t cotton to the Keefs independent ways and named Byron (“Whizzer”) White instead.

One day last week, the Senator left the Senate floor, complaining of an upset stomach. Less than 36 hours later he died in Bethesda Naval Hospital of a ruptured main heart artery.