(See Cover)
By midnight of primary day in New Hampshire, a cramped, L-shaped bedroom on the second floor of Manchester's Eagle Hotel was jammed and seething. Coats & hats were piled on the twin beds, and people were perching cheerfully on top of the coats & hats. Others helped themselves to the open bottles of Scotch, bourbon and rye on the dresser, or dug into the communal paper buckets of chop suey, chicken and egg rolls on the table. Looming above the pandemonium, with the air of a prophet who has just been slugged by a vigorous vision, was Candidate Estes Kefauver. He moved slowly through the throng, sipping a Scotch highball, dropping an affectionate long arm around shoulder after shoulder, and murmuring fervently: "I certainly did appreciate your help."
By 2 a.m. the news was good and getting fabulously better: not only was Estes Kefauver* beating Harry Truman in the preferential "beauty contest," but he was winning all twelve of the delegates to the Democratic convention. Kefauver had been rated an outside chance to win a single delegate. Whispered one guest to another: "I was afraid the voters wouldn't know our delegates." "Hell," snorted his friend, "I didn't know a one of them myself." An old Kefauver admirer, who had come up from Tennessee for the fun, shook his head admiringly and drawled into the din: "Handshaking seems to work as well in New Hampshire as it does in Tennessee."
Seven Days. Handshaking—with a lot of help from Truman's unpopularity and Kefauver's vague stand on issues—had worked a political miracle in New Hampshire. Hardly anybody in the state could remember one word of Estes Kefauver's formal speeches. He had drawn such small crowds (except for a rousing reception at a Dartmouth basketball game) that, five days before the election, he was in deep despondency. In Keene (pop. 15,638), only 30 people came out to hear him, and he was introduced by the mayor, who was running as a Truman delegate. In Claremont (pop. 12,800), Kefauver took one look at the 60 people scattered in the big auditorium, then invited them all to come down front for a chat. In an evening address in industrial Nashua, the crowd that heard Kefauver was much smaller than the one that Republican Bob Taft had drawn at the unhandy hour of 9:30 that same morning.
But for seven solid days Estes Kefauver and his attractive, redheaded wife Nancy had trudged the sidewalks of the small towns, from the Canadian border (where Nancy spoke rusty French) to Massachusetts. They would stop their borrowed car on the outskirts of each town and walk up Main Street, introducing themselves to the store owners, shoppers, cops and kids. In the cities, they headed for newspaper offices and courthouses to shake more hands. In Manchester (pop. 82,732), Kefauver walked through a slaughterhouse, a shoe factory, a brush plant, an insurance office and several mills. Beside each workman he stopped to shake hands and say: "My name is Senator Kefauver, and I'd appreciate your help next Tuesday." Or simply, "I'm certainly glad to meet you."
He tried a variant of this in a roadside diner. Approaching a counterman, he said: "My name is Estes Kefauver, and I'm running for President."
"President of what?" asked the counterman.