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Such public education was what Kefauver said he wanted. But in practice, it distressed and embarrassed him more than anything he has ever done in his political life. An example of his distress is the Tubbo Gilbert case. A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times got his hands on some secret Kefauver committee testimony about Tubbo, who was the Democratic candidate for sheriff of Cook County. The Sun-Times story touched off a political chain reaction, Tubbo was defeated in the election, and in the general revulsion against Tubbo & Co. Illinois' Scott Lucas, a Democrat and the Senate majority leader, went down the drain. Kefauver apologized for the leak, turned with a vengeance to investigate how it happened, and begged Lucas for forgiveness. Kefauver does not brag about his committee's influence for clean government. Said he: "I don't believe it is fair, and I don't believe the record will sustain the complaint that we were instrumental in swaying the elections anywhere."
Eisenhower, Only Smaller. Just exactly when Estes Kefauver became aware of his own presidential possibilities, nobody knows for sure. Says Washington Congressman Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, one of the capital's few Kefauver disciples: "It was his trip around the country last fall that did it. He felt quite a bit of grass-roots support which he didn't expect —something like Eisenhower, I'd say, on a smaller scale." Nancy Kefauver thinks something clicked when Estes got a rousing presidential draft call in Nashville last December. Soon afterward, Kefauver confided to a friend: "Right today I have a better chance of becoming President than I had of becoming Senator when I decided to run."
Once decided, Kefauver went about declaring himself in his usual, offend-nobody way. He humbly asked the advice of friendly newsmen, and if they suggested that he had too little support he retorted: "I can't wait for the professional politicians." But he conscientiously paid a call on Professional Pol Harry Truman and came away in high spirits, convinced that Truman was not opposed to a Kefauver campaign. In late January Kefauver announced publicly that he was "in to the finish."
From that day to election eve in New Hampshire, the pundits underrated him. He had, they said, neither professional funds nor professional organization. But, like Cornelia of old, Kefauver had more precious jewels. In a pleasant grey brick house in Washington's Spring Valley district, he has a lively, lovely, photogenic household consisting of his wife, three daughters, an adopted son, two cocker spaniels and a tame, deodorized skunk named Shanghai. He has amateur Kefauver-for-President clubs in every state in the Union. And he has behind him the power of the Kefauver legend.