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More than Skin-Deep. Thus has Estes Kefauver's plain and simple exterior made him Adlai Stevenson's right-hand man in the 1956 national campaign. But behind that Kefauver there is another Kefauver, neither plain nor simple.
Everything about Kefauver points to birth in a log cabin, but he was actually raised on his family's 600-acre farm near Madisonville, Tenn. (pop. 1.500), where his father was a well-to-do real-estate operator, hardware dealer and five-term mayor. Kefauver's whole demeanor speaks of an education limited to the little red schoolhouse, but he graduated from the University of Tennessee and Yale Law School. (His top adviser, Washington's "Jiggs" Donohue, says Adlai and Estes get along well because, "after all, they're both Ivy Leaguers, you might say.") Kefauver has won a name as an outspoken critic of big business, but he was once a highly successful Chattanooga corporation lawyer. He appears to be a happy, stunt-loving, political extravert, but beneath the calm, smiling surface is a tense introvert.
Estes Kefauver has met, talked to and sympathized with as many people as anyone in the U.S., but his own wife, redhaired, Scottish-born Nancy Pigott Kefauver, has said that he is "not much interested in individuals." Thousands of U.S. farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers and elderly ladies feel, on the basis of a moment's acquaintance, that Kefauver is an old friend. But his oldest friends sometimes feel that they do not know him at all. Recalls his 1948 senatorial campaign manager, Charles Neese: "I was riding with an assistant of his one day, and I asked, 'Do you understand him?' The answer was, 'No, do you understand him?' " Neese's reply: "No."
The Life of Two Boys. The key to an understanding of Carey Estes Kefauver lies deep. From his father, Robert Cooke Kefauver, who is now seriously ill in Tennessee, Estes inherited a pre-Revolutionary name (it had originally come from the German Kefober) and a penchant for Wilsonian liberalism that, although fuzzily expressed, has remained constant. From his mother, Phredonia Estes,* came a lineage tracing back to Renaissance Italy (Villa d'Este, the family seat in Tivoli, is famed the world over for its fountains and terraced gardens).
But Phredonia gave Estes something more than a proud bloodline; she instilled in him the overwhelming, sometimes smothering sense of kindness that is one of his most notable characteristics. Even when he was in college, she wrote every other day with homely admonitions; e.g. "Leave no tender word unsaid" (he has not left one), and "Do good while life shall last" (he tries desperately). The Bible she gave him as a boy had pasted in it a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox :
If you are sighing for a lofty work,
If great ambitions dominate your mind,
Just watch yourself and see you do not shirk
The common little ways of being kind.