(6 of 8)
Postcards from Moscow. Kefauver began pointing for 1956. Increasing the number of speeches he made for fees, he paid off the debt—estimated at $30,000 —incurred by his 1952 campaign. He held his place in the Senate by carrying 91 of Tennessee's 95 counties against a tough, helicopter-hopping war hero who accused Estes of coddling Communists. With his investigations of juvenile delinquency, violence and sex in motion pictures, pornography, black-market babies and Dixon-Yates, Kefauver went prospecting for publicity. He became one of the first Democrats to speak out squarely against Dwight Eisenhower ("Eisenhower is a disappointing President"). Whereas most prospective presidential candidates make one trip abroad, Kefauver made three, covering Europe, the Middle East and Asia. And when the Soviet Union relaxed its restrictions against U.S. travelers. Kefauver was among the first to pop over to Moscow.
Estes Kefauver's travels brought no great contributions to U.S. foreign policy. He remained, as for years before, an enthusiast of Clarence Streit's dreamy Atlantic Union, under which the U.S. would give up significant rights of sovereignty to participate with other free nations in a constitutional federation.
What Kefauver's journeys did bring was a blizzard of postcards and notes from all points of the world to all parts of the U.S. To Texas' Senator Lyndon Johnson came one beginning: "Dear Lyndon. I am at the airport waiting to get on a plane for Helsinki. I want you to know I am thinking about you." In one of the choice seats of a Moscow theater, with Soviet culture cavorting all around him, Estes Kefauver sat scribbling away on his postcards to prospective supporters. And finally, thousands of miles and three months after Moscow, to a man in Illinois came a message from Washington: "Dear Adlai. As you know, I am announcing tomorrow. I do hope we can get together."
Nettles from Adlai. In 1956 Kefauver had to fight a personal as well as a political battle. Wife Nancy, 45, who had campaigned with him in 1952, was at best unenthusiastic this time. Kefauver's four children (three girls and an adopted boy) were extremely unhappy about Daddy's leaving home again. The oldest daughter, Linda, 14, refused to speak to Kefauver for three weeks after his announcement. But Estes Kefauver knew what he wanted, and he had only one way to go after it. Says he: "If you seek anything, you ought to do it with all your might."
He did just that, and his win over the favored Stevenson in Minnesota again demonstrated Kefauver's great strength in the farm states. After that the campaign got rougher—and the two men who are now running mates said things they wish they had swallowed. Directly or indirectly, Kefauver accused Stevenson of bossism, mudslinging, fair-weather liberalism, inconsistency on civil rights, and of being a "silver-platter candidate." Said Stevenson: "I find this very irksome." Then Stevenson charged Kefauver with neglecting his Senate duties. Said he: "There may be such a thing as wanting to be President too badly." Retorted Kefauver: "Mr. Stevenson is not talking sense; he is simply talking nonsense, and he is doing it in the manner of a man who is desperate."