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.