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What the hearings will do to Talmadge's chances for election to a fifth Senate term next year is uncertain. After a string of personal setbacks—the death by drowning of his son Robert, the bitter divorce from Betty, a bout with alcoholism that once sent him reeling onto the Senate floor—Talmadge has little left but his political career, and he intends to fight for it. He defiantly reaffirmed his candidacy in February, upon emerging from the Long Beach Naval Medical Center after five weeks of treatment that he says cured his drinking problem. Two weeks ago, he spurned an offer by Senator Adlai Stevenson, chairman of the Ethics Committee, to drop the hearings if he would accept Senate censure.
Talmadge's popularity undoubtedly has nosedived in Atlanta. But the church-going rural fundamentalists who idolized his father, gallus-snapping Eugene Talmadge, four times elected Governor, view the Senator's troubles more in sorrow than in anger. Bill Robinson, a veteran Georgia political observer, says that they regard Betty as a vindictive woman and see the Senator as "an old man kicked out of his home, living in an apartment while his wife got the hogs, the land and the pecan trees. His only home is the Senate." The prevailing view is that Talmadge can be beaten only if the Senate votes to censure him outright—and even then it would be a close race.