THE MAN FROM TENNESSEE

...But they insist it is an exception because TVA is a vital local matter to any Senator from Tennessee and that a Tennessee city—Memphis—was involved in the contract between the TVA and the Atomic Energy Commission...

...Not content with uttering in Washington such non-Southern sentiments, Kefauver repeated them in Norfolk at the height of Virginia's campaign to approve a constitutional convention to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling...

...His burning ambition and the obviousness of his high aspirations make them uncomfortable...

...The Editors HPHE FIRST person I ever heard pronounce that tongue-twisting name was John Rankin...

...It is easy to understand why his forthrightness would frighten professional politicians...

...But when you try to get him stirred up about something that interests you, he can barely hear you...

...Kefauver won his first statewide victory by appealing to the people of Tennessee over the head of Boss Crump...

...Here is the Case bill of 1946...

...At the close of a brief talk, he asked for questions...

...Kefauver's record is equally consistent against witch-hunters...

...To all appearances, Kefauver was willing to benefit from the Republican charge that mink coats, deep freezes, and five per centers were symbolic of an Administration corrupt beyond reform...

...Ironically enough, the Sun-Times in 1950 was supporting Lucas...

...It has been hard for Kefauver to forget or forgive the fact that, through die long, hard, and expensive method of winning primaries, he turned up with 362V4 votes on 'the second ballot at Chicago only to see the prize handed to a man who not only refused to fight for it but insisted he didn't want it...

...But because in our usiness of covering Washington we stand always in fear of being naive, it is a temptation to refuse to accept so simple and logical an explanation of the attitudes of so ambitious a man...

...Kefauver and his supporters itched to have a test with Stevenson this year in New Hampshire, which they regard as their own private reserve...

...There is a convincing sound to Kefauver's repeated assertions that he is far happier as an active Senator than he would be in the ceremonial office of Vice Presidency...

...It is unlikely, of course, that Kefauver expects anything quite as good as a Minnesota victory...

...He expects you to be interested in the things that interest him...

...If Kefauver by 1946 was nursing an ambition to become Senator, it would have seemed wise to try to ingratiate himself with rural voters who were supposed to be aroused against labor leaders...

...One of the awkward features of our system is that such a ticket cannot be arranged ahead of the convention...

...At though Lucas bears an unyielding grudge against Kefauver, he concedes he might have slipped by to re-election if his journalistic supporter hadn't been so enterprising...

...Why liberals have shown so little enthusiasm for Kefauver this time is a question that has fascinated many of them, including Michael Straight...

...The way he mumbled through it, you could tell he hadn't seen it before he came on the floor...

...In order to be considered for second place, Kefauver will have to make a strong showing as a contender for first prize...

...They suspect further that Kefauver's intense interest in people and his warmth and his obvious honesty are not deep-seated traits of personality, but the outward features of a chosen political image...

...He added he thought an ambassador in such an important diplomatic listening post could render valuable service to his country...

...II In all the Congress, there is not a more consistent record than Estes Kefauver's...

...In addition to Minnesota, the two men will oppose each other in Florida and California...

...Like most Southerners, Kefauver has a consistent record of favoring international collaboration, even going beyond many in his acceptance of the one-world concept...

...There was no way the Committee could hurt Hennings per sonally, he is said to have told Ke fauver, but it wouldn't do any Demo cratic candidate any good to have the Committee in the state at that time...

...Those who watched Kefauver at work on that assignment day after day grew to have deep admiration for the way he handled it...

...It was not televised...

...There was also a matter of strong personal pride in his entry in the Minnesota primary...

...You make a point to be on hand to vote with him on something that's important to him...

...As our anonymous Senator put it, his phlegmatic nature helps him endure burdens too heavy for other men...

...The first trait is his simple faith, which is the hallmark of every successful politician, that no matter how bitterly the leaders oppose him, he is the people's choice...

...He won an even more impressive victory at the hands of the rank-and-file when he carried his fight for Senatorial renomination to them in 1954...

...So we look at other parts of his record in hope of bolstering our suspicion that he is simply another politician on the make...

...He voted in 1950 to uphold Truman's veto of the anti-Communist bill which party stalwarts such as Senate Leader Scott Lucas were voting to override...

...Hennings is understood to halt received assurances from Kefauver that he would let Missouri alone for the time being...

...Not once during his 1952 primary victories did he get a chance to find out if he could defeat Stevenson for the simple reason that Stevenson entered no primary...

...Even Senators who agree with him on issues do not have for him that warm personal feeling which is a part of the club spirit of the Senate...

...He demonstrated the truth of that belief when he dared run for the Senatorial nomination against the wishes of Mister Crump in 1948...

...It was the first tentative effort to "put unions in their place," a forerunner of the Taft-Hartley Act...

...This time, he can afford to coast a bit on the assumption that most people know about him...

...I looked up a Senator whose votes on 50 issues come extremely close to paralleling Kefauver's record...

...In Truman's estimation, Kefauver committed the unforgivable crime of allying himself in 1952 with those who put the tag "corrupt" upon the Democratic Administration...

...Other portraits to appear soon will include Adlai Stevenson and Senator William F. Knowland...

...But it does seem safe to say this: If Kefauver is as popular with the rank-and-file as he believes he is, if he comes out on top in Florida and California, and makes a respectable showing in Minnesota, it is going to be a lot harder to crowd him off the ticket this year than it was for Sam Rayburn to push him around the convention platform while Kefauver was trying to concede defeat in 1952...

...In his overpowering eagerness during the unsuccessful 1952 effort to win the nomination, he not only almost wore himself out but made enemies needlessly...

...He opposed the earlier antics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities...

...When we were fighting the Administration over the public power-atomic energy-TVA issue a couple of yean ago, we couldn't get Estes to bear any of the burden of the night and day filibuster...

...It was his long-shot victory in New Hampshire which really made him a formidable candidate in 1952...

...Among all its members, there is not one who answers questions more forthrightly, who deals less in double talk...

...Here is what he said: "Very few members actually dislike Estes...

...In 1954 he stood alone in fighting against the efforts of Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota liberal, to prove, by harassing legislation, that Democrats hate Communists even more fiercely than do Republicans...

...For he is a Southerner, and he can't be intimidated by bluff...

...The unreconstructed Mississippi rabble-rouser stood on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1942, pointed an accusing finger and shouted: "Shame on you, Estees Kee-fow-verl" The shameful act by which the second-term Congressman from Chattanooga had betrayed the South and insulted the memory of Andrew Jackson was to cast his vote for a federal law to abolish the poll tax as a requirement for voting in eight states...

...On the same day, he said of the integration decision: "The Supreme Court decision is the •law of the land...

...None, for example, feels toward Kefauver the way Southerners like Senators George and Russell feej toward their favorite wild man, Hubert Humphrey...

...Nobody knows all the facts, certainly I don't, but I think that mob action should be made a violation of the criminal code...

...He says, 'I'll be there at 3 o'clock when the roll is called.' But you know all the time he's making that 3 o'clock promise that he has a ticket in his pocket for a flight that leaves the airport at 1 -.50 o'clock...

...He 1952 Florida Presidential primary that he is not without followers in the deep South...

...In that belief, he is almost alone...

...I remember a cold day in a bleak mill town in New Hampshire in February, 1952...

...Most of the time there wasn't much of an audience in the small committee room in which he, Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney, and the maverick Republican Senator William Langer nibbled and pecked at witnesses high in the Eisenhower Administration or from the upper echelons of finance...

...The were just enough to whet public in-terest...

...More important, of course, these groups have heard a voice in American politics unequalled for intellectual clarity since Wilson's time, and for as long as Stevenson is willing, they are committed to him...

...But while victory and a like-minded attitude toward most issues have made Hennings tolerant toward Re* fauver's crime investigation methods, some of his friends still bristle about the 1950 experience...

...That belief was strengthened by his primary victories of 1952, when he beat Truman in New Hampshire and Senator Robert S. Kerr in Nebraska and gave Senator Russell quite a scare in Florida...

...He said he was just as radical, or more so, than New York's far left Congressman, Vito Marcantonio...

...If, in the face of the organization indorsement for Stevenson, Kefauver should come in first in Minnesota, it would take all the ingenuity of his opponents in the party to stop him between March and August...

...The mixed emotions of those who have left Kefauver for Stevenson are much like those of a man who has jilted a sweetheart wl\en he found the one he secretly loved all the time was willing to have him...

...But the pattern doesn't change...

...III Kefauver insists, both in public and in private, that he and Harry Truman are on the best of terms, that the former President has promised not to throw any roadblocks in his way...

...He raised it in his New Republic and attempted to answer it this way: "The Senate Democrats resent Kefauver's preoccupation with his own career...

...He knows how to put together a good staff...

...If you follow the Kefauver voting record on civil rights, his ballots on succeeding anti-poll tax legislation, his stand in favor of an anti-Iynching bill, his firm support of the Supreme Court's school integration decision, his unqualified denunciation of the Till murder in Mississippi, you are forced, however reluctantly, to one conclusion...

...Kefauver they really fear as a spokesman for civil rights...

...In that vote and in that denunciation by the man who was competing with Theodore Bilbo for the title of champion race-baiter lies the key to an understanding of Senator Estes Kefau-ver...

...He hopes for a miracle in Minnesota...

...It is in Kefauver's favor this year that he is, at 53, a more relaxed candidate than he was four years ago...

...There must be, we say, a more involved and sinister reason for Ke-fauver's crusading zeal on behalf of civil rights...

...Eugene Meyer, wife of the owner of the Washington Post...

...If the victorious Hennings is inclined to be more forgiving than the defeated Lucas, other Democratic members of the Senate are still resentful...

...Southerners assume that Stevenson, being a Northerner, will stop short when they warn him that bloodshed in the South will be the price of further reforms...

...You have to decide that such a consistent pattern could be established only by a man who votes and speaks according to principles in which he believes, and not with a view to helping himself climb the Eolitical ladder...

...His detractors insist that New Hampshire was no test...

...He never showed any interest in the hearings on juvenile delinquency until the witness was Mrs...

...If the race issue is to be one of the tests, where can liberals find a politician, North or South, who has taken, in recent weeks, a more forthright position than Kefauver...

...Lucas will go to his grave believing that in spite of the Korean War, in spite of Everett Dirksen's campaign oratory about "your sons' bodies coming home in boxes," he would have been re-elected to the Senate in 1950 if Kefauver had kept his crime investigation away from Chicago a few weeks longer...

...His only deviation from the labor-liberal line was to allow himself to be swept into voting for Harry Truman's request for power to draft railroad strikers into the Army...

...It was a more difficult assignment than that of cross-examining gangsters and racketeers...

...The Southern leaders scorn him as one who has crossed the line to judge matters of life and death for Southern whites in national terms...

...Estes probably would be a good President...

...He's a headline grabber...

...In fact, he was the only Democrat who unseated a Republican Senator (Forrest Donnell) in a year when Democrats were fall...

...The Chicago Sun-Times, aroused by journalistic pride in its scoop, has lately sought to deny to Kefauver, and to claim exclusively for itself, credit for the disclosures which seemed to cause the Lucas defeat...

...They admit this is one time that he has been willing to undergo the drudgery of committee details...

...Kefauver had gone through his usual routine of shaking hands with everyone who turned out to hear him and had listened to their shy comments, most of them delivered in French-Canadian accents...

...And when you need his vote, he's quick to promise...

...He was known as the "richest cop in America...

...ROBERT t. RIGGS, Washington correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, has watched Senator Kefauver in action, as Congressman and Senator, for nearly two decades...

...The scorekeepers of Americans for Democratic Action and the record compilers of AFL-CIO find virtually no black mark against him during his nearly twenty years in Congress...

...The fact that Truman is not actively opposing him, however, does not mean that he would do anything to help him...

...When Hennings got Kefauver on the telephone to remind him of his promise, Kefauver is reported to have explained that he couldn't control the decisions of his Committee, that he had to go into Missouri in order to guard his own integrity...

...It is true that some of Kefauver's 1952 victories were almost sham battles...

...It is the chant of his lieutenants that he has no support save among the rank-and-file...

...It appeared to be a tight race in Missouri...

...I got him, under promise of anonymity, to say why Senators feel, to put it mildly, a lack of enthusiasm for Kefauver's Presidential aspirations...

...The focus of the Chicago investigation was Police Captain Dan Gilbert, Democratic nominee for sheriff of Cook County...

...Last time, in his desire to cash in on the publicity gleaned from his televised investigation of the connection between political machines and organized crime, he inflicted some lasting wounds...

...The puzzling thing about the 1956 contest for the nomination is that so many independents, liberals, and egg-head Democrats have responded coolly to the Kefauver cause...

...They point out that Truman was not a bona fide candidate and that it was no great feat to beat Kerr in Nebraska...

...They grant that courage and vigor are demanded of a President and that Kefauver has rare courage and vigor...

...But, he said, the harm done by the controversy the appointment would stir up in this country would more than offset any good the ambassador could accomplish...

...But, unlike the majority of Southerners, he refused to follow Senator Walter F. George when that figure of legend tried to make the Bricker Amendment respectable...

...His cumbersome, plodding, pedestrian method of asking questions stood him in good stead...

...It will be his first showdown with Adlai Stevenson in four years...

...The Memphis boss did more than compare Kefauver to a pet coon...

...A Sun-Times reporter, Ray Brennan, secured a transcript of Gil-bert's closed-session testimony by posing as a Committee staff member, The paper ran large chunks of the questions and answers in all their fascinating detail...

...He knew he'd get a headline out of her...

...ing on all sides...

...But Kefauver voted against the Case bill...

...Whether Truman has forgiven him or not, there is no likelihood that Scott Lucas ever will...

...If you were the President, would you appoint an ambassador to the Vatican...

...It is high time that the people of both races should get together to work out ways of implementing the Supreme Court decision...

...His purposes will be well served and he will continue as a strong contender if he does no better than make a respectable showing against Stevenson and his powerful Minnesota allies...

...They concede that Kefauver has done yoeman service in hammering at the Eisenhower Administration on the Dixon-Yates contract...

...It is easy to understand why his liberal voting record should arouse the opposition of Southern conservatives...

...Kefauver was one of 31 Senators, led by Thomas C. Hennings, Jr., of Missouri, who prevented, by the margin of one vote, approval of the George version of the Bricker Amendment...

...In the face of this record and because of the hostility toward Kefauver by conservatives and Southern leaders, many professional liberals have had a bad conscience over the fact that they have failed to rally to his support...

...He genuinely believes the ordinary Southerner is far ahead of the section's political leaders in economic and social outlook...

...They look forward with confidence to the preferential primaries this spring to support that contention...

...That accounts, in part, for the volume of the chorus which calls for a Steven-son-Kefauver ticket...

...He wants his new love, but he wants his discarded girl to have happiness...

...Kefauver said he would not...

...Two weeks before the election, Kefauver telephoned Hennings, ac-cording to Missourians, and asked if it would cause him any harm if Kefauver's Committee opened hearings in Kansas City...

...He has a good mind and a phlegmatic nature which would help him bear the White House burdens...

...Kefauver had won that title of shining knight at the expense of some Democratic leaders...

...But he's so damned single-minded...

...After his success in beating the bosses in Tennessee in 1948, it was not hard for him to be convinced that the people do indeed believe in him...

...It annoyed them when he wrote a book, while still a relatively new Congressman, on how to improve the operations of Congress...

...His decision to fight it out in Minnesota points up a second Kefauver trait—his willingness to gamble...

...He never abandoned any lead until he got at least the semblance of a reply, whether the witness be the director of the budget or the ranking official of a bond company...

...Hennings is said to have replied that while it never would have occurred to him to initiate such a re-quest, he would say, so long as Kefauver had raised the question, that he'd be just as happy if the crime hunters stayed away for a cou-pie of weeks...

...He was one of a small band who refused to follow Senator George blindly when the Foreign Relations chairman insisted on giving President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles what many thought was a blank check to decide when to go to war over Formosa...

...Not only was Republican Donnell an extremely popular man, but the Yalu River, the Red Chinese, and bad news elsewhere were giving the Democrati about all the trouble they needed...

...In closed hearings, he gave the Kefauver Committee some interesting explanations of how he acquired that wealth...

...Articles in earlier issues dealt with New York's Governor Averell Harriman, Massachusetts' Governor Christian Herter, and Vice President Richard Af...

...His stock-in-trade was the claim that he, as the shining knight of television's crime investigation, was the sole Democrat qualified to lead his party back into the paths of righteousness...

...Therefore, he would not appoint one...

...Reasons far more obscure than these lead the independents, the reporters, the commentators, the intellectuals and some former officials of the New Deal and the Fair Deal to discount Kefauver's claims...

...There has been an amazing amount of hesitancy in both camps to make confident predictions about the outcome...

...He has some very striking abilities...

...He never seemed to lose patience...

...But in a few days, while Hennings was busy on the stump, Kefauver and his investigators showed up in Kansas City and began taking testimony about money passing between the underworld and Democratic politicians...

...Yet, it is easy to remember how insistent John W. Bricker was in 1944 that never, never, under any circumstances, would he accept the Vice Presidential nomination...

...But the Southern Congressmen are not alone in their hostility to his Presidential aspirations...

...Two years later he opposed the Taft-Hartley bill...

...Only one came— the kind most politicians duck...

...Another Senator who got caught in Kefauver's line of fire in 1950 was Thomas C. Hennings, Jr...

...It was a pose not likely to endear him to Truman...

...The Missouri Democrat has never felt so strongly about it because he had better luck than Lucas...

...If they were utilizing the Atomic Energy Commission to wreck the Tennessee Valley Authority and thus deliver a serious blow to public power, they were doing it in the sacred name of free enterprise and as part of a back-to the-wall defense against creeping socialism...

...He'd come in and read a speech...

...They add that executive capacity, a sense of proprieties and the ability to summon outstanding men to public service are the further requirements of a President, and they sense that Kefauver lacks these qualities...

...Chairman Kefauver gave to the press daily statements covering the bare-bones outline of what Gilbert had revealed about himself...

...Kefauver himself professes to believe that Southern leaders have dropped most of their hostility toward him...

...On the December day he announced he was again a candidate for the Presidency, he answered in these words a question about his reaction to the Till case in Mississippi: "It was a horrible and terrible murder of this boy and it's a terrible thing that nobody has been brought to account for it...

...Nixon...

...The truth is that he doesn't care greatly if the leadership thinks he is too far to the left on labor issues, on civil rights, and on other questions...

...There are two Kefauver traits which are best illustrated by his decision to enter the Minnesota primary despite the handicap that Senator Hubert Humphrey and Governor Orville Freeman have sucked the Democratic-Farmer-Labor organization for Stevenson...

...There wasn't much the unions could do then in Tennesssee for a candidate in a statewide race...

...Kefauver's work on the Dixon-Yates contract did not bring him the fame that he gained from the crime investigation...

...This time, however, Kefauver is going to meet Stevenson head-on at least three times...

...He won't endure the long, brutal drudgery required for good committee work...

...For the witnesses were all respectable gentlemen, most of them covered by the umbrella of public confidence in Dwight D. Eisenhower's crusade...

...Many liberals who went with him four years ago because they gave up hope of getting Adlai E. Stevenson to be their champion are now enrolled early in the Stevenson camp...

...It also provides one explanation why he has so many enemies as he swings into a second campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination...

...Men who served in the House with him resent him...

...Search as you will, you can find no political advantage a Representative from east Tennessee could gain in 1942 by voting to abolish the poll tax...

...But even if the Southern leadership stays hostile to him and his fellow-Senators remain cool, why are not the professional liberals rising to his support...