Maverick Kefauver

...However, he voted for anti-poll tax legislation (not a hot issue in Tennessee) and, more adventurously, against the House Un-American Activities Committee on key votes as well as against Carroll Reece's loyalty oath bill...

...Gorman's study of Kefauver the politician is a sound, workmanlike book that puts the facts in order and fairly...

...In 1962, when a Supreme Court vacancy came up, there was talk about Kefauver, but the Kennedys (perhaps remembering 1956) chose Byron "Whizzer" White instead...

...Never a traveler on the swimming-pool, cocktail, "beautiful people" circuit, his methods and manner seemed dated, left over from an outmoded New Deal progressivism of the 1940s...

...While the parade before the camera of characters like "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Virginia Hill/ Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello was fascinating enough, the political repercussions of the hearings were tremendous...

...He was in the headlines in 1954-56 during the Dixon-Yates affair and the struggle over public power...

...It does not try to do too much, and what it sets out to do it does well...

...Nader's young raiders and other crusaders could read it with profit—for without the tradition that Estes Kefauver inherited and maintained through his times, where would they be...

...On the other hand, Kefauver's career in the Senate revealed more and more of the independent who tended to follow his own drummer...

...The convention chose Adlai Stevenson, and as a final humiliation the chairman refused to recognize Kefauver when he tried to withdraw...

...Unlike Adlai Stevenson, who displaced him in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Kefauver could never quite accommodate himself to organization...

...In Illinois they helped retire House Majority Leader Scott Lucas from office and earned Kefauver the undying hatred of the Chicago machine...

...His career in the House was not notably spectacular, and he voted consistently down the New Deal-Fair Deal line...

...But in the heady days of the New Frontier, Kefauver's style—a matter of great importance in status-conscious Washington—was distinctly old-fashioned...

...Fighting monopolies did not really fit into the political milieu created in Washington by the bright young lawyers who descended on it in 1961...

...Kefauver's first introduction to a national audience came with the famed televised hearings on organized crime, held in many of the nation's larger cities, and over which he presided as chairman of a special Senate committee in 1950-51...

...It will probably elicit, from a generation to whom Ralph Nader is the ultimate crusader, a half-memory out of old newsreels of a man in a coonskin cap...

...The mild-mannered man from Tennessee raised prickly issues of public policy...

...In August, 1963 (he had just completed a review for The Progressive, to which he frequently contributed), Kefauver died suddenly in the midst of a characteristically heated debate over the public interest in the new communications satellite corporation, privately run by AT&T...

...Kefauver completed the break with the McKellar-Crump organization by running successfully against it for the Senate in 1948...

...As a kind of fringe benefit, the hearings also brought him an Emmy, a partly ghostwritten book, and a somewhat frozen-faced but successful television appearance on "What's My Line...

...He eventually broke with McKellar, and in 1946, as a member of the House Small Business Committee, began to attract notice as a kind of novice trust-buster...

...In 1950 he was one of the few Senators who voted against the McCarran Internal Security act (which liberals William Fulbright and Wayne Morse voted for) and in 1951 he unsuccessfully tried to introduce legislation to curb McCarthy...

...The cap became a familiar but unrepresentative trademark, and Kefauver, by no means a rustic log-cabin type, later had to wear it rather self-consciously from time to time...

...In 1952 he denounced McCarthy in Wisconsin, which probably affected his chances for nomination to national office at the 1952 Democratic convention...

...Mr...

...After that ill-fated campaign he went back to his committee work, plugging away at price-fixing in steel, autos, bread, electrical equipment, and drugs, dramatizing the monopoly problem so effectively that the public was more fully aware of it than at any time since the era of Theodore Roosevelt...

...He might be a coon, he replied, but he was certainly not Boss Crump's, and he put on a coonskin cap to prove it...

...Meanwhile, his relations with Kenneth McKellar, his powerful Tennessee colleague, cooled over Mc-Kellar's attempts to control the Tennessee Valley Authority...

...Kefauver did not fit well into the Senate of the 1950s, run as it was by the iron hand of Senator Lyndon Johnson, and he had to make his own opportunities as chairman of the Antitrust and Monopoly Committee...

...He was accused at home, in fact, of voting the Communist line along with Representative Vito Marc-antonio of New York, who quickly disclaimed Kefauver as any friend of his...

...The final impression this political biography leaves is of a man who, in a world of maneuverings, deals, and outstretched hands, maintained his own style and his own brand of stubborn individuality...

...He lacked the gift of compromise, partly because it was not in his makeup and partly too, perhaps, because he saw the political appeal of the maverick stance...

...But it is time to be reminded, as Joseph Bruce Gorman's biography does admirably, that Kefauver was there first—or more accurately, that he carried on in his era an honorable American political tradition, reaching back to the Populists and Grangers and Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Robert M. La-Follette Sr., to which Nader, Barry Commoner, and Senator Philip Hart are relative newcomers...

...At the 1956 Democratic convention Kefauver offered only a transitory threat to Stevenson's renomination, but he did defeat young John F. Kennedy for the Vice Presidential post...

...Elected with the acquiescence of the McKellar-Crump machine in Tennessee, he stayed in the middle of the ideological road...

...Nye, a specialist in American studies at Michigan State University, wrote "Midwestern Progressive Politics," "A Baker's Dozen," and "The Unembarrassed Muse...

...During that campaign he was termed "Crump's pet coon...

...A Yale Law School graduate and scion of an old Tennessee family, Estes Kefauver had already established himself as a successful corporation lawyer when he was elected to the House in 1939, at which point this book—accurately called a "political biography"-— begins...

...They broke Tammany in New York, sent Mayor William O'Dwyer into flight, and embarrassed dozens of public officials in Miami, Chicago, and points west...

...Nonetheless, the crime investigations were, it turned out, the first major exposure of what J. Edgar Hoover later claimed did not exist—a network of crime syndicates—and a dramatic introduction to the public of an issue as important now as it was then...

...In the Senate, Kefauver stayed clear of the Southern bloc, and while he was no farther left than any other mainstream Democrat, he looked like a flaming radical in the company of the Bilbos and Talmadges who made the headlines...

...Kefauver's concern for civil rights was soon tested by the witch-hunts of the Joseph R. McCarthy era...

...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye The name of Estes Kefauver will ring a nostalgic bell with "older" liberals (to use the current distinction) who remember the battles over pre-Vietnam issues of the Truman-Eisenhower era...

...Although he came to the convention with victories in fourteen of seventeen primaries and 275 delegates, it was clear that nobody on the inside-—city pols, Southern conservatives, or Northern liberals—seemed to want him...

...and again in 1956 when he and Albert Gore, two out of all the Southern Senators, refused to sign the "Southern Manifesto" against the Supreme Court's ruling on school desegregation...