Campaign 1952: The Rise – and Fall – of “Senator Legend”

(featured image source: Bettmann archive)

The televised hearings of the Crime Committee catapulted Estes Kefauver into the national spotlight and made him a leading contender for the 1952 Presidential nomination. He wound up making a spirited run for the nomination, using a potent combination of television fame and first-class retail campaign to score a string of primary victories. Despite coming into the convention as the heavy front-runner, Kefauver had the nomination snatched from his grasp, as the party leaders – who had always been cool to his candidacy – overwhelmed his poorly organized campaign.

The Kefauver-for-President boom began in early 1951, in the wake of the Crime Committee’s successful showdown with Frank Costello at the New York hearings. As Kefauver’s Crime Committee colleague Herbert O’Conor told Kefauver’s father, “The boy has struck a wave of popularity from Maine to California. Those people have put their money and their efforts into getting him boosted for the Presidency, and he can’t do anything but ride with the wave.”

In April of that year, Kefauver dismissed the speculation on Meet the Press, saying, “I just want to be a United States Senator if I can, and if I can’t be that I want to go back to Tennessee and be a country squire.” By the end of the year, though, he had changed his tune.

Granite State Shocker

At the time Kefauver was contemplating his campaign, the Democratic race was in a holding pattern, thanks to Harry Truman. Although Congress passed the 22^nd Amendment limiting presidents to two terms in 1947, Truman was exempted from it. While Truman was widely unpopular and beset by scandals by 1952, he still believed he could win re-election. He’d defied the odds and the experts in 1948, and thought he might be able to do it again.

While Truman dragged his feet, refusing to rule himself in or out, the rest of the field was frozen. Except for Kefauver, that is. The Senator met with Truman at the White House in January 1952 and received what he interpreted as a green light to run.

On January 23, Kefauver officially launched his Presidential bid. He immediately headed up to New Hampshire, site of the first primary.

Kefauver’s bid backed Truman into a corner. The President faced a decision: stay out of the primaries and risk Kefauver rolling up popular support uncontested, or run and risk a head-to-head loss? On January 31, Truman announced he wouldn’t contest New Hampshire, calling the primaries “eyewash” and proclaiming that the nomination was his for the taking. This backfired, sparking a wave of resentment in the Granite State and elsewhere. Six days later, Truman declared that he would contest New Hampshire after all.

With his wife Nancy by his side, Kefauver attacked the primary with the same hard-working approach he brought to his Senate campaigns. He crisscrossed the state, shaking hands and repeated his straightforward pitch: “My name is Estes Kefauver. I’m running for President of the United States. I’d sure appreciate it if you’ll help me.”

Facing the incumbent president of his own party, Kefauver stoutly insisted that he was not running in opposition to Truman. Life magazine noted Kefauver’s “amiable assurance that he was not a candidate against Truman – but for himself.” Life considered this pitch “a nice, somewhat silly and utterly sincere way to put the matter.”

Despite his tireless campaigning, Kefauver was expected to lose the primary by 20 to 30 points. Instead, he shocked the country, capturing 55 percent of the vote and winning the state’s entire delegate slate. This stunning victory led Time magazine to dub Kefauver “a sort of Senator Legend – half man, half fiction, a candidate conjured up by the disillusioned New Hampshire Democrat to answer his own yearnings.” As one politico stated, “Handshaking seems to work as well in New Hampshire as it does in Tennessee.”

Within days, Truman had abandoned his reelection bid. Suddenly, Estes Kefauver was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

The Kefauver Wave Builds

On the heels of his New Hampshire win, Kefauver decided to run in as many primaries as he could. His pitch was knocked as light on policy specifics (Time mocked him as being “in favor of good government, peace, kindness, vision, and purity”), but his earnest manner and dogged campaigning charmed the voters.

In Wisconsin, he cruised to victory over a “draft Truman” campaign and an unpledged delegation. In Nebraska, he scored a 20-point win over Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr. (In the wake of his defeat, Kerr joked, “If I run again I’ll have to learn to square-dance and ride a bicycle,” a tip of the hat of Kefauver’s just-folks campaign style.)

In Illinois, the Chicago Democratic machine and ex-Majority Leder Scott Lucas – still smarting over the crime hearings – tried to stop Kefauver by boosting a write-in campaign for the state’s governor, Adlai Stevenson. Kefauver won by nearly a 10-to-1 margin.

Kefauver’s next challenges were primaries in Florida and Ohio, both taking place on May 6.

In Florida, he faced a major battle against conservative Georgia senator Richard Russell. Governor Fuller Warren, also still upset about the crime hearings, was loaded for bear and determined to take down Kefauver. The governor prepared a list of 21 questions challenging Kefauver’s fitness for office and challenged the Tennessean to a debate. Kefauver accepted, but Warren proceeded to duck the challenge he had set. Kefauver followed Warren around the state, even showing up at the governor’s office, only for Warren to slip away from a back door.

Unfortunately for Kefauver, his true opponent was not the buffoonish governor but Russell, who wound up winning the state with 65% of the vote. Kefauver won only eight counties, all in urban areas, snapping his winning streak.

In Ohio, meanwhile, Kefauver faced a favorite-son campaign backed by the state Democratic organization. Faced with the need to run in Florida and Ohio simultaneously, Kefauver sent Nancy to the Buckeye State to campaign for several days on his behalf. Nancy, whom Russell called “Kefauver’s most dangerous secret weapon,” proved a popular and effective speaker. Kefauver scored a strong victory in Ohio, with 31 of his 35 delegates winning.

From there, he rolled to victories in Oregon, where he defeated Stevenson; California, where he crushed state Attorney General and future Governor Pat Brown; and South Dakota. He lost the D.C. primary to New York Governor Averell Harriman, leaving his overall record at 12 wins and 2 losses. (He did not contest Minnesota, where victorious Senator Hubert Humphrey wound up supporting Kefauver, or West Virginia, which elected an unpledged slate.)

Despite running on a shoestring budget and a campaign staff that columnist Drew Pearson called “”a bobtail assortment assortment of young and enthusiastic amateurs that no one had ever heard of,” Kefauver had successfully demonstrated his popular appeal across the nation, and had proven himself (in the words of Life) “a capable campaigner with unbounded optimism, energy and ambition.”

But all those primary victories didn’t win the hearts of Democratic party leaders. The urban bosses who’d been humiliated by the crime hearings, the Southern conservatives who considered him a traitor on civil rights, the fellow Senator who were jealous at his success and felt he’d jumped the line – none of these folks were eager to climb on board the Kefauver bandwagon.

As far back as the New Hampshire primary, Life had called Kefauver’s “lack of support within the regular machines” his greatest liability. His energetic campaign had done nothing to change that; if anything, it made the regulars all the more determined to stop him.

During the primaries, Kefauver had turned that into an asset, telling the voters, “The boys in the back room have never cared for me.” Now he was depending on the boys in the back room to give him the nomination.

Showdown in Chicago (aka Wave, Meet Brick Wall)

There was a month between the end of the primary and the convention in Chicago. Kefauver had won more delegates than anyone else, by a healthy margin, but not enough to capture the nomination. The would-be nominee faced a choice: try to make nice with the party bosses and convince them that he was a suitable choice, or try to whip up public opinion to embarrass the bosses into giving him the nod.

On the advice of campaign director Gael Sullivan, Kefauver chose Door Number Two. He hosted a television show in which Sullivan claimed that the party leaders held a “political monopoly,” and accused the other candidates of conspiring to deadlock the convention and deny Kefauver the nomination. Needless to say, this tactic – along with Kefauver’s own milder statement that “[a] political party should belong to the people” – didn’t win any points with the party regulars. (The fact that Sullivan’s conspiracy theory turned out to be a fairly accurate forecast of how the convention played out was beside the point.)

The problem for the anti-Kefauver forces was finding a candidate who could beat him. The other candidates with significant delegate totals coming into the convention were Russell, who was considered too conservative to win, and Harriman, who was considered too liberal. Stevenson, the great hope of many party regulars, was still insisting that he wouldn’t run (despite opening the convention with an eloquent welcoming speech that only further endeared him to the delegates). A brief bubble of support for Vice President Alben Barkley burst almost as quickly as it started.

Kefauver’s forces formed an alliance with Harriman’s group; combined, they still would not have had enough votes to win, but it could get him closer. Harriman, though, wasn’t ready to give up on the hope of winning the nomination himself. In addition, Harriman’s bloc of liberal advisors unwisely persuaded Kefauver to support a convention rule staring that delegates would not be seated unless they pledged to support the convention’s nominee in November. (Bear in mind that this was in the wake of the Dixiecrat revolt four years earlier, when several Southern states supported Strom Thurmond for president instead of Truman.)

The Southern delegates reacted with anger, and three states – Virginia, Louisiana, and South Carolina – refused to take the pledge. Later, while candidates were being nominating, convention chair Sam Rayburn – who was hostile to Kefauver throughout the proceedings – engineered a vote on whether to seat the Virginia delegation.

At first, both Kefauver’s and Stevenson’s backers voted against seating Virginia, which should have been enough to block the idea. But Rayburn held the floor open, given Stevenson’s forces a chance to pull a last-minute switch and vote in favor of seating Virginia, thus getting credit for uniting the party and hardening the Southerners against Kefauver. (Kefauver personally favored seating the Virginia delegation, but his wishes were apparently never conveyed to the convention floor.)

At the end of the first nominating ballot, Kefauver led with 340 votes, with Stevenson – still not an actual candidate – second with 273 votes, Russell third with 268, and Harriman fourth with 123½. Meanwhile, Harriman and the liberals – with a strong nudge from President Truman – decided that Stevenson was acceptable, and Harriman secretly agreed to withdraw in favor of the Illinois governor – without telling Kefauver, with whom he was supposedly allied.

One last opportunity for Kefauver presented itself, when Texas Governor Allen Shivers – no fan of Stevenson – approached the Kefauver camp with a proposition. Shivers was a strong supporter of offshore oil drilling, and he was hoping for passage of a bill in Congress giving states the rights to drill for oil off their shores.

Shivers had previously offered to back Kefauver if the Tennessean would agree not to veto such a bill if it passed Congress. But Kefauver favored federal control of those waters, and refused the deal. Now, eager to block Stevenson, Shivers offered the support of several Southern delegations if Kefauver would issue a statement saying his mind was open on the issue. But Kefauver again declined. (Shivers got his bill in 1953 – under President Dwight Eisenhower, who won Texas in November.)

After the second ballot, Kefauver still led Stevenson by about 40 votes. But Harriman was about to withdraw and throw his support to Stevenson. Kefauver recognized that the stampede was on and tried to withdraw before the third ballot, but he arrived on the floor too late and Rayburn refused to recognize him in the middle of the round. It wasn’t until the end of the third ballot, with Stevenson just a handful of votes from victory, that Rayburn finally allowed Kefauver to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.

If all of that weren’t enough, his withdrawal speech and Stevenson’s victory occurred on Kefauver’s birthday.

What Went Wrong?

In the end, Kefauver’s popularity with the voters wasn’t enough to overcome the hostility of the Democratic establishment. But how was that possible? How could the Democratic party, which proudly considered itself the “party of the people.” Reject the man who was clearly the people’s choice?

Kefauver biographer Charles Fontenay, who covered Kefauver’s campaign as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, laid a large share of the blame at the feet of campaign manager Sullivan. Fontenay notes that Sullivan did virtually nothing to woo unpledged delegates prior to the convention, and that the campaign as a whole – which was poorly funded and sparsely staffed – relied too heavily on Kefauver’s personal appeal and failed at the organizational ground game needed to back it up.

Another biographer, Joseph Gorman, pointed out that since Kefauver won several primaries either unopposed or against nominal opposition, which gave many of his critics an excuse to write off his popular support (despite numerous polls throughout the spring and summer showing him as the strong favorite among Democratic voters). Stevenson, by contrast, was never an active candidate until the convention.

Both Fontenay and Gorman also pointed the finger at Rayburn and the convention managers, who clearly stacked the proceedings against Kefauver. Fontenay called Rayburn “one of several major factors in [Kefauver’s] ultimate loss of the nomination. Repeatedly, at key points in the proceedings, Rayburn’s handling of the gavel meant the difference between success and failure for the strategy of the Kefauver forces.” Gorman agreed that Rayburn “used every parliamentary trick possible to block  any move that was regarded as favorable to Kefauver[.]” When Kefauver went on television to ask people to send telegrams supporting him to the delegates, the people did – but according to Fontenay’s account, the convention managers never delivered those telegrams.

Truman’s hostility to Kefauver certainly didn’t help. While it’s unclear how much the outgoing president directly intervened to shift the convention in Stevenson’s direction, he had made it abundantly clear that the Illinois governor – and definitely not the senator from Tennessee – was his preferred successor.

Finally, there was the fact that Stevenson himself was popular with the party regulars. It was pure coincidence that since the convention was in Chicago, Stevenson – as the home-state governor – got to give the opening speech. But that speech reminded the delegates of how much they liked him. Stevenson was also considered a moderate, and thus acceptable to all the major party blocs. Gorman concluded that “it is doubtful whether anti-Kefauver leaders could have assembled a successful coalition on behalf of any candidate other than Stevenson.”

Understandably, Kefauver took his convention defeat hard. Back home in Tennessee, he struggled to sleep at night, agonizing over whether he could have done things differently. Soon enough, though, he was able to shake it off and get back to work – and set his eyes on 1956.