Estes
"Murray, Sorry I missed you, will try back later. Estes Kefauver"
January 1952. My father returned from lunch to find this message wedged in the door of his Main Street law office in Concord, NH, written in pencil on a page torn from a pocket-sized ring binder notebook. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had come to approach him to organize a run for President of the United States. Dad, who was called by his middle name, Murray, had a 1-man law office across from the State House. He had never met Kefauver and the note was unexpected, especially its personal and informal tone, written diagonally across closely spaced blue lines. We'd all seen Kefauver on television as he grilled the Mafia bosses in sessions of his televised Senate committee hearings on organized crime.
Kefauver recognized an opportunity that few at that time had even imagined, namely, to run for the nomination by campaigning in person in the primary contests. Less than 1/3rd of states even held primaries in 1952. In those days the national conventions were high drama contests fought on the convention floor, not the single-ballot formalities we have today. He grasped that NH was small enough for retail campaigning where a candidate might meet many voters and make a personal connection with them, and schmoozing voters was Estes' specialty. And New Hampshire had a unique advantage: it was the first on the political calendar, an accident of planning because town meetings, where small-town voters convened, were scheduled ahead of the mud season when traveling on unpaved roads became difficult.
So, Estes had this inspired idea and but no NH contacts. He asked in Washington, "Who are the Democrats in Concord, NH?" Concord is the state capital, and, he presumed, the center of political power. Not so where the Democrats were concerned. Their center of power was Manchester, a city more than twice the size of Concord, a 19-century milltown, with large French-Canadian and Polish populations. Concord was all Republican, a Yankee bastion. But Estes didn't ask about Manchester and so he got, in answer, two names, Murray Sawyer and Bob Branch. These were the only Democrats of any prominence in the entire capital city.
Murray Sawyer, my father, had served two terms in the Legislature. His father, William H. Sawyer, had been a Superior Court Judge, appointed in 1913 by Governor Samuel Felker, the first Democratic governor elected in 38 years. For these few facts Murray qualified as a notable Democrat, and this is what brought Estes to his door while he was at lunch.
Kefauver came back later that day and appealed to Murray for intelligence and organization. It's amusing to think that Dad might have been the gateway to a new President. His sole experience in political campaigning consisted of knocking on the doors of voters in Ward 9, explaining that he was husband of Germaine Scully, one of the Jordan clan and he'd appreciate their vote, even though he was a Democrat. "Jordan Farm" was the key here because many people in Ward 9 were from immigrant families who had trekked up Pennecook Street to knock on the Jordan Farm door and ask permission to pick wild blueberries in the high pasture above the granite quarries. The Jordans themselves were immigrants, so they were sympathetic. C. Murray Sawyer was elected to the New Hampshire General Court.
Kefauver set himself up in the Eagle Hotel a few doors down from Dad's office and it wasn't long before Dad took me to meet the candidate. To an 10-year-old boy Kefauver's charm was irresistible, overwhelming, I'd say. He was tall and handsome and he had the gift of great politicians that when he took your hand and looked into your eyes you knew that you were all he cared about for those few moments you were speaking to each other. He had a deep resonant voice and he spoke with a mid-South drawl. He was a honey-dripper, the Bill Clinton of his time.
Murray Sawyer was not much of a political operator, but he knew whom to enlist to get the campaign started. Kefauver took the state by storm and it made good copy for the newspapers. He was challenging a sitting president who had been in office since the final months of World War II. Truman had decided not to run for re-election, but that fact was still a secret in the winter of 1952. All the authority and prestige of the office made him the putative nominee and Kefauver's challenge was audacious. Kefauver was an upstart, a maverick, and a near-unknown.
I don't remember how the campaign came together and I don't know my father's actual role. I thought he was campaign manager to the next President, but he never told me anything like that. I just remember Estes, tall, handsome Estes, with his mahogany voice and the way my name sounded spoken in that sorghum drawl.
Here is a photo of Kefauver, the tall, hatless, bespectacled man, standing by his chartered DC-3 with some supporters. The woman in the plaid dress is my mother, Germaine Scully Sawyer. The man just behind her is my father, C. Murray Sawyer.
"Murray, Sorry I missed you, will try back later. Estes Kefauver"
January 1952. My father returned from lunch to find this message wedged in the door of his Main Street law office in Concord, NH, written in pencil on a page torn from a pocket-sized ring binder notebook. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had come to approach him to organize a run for President of the United States. Dad, who was called by his middle name, Murray, had a 1-man law office across from the State House. He had never met Kefauver and the note was unexpected, especially its personal and informal tone, written diagonally across closely spaced blue lines. We'd all seen Kefauver on television as he grilled the Mafia bosses in sessions of his televised Senate committee hearings on organized crime.
Kefauver recognized an opportunity that few at that time had even imagined, namely, to run for the nomination by campaigning in person in the primary contests. Less than 1/3rd of states even held primaries in 1952. In those days the national conventions were high drama contests fought on the convention floor, not the single-ballot formalities we have today. He grasped that NH was small enough for retail campaigning where a candidate might meet many voters and make a personal connection with them, and schmoozing voters was Estes' specialty. And New Hampshire had a unique advantage: it was the first on the political calendar, an accident of planning because town meetings, where small-town voters convened, were scheduled ahead of the mud season when traveling on unpaved roads became difficult.
So, Estes had this inspired idea and but no NH contacts. He asked in Washington, "Who are the Democrats in Concord, NH?" Concord is the state capital, and, he presumed, the center of political power. Not so where the Democrats were concerned. Their center of power was Manchester, a city more than twice the size of Concord, a 19-century milltown, with large French-Canadian and Polish populations. Concord was all Republican, a Yankee bastion. But Estes didn't ask about Manchester and so he got, in answer, two names, Murray Sawyer and Bob Branch. These were the only Democrats of any prominence in the entire capital city.
Murray Sawyer, my father, had served two terms in the Legislature. His father, William H. Sawyer, had been a Superior Court Judge, appointed in 1913 by Governor Samuel Felker, the first Democratic governor elected in 38 years. For these few facts Murray qualified as a notable Democrat, and this is what brought Estes to his door while he was at lunch.
Kefauver came back later that day and appealed to Murray for intelligence and organization. It's amusing to think that Dad might have been the gateway to a new President. His sole experience in political campaigning consisted of knocking on the doors of voters in Ward 9, explaining that he was husband of Germaine Scully, one of the Jordan clan and he'd appreciate their vote, even though he was a Democrat. "Jordan Farm" was the key here because many people in Ward 9 were from immigrant families who had trekked up Pennecook Street to knock on the Jordan Farm door and ask permission to pick wild blueberries in the high pasture above the granite quarries. The Jordans themselves were immigrants, so they were sympathetic. C. Murray Sawyer was elected to the New Hampshire General Court.
Kefauver set himself up in the Eagle Hotel a few doors down from Dad's office and it wasn't long before Dad took me to meet the candidate. To an 10-year-old boy Kefauver's charm was irresistible, overwhelming, I'd say. He was tall and handsome and he had the gift of great politicians that when he took your hand and looked into your eyes you knew that you were all he cared about for those few moments you were speaking to each other. He had a deep resonant voice and he spoke with a mid-South drawl. He was a honey-dripper, the Bill Clinton of his time.
Murray Sawyer was not much of a political operator, but he knew whom to enlist to get the campaign started. Kefauver took the state by storm and it made good copy for the newspapers. He was challenging a sitting president who had been in office since the final months of World War II. Truman had decided not to run for re-election, but that fact was still a secret in the winter of 1952. All the authority and prestige of the office made him the putative nominee and Kefauver's challenge was audacious. Kefauver was an upstart, a maverick, and a near-unknown.
I don't remember how the campaign came together and I don't know my father's actual role. I thought he was campaign manager to the next President, but he never told me anything like that. I just remember Estes, tall, handsome Estes, with his mahogany voice and the way my name sounded spoken in that sorghum drawl.
Here is a photo of Kefauver, the tall, hatless, bespectacled man, standing by his chartered DC-3 with some supporters. The woman in the plaid dress is my mother, Germaine Scully Sawyer. The man just behind her is my father, C. Murray Sawyer.
I remember the gatherings in small towns. In my dim recollection it was always snowing. We would arrive and enter the hotel lobby. The phrase "press the flesh" doesn't capture the way Kefauver greeted people, often by name. He never forgot a name or face, and if he did, he had a way of discerning the fact they'd met before and wheedling the details of that earlier meeting in a way that would seem like a mutual discovery.
I wonder why he took to me so. He would pull me along with him, sometimes into crowds, introducing me as "my boy, Charlie." That provided me with the primal experience of a request for an autograph from another youngster. I was just 10 years old and someone wanted my autograph. Maybe he understood the value of a child sidekick. Maybe I was his arbiter, his way to seem a family man even in a crowd. Whatever it was, I think it wasn't just for show because he invited me to ride with him between towns.
There would be five of us: Estes, his wife Nancy, his secretary, the driver, and me. The routine always included data capture from the last stop. At least capture the name of everyone he'd met there, and their role in politics, elective office, if any, phone numbers, mailing addresses. Some would get a follow up phone call or thank-you note. Next came the briefing for the stop ahead: Whom to expect, who organized the event. All common sense sort of stuff, but for me, age 10, it was a look behind the curtain at the wizard turning the dials.
There was time for conversation on these drives between campaign stops. Already I had a keen interest in world affairs. The burning issue of the day was the war in Korea which had ground to a stalemate dividing the Korean peninsula roughly where it had been divided before the North Koreans attacked across the 38th parallel in June of 1950. It was a conventional ground war with some aerial dueling between American pilots in F-86 Saber jets, and, enemy pilots, mostly, Russians, in MiG-15's. Our principal adversary was no longer North Korea since the Chinese army had joined en masse. Americans didn't take kindly to the idea of settling for the status quo ante. We don't lose wars, people believed, just seven years after MacArthur took the Japanese surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri.
"Senator," I asked in a lull between campaign stops, "what would you do to end the war in Korea?"
"Well, Charlie," he began. "I think I would tell the Chinese that I would be ready to discuss how to stop the fighting if they would come to the negotiating table." Mind you, I'm dredging the memory of an 10-year-old boy, 60 years after the fact, so my use of quotation marks is loose, to say the least. But this is how I reconstruct it, faithful to my memory of the meaning I took at the time.
"And I would tell them that if they wouldn't meet me, I was prepared to use our nuclear weapons to win the war."
Whew! A presidential candidate tells an 10-year-old boy riding in his campaign car that he would incinerate the Chinese army with nuclear bombs. And maybe a few major cities, to boot? He wasn't very specific. So far as I know, his position on this point was never announced in public. I was impressed. Estes gets my vote, albeit I wouldn't be eligible to vote until after President Kefauver's second term.
I tagged along for the entire New Hampshire campaign, through small towns and cities, like Manchester and Nashua. Kefauver drew serious national attention. Life Magazine did an article on him. He won the primary, 19,800 votes to 15,927 for President Truman, and went on to win 12 of 15 primaries held before the Democratic nominating convention. Truman announced he would not run for re-election after the vote, promulgating the false narrative that Truman folded his campaign after the defeat in NH. There was no such campaign and Truman had been courting a successor to take up his New Deal/Fair Deal vision for the country. According to David McCollough, Truman courted no fewer than three possible successors, including Eisenhower himself, though both Truman and Eisenhower denied they ever discussed an I-Like-Ike Democrat for President. Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson was his choice, until Vinson declined. Next was Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. Adlai demurred and demurred. Estes? According to McCollough Truman disliked Kefauver and distrusted him, referring to him as "Cowfever."
Kefauver led the first ballot among delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago:
On the third ballot Truman's preferred candidate, Adlai Stevenson, won the nomination. We know how that went in November.
That New Hampshire primary was not entirely a Democratic show, historically. The Republicans had their own moment in history by choosing as their preferred candidate a man who was not even living in the U.S., General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of NATO, stationed in Paris. His appearance on the ballot was engineered by Republican Governor Sherman Adams, who secured from Eisenhower a letter to the election commission stating that he had no objection to listing him on the Republican primary ballot. Ike upset presumptive nominee Senator Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," of Ohio, 50% vs. 39%. We know how that turned out.
[Ike rewarded Adams for his deft midwifery of Ike's candidacy by appointing him Chief of Staff in the Oval Office. Adams became known as the second-most-powerful man in Washington and remained in that post for three years until a flap about his accepting a vicuna coat as a gift brought his downfall.]
Four years later, 1956, Estes returned to New Hampshire for a second try. He trounced Adlai 21,701 to 3,806 votes and seemed on his way to the nomination. But Adlai carried the primaries in Oregon, Florida and California, and won the nomination on the first ballot in Chicago. Adlai pulled a surprise when he announced he would not designate a running mate, but instead would leave it to the convention to nominate a candidate for Vice President. The two contenders were Estes and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. On the second ballot Kennedy was just 15 votes shy of the nomination, but favorite son states began revising their votes toward Kefauver and when it was all said and done Estes was nominated to run as Adlai's running mate. The Democratic ticket in November was Adlai and Estes. We all know how that turned out.
His run for V.P. was the last hurrah for Kefauver. He was re-elected to the senate for a third term with 72% of the vote in 1960, despite the pre-election polls showing his support as virtually nil. On August 8, 1963, Kefauver was taken ill on the floor of the Senate, arguing for an amendment to a bill funding NASA. He died in his sleep two days later of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.
I know what effect the Kefauver campaigns had on American politics--they showed the way to presidential politics at the retail level. But I wonder what effect my adventures with Estes in 1952 and 1956 might have had on me. A tendency to find heroes in presidential politics, though that tendency did not survive the decades. A taste for celebrity, which found expression in 1968 when I met another son of Tennessee, Riley B. King. When I think back on it now I remember most that a candidate for President took seriously my question on foreign policy and gave me an answer that today would destroy a candidate's campaign overnight.
Estes. Tall, handsome Estes, from Tennessee. I asked him if he knew a popular song and he said he wasn't sure but he might recognize it if I sang a few bars of it. The song, which I quoted to him but didn't sing, had the recurrent lines "You're undecided now/So what are you gonna do." A good campaign theme.