Word: keefe
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...critics, and for all the sophisticated sorts who jeered at "The Keef," he was a great vote-getter with a vast store of plodding energy and a vaulting ambition. He wanted to become President of the U.S. He never made it - but even in his failure Estes Kefauver, by the time of his death last week at 60. left his mark on U.S. politics...
Crime & the Keef. Once in the Senate, Kefauver voted the party line, authored no major bills. But in 1951 he catapulted to fame and, thanks to national television, built himself a real political image. As chairman of a special Senate crime investigating committee, he dragged such diverse and unsavory characters as Greasy Thumb Guzik, Virginia Hill and Frank Costello into the bright lights for a classic lesson in morality. Gentle but relentless, Kefauver questioned them with painful sincerity, became to millions a pillar of log-cabin courage and small-town mores because of the contrast between his stolid ruggedness...
...pleading for help ("I am Estes Kefauver; I'm running for President of the United States and I hope you'll help me"), he plodded tirelessly through the New Hampshire primary campaign in March 1952, astonished everyone by getting more votes than President Harry Truman. The Keef kept on, sewed up 14 of 17 primaries, went into the Democratic Convention in Chicago with 275 delegates-well ahead of Adlai Stevenson who said he didn't want the nomination anyway...
Admission of Guilt. With his ear-to-ear grin and coonskin cap routine, Estes Kefauver has often been dismissed by pundits as an excessively folksy light weight. But in his battle against "Tip" Taylor, the Keef showed bracing political courage. When Taylor called him a traitor to the South for voting for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, Kefauver defended the bills on the steps of every courthouse where he could draw a crowd. "I shall continue to favor the expansion of the right to vote," he said in Memphis, Tennessee's most strongly segregationist city, "until every...
...virtue of cold arithmetic, Tennesseans granted that the Keef ought to keep his narrow edge in next week's primary election. The state's Negro vote (roughly 75,000) is with him, and so is much of the labor and big-city vote-with the exception of Memphis, in West Tennessee, where Tip Taylor's strength is greatest...