The Manicured Fistful

As a practitioner of the art of making headlines, Tennessee's Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver has few equals in the political world. Before the Democratic Convention of 1952, he turned a television reputation as a crusader against crime into a good run for the presidential nomination. This year he is hard at work again, and not doing badly, with the same old formula.

Since last winter, Estes has put his well-manicured Tennessee hand into a whole fistful of investigations. As the head of a subcommittee charged with investigating juvenile delinquency, he has traveled to New York to study the injurious effect of pornographic literature upon teenagers, and to Los Angeles to criticize various motion pictures, e.g., Blackboard Jungle, for stressing sex and violence. As the head of another subcommittee, he has pondered how the U.S. can save itself from hydrogen demolition. He has held hearings on the Bricker Amendment, and as the chairman of still another subcommittee, he has kept the ball rolling against the Dixon-Yates power contract (see above).

Last week he headed for Chicago, where he had a juicy morsel awaiting him. His new target: the black market in babies.

Kept on ice for two weeks at congressional expense had been Harry Miner, a French Canadian whose profession is to smuggle babies across the U.S. border for adoption (at a price) in the U.S. But Miner had jumped the gun on the hearings, with a North American Newspaper Alliance description of his activities. After this happened, Kefauver received a chin-up note from one of his staffers: "Estes, at first blush this sounds bad, but it really is not. It will steal a little thunder, but at the same time it will really 'boom' our hearings."

Harry Miner proved to be a singularly unrepentant witness. When asked to explain his smuggling activities, he roared indignantly: "You call bringing in a baby smuggling? That's giving a baby a home!" Even Estes Kefauver did not find an answer for that sentiment. But the hearings were by no means a total loss, since Kefauver managed to wind up with a virtuous line: "It's certainly a fine thing for kids to know about the Ten Commandments."

Among Washington's politicians and pundits there is no doubt about what Estes Kefauver is up to. He is running hard for his party's presidential nomination in 1960, and that means that he must keep his name and face before the U.S. over a long pull. It does not mean that he would turn down the nomination in 1956, if it should happen to come his way.

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