Estes Kefauver

Estes Kefauver was one of a long and honorable line of United States Senators who have defended the individual fearlessly and with compassion. Like George Norris and Robert M. LaFollette, whose worthy successor he was, Kefauver emerged from a gentle strain of native-bred populism, rooted in an ideal of equality based on honest work. He never betrayed the people who elected him because he never betrayed his own conscience.

Kefauver's investigations of racketeering and organized crime in 1951 made him a national figure. His true quarrel, though, was not with the gangsters and thugs, freakish vestiges of the Prohibition experiment; it was with a more subtle kind of greed, the greed of huge industrial combines and arrogant bureaucrats masked by respectability, or worse, by legality. He never accepted the idea that wealth and power are synonomus with virtue, and he fought monopoly and privilege on every level. On the issue of civil rights, he displayed his customary courage and independence.

Two days before he died on Saturday, Kefauver was still fighting, this time against a second huge giveaway to the privately owned Communications Satellite Corporation. His death robs the individual of an honest spokesman and protector.