Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1954: The Lavender Scare Claims the Life of a Senator

Sen. Lester Hunt, Sr. (D-WY)

Sen. Lester Hunt, Sr. (D-WY) had an illustrious career. He served as governor of Wyoming from 1943 to 1949, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He was popular enough to defeat the incumbent Republican Senator by a landslide. Hunt quickly became a harsh critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-WI) slanderous Red and Lavender Scares.

McCarthy and his cronies got their revenge however when Hunt’s twenty-year-old son and namesake, Lester Hunt, Jr., (his nickname was Buddy) was arrested in June of 1953 for soliciting a male undercover vice cop in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Ordinarily, this being Buddy’s first offense — and with his father being a Senator — this would have been handled quietly. And that’s pretty much how things started out. Roy Blick, head of the D.C. vice unit was well known for his hardline stance on homosexuality in the District, but after meeting with Sen. Hunt’s administrative assistant, he agreed to seek a dismissal of the charges. U.S. Attorney Kitty Blair Frank concurred (The District was still under the direct control of Congress, with U.S. Attorneys criminal prosecutions in the city.) Everything seemed to have been taken care of. Buddy, who was a theology student, then went to Cuba for a summer practicuum with an Episcopal parish.

StylesBridges (R-NH) and Herman Welker (R-ID)

Nevertheless, rumors flew among the political class, and they quickly reached Sen. Styles Bridges (R-NH), who was chairman of the Republican Campaign Committee. The Senate was split evenly between Democrats and Republicans at the time, and if Hunt could be forced to resign, Wyoming’s Republican governor would appoint his replacement and the Senate would finally be under Republican control. Bridges and Sen. Herman Welker (R-ID), who had a longstanding reputation as one of the most conservative, most anti-communist, and most anti-gay Senators in Washington, They also called the Chief of Police, Robert Murray, to demand an explanation for why the charges were dropped. They summoned Blick to a meeting. It’s not clear what happened at that meeting, but when Blick was summoned again the next day for another meeting with Bridges and Welker, Welker ominously told Blick that he had heard “rumors” that Blick received a bribe to fix Hunt’s case. Blick denied the rumor. After that meeting, Block was called later that night from his home, for another late night meeting with Welker. This time, Welker claimed to have proof that Blick had been bribed. Blick denied the charge again.

By the time Buddy returned from Havana that autumn, Blick had been relived of his responsibility over the case, and U.S. Attorney Frank was replaced by another U.S. Attorney, Kenneth Wood, who re-filed the charges. Meanwhile, Welker turned to the popular University of Wyoming Athletic Director Glenn “Red” Jacoby, who happened to be a childhood friend of Welker’s as well as a close personal friend of Sen. Hunt’s. Jacoby was sent to deliver a message from one friend to another: “If Hunt would retire from the Senate at the end of this term and not run for reelection next year, the charges against his son would not be prosecuted.” But if Hunt refused to resign, Welker would make sure the case was smeared all over Wyoming. Jacoby refused to be the go-between, but he confided his part of the plot to Tracy McCracken, publisher of Cheyenne’s two newspapers, who passed the story on to Sen. Hunt.

Hunt declined the “invitation.” The trial was held in October, with Sen. Hunt and his wife in attendance. While the arrest was a classic case of entrapment, the judge didn’t see it that way. He found Buddy guilty and sentenced him to thirty days in jail or a $100 fine (worth about $900 today). Hunt paid the fine, but his assistant later said that it was the first time he had “seen a man die visibly.”

At least one Washington newspaper carried the story, on page 5, but it failed to catch on publicly. Most Wyoming papers refused to run the story. But that didn’t mean Hunt’s enemies didn’t forget. In December, 1953, while the Hunts were back home in Wyoming, their Washington, D.C. home was broken into and ransacked. “Every drawer had been turned upside down, and every cranny had been looked in,”, Hunt., Jr. later said. “It was obviously some kind of a search.” Only two token items were missing: a camera and a pair of binoculars. No one was ever arrested.

The following April, bolstered by opinion polls showing that Hunt would likely win re-election, he announced that he would run again. Sens. Bridges and Welker tried another tack. They got White House staff to offer Hunt a higher-paying job as Chairman of the Federal Tariff Commission if he quit his Senate seat. That post paid $15,000 a year ($134,000 today) versus $12,000 as a Senator ($107,000 today). Hunt turned it down, knowing he’d be forced to explain why he took a higher-paying job in exchange for turning the Senate over to Republican control. Welker then let it by known that while many Wyoming papers refused to run the story of Hunt, Jr’s. arrest, Welker would make sure that the story wound up “in every mailbox in the state.” He even printed up 25,000 flyers to send out. On June 8, 1954, Hunt announced that he was withdrawing from the race. Citing health concerns, he said, “I shall never again be a candidate for elective office.”

Sens. Bridges and Welker won. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was already feeling the walls closing in around him when, during the famous McCarthy-Army hearing held on June 9, lawyer Joseph Welch blasted McCarthy with the question everyone else was asking: “Have you no sense of decency?” The hearings ended a few days later with McCarthy’s reputation in tatters. Struggling to find his footing, again, McCarthy declared on the Senate floor that he would open an investigation into an unnamed Senator who he claimed was bribing D.C. police. He didn’t name Hunt, but it was pretty obvious that McCarthy’s nemesis was in his crosshairs. The next morning, Hunt brought his hunting rifle to his Senate office and shot himself at his desk. He died two hours later in the hospital.

Lester Hunt’s funeral

News reports had it that Hunt killed himself because he was despondent over his health. But privately, Senate colleagues knew differently. On June 21, Sen. Edwin Johnson (D-CO) rose on the Senate floor to speak of his colleague:

Lester Hunt was a warm-hearted friendly soul…Politics to him…was based on warm friendship, courtesy, kindness, gentleness and good will toward all men. He was ill-prepared for the cruel, brutal, rough aspect of national partisan politics. He thought evil of no one, and his gentle nature was shocked into panic, that persons whom he liked and respected would destroy him in the cause of national partisan politics, when he was wholly without guilt. Perhaps his devoted friends in the Senate took too much for granted his capacity to accept barbaric treatment…To have such a lovable person die of a broken heart in our midst is indeed a tragedy.

The details of Hunt’s blackmail and suicide had circulated through Washington’s political class and became just one more factor, albeit an unspoken one, in the Senate’s vote to censure McCarthy in December. But that vote was taken too late to save the GOP’s majority. The November mid-terms elections delivered both the House and Senate into Democratic hands. The GOP-controlled lame duck Senate nevertheless had some more business to attend to, including a memorial for members who had died recently. Sens. Bridges and Welker were among those eulogizing Hunt. Hunt’s cousin, William Spencer, learned of their eulogies and was outraged. He wrote to Welker:

I was shocked when I read this. It recalled to my mind so vividly the conversation with Senator Hunt a few weeks before he died, wherein he recited in great detail the diabolical part you played following the unfortunate and widely publicized episode in which his son was involved. Senator Hunt, a close personal friend of mine, told me without reservation the details of the tactics you used in endeavoring to induce him to withdraw from the Senate, or at least not to be a candidate again. It seems apparent that you took every advantage of the misery which the poor fellow was suffering at the time in your endeavor to turn it to political advantage. Such procedure is as low a blow as could be conceived. I understood, too, from Senator Hunt, that Senator Bridges had been consulted by you and approved of your action in the matter.

Drew Pearson’s column of June 21 (Click to read the whole column)

Hunt’s blackmail remained hidden from the public until Drew Pearson, the popular muckraking political reporter, published an exposé three days after Hunt’s death in his nationally-syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round. He had been following the story for several months, and wanted to publish an account of Bridges’s and Welker’s blackmail attempt in December of 1953, at about the time of the break-in of the Hunts’ home. But Hunt’s office convinced Pearson not to run it. When he did publish it on June 22, this time exposing everything he knew, Senate Republicans launched a fierce counterattack to discredit Pearson. Admittedly, Pearson wasn’t hard to discredit; his columns typically veered more towards sensationalism than balanced journalism, but his political enemies did succeed in pressuring the Capital Transit Company, D.C.’s privatized streetcar monopoly which depended on Congressional favors to keep their streetcars running, to pull their sponsorship of Pearson’s weekly television program.

In 1959, Hunt’s blackmail and suicide served as inspiration for Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Advise and Consent. In the novel, and the 1962 political-noir film that was based on it, Sen. Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming blackmails Utah Sen. Brigham Anderson over a gay affair after Anderson derailed the confirmation of the President’s pick for Secretary of State. Like Hunt, Anderson shot himself in his Senate office.

But as gripping as that story was, Advise and Consent was still fiction, and the real story of Hunt’s suicide remained largely untold. It would take another several decades, long after Bridges’s and Welker’s deaths, after their personal papers became available to researchers, and after former aides became more willing to talk, when Rodger McDaniel could finally put all of the pieces together, definitively, in his 2013 book, Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt (also on Kindle).