This collection documents Lucile Myers’ effort to redeem the reputation of Estes Kefauver. The collection primarily consists of correspondence between Myers and a number of recepients regarding Seymour Hersh’s claim that Estes Kefauver was blackmailed during his crime investigations.
Click here for the Guide to the Lucile Myers papers, 1976-1977, mpa.171 / ms.0898. Collection location: row 11, box 33.
Estes Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee on July 26, 1903. He graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1924 before graduating from Yale Law School in 1927. He became a member of the bar in 1926 and practiced in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his firm, Kefauver, Duggan, and McDonald. In 1935, he married Nancy Patterson Pigott and they had four children.
Three years after an unsuccessful bid for the Tennessee State Senate in 1936, Kefauver served as Tennessee State commissioner of finance and taxation for a few months in 1939 before he was elected to the United States Congress where he served for ten years. In 1948, Kefauver was elected to the Senate where from 1949-1952 he held the position of chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce that gained him national fame. Kefauver was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination twice in 1952 and 1956. However, he served in the United States Senate as a Democratic representative for Tennessee until his death on August 10, 1963.
Seymour Hersh was born on April 8, 1937 in Chicago, Illinois.
Hersh is an acclaimed investigative journalist. In 1969 he received wide-spread recognition for his investigation into the My Lai Massacre in South Vietnam. In 1970 Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work in Vietnam.
In his biography of Estes Kefauver, Charles Fontenay refers his readers to a situation in 1976 in which Hersh claimed that Sidney Korshak had a photograph of Estes Kefauver with a call girl. Hersh wrote that Korshak blackmailed Kefauver to delay public hearings in Chicago, Illinois. Arthur Sulzberger identified Hersh’s source for this story as “a highly respected Chicago business executive.” (Fontenay, “Estes Kefauver: a biography.” Page 178, footnote 29)
Lucile Myers worked as a secretary for Estes Kefauver.