An unknown liberal martyr to homophobia and McCarthyism?

The central event in Allen Drury’s 1959 novel, Advise and Consent (made into a movie by Otto Preminger in 1962) is the suicide of a U.S. Senator. Principled and idealistic, Brigham Anderson is standing in the way of the President’s nomination of the controversial liberal Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State, because he has learned that Leffingwell, in testimony before Anderson’s subcommittee, has lied to conceal his past Communist associations. Senator Anderson then starts receiving anonymous threats that unless he stops blocking the nomination, a secret of his own, a homosexual affair in his distant past, will be exposed. Increasingly isolated politically and crumbling under the pressure of the blackmail, Anderson, who has a wife and young daughter, commits suicide.

I had always thought that the story was pure fiction. In fact, the incident is roughly based on the suicide of a Senator that occurred a few years before Drury began writing his novel in 1957.

In an article, “The Fictional Senate of Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent,” David Bratman writes:

The suicide of the book’s Senator Brigham Anderson resembles that of Senator Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) in 1954. Anderson is threatened with exposure of a homosexual affair in his past, in an effort to blackmail him into canceling his investigation of Leffingwell. He shoots himself in his Senate office and dies instantly. Hunt also shot himself in his Senate office, though he lingered for some hours. The reason given publicly at the time was despair over his poor health, but while that was a factor, there was an additional story probably known to political reporters such as Drury. Democrats were eager for Hunt to run for re-election in 1954 as the best hope to retain the seat, but Republicans threatened that if he did run, they would raise as a campaign issue his deepest secret: that his son had been arrested the previous year for homosexual solicitation. Caught between them in a situation both like and unlike Anderson’s, Hunt first announced his retirement and then committed suicide. (See Rick Ewing, “McCarthy Era Politics: The Ordeal of Senator Lester Hunt,” Annals of Wyoming, Spring 1983.)

Here is Wikipedia’s account of Hunt’s suicide:

Hunt [who had been Democratic governor of Wyoming since 1943] was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, taking office on January 3, 1949. During his tenure in the Senate, Hunt became a bitter enemy of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his criticism of McCarthy’s anticommunist tactics marked him as a prime target in the 1954 election.

Blackmail and death

In July 1953, Hunt’s twenty-year-old son was arrested for soliciting prostitution from a male undercover police officer in Lafayette Square. Republicans learned of this and delivered a blackmail demand in early 1954: Hunt was to retire from the Senate and not run for re-election. Furthermore, he was to resign from the Senate immediately, so the Republican governor could appoint a Republican to run as an incumbent. If Hunt refused, Wyoming voters would be informed of the arrest of Hunt’s son. On June 8, 1954, after some vacillation, Hunt announced that he would not seek reelection, citing a kidney ailment. Eleven days later, he shot himself in his Senate office. Although The New York Times attributed Hunt’s suicide to “apparent despondency over his health,” journalist Drew Pearson published a column stating that Senators Styles Bridges (R-NH) and Herman Welker (R-ID) had delivered the ultimatum to Hunt.

That’s quite a story, and Drury took the nugget of it and adapted it brilliantly for Advise and Consent. But the question is, did such a blackmail occur? I doubt it, and here’s why. If pro-McCarthy Republicans had done such a dastardly thing as to drive a U.S. Senator to suicide by threatening to expose the arrest of his son for homosexual solicitation, we would never have heard the end of it. Lester C. Hunt’s blackmail and subsequent suicide would have made him one of the martyrs of modern liberalism, his name would be a fixture on PBS, his story constantly retold as proof of the evil of Republicans, conservatives, anti-Communists, Christians, whites, and heterosexuals. Since Hunt is not famous, it seems unlikely to me that the blackmail story is true.

I haven’t done further research, and don’t know the answer. I’m simply responding to the two brief accounts I’ve read.

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I also seem to remember that the columnist Drew Pearson, the source of the Hunt blackmail claim, was a very controversial figure. So I just looked him up at Wikipedia and, wow, was he ever. He was not only a man of the left, but was well known for telling damaging untruths. Below I have bolded the passages that show Pearson’s leftism and cast doubts on his credibility.

In the early 1950s Pearson was one of the few journalists to stand up against McCarthyism. McCarthy (who once reportedly slapped or kneed Pearson in the groin, in public) referred to Pearson’s associate David Karr as Pearson’s “KGB handler”. Karr (born David Katz) had been exposed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1943 as having worked for two years on the staff of the Communist newspaper Daily Worker. In response, Pearson claimed that Karr only joined the Daily Worker because he wanted to get into baseball games for free. Karr ostensibly covered home Yankee games for the Daily Worker, a paper not known for its sports readership, but his other activities remained unknown at the time. Years later, however, the release of the FBI’s Venona decrypt of June 1944 revealed that Karr was an informational source for the NKVD. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Soviet investigative journalist Yevgenia Albats published an article in Izvestia quoting documents from KGB archives that Karr was “a competent KGB source” who ”submitted information to the KGB on the technical capabilities of the United States and other capitalist countries”.

Another member of Pearson’s staff, Andrew Older, along with his wife, was identified in 1951 as a Communist Party member in testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Older’s sister, Julia Older, was also suspected of having spied for the Soviet Union.

Those accusing Pearson of having been either pro-Communist or “soft on Communism” called attention not only to the affiliations of his subordinates but also to his support for policy positions and personal actions that worked to the advantage of international Communism. He was an early and vociferous critic of the anti-Communist government of Chiang Kai-shek in China. He was responsible for publicizing the infamous slapping incidents by America’s most outspokenly anti-Soviet General, George S. Patton, Jr., which led to Patton’s being relieved of command of the Seventh Army.

Pearson is most criticized[by whom?] for his largely unsubstantiated allegations against the Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, who served under both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Admired for his efficiency and hard work, he was despised for his Wall Street background and strong anti-communist views by some in the media, particularly Pearson, who began attacking Forrestal while Roosevelt was in office. Pearson told his associate Jack Anderson that he (Pearson) believed Forrestal was “the most dangerous man in America” and claimed that if he was not removed from office he would “cause another world war”. Pearson also openly suggested [citation needed] that Forrestal was guilty of corruption, though he was unable to prove any wrongdoing.

After President Truman took office, Forrestal attempted to moderate President Truman’s policy of large-scale defense economization, which was radically reducing the size of the U.S. armed forces at a time of increased Cold War tensions. The policy had infuriated the U.S. armed forces chiefs, and Pearson, sensing an opportunity, began to publish information he had received from Pentagon sources on Forrestal’s mental condition. Pearson continued his attacks on Forrestal in his columns and radio broadcasts, openly berating Truman for not firing Forrestal. President Truman asked for Forrestal’s resignation, replacing him with an administration insider, Louis A. Johnson. Forrestal’s removal and Johnson’s appointment would have serious consequences in coming years with the sudden outbreak of the Korean War.

After Forrestal’s death from a fall from a 16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Pearson falsely stated in his column that Forrestal suffered from “paranoia” and had attempted suicide on four previous occasions, lending credence to the conclusion that Forrestal’s death had been a suicide. Pearson’s claim of previous suicide attempts by Forrestal is corroborated by no known evidence and was contradicted by the testimony of Forrestal’s attending physicians at Bethesda. Pearson’s own protege, Jack Anderson, later asserted that Pearson “hectored Forrestal with innuendos and false accusations.”

In May 1948, Pearson leaked news in the Washington Post that the SEC and Justice Department were talking to Preston Thomas Tucker of the Tucker Corporation, an automobile company in Detroit. Pearson stated—erroneously, as it would later turn out—that the agencies would uncover financial crimes at the company. Tucker stock dropped from $5 to $2 based on Pearson’s charges. The SEC and Justice later found Tucker and his company innocent of any wrongdoing, but the damage was done. The Tucker Corporation was never able to recover and went out of business. It is widely believed[by whom?] that Pearson’s claims cost Tucker investors and 2,000 car dealers millions of dollars, and American customers perhaps the most innovative automobile of its time.

Based on the above, Pearson’s story that two Republican Senators blackmailed Democratic Senator Lester C. Hunt and drove him to suicide cannot be believed without further verification.

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Update: A further search reveals that the Pearson’s Republican blackmail story has been definitively disproved. Most interestingly, the information appears in the middle of a long article by Jack Shafer in Slate about a similar false Democratic charge against Republicans—namely Bill Moyers’s and President Lyndon Johnson’s story that when close Johnson aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for sexual acts with another man in a Washington D.C. men’s room in October 1964 (right in the middle of Johnson’s presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater), Jenkins had been set up by Republican-Goldwater operatives. The whole article is fascinating. But here is the part that deals with Hunt’s suicide:

Whatever the case, we have additional reasons not to rely on Moyers’ memory. In his letters to Slate and the Wall Street Journal, Moyers shares an anecdote to convey how destructive homosexuality rumors were in the old Washington. He writes:

The mere accusation [of homosexuality back then] was sufficient to end a career. Several years earlier, as I worked one afternoon at the Senate office building, I heard the crack of a gunshot one floor above as a U.S. senator committed suicide over his son’s outing. I have never forgotten that sound.

The suicide was Sen. Lester C. Hunt, D-Wyo., but Moyers botches the story. Hunt arrived on the third floor of what is now the Russell Senate Office Building at 8:30 on the morning of June 19, 1954, not the afternoon. Hunt’s staff discovered him in his office at about 8:55 a.m., shot in the temple by the .22 caliber rifle he had brought to work that morning. Hunt died three and a half hours later, and his death was ruled a suicide.

According to the Washington Post account published the next day, “[t]he building was virtually deserted at that early hour and no one heard the shot which pierced Hunt’s right temple and smashed through his brain.” The New York Times (paid), the Washington Star, and the Associated Press news stories about the suicide do not contradict the Post on this point.

If Moyers’ vivid memory of the suicide is correct, he heard something that the Capitol Police did not hear and that no other ear-witness reported to the Capitol Police, according to the June 20 Star story. It states:

Apparently an effort was made to conceal the shooting. Capt. Broderick [of the Capitol Police] said when the Senator’s office called for an ambulance, police were told that Senator Hunt had suffered a heart attack. Capt. Broderick said he learned from a newsman that it was a shooting.

Historian Rick Ewig’s 1983 article “McCarthy Era Politics: The Ordeal of Senator Lester Hunt” remains the most complete account of the senator’s story. In it, Ewig collects and assesses the considerable evidence that senator friends of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., drove Hunt to withdraw from his re-election campaign and kill himself 11 days later. Hunt’s foes allegedly threatened that if he did not quit the race, news of his son’s case would appear in every Wyoming mailbox.

Moyers contends that Hunt killed himself over the “outing” of his son, but that’s not exactly true. Hunt’s son was arrested on a charge of soliciting prostitution on June 9, 1953, and was convicted on Oct. 6, 1953, paying a $100 fine. The eight-paragraph Oct. 7 Washington Post story about the case effectively outed Hunt’s son in Washington. News wire stories printed in several Wyoming papers and elsewhere did the same. Yet Hunt did not kill himself for another eight months.

Hunt left several notes behind, “but none of these gives any explanation which sheds light on the real reason or reasons” for his suicide, Ewig writes. “While no one can ultimately be certain of the precise reasons for Hunt’s suicide, clearly he was under personal and political pressure.”

Later in the article, Shafer picke up the Hunt suicide again:

Drew Pearson wrote a column (PDF) the day after Hunt’s death alleging a blackmail scheme against the senator. Claiming the now-dead Hunt as his source, Pearson wrote that Sen. Herman Welker, R-Idaho, working through intermediaries, had told Hunt that his son would not be prosecuted if Hunt would abandon re-election. Hunt refused, the column states, and his son was convicted. Hunt announced for re-election in April 1954 but withdrew from the race in June, citing illness, but then he killed himself.

In his column, Pearson writes:

It was no secret that he had been having kidney trouble for some time. But I am sure that on top of this, Lester Hunt, a much more sensitive soul than his colleagues realized, just could not bear the thought of having his son’s misfortunes become the subject of whispers in his re-election campaign.

Columnist Marquis Childs wrote a similar piece, but Welker denied Pearson’s charges in a syndicated column by Holmes Alexander.

Here’s what Pearson wrote in his diaries the day Hunt killed himself:

Senator Hunt of Wyoming committed suicide early this morning. I am not sure whether it had to do with the threat Senator McCarthy made yesterday that he was going to investigate a Democratic Senator who had fixed a case, or whether it was Hunt’s concern over his son’s homosexual problems.

There’s something peculiar going on here. Why would Hunt have given in to his purported blackmailers by agreeing to leave the Senate—but also kill himself? Why would Pearson, who was sympathetic to Hunt and his son, deliberately give greater publicity to the son’s case—essentially fulfilling the dark side of the blackmailer’s threat? Does anybody have an alternate take on this? The Hunt suicide has been written up in Lewis J. Gould’s The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, and in Thomas Mallon’s novel Fellow Travelers.

I haven’t read any of Shafer’s sources yet.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 23, 2009 09:58 AM | Send