The central character of this tale is Estes Kefauver, who sprung a Senate motion to investigate crime. Your authors have a personal property right in this venture. For Senator Kefauver had read Chicago Confidential, and what he found there made his hair stand on end. This is no conjecture. His resolution was prompted by what we had discovered and published.
He was sincere, impulsive and ambitious—if you can call a yen to be Vice-President an ambition. He is our friend, and as such we wish him well and, as Americans who know a little more than most of their fellow-citizens about what is going on, we cheered the possibilities of an untrammeled turning of the turf that would show up officially any important portion of the staggering facts for which we risked our lives.
Kefauver began bravely. He realized that he had lightning bolts in both hands; that he not only could become one of the foremost men of his time, but that he could accomplish priceless service to his country. With the infinite power that was his, he could expose and perhaps destroy the Syndicate and the Mafia which rules it, and save us from the creeping, leaping conspiracy of criminals which already in many elements of our life has superseded constituted government.
But he wants to be Vice-President.
At this writing, he is 47; Barkley is 73. Political wisdom would dictate that the second man on the next national Democratic ticket should come from a border state. Kefauver is from Tennessee. He became a headliner when he licked boss Ed Crump. He is of Dutch-American stock and a Protestant.
He has four years more on his Senate term and could be re-elected. But for a national nomination one needs a majority of the delegates at a convention. Delegates are party men, designated by the party.
He had no more than taken his first bold steps when the party went to work on him. No Democrat can fight the Mafia and get anything from most Democrats except obstruction. They are so intimately and intricately interwoven with the underworld plunderworld through all political strata that they must protect it.
Kefauver was too naive to foresee this. He comes from one of the few states where there is no gangsterism except in picayune city and county affairs, and in those the Republicans share the chicken-feed rewards. Kefauver campaigned in a coonskin cap and unhorsed the Memphis machine, which had no great state-wide strength from within and no tie-ups to bring it help from without. But the explosion that followed when his bill passed rocked the whole national party.
Kefauver, in his innocence, had read our book of disclosures, but like thousands of others, he failed to grasp the significance of the political forces which have become integrated with the system, without which it could not have spread, and to which it has contributed and does contribute incalculable money, leadership and votes. It was inconceivable to him that mayors and governors he knew and many of the statesmanlike Senators with whom he mingled, could be beholden to, not to say slaves of, swarthy, sinister men, many of them ex-convicts, who traffic in bodies of women, making and supplying dope-fiends, dealing in extortion, smuggling, bootlegging, hijacking, bribing and murdering in the principal cities and states of the union; that these hyenas were a controlling influence in nominations and elections; that they owned vast commercial and industrial enterprises, labor unions, even some newspapers, and that their pirate hands gripped the steering wheels of enormous financial fleets.
He read it. But he couldn’t believe it. And what he did believe of it he couldn’t digest.