Лестер Хант: Политик, Губернатор и Трагедия в Сенате США

American politician (1892–1954)

Lester Callaway Hunt, Sr. (July 8, 1892June 19, 1954), was an American Democratic politician from the state of Wyoming. Hunt was the first to be elected to two consecutive terms as Wyoming's governor, serving as its 19th governor from January 4, 1943, to January 3, 1949. In 1948, he was elected by an overwhelming margin to the U. S. Senate, and began his term on January 3, 1949. Hunt supported a number of federal social programs and advocated for federal support of low cost health and dental insurance policies. He also supported a variety of programs proposed by the Eisenhower administration following the Republican landslide in the 1952 elections, including the abolition of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, and the expansion of Social Security. An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. In June 1953, Hunt's son was arrested in Washington, D. C., on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer (homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time). Several Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do. His son was convicted and fined on October 6, 1953. On April 15, 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re election. He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son's arrest against him. On June 19, Hunt died by suicide in his Senate office; his death dealt a serious blow to McCarthy's image and was one of the factors that led to his censure by the Senate later in 1954.

Born in Isabel in Edgar County in eastern Illinois, Hunt visited Wyoming for the first time as a semi professional baseball player. After graduating in 1917, he moved to Lander, Wyoming, and established a practice. He joined the United States Army Dental Corps when the United States entered World War I, and served as a lieutenant from 1917 to 1919. After postgraduate study at Northwestern University in 1920, Hunt resumed his practice in Lander. He was president of the Wyoming State Dental Society and began his career in government when appointed as president of the Wyoming State Board of Dental Examiners, serving from 1924 to 1928.

Hunt was elected in 1933 to the Wyoming House of Representatives from Fremont County. He sponsored eugenics legislation that would have permitted the sterilization of inmates at Wyoming institutions if "afflicted with insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, or epilepsy". The legislation, though similar to that enacted in several neighboring states in the 1920s, failed, and he later stated that he regretted sponsoring it. He was elected as Wyoming Secretary of State in 1934 and 1938, serving from 1935 to 1943. In 1935, he commissioned muralist Allen Tupper True to design the Bucking Horse and Rider that has appeared on Wyoming license plates since 1936. While serving as Secretary of State, Hunt personally claimed the copyright of the Wyoming Guidebook, a Work Projects Administration publication, after the Governor and legislature failed to act to preserve the bucking horse and rider design as the state's intellectual property. The book proved popular, and there were questions as to whether Hunt benefited personally from its sales. He was able to demonstrate that he had endorsed all quarterly royalty checks and turned them over to the state treasurer, and he transferred the copyright to the State of Wyoming in 1942. Hunt became the first person elected to two consecutive four year terms as governor, serving from 1943 to 1949. The principal legislative accomplishment of his first term was the enactment of a retirement system for teachers. He repeatedly proposed a retirement system for state workers in his second term without success. During his first term, Republican U. S. Senator Edward V. Robertson charged that the Japanese citizens interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, were leading pampered lives and hoarding supplies. The Denver Post wrote an exposé backing his complaints. Hunt dismissed that as a "political story" and said that "food stuffs cannot be brought into a city to feed 13,500 people in a wheel barrow and it would not be good business to bring it in every day." He toured the camp and said the internees' "living standard was, to my way of thinking, rather disgraceful." At the end of the war, he wrote to the War Relocation Authority that "We do not want a single one of these evacuees to remain in Wyoming." When President Roosevelt issued an executive order on March 16, 1943, creating Jackson Hole National Monument, Hunt joined in mobilizing opposition and said he would use state police to remove any federal official who tried to exert authority in the Monument's lands. Congress refused to fund the Monument until 1950, when Wyoming's two U. S. Senators, Joseph C. O'Mahoney and Hunt, reached a compromise with the Truman administration. It merged most of the Monument's lands into Grand Teton National Park, provided compensation for lost revenue, and protected local property owners. Hunt was a Wyoming delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940, 1944, and 1948. He chaired the National Governors Association in 1948. His official gubernatorial portrait was painted by artist Michele Rushworth and hangs in the state capitol building in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Hunt was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1948 to a term beginning January 3, 1949, defeating incumbent Republican E. V. Robertson by an overwhelming margin. His political positions combined fiscal conservatism and opposition to big government with support for public housing and increased federal aid to education. During his tenure in the Senate, Hunt became a bitter enemy of Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his criticism of McCarthy's tactics marked him as a prime target in the 1954 election. For example, he campaigned for a law to restrict Congressional immunity by allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. He served on the Senate Crime Investigating Committee (known as the Kefauver Committee) and the Senate Armed Services Committee. He backed foreign aid programs and supported a call for disarmament designed to demonstrate that Russia's peace proposals were not serious.

On June 9, 1953, Hunt's 25 year old son Lester Jr., known as "Buddy", who was a student and president of the student body at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was arrested in Washington, D. C., for soliciting sex from a male undercover police officer in Lafayette Square, just north of and adjacent to the White House property. It was his first offense, which police normally handled quietly as a matter for the offender's family to address, but the arrest became known to Senate Republicans. According to Drew Pearson's "Washington Merry Go Round" column published after Hunt's death, Senators Styles Bridges and Herman Welker threatened that if Hunt did not immediately retire from the Senate and agree not to seek his seat in the 1954 election, they would see that his son was prosecuted and would widely publicize his son's arrest. In a closely divided Senate, Hunt's resignation would have allowed Wyoming's Republican governor to appoint a Republican to fill the remainder of Hunt's term and to run as an incumbent in the 1954 election, possibly affecting the balance of power in the Senate in favor of Republicans. Hunt refused, and in response, Republican Senators threatened Inspector Roy Blick of the Morals Division of the Washington Police Department with the loss of his job for failing to prosecute Buddy Hunt. Aside from these brief media accounts, the arrest and prosecution of Buddy Hunt was not widely publicized at the time. In December 1953, Hunt told journalist Pearson that he would not stand for re election if the opposition used his son's arrest against him, Despite the threats of publicity from his political opponents, including a specific threat to distribute in Wyoming 25,000 leaflets about his son's arrest, A poll taken on April 5, 1954, gave Hunt 54.5% support, with his nearest opponent at 19.3%. Later that same month, Senator Bridges renewed his threat to publicize Hunt Jr.'s offense to Wyoming voters. The Eisenhower administration, taking a different tack, offered Hunt a high paying position on the U. S. Tariff Commission if he agreed never to run for the Senate again. He did not, however, resign from the Senate. On June 19, 1954, Senator Hunt shot himself at his desk in his Senate office, using a .22 caliber rifle he apparently brought from home. He was taken to Casualty Hospital, where he died a few hours later at age 61. Just one day before Hunt's suicide, Senator McCarthy had accused an unnamed member of the Senate of "just plain wrong doing". After Hunt's suicide, McCarthy's ally Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota denied that McCarthy was referring to Hunt.

Allen Drury, a journalist who covered the U. S. Senate for United Press International, used Hunt's blackmail and suicide as the basis for his 1959 best selling and Pulitzer Prize winning novel Advise and Consent. In the novel, Senator Fred Van Ackerman from Wyoming uses a homosexual affair to blackmail Utah Senator Brigham Anderson. In 1962, the novel was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and directed by Otto Preminger. University of Wyoming historian T. A. Larson, author of a history of the state, wrote an account of Hunt's suicide and submitted it to Hunt's widow Nathelle, seeking her permission to publish it. Instead she threatened him with a lawsuit and he never published the results of his research. Hunt's anti McCarthyism and his son's arrest appear in fictionalized form in Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (2007), a novel that describes a young man's introduction to hardball Washington politics in the 1950s as he discovers his gay identity. It is included as well in the 2023 television miniseries based on the novel. In 2013, at a mock trial of Hunt's Senate colleagues McCarthy, Welker, and Bridges, all three were "found guilty of a variety of charges, including blackmail and causing bodily injury". The event was organized to coincide with the publication of a new study of Hunt's death, Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins by Rodger McDaniel, a Presbyterian pastor, former Wyoming legislator (1971–1981), and Democratic candidate for the U. S. Senate in 1982. He used some of Larson's research.