"He Just Can't Stop"

"I wish I could have devoted the necessary time to Tennessee."

The long face of Estes Kefauver seemed as long as a Tennessee walker's on election night when he talked about what happened in his own state. "It was decided," he explained, "that it would be better for me to campaign where our chances looked less bright."

Estes made the campaigningest campaign in U.S. history. He traveled 54,000 miles, shook an estimated 100,000 hands. He made 450 speeches in 38 states--but only a brief hello and goodbye in his own Tennessee. Maybe he would have helped there, but the fact was that the Democrats lost all but one of the 38 states where he did speak.

Even in the last week, Estes, by staff count, shook the hands of 5,595 auto workers in one hour at a Flint, Mich, fac tory gate. By election eve he was so fagged out that in introducing his family to a national TV audience he called the dog by his daughter's name, Diane. Yet at 2:30 a.m. he was winging southward for some unprecedented Election Day campaigning in Miami. "It's absolutely insane," said an aide, "but he just can't stop." Estes started talking to mechanics in an airport hangar, kept it up from supermarket to street corner for 4 1/2-hours. Then, with a quick stop to vote at the Lookout Mountain schoolhouse above Chattanooga, he flew back to Washington.

There, while aides watched the early returns, Kefauver napped. Finally, in the smoke-filled Statler Hotel Presidential Room, in a maze of glowing lights, foot-tripping cord and people jostling each others' highball glasses, he made the loser's traditional speech. J. Howard McGrath, Kefauver adviser and onetime Democratic National chairman, insisted that his man had emerged from the pasting unscarred, unscathed, even enhanced. "How about 1960?" some of the crowd yelled. Kefauver's sagging face lit up and split into a crescent-moon grin. "I'm just thinking of relaxing for the next two or three days," he said. "Everybody in the family's got bicycles, and we're just going bicycling for a while."

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