Lester C. Hunt
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.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).Senator Edward V. Robertson charged that the Japanese citizens interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, were leading pampered lives and hoarding supplies.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."It merged most of the Monument's lands into Grand Teton National Park, provided compensation for lost revenue, and protected local property owners.[22] His political positions combined fiscal conservatism and opposition to big government with support for public housing and increased federal aid to education.He cited complete agreement with plans for agricultural subsidies, the expansion of Social Security, the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission, and the abolition of segregation in the District of Columbia.On October 7, 1953, Buddy Hunt paid a fine for soliciting a plainclothes policeman "for lewd and immoral purposes", and on the same day, The Washington Post published the story.[34] 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,[30][31] fearing that the publicity would have a negative effect on his wife's health.[10] On June 8, following a medical examination at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Hunt changed his mind about running again, and wrote to the chair of the Wyoming Democratic party, citing health concerns as the reason: "I shall never again be a candidate for an elective office.It recalled to my mind so vividly the conversation with Senator Hunt a few weeks before he died, wherein he recited in great detail the diabolical part you played following the unfortunate and widely publicized episode in which his son was involved.With his co-worker there, Nicholas von Hoffman, he co-authored a paper, "The Meanings of 'Democracy': Puerto Rican Organizations in Chicago", that appeared in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, an academic journal of linguistics in 1956.[58] 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.[10][60] 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.[62] 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"."[63] 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.