- Lester Hunt was a popular US Senator from Wyoming in 1954, but in the summer of that year, he killed himself in Washington.

In the decades since Hunt's death and the circumstances that led to it has come to be recognized for what it was, one of the ugliest incidents, not just in the history of Wyoming politics, but of the nation's politics as well.

Today, an updated installment of our show on Lester Hunt we first aired 11 years ago.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

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- [Steve] An ugly chapter in both Wyoming and US history involve the death by suicide in 1954 of US Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming.

In the years following Hunt's death, the episode has come to be understood definitively as a tale of intolerance, political dirty trickery and blackmail at the height of the scaremongering, and now disgraced political targeting of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Wyoming author, Rodger McDaniel wrote a book about the Hunt affair more than a decade ago.

At that time, Wyoming PBS produced an installment of "Wyoming Chronicle," hosted by one of my predecessors, Richard Ager.

State Senator Cale Case of Lander, whose father was a business partner of Hunt's in Lander before Hunt's full-time political career began again is raising awareness of Lester Hunt and the dark political forces trained against him, including a series of events to note the 70th anniversary of the popular Wyoming leader's unfair and untimely death, including a commemoration last month at the University of Wyoming.

Today we rebroadcast "Dying for McCarthy's Sins," a "Wyoming Chronicle" installment that first aired in 2013.

- Hello, I'm Richard Ager.

Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

When politicians become corrupt, they often destroy those around them, and there is no more poignant an example of that than Lester Hunt, US Senator from Wyoming.

When Hunt took on the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the fifties, he didn't know he would end up caught in what the Senate website calls one of the foulest attempts at blackmail in modern political history.

It cost Hunt his life, and it's the subject of a new book, "Dying for the Sins of Joseph McCarthy."

- [Narrator] Lester Hunt first came to public attention as a baseball player.

He was recruited from Illinois to pitch for a team in Lander.

Here, he married and eventually became a dentist.

In 1932, he began a long political career as a Democrat legislator, Secretary of State and governor.

In 1948, Lester Hunt was elected to the US Senate.

He brought his family to Washington, including his son, Lester Junior, also known as Buddy.

The Cold War was beginning and so was the career of another US Senator, Republican Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

McCarthy became infamous for his accusations, often unfounded of communists working for the federal government.

Lester Hunt didn't like McCarthy or his tactics and the two became enemies.

The historic question addressed by author Rodger McDaniel is were Senator Joe McCarthy and two other senators, Herman Welker of Idaho and Styles Bridges of New Hampshire involved in the death of Lester Hunt?

A series of mock trials using community actors has argued that question.

- All rise.

- Please be seated.

At the end of the trial, you must find a defendant not guilty unless the state has proved to you beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant has committed the offenses that he is charged with.

- That man over there, (audience laughing) he was a little known senator from a little bitty state, and this was a way for him to gain publicity for himself.

He's quite a showman.

- That's what I've heard.

- And so once he started this campaign to find communists, then he decided to also pick on people of the homosexual persuasion.

And that was that it became a personal vendetta on his part and of course that's where it got involved with Lester Hunt Jr. - And I need to be more direct so the jury understands just how awful this was in 1954.

What was Buddy charged with being and doing that night?

- Essentially it would involve homosexual acts.

- And in 1954, how did that come across to the general public?

- Because of that man right there, he had made a national campaign.

A major part of the Red Scare was not only against communists, but it was also against homosexuals.

This man and his minions, he developed this set of hearings called the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

And the whole point was to expose people in our government who were homosexual because he believed that people who had homosexual tendencies didn't have the moral fiber and moral strength to stand up to someone who would try to come and convert 'em into being a spy.

- You're a traitor to your country, Drew Pearson.

- Because he wouldn't resign, Styles Bridges and Herman Welker who were both on the District of Columbia Committee in the Senate, so they had a tremendous amount of power over all aspects of the District of Columbia, so they were able to get the charges reinstated.

So Doc and Nathie had to endure what Doc told me later was the worst two weeks of his life and that was a trial where a judge was vicious and they convicted his son.

And he told me that, he used the term bludgeoned.

He felt that he had been bludgeoned 'cause there was nowhere to turn.

He was boxed in and he had to sit there.

He and Nathie went to the trial every day for two weeks and he truly was never the same again after that.

It was an evil.

And there's the mastermind right there.

That man right there was the mastermind.

- And so while we don't say this was not a tragic event, and we don't say that Mr. McCarthy had the nicest record in the United States Senate.

In this case, the state has not proven that he had anything to do with this suicide.

So we would ask you to respect what this country is about and look past paper waving and ask where's the evidence?

Thank you.

- [Narrator] While the jury deliberated, the author sold a few more books.

Every mock trial has a different jury, and the jury on this evening found insufficient evidence to convict Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts.

- Well, Senator, there seems to be a slight split between Congress and the President on the case of the right wing of the Republican Party, and I refer to Senator McCarthy and the President over this issue of communists in the government.

Now, do you feel that this is gonna be the big issue again in the coming November elections?

- No, I don't.

I think the people are going and are perhaps now getting a little tired of dragging across the front pages of the papers, the names of those supposedly communists in our government who have been dead for several years.

- [Narrator] Five months after this interview, Senator Lester Hunt ended his life.

- And joining me in the studio is Rodger McDaniel, author of "Dying for the Sins of Joseph McCarthy."

Welcome to the studio.

- [Rodger] Good to be here.

- As you begin this book, you paraphrase the Book of Job in which God agrees with Satan to visit undeserved sufferings, quote, "on my servant, Lester."

That's quite a foreshadowing.

- Well, it is, and in my mind, after spending the time I did getting to know Lester Hunt all these years after his death, it was a Job-like story.

This really was a good, decent man upon whom undeserved suffering was visited in the last year of his life and came to define his life unfortunately.

- I mean, in any other era would seem, you know, the dimensions of this story, US Senator committing suicide in office, it would be more well known.

Why is it so little known?

- Well, there are a lot of reasons.

One is that the nature of journalism in 1954 was all together different than it is today.

There wasn't the 24/7 news cycle.

Journalists took a different approach to covering personal life situations than they do today.

And there was this sort of conspiracy, if you will, between Lester Hunt's family who didn't want the story told and retold for obvious personal reasons and of course, the the bad guys who didn't want the story told.

And the first time that Drew Pearson tried to tell the story, the people- - Well known columnist.

- Well known columnist at the time, who had a nationwide syndicated program and column, they came down on him with a ton of bricks, lawsuits, got sponsors to drop him.

And so for the most part, other journalists stood back.

- Why did Lester Hunt get into such a feud with Senator McCarthy who he knew, I mean, was known for dirty politics?

- Well, you know, think about Wyoming and the kind of people that come out of this state.

This is an altogether different world than back in Washington.

Lester Hunt grew up in Lander.

Politically, he grew up in Cheyenne.

You didn't have the same kind of press corps.

You certainly didn't have the same kind of partisanship.

So somebody like Joe McCarthy would've been unfathomable to a Lester Hunt.

And almost immediately after Hunt went to Washington as a senator, he tangled with Joe McCarthy during what are called the Malmedy hearings, which were hearings conducted by the US Senate investigating Nazi war crimes at the Battle of the Bulge.

And he got to know what kind of person McCarthy was and immediately the two of them began to become adversaries and that only grew over the years.

Lester Hunt introduced legislation to allow citizens to sue McCarthy for libel and slander because of the accusations he made.

He openly called McCarthy a liar and a drunk.

Hunt and his family had a home, the backyard of which overlooked an apartment building where Joe McCarthy had an apartment and a patio.

And he talked about how he could look out his window and watch McCarthy drinking and cavorting with women.

And he didn't like Joe McCarthy.

He just wasn't his kind of guy.

- Well, we'll get into exactly what happened in just a bit, but I'm wondering with this book, did you also set out, not to just tell this story, but to sort of rescue the totality of Lester Hunt's life and have him remembered more than just that sort of line where, well, I guess the official, as you said that the official historian T.A.

Larson had said simply that he had committed suicide.

- Well, I did.

What drew me to Lester Hunt's story, of course, was the nature of his death.

But after I got to looking at him and looking at his history, I became more intrigued.

And what I think is the fact that he was one of the giants in Wyoming political history in the 20th century.

I have a dear friend in in Cheyenne whose family was very political.

His aunt was on Senator Hunt's staff in Washington.

And he said to me after he read the book, he said, you know, "I was young when all this happened," but he said, "I remember a time in our household where we always talked about Lester Hunt."

And he said, "Then there came a day where we never talked about him again."

And I think that says it all.

The nature of his death and the stigma surrounding suicide and homosexuality covered up his life and all of his accomplishments since then.

- So he's not remembered, for example, as you pointed out, as the person who was, as Secretary of State responsible for putting the bucking bronco on our license plates?

- Yeah, I mean that's a pretty significant thing in Wyoming history that- - [Richard] Near to a lot of hearts here.

- We all know what that symbol means to the state and it was Lester Hunt who created the design and put that on the license plate.

He was the governor during World War II and as a wartime governor had enormous responsibilities.

He became a United States senator following the war, and during the early years of the Cold War was involved in all of the major national issues of the day, everything from healthcare reform to civil rights, to the early days of the war in Vietnam.

- Now, one interesting thing I thought that he wanted to do, he was early on... Well, his mother was very involved in the temperance movement, so he was pro temperance basically all of his life.

He got involved in the issue of drunk driving before it was really an issue.

And he wanted to issue giant license plates to identify those who were convicted.

- Yeah, he did.

Actually as Secretary of State, he became very well known for a safe driving campaign and part of it was the fight against drunk driving.

He wanted those who had been convicted to serve long sentences.

He wanted them to be well identified so people know to stay away from them.

And he was the person who drafted the first open container law.

- Wow, so well ahead of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Not a perfect person, of course.

One of his less attractive aspects was his involvement with the eugenics movement.

As a state rep, he actually introduced to bill to sterilize the mentally handicapped at the state school.

- He did, and putting that in context, he was first of all a legislator from Lander where the state training school was and he had constituents who were concerned about the fact that there were generational residents at the training school.

And eugenics was a very popular movement before Adolf Hitler.

Before Adolf Hitler, 30 states had enacted eugenics laws and so there was a popular outcry across the country.

Then along comes the Second World War and all of the abuses of the Nazis and that turned the corner, so that today we look back on that term with a far more negative connotation than it had when Lester Hunt introduced the legislation.

- Now, interesting thing that you pointed out was he got involved in politics to begin with as a result of the bone grafts that he had donated to his son.

- His son, right.

- And he couldn't stand up beside his dentistry...

He was a dentist and he couldn't stand up that well after those grafts.

- Yeah, his son had a bad accident and had a multiple fracture of his leg.

And initially the doctors said the leg should be amputated and Senator Hunt and his wife said, "No way," and they took him to the Mayo Clinic where they recommended these bone grafts, and his father was the donor.

There were five operations before it finally succeeded.

And after each one, the dentist, Lester Hunt could not stand and be a dentist and so he needed to find another career.

- So instead of standing, he ran for office.

(chuckles) - Right.

Somebody said he gave up the toothaches of dentistry for the headaches of politics.

- Well, you know, you wrote in your book that demagogues don't define their times.

I question you on that.

Many people refer to it as the McCarthy era because of the effect it had on people.

- Well, it had a huge effect.

And one of the really, I think, forgotten aspects of it is that in the final analysis, I believe that the McCarthy witch-hunts had a lot more to do with targeting homosexuals than with communists.

- [Richard] Right, 'cause most have heard of the Red Scare, but- - The Lavender Scare is something that's less discussed but the the fact is that prior to Joe McCarthy, homosexuals in this country, while they suffered a great deal of discrimination, also particularly in the larger cities were widely accepted.

They weren't targeted for discharge from government jobs.

They were allowed to have social lives in their community.

But along comes McCarthy, and McCarthy, in the early days, couldn't really provide evidence of all these communists he claimed to be in government.

But the State Department admitted that there were homosexuals working, and McCarthy believed that they were security risks.

And literally overnight the country turned on homosexuals.

It was the early days of the Cold War.

The Russians had just acquired the atomic bomb through espionage, people were afraid, and McCarthy successfully convinced them that homosexuals were, per se, the kind of people who would spy for the Russians.

And so overnight they became the targets, thousands of homosexuals, and people rumored to be homosexuals lost their jobs.

Bars that catered to homosexuals were shut down, their licenses taken away.

Criminal statutes were passed all over the country.

And in my view, the McCarthy era set back the quest for gay rights by three or four decades.

- Well, as you pointed out, there's a full scale purge of federal agencies.

Some went so far as to use lie detectors to find homosexuals.

So with all of that as the background, even local police in Washington were getting involved in targeting homosexuals.

One area, Lafayette Park, where on June 9th, 1953, Lester Hunt Jr., the senator's son was walking.

Why don't you take it from there?

- Well, McCarthy and Senator Styles Bridges and others were convinced that the District of Columbia should do more to arrest homosexuals because they wanted them identified so that if they were government employees, they could be removed from office.

And so of course, the Congress controls the District of Columbia budget and they put a great deal of pressure on the police department.

And in response, the Metropolitan Police Department created a task force, if you will, called the Pervert Elimination Squad.

And it was hundreds of undercover police officers who worked the bars, the restaurants, and the parks in Washington hoping to make eye contact with homosexuals and to- - Was there otherwise low crime rate?

I mean, putting hundreds of officers on that kind of duty?

- Well, there wasn't been otherwise low crime rate, but there was a huge emphasis coming down from Congress on the District of Columbia to identify people who might be homosexuals.

And so the District of Columbia poured a massive amount of resources into responding to the senators who wanted to make sure that that happened.

- [Richard] And they picked up one Senator's son.

- And on that night, it was this group of undercover agents in Lafayette Park who arrested Lester Hunt's son.

- Now the aftermath of that, of course, is what led through to the tragedy of all of this for the Hunt family.

Essentially, the police weren't gonna end up making much of it but that wasn't good enough for Senator McCarthy and his, as some call them McCarthy's Confederates, Senator Herman Welker and Senator Styles Bridges.

- Yeah, the initial decision by the US Attorney's Office was to dismiss the charge.

Young Hunt was a seminarian.

This was his first offense.

He was a good, decent young guy and so they dismissed the charge.

And when Senators Bridges and Welker heard about that, they used their influence to get the charges reinstated after threatening Senator Hunt.

They told Senator Hunt through a mediary in Wyoming that if he would resign, they would let it go, if he refused to resign, they would use their influence to get the charges reinstated.

- Now that would've flipped control of the Senate because it was 47-47 or 45?

- 48-47.

48 Democrats, 47 Republicans, one Independent.

And you had out in Wyoming, in Republican Wyoming, you had this Democrat, Lester Hunt standing in the way of the Republican control of the Senate.

And so when they learned- - High stakes.

- When they learned that Senator Hunt's son had been arrested, they believed they had enough leverage to force Hunt to resign.

He refused to resign and so they did get the charges reinstated, and Young Hunt was tried and convicted in October of 1953 but that didn't end the threats.

- No, the threats continued, didn't it?

Because Lester Hunt had declared that he was gonna run again for reelection that year and that's when the threats began anew, didn't they?

- Well, through the October of '53 through the spring of '54, the threats continued.

Somebody broke into Senator and Mrs. Hunt's home in Washington over Christmas, ransacked it, obviously, looking for something.

You can imagine how disconcerting that would've been to Mr. And Mrs. Hunt.

But by the spring of 1954, Hunt had a poll that showed he would be easily reelected in Wyoming.

He was willing to put up a fight.

But he did say that if the Republicans used his son in the campaign, he would withdraw from the race.

- But he never did and we have just a few minutes left here, but as a result of all this, he, in essence, was left with nowhere to go because you pointed out he was trying to protect his wife's feelings, Wyoming media had not really picked up on it.

Any kind of campaign was gonna be obviously very, very ugly.

- Yeah and, you know, the Eisenhower administration, the president had offered him a job.

President Eisenhower said- - [Richard] There's the carrot as opposed to the stick, right?

- Yeah, well, it was both.

He said that the president sent somebody to say, "If you'll resign from the Senate and let the Republican governor in Wyoming appoint a Republican to replace you, we'll give you a job as the head of the Federal Tariff Commission."

Hunt wanted to do that, because the pressure was just overwhelming, but his wife and his staff talked him out of it, said, "How would you explain to the people back at Wyoming that you got this big job and the Republicans got control of the Senate?"

And so he turned that down.

But by then the walls had really closed in.

And then on the day before he committed suicide, the key to McCarthy's involvement is a press conference that he held that Friday afternoon and announced that he intended to open an investigation against a Democratic member of the Senate who had been involved in a bribe.

And that connected Hunt to charges that were made eight or nine months earlier by the Republicans that the police officer who initially dismissed the charges had taken a bribe.

And the next morning after the McCarthy Press conference, Senator Hunt took his life.

- You know, when we talk about lessons to be learned from this, and when you look at what happened.

I mean, could you ask, could this happen again?

I mean, obviously attitudes towards gays are changing rapidly around the nation, so that's where the blackmail doesn't seem tenable anymore.

- I think it'd be more difficult today.

I think because of the nature of journalism.

Drew Pearson knew about this blackmail almost from the beginning.

Tracy McCraken, who owned many of the newspapers in Wyoming knew about it.

A lot of people knew about it.

Nobody wanted to talk about it.

And Senator Hunt didn't want anybody talking about it.

- So you think the lid just would not stay on now?

- I don't think the lid would stay on.

I think it would be impossible to create the environment.

It'd be difficult to create the environment where that sort of political blackmail exists.

That having been said though, you know, there's always this want in American politics to target some group.

In the 1950s, it was the homosexuals, today, it's the Muslims.

There's always a group at the whim of those who are willing to be demagogues and Americans are too often willing to be led by their fears.

It may or may not lead to the kind of tragedy that we had in the Hunt case, but it leads to a lot of personal tragedies that ought to be avoided in a mature democracy.

- You know, just before we go, the verdict in the mock trial that we saw in the earlier piece criticized Senator McCarthy, but did not convict him of contributing to the death of Lester Hunt due to insufficient evidence.

- Well, you know, the interesting thing about that, in an actual court trial, the jury would've been advised that circumstantial evidence is every bit as strong as direct evidence.

I think the jury here in Lander was troubled with the fact that against McCarthy, the evidence is circumstantial.

But any public defender in town will tell you how many of their clients are in a prison cell based entirely on circumstantial evidence.

And the circumstantial evidence against McCarthy is very strong.

- And I'm sure as you continue to present this, you'll expect a different result with different juries.

That's gonna have to be your last word for now, because "Dying for the Sins of Joe McCarthy" is an amazing read, remarkable story.

I highly recommend it.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you next time on "Wyoming Chronicle."