Robert F. Kennon - Gubernatorial Matters

Gubernatorial Matters

In 1952, despite major opposition within the Democratic primary, Kennon won his party's nomination in a runoff with state District Judge Carlos Spaht of Baton Rouge, who had the backing of some of the organizers of outgoing Governor Earl Long. Kennon polled 482,302 votes (61.4 percent) to Spaht's 302,743 (38.6 percent). Spaht's running-mate for lieutenant governor was a future governor, John Julian McKeithen, then a 33-year-old state representative from Columbia, the seat of Caldwell Parish, in northeastern Louisiana. McKeithen was defeated for lieutenant governor by C. E. "Cap" Barham, a state senator and an attorney from Ruston, the seat of Lincoln Parish. Barham, who stood to the left of Kennon politically, had not been Kennon's first choice for lieutenant governor, and the two ran on a common intraparty ticket of convenience in 1952. Elmer D. Connor had been Kennon's unsuccessful first choice for lieutenant governor.

In the following low-turnout general election in the spring of 1952, Kennon trounced Republican Harrison Bagwell, 118,723 (96 percent) to 4,958 (4 percent). Until 1952, Louisiana Republicans had not even offered a token name on gubernatorial general election ballot.

As a delegate to the 1952 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Kennon led a walkout of the Louisiana delegation, most of whose members opposed the party's civil rights plank, a point that he used in his advertising for the failed gubernatorial comeback bid in the fall of 1963.

Governor Kennon was often said to have conducted his office as if he were instructed by a "civics textbook." In addition to his interest in state sovereignty, Kennon pushed to procure voting machines to all Louisiana precincts to replace paper ballots still used in some rural parishes. Such machines were designed to eliminate the periodic problem of vote-stealing. Kennon expanded Louisiana state civil service with help from the New Orleans attorney Charles E. Dunbar, who had authored the original reform measure in 1940 under the Sam Jones administration.

In 1955, Kennon was named chairman of the National Governors Conference.

In the 1956 gubernatorial election, Kennon, who was ineligible to succeed himself, supported Fred Preaus, an automobile dealer from Farmerville, the seat of Union Parish in north Louisiana, who had been Kennon's highway director. Preaus also vowed a "strong stand on segregation." Another segregationist candidate, James M. McLemore, an Alexandria businessman, however, claimed that Kennon had done little to stem pending desegregation. According to McLemore, the Kennon administration had been "like an ostrich with the head buried in the sand" and had provided "no leadership" to halt racial integration.

"Cap" Barham, meanwhile never politically close to Kennon, sought reelection as lieutenant governor (Only governors were then term-limited in Louisiana.) on the deLesseps Story Morrison ticket. Morrison, then the mayor of New Orleans was a former law partner of Barham's 1952 ticket mate, then U.S. Representative Hale Boggs.

After his governorship, the Kennons resided for the remainder of his life in Baton Rouge, where he maintained a law practice. Kennon appointed his former law partner in Minden, Graydon Kitchens, also a graduate of the LSU Law Center, to the Louisiana Tax Commission. Earl Long, however, convinced the state legislature to remove Kitchens from the panel so that Long could make his own appointment. Kennon also named a Minden supporter, Leland G. Mims, to a vacancy on the Webster Parish Police Jury. Mims in 1965-1967 was president of the Police Jury Association of Louisiana.