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. Following Dwight Eisenhower's landslide victory in the 1952 election, Hunt announced that he felt obliged to support the administration's legislative proposals wherever possible. 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. Son's arrest and Hunt's suicide 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. Buddy Hunt was prosecuted, and Senator Hunt attended the trial. 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. Buddy Hunt's attorney was quoted in an October 8 New York Times account as saying his client preferred "to avoid any further publicity." 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