Frank Burton Ellis, a former state senator from St. Tammany Parish and later a short term judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Ellender polled 268,054 votes (59.1 percent) in the party primary; Ellis, 162,775 (35.9 percent), with 4 percent for minor candidates. He faced no Republican opposition that year. In 1960, Ellender was challenged by the former Republican National Committeeman George W. Reese, Jr., a New Orleans lawyer, who in 1952 and 1954 had challenged the conservative Democratic U.S. Representative Felix Edward Hébert of Louisiana's 1st congressional district, based about New Orleans. In the 1960 campaign, Reese accused Ellender of being "soft on communism". Ellender retorted that Reese's allegation came with "ill grace for the spokesman for the member of a party which has permitted the establishment of a Red-dominated beach head [Cuba] only ninety miles from our shores to attack my record against the spread of communism." Reese campaigned across the state in the fall, accompanied at times by Richard Lowrie Hagy of New Orleans, the in-state campaign manager for both Reese and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. In Lake Charles, he claimed that Senator Ellender had been lax in protecting military installations in Louisiana from being downsized or dismantled, with the impacted military services sent to bases in other states. "There has been inadequate representation of the state in these matters," Reese said. Ellender crushed Reese's hopes of making a respectable showing: he polled 432,228 (79.8 percent); Reese, 109,698 (20.2 percent). Reese's best performance was in two parishes that voted for Richard Nixon for president; La Salle Parish (Jena) and Ouachita Parish (Monroe), but he still gained less than a third of the ballots – 31.3 percent in each. In Caddo Parish (Shreveport), Reese finished with 30 percent. Reese was only the third Republican since the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified to seek a U.S. Senate seat from Louisiana. Ellender ran 24,889 votes ahead of the John F. Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson ticket, but 265,965 voters cast in the presidential race ignored the Senate contest, a phenomenon that would later be called an "undervote". In 1966, Ellender disposed of two weak primary opponents, including the liberal State Senator J. D. DeBlieux (pronounced "W") of Baton Rouge and the conservative businessman Troyce Guice, a native of St. Joseph in Tensas Parish, who then resided in Ferriday, and later in Natchez, Mississippi. The Republicans once again