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, 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. 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 not stand for re-election if the opposition used his son's arrest against him, Despite the threats of publicity from his political opponents, including a specific threat to distribute in Wyoming 25,000 leaflets about his son's arrest, A poll taken on April 5, 1954, gave Hunt 54.5% support, with his nearest opponent at 19.3%. Later that month, Bridges renewed his threat to publicize Hunt Jr.'s offense to Wyoming voters. The Eisenhower administration, taking a different tack, offered Hunt a high-paying position on the
U.S. Tariff Commission if he agreed never to run for the Senate again. He did not, however, resign from the Senate. On June 19, 1954, Hunt shot himself at his desk in his Senate office, using a
.22 caliber rifle he apparently brought from home. He was taken to Casualty Hospital, where he died a few hours later at age 61. Just one day before Hunt's suicide, McCarthy had accused an unnamed member of the Senate of "just plain wrong doing". After Hunt's suicide, McCarthy's ally Senator
Karl Mundt of South Dakota denied that McCarthy was referring to Hunt.
Aftermath The day after Hunt's suicide, Pearson published his charges about how Republican Senators had threatened Hunt, but described Hunt's motives as complex: Hunt was buried on June 22 in
Cheyenne at Beth El Cemetery following a brief church service. At the time of his death, Hunt was a
major in the
Army Reserve Corps. On July 4, the conservative
Washington Times-Herald reported Buddy Hunt's arrest and conviction from the previous year, with Hunt's death giving the story wider circulation than it had previously received. On November 9, the Senate eulogized its members who had died recently and Bridges called Hunt "a man who demonstrated the best qualities of an American. He was loyal and he served well". Hunt's cousin, William M. Spencer, president of the
North American Car Corporation in Chicago, wrote Welker after learning he had eulogized Hunt: Democrat
Joseph C. O'Mahoney won Hunt's Senate seat in the election on November 2, defeating the Republican nominee, Congressman
William Henry Harrison III. Buddy Hunt later worked on the staff of Catholic Charities in Chicago and then for the Industrial Areas Foundation of Chicago. 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. In October 2015, Buddy completed his first on-camera interview about his arrest and his father's suicide, for the Yahoo News documentary “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays.” Buddy Hunt died in Chicago on January 6, 2020, at the age of 92. ==Later references==