Bridges ran for
governor of New Hampshire in
1934 and narrowly won, becoming the nation's youngest governor at the time, according to
John Gunther's
Inside U.S.A. Republican presidential nominee
Alf Landon considered Bridges as his running mate for the
1936 United States presidential election, but aides pointed out that Democrats could use "
Landon Bridges falling down" as a campaign slogan. Bridges was elected to the
United States Senate in
1936, and would serve until his death in 1961. In 1937, he retired from the Army Reserve Corps, in which he had served as a lieutenant since 1925. In 1940, he attempted to win the
Republican nomination for
President; the nomination was eventually won by
Wendell Willkie. That same year, Bridges also received two delegates for the Republican
vice presidential nomination, which eventually went to
Charles L. McNary. Bridges broke his hip on
New Year's Eve 1941, and missed several months of the next Senate session. Bridges was reelected to four subsequent terms in
1942,
1948,
1954, and
1960, but died in office a year into his final term. He became the highest-ranking Republican senator, serving as chairman of the Joint Committee on Foreign Economic Cooperation when the Republicans had control of the Senate from 1947 until 1949,
Senate Minority Leader from 1952 until 1953,
President pro tempore of the United States Senate when the Republicans had control of it from 1953 until 1955, chairman of the Joint Committee on Inaugural Arrangements for both of the inaugurations of President
Dwight Eisenhower,
Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations when the Republicans had control of the Senate from 1947 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1955, and
Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee from 1954 until his death. In 1946, Bridges was part of a five-member committee which investigated racist, violent voter suppression in
Mississippi incited by the state's demagogic senator
Theodore G. Bilbo. The committee, being composed of three Democrats and two Republicans, voted to exonerate Bilbo along party lines. Bridges and his fellow conservative colleague on the committee,
Bourke Hickenlooper of
Iowa, dissented from the decision on the grounds that Bilbo's actions violated federal laws and abused the First Amendment. Bridges was on the first
Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the
Armed Services Committee under the chairmanship of
Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's biographer
Robert Caro argues that Bridges offered Johnson a free hand in running the committee in return for employing two subcommittee staff members who would in fact augment Bridges' staff. In the Senate, John Gunther wrote, Bridges was "an aggressive reactionary on most issues...and he is pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the
CIO, the
Roosevelt family and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." Bridges voted present on the
Civil Rights Act of 1957 and voted in favor of the
Civil Rights Act of 1960. After WWII, when the U.S. government was
recruiting Nazi scientists, engineers, and doctors, and Jewish members of the U.S. State Department obstructed the
naturalization and
political rehabilitation of those individuals, Bridges said on the floor of the Senate on July 18, 1950, that the
State Department needed a "first-class
cyanide fumigating job" to eliminate resistance to the program, part of an extended "house cleaning" metaphor referencing the common use of cyanide as a fumigant.
Association with Joseph McCarthy Bridges was a staunch defender of Senator
Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and was one of only 22 senators, all Republicans, who voted against the censure of McCarthy for his
"red scare" communist investigations, and for his so-called "
lavender scare" tactics aimed at homosexuals in 1954.
Blackmail Bridges was also a key collaborator, with fellow Republican senators McCarthy and
Herman Welker of Idaho, in the blackmail of Democratic Wyoming senator
Lester C. Hunt, harassment that led to Senator Hunt's suicide in his Capitol office on June 19, 1954. Bridges threatened that if he did not immediately retire from the Senate and agree not to seek reelection, Bridges would see that Hunt's son, Lester Hunt Jr., who had been arrested for soliciting an undercover policeman, was prosecuted and that his son's homosexuality would be widely publicized. Bridges also threatened Inspector
Roy Blick of the Morals Division of the Washington Police Department with the loss of his job for failing to prosecute Hunt Jr. A Republican,
Edward D. Crippa, was appointed by the Republican acting governor of Wyoming,
Clifford Joy Rogers, to fill the vacant seat.
Alex Ross in
The New Yorker wrote in 2012 of an event "loosely dramatized in the
novel and
film Advise & Consent [in which] Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after ... Bridges ... threatened to expose Hunt's son as a homosexual". ==Death and burial==