Kefauver Committee Televised Hearings Draw 30 Million Viewers - Organized Crime Exposed

The United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, popularly known as the Kefauver Committee after chairman Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN), convenes televised hearings in New York City in March 1951 that become the most widely viewed congressional investigation to date. An estimated 30 million Americans tune in to watch the live proceedings, making the committee a household name - in March 1951, 72 percent of Americans are familiar with the Kefauver Committee’s work. The broadcasts exemplify television’s emerging power to shape public consciousness and political discourse.

Established in 1950, the committee investigates organized crime crossing state borders and holds hearings in 14 major cities across the United States, hearing testimony from more than 600 witnesses. The televised New York hearings provide many Americans with their first glimpse of organized crime’s influence in the United States. Schools dismiss students to watch. Blood banks experience dramatic fluctuations - one Brooklyn center installs a television tuned to the hearings and sees donations shoot up 100 percent. Senator Kefauver characterizes the hearings as “a national crusade, a great debating forum, an arouser of public opinion on the state of the nation’s morals.”

Notable witnesses include Frank Costello, head of a powerful New York crime family, who objects to testifying on television. The committee agrees to restrict cameras, and cameramen focus only on Costello’s hands - creating iconic imagery that heightens the proceedings’ dramatic impact. Virginia Hill, former girlfriend of criminal mastermind Bugsy Siegel, testifies to having no knowledge of criminal activities while in the company of notorious mobsters. Antagonized by the press, Hill kicks and slaps aggressive journalists on her way out of the hearing room in actions caught on live television.

The televised hearings launch Kefauver to national prominence, leading to his unsuccessful 1952 presidential bid and 1956 Democratic vice presidential nomination. The committee becomes the first to suggest that civil law be expanded and used to combat organized crime. Congress responds to the recommendation, and in 1970 passes the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as direct response to the committee’s work. The Kefauver hearings establish the template for televised congressional investigations as political theater and demonstrate how Congress can use media spectacle to build political careers and shape public opinion, foreshadowing the Army-McCarthy hearings (1954), Watergate hearings (1973), Iran-Contra hearings (1987), and subsequent high-profile investigations that function as much as entertainment and political positioning as substantive oversight.