Dan Kuykendall

Dan Heflin Kuykendall ( born July 9, 1924 in Cherokee, San Saba County, Texas, † June 12, 2008 in Memphis, Tennessee ) was an American politician. Between 1967 and 1975 he represented the state of Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Career

Dan Kuykendall attended the public schools of his native Texas. During the Second World War, he was between 1942 and 1945 as a first lieutenant pilot in the Air Corps of the U.S. Army. Then he studied until 1947 at the Texas A & M University. He was then working for the wholesale chain Procter & Gamble. For this company he worked in Corpus Christi and Houston. He was, also, added on behalf of his employer to Memphis in Tennessee. There he began a political career as a member of the Republican Party. In the years 1963 and 1964 he was deputy chairman of the party in Shelby County. 1964 Kuykendall ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate: He defeated the Democratic incumbent Albert Gore with 46:54 percent of the vote. In the years 1965 and 1966 he was a member of a committee to revise the laws in urban Memphis.

In the congressional elections of 1966 Kuykendall in the ninth constituency of Tennessee was in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington DC chosen, where he became the successor of George W. Grider on January 31, 1967. He was the first Republican since 1875, could this district in Congress Represented. After three re- elections, he was able to complete 1975 four legislative sessions until January 3. These were shaped by the events of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Since 1973 Kuykendall acted as successor by Ed Jones the eighth district of his state. He was considered very conservative and loyal supporter of Richard Nixon. In the Watergate affair in 1974 he held the president's loyalty. This behavior was a reason for his, albeit very thin, electoral defeat in the same year.

After his retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives Dan Kuykendall lived for many years in Bethesda (Maryland). In 2002 he returned to Memphis, where he died after a long illness on June 12, 2008.