Ray Jenkins graduated cum laude from the university’s College of Law in 1920, having passed the Tennessee Bar and having received his license to practice in 1919. He had a reputation as a courtroom dramatist. When he tried cases, spectators would come to watch. His public reputation evolved from the more than eight hundred homicide defendants he represented, although civil law accounted for more than 90 percent of his practice.
In 1954 Jenkins was appointed chief counsel for the US Senate committee investigating the Army-McCarthy hearings. Jenkins worked closely with minority counsel Robert Kennedy to learn the truth about the relationship between Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Senator McCarthy, and he represented Private G. David Shine. His oratorical skills were made nationally known through television coverage of the events, and his picture appeared on the cover of Time. Cartoonist Al Capp adapted Jenkins’s likeness and personality for Cragnose, a character in the popular Li’l Abner comic strip. Jenkins’s papers are in the Special Collections at the university’s library.
Jenkins and his wife Eva (Nash) entered into a gift-purchase arrangement with the university in 1960 through which the university acquired the house at 940 Cherokee Boulevard, which was used as the residence of the president the university from 1960 to 1988 and as the chancellor’s residence from 1989 to 1999. With the 1999 reorganization of the university, the house again became the president’s residence and was subsequently sold.