[1] He attended the public schools and graduated from the law department of West Virginia University at Morgantown in 1914 and was admitted to the bar the same year.

During the First World War he served in the infantry from 1917 and was discharged as a captain in 1920; in 1921 he organized the West Virginia National Guard and retired as a colonel in 1953.

Senator Kilgore was West Virginia's favorite-son candidate in 1948 Democratic presidential primaries and won his home state unopposed.

[4][5][6] Kilgore did not sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto despite school segregation being legally required in West Virginia prior to Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

In 1942, American manufacturing expert Herbert Schimmel advised Kilgore to form a committee to centralize scientific research done for the war effort.

The Kilgore Committee drafted legislation for an Office of Technological Mobilization, which would have power to fund research, share patents and trade secrets, and facilities that could help the war effort.

The scientists running the war-time Office of Scientific Research and Development sought to bypass the Kilgore Committee in forming a postwar science policy.

After many months of negotiations with interest groups of scientists and manufacturers, Kilgore and Magnuson introduced a modified bill to fund the National Science Foundation in 1946, which did not pass.

Kilgore encouraged his former colleague, now President Harry S. Truman to veto the Smith bill, in large part because of the potential it made for the military to dominate scientific research.

[2]: 35 By 1948, other agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Defense had been established to fund specific domains of scientific research.