In 1964, that year of turmoil and soul-searching for the Grand Old Party, Cooper became Mitch McConnell’s lodestar. After returning to Louisville in the fall of 1963, out from under Snyder’s baleful eye, McConnell fired off a column urging Republicans to get on board with strong civil rights legislation at the state and national levels. Brimming with earnest idealism, the piece anticipates the main argument against civil rights reform and demolishes it: “Property rights have always been, and will continue to be, an integral part of our heritage, but this does not absolve the property holder of his obligation to help ensure the basic rights of all citizens.” McConnell disputed the opposition’s claim to constitutional rationales against the legislation: “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to conditions of contemporary society,” he wrote, and any “strict interpretation” was “innately evil” if its result was that “basic rights are denied to any group.”
By early spring, McConnell was speaking in a racially mixed assemblage at a campus “Freedom Rally” urging others to join King in marching on the state capital. As the divisive GOP presidential primary of that year took shape, McConnell sided against Goldwater and for two moderates—first Pennsylvania governor William Scranton and then ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. And at the end of the school year he was back in Washington, interning for the representative who was by this time the right fit: Cooper. That June, Cooper played a lead role in finagling just enough Republican votes to help break the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act led by Southern Democrats. And a year later, when McConnell was in Washington for a visit, Cooper brought him along to witness the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
Looking back, McConnell repeatedly cited Cooper’s leadership on civil rights legislation, despite hailing from a Civil War border state, as his model for being a senator. He recounted asking Cooper at the time, “How do you take such a tough stand and square it with the fact that a considerable number of people who have chosen you have the opposite view?” To which, he says, Cooper responded: “I not only represent Kentucky, I represent the nation, and there are times when you follow, and there are times when you lead.” McConnell expanded on this in his interviews with Dyche and in the annual oral history interviews McConnell has been giving for years to Kentucky historian John Kleber, which McConnell made available to Dyche. Cooper, he said, had often put him in mind of Edmund Burke’s famous dictum: “Your representative owes, not his industry only, but his judgment, and betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Cooper, McConnell said, “always carried out his best judgment instead of pandering to the popular view.” He “was sensitive to what his constituents were interested in, but not controlled by it.”
And Cooper showed that a senator with such independence of mind, forthrightness, and conviction could flourish. In 1966, he was reelected with nearly two-thirds of the vote.
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As riveted as McConnell was by the civil rights battles in Washington, it was the other great issue of the 1960s that threatened a more personal impact. And on this score, he again followed Cooper’s lead. In the fall of 1964, McConnell enrolled in law school at the University of Kentucky (thus allowing him to later claim both of the state’s major colleges as alma maters). There, like many other students, he grew opposed to the war in Vietnam—though there is no record of him speaking out as he did on civil rights. He received his degree in the spring of 1967, making him eligible for the draft just as the war, in which more than a thousand Kentuckians lost their lives, entered its deadliest two-year stretch for American soldiers.
McConnell decided to enlist in the army reserves. With remarkable candor, he later said that the reserves represented a kind of “honorable alternative that wouldn’t ruin my career or taint my advancement.” Left unsaid was that the reserves also were much less likely to put him in harm’s way, as they were used sparingly in Vietnam.
He reported for basic training with the 100th Division of the U.S. Army Reserves at Fort Knox in early July. Barely a month later, he was out, free on a medical discharge.
In McConnell’s later telling, as related by Dyche, he discovered soon after he arrived at Fort Knox that he was having trouble keeping up with basic training, which he attributed to residual effects of the polio. A subsequent physical examination, he says, found that he suffered from optical neuritis, a condition most often associated with multiple sclerosis that can cause foggy vision or partial loss of vision. The condition can often be treated with steroids, but McConnell says the diagnosis of optical neuritis prompted the medical discharge. McConnell’s Selective Service records, obtained from the National Archives under a public information request, do not specify the grounds for his discharge, and in fact show no record of his having received a physical examination prior to his discharge.
As short as his stay at Fort Knox had been, McConnell was growing impatient that his exit was taking as long as it was. By his own admission, he had his father place a call to his mentor in Washington. And on August 10, Senator John Sherman Cooper sent a wire to the commanding general at Fort Knox, stating: “Mitchell anxious to clear post in order to enroll NYU. Please advise when final action can be expected.” Five days later, McConnell was discharged. Effective as Cooper’s intervention had been, McConnell downplayed it years later, saying Cooper’s office had been doing “routine case work” in trying to help a constituent deal with army bureaucracy. He had, he said, “used no connections getting in” the army reserves and “no connections getting out.”
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Freed from Fort Knox, McConnell did not go to New York University, where there is no record of his ever having applied for classes, despite the claim in Cooper’s missive. He’d had plenty of schooling, after all, and was ready for the business of politics. The only question was where to begin. Ideally, he’d have gone right back to Washington. But there wasn’t all that much demand for a graduate of a non-elite law school with undistinguished grades. Even Cooper was disinclined to help out in this regard, telling McConnell he had no need for a young counsel.
He’d have to settle for Kentucky, for now. He took the first legal job he could find—working for a pro-union labor law firm. But the drudgery of his first regular job would last barely longer than his military sojourn. In early 1968, Morton, the state’s other senator, announced his retirement amid deep disillusionment over the urban riots and war in Vietnam. Marlow Cook, the moderate Republican executive for Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, announced his candidacy, and invited McConnell on as his campaign’s “state youth chairman,” a paid position. Mitch McConnell’s near lifelong career as a political professional had begun.
He had some campaign experience. Back in 1966, in his campaign debut, he had helped out on a primary challenge of none other than his first Capitol Hill boss, Gene Snyder, by a liberal Louisville Republican—further confirmation of where McConnell had lined up in his party’s internal conflicts. (Yet more evidence was the name he gave the cat he soon acquired: Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller, the moderate Republican governor of New York.) But now he was a full-time campaign staffer for the first time, and he took the task earnestly, recalls John Yarmuth, then a younger campaign worker who was paired up with McConnell. It was quite a spectacle: there, in 1968, at the height of the youth rebellion, was the unimpeachably square law school graduate going from one campus to another, urging students fixated on Vietnam, Bob Dylan, and the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy to vote for a county executive many had never heard of. If he got a cool response, it did not deter him—he worked relentlessly, not even letting his marriage shortly before the primary to Sherrill Redmon, a history Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky, slow him down. “He was incredibly serious even then,” says Yarmuth, who went on to work alongside McConnell in Washington and Louisville and was later elected to Congress as a Democrat. “I was having fun or trying to have fun. Even though it was going to play a very small part of the election—organizing campuses i
n 1968 was a fragment of the whole election—to him it was very important.”
The grind paid off—Cook won, and invited McConnell to Washington. Officially, McConnell was Cook’s chief staffer on the Judiciary Committee. He helped his boss reckon with Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations, two of whom were rejected, one as too conservative and the other as underqualified. And he helped handle Cook’s correspondence. In March 1970, he sent the Republican National Committee two speeches by Cook, which, McConnell wrote, “might be useful to you in your task of convincing both Blacks and other minority groups in the country that the Republican party is a logical home,” a preoccupation of moderate Republicans at the time. Three months later, he declined the invitation of an honorary membership for himself and Cook in the Kentucky State Rifle & Pistol Association, writing that “this would probably hinder effectiveness in fighting [strict gun control] laws, if we were members of the association.”
Unofficially, McConnell was a frontline foot-soldier in the era’s intensifying battle for his party’s soul. He lined up on the side of the moderates—his boss was a leading advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights for women—but was wary of any talk among his increasingly despairing fellow moderates of breaking away from the GOP.
This debate even led McConnell to the pages of Playboy—not for the pictures, but for the articles. In 1970, the magazine published a manifesto by Lee Auspitz, president of the Ripon Society, the organization founded in 1962 to promote moderate Republicanism. McConnell fired off a letter to Auspitz praising the piece as the “most definitive explanation of liberal Republicanism I have read,” while taking issue with the suggestion that had been made recently by some moderates that they ought to consider bolting the party. “The quickest way to completely eliminate our effectiveness within the GOP is to even suggest the possibility of withdrawing from our party,” McConnell wrote. “The Nixon administration, to this point, has been at worst completely reactionary and at best totally indecisive. No one is more frustrated with this state of affairs than I. However, for all the reasons you stated in your Playboy article, this is the logical home for us and we must not give up.”
He was a party man, above all, and the only question was when he’d make his official entrance under its banner. When the Nixon White House invited him to join the administration later in 1970, he fatefully declined, deciding it was time to head back to Kentucky and start his ascent from there. No sooner had he arrived home than he filed to run for a newly formed district in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He had moved to the district only two weeks before it became official, and his primary rivals challenged his candidacy under the Kentucky constitution, which requires candidates to reside in a given city or district for a year before running for office there. (McConnell, in an amusingly legalistic gambit, tried to argue that he could not have lived in the district for a year prior because the district hadn’t existed yet.) It was an embarrassing debut for the candidate-in-waiting, already sensitive to his status as a nonnative of Kentucky. He was tossed off the ballot.
Launch aborted, the thirty-year-old McConnell pinged back and forth between home and Washington: he worked on an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in Kentucky, returned to Washington to help prepare William Rehnquist for his Supreme Court hearings, took an undemanding law job at the firm of a successful lawyer-turned-entrepreneur in Louisville just in time for the birth of his first child, then returned to Washington to serve as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Ford administration, deputized as a liaison to Congress on judicial appointments. On weekends, he’d fly home to Kentucky to see Sherrill and their baby.
Someone who didn’t know any better might have taken McConnell as directionless, casting about while trying to care for his growing family (with three daughters, eventually). In fact, McConnell picked out his next target not long after his failed first run: the county executive job in Jefferson County, which had propelled his former boss Marlow Cook into the U.S. Senate. It was an unusual position—technically called “County Judge/Executive,” with some vestigial and nominal purview over the county courts—but essentially the elected chief administrator for the county, with particular purview for the fast-growing suburbs that extended beyond the Louisville city line, where the Louisville mayor’s bailiwick stopped. It was the ideal position for an ambitious first-time candidate—unglamorous enough to be attainable, but with real responsibilities, in the state’s largest jurisdiction, which held one in five Kentucky residents and many of the moderate to liberal Republicans, or even freethinking cosmopolitan Democrats, who fit McConnell’s profile. He had positioned himself well by getting involved in the Jefferson County Republican Party, succeeding its deceased chairman in 1973.
Crucially, the incumbent was vulnerable. Todd Hollenbach was a handsome Notre Dame alumnus in a heavily Catholic city, but he’d come under fire for running a crony-laden, ethically challenged administration. The Binghams, the liberal-minded owners of the influential Louisville Courier-Journal, didn’t care for him. (The feeling was mutual: “I didn’t see eye to eye with young Barry Bingham,” the publisher, Hollenbach says. “I told him respectfully that I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this city that a handful of well-placed funerals wouldn’t cure.”) Hollenbach had also been having marital troubles before getting a divorce.
He’d won reelection by a huge margin in 1973. But shortly into his second term, he’d been caught up in the biggest storm to hit Louisville in decades—in 1974, a federal judge acting at the behest of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a desegregation order for the Louisville schools, leading to the merger of the city and county districts, forced busing of 19,500 children, and protests from many white residents beyond the city line—Hollenbach’s constituents. Hollenbach had tried to position himself as a reasoned critic of the rulings, saying he supported desegregation but preferred means other than busing to achieve it. He was, in any case, powerless to do much about them.
Into this opening stepped McConnell. The thirty-five-year-old had, to this point, done barely anything in Kentucky except some law firm drudgery and helping manage other people’s campaigns. But he’d long been preparing for this moment, as suggested by his October 1975 letter offering President Gerald Ford his resignation from the Department of Justice job. After thanking Ford for the opportunity to serve, McConnell launched into a lament about the “discord” that busing had caused in Louisville, stated that he supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit it and, barring that, pleaded with Ford to nominate antibusing justices to the Supreme Court. It was a striking appeal from a junior staff member, particularly one who had a decade earlier joined the civil rights cause in Louisville.
But the motivation was plain to Bob Wolthus, a senior aide in the Ford administration, who wrote a memo to his supervisor that explained the context of McConnell’s letter: “In 1977 Mitch plans to run for the post of county judge in the Louisville area as a Republican. He says the busing issue down there is a very big political factor and he would like to position himself to take advantage of it in the 1977 election.”
As this plotting was under way, its target had no notion of what was coming his way. “I had never, quite frankly, heard of Mitch McConnell,” says Hollenbach.
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The young people on the campaign—that is, those even younger than the candidate himself—liked to practice a gentle sort of humor on him. McConnell slouched so much that Zane Griffin, his twenty-one-year-old scheduler, would pat him down and say, “What’s all this stuff in your pockets?” “We’d give him posture lessons,” she recalls. “We had fun with him—on his own terms.”
It was hard to figure how someone who had spent so much of his first dozen years out of college—or even longer than that—preparing for this moment could seem so ill-matched for it. To help loosen him up when he was out meeting voters, the campaign made sure he was always accompanied by his personal assistant, a handsome and affable young man by the nam
e of Mike Baer, who radiated such confidence that a little of it couldn’t help but pass into Mitch by osmosis. Aides with the candidate in public were charged with remembering names.
And it wasn’t just in interacting with voters that McConnell’s greenness shone. It was also in some of the basic backroom strategizing, recall Goodman and Plesser, his adman and pollster. “He was very ingenuous and very earnest—he did not have any of the sophistication or sensitivity to the political process and communications and the strategic management of elections,” says Plesser. “Like a lot of newcomers, he’d think about it straightforwardly: let’s speak to the issues. That’s something that came to him a little later, the mechanics. For us, it was about giving him some orientation and insight into the ways that campaigns really worked.”
Luckily, their candidate was open to that orientation. He assented to the consultants’ suggestion that he break up the electorate into segments, by neighborhood and interest group, and create not just a message for each but, essentially, an image of himself for each. This strategy was not only a good way to relate to voters but was all but mandatory for someone like McConnell, who had such a nondescript profile. “Rather than being ‘Mitch McConnell the lawyer,’ and using that as a credential—that was meaningless—he became ‘Mitch McConnell the county judge candidate who feels very strongly about the highway light,’ ” says Plesser.
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