It was a remarkable strategy, year in and year out, given that McConnell was not exactly tilling the bluegrass himself. He was as citified as they come. His Kentucky home was a townhouse in Louisville a few blocks from a trendy commercial district with coffeehouses and shops that now carry “Louisville: The Gayest City in Kentucky” T-shirts. (In Washington, he lived in a Capitol Hill townhouse where neighbors saw him come out on a regular basis with a broom in hand to sweep away every last bit of leaf or twig from his stoop.) Early in his career, he had tooled around Louisville in a little sports car. And he was, by his 1996 race, a wealthy man from his marriage in 1993 to Elaine Chao, the daughter of a Taiwanese shipping magnate.
Yet the populist attacks kept coming, to the astonishment of his opponents. “He did all that shit about [Beshear] foxhunting, about him being an elitist—Steve had two or three million dollars to McConnell’s nine!” says Jim Cauley, who’d gone on to manage Beshear’s campaign. Lunsford shrugged about the attack on his wealth and business, even if McConnell was, by 2008, himself worth as much as $13 million. “In a state as poor as Kentucky, that’s an easy target,” Lunsford said. “Why wouldn’t you do that?” Lunsford said he never thought of countering by pointing out McConnell’s own fortune, because he knew that much of it had come from Chao.
Chao’s wealth was not only hard to use against McConnell, but his campaign was adept at deploying Chao, with her cheery demeanor, to humanize her dour husband. Lunsford couldn’t help but wonder if Chao was so present on the campaign trail in 2008 to highlight that he himself was single. “My initial reaction was to say, ‘He brought in the secretary of labor [Chao’s government position at that point] to keep his job.’ ” But he decided that “that was hard to do when a woman is as nice as she is. If she was considered a bitch, it would’ve been different.”
* * *
McConnell’s approach of rendering the opposition unacceptable could be discerned in other political races, as well. In 1997, in his third try, he was named head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—the campaign organ for GOP senators—thus extending his hand into races across the country. And he was also becoming active in races back home, taking it upon himself to speed the state’s shift into the Republican column (a 1994 victory he engineered in a special election for an open congressional seat in a Democratic-leaning Kentucky district was a harbinger for the GOP sweep that fall). In 1998, he encouraged state legislator Ernie Fletcher to run for Congress against a Democrat who, as a public defender, had represented a man charged with raping and shooting a woman. The victim appeared in a Fletcher ad attacking his opponent for taking the case. The Kentucky Bar Association and Lexington Herald-Leader editorialists protested, but the ad swung the polls toward Fletcher, and McConnell later said, as related by Dyche, that he found it “legitimate” to attack a lawyer in that way. “I mean, I think you make a conscious decision in picking your clientele,” he said.
That same year, the NRSC, under McConnell’s leadership, provided funding for an ad before Election Day attacking the Democratic congressman Scotty Baesler, who was running against Jim Bunning, the former major league pitcher, for Kentucky’s other Senate seat. The ad cited Baesler’s vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement—with a swarthy Mexican actor saying, “Muchas gracias, Señor Baesler.” This scene was followed by the line, “But he also voted to give China special trade privileges, even though they’re shuttin’ out Kentucky-made products,” accompanied with Chinese music and, in Cantonese: “Thank you, Scotty Baesler.”
Six years later, Bunning was flailing in his race against Daniel Mongiardo, a state senator and physician from eastern Kentucky. On a bus caravan around the state with Bunning eight days before Election Day, Republican state senate president David Williams, a longtime McConnell ally, called Mongiardo, who was unmarried, “limp-wristed” and a “switch hitter.” Another Republican senator, Elizabeth Tori, said she questioned whether “the word ‘man’ applies to” Mongiardo. Tori later said that if listeners took this to refer to Mongiardo’s sexuality, “so be it.”
By his own admission in later accounts, McConnell advised Bunning against rebuffing these comments. McConnell urged a redoubling of attacks on Mongiardo in the final days of the campaign on the issue that had emerged as a rallying cry for Republicans in that year’s presidential election: same-sex marriage. The issue was also boiling at the state level, with a question on the Kentucky ballot to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage. That Mongiardo himself supported that amendment did not stop McConnell. He conceived of an ad that linked Mongiardo and John Kerry in their opposition to a national constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Looking back, Mongiardo has no doubt that the Williams and Tori comments and same-sex marriage ads were an organized effort to “make people in Kentucky believe I was gay because I was single at the time . . . they were almost directly saying, this guy is gay—don’t vote for him.” And he has no doubt who was behind it. “Anything that happened in the Republican Party in the last twenty-five years in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell has been the orchestrator of. He has been the puppet master. Nothing happens in this state without his direct knowledge, his control. And while he’s good at keeping his hands off things, no question his fingerprints were all over it.”
The whole spectacle flabbergasted Mongiardo. He had closed to a tie in the polls with the increasingly erratic Bunning, who had at one point declared that Mongiardo resembled Saddam Hussein’s sons and at another point confessed to no longer following the news. Then came Williams’s and Tori’s comments, and there was Mongiardo, campaigning in front of a large crowd at a shopping center, when a TV reporter marched right up to him and asked him point-blank if he was gay. “I answered it truthfully, honestly. I just said, ‘No.’ ” What astonished him was how blatant it was. “They were desperate—they saw the direction the campaign was going in. They couldn’t take a chance on doing it quietly. And obviously they were right—it worked as far as politics goes, so, you’ve got to hand it to them.”
Mongiardo still runs his practice in Hazard. He is now married, and he and his wife have two children.
* * *
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, Mitch McConnell was claiming some big Kentucky marks. In 2002, he had broken John Sherman Cooper’s record for the biggest margin of victory in a Senate election in Kentucky, in a race that he declared he had run “stronger than mule piss,” better even than the “first-class ass-kicking” he had delivered to Beshear in 1996. In 2009, he had surpassed Wendell Ford’s tenure as the longest-serving senator in the state’s history. His work on behalf of other Kentucky Republicans, particularly in formerly Democratic western Kentucky, had put all but one of the state’s six congressional districts in Republican hands. (However, Kentucky lagged behind the Republican ascendance in the rest of the South, with its House of Representatives still in Democratic control and only a single Republican governor since 1971.)
It was an unlikely record of electoral success, says Don Vish, a Louisville lawyer who first met McConnell when they worked together on the 1966 primary campaign against Gene Snyder. “You would never think he was headed in the direction he ended up,” Vish says. “You think of political people with great charisma and smiles and pals and everybody’s a friend and hail-fellow-well-met—well, this is quite unfriendly territory for him. It’s like finding a plant that is growing in soil that shouldn’t really be able to support the plant. Mitch is fairly urbane and looks and talks like he is from the city, and Kentucky has always regarded Louisville like a foreign country. He’s always had so many strikes against him—he’s like a column of numbers that don’t add up—you always get more in the bottom than there was at the top.”
To what end? McConnell’s mentor Cooper had left his mark in any number of areas—standing up to Joe McCarthy; resisting a push to remove the Fifth Amendment’s protection for reluctant witnesses against self-incrimination; restraining U.S.
military involvement in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand during the Vietnam War. Another legendary Kentucky senator, Democratic majority leader Alben Barkley, had helped power New Deal legislation through Congress before resigning his leadership post in protest in a dispute with Franklin D. Roosevelt over tax legislation. Long before that, of course, Henry Clay had brokered the great compromises that sought to resolve the growing nation’s burgeoning conflict over slavery.
McConnell had developed his own area of expertise, an issue he cared about deeply. It was not always the most popular thing to be seen fighting for, which might have seemed at odds with his perennial fixation on setting himself up for victory in the next election cycle. But at its essence, the issue was utterly consistent with that goal.
Chapter Two
NO MONEY DOWN
The collapse came in the middle of the night, on October 11, 2000. Three hundred million gallons of coal slurry, the viscous mix of mud, coal waste, and chemicals left as a by-product from purifying coal, broke through the inadequate buffer that separated the sixty-eight-acre holding pond of the Martin County Coal Corporation’s Big Branch Refuse Impoundment from the surrounding mine. The dark sludge poured through two miles of mine tunnels—a miner had left the area just moments earlier—before oozing out of a mountainside opening into the hilly landscape of far eastern Kentucky. It found its way into two tributaries of the Big Sandy River—first Coldwater Creek, and then, after the pressure forced a break in the other side of the impoundment, into Wolf Creek—filling them ever higher until it overran embankments, spreading toward the homes lining the creek bottoms of Inez, the 500-person town that Lyndon Baines Johnson visited in 1964 to promote his War on Poverty, and covering their yards with a vast moat of goop that rose to six feet deep in places. Inez resident Mickey McCoy threw golf-ball-size rocks into the blackened creeks and watched as they refused to sink in the noxious pudding. “It was a slow-moving black smothering,” he says. There was no immediate effort by the company to alert the townspeople sleeping in the spill’s path—Abraham Lincoln “Linc” Chapman didn’t know about the sludge until he encountered it while heading up Coldwater Creek before daybreak to bow-hunt deer. “It was a lot of chaos,” he says. “If you never saw a slurry spill it’s hard to describe it. It was like a lava flow coming down the creek bed.” His nine-year-old daughter was so terrorized by the advancing slop that he would later build another story onto their house, as a refuge from future assaults.
In the sheer scale of contamination, it was a much larger disaster than even the 1989 spill of 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez. As documented in reports by Washington Monthly and Salon and a documentary film by Robert Salyer, the slurry’s seventy-five-mile course of destruction downstream to the Ohio River killed 1.6 million fish and countless wildlife that got stuck in the muck or drank from it; carried away roads and bridges; and contaminated the water systems of more than 27,000 people (a 2001 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found up to thirty times the typical levels of arsenic and mercury in Inez’s groundwater). The cleanup only exacerbated the damage, as trucks and other heavy equipment rolled onto people’s lawns, ripping up gas lines and knocking over trees. Later “creek bank reconstruction” efforts resulted in widespread tree removal and in many places only exacerbated erosion. “People’s property just gets eaten off and falls,” says Chapman. The only consolation was the miraculous lack of any loss of human life (though many residents reported suffering from rashes and respiratory problems). A 1972 slurry flood following a dam break in Buffalo Creek, across the border in Logan County, West Virginia, had claimed the lives of 125 people; had the Martin Creek spill surged entirely into Coldwater Creek instead of being diverted into Wolf Creek as well, it could have swept away hundreds of townspeople.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration kicked into gear, with an investigative team led by Tony Oppegard, a senior political appointee. His second in command was Jack Spadaro, a career MSHA engineer. As a twenty-three-year-old new hire at the agency, Spadaro had worked on the Buffalo Creek investigation and was haunted by it still. The team found a trail of clues implicating both Martin County Coal’s owner, the mining giant Massey Energy, and their own agency, most notably a 1994 recommendation by an MSHA engineer, following a slurry spill at the same impoundment earlier that year, that Martin County Coal needed to carry out a host of recommendations before it could resume using the holding pond. Martin County Coal had failed to carry out the recommendations, and MSHA had failed to follow up on them. The rock and earthen wall separating the pond and the adjacent mine was as thin as 15 feet in spots—far below the 150 feet recommended by MSHA, far below the 70 feet Martin County Coal had claimed it to be on a map submitted to MSHA, and far too meager to hold back the pond, which was 80 feet deep at the time of the break. Oppegard and Spadaro’s team of investigators was on its way to preparing to bring eight separate violations against Massey that together could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines and laid the foundation for charges of willful and criminal negligence. “It’s a crazy thing to build an impoundment over an active coal mine,” says Oppegard.
As their investigation in deepest Appalachia proceeded, though, another process had been dragging out in sunny Florida. And on December 12, with a 5–4 ruling by the Supreme Court reversing the Florida Supreme Court’s call for a statewide recount of votes, George W. Bush was decreed president of the United States. The senior senator from the state where the coal slurry spill occurred was overcome with glee. “I don’t think I have ever felt better, including my own election victories, than the night of the Supreme Court decision,” McConnell said later. “I felt so deeply that Al Gore was a horrible person and was wrong for the country and ought not to be president of the United States.” As head of the Rules Committee, McConnell would preside over the inauguration, and inaugurating Gore, he said, would have been “enough to make me want to call in sick.” Instead, Bush was sworn in at a $40 million ceremony. And that day, Tony Oppegard got a call in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, from superiors at MSHA telling him that the incoming Bush administration was declining to approve the six-month extension that had been arranged for Oppegard so he could finish the investigation. “It was ‘Don’t come back tomorrow, because you’re out of a job,’ basically,” he says.
Tim Thompson, a district manager from Morgantown, West Virginia, replaced Oppegard. On arriving in Kentucky, Thompson announced that he wanted the investigation scaled back. Spadaro and his colleagues still had thirty people left to interview, but he told them that they only had time for six. “We were told, ‘Boys, you need to close out your investigation,’ ” says Spadaro. “We said, no, we’re not done. He said, ‘You’re done.’ ”
Thompson says the investigation needed to be reined in because it was getting beyond issues of mine safety and into environmental violations better left to the EPA and state environmental officials. “Some of the environmental things were really ugly,” he said. “But the violations they said existed were not violations of the Mine Safety Act.” Spadaro and Oppegard disagreed, saying the violations they were pursuing were very much related to mine safety, given that the holding pond was next to a working coal mine.
There was a new regime at the Mine Safety and Health Administration. And at the top was Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s second wife, whom Bush nominated as secretary of labor upon taking office. Chao had suitable politics for the Bush administration (she was far more conservative than McConnell’s first wife) but had little experience with mining safety. In addition to running the Peace Corps, she had led the United Way and served on the Federal Maritime Commission. Her husband, on the other hand, had for sixteen years represented one of the biggest coal mining states in the country. She turned to him to fill out her office. She hired as her chief of staff Steven Law, who had served six years as McConnell’s chief of staff. She hired as her spokesman McConnell’s former spokesman. Bu
sh nominated as the head of MSHA a former Utah coal operator named David Lauriski; his two deputies were also former coal mining executives. Lauriski in turn hired as one of his aides yet another former McConnell staffer, Andrew Rajec, who started attending many of the meetings of the Martin County investigators.
Thompson pushed to have the case against Massey reduced to just two violations with a fine of $55,000 each, rather than the eight that Spadaro and his fellow investigators believed were justified. One day in April 2002, Thompson got a call from MSHA headquarters outside Washington, D.C., after which, with the investigators watching, he crossed out a section of the draft report that called MSHA to account for its lax oversight.
That was enough for Spadaro. Seeing where things were heading, he tendered his resignation in a letter published in the local papers. “I do not believe that the accident investigation report, as it is being developed, will offer complete and objective analysis of the accident and its causes,” he wrote. As word of Spadaro’s protest spread, Elaine Chao dismissed it by telling a reporter, “It’s time to call off the MSHA food fight over the Martin County Coal Slurry investigation.”
For Spadaro, the consequences for speaking out became clear. Back at his regular post running MSHA’s training academy in West Virginia, he became the target of an internal audit for making thirteen cash advances with his agency credit card to entertain students and visiting dignitaries, including a Chinese delegation. He had paid the charges back, but the audit cited $22.60 in processing fees for the advances and suspended him for three days. In 2003, he was called to MSHA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and upbraided for letting an MSHA inspector with multiple sclerosis who was teaching classes at the academy live at the academy free of charge. Spadaro noted that his superiors had approved the arrangement, but he was placed on administrative leave anyway. He learned later that while he’d been in Arlington, MSHA officials had gone to his office in West Virginia to confiscate his files and hard drive. They picked apart his family photos to search for incriminating evidence he might have tucked inside the frames. A few months later, he was fired. He challenged his termination and had it reduced to administrative leave, but when the agency then demoted him and ordered him to a post in Pittsburgh, he relented and quit.
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