The Long Game

by Mitch McConnell

It was the biggest high school in the state, and I didn’t know a soul. With my southern accent and tendency to be on the quiet side among so many strangers, I didn’t make friends easily. While most other kids were discovering Elvis and cruising downtown’s Fourth Street, looking for girls to ask to the next YWCA dance, I spent most of my time with my mom, both of us battling homesickness. I’m pretty sure we survived that winter thanks largely to the pleasure we found watching the University of Louisville basketball team, which, under all-American Charlie Tyra, went on to win the 1956 NIT championship.

  The one bit of good news was that Louisvillians took their youth baseball far more seriously than we had in Augusta. The local Beechmont League played on nice fields and wore impressive uniforms, and boys had to first try out. The team managers came to watch the tryouts, attended by at least three hundred kids, and after a few days, a draft was held. I was the number one pick, and was placed on a team called the Giants. I was exceedingly proud, and really wanted to live up to this honor, but after my experience in Augusta, I knew I shouldn’t allow my highs to be too high or my lows too low, and I remained cautious. This ended up being a wise decision. After a good year with the Giants—hitting over .300, pitching well—I was not chosen as an all-star player, passed over for one of the manager’s sons. By tenth grade, I wasn’t even good enough to make the Manual High School team.

  It wasn’t easy, but I accepted it: if I was going to excel at something, it wasn’t sports. And the more baseball faded, the more something else was beginning to entice me, something that shared the same sense of competition, the team spirit, the need for endurance: politics.

  When I was quite young, my father shared with me the story of how his father, Big Dad, had first explained politics to him.

  “Sit down, son,” Big Dad said. “This won’t take long.” My dad did as he was told. “Okay,” my grandfather continued. “The Republican Party is the party of the North. The Democratic Party is the party of the South. You can go now.”

  From what I could tell, my grandfather’s words remained true. In Athens, I’d sometimes tag along with Big Dad to the funeral parlor he owned, where the men from the neighborhood would gather on the comfortable leather chairs in the large front foyer to talk politics. I heard the story of one local election. This was back in the days of paper ballots, and when the polls closed, the election officials counted the ballots back at the courthouse. It was pretty routine: Democrat, Democrat, Democrat. But once, a ballot for the Republican appeared. Then, after a while, another was pulled from the box.

  “What do we make of this?” one official asked the others.

  “Throw it away,” someone said. “The poor son of a bitch voted twice.”

  When my dad voted for Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, it’s therefore very likely he was the first McConnell ever to support a Republican. But he’d fought the war under Ike, who served as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. I greatly looked up to my dad, and if he was loyal to Eisenhower, then so was I—so much so that in my fifth-grade class photo, attached to the wide lapel of my button-down shirt, is a pin reading “I Like Ike.”

  The election of 1956 four years later, a rematch between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, was the first to capture my attention. Both the Democratic and Republican national conventions were broadcast on television, taking over several hours of programming, replacing shows like As the World Turns and The Johnny Carson Show. The broadcast was nothing more than a view of the podium, with intermittent observations offered by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite. In other words, it was deadly boring and I would venture a guess that I was probably the only fourteen-year-old boy in America interested enough in politics to watch both conventions, gavel to gavel.

  Watching these conventions helped to move me beyond simply adopting my father’s political loyalties to feeling sure of my own. It may have been unusual to identify as a Republican in Kentucky at the time, but it didn’t feel that way when considered from a wider lens and a longer view. Americans have always tended to be a fairly conservative bunch. The colonists overthrew the English not because they wanted to create some radically new political order, but because they liked the country they had put together here and wanted to preserve a way of life they had come to enjoy. Even as a boy I could see that the Constitution was meant to limit government, reserving power for the people. And I was proud to call myself a member of the party created on February 28, 1854, when about fifty opponents of slavery got together in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.

  The year 1956 would sure turn out to be an exciting one for a budding Kentucky Republican like me. Eisenhower won a second term, and not one but two Republicans were elected to the US Senate from Kentucky: Thruston Ballard Morton, who beat the Democratic incumbent; and John Sherman Cooper, who was elected in a special election to fill the seat made vacant by the death of former majority leader Alben Barkley. In the vicinity of these unlikely successes, it was not only a lot easier to form my party affiliation, it also led me to think that holding elected office might be something I could do—an idea that I’d first attempt to put into practice at Manual High School.

  I’d been a student at Manual for a few hours when the teacher announced it was time to head to the convocation, an all-student assembly that customarily took place once a week. I joined the other students in the vast auditorium, and surrounded by hundreds of strangers who all seemed to have grown up together, I took a seat toward the back, where I could hide in a poorly lit corner. Sitting there, I felt a pang of homesickness. When my dad had first told us we were moving to Louisville, it was a moment just like this that I had most dreaded: being an outsider. I was overwhelmed by how big this school was—so much so that I think that while I might have once been considered outgoing, I immediately became an introvert. But, although I couldn’t know this at the time, these first uneasy months at Manual, and this day in particular, would spur me to set a clear, if seemingly out-of-reach, goal that would set the course of my life.

  The convocation was presided over by the president of the student council, a boy from the senior class. I found the idea of public speaking to be utterly daunting, and the confident ease with which he spoke impressed me. He didn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated. After school that afternoon, I rode the city bus back to my house, where my mom was eagerly waiting to hear about my first day. I couldn’t help but share every detail of the convocation, and how in awe I had been of the student council president. It wasn’t just that he himself had particularly impressed me, but it was also the fact that one person could have the envy of everyone at the school. What teenage boy didn’t desire that?

  “That would be something,” I said. “Getting to be president of that big school, and having the respect of your peers and an influence over the direction of the school.”

  She must have sensed what was behind my words. “I bet you could do that.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t know a soul at that school. I don’t have even one friend.”

  “That won’t always be the case,” my mom said. “Later, if it’s something you want to do, I’m sure you could make it happen.”

  Her words stayed with me, and by the time I was a junior at Manual, things had improved. My grades were good, I’d made a few friends, and I even had a steady girlfriend, Annell Samuels, who was sweet and as pretty as can be. Her mother would drive us to the dances, and then out for a burger at the Ranch House drive-in. Annell and I would sit in the backseat, trying to forget Mrs. Samuels sitting silently in the front. I liked Mrs. Samuels, but was very happy when I got my driver’s license at sixteen, and could take Annell out on my own.

  At the end of my junior year, my desire to lead the school and know I’d earned the respect of my classmates had not abated. If I was going to do it—put myself out there and make a run for it—it was now or never. I walked into school one morning and en
tered my name into the race, feeling proud, excited, and pretty sure I was going to lose. My opponent, Terry McCoy, was by far the odds-on favorite. He was a better student than me, and enjoyed the obvious support of the student council adviser, Mr. Purnell. My mom’s advice was to stay positive, my dad’s: to work hard.

  “You can’t be one of those kids who puts your name on the ballot, sits back, and hopes for the most votes,” my dad told me. “You have to be smart and focused about this.”

  I agreed. To win the election, I needed to run a better campaign. Because I was not particularly well known, I needed the support of those who were. Just like Kentucky candidates today seek the endorsement of the Louisville Courier-Journal, I began to seek the endorsement of the popular kids, like Janet Boyd, a well-known cheerleader; Bobby Marr, the best high school pitcher in the state; and Pete Dudgeon, an All-City Football player. I was prepared to ask for their vote using the only tool in my arsenal, the one thing teenagers most desire. Flattery.

  I’d find them in the hallway or lunchroom. “People follow your lead,” I told Janet and the others. “If you vow to vote for me, I think others will too.” Not one person said no, and others quickly followed suit. I designed a pamphlet entitled “We Want McConnell for President” and listed the names of the popular students whose endorsements I’d secured. A classmate convinced her father to make copies. During my time between classes, or after school, I walked the long, tiled halls, sliding a pamphlet into the locker of every single student, even the underclassmen, often overlooked in these campaigns.

  A few weeks before the election, it was anybody’s win, and I went at it full-on. Enlisting my parents and some friends for help, we gathered in my basement and painted “McConnell for President” onto a twenty-five-foot-long banner. I carried it to school under my arm, and hung it on the wall of the school’s central stairwell, where it was impossible to miss.

  The day of the election, the school administrators set up three voting booths, and later, Terry and I went to Mr. Purnell’s office to receive the results. I’ll never forget the surprised and somewhat disappointed look on Mr. Purnell’s face as he handed me the returns.

  “Congratulations, Mitch,” he said. “You’ve won.”

  I rode the bus home with Terry after school, exhilarated. Although I did feel a bit sorry for him, I’d simply outworked him. Of course, my jubilation over winning was sobered a few days later, when I felt the pressure to prove to my fellow students that they had made the right choice in electing me. On the first day that I took the stage as the leader of my school—the same stage from which I’d watched the student council president speak a few years earlier as I hid in the back of the auditorium—I vowed to work hard over the next year to show they had. Walking onto that stage was a proud moment. I’d been tireless and smart and had run a better campaign. I knew that I’d earned that win.

  And I knew something else too: having had my first taste of the responsibility and respect that came with holding elected office, I was hooked.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Seeing Greatness

  Soon after moving to Louisville, I had made a vow to myself: if I ever got used to Kentucky, I was never going to leave. The two moves I’d made as a child were downright traumatic, and I wasn’t interested in going through that again. In 1960, I enrolled at the University of Louisville. I remained living with my parents, and my dad bought me a little red Corvair to drive back and forth to campus each day.

  Whereas it had taken me a few years to find my footing at Manual High School, I immediately felt at home at U of L. I joined Phi Kappa Tau, a highly respected fraternity, and quickly made a group of close friends. Although I lived at home with my parents, I spent most of my free time at our frat house. Greek life provided the epicenter of social activities at our college, and every weekend, I was on campus, attending a party or dance. I became a rabid fan of the U of L Cardinals football and basketball teams, rarely missing a home game. This was the beginnings of a love that endures to this day.

  At the insistence of my college girlfriend, I attempted to expand my interests beyond politics. I signed up for an art appreciation class, and committed to take it seriously. For our first assignment, we were asked to write a paper on a painting of our choosing. I put a great deal of effort into that paper, and felt quite proud of it. It earned a D. Somebody’s trying to tell me something here, I thought, accepting the idea that I was probably never going to be a Renaissance man.

  Instead, I happily focused my studies on political science and, perhaps my favorite subject, American history. Later, as a law student at the University of Kentucky, my love of history was so great that I briefly considered dropping out to pursue a doctoral degree in history, and an eventual position as a history professor. I obviously thought better of this idea, but I’ve been interested in history since I was very young, especially in learning about the lives of great men and women who stood strong in their beliefs regardless of popular opinion. People like John Marshall Harlan, the Kentucky-born Supreme Court justice who is best known as the lone dissenter in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation. And another fellow Kentuckian, Senator Henry Clay, the so-called Great Compromiser. I’d spend my senior year at U of L studying Clay for my honors thesis, admiring his efforts to hold the union together in the years prior to the Civil War. Learning about Clay, seeing what he was able to accomplish from his place in the US Senate, was the first time I began to feel the stirrings of hope that I might, in my very wildest dreams, follow in Clay’s footsteps and serve as a US senator myself. Learning about great men like Harlan and Clay—coupled with the experiences I would have with contemporary political leaders over the next few years, as I finished my undergraduate degree and went through law school—only crystalized this ambition.

  At U of L, I was fortunate to fall under the tutelage of Grant Hicks, a political science professor who inspired me, on a more personal level, to practice my own independent thinking, especially about the type of government that can best serve our country. In a university where most professors were liberal Democrats, Grant Hicks was the lone conservative. The poor guy probably had to eat lunch by himself, but unlike most other political science teachers I had, Hicks didn’t give conservative thinking short shrift. In learning about both sides of the political coin, I had a way to make a comparison, allowing me to further cement my conservative views. In Democrats, I saw a party more concerned about prioritizing the state over the individual and whose playbook was filled with plans to bloat government, enact out-of-control spending, and then raise taxes to pay for it all. My studies greatly confirmed my growing skepticism about big government. Whereas Democrats wanted to place their trust in the government and its agents to guide our institution and direct our lives, I felt it far wiser to put our trust in the wisdom and the creativity of private citizens working voluntarily with each other and through more local mediating institutions, guided by their own sense of what’s right and fair and good.

  A Barry Goldwater enthusiast, Hicks turned me on to Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. Reading this book made me excited about Goldwater and what he meant for the future of my party. Since FDR, cowed by the success of the New Deal, Republicans had sacrificed a lot of their ideology and essentially went along with Democrats. In fact, the liberal orthodoxy was so entrenched in the middle of the century that William F. Buckley, one of the nation’s leading intellectuals and the founder of the National Review, often reminded people of the prevailing idea at the time, first espoused by a prominent liberal intellectual—that there were no conservative ideas in general circulation in America at this time. None.

  But here was Goldwater, moving Republicans away from the “me too” way of thinking embraced by Dewey and Eisenhower, advocating more conservative policies, emphasizing the need to rail against the ever-increasing concentrations of authority in Washington. He pledged to present voters “a choice, not an echo” of the way it had be
en.

  I was so inspired by Goldwater, in fact, that Grant Hicks encouraged me, in my role as the president of the College Republicans, to invite him to speak on campus. I was proud, and more than a little surprised, when Goldwater accepted, and prouder yet to be the one to introduce him before the speech he gave to the large crowd that had gathered on the university’s main quad.

  That day, a reporter snapped a picture of the moment I met Goldwater. It appeared in the Courier-Journal, and if you walk into my office in the Russell Senate Office Building today, an office once inhabited by Ted Kennedy, you’ll find that photograph, which Goldwater later signed for me, hanging prominently on the wall. I like this image immensely, as it helps to remind me how far I’ve come since that day in 1962 when, even at that young age, I was beginning to harbor hopes about a political future of my own.

  My staff, however, likes this photo for an entirely different reason: with one look at me then, all crew-cut and earnest, wearing a jacket and tie, you can put yourself at ease over the question of whether I ever smoked pot in college.

  If I was serious about holding elected office someday, I needed to get some real experience—and I set my sights as a college student on getting that experience both through elected office myself as well as real-life experience in Washington, DC. Fortunately, I achieved both. After two unsuccessful runs for office at U of L my sophomore year—both of which I lost by exactly one vote—I was elected my junior year to be the president of the Arts and Sciences student council. Then, that summer, I was, happily, the first student chosen in the U of L political science congressional internship program, and went to work for Kentucky congressman Gene Snyder, an ultraconservative Republican who was elected the previous year to the House of Representatives.

  Arriving in Washington, DC, for my first political job was a truly proud moment. The last time I’d been to DC was the summer I turned ten, when my parents and I spent two weeks driving in our 1953 Chevy through the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. We visited Mount Vernon, and then went up to Washington, where we toured the Smithsonian and every monument up and down the mall. This time, it wasn’t a 1953 Chevy that brought me to DC, but a two-seat 1961 MG that certainly made me feel as if I was something else. I moved into Hartnett Hall at Twenty-First and P Street NW, where I had my own small room, and shared a bathroom with the other tenants on my hall.