KENTUCKY’S
KING
AP PHOTO/BILL ALLEN
many things Bingham wanted to
talk about, the paper’s early support of McConnell was one them.
“He looked at me and he said,
‘You know, the worst mistake we
ever made was endorsing Mitch
McConnell’ in 1977.”
MODERATE MITCH
Squint long enough and hard
enough, and you can see vestiges
of the young, moderate McConnell
in his funneling of federal money
toward Kentucky projects. This is
the McConnell who forged a polit-
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
ical identity at the elbow of Kentucky’s iconic reformer Republicans, the McConnell who didn’t
just admire Martin Luther King,
Jr., but made a point of witnessing
the March on Washington from
the Capitol steps and later spoke
up for the cause on his University
of Louisville campus.
In the summer before he began law school at the University
of Kentucky, McConnell went to
Washington as an intern for Kentucky’s beloved Republican statesman, Sen. John Sherman Cooper.
The senator had helped draft the
first legislation for federal education aid, had fought school dis-
Senator John
Sherman
Cooper (RKy.), testifies
before the
Senate
Commerce
Committee in
Washington,
in support of
civil rights
legislation, on
July 3, 1963.