KENTUCKY’S
KING
crimination and had been a cosponsor of the bill that created
Medicare. He’d been hit with a lot
of flak back home for the health
care legislation, but his experiences taught him a bleak lesson.
“I noticed that the old country
doctors and the country officials
— people who had been out in the
country and had seen the plight of
the people who live in the hollows
and down the dirt roads — they
were for it,” Cooper told reporters in 1972. “And I remembered
my experiences as county judge in
Pulaski County, when I’d go out in
the county and see these people
— desperate, hungry, sick and nowhere to turn, and no one to help
them except the old country doctors. You just can’t let people go
hungry. You can’t just let them
lie there sick, to die. Not in this
country. Not with all we’ve got.”
Cooper had also been an ardent
supporter of one of Lyndon Johnson’s signature achievements,
the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
and helped defeat the filibuster
against it. The summer after his
internship, “Cooper grabbed a
visiting McConnell by the arm and
spontaneously took him to the
Capitol” where the two watched
Johnson sign the Voting Rights
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
Act of 1965, according to John David Dyche’s Republican Leader, a
biography of McConnell.
McConnell later joined Marlow
Cook’s campaign for Senate in
1968, as a field organizer at colleges across the state. By the time
he was through, every campus had
a Cook group. “I think he believed
in what we were doing,” Cook
says. “He believed that we were
trying to bring a moderate Republican to succeed a moderate Republican. As a Republican, I was
the one that could do that.”
After the successful campaign,
McConnell joined Cook’s staff
in Washington where he worked
with the senator to pass the Equal
Rights Amendment, which would
have guaranteed equal rights for
women. Cook says McConnell and
his staff all “had to work like hell
on it.” The amendment passed but
ultimately failed to be ratified by
enough states to be written into
the Constitution. Cook had been
the only Republican leading the
deeply controversial effort. “We
were fighting the likes of Phyllis
Schlafly that didn’t want women
in the military,” Cook explains.
“All the churches were against it.”
John Yarmuth, another young
reform-minded Republican, crisscrossed the state with McConnell campaigning for Cook, and
remembers McConnell as pro-