John Sherman Cooper

Early life

John Sherman Cooper was born August 23, 1901, in Somerset, Kentucky. He was the second child and first son of seven children born to John Sherman and Helen Gertrude (Tartar) Cooper. The Cooper family had been prominent in the Somerset area since brothers Malachi and Edward Cooper migrated from South Carolina along the Wilderness Trail and through the Cumberland Gap around 1790, shortly after Daniel Boone. His father's parents – staunch Baptists – were active in the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century, and the elder John Sherman Cooper (called "Sherman") was named after the Apostle John and William Tecumseh Sherman, a hero of the Union in the Civil War. The family was very active in local politics; six of Cooper's ancestors, including his father, were elected county judges in Pulaski County, and two had been circuit judges. Sherman Cooper engaged in numerous successful business ventures and was known as the wealthiest man in Somerset. At the time of John Sherman Cooper's birth, his father was serving as collector of internal revenue in Kentucky's 8th congressional district, a position to which he had been appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt.

During his youth, Cooper worked delivering newspapers, in railroad yards, and in his father's coal mines in Harlan County. Despite having formerly served as county school superintendent, Cooper's father had a low opinion of the public schools, and until he was in the fifth grade, Cooper was privately tutored by a neighbor. While his father was away on business in Texas, his mother sent him to sixth grade at the public school, which he attended thereafter. At Somerset High School, he played both basketball and football. After the outbreak of World War I, Cooper joined an informal military training unit at the high school. Two of the school's instructors organized the boys into two companies, but Cooper, who was given the rank of captain, later recalled that "they taught us how to march and that's about all." During his senior year, Cooper served as class president and class poet. In 1918, he graduated second in his high school class and was chosen to give the commencement speech.

After graduation, Cooper matriculated at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. While at Centre, Cooper was accepted into the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He also played defensive end on the Praying Colonels' football team. Cooper was a letterman on the team, playing alongside football notables Bo McMillin, Red Roberts, Matty Bell, and Red Weaver. Another member of the team, John Y. Brown Sr., would later become one of Cooper's political rivals. Coached by Charley Moran, the team was undefeated in four games in the 1918 season, which was shortened by an outbreak of the Spanish flu.

Early political career

After being urged into politics by his uncle, Judge Roscoe Tartar, Cooper ran unopposed for a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives as a Republican in 1927. As a member of the House, he was one of only three Republicans to oppose Republican Governor Flem D. Sampson's unsuccessful attempt to politicize the state department of health; the measure failed by a single vote. Cooper supported the governor's plan to provide free textbooks for the state's school children and sponsored legislation to prohibit judges from issuing injunctions to end labor strikes, although the latter bill did not pass.

In 1929, Cooper declared his candidacy for county judge of Pulaski County. His opponent, the incumbent, was the president of Somerset Bank and the former law partner of Cooper's father. Cooper won the election, however, beginning the first of his eight years as county judge. During his service, he was required by law to enforce eviction notices, but often helped those he evicted find other housing or gave them money himself, earning him the nickname "the poor man's judge". He reportedly became so depressed by the poverty and suffering of his constituents during the Great Depression that he had a nervous breakdown and took a leave of absence to seek psychiatric treatment.

Cooper served on the board of trustees for the University of Kentucky from 1935 to 1946. In 1939, he sought the Republican gubernatorial nomination. As a result of a mandatory primary election law passed in 1935, the Republican nominee would not be chosen by a nominating convention, as was typical for the party. Cooper lost the nomination to King Swope, a Lexington circuit court judge and former congressman, by a vote of 121,297 (59%) to 73,305 (36%).

Service in World War II

Although well above the draft age at 41 years old, Cooper enlisted for service in the United States Army in World War II in 1942. Immediately offered an officer's commission, he chose instead to enlist as a private. After basic training, he enrolled in Officer Candidate School at the Fort Custer Training Center in Michigan. He studied military government and graduated second in his class of 111 students. In 1943, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the XV Corps of General George Patton's Third Army as a courier in the military police. Cooper served in France, Luxembourg, and Germany. After liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp, Patton ordered the entire population of the nearby city of Weimar to go through it and observe the conditions; Cooper also viewed the camp at that time.

Following the cessation of hostilities, Cooper served as a legal advisor for the 300,000 displaced persons in his unit's occupation zone seeking repatriation after being brought to Germany as slaves by the Nazis. Under the terms of the agreement reached at the Yalta Conference, all displaced Russian nationals were to be returned to the Soviet Union, but Soviet negotiators decided that the agreement did not apply to non-Russian spouses and children of the nationals. Cooper brought this to the attention of General Patton, who rescinded the repatriation order in the Third Army's occupation zone. Cooper received a citation from the Third Army's military government section for his action. Cooper also oversaw the reorganization of the 239 courts in the German state of Bavaria in an attempt to replace all the Nazi officials, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. Among the judges installed by Cooper were Wilhelm Hoegner, future Minister-President of Bavaria, and Ludwig Erhard, the future Chancellor of Germany.

In 1943 or 1944, while he was still in the Army, Cooper married a nurse named Evelyn Pfaff. Cooper was elected without opposition as circuit judge of Kentucky's twenty-eighth judicial district in 1945, despite still being in Germany and not campaigning for the office. He was discharged from the Army with the rank of captain in February 1946 and returned to Kentucky to assume the judgeship.

First term in the Senate and early diplomatic career

Cooper's judicial district included his native Pulaski County, as well as Rockcastle, Wayne and Clinton counties. During his tenure, blacks were allowed to serve on trial juries in the district for the first time. Of the first 16 opinions he issued during his time on the bench, 15 were upheld by the Kentucky Court of Appeals, Kentucky's court of last resort at the time.

Cooper resigned his judgeship in November 1946 to seek the U.S. Senate seat vacated when A. B. "Happy" Chandler resigned to accept the position of Commissioner of Baseball. Cooper's opponent, former Congressman and Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives John Y. Brown Sr., was better known and widely believed to be the favorite in the race. However, Brown had alienated Chandler's supporters in the Democratic Party during a hotly contested senatorial primary between Brown and Chandler in 1942, and this group worked against his election in 1946. Further, the Louisville Courier-Journal opposed Brown because of his attacks on former Senator J. C. W. Beckham and Judge Robert Worth Bingham, who were heads of a powerful political machine in Louisville. With these two factors working against Brown, Cooper won the election to fill Chandler's unexpired term by 41,823 votes, the largest victory margin by any Republican for any office in Kentucky up to that time. His victory marked only the third time in Kentucky's history that a Republican had been popularly elected to the Senate. The move to Washington, D.C. proved to be too much for Cooper's already strained marriage. In 1947, he filed for divorce, charging abandonment.

Cooper described himself as "a truly terrible public speaker" and rarely made addresses from the Senate floor. He was known as an independent Republican during his career in the Senate. In the first roll-call vote of his career, he opposed transferring investigatory powers to Republican Owen Brewster's special War Investigating Committee. His second vote, directing that proceeds from the sale of war surplus materiel be used to pay off war debts, also went against the majority of the Republican caucus, prompting Ohio Republican Robert A. Taft to ask him "Are you a Republican or a Democrat? When are you going to start voting with us?" Cooper responded, "If you'll pardon me, I was sent here to represent my constituents, and I intend to vote as I think best."

A few days after being sworn in, Cooper co-sponsored his first piece of legislation, a bill to provide federal aid for education. The bill passed the Senate, but not the House. Cooper was made chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Roads, and helped draft a bill authorizing $900 million in federal funds to states for highway construction. In 1948, he sponsored a bill to provide price support for burley tobacco at 90 percent of parity. He insisted on an amendment to the War Claims Act of 1948 that benefits to veterans injured as prisoners of war of the Germans and Japanese during World War II be paid immediately using enemy assets. He also co-sponsored legislation allowing hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the Nazis to enter the United States legally. He opposed bans on industrywide collective bargaining for organized labor and on the establishment of closed shops. He voted against putting union welfare funds under government control, but helped to pass an amendment forbidding compulsory union membership for workers.

Second term in Senate

Cooper's supporters believed he would again seek the governorship of Kentucky or be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in the early 1950s; some even formed a committee to elect Cooper president. Cooper considered running for governor in 1951, but when Chapman was killed in an automobile accident on March 8, 1951, he decided to make another run for the Senate against Thomas R. Underwood, Governor Lawrence Wetherby's appointee to fill the vacancy. Underwood was considered a heavy favorite in the race. Some Republicans faulted Cooper for taking an appointment from Democrat Truman. Both the Louisville Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal recanted their statements in 1950 for Cooper to seek election to the Senate in 1954. They now feared that the election of a Republican would allow that party to organize the Senate, giving key committee chairmanships to isolationists opposed to continued US involvement in the Korean War. Nevertheless, Cooper defeated Underwood by 28,924 votes in the election and served out the remainder of Chapman's term. His victory marked the first time in Kentucky's history that a Republican had been elected to the Senate more than once.

Cooper was named to the Senate Committee on Labor, Education and Public Welfare and chaired its education and labor subcommittees. He sponsored a bill authorizing public works projects along the Big Sandy River, including the Tug and Levisa forks. He also supported the reconstruction of the locks and dams along the Ohio River and the construction of locks, dams, and reservoirs in the Green River Valley. He opposed the Dixon-Yates contract, which would have paid a private company to construct a new power station to generate power for the city of Memphis, Tennessee, calling instead for authorization for the Tennessee Valley Authority to issue bonds to finance the construction of new power stations. He supported a comprehensive program benefiting the coal industry and cosponsored a bill to extending public library services to rural areas.

Cooper continued to be an independent voice in the Senate. During the Red Scare, he was critical of attempts to permit illegal wiretap evidence in federal courts and attempts to reduce the protections against self-incrimination granted by the Fifth Amendment. Nevertheless, he refused to strip Joseph McCarthy, the leading figure in the Red Scare, of his major Senate committee chairmanships, cautioning that "many of those who bitterly oppose Senator McCarthy call for the same tactics that they charge him with." He was the only Republican to oppose the Bricker Amendment, which would have limited the president's treaty-making power. He concluded that the issues addressed by the amendment were not sufficient to warrant a change to the Constitution. He also opposed the Submerged Lands Act and the Mexican Farm Labor bill, both of which were supported by the Eisenhower administration. He denounced Eisenhower's appointment of Albert M. Cole, an open opponent of public housing, as Federal Housing Administrator and opposed many of the agricultural reforms proposed by Eisenhower's Agriculture Secretary, Ezra Taft Benson. Again, his independence did little to diminish his stature in the party. In 1954, he was named to the Senate Republican Policy Committee.

Ambassador to India

In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower nominated Cooper as U.S. Ambassador to India and Nepal. During his time as a delegate for the United Nations, Cooper had met Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and established a cordial working relationship with the Indian delegation, including Nehru's sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The Indians had been impressed with Cooper and the Indian government had expressed their desire that Cooper serve as their ambassador from the U.S. Cooper initially rejected the position offered by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles but was convinced to accept it by a personal request from President Eisenhower.

India had only become an independent nation in 1947, and it was considered a bulwark against Communism in Asia. U.S.–India relations were strained, however, because of India's recognition of Communist China, its opposition to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and its resistance to foreign interference in Indochina. U.S. News & World Report described the ambassadorship as "one of the most difficult and delicate in all the diplomatic world".

Cooper married Lorraine Rowan Shevlin on March 17, 1955, in Pasadena, California, just ten days before leaving for India. Twice divorced, Shevlin was the daughter of Robert A. Rowan (a wealthy California real estate developer whose projects included the Hotel Alexandria and the Security Building), step-daughter of Vatican official Prince Domenico Orsini, and a well-known socialite. She was fluent in three languages and understood Russian. The two had dated for much of the 1950s, but Cooper was hesitant to marry because he had doubts about moving into Shevlin's elaborate Georgetown home. (While in Washington, the unmarried Cooper permanently resided in the Dodge House Hotel.) The move to India removed this barrier, and Secretary Dulles encouraged Cooper to marry her before leaving so that the embassy in New Delhi might have a proper hostess. On April 4, 1955, the couple stopped in England on their way to India to visit with Louis Mountbatten, the last Governor-General of India. Their discussions about the situation of the Indian situation were part of the scant preparation Cooper received before arriving there.

Cooper began his service as ambassador by developing a close friendship with Prime Minister Nehru. Nehru's respect and admiration for Cooper soon became widely known. Cooper labored to help officials in Washington, D.C. understand that India's reluctance to align with either the West or the Communists in China and the Soviet Union was their way of exercising their newly won independence. At the same time, he defended the U.S. military buildup after World War II, its involvement in the Korean War, and its membership in mutual security pacts like NATO and SEATO as self-defense measures, not aggressive actions by the U.S. government, as the Indians widely perceived them. Cooper condemned the Eisenhower administration's decision to sell weapons to Pakistan, which was resented by the Indians, but also felt that the Indian government took some political positions without regard to their moral implications. By late 1955, the Chicago Daily News reported that Indo-American relations had "improved to a degree not thought possible six months ago".

Later service in the Senate

Senator Barkley died in office on April 30, 1956. Republican leaders encouraged Cooper to return from India and seek the seat, but Cooper was reluctant to give up his ambassadorship. After a personal appeal from President Eisenhower, however, Cooper acquiesced and declared his candidacy in July 1956. Even after leaving India, he maintained close ties with the country's leaders and was the official U.S. representative at the funerals of Prime Minister Nehru in 1964, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.

Because Barkley's death occurred after the filing deadline for the November elections, the Democratic State Central Committee had to choose a nominee for the now-open seat. After unsuccessfully attempting to find a compromise candidate that both the Clements and Chandler factions could support, they chose Lawrence Wetherby, whose term as governor had recently expired. Chandler, now serving his second term as governor, was angered by the choice of Wetherby, and most members of his faction either gave Wetherby lukewarm support or outright supported Cooper instead. This, combined with Cooper's personal popularity, led to his victory over Wetherby by 65,365 votes.

Upon his return to the Senate in 1957, Cooper was assigned to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1959, he challenged Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen to become the Republican floor leader in the Senate, but lost by four votes. In a 1960 poll of fifty journalists conducted by Newsweek magazine, Cooper was named the ablest Republican member of the Senate. He helped author and co-sponsored the National Defense Education Act. Together with Senator Jennings Randolph, he sponsored the Appalachian Regional Development Act, designed to address the prevalent poverty in Appalachia. He succeeded in gaining more state and local control over the anti-poverty group Volunteers in Service to America. He was a vigorous opponent of measures designed to weaken the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In 1960, Democrats nominated former governor Keen Johnson, then an executive with Reynolds Metals, to oppose Cooper's re-election bid. Cooper had the support of organized labor and benefitted from a large segment of Kentuckians who voted for Republican Richard M. Nixon over Democrat John F. Kennedy as a reaction against Kennedy's Catholicism in the 1960 presidential election. Cooper ultimately defeated Johnson by 199,257 votes, a record victory margin for a Kentucky senatorial candidate.

Opposition to the Vietnam War and last years in the Senate

Although Cooper voted in favor of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, he opposed escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As early as April 1964, Cooper was urging President Johnson to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the tensions in Southeast Asia. He questioned Southeast Asia's strategic importance to the U.S. and expressed concerns about the feasibility of deploying the U.S. military on a global scale. On March 25, 1965, he joined New York Senator Jacob Javits in a call for President Johnson to begin negotiations for a settlement between North Vietnam and South Vietnam without imposing preconditions on the negotiations. Later in the day, he introduced resolutions calling for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to brief the full Senate on recent developments in Vietnam.

In January 1966, Cooper accompanied Secretary of State Rusk and Ambassador W. Averell Harriman on an official visit to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos as part of a widely publicized "peace drive". This visit, along with visits to South Vietnam in December 1965 and January 1966, reinforced Cooper's opposition to military operations in Southeast Asia. In a meeting with President Johnson on January 26, 1966, he again urged the president to forgo his announced intentions to resume bombing missions in North Vietnam and negotiate a settlement instead. Johnson was noncommittal, and that afternoon, Cooper returned to the Senate floor, urgently trying to convince the legislators that negotiation was preferable to escalation, even when it meant negotiating with the Viet Cong fighters in South Vietnam, which he believed was necessary to achieve peace. Cooper advocated a three-to-five-year cease fire, enforced by the United Nations, followed by national elections as prescribed by the 1954 Geneva Convention. Ultimately, Johnson did not heed Cooper's plea and resumed U.S. bombing missions in North Vietnam.

In 1966, Cooper again won re-election over John Y. Brown Sr., by 217,726 votes, breaking his own record of largest victory margin for a Kentucky senatorial candidate, and carrying the vote of 110 of Kentucky's 120 counties. In the lead-up to the 1968 Republican presidential primary, he endorsed New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, saying that Americans would only support a candidate who took a clear position on Vietnam. Rockefeller had laid out a plan for reversing the Americanization of the war, while other Republican candidates tried to remain non-specific about how they would handle it. As Rockefeller's candidacy faded, Cooper encouraged his colleague, Kentucky Senator Thruston B. Morton, to seek the presidency, but Morton declined. The Republican nomination – and the presidency – went to Richard Nixon.

Later life

After the expiration of his term, Cooper took over the "Dean Acheson chair" at the prestigious Washington law firm of Covington & Burling. In 1972, he was chosen as the commencement speaker at Centre College, where he had served as a trustee since 1961. At the ceremony, he became the first recipient of the Isaac Shelby Award, named for two-time Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby, the chair of the college's first board of trustees. In 1973, Cooper resisted an attempt to name a federal building in his honor. Upon the completion of the dam that formed Laurel River Lake in 1977, Congress proposed naming the dam and lake after Cooper, but again, he declined. He was pleased, however, that the Somerset school system chose to name a program to teach and reinforce leadership skills the John Sherman Cooper Leadership Institute.

In April 1974, Nixon announced that he would appoint Cooper to be the US Ambassador to East Germany, but during the final negotiations between the countries for the US to establish an embassy in the country, Nixon resigned. His successor, Gerald Ford, officially appointed Cooper to the ambassadorship, and Cooper took leave from Covington & Burling to accept it. He arrived in East Germany in December 1974 and served as ambassador until October 1976. After returning to the US, he resumed his work at Covington & Burling. In his last act of public service, he again served as an alternate delegate to the UN General Assembly in 1981.

Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown Jr., the son of Cooper's former opponent in the senatorial elections of 1946 and 1966, awarded Cooper the Governor's Distinguished Service Medallion in 1983. Later that year, Senators Walter Huddleston of Kentucky and Howard Baker of Tennessee introduced a bill to honor Cooper by renaming the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area to the Cooper National Recreation Area; Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers sponsored a parallel measure in the House. As a senator, Cooper had been instrumental in securing congressional approval for the creation of Big South Fork. Opponents of the measure in both Kentucky and Tennessee (the recreation area spans the two states) cited a variety of reasons to retain the old name, and the proposal was eventually dropped at Cooper's request.

In 1985, Cooper became the third-ever recipient of the Oxford Cup, an award recognizing outstanding past members of Beta Theta Pi. Also in 1985, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Cumberland College (now the University of the Cumberlands) in Williamsburg, Kentucky. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Centre College in 1987. A non-partisan group co-chaired by former Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy raised $60,000 to commission two sculptures of Cooper. A life-sized bronze bust of Cooper sculpted by John Tuska was installed at the Kentucky State Capitol in 1987. The other sculpture, a life-sized bronze statue crafted by Barney Bright, was placed in Fountain Square in Somerset.

Death and legacy

On February 21, 1991, Cooper died of heart failure in a retirement home in Washington. He had been preceded in death by his second wife, Lorraine Arnold Rowan, on February 3, 1985. On February 26, 1991, Kentucky's two senators, Wendell H. Ford and Mitch McConnell, gave speeches on the Senate floor praising Cooper, and the Senate adjourned in Cooper's memory. Cooper was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Because of his extensive support of rural electrification as a senator, the East Kentucky RECC was renamed the John Sherman Cooper Power Station in his honor. In 1999, the Lexington Herald-Leader named Cooper one of the most influential Kentuckians of the 20th century. In 2000, Eastern Kentucky University's Center for Kentucky History and Politics established the annual John Sherman Cooper Award for Outstanding Public Service in Kentucky.

Despite his patrician background, Cooper was known for being "affable, frequently self-deprecating and approachable."