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John Sherman Cooper

John Sherman Cooper (August 23, 1901 – February 21, 1991) was a liberal Republican United States Senator from Kentucky who served a total of twenty years (1946-1949, 1952-1955, 1956-1973). He was a captain in the United States Army, and served as a member of the Warren Commission, and as U.S. ambassador to India and Germany.

John Sherman Cooper was born in Somerset, Pulaski County, Kentucky. After a year at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Cooper transferred to Yale, where he was captain of the basketball team, and a member of Skull & Bones; in 1923 he was voted "most likely to succeed".

He went on to Harvard Law School, but had to withdraw in 1925 after learning from his dying father that the recession of 1920 had virtually wiped out the family's resources. Assuming his father's debts, Cooper sold the family mansion. Over the next twenty-five years he paid off the debts and sent six brothers and sisters to college. He passed the state bar examination and was admitted to law practice in 1928.

Cooper won his first elective office in 1927, a two-year term in the Kentucky legislature. From 1930 to 1938 he served as county judge, a powerful local administrative post that controlled county patronage.

Cooper was elected three times to fill unexpired terms in the United States Senate. The first time was in 1946, after A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a former and future Kentucky governor, resigned to become Commissioner of Baseball. Cooper failed to win re-election in the 1948 general election, but in 1952 he was elected to fill the unexpired term of Virgil Chapman, the man who had defeated him in the 1948 election.

Considered a liberal Republican, Cooper was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to denounce Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin for the tactics of McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign. At a time when it was unpopular to do so, Cooper also opposed legislation to remove from reluctant witnesses the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.

In the next general election (1954) Cooper was defeated by Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat who had been Vice President under Harry S. Truman — but Barkley subsequently died, and Cooper was elected to fill his unexpired term in 1956. This time Cooper finally succeeded in winning re-election to a full term, in the election of 1960; he won election to his final term in the Senate in 1966.

Refusing to follow the Republican Party's non-support for civil rights, Cooper voted for many pieces of civil rights legislation, including the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cooper became a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, and in 1970 he joined with Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho in drafting the Cooper-Church Amendment, which was aimed at barring further United States military action in Cambodia. Cooper's service in the Senate continued until his retirement in 1973.

Cooper's brief first stint in the Senate won him friends, among them Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican Senate leader, and President Harry S. Truman. In 1949 Truman made Cooper a delegate to the United Nations; in subsequent years Cooper served in other missions to the United Nations, and as a special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Cooper was one of the members of the Warren Commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was later quoted as saying: "Now, people have said that somebody told them that they saw somebody on the railroad bank or saw somebody going over the bank, but no one has ever been able to show any cartridges, any rifle, any pistol, no one has ever found anything other than the evidence about Oswald."

Today, there is a statue honoring Cooper at the Fountain Square in Somerset, Kentucky; in addition, the John Sherman Cooper Power Plant supplies most of the county's power.

• Find-A-Grave profile for John S. Cooper
• "John Sherman Cooper: A Unique Senator" (Senate February 26, 1991)

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