[Addison Mitchell McConnell III] was born on February 20, 1942, to Julia Odene "Dean" (Shockley; 1919–1993) and Addison Mitchell "A.M." McConnell II (1917–1990). McConnell was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and grew up in nearby Athens, Alabama, where his grandfather, Robert Hayes McConnell Sr. and his great uncle Addison Mitchell McConnell, owned McConnell Funeral Home. He is of Scots-Irish and English descent. One of his ancestors fought on the American side in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1944, at the age of two, McConnell's upper left leg was paralyzed by a polio attack. He received treatment at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. The treatment potentially saved him from being disabled for the rest of his life. McConnell said his family "almost went broke" because of costs related to his illness.
In 1950, when he was eight, McConnell [and his family] moved … from Athens to Augusta, Georgia, where his father, who was in the Army, was stationed at Fort Gordon.
In 1956, his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he attended duPont Manual High School (Wikipedia 2).
… As a junior at Louisville’s Manual High School, McConnell decided to run for student-body president. The hitch, as he confessed to his mother earlier in high school, was that “I don’t have even one friend.” As he recounted in his 2016 memoir, The Long Game, McConnell set out to make his lack of popularity irrelevant — by manipulating those who had it.
“Just like Kentucky candidates today seek the endorsement of the Louisville Courier-Journal,” he wrote, “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” (Moser 5).
[He crammed into the lockers of underclassmen and unpopular students endorsements he had received from popular classmates]
… McConnell tried and failed a couple of times in his early [election] races. But he finally became the vice president of the student council. … (Stein 2).
… “having had my first taste of the responsibility and respect that came with holding elected office,” he wrote, “I was hooked” (Mosar 5).”
He graduated Omicron Delta Kappa from the University of Louisville with a B.A. in political science in 1964 with honors. He was president of the Student Council of the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity (Wikipedia 3).
McConnell recognized his future in politics by high school and narrowed his ambitions to the upper chamber by the time he graduated from college; on his law-school applications, according to his authorized biographer, John David Dyche, one of his professors wrote that McConnell ‘‘will be a U.S. Senator.” “I was running for the Senate in ’84 from the moment I was sworn in as county judge on Jan. 1, 1978,” McConnell once said — and he has never aspired to anything outside it. “I think most senators look in the mirror and think they hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in the background,” Terry Carmack, who has worked for McConnell on and off since his first Senate campaign, told me. “But he always wanted to be in the Senate.” And from early in his Senate career, McConnell later wrote, “I wanted to one day hold a leadership position in my party, helping to call the plays and not just run them” (Homans 6).
[While attending law school] McConnell attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. In 1964, at the age of 22, he attended civil rights rallies, and interned with Senator John Sherman Cooper. He has said his time with Cooper inspired him to run for the Senate later in life (Wikipedia 3).
Mr. McConnell’s interest in race issues was inspired by his upbringing in Kentucky by parents who opposed segregation. It was fermented on the campus of the University of Louisville, where he encouraged students to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was reinforced by his internship in the office of Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican who helped break the Southern-led filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
…
“I was born in North Alabama, and when I was a little kid, I remember segregated movie theaters, segregated drinking fountains, segregated schools,” he said. “We had a day off for Robert E. Lee’s birthday, along with Lincoln’s. The Civil War was omnipresent.”
During college, he served as an intern in Washington and attended Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — “You could see a massive throng of humanity down to the memorial” — and wrote a college editorial excoriating opponents of civil rights. He worked … [for Senator] Cooper, opening mail, much of which was from constituents unhappy with the senator’s support for the Civil Rights Act.
Mr. McConnell, 73, recalled, as he often does, asking Mr. Cooper how he could handle the overwhelming pressure. His boss told him, “There are times when you are supposed to lead, and other times to reflect the views of your state, and I think it is time to lead,” he said. “That was pretty inspirational to a young guy just going to law school.”
These experiences combined to have a profound and lasting impact, Mr. McConnell and others said. “Mitch doesn’t reveal a lot,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a contemporary of Mr. McConnell. “But we have had discussions about our parallel experiences. You couldn’t be a student in the late ’50s and ’60s without racial injustice staring you in the face.”
Mr. McConnell spoke recently at the John Sherman Cooper Lecture Series, held at Somerset Community College in Kentucky. “He was my hero,” Mr. McConnell said of Mr. Cooper, who died in 1991. “In all my years of public life, there’s been no one from whom I’ve learned more” (Steinhauer 2).
McConnell was a 25-year-old University of Kentucky law student with political aspirations in spring 1967, during the Vietnam War. As his graduation neared, making him eligible for the draft, McConnell secured a coveted post in the U.S. Army Reserve, which President Lyndon Johnson kept out of combat for most of his administration. McConnell enlisted March 21, 1967, and then returned to UK to finish law school. Private McConnell spent little time in uniform. He won a discharge from the Reserve after five weeks of active duty. He trained at Fort Knox from July 9 to Aug. 15, 1967. McConnell's discharge came five days after U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., for whom he had worked as an intern, sent a letter to the two-star general in command of Fort Knox.
Cooper told Maj. Gen. A.D. Surles that McConnell expected to be released on a medical discharge because of optic neuritis, a painful eye condition that is treated by steroids. The man's papers seemed to be stalled somewhere on base and needed to be forwarded, Cooper wrote. "Mitchell anxious to clear post in order to enroll NYU," the senator told the general on Aug. 10, 1967. "Please advise when final action can be expected." Actually, McConnell never attended New York University. After his discharge, he did a short stint at a local law firm, and then returned to Washington to join the office of Sen. Marlow Cook, R-Ky., where he worked for the next few years. In a 2006 interview with the Herald-Leader, McConnell denied that anyone pulled strings for him in 1967. "No one helped me get into the Reserve, no one helped me get out of the Reserve," McConnell said. McConnell said he was entitled to a medical discharge for his eye problems. His father asked the senator — a family friend — to expedite the discharge, but he eventually would have been granted an early release anyway, McConnell said (Cheves 1).
From 1968 to 1970, McConnell worked as chief legislative assistant to Senator Marlow Cook in Washington, D.C., managing a legislative department consisting of five members as well as assisting with speech writing and constituent services.
In 1971, McConnell returned to Louisville, where he worked for Tom Emberton's candidacy for Governor of Kentucky, which was unsuccessful. McConnell attempted to run for a seat in the state legislature but was disqualified because he did not meet the residency requirements for the office. He then went to work for a Louisville law firm, Segal, Isenberg, Sales and Stewart, for a few years. During the same time period, he taught a night class on political science at the University of Louisville.
In October 1974, McConnell returned to Washington to fill a position as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under President Gerald Ford, where he worked alongside Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman, and Antonin Scalia.
In 1977, McConnell was elected the Jefferson County judge/executive, the top political office in Jefferson County, Kentucky, at the time, defeating incumbent Democrat Todd Hollenbach, III, 53% to 47%. He was re-elected in 1981 against Jefferson County Commissioner Jim "Pop" Malone, 51% to 47%, outspending Malone 3–1, and occupied this office until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984 (Wikipedia 4).
“Even as you saw him as a moderate/liberal Republican earlier on [biographer Alec MacGillis recalled], you saw these glimmers of expediency earlier — you can still see that the overriding desire was to win, and to an extent that's unusually strong even compared to other politicians.
“In a way, you could say it even goes back to his high school campaigning years. He was one of those kids always running for office — high school, college — just always running for student government. Doing whatever he had to do to win those races and just taking it all way too seriously.
…
“… at the University of Louisville, he lost a lot. He lost his races in succession for freshman class president, president of the student senate, and president of the student council. He lost all three and took them pretty hard and decided it was so painful he'd never lose ever again. Finally, junior year he wins presidency of the student council.
“He's just running all the time. And when he gets to doing his first real elections — running for county government in Louisville — the expediency comes in two ways. One, he's just incredibly malleable. That's the thing his political consultants marveled at when I talked to them. In ’76, they were amazed by how he was so physically unskilled — totally lacking of natural charisma and natural political skills — but also very aware of that fact and so utterly willing to let them tell him what to do.
“Shooting ads with him was relatively easy. Because as unskilled and hapless as he was, he completely submitted to their instructions far more than most candidates were willing to do.
“As he was leaving his previous job with the Department of Justice in the Ford administration in Washington, he saw that the school busing fight was starting to brew back in Louisville. There had been a big busing fight there in the mid-’70s, and McConnell fires off his resignation to Ford saying, ‘Thanks for having me; I'm going home to Louisville.’ He then threw in a gratuitous paragraph saying, ‘Hey, please, take more notice of how concerned people are about school busing and appoint Supreme Court justices who will be more skeptical of the school busing and integration push.’ It was so clear he was doing this to leave a paper trail he could point to when he was running for office later.
…
“It was an especially crippling drawback for him given that he was running in the upper South, which has a long tradition of charismatic, wisecracking, folksy politicians. That's even more expected there than it is elsewhere in the country, and he completely lacked that ability. As one of his Kentucky pals said to me, ‘He doesn't have the personality to wash a shotgun with.’
“He was very aware of this fact and compensated for it mainly by raising tons of money. His great epiphany early on was that he could overcome this deficiency by raising gobs and gobs of money, and then using that money to [run] ads that would simply tear down the opponent.
“That became his message, over and over. His own popularity was always middling; people were always ambivalent about him because of his lack of natural charm and constituency; he'd just tear down the other guy, so he'd be left standing as the fallback alternative. In his first run for Senate, he worked with Roger Ailes, who came up with this legendary and notorious ad going after the Democrat with the hound dogs for the [Senator’s] missed votes.
“So a lot of it was the money. But the other part was being incredibly willing to stake out positions to help you win that one election — and then abandoning them to a degree most politicians would find shameless.
“In ’76, running for his first job as county executive, he came out in favor of collective bargaining for public employee unions and won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO in Louisville, and Kentucky was a strong union state. He also won the endorsement of the Courier-Journal, a very influential newspaper. He did that by taking a bunch of center-left positions, including campaign finance reform.
“In the years since, he's admitted — openly! — that he took both of those positions for political expediency. That they were completely expedient and taken at the time to gain the support of these influential constituencies in Louisville” (Stein 3-5).
For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies. Unlike Trump, however, McConnell, 77, has always been laser-focused on politics. At age 22, when he interned for Sen. John Sherman Cooper, a genteel Republican of an era long gone, McConnell determined to not only follow his mentor’s path but to surpass him and become Senate majority leader. “It dawned on me early — let’s put it that way,” he told Jonathan Martin of The New York Times. Most senators dream of the White House; all McConnell ever wanted was that gavel, that particular form of power.
…
As an undergraduate at the University of Louisville, and a law student at the University of Kentucky, McConnell would further hone his skills in winning student-body presidencies. In the 1960s, he worked as an intern to Kentucky Rep. Gene Snyder, a hardcore segregationist. But McConnell’s brand of Republicanism — he’d chosen the party because his father fought under Dwight Eisenhower in World War II — was more moderate. Young Mitch was gung-ho for civil rights. In 1963, while an undergraduate, McConnell spoke at a university rally, urging students to join Martin Luther King Jr. in marching to the state capitol. That same year, he wrote an op-ed urging Republicans to eschew the “constitutional” arguments that Barry Goldwater and other conservatives cited as reasons to oppose the Civil Rights Act. “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to conditions of contemporary society,” McConnell wrote. Any “strict interpretation” of the founding document was “inherently evil” if it meant that “basic rights are denied to any group.”
In his first bid for office, in 1977, McConnell challenged the Democratic incumbent for Jefferson County judge executive — basically, the official in charge of Greater Louisville’s government. He courted women’s groups by supporting abortion rights, and promised unions that he’d press for collective-bargaining rights for public workers. But for the first time, he also showed how willing he would be to cast aside principles. “Forced busing” had recently been imposed by the courts to desegregate Louisville’s public schools, and McConnell ran in opposition to it; the former civil-rights champion was now pandering to white voters’ anxieties and resentments.
In that first race, he also gave a glimpse of the kinds of campaign tactics he’d use for the next 40 years. McConnell was never much good when it came to mixing with folks on the campaign trail, but he had no compunction about asking big donors for money. They were the popular kids he’d now be using for his own ends. Raising $355,000 for the race, well beyond any amount ever spent in Jefferson County, he hired a top ad maker and pollster. With their help, McConnell zeroed in on the vulnerabilities of his opponent, Todd Hollenbach. He blew up some minor ethical lapses into darkly ominous controversies. And because Hollenbach was going through a divorce, McConnell’s ads were full of smiling family images of the Republican newcomer, his wife, and his daughters. (McConnell’s first wife, who went on to become a noted feminist scholar, divorced him in 1980.) Decades later, Hollenbach was still fuming about McConnell’s tactics, bitterly telling The New York Times Magazine, “He’s whatever he needs to be for the occasion.”
But it worked. McConnell won by six percentage points, and then proceeded to forget about his pro-labor promises once in office. “He burned them and never looked back,” says Mike Broihier, a former newspaper editor who’s running a grassroots Democratic campaign to challenge McConnell in 2020. “That’s the guy.”
It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections” (Moser 5-10).
Works cited:
Cheves, John. “McConnell Opens Military Record.” Lexington Herald Leader, October 23, 2008. Net. https://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article43980846.html
Homans, Charles. “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?” New York Times, January 22, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/magazine/mcconnell-senate-trump.html
“Mitch McConnell.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_McConnell
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mitch-mcconnell-man-who-sold-america-880799/
Stein, Jeff. “Mitch McConnell’s Entire Career Has Been about Gaining Power. What Happens Now That He Has It?” Vox, January 2, 2017. Net. https://www.vox.com/2017/1/2/14123496/mitch-mcconnell-motives
Steinhauer, Jennifer. “Mitch McConnell’s Commitment to Civil Rights Sets Him Apart.” New York Times, July 10, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-republicans-civil-rights.html
No comments:
Post a Comment