John Cooper; Ex-Senator Was a GOP Liberal
John Sherman Cooper, a highly respected, liberal Republican leader who served both Kentucky and his country as a U.S. senator and diplomat, has died.
Cooper was 89 when he died Thursday in a Washington retirement home.
The two-decade Senate veteran, whose career was marked by “integrity and decency,” in the words of one editorial writer, was active in civil rights legislation and helped write the Cooper-Church Amendment designed to force the country to define its role in the Vietnam War.
Cooper left the Senate in 1973 after a political career that began as a judge in Kentucky in 1930. He served full or partial terms in the Senate from 1947 to 1948, 1952 to 1955 and from 1957 to 1973.
Cooper was one of the first to repudiate Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s, and by 1960 had compiled such a record that he was selected by Washington journalists as the outstanding Republican in the Senate.
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