John Sherman Cooper was an American politician, jurist, and diplomat from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He served three non-consecutive, partial terms in the United States Senate before being elected to two full terms in 1960 and 1966. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to India from 1955 to 1956 and Ambassador to East Germany from 1974 to 1976. He was the first Republican to be popularly elected to more than one term as a senator from Kentucky. Cooper died of cancer at the age of 83 in February 1991.
About John Sherman Cooper in brief
John Sherman Cooper was an American politician, jurist, and diplomat from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He served three non-consecutive, partial terms in the United States Senate before being elected to two full terms in 1960 and 1966. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to India from 1955 to 1956 and Ambassador to East Germany from 1974 to 1976. He was the first Republican to be popularly elected to more than one term as a senator from Kentucky. Cooper died in a Washington, D. C., retirement home on February 21, 1991, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The Cooper family had been prominent in the Somerset area since 1790, when brothers Malachi and Edward Cooper migrated from South Carolina along the Wilderness Trail and the Cumberland Gap. His father’s parents were anti-slavery Baptists active in the nineteenth century, and the elder John Sherman was named after the Apostle John Tecumseh, a hero of the Civil War. During his youth, his father was serving as collector of internal revenue in Kentucky’s 8th congressional district, a position he had been appointed to by President Theodore Roosevelt. The family was very active in local politics; two of Cooper’s ancestors, including his father, were elected county judges in Pulaski County, Kentucky. At the time of his birth, John Sherman Cooper’s father was known as the wealthiest man in Somerset and was known for his business ventures and was a well-known philanthropist. He died of cancer at the age of 83 in February 1991, but his family is still proud of his contributions to the state of Kentucky and to the country as a whole.
He is survived by his wife, the former Helen Gertrude Cooper, and a daughter, the current First Lady of the State of Kentucky, Mary Jo Cooper, who was a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1927 to 1929 and served as a county judge from 1929 to 1939. Cooper served in the U. S. Army during World War II and earned the Bronze Star Medal for reorganizing the Bavarian judicial system after the allied victory in Europe. He returned home to accept the judgeship, which he held for less than a year before resigning to seek election to A. B. Chandler’s vacated seat in the Senate. He won the seat by 41,823 votes, the largest victory margin by any Republican for any office in Kentucky up to that time. In 1960, Cooper was re-elected, securing his first full, six-year term in the senate. Cooper gained the confidence of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and dramatically improved relations between the recently independent state of India, helping rebuff Soviet hopes of expanding communism in Asia. After Cooper’s re-election in 1966, he worked with Idaho Democrat Frank Church on a series of amendments designed to de-fund further U. s. military operations in the region. He did not seek re- election in 1972. Cooper was appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
You want to know more about John Sherman Cooper?
This page is based on the article John Sherman Cooper published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
