John Sherman Cooper: Private at 41, Warren Report Skeptic, Cooper-Church

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John Sherman Cooper was born in 1901 in Somerset, Kentucky, to the town's wealthiest family, captained the Yale basketball team, joined Skull and Bones and went on to Harvard Law. In 1924 his father died and the fortune proved gone, so he left Harvard, passed the bar on his own, and spent 20 years paying family debts and his six siblings' college costs. As Pulaski County judge during the Depression he paid rent for poor families to spare them eviction, earning the name poor man's judge. In 1942, at 41, he turned down an officer's commission to enlist as a private, rose to captain in George Patton's Third Army, persuaded Patton to rescind forced repatriation of Soviet nationals' families, and vetted 239 new judges for Bavaria's courts.

Elected to the Senate in 1946, he voted with his party only 51 percent of the time in his first term, and he condemned Joseph McCarthy's methods while refusing to strip his chairmanships. After losing in 1954 to Alben Barkley, he served as Dwight Eisenhower's ambassador to India, befriending Jawaharlal Nehru and pressing John Foster Dulles for aid. On the Warren Commission he rejected the single bullet theory and told Jacqueline Kennedy he did not accept the official conclusion. With Frank Church he wrote the Cooper-Church amendments to cut funding for U.S. ground operations in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, and he opposed anti-ballistic missile deployment before retiring in 1973.

• Kentucky voters elected him a circuit judge while he was still in Europe and not campaigning.
• Republican leader Robert Taft demanded to know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat.
• He married socialite Lorraine Rowan Shevlin just before taking the India post.
• Gerald Ford named him the first U.S. ambassador to East Germany.
• He fought legislation to name a dam and recreation area after him and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.