THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 59
to look like other kids once the doctors
finally allowed him to walk. He emerged
unimpaired, other than having a weak
left leg. He credits the experience, and
his mother’s determination, with giving
him the focus and drive that have pro-
pelled him throughout his career. Beat-
ing polio, he writes, was the first in a
lifetime pursuit of hard-fought “wins.”
In recent weeks, as McConnell has con-
tended with the coronavirus challenge,
he has said that it brings back “this eerie
feeling” of “fear that every mother had”
during a polio epidemic.
An only child, McConnell remained
close to his mother, who shared his flinty
personality. He also remained devoted
to the idea that grit and preparation could
beat even the longest odds. He keeps on
his office wall a framed copy of a quo-
tation often attributed to Calvin Coolidge,
which begins, “Nothing in the world can
take the place of Persistence.” (Some
people who knew of this found it ironic
when, in 2017, in the Senate, he criticized
Elizabeth Warren for refusing to yield
the floor, complaining, “She persisted.”)
In his book, McConnell recounts a
day when his father ordered him to cross
the street and beat up an older boy who
had been pushing him around. McCon-
nell protested that the boy was bigger,
but his father said, “It’s time you showed
him who’s boss.” Fearing his father more
than the bully, McConnell went over
and sucker-punched his neighbor. Mc-
Connell writes that the lesson taught
him the importance of “standing up for
myself, knowing there’s a point beyond
which I can’t be pushed, and being
tough.” He admits that he’s been criti-
cized for his toughness, but adds that
“it’s almost always worked.”
McConnell’s first ambition was to
be a baseball player. He was a good Lit-
tle League pitcher, but by middle school
his physical limitations ended his hopes.
According to people who know him,
his box-score approach to politics—“Our
team against their team,” as one put it—
is merely a substitute for his competi-
tive approach to sports.
When McConnell tells the story of
his first campaign—for student-council
president—what leaps out is that he
seemed far more interested in winning
the title than in doing anything with it.
As an underclassman, he was an intro-
vert who sat by himself in the back of
the auditorium at assemblies, and he was
dazzled by the student-council president,
who “had the envy of everyone.” When he
confided this to his mother, she encour-
aged him to run for the position. He told
her, “I don’t have even one friend.” But,
McConnell writes, he went ahead, real-
izing that he could hustle endorsements
from popular cheerleaders and athletes
by giving them the “one thing teenagers
most desire. Flattery.” He won.
He writes that, upon having
his first taste of the respect that
comes with holding elected
office, “I was hooked.”
McConnell was the kind
of political nerd who, as a kid,
watched both parties’ Con-
ventions gavel to gavel, and he
soon set his sights on a goal:
becoming a U.S. senator. He
wrote his college thesis on
Kentucky’s famed nineteenth-century
senator Henry Clay, who was known as
the Great Compromiser. The Senate
seemed like the ideal place for McCon-
nell: he lacked charisma but had sin-
gle-minded ambition, as well as a gift
for savvy, farsighted planning. He also
had a flair for cultivating powerful back-
ers, and for what he has called “calcu-
lated résumé-building activities.” After
college, he got an internship with the
Kentucky senator John Sherman Coo-
per. McConnell describes the glamorous
Republican moderate as “the first truly
great man I’d ever met.” Cooper social-
ized in Georgetown with the Kennedys,
and the press praised him for following
his conscience instead of Kentucky polls.
He backed the Civil Rights Act and op-
posed the Vietnam War, telling McCon-
nell that there were times to follow the
herd and times to go your own way.
In those days, McConnell opposed
the war himself. Nevertheless, in 1967,
after graduating from the University of
Kentucky’s law school, he began serving
in the Army Reserve, because, he ac-
knowledges, it was smart politically. Five
weeks later, he obtained a medical dis-
charge, for an eye condition. McConnell
has claimed that he “used no connec-
tions” to get out. But, soon after he en-
listed, his father contacted Senator
Cooper, who intervened with the com-
manding officer at McConnell’s base.
Records show that Cooper pressured the
Army to move quickly, suggesting thatMcConnell had immediate academic
plans: “Mitchell anxious to clear post in
order to enroll NYU.” He never enrolled.I
nstead, McConnell began his politi-
cal climb. It started poorly. In 1971,
he ran for the state legislature, but he
was disqualified because he didn’t meet
the residency requirements. He vowed
never again to ignore the fine print, and
has since become a master of
the Senate’s arcane rules.
In 1973, during the Water-
gate scandal, McConnell
wrote an op-ed in the Louis-
ville Courier-Journal denounc-
ing the corrupting influence
of money on politics as “a can-
cer,” and demanding public
financing for Presidential elec-
tions. To read the op-ed now
is head-spinning, given his
current views. On closer examination,
though, there is a consistency to his flip-
flop. His call for reform reflected the
political consensus after Nixon’s disgrace.
In other words, the anti-corruption po-
sition he took in 1973 was in his politi-
cal self-interest, just as his embrace of
big money has been in recent decades.
As he confessed to Dyche, his biogra-
pher, the op-ed was merely “playing for
headlines.” McConnell, planning to run
for office as a Republican, wanted to
clear his name of Nixon’s tarnish.
McConnell had been hired by a Ken-
tucky law firm, but he found it dull. In
Louisville, he became friends with the
sister of the Deputy Attorney General,
Laurence Silberman, and in 1976 he used
the connection to get a job working for
Silberman in D.C., as Deputy Assis-
tant Attorney General. The experience
appears to have influenced his thinking
about money in politics and much else.
He became an acolyte of Silberman and
two other towering figures of conservative
jurisprudence then at the Justice Depart-
ment: Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.
After Watergate, Congress had cracked
down on political money by imposing
strict limits on campaign contributions
and spending, and created the Federal
Election Commission to enforce the new
laws. But conservatives, as well as a few
liberal groups, including the A.C.L.U.,
began to litigate against the reforms. James
Buckley, a conservative New York sena-
tor, challenged the spending limits as an