Redmon, whom McConnell divorced
in 1980. After the marriage ended, Red-
mon, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy,
left Kentucky and took over a wom-
en’s-history archive at Smith College,
in Massachusetts, where she collabo-
rated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices
of Feminism Oral History Project. In
an e-mail, Steinem told me that Red-
mon rarely spoke about McConnell, and
noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to
recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t
talk about the earlier part of her own.”
Steinem’s understanding was that Mc-
Connell’s political views had once been
different. “I can only imagine how pain-
ful it must be to marry and have chil-
dren with a democratic Jekyll and see
him turn into a corrupt and authoritar-
ian Hyde,” she wrote. (Redmon is evi-
dently working on a tell-all memoir.)
Steinem’s comment echoed a com-
mon belief about McConnell: that he
began his career as an idealistic, liberal
Republican in the mold of Nelson
Rockefeller. Certainly, McConnell’s cur-
rent positions on several key issues, in-
cluding campaign spending and orga-
nized labor, are far more conservative
than they once were. But when I asked
John Yarmuth, the Democratic con-
gressman from Louisville, who has
known McConnell for fifty years, if Mc-
Connell had once been idealistic, he
said, “Nah. I never saw any evidence of
that. He was just driven to be powerful.”
Yarmuth, who began as a Republi-
can and worked in a statewide cam-
paign alongside McConnell in 1968, said
that McConnell had readily adapted to
the Republican Party’s rightward march:
“He never had any core principles. He
just wants to be something. He doesn’t
want to do anything.”
For months, I searched for the larger
principles or sense of purpose that ani-
mates McConnell. I travelled twice to
Kentucky, observed him at a Trump rally
in Lexington, and watched him preside
over the impeachment trial in Washing-
ton. I interviewed dozens of people, some
of whom love him and some of whom
despise him. I read his autobiography, his
speeches, and what others have written
about him. Finally, someone who knows
him very well told me, “Give up. You can
look and look for something more in him,
but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you
that there is some secret thing that he
really believes in, but he doesn’t.”T
he notion that McConnell started
out as an idealist is a staple of most
versions of his life story, including his
own autobiography, “The Long Game,”
published in 2016. He describes his awe,
as a young congressional intern, at see-
ing crowds gather on the Washington
Mall for Martin Luther King’s “I Have
a Dream” speech, in 1963. McConnell,who was on summer break from the
University of Louisville, writes that he
recognized he “was witnessing a pivotal
moment in history.”
McConnell was born in Alabama in
1942, and grew up in the segregated Deep
South. He spent much of his childhood
in Georgia before moving with his fam-
ily to Louisville, Kentucky, just before
his high-school years. His mother, the
daughter of Alabama subsistence farm-
ers, was a secretary in Birmingham when
she met McConnell’s father, a mid-level
corporate manager who had grown up
in a more prosperous family but had
dropped out of college. McConnell, in
his autobiography, describes his moth-
er’s wedding dowry as little more than
“an apple corer and a can opener.” But
his parents, he writes, gave him a com-
fortable middle-class childhood and “in-
stilled me with a deep-seated belief in
equal and civil rights, which, given their
own upbringing in the Deep South, was
quite extraordinary.” He quotes a mov-
ing letter from his father celebrating the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
and writes that he, too, supported the
legislation. That year, McConnell even
voted for Lyndon Johnson for President.
McConnell’s book does not men-
tion that his father, who worked in the
human-resources department at Du-
Pont, was deposed by lawyers for the
N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Edu-
cational Fund in a historic racial-dis-
crimination case. Kerry Scanlon, one of
the lawyers, told me, “The leadership at
that plant seemed to define racism. There
was a plantation system in which the
black employees did the hardest jobs,
like working in front of these open fires
where they got burned—and they got
the worst pay. There was a systemic pat-
tern of racism.” After years of litigation,
the company settled the case, for four-
teen million dollars.
McConnell writes that the forma-
tive experience of his early life was con-
tracting polio at the age of two, ten years
before Jonas Salk developed his vaccine.
McConnell’s father was away, having
joined the military after the start of the
Second World War, and so for the next
two years his mother, largely alone,
confined him to bed except for a pain-
ful daily regimen of exercises. His first
memory is of his mother’s purchase of
a pair of saddle shoes that allowed him