Kenneth Spicer Wherry liked to call himself a "political fundamentalist." He could reduce the shadings of any political controversy into a black & white conflict between free enterprise and socialism, or economy and waste. With stubborn affability, he spent nine years in the Senate defending his own simplified brand of Midwestern Republicanism against Democrats and internationalist Republicans.
He trained for the Senate as a salesman and small businessman in Pawnee City, Neb. (pop. 1,595). There, "Lightning Ken" Wherry parlayed his family's furniture business into a bigger furniture store, an automobile agency, a law office, a real-estate firm and an...
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