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In 1946 John Sherman felt he was ready for Washington. That year he won the Republican nomination for the Senate vacancy created by "Happy" Chandler's resignation. It was an audacious bid (only twice before in Kentucky's history had the voters sent a Republican to the Senate), and Cooper gave it all he had. Once again he tried his Pulaski County handshaking technique. The system is simple: Cooper drives to the edge of a town, gets out at one end of Main Street and walks up one sidewalk and down the other, in and out of shops, greeting everyone he encounters with a handshake and a simple statement: "I'm John Cooper. You know me. I'm running for the Senate, and I want you to vote for me." If anyone wants to talk, John Sherman is only too willing to pass the time of day. In this way Cooper can cover a town of 1,500 in less than an hour. The effect of the Cooper technique is measurable. In 1946 Kentucky sent him to the Senate by a 40,000 majority—a state record for a Republican.
Cooper probably knows more living Kentuckians than any man, estimates he will shake 50,000 hands in his 1954 campaign.
Cooper cast his first Senate vote—on the transfer of investigatory powers to Owen Brewsters special War Investigating Committee—against his party. He felt that the Brewster committee was a political device, and he made it the subject of his maiden speech in the Senate. "One of the most disturbing factors we have seen during the past 13 years," he said, "has been the ignoring of the rules of laws, and sometimes an actual contempt of those rules by some of those who were a part of the Government itself. For myself, I should like to uphold in this body, when I can, rules of law."
Spare That Oak. Cooper respects the oak of the law with druidical passion. He still bristles at the recollection of Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing plan or Harry Truman's use of "inherent power" to seize the steel mills. He is just as passionately opposed to attempts of his own party colleagues to rule by fiat or overlook the established law. Cooper was one of the first Senate Republicans to denounce Joe McCarthy openly. He is ferociously opposed to legislation permitting wiretapping by federal law-enforcement officers and to the removal of Fifth Amendment protection from reluctant witnesses. "These fundamental things," he says, "are the very substance of our Government." In his brief first term in Washington, Cooper earned the respect of the Senate's greybeards (notably the late Arthur Van-denberg). But in 1948 the Democratic tide was running too strong; Cooper was beaten. The next year he took a Truman appointment as a delegate to the U.N.
General Assembly—the first of six consecutive State Department jobs (three missions to the U.N., three as Dean Acheson's special assistant).
In 1952, after the death of Virgil Chapman, the man who defeated him in 1948, Cooper got an opportunity for another try at the Senate—again for a short two-year term. The Republican National Committee preferred to concentrate on states where the party seemed to have a better chance.