John Sherman Cooper - Later Career, Death, and Legacy

Later Career, Death, and Legacy

After the expiration of his term, Cooper took over the "Dean Acheson chair" at the prestigious Washington D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling. In 1972, he was chosen as the commencement speaker at Centre College, where he had served as a trustee since 1961. At the ceremony, he became the first recipient of the Isaac Shelby Award, named for two-time Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby, who was chair of the college's first board of trustees. In 1973, Cooper resisted an attempt to name a federal building in his honor. Upon the completion of the dam that formed Laurel River Lake in 1977, Congress proposed naming the dam and lake after Cooper, but again, he declined. He was pleased, however, that the Somerset school system chose to name a program to teach and reinforce leadership skills the John Sherman Cooper Leadership Institute.

In April 1974, President Nixon announced that he would appoint Cooper to be the U.S. Ambassador to East Germany, but during the final negotiations between the countries for the U.S. to establish an embassy in the country, Nixon resigned the presidency. His successor, Gerald Ford, officially appointed Cooper to the ambassadorship, and he took leave from Covington & Burling to accept it. He arrived in East Germany in December 1974 and served as ambassador until October 1976. After returning to the U.S., he resumed his work at Covington & Burling. In his last act of public service, he again served as an alternate delegate to the U.N. General Assembly in 1981.

Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown, Jr., son of Cooper's former opponent in the senatorial elections of 1946 and 1966, awarded Cooper the Governor's Distinguished Service Medallion in 1983. Later that year, Senators Walter "Dee" Huddleston of Kentucky and Howard Baker of Tennessee introduced a bill to honor Cooper by renaming the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area to the Cooper National Recreation Area; Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers sponsored a parallel measure in the House. As a senator, Cooper had been instrumental in securing congressional approval for the creation of Big South Fork. Opponents of the measure in both Kentucky and Tennessee – the recreation area spans the two states – cited a variety of reasons to retain the old name and the proposal was eventually dropped at Cooper's request.

In 1985, Cooper became the third-ever recipient of the Oxford Cup, an award recognizing outstanding past members of Beta Theta Pi. Also in 1985, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Cumberland College (now the University of the Cumberlands) in Williamsburg, Kentucky. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Centre College in 1987. A non-partisan group co-chaired by former Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy raised $60,000 to commission two sculptures of Cooper. A life-sized bronze bust of Cooper sculpted by John Tuska was installed at the Kentucky State Capitol in 1987. The other sculpture, a life-sized bronze statue crafted by Barney Bright, was placed in Fountain Square in Somerset.

Cooper retired from the practice of law in 1989. In June 1990, Cooper was honored with a gala screening of Gentleman From Kentucky, a Kentucky Educational Television documentary about his life, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. On February 21, 1991, Cooper died of heart failure in a retirement home in Washington, D.C. He had been preceded in death by his second wife, Lorraine, on February 3, 1985. On February 26, 1991, Kentucky's two senators – Wendell H. Ford and Mitch McConnell – gave speeches on the Senate floor praising Cooper, and the Senate adjourned in Cooper's memory. Cooper was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Because of his extensive support of rural electrification as a senator, the East Kentucky RECC was renamed the John Sherman Cooper Power Station in his honor. In 1999, the Lexington Herald-Leader named Cooper one of the most influential Kentuckians of the 20th century. In 2000, Eastern Kentucky University's Center for Kentucky History and Politics established the annual John Sherman Cooper Award for Outstanding Public Service in Kentucky.