Published: July 05, 2007 11:16 am            

Kentucky Politics

July 4, 2007 — A giant summer edition of The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society includes edited transcripts of tapes of oral interviews with Edward F. Prichard Jr., the flawed but huge Kentucky political figure. I wish the edition was even larger because the reader is left wishing for more.

Prichard was brilliant by any measurement, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Franfurter, advisor to the administration of President Franklin Rooselvelt and several Kentucky governors and thorn in the side for others. The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence bears his name. Many thought in the late 1940s Prichard might one day be president and was routinely referred to as “the future governor of Kentucky.”

Prichard knew every significant Kentucky political figure over more than 50 years, working for some, opposing some and sometimes doing both. He worked for the election of A.B. “Happy” Chandler in the 1930s, later became a Chandler adversary, helped Earle Clements in the 1950s, advised Bert Combs and Ned Breathitt in the 1960s, and successfully sued Kentucky’s last Republican governor before Ernie Fletcher, Louie Nunn, for improper Merit System firings. He was the “intellectual force” behind a state constitutional convention in the mid-1960s although the proposed revision was turned down by voters.

But he was caught stuffing a Bourbon County ballot box in 1948 and later went to prison for six months, ending any prospects for becoming governor or president. He later said he did it because it had always been done, was part of the “sport or game” of Bourbon County politics. Prichard said he could hardly recall an election in Bourbon County since his youth when there weren’t stories of election fraud.

“It was just considered a part of the political game, and more or less a sort of a sport. Of course I knew it wasn’t right, but it was just one of the things that people did,” Prichard told interviewer Vic Hellard, then head of the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission.

History and biography are useful for the present, not only entertaining and enlightening but instructive. In many ways, Ernie Fletcher couldn’t be more different from Ed Prichard. But when I read the passage above, I couldn’t help but think of Fletcher.

It’s easily forgotten now, but a little less than four years ago there were Republicans around Fletcher who thought he might have a future in national politics. Fletcher and his supporters saw his election as the dawn of a new age in Kentucky politics – “a new world order” some of them called it. And then he allowed himself to be pressured into doing “what had always been done.” He sank into the same sort of political patronage games his predecessors had played. And when accused, he alternately claimed the ensuing investigation was a political witch hunt – or “the Democrats have always done it.”

Fletcher may yet win a second term. But his political future will never be what it might have been. He should have learned from the tragedy of Prichard. And if Steve Beshear wins in November, he should too.

RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com.

        

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