BREAKING NEWS: Former Governor Louie B. Nunn Dies at 79

Fomer Governor Louie B. Nunn died, Thursday night at his home just outside Versailles.

He was Kentukcy's last Republican Governor before current Governor Ernie Fletcher. Nunn served as Governor from 1967 to 1971.

He attended Bowling Green Business University after graduating from high school. He served in World War II from 1943 to 1945. After returning from the service he attended the University of Cincinnati and then the University of Louisville where he got his law degree in 1950.

In his first attempt at a state office, Nunn lost to Democrat Edward T. Breathitt. in 1963. Four years later he beat Jefferson County judge Marlow Cook in the Republican primary. He then beat Democrat Henry Ward in the general election.

During his administration the University of Louisville became a state school and a community college became Northern Kentukcy University.

His terms in office were also highlighted by increased support for econimic development programs, mental health services, and the establishment of the Kentucky Educational Television System, along with the expansion of state parks.

Former governor, force in GOP, dies
Directed state to better roads and education
Former Gov. Louie B. Nunn, a force in Kentucky Republican politics for more than 50 years and the party's only governor in the second half of the 20th century, died last night. He was 79.

Nunn's heart stopped around 8 p.m. while he was at his home in Versailles, said his son, state Rep. Steve Nunn, R-Glasgow. He said his father died at Woodford Memorial Hospital.

"He was at home and had had a good day," Steve Nunn said. "He felt good. His heart just quit."

Nunn directed the state to broad improvements in education, mental health, highways and other areas, thanks largely to his ability to get the 1968 General Assembly to increase the sales tax. But that move helped lead to his defeat in the 1972 race for the U.S. Senate and for governor in 1979.

Nunn's record as governor was more progressive than might be expected of a man who had been considered a hard-nosed conservative whose campaigns were marred by accusations that he had appealed to racial and religious prejudice. In later years, he took more moderate stances and remained active in public affairs.

Steve Nunn said his father wanted to be remembered "as a statesman."

"He was a man who loved Kentucky and Kentuckians."

Louie Nunn experienced more than his share of disappointments during his career. His first bid for the Republican nomination for governor was stymied by party leaders in 1959 and he was forced to withdraw. In 1963, he ran a strong race against Democrat Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt only to lose by 13,000 votes.

After defeating Democrat Henry Ward for governor in 1967, he faced a severe budget crisis. He broke his campaign promise that he would not raise taxes, and got the legislature to raise to 5 percent the 3 percent sales tax that it had enacted under Democrat Bert T. Combs in 1960.

"I have done what the time, circumstances and conditions demanded that I do," Nunn told legislators. "To do otherwise, I would not be worthy of the office I hold."

Nunn was a reluctant candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1972, filing just 28 minutes before the deadline in an attempt to hold the seat of Republican Sen. John Sherman Cooper, who had decided to retire.

With President Richard Nixon seeking a second term against Democratic Sen. George McGovern, Nunn was the odds-on favorite. But even as Nixon beat McGovern in Kentucky by 310,000 votes, Nunn lost to Walter "Dee" Huddleston, a Democratic state senator who had been Gov. Wendell Ford's campaign manager, by 34,000. Observers blamed his defeat largely on the tax issue.

When Nunn announced for governor in 1979, he was unaware — as were the Democratic candidates — that the political landscape was about to change with the candidacy of millionaire John Y. Brown Jr., the Kentucky Fried Chicken entrepreneur.

Brown swept the Democratic primary and rolled over Nunn in the fall by a near-record margin, despite the tough campaign Nunn ran against him. The race was Nunn's last.

However, Nunn played a role in extending bipartisan support to the school-improvement programs that Gov. Martha Layne Collins proposed to a special session of the General Assembly in 1985. He also took on special assignments for Collins and Gov. Wallace Wilkinson, serving on the boards of trustees of Morehead State University and Kentucky State University.

When he left office in 1971, Nunn told an interviewer, "My hope is people will look upon my record 20 years from now and say, `This man was good for Kentucky,' rather than to say, `He was a hell of a politician.' Of course, I don't know why they couldn't say both."

Louie Broady Nunn was born March 8, 1924, at Park in rural Barren County. He was the fourth son of Waller H. and Mary Roberts Nunn, who farmed and operated a country store. One of his brothers, Lee Nunn, was active in Republican politics, playing a major role in his brother's campaigns and serving for a time as Republican state chairman. The Nunns came to be known as tough, bare-knuckle politicians.

Louie Nunn graduated from Hiseville High School and attended Bowling Green Business University before entering service in World War II. After the war, he earned a law degree from the University of Louisville.

With his election as Barren County judge at the age of 29, Nunn received statewide notice and became known as the boy wonder of Republican politics. He had the base to begin his climb in state Republican ranks.

He served as chairman of the party's 1956 campaign, in which Kentucky went for President Dwight Eisenhower and elected two Republican senators, Cooper and Thruston B. Morton. He played a similar role in the party's successful statewide races in 1960 and 1962, winning the support of most of the GOP's key players.

In 1963, he won the GOP nomination without serious opposition. The race against Breathitt was rough and tumble, with Nunn hammering away at an executive order issued by Gov. Bert Combs banning discrimination in public accommodations. Breathitt came away with a surprisingly narrow win.

Nunn's loss opened bitter feelings between his supporters and the moderate Republicans who led the party organization in Jefferson County. His backers charged that the Jefferson County organization had been less than diligent in backing the state ticket.

The hard feelings were to carry over into the next GOP race for governor.

Jefferson County Judge Marlow Cook announced for governor the day after the 1966 election. A day later, Nunn announced he would support Morton, who was in the closing stages of his second term in the Senate.

Nunn's surprise announcement appeared to outflank Cook, because it put Nunn in the position of backing a popular Louisville Republican against the sitting Jefferson County judge. Had Morton entered the race, he would have pre-empted the primary, but he soon took himself out of contention.

Nunn subsequently entered the race, and the party had a full-fledged primary on its hands. It turned out to be tough battle, largely without issues, in which the personalities and backgrounds of the candidates were central.

Cook, a leader of the Republican renaissance in Jefferson County, portrayed himself as part of a progressive generation of young political leaders and said Nunn's conservatism would hurt the party. Anticipating that his religion would be an issue, Cook, a Roman Catholic, said he believed in the absolute separation of church and state.

Nunn played for the vote in rural areas and small towns. During Cook's term, Jefferson County had been the target of gambling investigations, which the Nunn campaign sought to exploit. Nunn also charged that Cook, a native of New York who had settled in Louisville after World War II, had made fun of "hill-country courthouse and local political organizations."

The tone of Nunn's campaign eventually brought denunciations from some moderate Republican leaders. Cooper said Nunn's campaign, "whether with his approval or denunciation, has the purpose of stirring up religious prejudice."

U.S. Rep. Tim Lee Carter of Tompkinsville, Nunn's south-central Kentucky neighbor, said Nunn had injected "racism, religious bigotry and mudslinging into the campaign."

Nunn denied the charges and beat Cook by less than 4,000 votes. A year later, Cook won election to the U.S. Senate as Morton's replacement. Their success gave rise to the theory that a hard-fought primary was good for the party.

To an extent, it was. But both men benefited from weak opponents and the unpopularity of the Democrats — led by President Lyndon Johnson, who was submerged by the Vietnam War and domestic unrest. Nunn defeated Ward, the Democratic nominee, by 28,000 votes.

Inaugurated in December 1967, Nunn found the cupboard bare. Reports of the state's financial problem began trickling out after the election. In mid-November, Breathitt ordered a $24 million budget reduction. The cutback reflected the teachers' pay raise he had granted the year before. Revenue estimates had been inflated to cover the cost.

Nunn outlined the problem in broad detail in his State of the Commonwealth address to the 1968 General Assembly. In late February, he prescribed the cure in his budget address.

"There is no economy in retreat," he told legislators in proposing to increase the sales tax and to raise the cost of the motor-vehicle license fee from $5 to $12.50. He said there were "staggering" needs in education, mental health and welfare.

"I have now drained the bitter cup. The burden passes from me to you," he said.

Nunn's budget won overwhelming approval, but he had to pull out all the stops to pass the tax increases. The major educational interests, including the Kentucky Education Association and the state universities, were mobilized in support of the plan. Through pressure and horse-trading, Nunn picked up enough Democrats — including legislative leaders — to pass it. Without the additional money, Nunn would say later, he would have presided over the state as "a referee in bankruptcy."

At Nunn's suggestion two years later, the legislature eliminated the sales tax from prescription drugs. In addition to big funding increases for schools at all levels, Nunn made major strides in the areas of mental health.

The state began work on the Oakwood center for the mentally retarded in Somerset to replace the ancient Frankfort State Hospital and School. Nunn's administration arranged for legislators to tour the aging Frankfort facility to see the heart-rending conditions as a means of winning support for his tax package.

As governor, Nunn paid a surprise visit to Kentucky Village, an antiquated institution near Lexington to which the state's juvenile delinquents were committed. Appalled at conditions there, he ordered the place improved or closed.

By the end of his term, it was closed and juveniles were sent to smaller facilities, many built during Nunn's term.

Nunn also provided money for Kentucky Educational Television, which went on the air during his term; funds for the University of Louisville, which was granted entry into the state system; and money to start what is now Northern Kentucky University, the first new institution of higher education in 47 years.

Although Nunn had criticized Combs' public-accommodation order in the 1963 campaign and had opposed open-housing legislation in his 1967 race, he allowed a statewide open-housing bill to become law without his signature in 1968.

Nunn also proposed toll roads linking Henderson in Western Kentucky with Hazard in the mountains. Nunn had criticized Combs and Breathitt for using bonds to build highways, but his administration issued more toll road bonds than Combs and Breathitt combined.

During Nunn's term, the state took steps to preserve the Red River Gorge in Powell County, which had been threatened with flooding by a dam proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and acquired Lilley's Wood, a tract of virgin forest in Letcher County. However, the administration was criticized by environmentalists and citizens' groups in Appalachia for lax enforcement of strip-mine regulations.

Nunn's term was marked with controversy, including the firing of thousands of state employees protected by the merit system. According to one estimate, 6,000 state employees — about a quarter of the payroll — were fired during the early months of his term. Many appealed their dismissals, and the state eventually paid $2.1 million in back pay.

Contrary to expectations, Nunn mastered the General Assembly, never losing a major battle in a legislature where his party had no majorities between 1920 and 2000. His dominance was remarkable because he came to Frankfort without having held major office and without a cadre of experienced state officials to help him.

Instead, he recruited a group of bright young men, many of them lawyers, to fill key positions. One was Larry Forgy, the Republican nominee for governor in 1995.

As his term drew to an end, Nunn described most Democratic legislators and constitutional officers as indifferent or hostile to him. He said Ford, the lieutenant governor, "was opposed to every program I presented, regardless of how good it was."

Nunn used his veto power liberally, and not one was ever overturned.

Nunn had hoped that a Republican would be elected as his successor, but he was disappointed. He backed Tom Emberton, one of the young men he had attracted to his administration, but Emberton lost to Ford by a margin of 58,000 votes.

Later, during the Watergate investigation, it was learned that $100,000 in cash, left over from Nixon's 1968 campaign, had gone into Emberton's campaign. Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon's personal lawyer, testified during the Watergate probe that he had passed the money to Nunn in 1971. Nunn said he was only a conduit for the cash and turned it over to the Emberton campaign. There was no accounting of the money in the campaign's finance reports.

Fund raising by the Nunn administration also produced controversy. At one point, the state attorney general's office obtained a court order to prevent state employees from soliciting funds from people doing business with the state.

One Nunn administration official said in 1971 that he found the fund-raising disturbing. "There was an awful lot of money that was passing through there and going to — quote — the campaign contribution fund," Basil Ktsanses said. He said no one kept a record of it.

Nunn took the state GOP delegation to the 1968 national convention pledged to Nixon. He served as chairman of the Republican governors and emerged as a major spokesman for the party.

After Nixon left office, Nunn supported his fellow governor, Ronald Reagan of California, and acted as a regional coordinator in Reagan's 1976 presidential bid against President Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon after the latter's resignation.

Nunn, a big man at 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, was ever the hard-nosed partisan, asking no quarter. He was a frequent critic of national Democratic leaders, and after he passed from the party's leadership, of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was first elected in 1984. In 1988, Nunn lost a bid for Republican national committeeman to Republican Jim Bunning, then a congressman and now a senator.

Twice in his term, Nunn was forced to use the National Guard to quell civil disturbances. In May 1968, at a time of racial tension in Louisville, Nunn dispatched the guard at the request of Mayor Kenneth A. Schmied after rioting broke out in the city's West End.

In 1970, Nunn ordered the guard to the University of Kentucky campus after an ROTC building was burned. The fire and the demonstrations occurred in the wake of the fatal shootings of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University. The incident at Kent State had been touched off by Nixon's order sending American troops into Cambodia.

Nunn, who was also chairman of UK's board of trustees by virtue of his office, imposed a campus curfew and warned in a brief television address in Lexington that state troopers and National Guardsmen, armed with live ammunition, would be stationed on the campus.

"These officers are under orders to use such force as is necessary to perform their mission of protection. Anyone attempting to defy them does so at his own peril," he said.

Some students and faculty challenged Nunn's action in court, but the late U.S. District Judge Mac Swinford ruled Nunn's action justifiable.

"I concluded that a massive show of strength was necessary to make it clear that we would not permit civil authority in Kentucky to be overwhelmed on the campus or elsewhere," Nunn said later.

During the 1960s, demonstrations, riots and civil disorder were commonplace. To many, discontent and disorder were justified, given the country's domestic and national problems. In 1968, Nunn took strong exception, saying there must be an end to the "reign of fear that has seized America."

During her husband's term as governor, Beula Nunn was heavily involved in the restoration of the Executive Mansion and of White Hall, home of Cassius M. Clay of Richmond, the Kentucky politician and abolitionist.

She and Nunn divorced shortly before her death in 1995 at age 81.

While maintaining a residence and business interests in his native Barren County, Nunn practiced law in Lexington after leaving office and later moved there.

Staff writer Al Cross contributed to this story.

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