Editing Marlow Cook (section)

==Political career==
===Kentucky House of Representatives===
Cook was elected to the [[Kentucky House of Representatives]] in 1957 and again in 1959. He served on a special committee analyzing education in the state and also on a planning committee.<ref name="enc" />

Cook was elected to two terms as Jefferson County Judge, the equivalent of a [[mayor]]al or [[county executive]] position administering populous [[Jefferson County, Kentucky|Jefferson County]], which, by the 1960s, was mostly suburbs of Louisville. He was elected in 1961 and, along with fellow Republican [[William Cowger]], who became the new mayor of Louisville, Cook unseated the [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]], which had held both offices for 28 years.<ref name="enc" />

In 1962, Cook was primarily responsible for the county's $34,000 purchase of the decrepit steamboat ''Avalon'' at [[government auction]] in [[Cincinnati]]. Auctioned as little more than scrap material, upon refurbishment the boat was now called the ''[[Belle of Louisville]]'', and, {{As of|2024|lc=yes}}, it still carried passengers yearly and was one of the most recognizable symbols of the city. At the time, [[Interstate 64]] was being constructed along the city's waterfront, and Cook's purchase of the steamboat was intended as a measure to bring attention to the city's historic [[cobblestone]] [[wharf]].

A politically motivated taxpayer suit was brought by local lawyer Daniel Boone because of the county's expenditure of such an "outrageous sum" for a dilapidated "throwback to the Dark Ages of transportation," in Alan Bates' memorable phrase. According to Cook, the expenditure worked out to roughly six cents per taxpayer, a negligible sum, even at that time, and when individual citizens complained, he would simply pay them off with pennies from a jar that he kept in his office desk for the purpose. In a 1989 interview, Cook said that some people insisted on checks, and he wrote several such six-cent checks, but none of them was ever cashed.

Cook was reelected county judge in 1965 by a wide margin, 121,481 votes to Democrat [[William B. Stansbury]]'s 71,280.<ref name="enc" />

In [[1967 Kentucky gubernatorial election|1967]], Cook ran at the top of a slate of statewide office holders as a candidate for [[governor of Kentucky]] in the Republican [[Partisan primary|primary election]]. He was narrowly defeated by more [[Conservatism|conservative]] [[Barren County, Kentucky|Barren County]] Judge [[Louie Nunn]], who went on to be elected the first Republican governor in Kentucky since 1943. Nunn had also been the party's unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 1963 but had narrowly lost to Democrat [[Ned Breathitt]]. At the time, Kentucky governors could not succeed themselves in office.

===U.S. Senator===
In [[1968 United States Senate election in Kentucky|1968]], Cook ran for the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of another moderate Republican, [[Thruston Ballard Morton]], a former chairman of the [[Republican National Committee]]. In the [[1968 United States presidential election in Kentucky|general election]] in which [[Richard Nixon]] carried Kentucky over [[Hubert Humphrey]] and [[George Wallace]], Cook defeated former state Commerce Commissioner Katherine Peden. He was the first [[Catholic Church|Roman Catholic]] to hold statewide office in Kentucky. He was subsequently one of the first Republican senators to call for Nixon to resign during the [[Watergate scandal]].<ref name="enc" />

Cook was defeated in his 1974 bid for re-election by Governor [[Wendell Ford]], a popular Democrat. Cook's repeated plea that Ford debate him was seen as highly unusual.<ref>{{cite news|last1=King|first1=Wayne|title=Democrat Leads in Kentucky Senate Race; Controversy Over Ads Short on Funds|url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E01EEDF1F3DE13ABC4F51DFB667838F669EDE|access-date=October 8, 2014|newspaper=New York Times|date=October 27, 1974}}</ref> Following the election, Cook resigned his seat early, in December, so that Ford could resign and be appointed senator by his successor, [[Julian Carroll]], thus having greater seniority in assuming the office. (Morton had done the same for Cook, in 1968.)