Thomas Kuchel was born in Anaheim, California in 1910, the son of a local newspaper editor. As Anaheim High School’s student body president and yell leader, he beat a Whittier High debater named Richard Nixon. After undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Southern California, he served in the California Assembly and state Senate from 1937 to 1945, took leave as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve during World War II, and was state controller from 1946 to 1953. When Nixon became vice president in 1953, Governor Earl Warren appointed Kuchel to Nixon’s Senate seat, and he won it outright in 1954, 1956 and 1962.

A Rockefeller wing Republican, Kuchel was Senate minority whip from 1959 to 1969. He voted to repeal the right to work section of the Taft Hartley Act, was one of a small group of Republicans to vote for Medicare, and served as a floor co-manager of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He refused to endorse Nixon for governor in 1962 and backed Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1966 he declined to run for governor against Ronald Reagan and publicly condemned the party’s rising right wing, and in 1968 he narrowly lost the Republican primary to Max Rafferty, who then lost to Democrat Alan Cranston, a former state controller. He practiced law in Beverly Hills and died in 1994.

• Working with Hubert Humphrey, he helped hold a bipartisan coalition together through a 60 day filibuster to reach cloture on the 1964 civil rights bill.
• In 1962 he carried all 58 California counties, and he remains the last person to do so.
• A forged affidavit falsely claiming he had been arrested in 1949 circulated during the 1964 campaign.
• Four men, including a former Los Angeles police officer, a bar owner, a PR executive and a newsletter publisher, were indicted for criminal libel over the forgery.
• Leon Panetta, later CIA director and Secretary of Defense, began his career as Kuchel’s legislative assistant.