“Forty years ago, having passed my 30th birthday, and imbued with all the hubris that only the young can assume,” Bill Brock wrote in a 2002 forward to an autobiography written by his longtime assistant, Olive Hunt, “I decided to run for Congress.”
That decision – and his upset victory in the fall general election – would change politics in Chattanooga, in Tennessee and, some would say, across the South.
When Brock, who died Thursday at the age of 90, was elected in 1962, he became the first Republican congressman from the state’s 3rd Congressional District in 42 years and only the second in 68 years.
Tennessee, at the time, was a solid Democratic state, with two congressmen in the stalwart Republican northeast corner of the state the only exceptions.
What led to today’s solid Republican state, with a Republican governor, two U.S. senators, seven of nine members of Congress, and super majorities in the state Senate and state House, was a gradual process. But Brock often has been credited with kicking the door open.