Robert “Bob” Gable was the Republican nominee for Kentucky governor in 1975. (Kentucky Museum Special Collections, Western Kentucky University)
Bob Gable, a Stanford-educated patron of the arts and Navy veteran, never won elective office but helped lead the Republican Party of Kentucky out of the political wilderness.
Gable, 90, died Nov. 29 at Baptist Health in Lexington.
A rare Republican supporter of abortion rights, Gable is being praised by Republicans, including U.S. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell who called him a “titanic figure.”
In a statement, McConnell said Gable’s “unflappable focus and the groundwork he laid during his decades of service” were critical to the emergence of a competitive state GOP and Kentucky’s transformation into a Republican stronghold.
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who served as Republican National Committee chair, said in a statement that Gable was “a leader and a driving force for the Republican Party in Kentucky and beyond. As state party chair, where I first knew him, he played a key role in advancing conservative principles and supporting the Reagan Revolution.”
Gable, in his last of three runs for public office, teamed up in 1995 with an unlikely partner, the American Civil Liberties Union, to challenge a new (and short-lived) state law aimed at reducing money’s influence on elections by publicly financing candidates for governor who agreed to abide by campaign spending limits. (The ACLU did not object to public financing but to other restrictions in the Kentucky law.)
Gable, who denounced public financing as “welfare for politicians,” also said, “Money in politics is freedom of speech,” presaging the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling in 2010 which obliterated restrictions on political money that had been in place for a century.
‘Overeducated and underchallenged’
Robert Elledy Gable was born in New York City and grew up in Port Orford, Oregon, and later Tucson, Arizona, after his father’s death, spending summers with family in Michigan and Minnesota and being educated at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, according to his obituary.
After graduating from Stanford University in 1956 with a degree in industrial engineering and serving as a Navy officer, Gable and his wife, Emily Brinton Thompson, moved to Stearns in McCreary County, where he helped lead the family business.
Gable’s great grandfather, Michigan lumber baron Justus S. Stearns, had founded the town as a company headquarters after buying 30,000 acres of forest in Kentucky and Tennessee in 1902 where coal was soon discovered. Stearns also was a prominent Republican in Michigan and a philanthropist. The Stearns Lumber & Coal Co. built the Kentucky and Tennessee Railroad and the first all-electric sawmill in the U.S. while employing thousands of people living in 18 coal camps. It eventually amassed 215,000 acres.
In Stearns, Bob and Emily Gable raised their three children, and in 1964 Gable dipped his toe into politics in Tennessee. He ran logistics and the campaign headquarters for Republican Howard Baker’s losing race for U.S. Senate. Two years later, he worked in the campaign that made Baker the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a U.S. Senate seat from Tennessee.
In a 1995 interview with Joe Gerth of The Courier-Journal, Baker recalled the 30-year-old Gable as “overeducated and underchallenged” in his job at Stearns. “He was a bright young man. Politicians have a way of keeping an eye out for bright young men and women,” said Baker.
In 1967, Gable worked in the winning gubernatorial campaign of Kentucky Republican Louie B. Nunn, who made Gable his state parks commissioner; the Gables moved to Frankfort.
Truth bell
Eight years later, Gable was the underdog Republican nominee for governor against Democratic incumbent Julian Carroll, who had been lieutenant governor when Democratic Gov. Wendell Ford was elected to the U.S. Senate. Gable had run against Ford in 1974.
Gable criticized Carroll for not opposing busing to integrate Louisville’s schools and blamed Democrats for then-high inflation.
In the first-ever KET gubernatorial debate, Gable secured a lasting place in Kentucky political lore by bringing a bell — he called it the “truth bell” — on stage that he promised to ring every time Carroll lied. The debate rules prohibited props, and after the second clanging, moderator Al Smith said the debate would end unless Gable pocketed the bell, which he did.
Earlier in 1975 in a column published in his weekly newspapers, Smith wrote that Gable “grew up in an affluent family, but he is a serious-minded and hard-working young man who acts as if he feels compelled to devote part of his talents and fortune to public stewardship. … He is bright and articulate in advancing a fundamentally conservative viewpoint about government and business.”
Daunting challenges
In 1986, Gable became chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky (RPK) and served on the Republican National Committee.
“When Bob first took the helm of our state party in 1986, the electoral challenges Republicans faced in Kentucky were daunting,” said RPK chair Robert Benvenutti in a statement. “At that time, Republicans held only one statewide office and were in the extreme minority in the General Assembly. Yet Bob’s unwavering commitment to our party guided us as we began laying the groundwork to reshape Kentucky’s political landscape.”
Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers praised Gable as “a leader when there were few Kentucky Republicans” and said “Bob gave me my first contribution when I decided to get into politics.”
By then The Stearns Co., as it had been renamed, had moved out of coal and timber and into real estate development, selling its last coal mine in 1975 when coal prices were high. The economic challenges of the 1980s led to the company’s eventual restructuring, says the obituary.
Part of Stearns’ vast holdings had become the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, thanks to efforts in Congress by Tennessee’s Baker and Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky. Stearns was paid $18 million for 60,000 acres which it sold to the federal government under threat of condemnation.
Gable also waged a long-running but ultimately unsuccessful legal battle against state and federal governments challenging restrictions on mining and logging and seeking compensation for mineral rights that the company had owned inside federal lands.
Running against public financing of the governor’s race
In his quixotic run for governor in 1995, he lost in the primary to the eventual Republican nominee Larry Forgy, who, unlike Gable, supported public financing and spending limits. Democrat Paul Patton won the general election and was reelected with token Republican opposition. Before the 2003 race for governor, the legislature ended public financing and spending limits.
Gable served on the boards of many businesses and organizations. He also chaired the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Opera and served on the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts board. He served as George Peabody College for Teachers final board chair and oversaw its merger with Vanderbilt University, where he later served as a trustee. Nationally, he was president of the National Committee for the Performing Arts and a member of the President’s Committee for the Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Gable and his wife Emily, who died in 2017, were avid travelers during their 58-year marriage. A member of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Frankfort, Gable also served on the Missions Board of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky.
He is survived by his children, James (Lisa Guillermin), Elizabeth Gable Hicks and John (Virginia Harris), as well as grandchildren Helen-Anne and Robert “Bo” Gable.
In 2017, Kentucky Republicans gathered to honor Gable at a tribute sponsored by the Republican Women’s Club of Franklin County. Writing about the event in The Courier-Journal, political strategist and GOP commentator Scott Jennings reported that Gable brought the truth bell.
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