Tom Cotton is a seventh-generation Arkansas native who grew up on his family’s cattle farm. His father was also a district health supervisor, and his mother was a school teacher. At 6'5", he played center for his high school basketball team.
After graduating in 1995, Tom went to Harvard University, where his focus was government. He also served on the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, where he often found himself with the minority on the right side of issues, against the Crimson’s majority leftists.
He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in just three years and was accepted into the graduate program at Claremont in California, but he left a year later, finding the academic setting there was “too sedentary.” He returned to Harvard Law School and completed his Juris Doctor in 2002.
From there, he clerked with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and became an associate with a Washington DC law firm.
In March 2005, Tom enlisted in the Army and entered Officer Candidate School (OCS). He completed OCS and the U.S. Army Ranger Course, earning his Ranger Tab, and the Airborne School, earning his Parachutist Badge. Of that decision, he says: “I joined the Army after 9/11, after the Iraq war was started. I joined in part because I wanted to go fight on the front lines.”
In 2006, he was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he served as an air assault infantry platoon leader with the 101st Airborne, 506th Infantry Regiment. In that capacity, Tom led daily combat patrols for six months. It was also during that deployment that he wrote a letter to The New York Times, asserting three reporters had violated “espionage laws” when publishing an article containing classified information. He insisted that the reporters should be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law” and that the Times had “gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis.” Of course, the Times refused to take action against its reporters.
In 2007, promoted to 1st Lieutenant, he was reassigned as a platoon leader with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) at Fort Myer in Virginia. In 2008, he deployed again, this time to eastern Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, with the Train Advise Assist Command — East, a multinational military force at the TAAC — East forward operating base in Laghman Province. There, he was tasked with planning counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations.
After completing two combat tours, Cotton decided to return to the private sector as a management consultant with one of the nation’s largest consulting firms. At the same time, he served three years as an Army Reservist.
In 2012, he turned his focus to public service as a legislator, approaching that calling much as he did his military service, guided by his oath “to support and defend” our Constitution — an oath many in Congress have forsaken. He won Arkansas’s 4th district House seat in a landslide. He served one term before running for Senate and defeating Democrat incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor, who received less than 40% of the vote. Cotton was reelected to that seat in 2020. He joins a substantial number of Republican Veterans in Congress.
Of his timeline of military and public service, he says: “Some people say I’m a young man in a hurry. Well, guess what: they’re right.”
In Congress, Cotton’s constitutionally constructionist positions on policy matters elevated him to a status of national prominence during Barack Obama’s presidency and more so under Donald Trump. Of his constitutional focus, he notes: “My thesis was a defense of our Constitution on the terms that the Founding Fathers wrote specifically in the Federalist Papers. They hoped that our form of government would draw forward men and women who are the wisest, most prudent, and most experienced.”
Of his primary goal, he says, “What I can do as a member of the United States Senate is everything I can to keep America safe.”
Over the last 10 years, that prominence, combined with his service on the House Foreign Relations Committee and, subsequently, the Senate Armed Services, Intelligence, and Judiciary Committees, also made him the target of death threats.
Tom has also been the target of criticism for articles he wrote years earlier in The Harvard Crimson, including calling Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton “race-hustling charlatans” and asserting correctly that race relations nationwide “would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life.” Predictably, he was the target of leftist criticism for sponsoring the Saving American History Act of 2020 to prevent federal funding from being used to teach and promote the New York Times’s spurious 1619 Project curriculums.
Of course, the current cadres of race-bait hate hustlers fomenting that criticism have staked their political fortunes on sowing hate and division.
Cotton’s legislative record is firmly on the right side of Liberty, in the mold of Ronald Reagan. He is accustomed to taking incoming fire and is a resilient leader. He notes, “We are living in unmistakably troubling times. We must meet them with unmistakable strength and resolve.”
Tom is the author of a 2019 book, Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery. He delivered remarks on the book at Hillsdale College.
Tom and his wife, Anna, have two kids and live near family in Little Rock.
CPT Tom Cotton: Your example of valor — a humble American Patriot defending Liberty for all above and beyond the call of duty, and in disregard for the peril to your own life — is eternal.
"Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends." (John 15:13)
Live your life worthy of his sacrifice.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate -- 1776
Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen -- standing in harm’s way in defense of American Liberty, and for Veterans, First Responders, and their families.