Larry Hopkins

Larry Jones Hopkins (born October 25, 1933) represented Kentucky's Sixth Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. He was the Republican nominee for Governor of Kentucky in 1991 and lost to Brereton C. Jones.

Hopkins served in the Kentucky House of Representatives 1972–1976 and in the Kentucky Senate 1976–1978. He served in the United States House of Representatives January 3, 1979 – January 3, 1993. His principal committee assignment in Congress was Armed Services, where he was a principal House cosponsor of the Military Reorganization Act of 1987. In 1991 Hopkins ran for governor and defeated Larry Forgy in the Republican primary. Hopkins lost the general election to Brereton C. Jones who polled 540,468 votes (64.7%) to Hopkins' 294,452 (35.3%). While Kentucky Republicans had been competitive in the Gubernatorial races of the era, Hopkins overwhelming loss was in part due to his false claim to have been a Korean War veteran. In fact, he enlisted in the Marines in 1954, 11 months after the war ended. The exposure of that claim was harmful, if not devastating, in Kentucky, a state with a large military presence at Ft. Campbell and a large number of military veterans. Hopkins did not seek re-election to the House in 1992, due in part to his loss in the race for governor and also because he had bounced checks on the House Bank. He was appointed by the Bush 41 Administration to a civil service post in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.