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.

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.

It has also made him the target of leftists trying to shoot down this rising star.

In 2021, a leftwing publication asserted that Cotton’s claim that he is a Ranger is not correct because he never served with the 75th Ranger Regiment. But retired Command Sergeant Major Rick Merritt, a former Regimental Sergeant Major with the 75th Ranger Regiment, defended Cotton, saying those assertions were “absurd” and “slanderous.” Merritt left no room for dissent: “He’s 100% a Ranger. … He will always be a Ranger. An attack on him is an attack on every veteran who has served honorably.” The Army affirmed that its U.S. Army Ranger Course is “the Army’s premier leadership school.”

For his part, Cotton responded: “I graduated from the Ranger School. I wore the Ranger tab in combat with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. This is not about my military record. This is about my politics.”

The criticism did not stick, unlike the plethora of documented “stolen valor” claims made by Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.

Tom has also been criticized for articles he wrote years earlier in The Crimson Tide, 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.” Of course, the current cadres of socialist Democrats, with the support of their Leftmedia publicists, have staked their political fortunes on race hustling and sowing hate and division.

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.

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.

(Read more Profiles of Valor here.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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