The Cynic is based on interviews with more than seventy-five people who have worked alongside Mitch McConnell or otherwise interacted with him over the course of his career. McConnell declined to be interviewed, as did his wife, Elaine Chao. Many of the McConnell remarks and observations quoted in the book are derived from John David Dyche’s authorized 2009 biography of McConnell, Republican Leader. Dyche interviewed McConnell for his book and also was granted access to oral history interviews that McConnell gave over the years to John Kleber, a Kentucky historian. Other books helpful in researching this book include Geoffrey Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin, Robert A. Caro’s Master of the Senate, Gabriel Sherman’s The Loudest Voice in the Room, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. Among the many articles that informed the book were Clara Bingham’s 2005 piece in Washington Monthly on the Martin County slurry spill, Phillip Babich’s 2003 piece on the same subject in Salon, John Judis’s 2001 piece in the New Republic on McConnell’s relations with China, John Cheves’s 2006 series in the Lexington Herald-Leader on McConnell’s interactions with campaign donors, Joshua Green’s 2011 profile of McConnell in the Atlantic, and Jason Cherkis and Zach Carter’s 2013 profile of him in The Huffington Post. The book is also indebted to the daily beat reporting of Capitol Hill veterans such as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane, the New York Times’ Carl Hulse, and the Louisville Courier-Journal’s James R. Carroll, among others.
The author made two reporting trips to Kentucky in the course of researching the book, to western Kentucky in August 2013 and Louisville and eastern Kentucky in April 2014.