After graduating from the University of Louisville, Wetherby held several offices in the Jefferson County judicial system before being elected lieutenant governor in 1947 as the choice of 2nd District U.S. Rep. Earle C. Clements, D-Morganfield, who won the primary for the top job.

Wetherby won immediate acclaim by calling a special legislative session to increase funding for education and government benefits from the state's budget surplus.

In 1951, campaigning as a "Middletown farmer" in a largely rural state, he won a four-year full term as governor, during which he continued and expanded many of Clements' programs, including increased road construction and industrial diversification.

He endorsed the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation order in the case of Brown v. Board of Education and appointed a biracial commission to oversee the successful integration of the state's schools.

[8] School board races fascinated him, and he allied himself with a faction of the Jefferson County Democratic Party headed by Leland Taylor and Ben Ewing.

[1] In March 1947, he resigned as trial commissioner of the juvenile court in order to run for lieutenant governor.

[12] Previous lieutenant governors did little beyond their constitutionally mandated duty of presiding over the Kentucky Senate, but during Clements' administration, Wetherby was charged with preparing a state budget, presiding over the Legislative Research Commission, leading tours for the state Chamber of Commerce, and attending the Southern Governors Conference.

[7] One of his first actions was to call a special legislative session for March 6, 1951, for the purpose of allocating the state's $10 million budget surplus.

[11] Among the expenditures approved in the special session were increases in teachers' salaries, a topic on which Clements had been more conservative, and state benefits for the needy and government employees.

[14] Wetherby's popularity soared as a result of this session, and he seriously considered running for the Senate seat vacated by the death of Virgil Chapman in 1951.

[15][17] In the general election, Wetherby faced Republican Court of Appeals Judge Eugene Siler.

[22] Because three members of Wetherby's close family had been killed in automobile accidents on the state's roadways, improving roads was a high priority for him.

[20][24] He encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to construct a federal toll road connecting the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

[26] Wetherby also brought national attention to Kentucky as prime hunting and fishing land by conducting his own personal sporting excursions in the state.

[27] In 1954, he used the state police to quash labor unrest in Central City and other parts of the Western Kentucky Coalfield.

[20] He was not a pawn of industry, however: He secured passage of the state's first laws regulating strip mining and killed a right-to-work bill in 1954.

[25] He secured federal flood control programs for the watersheds of the Salt, Licking, Green, and Kentucky Rivers, saving valuable farmland.

[28] He called for the creation of an educational television network and initiated the state's first publicly funded bookmobile program.

[20] He supported the 1954 Minimum Foundation Program, an amendment to the state constitution that allowed funding to be allocated to school districts based upon need rather than number of pupils.

[14] In 1954 and 1955 Wetherby chaired the Southern Governors Conference and urged the sgovernors to peacefully implement desegregation as required by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

[29] In Kentucky, he appointed an advisory council of both white and black citizens to oversee public school integration, which was accomplished with little acrimony compared to other states.

[31] Wetherby had named Combs to the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1951 to fill a vacancy created by the death of Judge Roy Helm.

[33] Chandler promised that, if elected, he would use "good, honest Kentucky wood" in his office and that all Kentuckians would be invited to the capitol to walk on the $20,000 rug.

[36] Barkley's death occurred so late in the year that there was not time for a Democratic primary to choose the party's candidate for the open seat; Chandler had persuaded the legislature to move the primary from early August to late May to complicated the re-election bid of Clements, who had become acting majority leader when Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson suffered a heart attack in 1955.

[35] In the general election, Cooper defeated Wetherby 538,505 (53%) to 473,140 (47%) and Clements lost to Thruston Morton by 6,981 votes.

[37] After this defeat, Wetherby moved to the state capital of Frankfort and secured a position at Brighton Engineering, owned by his former foe, Bill May.

That gave Breathitt a working majority, and senators elected Wetherby president pro tem.