Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal did the honorable thing last week. He confessed that he’d gotten Vivek Ramaswamy all wrong:
A long, long time ago, in 2022, Mr. Ramaswamy was a promising arrival on the political scene, a youthful and gifted entrepreneur with a classic American success story, ready to put his many talents at the disposal of the American people. I interviewedhim several times and was impressed. He wrote passionately on these pages and elsewhere about reversing the retreat from the American values of political and economic freedom. But his performance on the campaign trail and in debates has betrayed that promise. Last week he capped a yearlong descent into the gutter by seeking political advantage in publicly rebuking another Republican for her parenting skills.
The transformation of Mr. Ramaswamy from brilliant young outsider of principled views and fresh energy to a parody of the most cynical, self-promoting and calculating opportunist is thus complete: from George Bailey to Elmer Gantry in less than 12 months.
Well, it happens to the best of us. It’s happened to me—more than once. In the most embarrassing instance, I wrote a book—well, half a book—about a fellow named Eric Greitens, who created a terrific public service organization, got elected Governor of Missouri—and then became a fanatic Trumper, accused wife-beater and was hounded from office.
The book was called Charlie Mike. Please indulge me:
The story begins with David Petraeus, who mentored me in the nuances of counter-insurgency warfare at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was surrounded by a group of the smartest, most disciplined and honorable public servants I’ve met in 50 years of reporting: military intellectuals, members of the U.S. Army. They ripped me apart when I fell down in my reading assignments. They ripped me for my weight and my dress. “Klein,” Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl once said, staring at my loafers, “you’re so lazy you can’t even bother to tie your shoes in the morning.”
It was love at first sight. And when the time came, I went to Iraq and then to Afghanistan, to watch this new generation of Soldiers implement counter-intelligence insurgency strategy, which really is a fancy name for community policing. I watched Captain Jeremiah Ellis send out his troops into the town of Sanjaray, just west of Kandahar—not to search for the Taliban, but to ask the residents what kind of help we could give them. We had CRP funds for public works. The people—who, I imagine, had never before been asked their opinion about anything before—told our troops they wanted us to reopen a school the Canadians had built and the Taliban had shut down and booby-trapped. The school was being used as bait by the Taliban; it was a complicated operation to liberate it. Captain Ellis, from Winterset, Iowa, went about his work with intelligence and enthusiasm. One day, I watched him—helmet off, sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug—convince a merchant to let our troops use his roof, which overlooked the school, as an observation point. He was brilliant at it…and a lightbulb went off: If he could do that here, under fire, using an interpreter, with such ease and grace, he could go home to Iowa and run for office.
I checked in with General Petraeus when I got home. “You’re not just training them for asymmetric warfare,” I gushed. “You’re training them to be politicians. You’re training the next great generation of public servants.” (I went back to Sanjaray several times, saw a succession of young Captains work to reopen the school. They eventually succeeded; General Petraeus attended the opening ceremony. I don’t know if the Taliban have allowed it to remain open.)
Books about veterans are a hard sell. The public sees them as victims. PTSD, drug abuse, unemployment, homelessness. I’d once written a book like that about Vietnam veterans called Payback. It may have sold eight copies. But another book needed to be written, a positive book; this was a different generation of veterans. They were volunteers, they were into service. They wanted to “Charlie Mike”—which means “continue the mission” in military radio jargon.
So I went to work. I spent years interviewing the most spectacular group of kids, those who had come home to continue their mission. General Petraeus, David Gergen and Paul Reickhoff of IAVA helped me find them. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, who was one of them. But in the end, I chose to focus on two organizations. One was Team Rubicon, an international disaster relief organization, founded by two Marine Sergeants, Jake Wood and William McNulty. I went out on deployments with Team Rubicon, did tornado relief in Oklahoma; it was exhilarating. (I called Petraeus and told him about that, too; he went on to join the Team Rubicon board.)
The other was called The Mission Continues, and it was founded by Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL. It offered six-month public service fellowships to wounded veterans. Greitens was a hard-charger, a Rhodes Scholar, a White House fellow, a goody-goody who had been shunned by the SEALs because he blew the whistle on drug use by a superior officer; he had spent his teenage years serving in refugee camps; he had worked for Mother Theresa in Varanasi. The Mission Continues was a blue-chip organization, “a challenge not a charity” was the slogan. I interviewed dozens of veterans whose lives had been transformed by Greitens, men and women who would stop a bullet for him. Today, hundreds and hundreds are leading valuable, productive lives of leadership in their communities.
Thus ended the book. I remained active with both organizations, donated a portion of the proceeds of Charlie Mike to their programs. But there were no proceeds. People I admired like Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tom Brokaw and Jon Stewart raved about it…but most people still saw veterans as bummers. There were more entertaining books to read under a beach umbrella. A reviewer in the New York Times noted, brilliantly, that Charlie Mike wasn’t as much fun as Primary Colors. No matter. It was a good book. You win some, you lose some.
Jon Stewart and I continued to work with The Mission Continues. We spoke at fund-raisers, participated in service days. It just felt great to be around those kids. And then, after the book was published, Eric Greitens decided to run for office. I knew he was a Republican (though his lovely parents were Dems), but that didn’t matter. He was honest, I thought, and he had a lot of very good ideas about governance. He was elected. Then a story broke about him having an affair with his hair-dresser, whom he was said to have bound and photographed in his basement. The affair was not implausible, even if Eric dressed himself as a straight arrow; the torture part seemed a bit much; no photograph ever turned up. Other charges—corruption—were made and they didn’t seem like much more than a political vendetta. But his enemies drove him from office—and that’s when things began to get pretty hairy: Eric maintained the support of the most fanatic, conspiracy-addled Trumpers, people he’d normally avoid like the bubonic. But he found solace in them. He lurched toward the authoritarian populist right. His wife, an academic named Sheena Chestnut, left him. He ran for the Senate and was leading the race when Sheena went public with claims that Greitens had physically abused her and the children. Sheena’s rock solid, but Eric had seemed so, too. (I speak with his friends from time to time—but not with Eric—and no one can explain what happened to the guy, beyond a toxic case of overweening ambition.)
Your books are like your children, goes the cliche. But my embarrassment over Greitens made Charlie Mike an orphan, even if all his transgressions took place well after the book was written. I had gotten him wrong. Others had, too…but I shouldn’t have.
Then, a few weeks ago, I attended the annual gala of With Honor, the political action committee that supports the 30-member bipartisan For Country military caucus in the House. I wrote about that marvelous event in this space. Wes Moore spoke; David Gergen was honored. David graciously mentioned the years I’d spent promoting the idea that these veterans would be terrific political leaders. I spent time with many of the caucus members—spectacular young leaders like Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Jason Crow of Colorado, Steve Womack of Arkansas, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin (I wish I’d gotten a chance to chat with Jared Golden of Maine, who spoke beautifully). And I realized my embarrassment about Charlie Mike had been misplaced: I was wrong about Eric Greitens, but my thesis was right—this is a great generation of Americans, in large part because of the service, sacrifice, love, discipline and honor they’d learned through their military service. Despite all the crap going on, they are a real source of optimism for the future. As Eric Greitens taught me to say, “Thank you for your service. We still need you.”
I don’t know if Eric will ever find his way back to the Sanity caucus, but if he reads these words I’d offer this: You need to follow the advice you gave to so many others. The path to redemption lies in service. It’s therapy for the mind and the soul. As Wes Moore says, “Service will save us.”
In fact, I’m so proud of Charlie Mike that I’m not above a little commerce here. I’m happy to send signed copies of the book to the first twenty readers who purchase a subscription to Sanity Clause:
Or, better still, give one as a gift for the holidays:
This edition of Sanity Clause is in memory of Clay Hunt…and all the others who came home and didn’t make it.
I think it is fair to say, Joe, that you and I share enthusiasm for fields -music, politics, journalism, sports, the military-where success requires at least a touch of arrogance. You don’t become a Senator, lead guitarist, brigadier general or columnist on humility. Political arrogance may be the most complex of all - there was a great book about it in the 1992 Democratic primary by some guy whose name I forget. :). But history surely tells us that the arrogant are especially vulnerable to “giving the people what they want” with occasionally disastrous results. I still believe that, “all other things being equal”, the candidate with a military record is generally preferable, but the impact of the toxic stew that the Republican base has become cannot be ignored either.
Joe, this sounds like a book nonetheless. In fact, a better one -- deeper, more unexpected, more tragic. Call my agent!