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Photographs by Ashley Gieseking
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No alcohol was allowed at Ed Martin’s high-school graduation party in Whitehouse Station, N.J. One by one, he pulled his friends toward his room, where he’d slid a bottle of whiskey under the mattress. Each guy got a shot, and Ed had a shot with each of them. Mid-evening, his mother marched out in the middle of the nice Catholic boys from Saint Peter’s Preparatory School and held what struck Ed’s buddy John Hester as “a press conference. She said, ‘Apparently Ed had a bottle of Wild Turkey. You will not be seeing Ed for the rest of the evening. You are all welcome to stay.’”
Hester laughs—hard, not just a chuckle. “The next morning was the most uncomfortable breakfast I’ve ever had. Ed was grounded that whole summer.” It’s still funny, he explains, because it was either spectacularly poor judgment or the only act of rebellion he’s ever seen his friend commit. “Ed was the Alex Keaton type, from Family Ties. Knew how to shake your hand. Everybody agreed he was either going to be a politician or a priest.”
In November 2010, Ed Martin lost a congressional race to the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan—by only 4,600 votes. He alleged voter fraud. Then he took his family on a week’s vacation to Williamsburg, Va.
We waited. Martin had been through so many incarnations already: aide-de-camp for the archbishop, reformer for the city election board, right hand (soon slapped) of former Gov. Matt Blunt. How was he going to reinvent himself this time?
He was returning to his law practice, he said. But he was clearly still in campaign mode. On January 2, he rented Two Hearts Banquet Center in South County to thank his supporters. He tied red-white-and-blue balloons around the room and set up two easels displaying photos of his deceased congressional campaign. Retirees stood in clumps, talking glumly. Balloons rose ceilingward, caught on currents of heated air, then bounced down again. Shirt collar open, trademark red tie missing, Martin moved through the crowd cheering people up.
“We’re gonna get on the voter fraud stuff,” he promised one supporter. “We’re not gonna wait for them to not tell us… I started a Facebook page this morning.”
On it, he described himself as “a community leader with a commitment to public service and assisting those in need”—deft phrasing, since he believes most assistance should come from the private sector. He also listed his new website, edmartinformissouri.com,
on which he’d already begun issuing press releases reacting to—well, everything. After U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Arizona, he proclaimed the assault “an attack on the very concept of self-government.”
Then he posted a link on Twitter to a Wall Street Journal piece that began, “One of the tragedies of tragedies is that some politicians just can’t resist the urge to use them for political gain.”
Martin is attractive in a squarish, somebody’s-dad way. His dark hair draws a straight horizontal line above his forehead, and his squinty eyes look friendly, sometimes stubborn. He can say outrageous things and sound good-natured. He bounces on his toes, throws a verbal punch, and pauses to grin at the crowd.
“He’s an affable guy,” says Kevin Horrigan, deputy editorial page editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But he’s not fit for public office. He is capable of saying things and making them sound like fact when in fact they do not withstand any parsing at all.” How did he come so close, then? “He knows retail politics, he knows districts, he knows vote counting—and he knows that politically, most people’s attention span is nonexistent.”
Another political observer described Martin as “professionally affable. Privately amusing. Smart. Missing an off switch. Heart of coal. Might have had a cameo in The Wrath of Khan.”
That’s a recent take, though. Twenty years ago, Martin looked like a scholarly young man driven by traditional Catholic ideals and deeply loyal to authority. In his thirties, he looked like an ambitious, well-connected young politician driven by conservative Republican ideals and deeply loyal to his friends. Now he’s 40 and a little more seasoned, and the Tea Party is providing a
new audience.
To him, there’s no break in continuity. Same values, different crowd.
Martin grew up the middle kid of three, his father a lawyer, his mother a nurse. He played in the backyard creek, damming it. He oiled his Little League catcher’s mitt and slept with it under his mattress.
Whitehouse Station was safe, gently rural, and well-to-do. (In the 2000 census, median family income was $92,793, and not a single family lived below the poverty line.) But when it came time for high school, the Martins put Ed on a commuter train to Newark and told him how to catch the PATH train, then walk, to Saint Peter’s Prep in Jersey City. He still sounds a little shocked that they let him take such risks.
“The first two days of school, I didn’t know a soul,” he says. A Filipino classmate invited him to sit with him, so his first set of friends was Filipino. Sophomore year, he started hanging around with Hester and his friends, who lived in Jersey City. Hester liked how down-to-earth Martin was: “Other kids had those Volkswagen Cabriolets, and Ed would come barreling down the block in this beat-up old blue Malibu Classic.”
Hester’s dad was a truck driver, just as strict as Martin’s father, but always ready to throw an arm around his son, tease back and forth with his friends, even crack an off-color joke.
“Ed’s parents were definitely on the serious side, and kind of dry,” Hester says. “Mom would have the food line ready to go, making sure everybody ate their vegetables. Dad would sit on the couch and kind of chuckle once in a while. Ed’s told me he opened up later, and their personal relationship’s gotten a lot looser. But Ed always kept in touch with my dad.”
Martin went to the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit liberal arts college in Worcester, Mass. He majored in English and later added a certificate in peace and conflict studies—which he usually shortens to “peace studies.” But he was not passionately interested in peace. “It was this interdisciplinary thing, and I sort of had the qualifications, so it sort of just fit,” he says.
He’d gone to Mexico on a cultural immersion trip, and two people he met there had died of dysentery. “That was stunning,” he says. “Someone we just met died.” He came home, signed up for an anthropology course, and met Susan Rodgers, who now chairs that department at Holy Cross. She says Martin wasn’t necessarily a deep thinker, but he was a creative one, “with the ability to latch onto interesting and important problems. I do know all of us found him a whole lot of fun to talk to.”
Rodgers’ research area was Indonesia, so Martin applied for a Watson Fellowship to study water purification there. He applied for a Rotary scholarship as backup—and wound up receiving both. He could spend two years in Indonesia!
He didn’t want to. A few months after arriving in Indonesia, he wrote to Rotary International and apologized, saying he wanted to study philosophy and theology, and Indonesia wasn’t the right place. “They write back and say they’ve already put money aside, as long as I study abroad,” he says. “So I write to the Gregorian University.”
The choice sounds almost casual, a ticket out of Indonesia. But the Gregorian is perhaps the most prestigious of Rome’s pontifical universities, alma mater to eight of the last 11 popes and probably a quarter of the world’s bishops.
“I fly to Rome, and I don’t know a soul,” Martin says. (Not knowing a soul is a state he finds intolerable—until he’s fixed it.) He got himself invited to a prayer group and made friends there. “It was nice,” he says, “not too much praying. We’d pray and then almost always we’d go for Chinese food.” He befriended a Jesuit who, sensing eager but undirected ambition, suggested Saint Louis University’s law school. Then the Rev. Kevin O’Rourke, who was starting a bioethics program at Saint Louis University, came to Rome to lecture.
“I go up, I say I’ve applied to SLU; he says, ‘Great, let’s go to dinner,’” says Martin.
O’Rourke remembers him as “a straight arrow. Very fine person. You liked him immediately. We went to Via della Croce—what was the German beer they served there? We struck up a friendship. I think he knew bioethics was a developing field, and he had an idea it would blend in well with a law degree.”
And what about the Ph.D. in philosophy and theology from the Gregorian University? “I didn’t finish, ultimately,” Martin says. “I came home with another bachelor’s.” He pauses. “You think it’s pure thoughts and deep thoughts, and then it starts to dawn on you: It’s like everything else—it’s a game.”
Martin moved to St. Louis for law school. “I have nothing to do,” he recalls. “Thursday night. Friday night. Saturday night, I do laundry.” Sunday, he went down to Busch Stadium and got into the press box by flashing Vatican press credentials he’d wangled to see Mother Teresa: “I get some popcorn and a hot dog, and Bob Costas comes in out of the booth. I remember leaning against the post talking to him, playing it cool. You’re in the press box; you can’t be like, ‘That’s Bob Costas!’”
After the game, broadcaster Skip Erwin waved Martin along to the locker rooms with the rest of the pack. Martin followed and eventually left through the players’ door, waving aside excited cries from fans who thought he was on the team.
“I went home still not knowing a soul in St. Louis—except Bob Costas and Skip Erwin.”
Martin used to walk from his Waterman Avenue apartment to law school in midtown, taking back streets and admiring the old brick houses. After Mass at the Cathedral Basilica one morning, Martin shook the cool, dry palm of the new archbishop, Justin Rigali, and said, “Hey, Archbishop, my name is Ed Martin, and we have a mutual friend, Monsignor Elmer.”
Startled, the normally stiff, reserved Rigali blurted, “How do you know Charlie Elmer?”
“I studied in Rome for two years,” Martin said, adding that, like Rigali, he was new to St. Louis and knew no one. Rigali called a few weeks later and invited him to dinner.
More dinners followed. “Do you think you want to be a priest?” Rigali asked.
“I spent a couple years thinking about it, praying about it,” Martin answered gravely. “I really don’t think it’s what I’m meant to do.”
Two years later, when Rigali helped organize the Synod of the Americas, he nominated Martin to go to Rome as a peritus—a papal assistant—representing youth.
The month-long synod began every morning in a vast auditorium, with Pope John Paul II and various cardinals seated down in a central well, on a dais. “At 10:15, they’d break for coffee,” says Martin, “and I didn’t know any better, so I would just go down into the well and talk.” He took to chatting with the pope’s assistant, and sometimes exchanged a few words with the pope. When it came his turn to have dinner in the papal dining room—everyone rotated in once—he says he waited for an opening and said, “Holy Father, my friend Archbishop Rigali and I often eat together in St. Louis, and the food here is almost as good as it is at his house!” He says the room froze—until the pope laughed.
After dinner, Martin says, the pope came over to him and prodded him with his walking stick. “Mar-tan,” he said, pronouncing it like the French, “let’s go pray.” They walked to the papal chapel “shoulder to shoulder.” Encouraged, Martin later told the assistant it would be a shame if he never got to go to Mass with the pope. The invitation came the following week. Martin wore a shiny red tie, and after Mass in the papal chapel, John Paul II paused to say, “The tie is bright.”
“The blood of St. Andrew,” Martin shot back, because it was that feast day.
“Oh, Mar-tan, always a good response,” the pope said.
Those exchanges meant the world to Martin. In 2010, during his congressional campaign, Jerry Berger quoted him as saying, “I had lunch with Pope John Paul II almost every day.” And when Martin appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News put up a subtitle that read “served as special assistant to Pope John Paul II.”
Martin doubles up on his ambitions: applies for two fellowships, tries for a doctorate in both philosophy and theology, studies law and healthcare ethics at once, works for the city and then the state, runs for the House and then the Senate. Nearly always, he gets in over his head, bobs back up, and manages to float his new course as a far better choice. He leaves Rome with a second bachelor’s degree so he can start law school, then almost quits law school (“I didn’t love it”) and scales back his biomedical-ethics degree: “I never got my head around a dissertation, so I examined for the M.A. and got out,” he says. “I just got going with life.”
As soon as he graduated from law school, he was offered a job that would win him brownie points for the rest of his life—and more enmity than he ever dreamed.
Rigali asked him to direct the archdiocesan Human Rights Office.
Martin was 28, the youngest such director in the U.S. He wrote a letter introducing himself to the staff, reminiscing how he’d been reading “from a Catholic study Bible and an old tattered copy of the Vatican II documents” when “a friend delivered to me a message that I had been awarded a Rotary scholarship to study in Rome.”
His new staff wasn’t charmed. Angie O’Gorman, who was working on immigrant deportation cases, wrote a letter to archdiocesan officials complaining that he had no experience in human-rights work. At the time, the St. Louis office was one of the most active in the nation, tackling fair labor practices, global human rights, and economic justice. “Ed did not understand the difference between charity and human rights,” O’Gorman says, jaw clenched. “And he decorated his office with hand grenades!”
They were not hand grenades, Martin says. “They were plastic land mines.” They were used for training, he explains; his brother is a Marine. “It was really exciting,” he says. “I could sort of dabble in law. [U.S. Rep. Richard] Gephardt’s people would call in the morning and [U.S. Sen. John] Ashcroft’s people in the afternoon.” He stayed through the 2000 presidential election, thrilled that candidates were fighting over the Catholic vote.
Archbishop Rigali wanted the Human Rights Office reined in—more orthodoxy, less autonomy. So Martin shifted the priorities. “There was a whole bunch of social-justice stuff,” he recalls. “The office was doing strawberry pickers. And they weren’t doing much meaningfully about African-Americans. We did the jubilee Freedom Ride, took buses and went to Selma. It was really heady. The idea was, what does faithful citizenship call you to do as a Catholic?
“I think some people would say, ‘You didn’t want to take on the hard stuff, and in some ways doing the Freedom Ride is easier than taking on strawberry pickers,’” he says. “I don’t agree with them.”
When Martin fired O’Gorman in May 2001, she was the last of the office’s original staff except the secretary. In June, he left to begin a judicial clerkship he’d promised Rigali he’d postpone.
Martin’s 2010 campaign bio described one of the highlights of his years in the Human Rights Office as “his role in the Pope’s January 1999 visit to St. Louis, during which he escorted civil rights legend Mrs. Rosa Parks to her historic meeting with the Pope.”
It almost didn’t happen.
“I get to her hotel, and the guy says, ‘Mrs. Parks is napping,’” Martin recalls. “What do you do? You are now in a position where you are snubbing Rosa Parks! I said, ‘Look, we are going to lose this window,’ so finally we get her out of the hotel. We are late, and I’m walkie-talkie-ing. We get four blocks away and all the streets are shut down. I’m on the walkie-talkie saying, ‘Guys, what are we going to do? The story will be ‘Pope doesn’t see Rosa Parks’! I’m frazzled, thinking I’m going to let the archbishop down. She turns around and says, ‘Young man, sometimes you need to have a little patience.’”
The meeting finally took place later, in the back of the Cathedral Basilica. “The acoustics were really bad, echoes, and he not speaking English as his first language, her not speaking Italian, both of them old—it was sort of fits and starts,” he says. “But we did get the photo!”
After Martin left the Human Rights Office, what had seemed like a linear progression started looking more like a computer game where the gopher pops up all over the place, wherever you least expect him. First, he retreated into conservative legal research and public policy. Then he got bored and a little flamboyant. He sued Illinois’ infamous then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich for mandating access to emergency contraception. He plunged into the national school-choice battle and Republican state politics, getting to know future Gov. Matt Blunt.
In 2005, Blunt appointed Martin to chair the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners, where he made a name for himself as a tough, partisan reformer. He shook hands with the city’s most powerful black politicians. He stayed active nationally, too: Rich Chrismer, communications director for then–U.S. Sen. Jim Talent, ran into him “at various events in Washington. He would often keep in touch with the leadership in various congressional offices.”
In 2006, Blunt picked Martin to be his chief of staff. The man he replaced, Ken McClure, is now an administrator at Missouri State University in Springfield. He says even though Martin disagreed with Blunt about stem-cell research, he’d been helping the governor mend fences with the right-to-life community. But Blunt was dropping in the popularity polls, and he needed someone more politically savvy and aggressive than mild, wonkish McClure. He made Martin—who readily admitted he knew nothing about the structure of state government—his chief of staff.
In Jefferson City, Martin’s office had “all kinds of Cardinal memorabilia, a Stan Musial jersey on the coat rack, and baseballs sitting at various points in the room,” McClure recalls. He didn’t notice any land mines.
Then reporters started asking for Martin’s emails. He says he had deleted the requested emails, because they weren’t important enough to be preserved for the public record. Granted, a backup tape existed, but he figured a Sunshine Law request did not extend to backup tapes. The young deputy general counsel, Scott Eckersley, challenged his interpretation—so persistently, Martin deemed it insubordination and fired him, citing all manner of other offenses. Eckersley filed suit to clear his character, media outlets filed suit to gain access to the emails, and the whole debacle wound up costing the state roughly $2 million. In November 2008, Martin resigned.
He returned to St. Louis and worked on his SaveAB.com website, which was either a brilliant strategic move or a quixotic attempt to keep the Anheuser-Busch brewery in town. “Looking back, I see that the writing was on the wall,” Martin says. “But we came shoulder to shoulder, union guys and Republicans and me and [Lt. Gov.] Peter Kinder and Mayor Slay—and there were Japanese, Chinese, all these TV crews. That was pretty cool.”
Martin captured at least 50,000—he sometimes says 80,000—email addresses through SaveAB.com. Before he shut down the site, he used it to announce his run for Congress.
His 2010 campaign raised more than $1.6 million and drew wide support, including that of former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, who’d opposed Martin on stem-cell research. “This election’s not about subtle things,” Danforth said. “This is about the direction of the country.”
Martin came closer to winning than anyone predicted, taking rural areas and outer suburbs, Ste. Genevieve County, and Jefferson County before losing the city.
In early January, I meet with Martin in his office. On his desk, a tiny Nativity scene sits next to a book titled War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World. The baseballs have been confined to a single shadow box. There is a photo of him with a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in the background.
He still swears he’s not running for office, but he’s wearing the solid, cherry-red tie that became a campaign trademark. A Post-Dispatch reporter once commented on the cowboy boots he wears with his pinstripe suits, so he was “locked in,” he jokes, and wore them every day for years. His wife never liked them, so now it’s the tie.
He comes around to sit in the other guest chair, and without prompting, he starts talking. His sentences take off in all directions, like spokes from a wheel. He talks fast, gives vivid details, adds quick caveats, backtracks, enthuses, digresses, tells lots of stories. They’re not all of equal weight, but they all tickle him.
He confides that he has no sense of smell, which would seem a handy trait in politics.
He offers a scoop—that after leaving as Blunt’s chief of staff, he had open-heart surgery, and no one knew. (He told the Riverfront Times last fall.) He says he wanted to reveal the upcoming surgery to “soften” his departure, but “to his credit, the governor said, ‘Let’s not,’ because it would have made it too personal.”
Martin says “candidly” quite often, a verbal tic that in someone else might signal candor’s opposite. But Martin’s so eager to speak whatever enters his head, he’ll cheerfully shoot himself in the foot just to keep going.
He also says “I’m blessed,” and that, too, he seems to mean. He adores his wife, Dr. Carol Martin, a physician on the gerontology faculty at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. “I think she changed me,” he says. “She once said, ‘I love you like God.’ That’s a big deal. Your parents love you, but they have to let you go. And then you have somebody like her. She’s made me confident in a way that everything’s all right, no matter what.”
During Martin’s tenure at the Board of Election Commissioners, seven staffers were fired or demoted. One, Jeanne Bergfeld, sued, saying he fired her because she was “not Republican enough.” It’s a weird echo of a comment by O’Gorman: “I was told Ed had said I wasn’t Catholic enough.”
Bergfeld’s 2007 lawsuit settlement included a nondisparagement clause and a letter, signed by Martin, saying she’d served 12 years as “a conscientious and dedicated professional.”
On October 20, 2010, he was quoted in the Riverfront Times saying that Bergfeld had “twelve years of not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.”
On October 21, she filed another lawsuit.
I ask how many people Martin fired at the governor’s office.
“There’s a difference between firing and moving people on,” he says. “I was asked specifically by the governor to take a careful review of the whole place. We moved out some people. So—I don’t know. I don’t keep a tally of that too well.”
He summons one example: “I said, ‘Boy, that’s a real screw-up, and somebody better be held accountable. This might be a firing offense.’ I think someone read that to mean, ‘This is a firing offense.’ Now, it probably was a firing offense…” He remembers two more examples, one of them Eckersley, whom he still says “was terminated for all sorts of other problems.” (The court disagreed and has cleared Eckersley of all allegations.)
Eckersley taped Martin firing him, in a conversation hot with frustration and profanity. “He used to lose his temper like a football coach on crack,” Eckersley says.
“I’m certainly someone who doesn’t hide my emotions,” Martin says, “and I was probably under more stress than ever.”
Fact is, the man doesn’t have much of a filter. Enthusiasm and anger color his assessments, and he’s always circling back later, trying to correct himself. At a Missouri Roundtable for Life meeting in 2009, he was taped calling Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan “very, very devious. She does—with a, with a clever hand—she does the devil’s work.” In 2010, on a Christian radio show, he called her brother, U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, “contemptuous of liberty as we know it.” Just where does he think a politician should draw the line?
“I think the thing that’s disturbing, or harder—‘Where do you draw the line?’ I guess is a harder question, but where do you not tell the truth about stuff?” Martin says. “My campaign—I don’t think we ever told an untruth, but that doesn’t mean—[Carnahan’s] boat, we called it a yacht, that he’d never paid taxes on—that’s a wonderful way to make a point. But ‘Ed Martin is in the pocket of big oil’? My wife’s grandfather gave her stock.”
More than $100,000 worth, which he was 300 days late reporting in campaign filings. “And the whole reason that came up,” says someone from Carnahan’s campaign staff, “was because after the BP oil spill, Ed basically went out and said the oil industry should be totally deregulated.”
As Martin tells it, St. Louis Tea party co-founder Bill Hennessy sought him out for advice. As Hennessy tells it, Martin emailed him on Facebook offering support. These creation stories are not mutually exclusive. The affinity came naturally, and Martin helped Hennessy strategize from the start. Before the first St. Louis Tea Party, “I said, ‘Bill, put a press release out and say you are going to get 30 people. If you get 50, you will have 40 percent more,” Martin recalls. An estimated 400 people showed up. “I remember turning to him and saying, ‘Bill, this is a big deal.’
“The Tea Party’s an interesting study,” he continues, listing half a dozen party affiliates who’ve spun off into unprecedented success and national media attention. “But they didn’t coalesce around a Tea Party structure and continue to build the Tea Party.”
And what is the Tea Party, ultimately? “A bunch of people that genuinely care about the country and think things aren’t going in the right direction,” he says. “They all have different priorities.” His own emphasis is—and was, even before he read the tea leaves—smaller government, with less spending. He’s “a classic Reagan Republican,” says talk-show host and Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch.
I ask about the famous July 2010 quote on-air with Christian talk-show host Gina Loudon, when Martin said, “That’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the growth of government. It’s this taking away of that freedom—the freedom, the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you. And I think that’s one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of, that the Obama administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.”
“It’s a very poor choice of words,” he sighs. “I immediately thought, ‘That wasn’t very artful.’ What I meant was, we even started as a country that was based on wanting to get away from an overintrusive government, so when you think about what does it mean when government grows—and for me Obamacare is an intrusion—I believe our freedoms are in jeopardy. Now it’s not like today that’s happening. And I really didn’t like that the quote sounded like ‘Christ for everyone.’ The beauty of freedom of religion is, you don’t have to have any religion in America.”
He didn’t clarify that in the fundraising letter he sent out to supporters, though, the day after MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews skewered him for the quote. “I believe religious liberties are in peril,” Martin wrote. “I stand by what I said… All liberties are under assault these days.”
Martin’s picked up a lot of support by affiliating with the Tea Party. But he’s lost more than he realizes. He loves to talk about Sr. Antona Ebo, for example, a Franciscan Sister of Mary who marched in Selma in 1965 and has been a good friend of his for 12 years.
“I feel that he has set his course,” Ebo tells me. “And the course he seems to be on, if he gives me an invitation to get on board, I just couldn’t do that.” She says she thought Martin felt a sense of mission, an impulse to make the world better.
“I don’t see any of that in this past year of campaigning.” She’s silent for a moment. “I think I am speaking from my own disappointment.”
Gentry Trotter, publisher-at-large of The St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl, runs a PR company, Multimedia PR Group, that did some work for the Blunt administration when Martin was chief of staff. To get Martin better connected in St. Louis, Trotter helped arrange a gig writing for the St. Louis Sentinel, a historic African-American newspaper. “What he wrote was milquetoast,” Trotter says, adding that when Martin left state government, he invited him to write for the Whirl and “turn the flame up a little bit.”
Martin didn’t need a second invitation. His shots at President Barack Obama and Rep. Russ Carnahan were relatively good-humored, “nothing different from what a lot of folks were saying,” Trotter says. “The idea was to slam and beat up on people. On the holidays he’d get real bland and boring, saying things about the American flag or ice cream and Mom and apple pie. But what really pissed me off—I enjoyed a good relationship with Ed up until I saw his campaign commercials. They were all purebred white! I didn’t see one Hispanic, one gay, one black. He was running for office in the city of St. Louis, and he had ignored a whole population.”
Martin says this was “not a conscious decision. And if it’s a question of people of color, I recall being fascinated by the Vietnamese workers at McArthur’s Bakery—they were in one of the commercials.”
Trotter must’ve missed them. “I kept thinking, ‘He was the human rights director—certainly he would know about racial injustice!’” he says with a groan. “I did not know his mind was closed as tight as a Peruvian jail cell. I thanked him for writing the column and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, no need to write anymore.’ He doesn’t know why, but I made sure to pull the plug on the sonofabitch. I was just so disappointed.”
In mid-January, Randy McArthur, owner of McArthur’s Bakery, reminisces by phone about how he met Martin. It was August 2009, and McArthur was protesting because he believed Carnahan had ignored his stand on the cap-and-trade bill. “Ed came out and said he’d been entertaining some thoughts to run.” McArthur promptly became his campaign treasurer.
“The rhetoric is always to help small business,” McArthur says, “but if you talked to 10 small-businesspeople, I’d be surprised if one or two said either party was doing anything to help them. That’s why a lot of us latched onto folks like Ed.”
I ask, because rumors are now flying, whether he thinks Martin will run for U.S. Senate. “I don’t think Ed would consider it,” he says instantly. “You need to be pretty well-known statewide. We talked in depth about it.” A minute later, he breaks off. “I’m just seeing something pop up.” It’s an email from Phyllis Schlafly, lending full and vigorous support to Martin should he run for Senate. He hangs up hurriedly. Then he emails: “There have been many conversations in the past 15 minutes that change the possibility of Ed looking at the Senate race. It is something he may have to consider.”
On January 27, I meet Martin at his little gingerbread house in St. Louis Hills. Jim Talent has finally, publicly, said he’s not running for Senate. Martin has yet to declare.
Around 3 p.m., his 6-year-old daughter, Madeline, bursts through the door.
“Hey, Green Machine?” he greets her.
“No, yellow,” she says blithely, dumping her backpack and turning to leave again.
“Why?” he asks. And then, quickly: “Who else got yellow?” She tosses off a few names and explains that she lost her green (good behavior) status for being “talkative.” She goes outside to play.
“I can’t believe yellow,” Martin groans. “‘Talkative’—did you hear that? She was trying to spin that as a positive development. It means she talked out.”
Maddy has two younger brothers, Edward Robert III and Michael, the “stimulus baby. Carol had him right after the economic stimulus was passed.”
That’s also when the Tea Party started.
I sit in the Martins’ living room, across from the small fireplace with Lladró figurines on its mantel, and rifle through the thick stack of news clips on my lap. St. Louis Tea Partiers calling President Obama “Our Fuhrer” and “Grand Dragon Wizard.” Calling Afghans “ragheads.” Burning a photo of Carnahan, then standing on the sidewalk outside his house, praying and weeping over a coffin, after he votes for the president’s healthcare reform bill. Screaming that President Obama was not born in the U.S. of A. Depicting him speaking in front of an American flag with hammers and sickles replacing the stars.
“People seem upset that you don’t—”
“Denounce them? Yeah. But my experience of the Tea Party, I only saw a couple of really inappropriate things, and I’m not willing to tar and feather the group. And you can’t stop long enough to denounce everybody who says anything kooky. It’s hard enough to keep my own counsel!
“If you say something stupid,” he adds, “people will figure out that you’re a fool.”
“It’s interesting,” I say. “People seem to like you, even when they disagree with you. They call you ‘affable.’ Yet you—”
“I’m not too moderate, am I? I found this on the political trail: People will disagree with you vehemently, but if you’re being respectful—”
In public settings, Martin comes across as both congenial and aggressive. You can tell when he’s a tad nervous: He gestures with his arms higher than usual, holding them away from his stocky body in a way that looks a little cartoonish. Usually, though, he’s relaxed. Even when he says he’s flustered, he’s more relaxed than most. Not dozing-cat relaxed. More like Tigger.
“I genuinely like—there’s times I don’t—but I genuinely like being around people,” he says. “I find it hard to be around people that are fake. Everybody—everybody’s suffered. It may be, you suffered when you were a kid in the schoolyard or when you were married or divorced or your kids were sick, but everybody’s suffered. To be human, you have to live through it, and it takes a certain courage. Some people are closer to that, and closer to the courage it takes to live with it. I’m sometimes able to access that in people and, almost without realizing how or why, able to relate to that. What are you eating?”
His daughter’s gotten herself a snack.
Martin picks up his phone and glances at the display. “Interesting.” He sets it down.
I raise my eyebrows.
“The whole world—” he says, and breaks off. “Now the pivot goes to whoever else said they might run, and they’re all asking.”
He makes a visible effort to return to the conversation. “I’m a middle child,” he says, more than willing to psychoanalyze himself. “‘Always been striving,’ you could say. But I’ve been in a room with John Paul II for hours and related to him in a way that was meaningful.”
The segue’s not clear to me, but he keeps going. “You could say ‘people person’; that’s sort of true. But I like being alone, too. And I like talking about nontraditional subjects.”
I ask what he learned about water purification in Indonesia.
“What I thought you were going to ask—I took a hand-held pump, and you pumped your own water,” he says. “You sort of took care of yourself. But it’s a hot place.” He regroups. “What was interesting was despite the inefficiency of the U.N. efforts, when you took a village and put in drains, no matter how inefficient, it still made a big difference.”
He believes such improvements should be made by private nonprofit groups, though. “When our government does so much, how do you know how well the priorities get met?”
Martin’s been begged by staunch supporters to add tabs on his website with his stances on the issues. I try a few standards. Government spending? “There are certain groups you have to honor first. Veterans are at the top. Common defense and some other basics. Then, to me, Social Security. When you pay in, you want that to be honored. But then you get down to Medicaid and welfare, and those are places where people aren’t paying in, so maybe those safety nets have to be more spare.”
The table lamp flashes on, as though signaling a new idea. I realize it’s dusk, and the lamp’s on a timer.
Death penalty? “I’m sort of a John Paul II death-penalty person,” he says. “I think the Catholic Church’s teaching is that it is morally OK. His statement was, ‘Yes, but it’s not necessary today.’ I think today it is necessary at times, like that kid who just got life without parole, the embassy bomber. I’m not sure I can be as Catholic on that one.”
Wait, so if the Catholic teaching is…
Oh, never mind. We climb into his truck to “ride the circuit,” picking up his sons. He notices I’ve brought nothing but my notepad and looks worried. “You have your phone?” At Edward’s nursery school, Martin starts inside, then runs back for his BlackBerry.
While he’s gone, Madeline informs me that “when Mom needs help, he usually doesn’t help, ’cause he’s speaking so much. Sometimes he’s on the phone in his underwear!” His favorite game, she informs me, is tag. “And he kisses my mom a lot!” she says, her face scrunching up.
When Martin returns to the truck. I repeat Madeline’s last comment. He considers it judiciously. “I’d say just the right amount. My parents are not, were not, too affectionate. But we are.” I’ve heard Carol’s reserved—do they balance each other? “When we’re out, she sometimes calls it The Ed Martin Show!” he admits. She’s no longer nervous about him running for office, though: “Brenda Talent, Jim’s wife, told us she’d only have to do three things: Show up at the kickoff, show up election night, and in between, take care of your family. That was liberating for us.”
What was hardest, in last year’s campaign, was The Real Ed Martin (therealedmartin.com), a website put up by political investigator Michael Corwin. He had initially worked for Carnahan, but the Carnahan campaign refused to publicize his report. In it, he tries to connect Martin’s time in Rome and friendship with Rigali with Martin’s seat on the archdiocesan Curia. Using the traditional Roman definition of a curia, Corwin suggests that Martin would have known about incidents of priest pedophilia. Martin describes the St. Louis Curia as a “terribly long meeting” at which everybody went round and said what their office was doing.
“Nobody who knows the Catholic Church would think that a 28-year-old kid would be in on it,” Martin adds. “It’s a dirty-tricks game. I suspect actually, in Carnahan’s defense—well, I don’t need to defend him—but somebody said, ‘Hey, this is a little over-the-top.’” Corwin now says he was misunderstood, and only wanted to make the point that the St. Louis media should have grilled Martin more severely.
This is the painful part of politics—not so much for Martin, who’s as resilient as a rubber ball, but for his family. “If you want to do things in the public, some people might not like you,” he shrugs, unfazed.
He loves to talk about ideas--but he’s not an intellectual. He likes meeting people, conversing, making connections. He holds his traditional, conservative values close, but he plots his way through life by the alliances he forms. And he’s really, really good at finding common ground with just about anybody.
As long as they’re on the same side.
Martin declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate on January 31. The incumbent, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, declined to comment.
