Illustration by CranioDsgn
Now that he's been elected Missouri governor, here's a look back at our May 2016 issue, in which we profiled Greitens before the August primary.
Born of sane and loving parents, Eric Greitens drinks nothing stronger than hot chocolate, excels at (to date) everything he attempts, sacrifices free time to perform humanitarian service, and has, his best friend reports, “excellent portion control.” He proved his brainpower as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University; his courage by becoming a Navy SEAL; his leadership ability by founding a heartwarming nonprofit. His brilliant young wife looks a bit like Kate Middleton, believes in him wholeheartedly, and is carrying their second child. In 2014, Fortune magazine named him one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” alongside Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, and Angelina Jolie.
If the man has an Achilles’ heel, it’s perfection.
Now he’s running for governor, and Missouri has to decide whether he’s A. Superman, B. too good to be true and hiding some dark flaw no one can find, or C. a strategist whose entire life has been planned as a ramp to the U.S. presidency.
And if the answer is C, does aspiring to be the perfect politician tarnish his perfection? Or is that the very cynicism he’s fighting to change?
The Résumé
A navy blue “Eric Greitens for Governor” banner stretches across the curved white balcony of Beth Berra’s house in Town & Country. Inside, golden balloons cluster on the high ceilings, and guests sip coffee or mimosas and chuckle over a tray of elephant cookies frosted with the initials E.G.
Their namesake arrives, as he usually does, just a sliver past the appointed hour—close enough to seem prompt, late enough for anticipation to rise and be gratified. He comes in smiling, his jeans and boots Springsteen-patriotic, his open-collared white shirt relaxed, his trademark navy blazer stretched across reassuringly broad shoulders. Greitens’ good looks are so all-American, they’re retro: Paul Newman’s bright-blue eyes, Robert Redford’s boyish grin, a jaw so strong and clean, no beard would dare grow there.
“A little background on me and how I ended up here,” he begins as the Berra’s friends gather around him in the living room. “The seeds were probably planted some 15 or 16 years ago...”
I do fast math: That’s when, at 26, without ever having attended a military academy, he decided to become a Navy SEAL.
But the seeds of his political ambition were planted a whole lot earlier.
“When we did the ‘What I Want to Be When I Grow Up’ unit, Eric’s answer was ‘President,’” confides his kindergarten teacher, Anne Richardson, who spoke at the ceremony announcing his candidacy. “They did not want me to put that in my speech. They said, ‘We want to keep him in people’s minds as governor.’”
A friend remembers Eric being chosen as one of the presidential candidates in a mock election. They were in the fourth grade, and the friend can’t remember whether Eric was supposed to be a Democrat or a Republican. But he debated his opponent into chalk dust.
In high school, Greitens attended the Missouri Boys State government leadership program. Jeff Smith, who competed against Greitens in soccer (and went on to become a Democratic state senator), was there, too. He remembers Greitens being “as driven as anyone you’ll ever meet.”
As an Angier B. Duke scholar majoring in ethics at Duke University, Greitens told one of his professors, Tom McCollough, that he wanted to be president someday. McCollough found the plan entirely plausible. “I met Eric early,” he says, “because he spoke to the general assembly of the faculty on the honor code. Yes, as a freshman—and it was so compelling that I went up and congratulated him afterward.”
Greitens went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, earned a master’s in development studies, and spent the long breaks volunteering in Albania, Cambodia, India...
Then, for his Ph.D., he switched to politics.
The First Turning Point
Greitens’ bestselling memoir, The Heart and the Fist, presents the turning points in his life as swift, impulsive, and decisive, as though he’s being led by deep inner wisdom along an ordained path. It’s a writerly device, boiling a life down to its essence and pulling out the drama. But it makes everything feel a little too pat, a little…scripted.
Entering the military, for example. As he tells it, he attends a fancy dinner in the Rhodes mansion at Oxford, gazes up at the rotunda and sees, etched in marble, the names of all the Rhodes scholars who fought and died in World War II. If they hadn’t made that choice, he thinks, I wouldn’t be able to be standing here, looking up at them. So he forgoes lucrative job offers for the U.S. Navy’s measly pay and the grueling test of becoming a SEAL.
To those who knew him well, though, the decision wasn’t quite that abrupt. “The military thing was always there,” says his lifelong buddy Steve Moore, “from G.I. Joes to video games in middle school.” Greitens consistently sought the most extreme tests of his abilities. Spartan even in his teens, he shunned alcohol and bounded out of bed early in the morning. “He’s known for a long time that he wants to do something really special,” Moore explains, “and like a lot of people who do great things, he’s ultracompetitive.”
What better proof of courage and character could he offer, years later, than a SEAL trident?
The Second Turning Point
In SEAL training, his résumé wins him extra hazing. “We could be here all day,” yells an instructor after forcing him to enumerate each accomplishment while buried in cold, wet sand. “Now, did that Ph.D. help you dig that hole?”
Unfazed, Greitens criticizes some higher-ups for fostering the wrong culture, writing that “an inordinately large portion [of class time] is spent listening to stories of sex and drinking.” (At university, he criticized relief agency administrators just as freely, for failing to help children.) This self-assured candor further sets him apart, and enough officers welcome it that he acquires an aura of promise.
One of only 21 members in a class of 220 to tough it out past Hell Week, he receives his trident.
He serves in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq. He reports his own men for illegal drug use in Thailand and blames the fallout when he is not given a SEAL unit to command. He volunteers for a final deployment with Marines in Iraq instead.
Two weeks before he is scheduled to come home from his fourth and last deployment, a suicide truck packed with chlorine explodes outside his barracks. The chlorine exposure qualifies him for disability, but he turns it down and jogs until his lungs stop aching. As he tells it in his memoir, he learns that a buddy has died in Fallujah, goes to Bethesda, Maryland, to visit the wounded, and hears them saying they want to continue to serve.
Steve Culbertson, CEO of Youth Service America, gives me his version. The two men talk late one evening in Greitens’ D.C. apartment, Culbertson hoping for a glass of red wine and Greitens offering green tea instead. Culbertson worries aloud about veterans returning with disabilities—they’ve had such extraordinary experiences, and what will they do now?
“Do you want to go ask them?” he remembers Greitens saying. “I can get us in.”
Greitens meets him at Bethesda in full dress uniform. The two men move from bed to bed, listening as wounded soldiers tell them they want to go back to their units. Culbertson gently points out that that may not be possible. “We still need you,” Greitens assures them.
He and a college buddy have long had an idea for a service organization for college students, the Center for Citizen Leadership. Why not focus on veterans instead? And so, with his combat pay and two friends’ disability checks, he starts a nonprofit (later renamed The Mission Continues) that helps vets with crushing disabilities rediscover their strength by serving others.
The concept is so powerful, people line up to lend their support. Platoons form across the country to perform community service. Revenue grows from $26,372 to $10.9 million in just seven years, and more than 100,000 people volunteer nationwide.
In the early years, he takes virtually no salary, but by 2011 he’s making $175,000 a year. He writes a bestseller and rakes in thousands of dollars in public speaking fees. National media turn to him regularly to interpret SEAL behavior.
Not that he gives anything away. When CNN’s Zoraida Sambolin asks about a SEAL raid in Somalia, he offers the dramatic revelation that “planning for this kind of contingency, Zoraida, would have been happening for months… As they developed a fuller intelligence picture, they would have assessed their options and then determined when they were ready to go.”
No real information needed; just being a SEAL is enough. Sambolin ends the interview: “Wow! Well, Eric Greitens, we could talk to you all day.”
Photo by Huy Mach/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP
Greitens on the campaign trail with his wife, Sheena, and their son, Joshua. Even before he entered politics, the Navy SEAL had won awards, appeared on national media, and rang the NASDAQ’s opening bell.
The Third Turning Point
In his abbreviated narrative, Greitens meets Sheena Chestnut after giving a talk at Harvard, asks her out for hot chocolate, and hears a voice telling him this is the woman he’s going to marry.
In reality, the revelation takes a while to sink in. He waits six months to contact her (he’s dating someone else at the time). That fall, when he’s back in Boston for a fundraiser, it comes to him: “You know that woman you thought you’d marry? You should call her.” They meet but won’t start dating for another nine months.
Once the courtship begins, though, it speeds toward its destination: He proposes five months later. Chestnut is perfect for him. The daughter of two Republican physicians, she was a Marshall scholar at Oxford and earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard, and her dream job is to be a national security advisor.
Now they live in a gracious old house in the Central West End. It’s where Greitens seems most relaxed, hanging out with his wife and son. He finds ways to mention Joshua in nearly every speech. “I spent this morning cleaning up Cheerios and yogurt from Joshua” is, obviously, a baby-kissing crowd-pleaser. But in the sanctuary of home, it’s obvious that Joshua is good for him in other ways, too: a break from all that seriousness, instant permission to be a little goofy.
He stays patient when his son fusses, recognizes the inherited flashes of temper that worried his own mother, anticipates Joshua’s need for motion and challenge and adventure. When his energy ramps up, we go for a walk, all four of us. Sheena holds her own, staying at her husband’s side even when it means dodging trees and stepping off the pavement. I ask when it first occurred to her that she could wind up the nation’s first lady. “Not until this very moment,” she says, blinking rapidly.
I don’t believe her. But I’m more intrigued by the mysterious, never-named first wife. It turns out she’s the unnamed girlfriend he mentions in The Heart and the Fist. They had a movie-montage sort of courtship—cut the dialogue, bring up the soundtrack, flash through romantic dates in the English countryside, travel abroad to do humanitarian relief work, a wedding in a castle in Wales. When he began SEAL training, they lived in a pastel condo complex a stone’s throw from the bay. He’d come home after 16-hour days and find her alone and fiercely unhappy.
And then he flew home to spend Christmas with his family and came back to find she’d left him.
I want to know more about this bit of romantic folly with a Welsh woman who wouldn’t be bent. His parents and brothers are the obvious source, but he’s asked me to respect their privacy. They did talk to Time columnist Joe Klein, though, when he devoted half of his book Charlie Mike to Greitens’ efforts with TMC.
So is Greitens altruistic, or self-serving? Klein hesitates. “He has a kind of selfish selflessness. He’s very, very ambitious.”
I reach Klein in Iowa, where he’s covering the presidential campaign and glad for a chance to talk about anything else. We start with Greitens’ parents.
“Becky Greitens is someone you’ve seen before,” Klein tells me, “a preschool teacher, all heart.” Rob, an accountant, is less expressive and more cerebral, devoted to the philosopher Montaigne. Eric is their eldest son, and his two brothers are nothing like him, which caused a bit of friction at times, Klein adds. “It’s not easy to be the brother of Mr. Perfect.”
It’s not easy to write about Mr. Perfect, either. Klein knew that Greitens would be hard for East Coast readers to fathom because he’s utterly devoid of irony. But Klein liked his emphasis on the responsibilities of citizenship.
So is Greitens altruistic, or self-serving? Klein hesitates. “He has a kind of selfish selflessness. He’s very, very ambitious.”
Earlier I’d asked Rachel Wald, a former TMC staffer, whether he was driven by ethos or ambition. “They’re inseparable,” she said. “There’s no light between Eric and ambition. That is who he is: an ambitious, meticulous, relentless force.”
The result is a life strung taut, one end anchored in a commitment to public service and the other in the preoccupation with self that’s made that service possible.
He’d need a wife who understood both extremes.
The first wife “was mercurial,” Klein says, “in a way that is the exact opposite of Eric.” Greitens gradually opened up, talking about how hard he tried to make her happy, and the account became a full chapter in Charlie Mike. “He really fell apart when she left him,” Klein says. “He called his mom in tears, saying, ‘Who is going to want me now?’ It was the first thing he’s ever failed at.”
Klein’s editor said the chapter broke the flow of the book, so it was excised.
The Fourth Turning Point
It’s April 16, 2015, and Greitens is on The Daily Show, talking with an almost fawning Jon Stewart about his latest book, Resilience. Subtitled Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, it’s written as a series of letters to a fellow SEAL struggling with alcoholism and PTSD.
“This book is great. It’s so good,” Stewart tells him. “The letters are incredibly erudite, incredibly heartfelt.” Later, he says, “You are the type of guy…I could see running for office, if he didn’t think that that terribly corrupt process would destroy him. Is that something…?”
“Yes,” Greitens says, “and in fact, we are going to do it, Jon.” He lets his voice crescendo, like a sports announcer when somebody’s rounding all the bases: “I’ve set up an exploratory committee, and we are looking at the governor’s race in Missouri in 2016!” Applause thunders.
But this, too, has been building for some time.
“I knew he was going to run for office when he sent me his board of directors and it had two names: [former Republican U.S. Senator] John Danforth and [former Democratic Missouri Governor] Bob Holden,” chuckles Pat Heavey, founder of several veterans’ advocacy organizations.
Greitens went with Holden to the Democratic National Convention in 2008. The two became good friends, Holden flying out to Spokane for Greitens’ wedding and Greitens finishing his book in Holden’s cabin. But they never wrangled over political issues, because Holden always assumed that they were on the same page.
The next year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee talked to Greitens at length about a run for U.S. Senate, and he flew out to D.C. for a series of face-to-face meetings. The DCCC thought he was serious; in their narrative, he was initially engaged and avidly taking notes but then stopped returning calls and dropped out after Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan entered the race. In Greitens’ narrative, his answer was a blunt no, and he was “never serious,” only being polite. “I was happy to listen to them,” he tells me, “but I was totally committed to The Mission Continues at the time.”
That was the year, 2009, when someone anonymously registered the domain name EricGreitensforPresident.com.
Over the next few years, Greitens did more writing and speaking, collected more awards. He was easing away from TMC, making sure it could stand on its own. Klein writes that he asked to step down in 2011, but board members said it was too soon. They gave him a $25,000 bonus that year. In 2013, he asked again, and in July 2014 he stepped down—citing the upcoming birth of his first child.
Surely politics crossed his mind, I say. No, he insists, just Joshua’s arrival and the upcoming release of Resilience.
Joshua was born on July 27. Two weeks later, Michael Brown was shot, and protesters filled the streets. “I need to go to Ferguson,” Greitens told his wife. “I think it’s important to understand what’s going on.” She paced the living room alone with their colicky firstborn, worrying about both of them until her husband rolled in at 2 a.m. railing about the void of leadership.
That, he says, was one of the catalysts for his campaign. “If there’d been a leader who’d shown up with any kind of command presence, courage, calm, and clarity, we would have had peace by the second night.” I jot the quote before he finishes; memorably alliterative, it’s become one of his campaign sound bites. “The governor should have declared a dusk-to-dawn curfew,” he continues, “and told people, ‘I’ll be in this neighborhood church from now until 6 a.m. to hear everything that needs to be heard.’”
Six months after Ferguson, Greitens announced that he was considering a run for statewide office.
Conventional wisdom would have had him begin by supporting another Republican candidate, then maybe try for state representative or senator. But the Washington Free Beacon quoted Greitens saying, “I’m looking at something in the executive branch where I can lead and actually make a difference, governor or lieutenant governor.”
One week later, the Republican front-runner for governor, Tom Schweich, committed suicide after complaining of smear tactics that included the false statement that he was Jewish. Greitens—who, ironically, is Jewish, on his mother’s side—called Schweich’s death “a tragic indictment of Missouri politics.” He declared himself an “outsider” candidate who would restore ethics and decency.
Ham on the Lam
Guests at the O’Fallon Chamber of Commerce meeting dab away guacamole, crumple their napkins, and sit back to hear the luncheon speaker. Few have heard of Eric Greitens. As introduction, a clip from the Tom Brokaw documentary is shown. Greitens stands amid gravestones at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, talking about veterans who’ve returned from combat with disabilities. People in the audience begin to nod. He explains how hungry these vets are to have purpose in their lives again—the nods grow more vigorous—and how his nonprofit, The Mission Continues, offers them new ways to serve. The camera cuts to a vet whose life has been transformed. By the time Greitens strides onstage, people are on their feet, already giving him a standing ovation.
He tells a funny little story he told four years earlier at Tufts University, which gave him an honorary degree. It’s about getting trumped in the newspaper by a headline about a wild pig getting shot: “Ham on the Lam Dies With a Bam”—“No matter what you do in your life, it’s always going to be tough to beat those stories of wild pigs.” There’s a trickle of laughter, but this isn’t what they want. He moves into his story about Fallujah, how an Al Qaeda truck loaded with chlorine suicide-bombed his barracks, and how long it took him to realize that the blood on his shirt wasn’t his but instead the blood of his friend Joel, who’d been standing next to him.
Now the audience is riveted. He says he thought he’d talk about “what it means to serve for all of us, what it means to lead.” He shows video of big strong SEAL recruits losing consciousness the first time they have to swim 50 meters underwater—“and then they go back and do it again, because the challenge remains.” He quotes an instructor saying that every time you move through pain or suffering, your character evolves. It’s when people focus only on themselves that they collapse, he says.
As the next video plays, Greitens waits onstage with an easy poise, no fidgeting or shifting gaze. Then he says more about the frontline, “a place of hardship, fear, suffering, and chaos.” Everyone has a frontline in their life, he says, “and every single one of us has untapped capacity for courage.”
Another ovation.
After the talk, several of the people who’d “never heard of the guy” line up, clutching his book to their chest, hoping for his autograph—bold angular flourishes, jumbo size, done with a black Sharpie. “It was an honor meeting you,” they tell him. “That was amazing.” “You’re one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard.”
“My daughter’s in the Navy,” a woman murmurs, and he touches her forearm, thanks her for her support. An old guy in a ball cap hugs him, saying, “If there’s anything I can do to help you…” “Thanks so much for what you are doing for the country,” a younger man says.
Actually, what he’s doing right now is running for governor. The two roles have merged in people’s minds. He’s already got some people’s votes “because of the way he served his country.” “Anybody who can make it into the SEALs…” they say, not bothering to finish the sentence.
“The general public is undergoing this terrible guilt for sending these kids out there for 15 years, and they come home with nothing except holes in them and their heads f—ed up,” Pat Heavey remarks later.
Greitens has transformed those victims into heroes—and become a hero in the process.
The Absence of Error
In our first interview, I ask Greitens if he ever tires of reciting his résumé. “I almost never do it, because I don’t like to talk about myself,” he says—yet he’s just inserted deft mentions of his books, his visit to Ferguson, and his volunteer day doing flood cleanup (he’d really wanted to go out in rescue boats). He once told Charlie Rose, “Oxford had these long breaks so I could leave Oxford and I could go to work with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I could go to Cambodia and work with kids who lost limbs to landmines. I could go to Albania…”
Illustration by CranioDsgn
Remember the honor guard at the memorial ceremony on Star Trek: Into Darkness? It’s Greitens and three TMC fellows.
To reach his goals, Greitens has to tell and retell his own story. He has to tell it to media, to staffers and volunteers and donors, to readers and audiences who vote. Seductive in a group, all that humblebragging can get a little tiresome in more casual proximity. People quote his words in Resilience—“I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility”—and roll their eyes.
Unless they’re in the inner circle. Those who have worked closely with him describe him as down to earth, unpretentious, interested in their lives.
At the moment, though, he seems a little stiff—which is puzzling, because he’s hardly the shy type. Later I realize that what I’m picking up isn’t awkwardness but agenda: He is always steering toward a preordained destination, resisting any tangent or distraction.
Remembering advice he wrote about the importance of having a devil’s advocate, I ask who plays that role for him.
“We have built an entire team of people who do that,” he assures me, nodding to his campaign manager, Austin Chambers, as a prime example.
“And what do you two disagree about?”
“I don’t know if it’s a disagreement,” Greitens says, “but one of the things that’s important to me, we go out and do service work.” That’s rare in politics, he explains, and Chambers wasn’t used to it.
I turn to Chambers. “Have you ever told him he’s off base?”
Chambers hesitates.
“I’ll tell you one,” Greitens offers. “We were going to do campaign workouts. Austin pointed out that it was going to be 6 degrees outside.”
Eric Greitens just isn’t very good at admitting flaws, or dissent, or doubt. In his memoir, he acknowledges an early B-minus—in handwriting, for God’s sake. He also details a teenage moral failure: He thought to bring his dying grandfather a ChapStick for his cracked lips but failed to reach over and help him when he fumbled to apply it.
“One of the things I think is a really important virtue for a leader is to be humble,” he says now. “I—like everyone, you make lots of mistakes.” TMC’s original name, Center for Citizen Leadership, was terrible, he says, “and we had to experiment with the length of the internship.” That said, he slides back to the comfort of second person: “Everyone around you is better than you in some way, and you can learn from them.”
“But have you ever really screwed up?” I ask. “You know, something you did that made you say, ‘Aw, shit’?”
His laugh is high and sudden, as though my mild profanity has startled loose a genuine giggle. Then he sobers. “I don’t mean to bring us down at all, but when you serve as a Navy SEAL overseas, one of the things that happens is, you lose people.” He’s talking about Travis Manion, a young Marine who died—it’s in Greitens’ books and many of his speeches—after Greitens left Fallujah. “You still, every year, sometimes every month, you think about him. You always look back and think, ‘Was there something else I should have said?’ When I left, I said, ‘Travis, you got it, man?’ and he said, ‘Yes, sir, I’ve got your back.’”
He sighs. “I kind of wish I’d turned to Travis and just said something like, ‘Stay safe, brother. Stay strong.’”
He’s silenced me.
“Be a Man”
On the now-infamous recording, Greitens is trying to set up a meeting with Republican rival John Brunner, whom he blames for an anonymous website that claims Greitens is only masquerading as a conservative. Brunner has canceled, and now he’s playing games—and secretly taping Greitens’ reaction.
“Oh, John,” Greitens groans. “Oh, John. John, I have a flight on Monday morning. If you are seriously going to pretend that you are going to duck this…” More stonewalling, and soon Greitens is yelling: “You name the place, John! Name the place! ”
More back-and-forth. “Oh, Jesus, you’re such a coward, John… I said you are a coward, that’s what I said. Stand up and be an adult…” Greitens suggests meeting that night after the Marine Corps Ball. No dice. “John, you are so weaselly, man. So weaselly.” He repeats the word a few more times. “You refuse to answer a question about whether or not you are responsible for this negative, cowardly attack. That’s weaselly. Be a man, John. Be a man.” He can’t let it go. When the recording is released, pundits aren’t kind to either one of them. One says Greitens sounds “angry and slightly unhinged.”
“It wasn’t your finest moment,” his wife says drily, and he agrees. But he also insists “it was deserved.”
The conversation with Brunner was a tiny unguarded moment of frustration, yet it goes viral—perhaps because it is the first time people have heard Greitens speak with such unvarnished candor. In Resilience, he admits to having a temper as a kid; he learned to control it through sports, and he still works out religiously every morning. “The idea behind control is not that you are not angry,” he says. “If you are alive in the world, you should feel anger.” A walking Bartlett’s, he adds an insight from Gandhi: “Anger is like electricity. If it’s channeled properly, you can use it to light the world.”
The next skirmish comes in February, when a YouTube video accuses him of fancifying his résumé, dramatizing nonexistent heroism, breaking the SEAL code of silence for his own political and financial gain. Greitens slams back with his own video, a red stamp declaring each charge FALSE as the drums of war beat in the background.
I’ve been wondering, myself, just how much danger he courted. He focuses his books and speeches mainly on the rigors of SEAL training. When I ask whether he’s killed anyone, he says, smile tight as James Bond’s, “I don’t answer that question.” In Iraq, he led Marines charged with capturing high-level al-Qaida officials but says only, “We were part of the effort that brought peace and security to Fallujah during the surge.” Then he adds, “Some of the most important accomplishments are ones you make with people around you,” mentioning a soldier who recently came to a political forum to support him.
“There are two kinds of SEALs,” I’m told by several military types: those who want to go “kill bad guys and blow shit up” and those who are cooler and more deliberate, propelled by duty and honor rather than bloodlust. Eric Greitens is the latter, and he’s not so popular with the former. Many SEALs think he’s been exploiting their tight, silent, macho community, using it for his own ends.
Hence the video, which so infuriates him that he breaks his reserve, documenting participation in more than 200 combat operations. According to the Fitness Report and Counseling Record for his service in Iraq with the Marines, “his work contributed directly to the detention of over 300 suspected terrorists and the capture or kill of over 90 known terrorists.”
He labels the video a political ploy orchestrated by a rival candidate. Then the SEALs who made the video come forward. “Was it a political video? F—k no,” one tells the Missouri Times. They were irritated that Greitens was riding “on our coattails of our valor” without ever having commanded a SEAL platoon. They intended the video only for their own community, they say, but somebody posted it on YouTube.
Greitens sputters about “dishonest media” reporting “demonstrably dishonest information”; he says he’s still convinced there were political motives.
At the press conference that he holds to reclaim his honor, retired and reserve members of the military line up. Clad in hoodies and ball caps, they snap to attention, presenting their weapons as he walks past. Dan Page, an Army veteran known for his far-right views and opposition to hate-crime laws, issues the call to arms, then directs the men to circle behind him in a “360,” showing that they have his back covered.
In the audience, Heavey, the veterans’ advocate, winces. He was impressed with TMC, but since Greitens began campaigning, he’s taken a more bellicose tone, “leaning too heavily on the military side,” Heavey says, “and that’s a very amateurish way to appeal to the veteran community.” He is relieved to learn, days later, that Page came up with the choreography himself, on the spot.
The Elephant in the Room
It was only last July that Greitens wrote a FoxNews.com editorial explaining that he was raised as a Democrat but that the only Democratic solutions he’d seen were more money and bigger government and the Veterans Administration bureaucracy that failed his friends. He called for “replacing Obamacare with something that actually works,” defending religious liberties and the right to bear arms, protecting innocent life, and reforming welfare.
Now he has to prove that he’s a conservative Republican to the core. Also, for all his world travel, a real Missourian (even if he did miss the sacrosanct Governor’s Ham Breakfast at the state fair).
Greitens vilifies the Humane Society of the United States and the Environmental Protection Agency as a Missouri Farm Bureau banner waves behind him. “Philosopher for the city folks and Navy SEAL ass-kicker for the rurals,” one observer mutters.
He proclaims it dangerous to allow Syrian refugees to enter the U.S. He calls it “crucial” to keep the Guantanamo Bay detention center open, even though in 2009, he called for its closure as necessary to uphold America’s commitment to justice.
At a Christian County Republican forum, he says that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Jay Nixon “think that by taking away your guns, they are gonna stop terrorist attacks!” He suggests settling the matter by inviting everybody out for a shooting contest, then grins: “I like my odds.”
On Facebook, he posts, “In the SEAL teams, we made gun control simple: It means you use both hands, because you have to get your first shot right!” Below, a Ph.D. student from Rutgers University comments that he knew Greitens when he was a White House fellow and was impressed by his “obvious brilliance and his deep humanity. This guy is unrecognizable to the person I met in 2006. I hope this is all an act to win and the real Eric stands up.”
Holden words the sentiment more tactfully: “While I don’t want to hurt Eric, I’ve already told him that I can’t support him. What he has to do I’m not sure lends itself to being successful once you are there… The people who are giving big money aren’t giving it so you can be somebody else once you get elected.”
Republicans raise an eyebrow at the hundreds of thousands of dollars
Greitens has raised from donors in other states, people they wouldn’t expect to give a damn about Missouri. Those folks know him from TMC, Greitens explains. They are “investing in leadership.”
Democrats criticize Greitens for taking money from Michael Goguen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who, in various shades of gray, is now accused of sexually abusing a woman who signed a $40 million contract to have an extramarital relationship with him; Greitens calmly points out that people are innocent until proven guilty. Dems have also questioned campaign money from Steve Cohen, whose company came under investigation for its financial dealings—even as Greitens castigates Missouri senators for refusing to support ethics reform. He freely criticizes those currently in office in Jefferson City, writing to supporters, “Even in the brief time that I’ve been running for Governor, I’ve been exposed to some of the worst people I’ve ever known. Liars, cowards, sociopaths.”
Greitens’ ethics platform was the first specific policy stance he released, and it’s still the strongest: He wants to limit terms, snip ties between state office and lobbyist money, and ban donations during the legislative session. The only missing plank is limits on campaign contributions. If he’d set a limit, could he have remained as moderate as many people suspect he still is?
“Yeah, but if he took that tack and didn’t have a deep base within Missouri”—and as an “outsider,” he doesn’t—“he wouldn’t be competitive,” Holden says. “Eric doesn’t come from money himself; he’s got to raise it,” if he wants to buy enough media exposure to get his name known, “and the Republicans who vote in primaries are not the moderates.”
But moderates do support him, including George Herbert “Bert” Walker III, cousin to the 43rd president. Greitens just isn’t—whether by temperament, experience, or strategy—the liberal some assumed him to be, on the basis of his academic and humanitarian credentials. St. Louis journalist Bob Duffy was initially so impressed with Greitens’ compassion that he gave his name to Tom Brokaw for a 2009 documentary about American character. Duffy now feels like Greitens has reneged on his earlier values.
“In his defense, these are the dilemmas of partisan politics: fitting square pegs into round holes,” says Jeff Smith. “But this seems to be a case of a 180-degree shift in worldview or pandering to a very conservative primary electorate.”
Mission Impossible?
Greitens lives at the high altitude of inspirational quotes and ideals, and he’s quick to call out those who fall short—especially when they’re above him in some hierarchy.
He does bother, though, with those “below” him.
“Eric walks into a room and introduces himself to every single person,” regardless of status, says Rachel Wald, the former TMC staffer. “There’s a philosophical reason, a sense of humanity and humility. But I also think that tactically, Eric understands that as you are trying to be out there accomplishing things in the world, a person delivering a package or at a reception desk is a potentially powerful person to have on your side.”
The worst said of Greitens is that he’s an opportunist, a narcissist, a weathervane with no political experience, a hypocrite who’ll say anything to win. The best is that he’s brilliant, brave, fit, disciplined, laser focused, powerfully persuasive.
Whether his drive to serve is a will to power, whether he’s more narcissist than altruist—only the outcomes will tell. It’s pretty hard to go wrong offering humanitarian aid to children or empowering veterans with disabilities. It’s pretty easy to go wrong raising a ton of money to introduce yourself, without prior political experience, to a partisan and polarized state that’s floundering by almost every measure.
Even making yourself the perfect candidate—an outsider superhero who can raise tons of money, call out corruption, and take firm stands on conservative issues—can backfire.
“To paraphrase a Republican friend and current elected official, I absolutely think he could get elected president,” says Smith. “I’m just not sure he can get elected governor.”
