If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. There’s an argument for candidates who’ve served in the military
With JD Vance as vice president and Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, now probably isn’t the best time to argue for more veterans in public service. But Rye Barcott wants to make the case anyway. It’s a persuasive one. He points out that as a general rule, Americans who’ve served in the military have forged bonds with and learned to respect people from diverse backgrounds and different places. The uniform can unite those who wear it as much as anything else divides them. Broadly speaking, they have had certain positive values, such as discipline and teamwork, drilled into them. “There’s also a degree of humility that military service instills,” Barcott, a 47-year-old former Marine, told me during a two-hour conversation in North Carolina, where we both live, just over a week ago. “You have served something that is larger than yourself.” And you’ve done that, he added, at potential risk, having accepted the idea that the public good may demand personal sacrifice. Imagine America if more politicians genuinely endorsed and acted on that principle. Barcott has written a thoughtful, hopeful book, “Courage Can Save US: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future,” that’s being published this week. It profiles current office holders — half of them Democrats, half of them Republicans — and suggests that qualities honed in the military (or, in one congressman’s case, the F.B.I.) positioned them to be less partisan, more independent, more civic-minded leaders. The book also reflects Barcott’s passion project. He’s the chief executive officer and one of the founders of With Honor, a nonpartisan group that, since 2018, has encouraged more men and women who’ve worn the uniform or performed similar government service — such as defense, law enforcement or intelligence work — to run for political office. To date, With Honor has supported more than 250 such candidates with more than $100 million across federal, state and local races. Those candidates must first sign a pledge to conduct themselves with civility, integrity and the courage to work across party lines. I was curious about Barcott’s perspective because we need more politicians with less vanity, less stridency, less pettiness. We need valor in a political landscape often barren of it. If recruiting a greater number of veterans improves the odds of getting that, I’m for it. It might. I don’t think there’s any definitive proof, but there’s this: On Wednesday, four House Republicans mustered the moxie to break party ranks and voted to direct President Trump to get congressional approval for the sustained engagement of American combat troops with Iran. Two of those Republicans, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio, each served in the military for more than a decade. A third, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, is the former F.B.I. agent in Barcott’s book; his work for the bureau included counterterrorism operations abroad. (The fourth dissident was Thomas Massie of Kentucky.) Barcott’s nine profile subjects in addition to Fitzpatrick are the Democratic governors Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Wes Moore of Maryland; the Republican House members John James of Michigan, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Dan Crenshaw of Texas; the Democratic House members Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Jared Golden of Maine; Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona; and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana. There are flaws, failures and disappointments aplenty among those politicians. But there’s also evidence of conscience and of openness to contrary views. In aggregate, they’re a more impressive bunch than any random selection of 10 elected officials. Although Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, has voted in line with President Trump since his return to the White House in January 2025, he publicly condemned him in early 2021 for his incendiary and bogus claims about a stolen election, and he’s known for his willingness to tangle with fellow Republicans. This year, Trump refused to endorse Crenshaw’s re-election bid, and Crenshaw lost his primary three months ago to a far-right challenger. Bacon, a former Air Force brigadier general who represents a district that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, has a bolder reputation than Crenshaw’s for statements that challenge other Republicans, including Trump. “He’s taken a stance on stuff like the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico,” Barcott said. “He was the only Republican to vote against that. He basically said it was a silly idea.” The exact word Bacon used was “juvenile.” Candor like that has earned him harassment and threats; at one point, Bacon’s wife slept with a loaded gun within reach. He announced last year that he would leave the House at the end of this term, his fifth. On the Democratic side, Moulton, a former Marine, sometimes quarreled with the Biden administration and has pointedly questioned Democratic orthodoxy. Kelly, a retired astronaut and naval officer, has also broken with his party at times but, more notably, drew threats from Hegseth of a court-martial, a demotion in rank and a reduction in retirement pay for participating in a 2025 video that reminded troops that they had not only the right but also the duty to disobey illegal orders. Not all veterans who run for office are interested in flexing political independence or in taking With Honor’s pledge, much as the impulse to join the military is, for some people, less altruistic than self-aggrandizing, less philosophical than practical, less patriotic than jingoistic. Veterans aren’t axiomatically virtuous and valorous. And some have a take on military culture that’s exclusionary, discriminatory, censorious. Hegseth, a bellicose theocrat, has gone out of his way to marginalize Black and female officers. “Military service also leaves some pretty deep scars,” Barcott said. “Mental health issues are pretty significant across the military.” That’s how Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the crucial U.S. Senate race in Maine, has explained disturbing social media posts and other ugly behavior in his past, though he says that he is now in much better shape, and his admirers emphasize that he stepped up to serve his country and put himself in harm’s way in the first place. The prevalence of veterans in Congress has declined significantly over the past half century, during which Americans’ respect for Congress has also plummeted. In the mid-1970s, about 75 percent of senators and House members had served in the military. Now, it’s just under 20 percent. From George Washington through George H.W. Bush, the overwhelming majority of our presidents were veterans. But since then, it’s the opposite. Some potential contenders for the presidency in 2028 are veterans. On the Republican side, there’s Vance, Senator Tom Cotton or Arkansas and, if the stench of his 2024 humiliation fades sufficiently, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Among Democrats, there’s Kelly, Moore, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and — if you count C.I.A. and Defense Department work — Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. I realize there’s only one woman on that list, just as there’s only one woman in Barcott’s book, and that’s another reason not to give too many political bonus points to veterans who run for office. Given the composition of our military, veterans are more likely to be male than female, and I don’t think we’d benefit at all from fewer women in Congress and statehouses. But I’m inspired by many of the veterans in politics with whom I’ve interacted. I think of Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, whom I once pitched as Biden’s ideal 2020 running mate. I think of Bob Kerrey, who was the governor of Nebraska and later represented the state in the Senate. I’ve written about his early and honorable advocacy for gay marriage. They, like many other veterans, tempered individual ambition with a sense of common mission. I spotted the military’s fingerprints in that. And I liked what I saw. Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, David French captured the American moment: “It’s the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we’re taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas.” (Thanks to Jeff Berke of Calabasas, Calif., and Nancy McGill of Seattle for nominating this.) Also in The Times, Bret Stephens suggested a fix for that: “Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair.” (Marjorie Pangas, Waukesha, Wisc., and Heide Estes, Brunswick, Me., among others) In her newsletter, Mary Geddry rolled her eyes at one of the president’s favorite boasts: “Trump has been posting and ranting about the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MoCA, as though it is the SAT, the LSAT, the bar exam, the MENSA entrance test and the Sorting Hat all rolled into one. In his telling, passing a basic cognitive screening is proof of ‘extreme intelligence,’ because nothing says genius like repeatedly announcing that you successfully identified a camel and drew a clock.” (Steve Casey, Gig Harbor, Wash.) Geddry separately noted that Trump’s reported abandonment of his $1.776 billion slush fund would hardly end his financial exploitation of the presidency: “The burglar may be abandoning the grand piano because it won’t fit through the window, but we should probably still check his pockets for the silverware.” (Nancy Turner, Stadl, Austria) In Rolling Stone, Matt Bai imagined the long half life of Trump’s spoken calculations (“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation”) of the Iran War’s impact: “If A.I. server farms don’t overwhelm the nation’s electric grid, the number of Democratic ad-makers downloading that clip just might.” (Jocelyn Olcott, Durham, N.C.) In The New Yorker, David Remnick used the current excitement over the New York Knicks to flash back to the team’s nonpareil roster in 1973: “It was a unit as exquisitely coordinated as a school of barracuda or the 1965 Miles Davis Quintet.” (Wendy Myers, Ottawa, Ontario, and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal) In The Economist, an unsigned article examined Country Life, a glossy British magazine aimed at the uppermost crust. “It even has its own vernacular: One does not ‘buy’ Country Life or ‘read’ it, one ‘takes’ it, like literary laudanum.” (Harold Gotthelf, Fords, N.J. In his newsletter, Dave Barry remembered the bearing of the French when their country hosted — and, to their surprise, dominated — soccer’s top tournament in 1998. At first, he wrote, “They were bemused, in their sophisticated French way, by these crude, boisterous tourists from primitive ketchup-intensive nations, with their flags and their face paint, getting all excited about grown men kicking a ball.” Then that changed: “Every time their team won, the French became less snooty about the World Cup. You could see the snoot literally draining from their bodies.” (Michael Jawer, Vienna, Va.) And in The Guardian, Grace Dent appraised the diners at the exclusive, expensive restaurant Skof in Manchester, England: “The crowd, during this particular service, at least, was older, possibly retired, and wantonly spending their children’s inheritance on compressed malwina strawberries with jasmine cream and amasake sorbet with milk oolong tea. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that millennials stand to inherit nothing more than a pile of Michelin-starred restaurant receipts and gout medication.” (William Wood, Edmonton, Alberta) To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence. Bonus Regan Picture!
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik explored our emotional interactions with dogs, including what we learn from them, and wrote that the tight boundaries around their ranges and rituals — the smallness of their daily world — “reminds us that we, too, doubtless see our place in the universe incompletely, in ways that would be obvious to a higher order of intelligence than our own.” That’s true, but I regard the modesty of my Regan’s wants and ways less as a failure of intellect and imagination than as a lesson in humility and gratitude. Contentment needn’t require so very much. A cozy room. A comfy blanket. A faithful companion. The touch of that companion’s hand — or paw. On a Personal Note
Some two decades ago, I flew from New York to Moscow and was driven through forests outside of the city to an odd campus of buildings where Russian strangers strapped me to a board, slid me into a metal capsule little bigger than a coffin, shut the hatch and spun me around in what was billed as the world’s largest centrifuge until the motion created the feeling that a hippo was sitting on my chest. This was part of the loopiest journalism assignment I’ve ever accepted. It came from editors at Men’s Vogue, a short-lived, well-funded offshoot of Vogue. They wanted someone physically ordinary to go through a few of the paces that an astronaut in training would. Think of it as “The Right Stuff” starring the wrong person: me. The campus in question is where Soviet (and then Russian) cosmonauts have received preparation for space travel since the 1960s. The centrifuge’s spinning approximated the multiples of the force of gravity that a space traveler might feel at certain moments. I spun to 2G (like a bad chest cold) and then 3G (lying under a concrete block) and finally 3.55G (hippo). Each stage was brief, and the strangers liberated me as soon as possible. Even better, they took me to a lunch at which I did shots of chilled vodka to decompress. Why mention this now? I was reminded of it by the recent debut of “Star City,” a new Apple TV mini-series about the Soviet space race. I haven’t watched any of the three episodes that have been shown thus far, but I imagine that I’ll get to them soon. Star City is the nickname for the campus where I spun. But I also mention that experience — which was coupled with a “zero gravity” flight in the United States, during which I floated in a hollowed-out plane whose steep descents created 30-second episodes of weightlessness — because it illustrates why I got into this journalism business in the first place. I trusted that it would be a ticket to encounters, adventures and places unavailable to me otherwise. It has kept that promise. I’ve lurked on movie sets and loitered in the kitchens of world-renowned restaurants. I’ve stood beside a surgeon — Dr. Mehmet Oz, as it happens — as he performed open-heart surgery. I’ve flown on Air Force One. And I’ve flown to the moon. Or at least I’ve come as close to that as someone with the wrong stuff can. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
|
