The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Looking back on that time, Father Randy Timmerman, the Ryan family’s longtime priest, recalled Paul as a young man in a hurry after his dad’s death. “It may have increased his drive, but it may also have inspired urgency,” Father Timmerman said. “To act, to take the chance, to step out.” The priest also noted that Ryan was “pretty—what’s the right word?—religious about exercise. You know what I mean? And that certainly comes from an awareness of the family genetics that he received.” Later, when Ryan was a famous politician, his obsessive iron pumping and devotion to P90X would become one of the goofier aspects of his public image, especially after he posed for a widely mocked workout-themed photo shoot in Time, sporting a backwards cap and grinning as he flexed his biceps. But for Ryan it wasn’t really about vanity, it was about staying alive as long as he could. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all died before they were sixty, and he didn’t know how much time he would have to make his mark.

  The phenomenon of “eminent orphans”—children for whom the loss of a parent becomes a propellant toward greatness—has been studied by psychologists. In his book David and Goliath, author Malcolm Gladwell highlights studies that show that one-third of U.S. presidents throughout history and a staggering 67 percent of British prime ministers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lost at least one parent when they were young. What’s more, a survey of encyclopedias found that of the 573 people who merited an entry longer than one column, nearly half had to bury a parent before they reached twenty years old. When I told Ryan about these figures one morning during an interview twenty-eight years after his father’s death, he grew quiet at first. “Really?” he asked. “I never heard that.” After thinking for a moment, he said, “It’s true. It makes you scrappy and tough. Makes you a self-starter. You don’t really have a choice. You just kind of got to go.” He paused. It was as though the numbers confirmed something he had long known about himself. “That’s interesting—it makes you resilient, too.”

  What was unique about Ryan’s youthful thirst for world conquering was that it manifested itself with peculiar politeness. His was not a sweaty, macho ambition; even as he plotted a big future for himself, he was well-mannered, patient, and even acquiescent to those around him. In a bit of trivia that would become a mainstay in the many profiles written about Ryan, his high school classmates voted him “biggest brownnoser.” The superlative was a friendly act of razzing from his peers, but it wasn’t an anomaly. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and competitors at virtually every stage of his life and career would describe Ryan in terms that suggest that the Joseph A. Craig High School class of 1988 had him pegged. He was a “Boy Scout,” a “team player,” a “real diligent kid,” a “respectful young man,” a “suck-up.”

  This strain of Ryan’s personality could also be traced back to his father’s death. At a get-together after the funeral, one of his dad’s best friends pulled him aside and told him that it would fall on him to become the man of the house. Ryan had grown protective of his mom in recent years as his dad’s struggle with alcoholism cast a shadow over their family, and so he took this charge seriously. From that moment on, there was little time for the careless high jinks and petty rebellions that were typical of most kids his age. “I kind of had to grow up faster than most,” Ryan told me.

  This set up the defining tension of Ryan’s rise: by the time he left for college at Miami University in Ohio, he had become an eager-to-please model of nice-guyness who was also driven to make a dent in history. On the surface, those two reflexes might have seemed incompatible; few revolutionary figures, after all, have been known for their good-natured temperaments. (See: Steve Jobs, Napoleon.) But Ryan channeled these competing impulses to great effect.

  In college, he made a project of befriending Richard Hart, the sole conservative economics professor on campus. “He would come to the office quite a bit, and very rarely to ask any questions about the course material,” Hart recalled. Instead, the student peppered the professor with earnest queries about Austrian economics, then politics, and eventually philosophy—hanging on Hart’s every word as though the man were a mountaintop guru in possession of the secrets to the universe. Along the way, the professor wrote a few glowing letters of recommendation for Ryan, and helped set him up with his first Capitol Hill internship after graduating, in the office of Senator Bob Kasten.

  Ryan, who seemed most in his element when he was under someone’s wing, had a knack for making friends with important and connected people wherever he was, and Hart was the first in a long line of men who would count him as their protégé. But Ryan didn’t turn to just anyone for advice; he distinguished himself as a connoisseur of well-chosen role models, a savvy collector of strategic father figures. From conservative luminaries like Bill Bennett and Kemp to veteran colleagues in Congress and eventually the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Ryan’s mentors tended to be people who could get him places.

  Meanwhile, Ryan conducted his life in college as though for the benefit of future campaign vetters. He joined Delta Tau Delta and took part in some mild frat boy antics—once accidentally shooting a firework into a rival fraternity’s house, starting a fire—but he mostly kept the partying PG-rated, and he was never so hungover on Sunday mornings that he couldn’t get up early and watch the political talk shows.

  Ryan graduated from college and moved to Washington in 1991, but after a short entry-level stint on a congressional committee ended with his boss losing reelection, he found himself juggling part-time jobs as a fitness instructor and a waiter at a Capitol Hill Mexican restaurant called Tortilla Coast. He would later write in his book that he considered chucking it all and following through on his original postcollegiate fantasy of moving to Colorado and becoming a ski bum. But those who knew him at the time said this was never really in the cards.

  Joe Mcalear, a fellow waiter at Tortilla Coast, told me that Ryan always seemed acutely aware of how his actions might influence a future career in politics. After their shifts ended at night, the restaurant’s staff would take their tips to a nearby pub called Irish Times, where they drank beer and listened to an amateur folksinger who perched himself on top of the bar and cycled through a narrow repertoire of songs. Their favorite drinking game required each person to assume the identity of one of the musician’s go-to artists—James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles—and chug his drink once his song came up. The would-be troubadour’s usual rotation was predictable enough to get most of them drunk most nights, but Ryan was always careful not to get too far beyond buzzed. “He was, like, the Boy Scout,” Mcalear realled.

  The extent of Ryan’s ambitions became clear one day while they were discussing their taxes. Mcalear had moved from Virginia to the District in the middle of the year and was thinking about fudging on his returns so that he wouldn’t have to file to two different states. Ryan was aghast.

  “Oh, no, no!” Ryan protested. “That’s how they get you! They get you on the taxes! You gotta make sure you got your taxes in order because they’ll look that up.”

  Mcalear was confused. “What the—who finds me? What are you talking about?”

  “Yo, politics!” Ryan, twenty-three, responded. “That’s always how they get you. You’ve always got to get your tax records in order if you’re going to run for office.”

  Bob Woodson was skeptical when he first got the phone call from Ryan a few weeks after the 2012 election. Fresh off the worst loss of his political career, the congressman had apparently decided that for his next act, he would recast himself as a champion of the poor, and he was asking Woodson to act as his Sherpa—guiding him through the rough terrain of America’s poverty-stricken, drug-ravaged inner cities, and introducing him to the ministers, volunteers, and activists who were making progress at the grassroots level.

  A spry, swaggering veteran of the civil rights movement who parted with black leaders in the seventies over the issue of forced busing, Woodson had spent the past several decades in W
ashington, lobbying on behalf of the needy as head of a nonprofit called the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. But doing God’s work in America’s petty, dysfunctional, status-obsessed capital had left him less than idealistic when it came to politicians’ motives.

  Early on in his DC career, Woodson discovered that his communitarian, up-by-the-bootstraps approach to combating social ills appealed to Republicans. And while he was no right-winger—he described himself as a “radical pragmatist” when it came to politics—he was eager to do what he could to focus the attention of the powerful on the plight of the poor, regardless of party affiliation. He would often tell friends that he saw himself as a matchmaker for modern-day Josephs and Pharaohs—connecting the righteous but obscure with the rich and powerful, in hopes that together they would bring about miracles. If the only Pharaohs who were interested happened to be conservatives, so be it.

  But Woodson wasn’t in Washington long before he noticed an odious pattern: some Republican looking to gain cheap outreach points by allying himself with a black elder statesman of the civil rights era would seek out his “counsel” in antipoverty policy making; Woodson would oblige by setting up a couple of visits to poor urban neighborhoods; and, after a photo op or two, the politician would promptly lose interest, having checked his “noblesse oblige” box for the year. Average number of poor people helped during these episodes: zero.

  In one emblematic example, Newt Gingrich recruited Woodson to help him sell the Republicans’ welfare reform proposals ahead of the 1994 elections. Woodson organized a diverse cast of former welfare recipients and advocates for the poor to appear in commercials for the party on the promise that they would get a seat at the policy making table once Republicans took control of the House. “Next thing I know, Newt hires a white liberal from Atlanta to come and do minority outreach for him… and instead of helping us raise money, he sets up a separate nonprofit to raise millions of dollars, hires the friends of his colleagues—all white—and he reaches out to liberals and abandons us,” Woodson told me.

  He said the cycle repeated itself so many times that he took to morbidly boasting, “I’ve been screwed by the most famous and most influential people here in Washington.”

  Woodson wanted to believe that Ryan was different. He had first met the congressman when he was a young aide to Jack Kemp in the early nineties, and he respected what Ryan had tried to do in the Romney campaign. He had been especially impressed when word got back to him that after the election Ryan personally wrote thank-you notes to every one of the people who had attended the roundtable in Cleveland. But Woodson had long ago stopped trusting every wide-eyed Republican who came to him with a spiel about looking out for “the least among us.” So he devised a plan to test Ryan’s motives.

  “Why don’t you come with me to Pastor Holloway’s ministry?” Woodson offered.

  Nestled deep in DC’s southeast quadrant—far away from the brightly colored row houses and trendy eateries frequented by the political class—Holloway’s homeless shelter functioned as a combination hotel and self-improvement seminar for the down-and-out. At Graceview, vagrant addicts and ex-felons were given apartments, enrolled in counseling and drug treatment, and provided with assistance in finding gainful employment—but they were expected to pull their weight. They had to stay sober, pass drug tests, keep their rooms clean, and show up for work; as long as they followed the rules, they were allowed to stay for as much time as they needed to get back on their feet. Since its founding in the early nineties, Graceview had become an oft-cited model of the teach-a-man-to-fish approach to social welfare, contrasting sharply—conservatives liked to point out—with state-funded shelters where residents were allowed to drink on the premises and the facilities often became magnets for drug dealers.

  For Woodson’s purposes, the visit to Graceview would give him a chance to see what the shelter’s residents—consistently keen judges of character in his experience—thought of Ryan’s sincerity.

  “The criminal lifestyle makes you very discerning,” Woodson later told me. “You can’t lip-synch authenticity around people like that.”

  The day of their scheduled visit arrived, and as the two men toured the shelter with Pastor Holloway, Woodson had to admit that Ryan made a good first impression. The congressman had come without a camera-wielding aide in tow, and he spent the bulk of the tour asking detailed, insightful questions about how the program worked, in the manner of an earnest pupil striving for extra credit. The stilted conversations he tried to drum up with the residents made it clear that he was outside his comfort zone—but at least he lacked the ego and smarm that seemed to ooze out of so many of his congressional colleagues like a festering pus. He actually seemed as though he was really trying to connect with the people here.

  This guy might actually be for real, Woodson thought.

  A few weeks after the tour, they went to dinner at Charlie Palmer’s, an upscale steak house on Capitol Hill. As they dined on fussily plated protein, Woodson enacted phase two of his sincerity test for Ryan: an aggressive, in-your-face grilling intended to fluster the congressman and expose any ulterior motives he was harboring.

  “Why the hell do you care about poor people?” Woodson demanded during the dinner.

  When Ryan met the question with a confused beat of silence, Woodson pressed harder.

  “Really! I want to know why you care. You’re a political celebrity. Everywhere you go, people want to talk to you. You don’t need this. The campaign is over. So, why do you care?”

  Ryan was taken aback by the sudden hostility, but he responded calmly with his trademark earnestness: “I’m concerned about this country.”

  He explained that he was worried the identity politics and class warfare that President Obama had so effectively deployed during his reelection bid were threatening to permanently impede the country’s ability to tackle big problems, like poverty—an issue where he believed that good-faith members of both parties could work together constructively.

  “We’re splintering,” Ryan said. “We’re being divided. I’m worried about that, and I want to do something about it. But I’ve got some gaps in my knowledge, and I’m hoping you can help me out with that.”

  This was part of the story, but it was really only the job interview truth.

  In reality, Ryan’s personal motives for this new antipoverty push were marked by a combination of genuine idealism and calculated self-interest. “Paul’s really sincere,” one former Ryan aide told me, echoing others who had worked with the congressman. “But I mean, he’s still a politician.”

  True, he was wrestling with a spiritual unrest that had lingered since that backstage prayer during the campaign, and he felt called to commit his influence and energies to helping the poor. But if he was being honest with himself, Ryan had to admit that he was concerned about his political profile as well.

  Much like the GOP itself, Ryan was suffering a political identity crisis. He sensed that the winds in Washington were shifting away from the austerity politics he had spent years championing. Back in 2009, when he authored his first deficit-hacking budget, it earned him rave reviews from figures on both sides of the aisle, where Washington rules dictated that statesmen must pay lip service to sound fiscal policy. Ryan’s plan was “gutsy” and “courageous” and “visionary” and “serious-minded.” Three years later, though, the Left had just won an election in part by subjecting his proposals to a populist pummeling, while many on the right complained that his budgets didn’t go far enough in shrinking the federal government. (Ryan was particularly vexed by the criticism from his own side, lamenting privately to friends, “I used to be a bomb thrower; I was the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party. Now I’m just part of the establishment.”)

  In the Darwinian evolution that American politics was now undergoing, Ryan was choosing to adapt rather than die—and he wanted to bring his party along with him. In this new political era, Republicans would have to work harder than ever to prove they were
interested in the problems of the so-called 47 percent. What better way to save the soul of his party—and his own career—than by embarking on a listening tour in America’s forgotten ghettos and barrios?

  Ryan didn’t say any of this at Charlie Palmer’s, of course. But his earnest monologue wasn’t what won Woodson over anyway.

  What did it for Woodson was Ryan’s reaction to the steady stream of schmoozers that approached their table throughout the evening to say hello to the newly famous congressman. Ryan was polite to the interrupting glad-handers, but he kept his focus trained consistently on Woodson and his other dining companions. By the end of the dinner, Woodson was almost convinced of Ryan’s sincerity, but he had one more test: he demanded that the congressman pay a tithe of his time.

  I can show you what’s working on the ground, and introduce you to some people who are making a real difference in these communities, Woodson said. But you need to give me at least one day a month, where you leave the budget committee meetings and postpone the fund-raising phone calls, and spend some actual time visiting poor neighborhoods, meeting poor people.

  Given the carefully guarded schedule of an in-demand member of Congress who also had a young family at home, Woodson knew this was no small ask. But Ryan readily agreed.

  As the men shook hands, Woodson thought, You better not screw me, too.

  On the evening of December 5, 2012, Ryan took the stage at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to deliver his first speech since the election. He was the keynote speaker at the Kemp Leadership Award Dinner, named for the mentor who loomed over his life, and he had chosen this venue—a crowded ballroom full of Republican dignitaries and political reporters—to begin his atonement for the sins of the Romney campaign, and reintroduce himself to Washington as a champion of the poor.