The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Of course, no one believed that the Southern Avenger would single-handedly serve as the senator’s undoing. In the course of most every politician’s career, there comes a time when he finds out that he has inadvertently hired a deviant—a pervert, a rank homophobe, an unapologetic communist. In Washington’s monochromatic political class, there was little room for weirdos or radicals—and whenever it was publicly revealed that one was secretly lurking in the lower ranks of some congressional office, the politician could generally weather the storm by adhering to a widely understood protocol. He would release a statement insisting he was unaware of the deviant’s past and assuring the electorate that he held his staff to the highest standards of tolerance and moral fortitude. Then he would unceremoniously fire the deviant and lie low while he waited for the media to move on.

  Not Rand. With reporters clamoring to know whether he was going to fire his aide, the senator grumpily instructed his communications director to issue a defiant (but vaguely worded) statement saying only that his office required “all employees [to] treat individuals with the equal protection of the law” and that “we find no evidence that this policy has been violated by any employee.”

  Translation: Jack Hunter hasn’t broken any laws. Now kindly bite me.

  When Trygve Olson saw the statement, he was bewildered. Rand could not seriously be thinking of standing by this disposable midlevel aide who was towing behind him thirteen years’ worth of racist commentary and radical activism—could he?

  Olson called up Doug Stafford in Rand’s office and told him what every political operative in Washington already knew: You guys have to fire Hunter.

  Stafford replied that it wasn’t going to happen. Rand had made up his mind; he thought the Free Beacon story was a cheap shot, and he didn’t want to give the neocons the satisfaction of a scalp. Besides, he didn’t think it was ultimately that big of a deal.

  Incredulous, Olson decided to go straight to the source. He had lunch that week with Rand and a couple of his aides, and on the walk back to the Capitol, Olson outlined the myriad ways in which keeping Hunter around would be a disaster. The aide’s history would be an albatross around his neck as long as he was on staff. And Rand’s failure to get rid of him would send a message to the Republican donor class, whose money he would be begging for ahead of 2016, that his campaign wasn’t serious. Why would any multimillionaire write a check to a candidate who wasn’t even willing to throw a freak show staffer under the bus to win?

  By the time they arrived at his Senate office, Rand had come around.

  “Yeah, he probably has to move on,” he conceded. “But I don’t want to fire him.”

  Olson assured Rand that he wouldn’t have to, that they would persuade Hunter to quietly slink away on his own. Rand signed off on the decision, and finally, almost two weeks after the Free Beacon story went live, Hunter resigned.

  It was clear, though, that weeks later, Rand was still smarting from the episode. When he was asked about Hunter during an interview with NPR in August, he lost his composure and began lashing out at the host. “You can go ahead and beat up on an ex-employee of mine, but… don’t you have something better to read than a bunch of crap from people who don’t like me?” he barked.

  L’affaire Hunter left many in the political world perplexed by why it had taken Rand so long to do what obviously needed to be done, and why he seemed to be taking it all so personally.

  But inside Rand World, the reason was obvious. Hunter wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill secessionist political aide: he was a friend of the family. A libertarian stalwart who was well regarded in the movement, Hunter had been a loyal Paulite for years. He was an early supporter of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, and at his dad’s suggestion, Rand had hired Hunter to coauthor his 2011 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington. The truth was that Rand had known all about Hunter’s Southern Avenger alter ego; it had just never occurred to him that a radical résumé should preclude a talented operative from joining his team.

  But that was then. Three years later, Rand was a rising star and leading contender in the early 2016 polls, straining to exhibit seriousness and escape the tentacles of the libertarian fringe without appearing disloyal to his father’s legacy. It was a sensitive undertaking rife with familial repercussions. Hunter had come under attack at a time when the relationship between Rand and his dad was growing more fraught with tension and resentment by the day. And while both Pauls publicly slapped down even the faintest suggestion of acrimony, the truth was that their father-son rivalry had been simmering for years.

  Rand Paul’s earliest political education was gained by eavesdropping on his dad. A slight, quiet kid with shaggy hair, Randy liked to hover near the long, rectangular table in his family’s Lake Jackson, Texas, dining room and pretend to read a book while he listened to Ron entertain a rotating cast of libertarian luminaries. He was not an ostentatiously precocious kid, not the type to butt in. But he was in awe of his father, and fascinated by the philosophical solar system in which his home was increasingly becoming the center of gravity. “I always was more drawn to the conversations with adults than other things,” he later told me of his adolescence.

  He was thirteen years old and just beginning to take an interest in his dad’s incessant talk of monetary policy when the old man was first elected to the House of Representatives, in 1976. Congressman Paul championed a suburban, culturally conservative spin on libertarianism that distanced itself from the free love hippies and libertine anarchists traditionally associated with the ideology, and resonated instead with the type of gun-toting, churchgoing small businessmen who populated south Texas.

  The Pauls lived in a big four-bedroom ranch house—paid for with the income Ron made as the only ob-gyn in town—that included a swimming pool and a TV set that was always on (even when nobody was watching). Ron and his wife, Carol, had a distinctly laissez-faire parenting style: no firm curfews, no mandatory chores, and absolutely no allowance, which Ron regarded as a handout that might foster dependence. “I don’t know that we had any rules,” recalled Ronnie, the oldest of the five kids. But while they weren’t disciplinarians or taskmasters, Ron and Carol set serious expectations for their kids that made for a brood of high achievers. “We really didn’t want to disappoint our parents,” Ronnie said.

  For Randy’s seventeenth birthday, his dad gave him a collection of Ayn Rand novels, which he promptly devoured. The books’ heroes—handsome and beautiful capitalists crusading against the evil forces of collectivism—lent romance to his dad’s economic sermonizing. At around the same time, Randy fell in love with the Canadian prog rock band Rush, famous for synth-heavy, libertarian-tinged tracks like the 1981 hit “Tom Sawyer,” about a free-spirited individualist whose “mind is not for rent / to any god or government.”

  As his father became a leading light of American libertarianism, many of the movement’s most prominent figures became part of Randy’s day-to-day life. He drove preeminent libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard to the airport. He watched free market economist Hans Sennholz choke on his first-ever bite of spicy Mexican food. These youthful interactions seemed unremarkable to Randy at the time, but they would become the raw material out of which his ideological worldview was formed.

  During summers, Randy interned at Ron’s congressional office in Washington. On morning commutes to the Capitol, he would sit quietly in the car and soak up his dad’s drive time philosophical musings with chief of staff Lew Rockwell. When the workday ended, Randy would head back to his dad’s condo in northern Virginia and the two would chat about the day’s political news over dinner. Neither of them could have guessed that two decades later, they would find themselves back in the exact same situation—but as budding rivals.

  Shortly after winning his 2010 Senate race, Rand asked his dad if he could move in with him. The senator-elect was taking a hefty pay cut by giving up his ophthalmology practice back home, and he wasn’t sure he could afford his own apartment in Washington.
He figured rooming with his dad—who was still serving in the House of Representatives, and still owned the northern Virginia apartment—would be an easy way to save cash as he transitioned to a government paycheck.

  Ron agreed, and the arrangement soon generated a small flurry of soft-focus media profiles about the proud father and admiring son going about the people’s business by day, and splitting chores and grocery checks by night. They diligently played up the shtick in interviews, cracking corny jokes about each other’s cooking and reminiscing about the summers they spent together in DC when Rand was a teenager.

  Privately, though, they were both miserable. Ron had bought the condo when he was first elected to Congress in the seventies, and Rand discovered upon moving in that the decor hadn’t changed in the ensuing thirty-five years. All wood paneling and retro earth tones, the place made Rand feel as though he was living in The Jeffersons’ “deluxe apartment in the sky,” only much closer to earth and about three decades past its deluxe prime. The younger Paul was also a bit of a neat freak, and he often caught himself grumbling about the grimy untidiness of his dad’s digs. He wasn’t comfortable with his wife spending the night there when she visited, and he came to loathe his daily commutes in traffic across the 14th Street Bridge.

  Ron, meanwhile, quickly tired of having his forty-seven-year-old son constantly crowding him. As much as he had always enjoyed spending time with his kids when he was at home in Texas, Ron long ago grew accustomed to being a solo operator when he was in Washington. Now, Rand’s inescapable presence was making him claustrophobic.

  Rand moved out of the condo after less than six months—but Ron’s claustrophobia never really subsided.

  One day early in 2011, Ron met with Jesse Benton—the young political strategist he shared with his son—to break the news that he wasn’t going to run for president again. The veteran congressman was getting ready to retire, and he felt he had made his point during his 2008 bid. He wanted to wind down his time in office with dignity, not in the harried heat of another national campaign.

  Benton was disappointed, but with Ron out of the picture, he decided it was time to start grooming Rand for a presidential run. He approached the younger Paul and pitched him on mounting an insurgent bid for the Republican nomination in 2012. He was adamant that Rand’s polish and pragmatism would make him a far more serious candidate than his dad ever was. Benton argued that, between the fiery base of supporters Ron had built up and the new voters Rand could attract, he would be a real threat to win the White House.

  Rand ate it up. He told Benton to start putting out feelers for a 2012 bid, and the strategist moved quickly to schedule a trip to the early primary state of South Carolina. On March 23, 2011, Rand made a surprise appearance at the Charleston Meeting, a gathering of Palmetto State Republican elites, and news of the visit set off sirens in the political punditocracy. Rand fanned the speculation by announcing future trips to Iowa and New Hampshire as well. The buzz was building, the strategy was working, the wheels were in motion—and then, suddenly, it all came to a screeching halt.

  A couple of days after Rand’s headline-grabbing South Carolina trip, Ron called up Benton. He had been giving some more thought to the idea of a 2012 presidential bid, and he’d changed his mind.

  I’ve decided I’m going to run, Ron said. And I want you to manage my campaign.

  Rand, it went without saying, would have to take a seat.

  The story of the elder Paul carelessly—maybe even maliciously—sidelining his own son’s presidential ambitions was never publicly reported, but it traveled quickly throughout the two men’s shared network of operatives and activists, who reacted like dinner guests trapped at a table where a nasty family argument is suddenly erupting: eyes turned downward, fake smiles frozen in place, everyone trying awkwardly to pretend they didn’t notice the enormous breach of decorum that had just taken place.

  In the weeks that followed Ron’s power play, they traded gossip and speculation in hushed tones and discreet text messages. Was Ron jealous of his son’s meteoric rise? Resentful that he wasn’t getting proper credit for laying the groundwork for Rand’s success? Or maybe Rand had jumped the gun without getting his dad’s go-ahead? Was this a sign that Ron didn’t trust Rand’s commitment to libertarian ideals? Or was he only trying to spare his son from foolishly rushing into the presidential fray before he was ready?

  Whatever the reason, as the campaign progressed, many in the Pauls’ concentric inner circles began to notice a gulf forming between father and son that hadn’t been there before.

  In December 2011, polls showed that the upcoming Iowa caucuses were—implausibly, unbelievably—within Ron’s grasp. The campaign believed that if he simply stuck to his core message of small-government economics for the final weeks of the race, he would win the state. But instead, Ron kept wandering off into unfiltered foreign policy rants that made him sound more like a crazed hobo shouting at a crowded bus stop than a credible contender for the Oval Office. “He kept wanting to talk about how Osama bin Laden had some valid justifications for attacking the U.S., or whatever,” one frustrated adviser later complained to me.

  Finally, Trygve Olson, who was working on Ron’s campaign, dialed up the candidate’s eminently more practical son and pleaded with him to stage an intervention, persuade his father to stay on message.

  “You’ve gotta talk to him,” Olson said.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Rand replied. “Do you ever talk politics with your dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how does that usually go?” Rand asked.

  “He usually ends up telling me I’m full of shit,” Olson cracked.

  “What makes you think it’s any different with my dad?”

  A couple of weeks after losing Iowa, Ron was in the greenroom at a Republican primary debate in South Carolina when Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham came up to him and began effusively piling praise on his son. They gushed about how Rand was a joy to work with in the Senate, a real contributor, someone with whom they felt they could work productively despite their ideological differences.

  Finally, Ron snapped, “Well, if he’s so great, he should run for president himself.”

  DeMint was taken aback by the outburst and quickly shut up. But Graham didn’t seem to catch on, because he just kept spurting commendations for Rand in his courtly Southern drawl, as Ron’s face twisted into a cranky scowl.

  By the time the 2012 campaign ended, the Pauls’ shared orbit of allies was quickly dividing into two factions, like middle schoolers getting picked for teams in gym class.

  Ron was eager to carve out a choir-preaching perch for himself after leaving office, so he stuck with the most hard-core of the true believers: libertarian scholars at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and politicos and activists who were either too unpredictable or too rabid in their convictions to work for his son. Many of these purists believed that Rand was watering down his beliefs to suit his presidential ambitions—thus tarnishing his father’s legacy and weakening their cause. They didn’t mind saying so to Ron either.

  This was nothing new for the elder Paul. Ever since Rand had first started running for Senate, Ron had been listening to leading libertarians complain about his son’s various disappointments. Once, at a dinner with Walter Block, the Loyola University professor and self-described anarchist rattled off a list of the younger Paul’s ideological heresies and demanded, “Can you take Rand out to the woodshed and spank him or something?” Recounting the conversation years later, Block felt bad for being so harsh. As he recalled, “Ron didn’t say anything… He just sort of mumbled and changed the subject.”

  But now the complaints were no longer being restricted to private dinner conversations: they were often out in the open. With Rand seizing his moment on the national stage, Ron found himself stuck in the peanut gallery with the libertarian losers and misfits who weren’t invited to join the show, and had nothing left to do now but heckle.

  One of the mo
st vocal Rand bashers was Lew Rockwell, a long-serving aide and friend to Ron who had made a habit of using the politician’s fame as a vehicle for his own polemics and score settling. In the most notorious example, Rockwell was suspected of authoring a series of racist newsletters that were sent out under Ron’s name in the seventies and eighties and came back to haunt him during his 2012 presidential campaign. Antics like this had left many in Paul’s circle suspicious of Rockwell. “Lew cuts two ways,” said Mary Jane Smith, Ron’s former campaign manager. “Totally, totally loyal to Ron. But Lew had his own ideas, and Ron was such a trusting person.”

  It was widely understood within the Paul family’s orbit that Rockwell detested Rand. He still thought of him as the scrawny, know-nothing teenager sitting in the backseat of his father’s car as they commuted to the Capitol all those summers ago—only now the unappreciative twerp was famous and selling out his family legacy every chance he got. Rockwell’s seeming contempt was so intense that many people close to the Pauls came to believe he was posting provocative, outlandish statements under Ron’s name on social media in an effort to sabotage Rand’s political prospects. For example, when @RonPaul tweeted in 2013 that the death of former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle proved that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword,” the public outrage that ensued forced Rand to put out his own statement distancing himself from his dad’s provocation and calling the slain sniper a “hero.” The episode was a political headache for Rand—and the senator’s aides suspected Rockwell was behind it. It wasn’t that Ron necessarily disagreed with the tweet, but its tone and timing seemed deliberately designed to tweak his son. (Rockwell denied ever posting on Ron’s account, and when he was asked what he thought of Rand, he said he was “agnostic” and “not a fan of the political process.”)