The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  It’s not that she was unsupportive of Rand’s political ambitions. She had spent her entire marriage watching her husband bob in and out of his father’s inner circle, and she always knew Rand might want to enter the family business one day. Part of her even looked forward to it. She wasn’t a political neophyte either: up until 2013, she’d been putting her PR skills to use at a Republican communications firm, where she helped elect a number of conservative candidates, including Ted Cruz.

  But her experience with Rand’s career in politics had been like adopting a baby gorilla: at first, it was a fun little pet that was exciting to have around, and then suddenly, without warning, it was a hulking, uncontrollable beast that had rampaged through their home, and was now hunched, panting, in the middle of their living room. Rand’s celebrity and influence had grown with a ferocity and speed that neither of them had planned on—and they were now well ahead of the timeline they’d agreed to when they first got married.

  Kelley Ashby met Randy Paul at a backyard oyster roast in Atlanta while he was completing his 1989 surgery internship at the Georgia Baptist Medical Center. While she would later joke to Vogue, “I kind of blew him off a little bit because I thought he was about eighteen,” the reality was that Randy had grown up quite a bit by the time the two met. His mischief-making college days behind him, he was now working toward a degree at Duke Medical School, intensely focused on his studies, and not smoking pot anymore (or, at least, so he told his just-say-no girlfriend; some of his friends had their doubts). He seemed serious and ambitious. Shortly after he and Kelley wed, she renamed him Rand—a moniker more befitting a well-credentialed surgeon, she thought.

  They settled down in Kentucky to be close to Kelley’s family—and also because they had just learned that the local eye doctor in the town of Bowling Green had recently died in a freak boating accident. The couple bought an acre and a half of land in a new gated subdivision called Rivergreen, where some of the region’s wealthiest families would eventually move and dwarf the Pauls’ comparatively modest home with their sprawling mansions and swimming pools. Rand began his ophthalmology career, and together he and Kelley built a relatively quiet, tidy, and happy family life. Dad and kids played basketball in the driveway and fished in the subdivision’s large man-made pond. Kelley enforced a healthy diet for her men—dinner often meant small portions of sauceless protein and salad—and when the Paul men splurged, like on an outing one night to an NBA game, all four would split a twenty-piece box of Chicken McNuggets. The lean-framed family kept the temperature in the house high, and Rand stockpiled eight-dollar mock turtlenecks he found on a discount shelf, something that his kids (and, later, the political press) would frequently tease him about. Later, when Jesse Benton was living in the Pauls’ basement during the campaign, he found that he was constantly sweating and always hungry—but he was struck by how normal, and relatively peaceful, their lives seemed. Benton, of course, was there to blow all that up.

  At the start of their marriage, Rand and Kelley had made a deal that he would wait to run for office until their kids were grown. But when the 2010 Senate race presented him with an opening, Rand asked for her permission to renege, and Kelley agreed—reluctantly.

  “It took her a while to come around,” said Gayla Warner, a longtime family friend and neighbor, who lived around the corner from the Pauls. When Warner first heard on the radio that Rand was running for Senate, she called Kelley from the car to congratulate her.

  “I just heard the news about Rand!” Warner exclaimed. “We want to do a fund-raiser at our house.”

  Kelley was embarrassed and quickly demurred. “Oh gosh,” she groaned. “I don’t know…”

  Privately, Kelley thought of her husband’s foray into politics as an exercise in principled agitation—a proud and familiar Paul family tradition that she was willing to indulge, but would rather not get the neighbors involved in.

  But even though she was reluctant, the truth was that Kelley had always thought she would make a rather good politician’s wife when the time came. And those who knew the couple agreed. Mary Jane Smith, who managed several of Ron Paul’s campaigns, would later credit Kelley with saving the younger Paul from repeating his father’s career as a batty protest candidate. “Can a wife influence a man? You bet,” Smith said. She added that Ron’s wife, Carol, “was always the stay-at-home mom. And she would do baking to make some extra money, she taught dancing lessons in their basement… whereas Rand’s wife, she does some creative writing and she does a little bit of PR work, and she’s a much more sophisticated woman. So obviously that impacts a man’s life. I think she is the perfect candidate’s wife. She’s just classy, classy, classy.”

  Once her husband’s Senate candidacy began to gain traction, however, Kelley would get her first squinty glimpse at the bright hot lights of a high-profile campaign—and the experience would leave her dreading the prospect of living out her adult life as a political spouse.

  Less than twenty-four hours after Rand won the 2010 Senate primary in Kentucky, the cavalcade of news vans and satellite trucks that had taken over the Pauls’ neighborhood transformed, suddenly, from floats in a victory parade into tanks in an invading army.

  A few weeks earlier, Rand had been asked during a little-noticed interview with the editorial board of the Louisville newspaper whether he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he had been in the Senate at the time. He’d responded that while he liked a lot of what was in the law, he thought free markets—not federal legislation—should have been the mechanism to desegregate lunch counters. “I abhor racism,” he told the editors. “I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant. But at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.” His new Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, had then gone on MSNBC later that day and pointed to the comments to claim, preposterously, that Rand wanted to repeal the landmark civil rights legislation.

  To set the record straight, Rand decided to book an appearance that night on Rachel Maddow’s show. When Kelley found out, she told him she had a bad feeling about the interview and urged him at the last minute to cancel.

  “It’s a setup,” she said.

  But Rand was undeterred. The media was clamoring for him to explain himself, and he was certain that if he could just give some context to his remarks and fully articulate his position, then this whole ridiculous controversy would fizzle out.

  Instead, the interview turned into a disaster, with Maddow asking the candidate the same question over and over again—Do you support the rights of business owners to discriminate?—while Rand tried to educate the host on the philosophical hierarchy of rights and the history of desegregation in Boston’s public transit system. The segment, which stretched on for nearly twenty minutes, ended with Rand scolding Maddow for the way she had “dumbed down” the debate and then demanding, “What is the totality of what I’m saying? Am I a bad person? Do I believe in awful things? No!”

  He knew as soon as he unclipped the microphone from his lapel at the end of the interview that it hadn’t gone perfectly—but he still thought fair-minded viewers would understand where he was coming from. His campaign team was less optimistic. They urged him to take a break from the interviews and stop dumping kerosene on this particular Dumpster fire. He still had an election to win, after all, and he wasn’t getting anywhere with all these TV hits. But Rand couldn’t help himself. He insisted that he would be able to make his case more effectively with a less partisan interviewer, that people would understand if they just listened to him. He was up early the next morning for another round of interviews.

  It was Kelley who finally brought him down to earth. She had been getting faux-worried phone calls from nosy neighbors who wanted to express their support for her in this very difficult time—lots of “How ya holdin’ up?” and “Is there anything we can do?” It was humiliating. Kelley had worked in public relations, and as far as she was concerned, it didn’t take the world’s greatest poli
tical mind to know that the only acceptable answer to “Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act?” was “Of course. Next question.” After day three of the media pile-on, she told Rand she’d had enough of seeing his stream of consciousness musings on national television. She all but ordered him to cancel his scheduled appearance on Meet the Press that Sunday—and he relented. That weekend, he ditched the campaign trail and recharged with a quiet night at home, donning shorts and socks and munching on popcorn as he played board games with his wife and kids.

  But the campaign only got worse for Kelley from there. Two months later, on the afternoon of August 6, 2010, Rand was driving across Kentucky with Stafford and Trygve Olson on his way to a campaign event when Jesse Benton called with news. Apparently, a GQ writer named Jason Zengerle, who was working on a profile of the candidate, had tracked down someone who knew Rand from the Baylor swim team, and he was seeking comment on a bizarre story she had told him.

  Zengerle wasn’t revealing the name of his source, but as Benton repeated what the reporter had told him, Rand realized that GQ had found his old friend Kristy Ditzler—and that she had told Zengerle about the fateful night of the Aqua Buddha. Zengerle was the first reporter to discover the candidate’s participation in his bizarro secret society at Baylor, and to Rand, the reporter’s queries might have sounded like the blast of a starting gun. He would spend the next several years trying to outrun kooky episodes like this from his past.

  But when Rand got on the phone with his wife to warn her of the coming story, it quickly became apparent to Stafford and Olson that Kelley had been unaware of this particular chapter of her husband’s youth. She was sharply demanding answers from Rand, who first offered weakly that he didn’t recall the incident, or that he did but he didn’t recall the woman, or that maybe something like this had happened, but who could say for sure? Mostly, he stuck with his fuzzy-memory defense, which struck one of his travel companions as amusing because memory loss is a side effect of toking.

  Rand would later confide to a couple of his closest advisers that Kelley—who was commonly referred to among his mostly male inner circle as “a good Baptist girl”—had known virtually nothing about his Baylor antics and was scandalized by the story.

  “This is fucking terrible,” the candidate complained later to a campaign confidant. “My wife didn’t know about all that.”

  Back in the car, though, Kelley’s emotional reaction over the phone was whipping Rand into a frenzy. The suddenly indignant candidate concluded that the only acceptable response was to sue GQ for libel. With his spouse seething on the phone, Rand demanded to be put in touch with a lawyer at once.

  Stafford and Olson knew that filing suit against a large national magazine would be distracting at best, and disastrous at worst, for his candidacy—but neither of them wanted to overrule Kelley in the midst of a marital dispute. So Olson suggested that they call up Chris LaCivita, the veteran Virginia-based operative who was doing work for the campaign, to ask for his take. They knew that LaCivita had already been notified of the reporter’s questions, and his specialty in political crisis management would give them perspective on how to handle this.

  Olson dialed and put his cell phone on speaker.

  “Dude,” LaCivita boomed into the receiver as soon as he picked up. “That story about the chick and the Aqua Buddha is fucking hilarious. I love that!”

  Olson winced. “You’re on speaker here with Rand and Doug.”

  There was a thick half beat of silence before LaCivita, apparently deciding it was best to ignore what had just happened, adjusted his tone to that of the sober crisis manager.

  “Rand, here’s what we’ve gotta do…” he said, before going on to lay out a proposed public relations strategy. (Litigation, he suggested, was not the best move.)

  After the election, the story would become lore in Rand World, with aides and advisers cracking up as they recited versions of it over beers and in between meetings. Kelley was not amused.

  For all the shrewd machinations that define made-for-TV political couples—the ruthless, plotting Underwoods on House of Cards; the loveless, scheming Grants on Scandal—the real-life marriages of America’s successful politicians tend to be governed by the mundane. They are humans, after all, and their decisions—even the big, potentially history-bending ones, like whether to run for president—are weighed against missed Little League games, and mortgage payments, and kids’ college funds.

  Most of the time, ambition will triumph over such concerns—but it is often a would-be candidate’s spouse who gets final say. In 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels decided to forgo a presidential bid because his wife was mortified at the prospect of reporters exhuming their decades-old divorce and reconciliation and presenting it for public examination. Paul Ryan’s wife, Janna, suffered from an acute case of stage fright that made her brief time on the presidential stage in 2012 miserable, and it weighed on her husband’s decision about whether to run in 2016. And for Chris Christie’s wife, Pat, it took a reassuring phone call from Barbara Bush—who insisted that the White House was, in fact, a lovely place to raise a family—to make her peace with the idea of her husband’s presidential bid.

  In the case of Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi, this negotiation was particularly delicate, as the latter was just reaching the pinnacle of her own impressive professional ascent when her husband began talking about running for president. Heidi had long been drawn to public service herself. In fact, when she and her husband both worked in the Bush administration early in their marriage, Ted had floundered while she thrived, earning multiple promotions until she ultimately landed her ideal post, directly reporting to Condoleezza Rice. But after Ted moved back home for his career-making appointment as Texas solicitor general—and they struggled for over a year through the nightmarish logistics of a long-distance marriage—Heidi finally gave up her dream job in the White House to join her husband, and put her Harvard MBA to use in the Houston offices of Goldman Sachs. Frustrated and unfulfilled by the work in finance, she suffered from a brief bout of depression, and on one particularly bad August night in 2005, she left her house and ended up sitting on the grass between an expressway and an on-ramp at around 10 p.m., her face buried in her hands.

  Heidi eventually recovered from the depression and went on to become a managing director at Goldman, but her husband’s ambitions meant that the 2005 police report from that night—filed after a worried passerby reported a “suspicious person” by the freeway—would almost certainly become public at some point, turning a difficult private moment into public fodder for a presidential campaign, and something that her colleagues could read about online. When the report did ultimately surface, it was in response to a wide-ranging series of public-records requests by my colleagues at BuzzFeed. The report was heavily redacted, making it hard to tell what exactly happened that night, and we were unsure whether such an incident should be covered anyway—but we decided to call a spokesman for Cruz to ask what he knew about it. The reply came back that the Cruzes were resigned to the likelihood that the report would come out in the campaign, and that if we wanted to write about it they had no objections. Besides, for Heidi, a sacrifice far greater than any one story loomed on the horizon: when Ted eventually announced his campaign, she would take an unpaid and indefinite leave from her job at Goldman. It was a political necessity, but for a couple of career-oriented high achievers, it was undoubtedly the subject of many long conversations between the two.

  Future wars and world markets hinge on these thoroughly human concerns, which get hashed out over a hundred family dinners and late-night talks in darkened bedrooms. In many ways, they always have.

  But in the run-up to 2016, prospective Republican candidates knew they had a special political incentive to make sure their spouses were fully committed to the campaign. The Underwoodian undertones of the Clintons’ relationship would present the GOP with an opportunity for contrast by allowing it to show off its nominee’s bright, happy, wholes
ome marriage. And Bill Clinton’s lustful relationship with TV cameras ensured that the role of the Republican candidate’s spouse would likely be elevated beyond the expectations of a typical election. Whoever the Republicans nominated to take on Hillary would need a spouse who could perform.

  Kelley Paul knew she could do the job—she just wasn’t sure she wanted to. The 2010 Aqua Buddha revelation had been a formative experience for her, and it loomed over the couple as they weighed the prospect of a presidential run. Not only had the GQ article driven home just how nasty high-level campaign politics could get, but it exposed the fact that there was still a lot she didn’t know about her husband’s past. Stupid college pranks were forgivable, of course, but how many more stories like this would there be? She couldn’t stand the thought of her sons (or herself, for that matter) continuing to learn about Rand’s youthful indiscretions on the Internet—especially in the sensationalized, trumped-up tone that typified presidential campaign smears.

  Even more troubling was the prospect of her kids winding up in the crosshairs of rival campaigns and sociopathic reporters. In 2013, the Pauls’ oldest son had been arrested at the Charlotte airport for underage drinking, and his mug shot was splashed across the Web. The incident occurred during a turbulent stretch of adolescence for the nineteen-year-old—one his parents hoped he was now emerging from. This, I would later learn, had been the real reason Kelley had gotten so upset about that GQ story: it wasn’t pious prudishness but fear that Rand’s parental authority would be undermined with his son once the press started chronicling Dad’s pot-fueled glory days. Kelley also fretted about how her son might react to researchers and reporters sniffing around for scandal among his old high school classmates.