by Joe Klein
He reacted to his ostracism stoically. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. Ever since high school there had been people who considered him a goody-goody, but he’d always had a strong circle of friends and supporters. This was the first time he’d tried to walk his talk in the real world—or at least in a world, the military, that allegedly lived with a strict code of honor. He had stood his ground but lost altitude among some of his peers.
He was intent on living a life of consequence. He would not change who he was. But he was beginning to realize how tough a road he had chosen. He was an American anachronism, a credulous outlier in a society drifting toward cynicism.
Chapter 2
THE UPHILLS
Eric’s Obi-Wan act didn’t come naturally. He had a flip side, equally intense. He was a wild physical creature. He’d amazed his mother by flipping himself over a week after he was born. He walked and talked early. And then he ran. He would go down to the basement, turn on the radio, and just run in circles, listening to music. Becky Greitens was a prekindergarten teacher who worked with special needs children, and she sometimes wondered if Eric had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But then she’d think: Nope. Not possible. It was more like Attention Surplus Disorder. He had full-throttle ADHD energy, but there was no deficit of attention. By the age of two, he seemed—to Becky, at least—observant, thinking, thoughtful. He looked at you strong and hard with ardent blue eyes; he seemed to be listening hard, too.
“You think maybe we brought the wrong kid home from the hospital?” she would ask her husband, Rob, an accountant at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose very mild manner camouflaged a sharp, inquiring mind. Rob was a devotee of Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher of the 1950s, and of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist. He and Becky were thrilled by their son, but also a little frightened by him. Becky worried that his physicality slipped too easily into violence, especially after his brother, Marc, was born. Very early on, Eric grabbed Marc by the throat and flipped him like a rag doll in the bassinet; Marc survived intact and Eric got a lecture, but it didn’t have much impact on his subsequent behavior. Eric spent his elementary school years banging on his younger brothers. There were times when he seemed on the brink of being out of control: during a snowball fight Marc broke Eric’s sunglasses, and Eric pinned him down and was just pummeling him. When Aaron was born three years after Marc, he’d join in the mayhem, using weapons like wooden blocks to make up for his lack of size.
There was a fair amount of tension in the house. Eric certainly provided his share, setting the warp-speed tone for his brothers. Becky seemed to be on the phone 24/7, talking to the frightened parents of her needy students. She worried that she wasn’t doing enough for her own kids, that she wouldn’t get the laundry done on time—and the amount of dirty laundry produced by her sons was prodigious, an Everest of soil. Rob helped by jiggering his hours at the USDA, starting at six a.m. and ending at three p.m. so that he could come home to be a coach and scout leader for his boys in the afternoon. Meals were often chaos, hot dogs or tacos eaten on the run, as Rob took the boys to sports practice. And the times when they did sit down as a family—like Friday nights, for Banquet fried chicken—were a zoo, the boys often stumbling in from the yard filthy and noisy, bloody and sometimes shirtless. “Do you think,” Rob would ask, terminally wry, “you might consider putting on a shirt for dinner?” It was, he believed, like eating with a pack of wolves.
Eric’s aggressiveness was balanced and, ultimately, conquered by his inner Obi-Wan—and here his attention surplus served him well: he had a reflexive respect for his elders, especially those who appealed to his heart and mind. He was easily socialized. His Obi-Wan education began with Bruce Carl, who taught Sunday school at the B’Nai El synagogue in suburban St. Louis. Carl was tall and curly-haired, a college basketball player, a dynamo, a classic “Ask Not” Kennedy liberal who believed his mission was to teach the protected middle-class kids of the B’Nai El congregation about the desperate lives being lived in the St. Louis ghettos and in the developing world. He taught tikkun olam—repair the world—as the core Jewish value, the place where your soul flourished, or not.
Eric was Carl’s most enthusiastic student. He always had his hand up, always had an opinion or a question about everything. He dominated the class. Eventually, Bruce took him aside and said, “I read this story recently about how American and Japanese executives behave when they have joint meetings. The American executives do all the talking. So, Eric, what’s the consequence of that?”
They were sitting on the grass outside the synagogue. Carl was speaking softly, casually. Eric didn’t know where he was going. “The consequence,” Carl continued, “is that after the meeting, the Japanese know everything the Americans know—but the Americans only know what they knew at the start of the meeting. You should keep that in mind.”
Eric would never forget it. He worked on it, honed it over the years. The outer calm became the brake against his inner Maserati; it was, in its way, as intense and relentless as other teenage boys’ need to flash their hormones. Later, after he became a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, he would use this skill to charm the people who expected him to be a self-righteous braggart. He refused to megaphone his résumé or drop names or talk about the important things he’d done. He’d ask the people he met about their lives—real questions, not perfunctory ones—and then run with their interests. He had a tendency toward pedagogy when it came to issues, especially ethical issues, but he would not talk about himself, or use himself as an example, unless it was unavoidable.
Deep in the Reagan era, he followed Bruce Carl to a program called Youth Leadership St. Louis, which attracted overachieving high school kids from all over the city. Carl began to take them out into the world—to a landfill, to learn about the solid waste disposal problem, to work in soup kitchens. At one point, they spent a night in a homeless shelter, much to Becky’s dismay.
Carl gave the Youth Leadership St. Louis kids whistles. He told them to blow the whistles every time they were in a meeting and someone said something that was racist or bigoted. One of the girls in the program took that extremely literally and blew the whistle on the mayor of East St. Louis, a black man who was going on about how the reporters and editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were all against him and didn’t pay attention to East St. Louis because they were racist. “I don’t believe that,” the whistle-blower said to the mayor’s amazement. “There are a lot of sensitive journalists at the Post-Dispatch and they’ve written some really good stories about the problems in East St. Louis.”
That became part of Eric’s nature as well: he was a whistle-blower from an early age. He was afflicted by a slightly goofy literalism at times, the sort of kid who actually said that he wanted to be President of the United States. He said it in third or fourth grade, when a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I want to be President,” he said, “because I want to help people, and the President gets to help the most people.”
Fair enough. But he was still saying it early in high school, when one of his favorite teachers, Bill Jenkins, had to set him straight. Jenkins was short, barrel-chested, African American, with a church bass Voice of God. He was faculty adviser on several of Eric’s extracurricular programs—and he thought one of his best students was acting foolishly. “Eric, I keep hearing from all of these people that you want to be President,” he said one day. “You can’t want to be president. That doesn’t make any sense. You have to want to do something. What do you want to do?”
Eric responded with political boilerplate. He wanted to create better schools and more jobs and . . .
“That’s not good enough,” Jenkins said, “and I don’t want to hear you talking that nonsense ever again.”
In the second semester of junior year, Eric’s honors English teacher, Barbara Osburg, opened her Trends in American Literature class with a summary course description she had written about the
life and death of the American dream. This would be the core theme of the class. She was a passionate teacher and liked to challenge her students’ assumptions. But Osburg also had some assumptions of her own, nurtured in the 1960s: she believed the American dream had collapsed into a rubble of tinsel materialism.
The students took the summary paper home to read, and the next day Eric raised his hand and asked, “Who wrote this paper?”
“Well, I gave it to you and there’s no name on it,” she said, “so you can assume I wrote it.”
“Well, I just don’t think what you’re saying is true.”
“Why not?” she asked, amazed by the kid’s maturity and confidence. This was not a teenage boy showing off. She had landed herself, she realized, in a serious intellectual dispute with an adolescent. And she was on shaky ground.
“There’s a Mexican American immigrant family who lives across the street from us,” Eric said. “The father—his name is Sergio—told me about how hard he worked to make it in America. When he first came here, he only learned how to speak English by listening to the radio.” Now Sergio had a job and a house in the suburbs and was able to put food on the table for his three kids. “Those are important things for people,” Eric continued. “They’re not hollow and materialistic, the way you argued in that paper. Eric Hoffer says, ‘America still offers more raw opportunity than any other country on earth.’ I agree with that. That’s the American dream.”
Eric Hoffer?
After their American dream confrontation—the kid was right, dammit—Barb Osburg would do anything she could to help Eric Greitens succeed. His goals were stratospheric. He wanted to go to Harvard, Stanford, or Duke, or nowhere at all. His family didn’t have the money to afford those sorts of schools—they lived in a modest three-bedroom ranch in Maryland Heights—and he would need a full scholarship if he got into any of them. He asked if he could do an independent study with Osburg for senior year so that he could work on writing the application essays, both for college and for a pile of scholarships, which he’d researched in the guidance counselor’s office.
He was accepted at Duke, where he received a full-tuition A.B. Duke scholarship. He also won a national Mars Milky Way scholarship competition to pay for his living expenses.
At Duke, his goals remained ambitious, but they became more personal: He wanted to live a life of service. He wanted real intellectual stimulation. He knew his body needed an athletic outlet. And he wanted to see the world. It would take a while—all of freshman year, in fact—before the components fell into place. But when they did, there was a surprisingly heterodox quality to his new obsessions, most of which—except the academic part—involved Duke University only peripherally. He became a Big Man Off Campus.
One lingering impulse from high school worked very much to Eric’s advantage at Duke—the constant search for fellowships, scholarships, awards, and prizes. He wanted to travel, but he didn’t have the money for it. He soon found that the Trent Foundation for International Studies offered a grant to Duke freshmen who’d never been out of the country before. It was a research grant and, with the help of his uncle Don Leventhal, who was part-owner of a broom factory in Beijing, Eric put together a proposal to study working conditions in joint Sino-American business ventures in the industrial city of Changchun, where Uncle Don had a friend with a factory.
The China trip, which took place in the summer of 1993, established many of the protocols for his future travels. He traveled light, and alone. He arrived in Changchun and was overwhelmed by the place, the din of it, the crowds, people pushing their way toward their destinations in a manner that would seem brazen and impolite in St. Louis, bicycles threading the streets lazily but sometimes unpredictably, with wild abandon, the smell of spices frying in oil mixed with the stench of open sewage, the coal dust pollution so intense that the air was a physical presence, the pigs and goats grazing next to brand-new factories. He found the people friendly and curious about him—reddish-brown hair and freckles were major events in China. They would approach him on the street, ask who he was, ask to touch his hair; sometimes they spoke a bit of English.
Changchun was a tough, industrial town, not fitted out for tourists. If he was hungry and his hotel’s restaurant was closed, he would go out to the street vendors and point or make hand motions to secure some food for himself. Alone, and looking for friends, he decided to take some kung fu classes—his first real experience with martial arts—which he enjoyed immensely. He also tossed aside standard tourist conventions. He’d brought a convection coil to boil water for drinking but soon grew tired of the hassle and began drinking from the tap. He ate the local food and drank the local water; he was sick once in China but never afterward in any of his travels.
One of his first meals in Changchun was a banquet with some young Chinese joint venture executives. He was still learning how to negotiate the food without offending his hosts—the dishes spinning around the traditional lazy Susan were lovingly described, in detail, and often involved improbable animal organs not entirely overwhelmed by heavy sauces; he was required to sample each, which required a fair amount of furtive concentration, as he took the smallest possible portion and shoved it deep into his rice bowl and hoped no one would notice. And then the host said, “Mr. Eric, now you will sing?” Sing? His mind went blank. He couldn’t remember the words to any song; he was even boggled by “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he tried to rehearse it. Of course, there was always “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” . . . He began to sing and made rowing motions with his arms, trying to get the others to sing along. They just sat there. It was awful—and became more painful when his host stood up and sang a traditional Chinese song with surpassing seriousness and beauty. As the years passed, and his exotic travel intensified, Eric realized that moments of awkwardness were the times he learned most about the cultures he had parachuted into, the times he remembered best.
Traveling alone, he was also a mark. The night before he was to return to Beijing, the hotel manager brought him his bill, and the rate was far higher than had been agreed upon. The manager said it was tourist season, which was transparently absurd. There were no tourists in Changchun. Afterward, Eric realized that he should have simply said, “We agreed to the lower rate,” handed the man his traveler’s checks, and headed for the train station. But he paid the bill and arrived back in Beijing nearly broke—and with three more weeks remaining in his trip.
He was greeted at the station by one of Uncle Don’s associates, who suggested that he come and live in the broom factory dorm and make some money teaching English to the workers. He had no idea how to teach English, but there were no other options. His students had varying levels of fluency. Conversations were possible with some of them, though, and he soon learned that a few had participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations four years earlier. They were starving for news of the outside world. They wanted to know about the American reaction to Tiananmen. They asked him questions about the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The conversations became animated, passionate, as they got to know and trust one another—and, Eric noticed, every time they began to talk about politics, one of the students would get up and close the door. Sometimes their classes spilled over into dinner; they would ride their bikes to a local restaurant and eat dumplings. Eric found that he was envious of these young people. They had made history. He wanted to find his way into history, too.
It was inevitable that an American having conversations about Tiananmen and the U.S. Constitution with former demonstrators would eventually draw the attention of the Chinese security services, and one Friday night, just before he was due to return home, two policemen came to the factory dorm and took Eric to the local police station. He was deposited in a bare room with a table and two chairs and made to wait. Then he was questioned for two hours. After the questioning was over, the police interrogator, who spoke halting English, said that Eric had broken Chinese law and must be punished. This was true: he’d been teaching
without a license, although there was no way of knowing if that was the nature of his crime. Eric tried to Obi-Wan his way through the panic and politely asked to call the U.S. embassy but was told, “We can call the U.S. embassy only if you are hit.”
Hit? He asked for a drink of water and tried to assess his situation. He was nineteen years old and clearly not a spy; he didn’t think the Chinese would risk an international incident with an American college student—but they weren’t allowing him to call his embassy either. He asked again to make the call and was told again that he could do that only if he was hit; this time, he realized that the policeman—and it was becoming clear that this guy was only a policeman—was probably citing a manual that said that if an American was injured (“hit”) in Beijing, they had to call the U.S. embassy. The interrogator was chain-smoking, sweating, and getting flustered; he seemed as confused about the situation as Eric was. Eventually, Eric was allowed to go, but the police kept his passport. They said that it would be available Monday for retrieval.
Eric returned to the station after a nervous weekend and was told that he could get his passport if he signed some papers he didn’t understand and paid a fine of approximately $9 for a crime that was never made clear to him. He did what he was told, secured the passport, and left the country soon after. It had been a terrifying experience, but it had been an experience—a potential moment of peril, in which he had to think clearly, in which he hadn’t been in control, and he’d made it through without losing his composure.
When Eric returned to Duke for sophomore year, he chose a new major and a new sport. The new major was an independent study, a blend of philosophy and public policy, supervised by Bruce Payne, who was another “Ask Not” Kennedy liberal like Bruce Carl.
The sport was boxing.