by Joe Klein
“You don’t even have a phone yet,” she laughed, “and already you’re proposing new programs?” But she liked the idea and passed it along to Secretary Jackson, who called Eric into his office the next day. “You did this on your first day on the job?” he asked.
“Well, I’m not sure if it’s a great idea or not, but I did get to talk to some of these deans and . . .”
“It’s a really good idea,” Jackson said. “I’m going to take it to the President.” By the end of the week, they had Bush’s approval and rearranged the HUD budget to provide $6.2 million in funding for the program.
Eric found the work at HUD satisfying, but the best part of the White House fellowship program was the opportunity to meet people who had real experience in government—not just the guest speakers in the weekly fellowship seminar meetings, but also people he sought out—and in the process, he gained two new Kennedy-era mentors, Harris Wofford and Adam Walinsky.
The relationship with Walinsky was immediate and intense—all relationships with Walinsky were immediate and intense, or they didn’t happen at all. He was a tough-looking guy, a former Marine, shaved head, gravelly voice, still physically fit in his seventies, always wearing his PT-109 tie clasp when he wore a tie. He had been a top aide to Robert Kennedy, a young Turk trying to push Kennedy to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam. He adored Kennedy, who was fierce, emotional, and tough—the President’s hatchet man—and compassionate enough to burst into tears in an Appalachian sharecropper’s shack. After the Detroit riots, in which 43 residents were killed by the police and 1,189 wounded, Walinsky and the senator tried to think their way through the disaster.
The Detroit police had gone berserk; they weren’t very well trained and they weren’t very well educated. There was a need to lift the quality of policing in America, to make it a profession rather than just a job. It would be a good thing, Kennedy and Walinsky agreed, if you could begin to inoculate American police forces with the functional equivalent of West Point cadets—recent graduates from Harvard and Princeton and Georgetown who could be trained, rigorously, as police officers.
The idea consumed Walinsky, especially after Kennedy’s assassination. He formally proposed the Police Corps in the early 1980s and introduced a brilliant lure to bring the best young people to serve in the poorest communities: if they agreed to spend four years serving as cops, they would receive scholarship money for graduate school—and more, he was able to get some of the most prestigious law schools, like Harvard and Yale and Stanford, to promise special preference for Police Corps graduates. He formed a board of directors—Bill Clinton was chair—and he kept pushing, but nothing happened.
Clinton appropriated Walinsky’s idea of service for scholarships when he ran for President. His audiences loved it, and when he was elected President, he launched AmeriCorps—and eventually he delivered on the Police Corps as well, over the objections of some on his staff and assorted liberals who thought that training college kids to become cops was probably sort of dangerous.
But the Police Corps worked. Brilliantly. Some states wanted no part of it, but cities like Baltimore; Portland, Oregon; and Charleston, South Carolina—and states like Utah, Missouri, and Mississippi—took advantage of the federal funds. The centerpiece of the program was a residential boot camp, which featured intense physical training, firearms exercises, and courses in sociology, ethics, and arrest and control. The training was, in effect, not much different from the way the military trained special operators. And it made a difference on the streets: Ed Norris, the Baltimore police commissioner, said that he could tell which of his cops were Police Corps graduates simply by the way they stood and looked and carried themselves. They were fit, which meant they could run down fleeing felons rather than shoot them; they were trained by Lew Hicks, a Navy SEAL, in the most efficient and least violent ways to arrest and control suspects. They became integral to the communities they policed, just as Travis Manion’s MiTT team had become part of the landscape in Fallujah’s Pizza Slice.
But George W. Bush killed the Police Corps. It was a program that fell through the cracks, unloved by liberals, not loved nearly enough by conservatives, for whom cost-cutting was more important than national service, even if that service promoted the values that conservatives claimed as their own. Walinsky, who never suffered fools even a tiny bit, was isolated politically and increasingly embittered, but he was brilliant in his bitterness, a scorching Old Testament prophet with a great deal to offer if you could stand the heat of his never-ending fire.
Walinsky met Greitens over dinner at The Monocle restaurant, a Senate hangout on Capitol Hill. Eric was accompanied by several of the other White House fellows, but he took the lead: Walinsky noticed that Greitens asked questions that took the conversation to the next level, both up and down—abstract questions about the largest ethical and policy questions out there, but also detailed questions about the intricacies of policy. He was fascinated by Walinsky’s work with the police, which raised issues that sounded very similar to the problems he’d seen in the Navy SEALs, though he never told Walinsky that. They had several more dinners. As Eric was about to leave for Iraq, Adam gave him a copy of Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival, a look at the larger forces at work in the region—the real fault lines, which were not the straight-line borders drawn by the Europeans after World War I, but the ethnic and sectarian divisions that had been unleashed by the American invasion of Iraq.
When Eric returned from Iraq a year later, Walinsky made him an offer. Fred Bealefeld, the Baltimore police commissioner, had asked Adam to retrain the entire Baltimore police department in the manner of the Police Corps. “I got two thousand five hundred guys out there on the street who are acting like they’re completely untrained,” Bealefeld said to Walinsky. “What am I going to do about them?”
Walinsky then explained his training plan to Eric. “You go with the macho stuff first in order to establish credibility. Give them amped-up situational firing sessions with paintball guns, taught by military trainers, rather than the one-dimensional target range sessions.” Then they would have Lew Hicks teach them arrest and control. But they also needed to learn how to behave in the community—this was the tough part—and that was where Eric came in. “I need a trained killer,” Adam concluded. “Someone they have to respect, to teach them how to talk to kids and how to be a moral presence, respected on the streets.”
“Oh,” Eric said, “I’ve got that.”
When he’d returned from the debacle in Thailand, Eric had been asked by his superior officer Michael Lumpkin to sketch out a code of ethics for the SWCCs. He produced, in consultation with Kaj Larsen, a 47-slide PowerPoint called The Complete Warrior. The slides were dense with anthropology, sociology, and aperçus:
SWCCs are warriors.
Warriors are servants.
Servants are humble.
Lumpkin thought the effort was potentially valuable for both SWCCs and SEALs and passed it up the line of command, where it died. It was the right message, but Greitens was considered the wrong messenger.
Now he and Walinsky began to adapt The Complete Warrior for the Baltimore police. Eric came up with a mnemonic device to make it indelible for the cops: the Diamond Standard. The top and bottom of the diamond came from a slogan the Marines used in Fallujah: “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.”
“ ‘No Worse Enemy’ means that if somebody pulls a gun on you, you’re going to kill them,” Eric would tell the cops. “You’re going to be so well-trained, so proficient with your firearms, that you can defend your fellow citizens. If someone makes the choice that they’re going to engage in a violent confrontation, you’re going to win that confrontation every single time.”
But “No Better Friend” was just as important. “It means you are someone who people in your district can count on,” Eric would tell them. “Your fellow police officers need to be able to count on you, the community needs to be able to count on you. You have to be there for people.”
The left-hand point of the diamond was “No Better Diplomat,” and here Eric would talk about The Odyssey. Homer always called his hero “clever” Odysseus. “This is his virtue,” Eric would say. “Odysseus is clever because he knows how to speak to everyone in his world. He knows how to talk to a potential enemy. He knows how to talk to his allies. He knows how to talk to his stable boy and to the grieving widows of his soldiers.” Eric would give examples of what he’d seen Travis Manion’s MiTT team do in Fallujah. “The point is, don’t create enemies,” he would conclude. “This is not necessarily going to make you friends, but you have to be a diplomat.”
The final point of the diamond was “No Better Role Model.” “You are working in a lot of environments in Baltimore where you may be the only adult with a responsible job and a respected position in the community these kids see. You have to be an example.”
Both Walinsky and the Baltimore police commissioner were in the audience when Eric delivered the Diamond Standard lecture for the first time. He was a strong speaker, simple and direct. He knew how to weave in SEAL stories that engaged the cops. Fred Bealefeld was impressed, and he hired Eric to give the Diamond Standard lecture once a month to each new training class—which was very satisfying for Eric, not just because it brought in some money, but also because he had found someone, in Adam, who saw the world the same way he did.
Eric wasn’t very interested in money; his apartment was famous for its lack of . . . almost everything. He did buy a stately, and very used, brown leather couch from craigslist, and most of his life took place on or near it. The one luxury he afforded himself, using his trove of combat pay, was to hire an assistant who would help organize his refugee camp photos—they had won awards at Duke—into a possible coffee-table book. A friend from Duke recommended a recent graduate named Rachel Wald, and Eric hired her.
Wald was smart and fast, but she was blitzed by the speed and intensity of Eric’s world. That summer Eric and his best friend from Duke, Ken Harbaugh—a former military pilot now at Yale Law School and, like Eric, a human protean shake—decided to create their own public service organization, which they christened, with great sobriety and mind-crushing blandness, the Center for Citizen Leadership. They wanted to give scholarships to college students who were willing to do public service work. They weren’t sure where the money would come from or how the students would be chosen or what the program would entail. But they were absolutely confident—and this was astonishing to Rachel—that something essential would emerge.
Her first task was to organize the photos for the book. “Make them beautiful,” Eric told her. But that soon took a backseat to Eric’s desire to start a career on the lecture circuit, which had been inspired by the Diamond Standard speech. He had been invited to address Boys Nation—the American Legion’s leadership program for high school students, famous for having been the venue for Bill Clinton’s handshake with John F. Kennedy—and Eric figured that he could use that speech as a way to sell himself to lecture agencies. He spent weeks writing and practicing it. Rachel had a theater arts background and tried to help him with his delivery—he was too straight, too remote, too serious. She suggested that they buy a video camera so that Eric could see for himself.
“You’ve got to lighten up, tell some self-deprecating jokes,” she told him. “You’ve got to be human.” Rachel soon realized that Eric wasn’t like most other confident guys: when she made a suggestion, he listened very carefully; if he thought it made sense, he acted on it. He became addicted to video practice.
The speech, delivered on July 26, 2007, was called “The Next Generation of American Leadership”—and Rachel sensed an immediate, hushed bond with the audience of idealistic, straight-arrow high school leaders from across the country and their chaperones. The content was Tikkun Olam 101, a plea for their generation to engage in public service and repair the world.
He started funny. He talked about the Christmas cards he’d gotten in Iraq from children across America. He described two unusual examples. “Have a Good War,” one read, and the other: “Try not to die.”
But that was it for humor. Within a paragraph, he was marching his argument forward. It was a young man’s idea of what an “important” speech should sound like, formal and worthy, bedizened with orotund Kennedyesque flourishes. But the argument was sound. He challenged his audience directly: they had to serve their country in some way. It was difficult to become full-fledged men and women, true citizens, unless they served their country and sacrificed their comfort. This didn’t necessarily mean military service—he mentioned programs like Teach For America, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps.
Eric had been circling this idea since college: citizenship wasn’t just a passive thing. It required action. If people didn’t feel part of something larger than themselves, if they were devoted only to their immediate material self-interest, society would begin to crumble. There were signs that it was crumbling in America—a coarsening of standards, the common good subsumed beneath a tide of rampant individualism—but Eric was, already, enough of a politician not to say that.
When he finished, the students stood and roared. Eric was thrilled by the reaction; it was confirmation that he was on track to do something important with his life. But the truth was, he still had no idea of what that would be.
He was back in touch with Harris Wofford, the other Kennedy-era mentor he’d met during his White House fellowship. Wofford was as gentle as Walinsky was tough. He had secured himself a place in history as the staffer who had pushed John F. Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King just before the 1960 election, when her husband was facing serious jail time in Georgia. The call established Kennedy as a supporter of civil rights in a Democratic Party that had long been a bastion of segregation in the South. Wofford went on to have a major role in almost every significant national service program of the Kennedy era and after: he was a founder of the Peace Corps, active in VISTA, and later, president of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which ran AmeriCorps. He was elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania in 1991, a harbinger of Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, and was promptly defeated on his next try by the archconservative Rick Santorum, a harbinger of the radicalization of the Republican Party.
The summer of the Boys Nation speech, Greitens and Wofford had dinner with Steve Culbertson, who had just been named the CEO of a private organization called Youth Service America, which promoted community and national service for young people, rather optimistically, “from 5 to 25.”
Eric and Culbertson hit it off and arranged another dinner meeting at a Mexican restaurant near Eric’s apartment on Capitol Hill. Eric wanted to know more about the national service community, what was being done and what wasn’t, and what he might do. Afterward, they continued the conversation at Eric’s apartment, sipping green tea—Steve was disappointed there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in the place.
“What do you really worry about?” Eric asked.
“I worry about those kids coming back from the wars with no arms and no legs, and even more about the ones coming home with significant brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder,” Steve said. “What do they do next? They’re the same age as the kids that I work with in high schools and colleges, and yet there’s something about them that is so different because they’ve had this military experience.”
“Do you want to meet some of them?” Eric asked—and as he said it, he realized, with no small amount of guilt, that he hadn’t visited the wounded at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
“Could we do that?” Steve asked.
“Absolutely,” Eric said.
In a matter of days, Rachel arranged the visit. Eric wore his khaki uniform, SEAL pin prominent. He seemed a different person to Rachel, even more serious than usual. They went to the amputee ward and she was just stunned. Afterward, she couldn’t remember how many men they’d visited or what had been said. She just shut down, terrified that she’d lose control. Everything was white, the doctors wore white,
the patients were swaddled in white bandages. There were men whose entire heads were covered by bandages. Eric would go up to them and ask them where they’d served and whom they’d served with, and what their situation was now. She remembered that Eric and the patients—some of whom were severely truncated; others who were severely disfigured—talked easily. But she couldn’t follow the conversation, and she didn’t say a word. She nodded sympathetically toward the wives and parents in the rooms, but she was stymied—there was nothing credible, and perhaps even intelligible, to be said. “Sorry” just didn’t begin to cover it, and indeed, it might seem callous.
Steve Culbertson thought, as they moved from room to room, that if the rest of the parents of America could see the amputee ward, they would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow. He, too, was struck by Eric’s ease and composure with the men, and the respect they accorded his uniform. The troops had, Culbertson realized, all sorts of visitors—celebrities, politicians, the President himself—but Eric was one of them, had been there with them, and he spoke their language, an acronym-soaked argot Steve could barely understand. Eric asked them what they wanted to do next, and each, no matter how seriously injured, said the same thing: “I want to go back to my unit” or “my guys” or “my brothers.”
The question Steve really wanted to ask at this point was: But what if you can’t go back because of your wounds? What would you do then? That would be too bald, too cruel, though, so he began to ask them, “What do you want to do after you retire from the military?” Many of them—a surprising number, Steve thought—said that they wanted to work in the public sector: teach, coach, join the police or firefighters (again, given their wounds, these latter choices were unlikely). He began to discuss the work he did, getting young people involved in service to solve the problems that the country faced—education, poverty, climate change, housing, and so forth—and asked if they might be interested in doing something about that. Not one of them said no, although Culbertson couldn’t tell if they were just being polite. Given the severity of their wounds, how could any of them think clearly at this point?