In the Indianapolis TV market, Pence’s half-hour shows couldn’t compete with the nightly news programs. However, week after week, the program gave him the chance to practice and polish his public persona. Ann DeLaney, a prominent Indiana Democrat, was a regular guest who would recall Pence as a man who “was using his personality to make a living, and so it was in his interest, it seems to me, to get along more with people.” Decades later, she would compare the 2018 version of Pence with the one she knew in the 1990s and find she liked the old one better. “He didn’t have the same kind of saccharine sincerity that he evidences now in his public speaking,” she said. “So, he was fine to deal with in that context. You know, you could disagree with him then, and certainly we did. I did. But there wasn’t any animus involved.”
Four times each year, Pence the TV host presented one-hour specials, which brought him into elite circles in business and politics. In 1995, the first of these shows was recorded at the home of Stephen Hilbert, who headed Conseco Financial, which at the time invested in projects across the country, including a building bought with Donald Trump. At the time Hoosiers knew Trump as a New York–based real estate promoter. High flying and highly leveraged, Conseco’s stock was nearing the top of a stunning run that would take it from one dollar in 1989 to fifty-eight dollars in 1998. Named one of America’s “shrewdest dealmakers” by Fortune magazine, Hilbert’s main personal asset was, according to one colleague, “an uncanny ability to get people to believe,” which made him an Indiana version of Donald Trump.
In four years, Hilbert would be fired, as, under his leadership, the firm headed for a crash in the form of the third-biggest bankruptcy in American history, which would wipe out billions in investor equity and render the stock virtually worthless. But in the moment, Hilbert, who earned $117 million in 1994, was one of the most influential executives in America. He was also famously erratic in his personal life. When Pence met him, Hilbert was just beginning his sixth marriage and in the midst of a physical transformation that included a fifty-pound weight loss and surgery to allow him to stop wearing glasses. He was forty-nine. His wife was twenty-four and still practiced an instrument—the saxophone—she’d played in her high school’s marching band. The Hilberts lived in the most expensive home in the state, which was decorated with a mural of Alexander the Great and portraits of nudes painted by French masters. Built at a cost of $35 million, the compound included a separate barn that housed an indoor basketball court and a three-thousand-square-foot guardhouse. Hilbert was personally involved in the local horse racing and casino industries, which depended on state licensing, and was partner in a race car team. He frequently hosted the state’s political elite at his home and regularly donated to their campaigns. He favored the GOP but sometimes gave to Democrats, including Governor Evan Bayh, who appointed Hilbert to the Indiana State University board of trustees and defended him when he was criticized for not attending the board’s meetings.11
When Pence taped his show at Hilbert’s home, the program was arranged as a group discussion with the Conseco chief and seven other executives from big locally based firms, including Mitchell Daniels of Eli Lilly. Daniels had previously been Senator Richard Lugar’s chief of staff. One of the execs caused a little stir when he agreed that “family” was the most important thing in life but added that he considered business associates to be part of his family. Hilbert may have offered the most candid reply to one of Pence’s questions when he confessed that he was motivated by “fear of failure.” At moments the show verged on parody. Longtime local television reporter Jim Shella described it as “movers and shakers sit around a dinner table and hold a conversation. I think it was really bad TV.”
Where DeLaney sensed in Pence a pleasant get-along guy, others detected in him an overeager desire to please. Local political reporter John Krull said Pence had a “puppyish desire to ingratiate himself and oversell everything he does.” Among the powerful, Pence posed as a “good professional son,” added Krull. “He will approach those political figures and say, ‘Please lead me, guide me.’ He’s got the gift of giving them credit, whatever he might accomplish, even if he ended up not taking their advice.”
Taken together, Pence’s broadcasting career—radio, weekly television, occasional specials—made him famous across the state, put him in contact with top political figures, and allowed him to approach men and women who were wealthy potential campaign donors with access to vast networks of like-minded and similarly wealthy people. In every encounter, Pence could offer access to his airwaves in trade for whatever these powerful people gave him. Along the way, he could test out various positions on issues and receive what were essentially instant poll results in the form of listener responses and ratings.
The mostly positive responses helped Pence make adjustments. Bruce Stinebrickner, from his post as a political science professor at DePauw University in Terre Haute, watched Pence’s development and saw a remarkable example of self-invention. “It strikes me if you were drawing up a composite portrait of what a president might look like, Pence was pretty close to it—extremely conservative but also opportunistic.” With decades of experience watching the political process, Stinebrickner had admiration for “principled conservatives.” This was not the main trait he detected in Pence. “I think he’s more political than the average politician. And those are not words of praise.”
The politics practiced by Pence reflected his professed “evangelical Catholic” faith, which allowed him to keep one foot planted in the state’s largest faith group and another in its second largest and most well organized. He and Karen demonstrated their Protestant/evangelical preference by attending Grace Evangelical Church. A large Indianapolis congregation located on the south side of the city in a suburban neighborhood, Grace was a small denomination—the Evangelical Free Church of America—that stressed that the Bible is literal truth handed down by God and completely free of error. Church leaders taught that Satan is a real being with a personality who is the enemy of God. They anticipated Jesus’s return to Earth to reign over one thousand years of peace. In the meantime, the denomination sought to help individuals and communities conform to a conservative Christian way of life.
Grace’s pastor, Bryan Hult, was a clean-cut young man whose short hair and firm posture indicated his past as an army officer and helicopter pilot and his present as a chaplain in the National Guard. Hult was not just a minister but also a counselor certified by the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors. The term nouthetic related to a Greek word for confrontation. The counseling is not psychological but religious, which explains why the association’s founder, Rev. Jay Adams, regarded mental illness as one of many “euphemisms that exist in the area of psychiatry and psychology, which have confused the public so greatly.”
In their rejection of mainstream mental health concepts, Adams and his students were similar to Scientologists, who saw spiritual problems where others saw neurosis or psychosis. Treatment involved getting one’s life aligned with God’s will, as Adams’s ministry determined it. Students of his “institute” were not required to write papers, take exams, or conduct research. God was presumed to monitor their mastery of the material. Certificates were granted on request to those who paid.12
People who joined Grace could immerse themselves in a community devoted to supporting their commitment to a conservative Christian way of life. In the time when Mike and Karen Pence joined, Grace was growing at a rate that would make it one of the first so-called “megachurches” in the state, a phenomenon that began in the South and spread across the country. The trend toward large congregations turned churches into communities where members worshipped, prayed, did business, and even voted together. (The prototypical megachurch was Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, which hosted his Old Time Gospel Hour TV show.) The rise of these big congregations was accompanied by new concern for politics marked by opposition to abortion and an embrace of Republican policies and candid
ates. Homeschooling was popular among some believers who wanted to remove their children from the influence of public school teachers and students. Others agitated for new laws to permit public funding for private, church-based schools so their kids could learn among the like-minded with the state paying their tuition.
Although the ministers at Grace were not as openly political as the nation’s most overtly partisan pastors, members harbored little doubt that their faith favored conservative Republicans. Their beliefs also commanded them to arrange their marriages so that wives would yield to their husbands and children would show consistent obedience. (The relevant scripture reads, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.”) They were also expected to go into the world to make it more in step with the Bible as they read it. For Mike and Karen Pence, as well as their fellow congregants, the strict ethos preached at Grace supplied boundaries that could make life seem more ordered and support their preexisting beliefs.
For Karen Pence, one key preexisting belief regarded homosexuality as a sinful state, and she was opposed to efforts to gain acceptance for gays and lesbians. In the summer of 1991, she was offended by a newspaper article that gave six young people who were gay an opportunity to describe their experiences as teens. They generally focused on the difficulties they had endured, and the article was titled, BEING GAY COMPOUNDS TEENS’ PROBLEMS. A sidebar reported on a hotline that provides “help amid terror” (hardly an endorsement of homosexuality) for young people with questions.
Although the Children’s Express page in The Indianapolis Star was punctuated by cautions, Karen Pence noted one nineteen-year-old’s anecdote about a crush he had on a male teacher when he was eight: “I knew I was different from then on.” In a letter to the editor, Mrs. Pence wrote, “No wonder our youth are confused. I only pray that most parents were able to intercept your article before their children were encouraged to call the Gay/Lesbian Youth Hotline which encourages them to ‘accept their homosexuality’ instead of encouraging them that they are not.” Pence wrote that, as a teacher, she had encouraged her elementary school pupils to read Children’s Express, but in the future she would not.13
Having left her teaching career, Karen Pence wouldn’t have to deal with schoolchildren who were concerned about their sexual identity or worry about anything they might read. However, she didn’t entirely withdraw from public issues. In 1998, she helped put together a fund-raiser for a local jeweler named Gary Hofmeister who had decided to run for Congress against Democratic incumbent Julia Carson. Hofmeister was a divorced man who nevertheless decried the social change of the 1960s, when divorce lost its stigma. This record mattered little to his supporters in local evangelical groups, who were firmly behind his campaign. Their faith required only that one profess to be a believer today. Their politics demanded that they share the positions he advocated, including the creation of vouchers to allow parents to direct tax money to private and religious schools and opposition to abortion rights. Despite help from a national organization called the Christian Coalition and local groups such as Good Shepherd Community Ministries, Hofmeister lost by 18 percent.14
Anyone looking at the Hofmeister/Carson election would have been hard-pressed to see any sign that Mike Pence was wavering on his decision to stay out of politics. Karen’s work indirectly reminded politicos that her husband might return to the game. She helped organize a circus fund-raiser in July and then, later in the campaign, helped put together a rally and luncheon where former vice president Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, were the honored guests. These activities brought her close to the state GOP elite, where she could judge the mood of the party, measure the caliber of its ambitious men and women, and, perhaps, imagine where her husband might rank in comparison.
5
GUNS, GOD, AND MONEY
For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.
—Deuteronomy 20:4
Walking into a shooting club in Columbus, Indiana, one day in the spring of 2000, Mike Pence did his best to look like a regular guy. He took off his jacket, but he could do nothing about his crisp, white button-down shirt. He donned protective glasses, stuck his hands in his pockets, and slouched a bit to show he was comfortable in the macho confines of the Hoosier Hills Rifle and Pistol Club. The sound of gunshots echoed off the cinder-block walls.
Pence visited the range to make a pitch for votes. Home to a national champion, Elisha Hoover, whose weapon of choice was a military-style AR-15 rifle, the club was an ideal hunting ground for the vote-seeking Pence, who was ardent in his support for the National Rifle Association’s rigid opposition to every proposal to regulate guns. Once known only as a sporting organization, in 1977 the NRA adopted a single-issue political mission that involved continually sounding an alarm about efforts to limit gun purchases and funding candidates who embraced their agenda of antiregulation. With gun manufacturers pouring millions of dollars into this effort, enthusiasts bought more weapons. By 2000, the number of guns in private hands was about to exceed the U.S. population even as the percentage of households where a gun was present steadily declined. The NRA had become one of the most powerful single-issue groups in the country.1
Politicized and frequently mobilized by the NRA, gun owners formed a reliable voting bloc, and clubs like Hoosier Hills became perfect points of contact for campaigning politicians who had received the national organization’s approval. As they arrived at shooting ranges and clubhouses, the vote-seekers entered a subculture where guns were symbolic of all sorts of conservative values, including a lock-’em-up approach to crime and a devotion to right-wing Christianity (hence such organizations as Christian Deer Hunters and Christian Hunters and Anglers). Pence needed the men at Hoosier Hills because, despite declaring he was through with the dirty rotten world of election campaigns—“I’ve had all of the political ambition knocked out of me,” he said—he wasn’t. Indeed, in the summer of 1999, Mike Pence had sent paperwork to the Federal Election Commission to start the process of running for Congress again.2
What had changed besides Pence’s mind? First, thanks to his TV and radio gigs, he was locally famous—a statewide celebrity, actually. Second, the congressional seat he wanted was going to be unoccupied. His nemesis Phil Sharp had retired in 1994, to be replaced by Republican David McIntosh, who intended to run for governor in 2000. In the summer of 1999, McIntosh had discussed his decision over breakfast with a group of powerful Republican activists, including Van Smith, who ran a manufacturing and real estate empire from a headquarters in Muncie. As chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Smith was also a national political figure with access to a network of conservative donors. After breakfast, he called Pence to say he should get back into politics. As Smith would later recall, Pence “said he wouldn’t do it without Karen’s blessing.” It came quickly.3
When Pence and Karen surveyed the political landscape, they could see that no one else in Indiana’s Second District was as well known or well connected to the political power and money elite as Mike. In fact, since his losing effort in 1990, Mike Pence had fashioned himself into an ideal candidate for the seat. Three weeks after McIntosh said he was leaving the House of Representatives, news reports indicated Pence was considering a run for his seat.
The opportunism was obvious, but there was more at work. Former campaign manager Sherman Johnson would recall sensing that Pence still thought the Christian conservative agenda was best for the country. He remained adamant about outlawing abortion, determined to cut taxes, and worried about the strength of the U.S. military, even if the end of the Cold War had left the nation with no major adversary. These beliefs were still powerful, even if he was also motivated by ego.
“If Mike were driven by pure ambition and the lust for public adulation, he would have run again much sooner for something,” Johnson said. Instead, Pence had b
een rocked by his early experience, which included not only the back-to-back defeats but the realization that he had betrayed his own personal ideals with negative tactics. “A reasonable person would certainly step back and take stock of things, as did Mike,” added Johnson. “Then, as time moves forward, one decides what one wants to still accomplish and how best to achieve those goals.”
Along with Pence, the Republican field for the open seat included four lawyers, two local politicians, and a retired teacher who hosted a radio gospel program. With party affiliation favoring the GOP, the Republican nominee would be the favorite to win the general election. Pence pursued it with a caution missing when he was younger and with the aid of more powerful friends. Among them was Bill Smith, former aide to Indiana Republican Congressman Dan Burton and founder of the Christian Right organization called the Indiana Family Institute.
Smith and Pence had become close friends in the 1990s. They were amused by the fact that they each were married to women named Karen and had family pets, dogs, named Buddy. Like so many like-minded activists, Smith was involved in a range of activities that included a radio program, a newsletter, and speaking tours. During one of these tours, prior to joining Pence as his 2000 campaign manager, Smith accompanied author Frank Peretti to gatherings across the state. Peretti was the Stephen King of the conservative Christian world. His most popular books included a series of horror stories for young readers. They imagined a community overtaken by demons whom young believers, aided by angels, must kill.
The Shadow President Page 10