Pete's Profile in Courage
His memoir is impressive, but it's possible his finest chapter is yet to be written
“I like him, he’s neat,” Chasten Buttigieg said with a twinkle in his eye. He had just watched a clip of his husband, Pete Buttigieg, making an eloquent case for democracy at a town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Chasten was sitting opposite MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace. Nicolle invited Chasten on her show to discuss his children’s book, Papa’s Coming Home, but now the clip from the town hall served as the segue and the moment for Nicolle to ask Chasten what is undoubtedly on the mind of every political analyst right now: Is your husband planning to run for President? Of course, she was a bit more subtle than that. Sort of. And, to his credit, Chasten fielded the question like a pro—certainly like someone who has been a campaigning spouse for a long time. After all, Chasten was First Gentleman in Pete’s tenure as the Mayor of South Bend. He then campaigned with his husband when the latter actually did run for President in the 2020 Democratic Party Primaries. Pete had already achieved some renown prior to the 2019/2020 political campaigning, but that race elevated him to household name status. Suddenly, people all over the country were talking about Pete’s impressive skills on the debate stage. I remember being one of those, late in the year 2019 who was struck by him. He was so young, so fresh-faced, yet so mature, intelligent, and knowledgeable. He was a breath of fresh air. I thought it was funny even then to think about having a President five years my junior. I wholeheartedly supported Pete’s campaign in 2020 and I wanted very much to see him become the Democratic Party nominee. It was exciting to see him on the stage with the other nominees, holding his own against the seasoned pros from the Senate, including Kamala Harris, and against former Vice-President Joe Biden. I was overjoyed when he won the Iowa Caucus, narrowly defeating the elder statesman Bernie Sanders. (Fun fact: Pete wrote an essay about Bernie that won him the Profiles in Courage Essay Award in 2000, when he was just 18 years old.) Alas, 2020 was not a year in which most Democrats were willing to gamble on the wunderkind who was South Bend’s second-youngest elected Mayor and the first elected official in the entire state of Indiana to come out while in office. The Democrats had one priority in 2020—to get Trump out of the White House—and with that goal first and foremost, they played it safe. That didn’t stop the Party from keeping Pete in the drawer, so to speak. His star power and likeability ratings were not lost on anyone. As he bowed out of the race, he immediately endorsed Joe Biden. Biden, in turn, repaid the favor by bringing him into his cabinet as Secretary of Transportation. At some point during the Biden presidency, I started reading Pete’s memoir, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future. More recently, I decided to listen to the audiobook. It’s great to hear the story in Pete’s voice.
If you click on the Bluesky post above, you’ll be taken to the thread where I live-posted the first couple of chapters. After that, I just kept listening. I listened to his vivid descriptions of the town he grew up in, the professor parents who inspired his love of learning, the Catholic school and faith that guided his moral precepts….onto Harvard, Rhodes Scholarship, professional career in Chicago, U.S. Naval Reserve, Afghanistan deployment, and a political career that gained rocket momentum….and now?
I love that he has joined the Substack community
. I love that he was one of the first political celebs to leave X and join Bluesky. I love that it took him all of five seconds to come out swinging against the deplorable Executive Branch actions that were rolled out during Trump’s horrible First 100 Days. With his well-coiffed beard, he’s been doing interviews both mainstream (legacy media) and off-piste. One host teased him a little about the beard, asking him if the beard was here to stay. Pete simply replied in the affirmative that it was, “for now.” That’s the kind of small talk he refers to in Chapter 8 of Shortest Way Home, the kind of thing it took eight years as Mayor to truly master. He was uncomfortable with it at first. Pete was a whiz kid, a brainiac, raised by Notre Dame professorial parents. He graduated from St. Joe’s Catholic high school as valedictorian. He went to Harvard on scholarship money—magna cum laude, class of 2004. He studied PPE—the quintessentially British Philosophy, Politics and Economics—as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He spent his 20s working as a policy nerd, consulting for defense contractors and government agencies, and in his spare time he knocked on doors for political campaigns, just to give himself a sense of greater purpose. In the Navy, he worked in Intel. He traveled the world as a consultant, making multiple trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as a navy officer, he did a tour in Afghanistan, where he later jokingly downplayed his work: “It’s not like a I killed Bin Laden, but it was dangerous.” My point is, Pete is a heady guy. As Mayor, he truly enjoyed the work a lot of us might find, not unimportant but dry. Getting out there and cutting ribbons, doing press conferences, consoling mourners….that was the kind of stuff that required small talk skills. That, he had to learn through experience, not books. His first year as Mayor, 2012, was an extraordinarily violent year in South Bend—18 homicides, doubled from 2011. He had to visit and chat with survivors and families, something that nothing can prepare you for. He says in Chapter 8:“Small talk felt unnatural in the midst of grief, but isn’t that what we need sometimes when grieving? Just someone to talk to, about nothing in particular, nothing profound, just being there.”
Learning how to “just be there” for his constituents matured him. It also challenged the introvert in him. He calls himself an introvert in the book, but one who, as Mayor, really had to challenge that. He recalls a colleague joking with him about wishing South Bend had a royal family. He was kidding, right? Sort of, but when he thought about it, he realized that it would have been helpful to have royalty assume the more mundane rituals of public life, like cutting ribbons and unveiling plaques for new buildings and statues. It would have freed him up to add that time to the hours devoted to the nitty gritty and the real business of being Mayor. He was kidding, though. Pete recognized even then that having to push himself outside of his comfort zone made him a better politician and a better person.
In Chapter 9, he talks about learning to be vulnerable. He talks about learning the piano as a teenager, how his mother managed to get him a 1920s-era Conover Grand for nothing—literally nothing. It’s not a euphemism for low cost. Someone she met on the bus in Chicago gave it to them! He kept practicing Gershwin (his favorite composer) on the piano when he went to college. As the Mayor in 2015, he agreed to do a solo piano performance with Ben Folds. He talks about making himself vulnerable by putting himself out there, taking a risk, and never regretting one second of it. He felt the same kind of vulnerability as he attempted to solve the local housing issues—in other words, daunting challenges where success is hardly a guarantee, a path of trial and error, but you won’t know unless you try.
In Chapter 11, he talks about going into the mayorship as a data-driven guy and coming out of it with a more nuanced (balanced) feeling—still feeling the advantages of data, but having a broader understanding that some issues are better solved by sheer human instinct. I kept thinking that the weirdos at DOGE might benefit from Pete’s knowledge on the subject. He talked about Artificial Intelligence in this chapter as well, another very nuanced conversation where solutions are sometimes found in the balance of data and human instinct.
Mike Pence was the Republican Governor of Indiana during Pete’s time as Mayor of one of the state’s core college towns. Chapter 12 is largely devoted to Pete’s encounters with Mike, which were, counterintuitively, extremely positive but for one major snag. Pete is not the only person I’ve heard (who has met Pence) say what a kind person he is. Andy McCabe also said; he was the FBI Acting Director Trump fired the day before achievement of 20-year retirement and he says in his book, “Mike Pence was nice. Mike Pence was always nice.” (I included McCabe’s book in my Ethical Leadership libguide.) A lot of Democrats, ones who despise Trump for his bully tactics, appreciate the kindness of Mike Pence. Pete Buttigieg is one of these. Pete and Mike have something in common now: they both have been honored by the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage initiative, Pete for his Bernie Sanders essay in 2000, and Mike for upholding constitutional duty while a Trump-inspired mob on January 6, 2021. (There is a lovely discussion about that between him and JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg.) All that being said, the ‘major snag,’ as I said, between Mike and Pete had to do with policy, nothing personal. Mike is unfailingly kind (he treats people with kindness, and that is not trivial, because it’s rare and it is the finest of all the virtues, in my opinion) but he is also misguided by a wrongheaded evangelical stance on LGBTQIA issues. That is a major snag for any ally of the LGBTQIA community, let alone for LGBTQIA people like Pete. The 2010s were a peak for an onslaught of LGBTQIA issues such as same-sex marriage (legalized by Obergefell v. Hodges) and transgender issues epitomized and too-often mischaracterized by the public restroom debate. As Pete notes in the book, Pence really backed himself into a bad position with his stances on these issues, and ironically, it was that fault line that made him ripe for the picking to be Trump’s VP. In contrast, Pete stands on the right side of history, being triumphant as both a same-sex married person and a gay man who served openly in the military.
Chapter 13 is about Pete’s military service. He was a reserve officer in the Navy, or in Navy speak, a “weekend warrior.” In 2014, he took a leave of absence from his elected office to deploy to Afghanistan. This chapter is mainly about what he learned from the inside of the largest bureaucracy in the world. As Mayor, he oversaw a small bureaucracy. As an intelligence officer in the Navy, he was a wheel in a much bigger cog. Perspective. That’s one thing the military gives a person. As a Navy veteran myself, I can attest to that. I gained insights into knowing what battles to fight, how to be flexible, how to adjust position based on new information, how to be a conscious listener, when to know when it’s time to speak or shut my mouth, how to face something honestly, maturely, and courageously. My ethical leadership libguide includes the book Here, Right Matters: An American Story, by
, the now-retired Army officer and NSC official who blew the whistle on Donald Trump’s disgusting behavior on his phone call with then-newly elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I loved the part in Vindman’s story when he talked about his philosophy of constantly assessing-and-reassessing—because no two situations are the same. Even if they share common themes, everything deserves a case-by-case strategy. Pete’s story confirms the truism that life is a process. Every person is a work in progress. Nothing is finished. Nothing is static. The truism that change is inevitable goes nicely with the overall thesis which underpins Pete’s book—that just because his life brought him, full circle, back where he started doesn’t mean that he is living in the past. Far from it, it means that he has an appreciation for the past without romanticizing it. I’ll come back to this theme later.Chapter 14 is about Pete’s deployment to Afghanistan. My biggest takeaway from this chapter is the underlying idea that for Pete the war began as it was ending, or at least ending in a counterintuitive sense—changing form or transitioning into something unrecognizable as wars go. He philosophized in this chapter—about war and its history, about World War I and how when that war ended it was hard for people to recall what the fighting had been about. The devastation was so pervasive, lives so altered. Pete admired many things about Afghanistan and the culture of those who live there. He describes the daily activities of locals, life going on despite the terrors. He went with another officer to deliver supplies to some Boy Scouts operating an orphanage. This other officer was called Mike. Pete says that Mike was someone he neither liked nor disliked. Mike was the kind of person Pete would just meet and never remember, barring some exceptional occurrence. That exceptional occurrence came soon. As Pete was in the process of leaving Afghanistan, he and others leaving with him on the C17 got news that some officers had been killed. When the identities of the casualties became known, Pete realized with a shock to his system that Mike was among them. He was more impacted by this occurrence than he would have ever expected to be. There was something about the “dictatorship of chance” (his words) that struck him forcefully. Why did some people, like Pete, get to leave unharmed, while others either left with scars (seen or otherwise) or did not leave at all? The war ended for all of them, but in such different ways. He talked about visiting the tombstones at Arlington Memorial and thinking about that “dictatorship of chance,” which decided who got buried beneath those tombstones and who got to go on living.
The next couple of chapters are about the transition back to civilian life and returning to his role as the Mayor of South Bend. The Afghanistan tour truly put his life in perspective, giving rise to a new sense, common for a 30-something, that life was catching up to him. He had known he was gay for a long time, but he had been so focused on his studies and then his career as to render his sexuality practically dormant. Like a sleeping beauty, his capacity to fall in love had been put into abeyance. Some friends suspected he was A-sexual, or just content to be bachelor. This was far from true. He had long wanted to be in a relationship. He just shoved it aside because, for several reasons, it was too complicated to figure out right now and he, therefore, kept deferring it. The first step to breaking this inertia was to tell his parents that he was gay. He found that they were not really very surprised. He was their only child, their darling son, and they loved him fiercely and unconditionally. Nothing could change that. The next step was to break the news to friends, some of whom helped him construct a profile for a dating app. It was by that means that he met Chasten. I was positively gobsmacked as he read a brief biography of Chasten! “High energy” sprang to my mind. Chasten was a world traveler, yet he came from a very working-class background. His father had even been homeless for a period. I like the story of Chasten’s Jif peanut butter tattoo. It symbolizes his father’s attachment to Jif peanut butter, something he could hardly afford to buy when he lived in his car. When he finally had a house, he vowed to always make sure the fridge had Jif peanut butter in it. Chasten took that story from his father to heart as a sign of his father’s love. That is what his tattoo means to him; it reminds him of his father’s love. Awesome, right? Chasten is awesome. He moved out of his parents’ house after high school and lived in Germany for a while. Then he came back to the U.S. and lived in several cities and worked at several jobs—barista, bartender, handyman, dog walker, whatever paid the bills. He taught theatre to kids with autism. He volunteered as a teacher for Upward Bound. He worked as a nursing assistant. He was a caretaker for a boy with cerebral palsy. Finding that teaching was his passion, he settled on course to get a Master in Education. When he came across Pete’s profile and started chatting with him, he was at Gate B5 at the Chicago airport. They hit it off pretty much immediately. Texting soon became making plans to meet up. Then Pete felt the thrill of holding his hand. Their story is as good as a Jane Austen novel. At times in Pete’s telling, it even has elements of a rom-com. Pete goes through all the stages—meeting the parents, moving in together, adopting a dog together. I love the story of Truman, their dog. It’s too good not to summarize for this article. They rescued Truman from a foster home, but he had come from a no-kill shelter in Kentucky with a history of abuse. Over time, by showing him that he was loved and adored, the hound/beagle mix overcame his trust issues. Truman is truly the ‘first child’ of Pete and Chasten.
Chapter 17: Proposal and marriage! Chasten was the first to bring up marriage. In Berlin, Chasten took Pete to the Brandenburg Gate, a spot that had become special to him when he lived there. He got down on one knee and gave Pete….a watch! LOL! Knowing Pete wasn’t quite ready for marriage, Chasten gave him a watch as a symbol of “giving him time.” A year later, Pete got a ring and proposed—where else? At O’Hare Airport, Gate B5!
Chapter 18 covers the 2016 presidential election and its consequences. Pete referenced the phrase “flyover states’ revenge” that many articles at the time used to explain the first Trump election. He published an essay about it called, “A Letter from Flyover Country.” The Democratic Party went into deep reflection about how they failed rural and working-class America. In the spirt of revamping the party platform and image, Howard Dean advised Pete to run for DNC chair: “a long shot,” he said, “but not a ridiculous one.” He did not get elected but it gave Pete his first real taste of national campaigning—for himself. He was a long shot, as Dean said. At one point during the campaigning, Pete got a call from an unknown Vermont number. It was Bernie Sanders! Bernie suggested that Pete dropout and lend his support to Keith Ellison! In the end, the establishment candidate, favored by Obama, Tom Perez was elected on the second ballot.
The final chapter of Pete’s book is essentially an argument against Trumpism and the idea of “making America great again.” Calling the past “great” is a mistake in Pete’s estimation. It romanticizes the past. Pete thinks it is better to just appreciate some things about the past, but don’t dwell in the past. Life is about change. The world is always changing and it is better to accept change than to resist it. Life is a one-way game. You can only go in one direction, and that direction is not backwards. Pete suggests making America “greater” instead of “great again.” Make America what it’s never been before. Make America even better. Always better!
I love his book. Can I give it more than five stars? I give it as many stars as I can. I give it all the stars and I cannot wait to see what Pete does next.
Below, I’ve compiled some links to Pete’s most recent appearances in the public forum. Enjoy!
