Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  THE FIRST TIME I TUGGED on the door of a recruiting office, I found it closed. It was the first step toward realizing that getting into the military was not as simple as I’d have thought. Later, a recruiter who called back from the 1-800 number I had dialed passed me to a cheerful NCO in the local office in South Bend, who routed me toward a lieutenant from somewhere in Michigan who would go silent for days, then suddenly pepper me with calls and emails, before going dark again. At one point I learned that when I’d told them my college coursework in Arabic might make me a good intelligence officer, they had recorded that my minor at Harvard had been in aerobics.

  But the wheels of Big Navy did their slow work, one bubble test or triplicate form at a time, until one day an email directed me to check in at a Radisson in Des Plaines, Illinois, ahead of a physical exam at the Military Entrance Processing Station. Judging by the dos and don’ts in the email, the expectations seemed manageable. “Take a shower—be clean.” Also, “No pants that shows exposed underwear.” And body piercings “must now be removable and the pierced area must be free of inflammation or infection.” I could handle this.

  At 0415 over breakfast in the suburban hotel, it was hard to miss the fact that the vast majority of people entering the military were more like the teenage recruits I had seen in Iowa than anyone I’d known in college. As conversation around me focused on which girls were the hottest and how various parents had reacted to the news, I began to wonder if I was the only one old enough to drink among this group of seventy or so, preparing to be herded onto the bus to “MEPS.”

  The sensation of being an object on an assembly line began at the top of the stairs leading to the intake room, as a woman ran what looked like a marker across my forehead, leaving a moist imprint that I later learned had something to do with testing for swine flu. Then we were separated by service, with Army people going to the Army room, and so on. I took my seat on one of the chairs in the Navy room, warily eyeing a poster on the wall that staff used to identify tattoos containing hate group symbols. A TV was playing some action movie, which captivated most of the recruits around me.

  My name was called. A very large woman with gray hair and purple sweatpants took my fingerprint on a computer and presented me with a folder and some papers to take to the “control desk,” whatever that was. Soon I was in line for a vision test; I waited in rows of seats with the other recruits as people filed in, one-in-one-out, to the testing room. The girl behind me, a redhead looking about seventeen, struck up a conversation. “You’re from a small town, aren’t you?” Not wanting to correct her or weigh out loud whether South Bend qualified as a small town, I just asked how she could tell. “The cowboy boots.” I looked down. In fact, they were shoes I had picked up at a Filene’s Basement in Chicago, which slightly resembled cowboy boots if jeans were draped over them. I wasn’t going to ruin our rapport, so I just nodded.

  “I’m from a small town, too,” she quickly volunteered. “Marseilles, Illinois.”

  I must have looked at her blankly, so she clarified: “It’s close to Peru, Illinois.” We had a Peru in Indiana, too, I offered a bit lamely. She hoped to work as a secretary in the military and had decided to join the Army because it would pay for college.

  After the vision test came a color blindness test, a blood test, a pee test. Just as I began to feel a sense of momentum moving from station to station, the line for “urinalysis” came to a standstill. One kid, it seemed, was unable to produce—and, for reasons of security and integrity, pulling him out of sequence was out of the question. This was when I learned that there is a surefire way to make someone urinate: chug fifteen cups of warm water in quick succession. Regrettably, it may also induce vomiting. The unfortunate recruit dutifully did both, and the line began moving again.

  There was a Breathalyzer, a doctor one-on-one, more waiting, more testing. The final exercise was in a room mysteriously called “ortho-neuro.” Twenty-five at a time and stripped to our underwear, we were put through a number of exercises by a cheerful civilian and an ancient-looking, humorless doctor. Formed into two lines facing each other, we were told to swing our arms around, forward, backward, do something like jumping jacks, then something called a “duck walk” that involved squatting and walking at the same time, then walk on our knees, and so on through about twenty of these little routines. I began to feel like a preschooler, or like a recruit in newsreel footage from World War II, as they put us through our various motions and then told us to sit, in numbered seats on benches. All of our medical folders were placed in a row of little holders on the wall, each numbered, 1 through 25, just like our spots on the bench. Looking bored, the doctor examined them in no particular order, then in no particular order names were called.

  “Winters! You’re qualified.” Winters gets up, is handed his folder, puts his clothes back on, and walks out of the room back into the hallway, looking like he just won the lottery. Macalester. You’re qualified. Lopez. Tagatz. Bowman. Perez. Buttigieg. You’re qualified. Ridiculously, you feel like you’ve accomplished something when they tell you you’re medically qualified. For this, you get to go to another waiting room. Eventually you are called up. A man behind a desk, whom I recalled as an unpleasant presence during the vision test earlier, now seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. “Butti . . . wha? Hoo-hee, it’s a good thing you’re in the Navy. I just wish I had someone with your name in my unit. Ha-haah, the fun I could have. Damn, guy.” Then, a little more quietly, confidential and approving, “You know how hard it is to get in for intel right now.” Then another look at the stack of paper and, finally, “You’re squared away.”

  OVER SUBSEQUENT WEEKS more paperwork followed, including the intense vetting for the background check that goes with a top-secret clearance. Screen by screen on a website belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, I carefully accounted for every foreign connection and trip: every commute to Canada for McKinsey, every Maltese cousin I kept in touch with, every penny of the fifty bucks or so that I still had in a British bank account from Oxford. I ran down contact information for foreigners I had known, and told old high school and college friends not to be alarmed if someone approached them saying they were from the FBI and wanting to know how many times they had seen me smoke pot (not many, but more than zero). With a remarkably straight face, an investigator appeared in South Bend to meet with me, confirm some address information, and ask if I had ever attempted to overthrow the government.

  At last, an email arrived in September 2009 affirming that everything was ready and it was time to take the oath. Even this process bore out the military mantra of hurry-up-and-wait, or in this case wait-and-hurry-up: after an excruciatingly slow process, the recruiting lieutenant insisted on getting the final signatures in by the end of the month. With my work travel schedule and her need to have me do the oath somewhere near her Detroit-area base, it wasn’t easy to find a time and place. I had built up a certain mental image in mind for my commissioning—if not a stirring scene like the emotional swearing-in of Richard Gere’s character at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, then at least a photogenic moment with my right hand raised and maybe a few flags in the background, something worthy of a photo that I would frame and one day and show my kids. I had assumed we would do the honors on the parade ground at Naval Station Great Lakes, the major Navy facility near Chicago. Instead, the lieutenant proposed we split the difference between South Bend and Detroit and meet at a Big Boy diner in Coldwater, Michigan. But the Big Boy was closed, so we wound up at a nearby coffee shop, where we went over the paperwork together one more time, and she showed me where to sign. Not big on ceremony, she added: “If you really want to raise your right hand, we can do that.”

  One minute later, I was a member of the military. A commissioned officer. Ensign, United States Navy Reserve.

  1 I think of him as Farmer Daughton, having gotten the impression he is a farmer, but I do not know his actual first name.

  5

  “Meet Pete”
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  No one sits on his mother’s knee and says he hopes one day to become a state treasurer. The truth is that I made it through my schooling and early adulthood without ever noticing the office existed, or giving any thought to what it meant. As a student, learning about the exploits of senators and governors and wondering if I might someday hold office myself, it never crossed my mind that “getting into politics” would mean running for an office that most people have never heard of. Yet by the time my twenty-eighth birthday approached in early 2010, I had decided to quit my job and spend the better part of the year, and my savings, seeking an obscure office that paid less than half of what I’d already been making.

  It all happened because of a chance to stand up for the then-unpopular rescue of the American auto industry—and because I actually knew what an empty car factory looks like. It takes great imagination to look at the broken windows and falling bricks of a decaying Studebaker factory in South Bend, and picture the days when it was heaving with life and employing tens of thousands of people. It takes far less imagination to glance at today’s enormous, well-kept Chrysler plants on the outskirts of Kokomo, Indiana, and picture what would happen if they were to fall silent. After about a year without maintenance, the walls would show disuse. Windows on the office side would be distressed or broken within a couple years, and by the end of the decade five-foot weeds would be pushing through the cracked asphalt of the massive parking lot.

  ANYONE FROM SOUTH BEND KNOWS exactly what it looks like when an industry collapses. No one wants to see it happen to anyone else—which was why I followed the news closely when the 2008 economic crisis left Chrysler on life support. I was still at McKinsey, working out of borrowed office space and hotel rooms in San Francisco, Dubai, Seattle, or Stamford, depending on the day. On paper I was part of the Chicago office, but in practice I worked wherever the study took me. Traveling at least four days a week, by this point I’d realized that it didn’t much matter to my employer where I actually lived, so I had moved home to South Bend. This cut my rent in half and gave me more time with my parents, who hadn’t lived in the same state as me in almost a decade. And in those rare days at home, or when I needed a break from my spreadsheets, or on a plane from somewhere to somewhere, I would pull up news articles and follow the unfolding drama of the near-death and rescue of the American auto industry.

  I hadn’t spent much time in Kokomo, but like most people from South Bend who had occasion to visit Indianapolis, I’d been through it at least a dozen times. About half the size of South Bend, the city of Kokomo was the midpoint of the three-hour drive between home and the state capital. Every state band competition, soccer tournament, or family trip to Indy involved at least passing through the edge of town on Old U.S. 31. Coming southward, you know you’re getting near the city limits when you see the Indiana Transmission Plant 2, or ITP2, on the left-hand side. From the highway, you wouldn’t notice much about this white and blue building, other than its sheer mass. Decades newer than the Studebaker Main Assembly building I knew so well in South Bend, it was made of steel rather than brick, and was one story across sixty-one acres rather than six floors, but the overall proportions are similar, with over half a million square feet of space. ITP2 accounts for about two thousand jobs, and it’s not even the biggest Chrysler facility in town. About three miles farther down the road, near the heart of the small city, you come to a stoplight and see two huge factories, one on either side. On the right is another transmission plant, with another thirty-five hundred jobs. Across from it is a plant that now belongs to GM Components Holdings with about a thousand more employees. The historic heart of Kokomo, with its quaint town square and the county courthouse, is about a mile west of the highway. Directly or indirectly, nearly everything in Howard County was fueled by the auto industry. In total, the town of fifty-six thousand had four Chrysler plants and one Delphi factory, and about one in five workers was in manufacturing.

  So Kokomo had a lot to lose when the Great Recession struck our country and our state, with the auto companies hit hardest. As cable news told the story in stock market charts, workers at Chrysler and Delphi saw it in layoff notices. Thousands were suddenly out of a job, and with unemployment in Kokomo in double digits, there were not a lot of other options. At least layoffs meant the possibility of coming back; families hoped and waited for news of a callback before their savings ran out. The alternative, a total collapse of the companies, was unthinkable—it would take the whole city down, not just the factories. The area could see 40 percent unemployment. No business—from Applebee’s to the Cone Palace, my favorite family-owned ice-cream shop—would stand much of a chance.

  Nor would the disaster be confined to Kokomo. Even at rock bottom during the crisis, the auto industry employed sixty-nine thousand people in Indiana. South Bend’s days of making Studebakers were long gone, but thousands of families in our city depended on good jobs at companies that made parts and supplies for the industry. At least we had our colleges and universities, and proximity to Chicago. If the auto industry went belly-up altogether, a city like South Bend would be wounded; a town like Kokomo would be devastated.

  As Christmas approached, the news went from bad to worse. Having laid off twelve thousand workers in 2008, Chrysler announced in December that it would halt production at all thirty of its manufacturing plants. Dangerously low on cash and headed for bankruptcy, the company seemed unlikely to survive very far into 2009.

  President Bush was preparing to leave office, but the emergency couldn’t wait for the transition. In December he boldly initiated a $17.4 billion bailout loan package, saying, “Bankruptcy now would lead to a disorderly liquidation of American auto companies.” To me, “disorderly liquidation” sounded like a cartoon whirlpool, with cars and workers waving their arms for help in the downward spiral toward the drain. A simpler way to put it was that millions of lives and hundreds of communities stood to be ruined. Yet the move to prevent this disaster was clearly not a political winner—something about the word “bailout” makes voters allergic—and the Senate was loath to vote for the package. When Congress refused to authorize funds, Bush acted unilaterally, rewiring money that Congress had authorized, with other purposes in mind, as part of the TARP bank rescue.

  The new Democratic administration planned to continue the unpopular policy, but as President Obama took office in January 2009, it was clear that the funding was not enough to hold off a collapse. The new president faced an immediate choice about whether to put more cash into supporting the auto industry. The politics could not have been worse: one poll found that 72 percent of Americans were against further loans. Even in South Bend, many voters viewed the idea skeptically. The bank bailout had left a bad taste in our mouths, and some thought more cash into the auto rescue would just be throwing good money after bad. Bumper stickers began to appear around town with a sarcastic contribution to the debate: BAIL OUT STUDEBAKER. Within the White House, most of Obama’s economic advisers were opposed. They didn’t believe Chrysler could survive even with the additional loans. But Obama decided to proceed anyway, adding funding while helping to broker an alliance between Chrysler and Fiat to keep it in business.

  And it worked. The newly formed, post-bankruptcy version of Chrysler was able to crawl, then walk, then run, and eventually the company exceeded expectations for sales and growth. And the auto industry comeback helped lead the overall economic recovery of the country. By the fall of 2010, all of the laid-off workers had been called back, and unemployment started moving back to normal levels. And with remarkable speed, the government had recovered most of the taxpayer money that had gone into the deal.

  By 2012, this once-unpopular policy had come to be seen as a clear win. Obama used it as a cudgel against his opponent, Mitt Romney, who had opined against the bailout in a 2008 op-ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” In 2008, that had clearly been the safe position to take, but by 2012 voters understood that bold action had been needed. The tables had turned, and now Romney
was left trying to explain away his previous view. When it came to health care, Romney refused to admit that he was the true father of what came to be known as Obamacare. But when it came to the auto industry, the reverse was true: his campaign actually tried to take credit for the bailout he had once opposed. A campaign spokesman said of the structured bankruptcy: “Mitt Romney had the idea first.” To be fair, Romney was making some nuanced and sensible points in his article about the need for Detroit to modernize, but events had disproven his bottom-line 2008 prediction: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

  I knew what South Bend had to deal with after losing just one car company. Even now I shudder to think of what would have happened to the industrial Midwest if the entire American auto sector had been allowed to fall apart. South Bend’s current renaissance would have been impossible; in fact, it’s doubtful that the Great Recession would have been reversed at all.

  MY CAREER IN ELECTED POLITICS, as I mentioned earlier, began in the midst of this American economic drama. What pulled me in was a weird subplot to the remarkable rescue: a lawsuit that almost stopped the Chrysler bankruptcy dead in its tracks. At work one day in the spring of 2009, I was calculating the effects of energy efficiency policies on utility balance sheets when I needed a break. The spreadsheet went into the background and I flicked through the news. An article caught my eye: “Indiana Pensioners Object to Chrysler Sale.” I clicked and read the unbelievable news that the state treasurer of Indiana, Richard Mourdock, was going to sue, demanding that a judge block the bankruptcy and liquidate Chrysler instead. In other words, an elected official in Indiana was attempting to stop the president from saving the livelihoods of thousands of Indiana families.