by Joshua Green
Their parents’ views and infatuation with Kennedy filtered down to the Bannon children less as a politics than as a class identity and self-conception. They were raised with a clear understanding of the value of hard work and the expectation that they would do their part. Steve mowed lawns and delivered newspapers before graduating to a job at a local junkyard. “He would come home looking like a coal miner,” said Chris. “Mom would make him strip down to his boxers and spray him off with a hose before he could come in.”
Martin and Doris Bannon were serious Roman Catholics who insisted that the family attend Sunday Mass, and they sent all three of their sons to Benedictine, the private Roman Catholic military academy in Richmond. As the Roman Catholic Church took steps to modernize after the Vatican II reforms of 1962–1965, the Bannons were drawn in the opposite direction, toward a deeper connection with Church tradition and the mysteries and beauties of its ancient rituals. After Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, the elder Bannons became Tridentine Catholics. “When [the Roman Catholic Church] first started allowing it in the mid-eighties,” Steve Bannon recalled, “we left our parish that we’d been in for years and went and joined St. Joseph’s in Richmond, which offers a Tridentine Mass.”
By the time he graduated from high school in 1972, the Byrd machine had withered, but Benedictine stood as a bulwark against a liberalizing world. “We were a right-wing military Catholic high school,” said John Pudner, a childhood friend of the Bannons who grew up two blocks away and attended Benedictine. “We were very small, just four hundred kids at a time. It was a very close-knit community.”
Bannon received an education steeped in classics and history. The Benedictine curriculum was traditional Western Civilization presented in a context of Catholicism. “We were all taught that Western civilization was saved five hundred years ago in Spain, when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Moors,” said Pudner. “The lesson was, here’s where Muslims could have taken over the world. And here was the great stand where they were stopped. We were taught a worldview: ‘This is how Catholicism survived.’ I think that shaped all of us. But what Steve took away, I think, was a belief that you’ve got to be willing to identify the threat. When we were growing up, the threat was the atheist, communist Soviet Union. . . . Now Muslims are trying to blow us up.”
Even though the Benedictine student body was overwhelmingly white, very few cadets came from wealthy families, and the school itself was located in a polyglot neighborhood of whites, blacks, and Jews. Benedictine cadets thought of themselves as working-class and cultivated rivalries with a pair of rich preparatory schools in the Richmond suburbs, Collegiate and St. Christopher’s. “We’d battle them in sports; we’d fight with them at parties,” said Pudner. “We were the blue-collar guys. They were the rich snobs. They’d always do the employer-employee joke at us: ‘When you grow up, you’ll work for us.’ And we’d punch ’em in the nose.”
By every account, Bannon prized—even relished—this class identity, a born believer with a quickness to take passionate sides. More often than not, he was the one who would throw the first punch in any showdown with a group of rich prep schoolers. But he was also taken with the much larger idea, imparted at Benedictine, that Western civilization had to be constantly and vigilantly defended against shadowy, shape-shifting enemies, and he was prone to viewing contemporary struggles, even minor ones, as critical junctures of historical significance. This fed a grandiose image of himself as someone galloping to defend not just a class but Western civilization itself.
Bannon would go on to work and thrive in a succession of elite, cosmopolitan institutions—Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood—a fact that has caused many observers to puzzle over just how it is that he emerged as an apocalyptic, fire-breathing conservative populist. Those who have known him the longest see no mystery at all. The Bannon they witness in the White House is a recognizable extension of the teenage go-getter they knew in Richmond, and his political views, though now more fiercely held, are rooted in the same beliefs that were instilled in him at Benedictine.
“Look at the three legs of conservatism today,” said Pudner, who went on to become a Republican political consultant. “There’s military and foreign affairs—Steve went to military school. There’s social conservatism—he’s a pro-life Catholic. And there’s economics, which for us didn’t mean rich guys protecting their tax breaks. It meant, for all of us who were working-class, that you worked a job. It was that kind of conservatism that we believed really helped the average worker. And when you think about it that way, there’s really no jump at all from Steve Bannon at Benedictine in 1972 to 2016 and Donald Trump.”
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Growing up, Bannon had designs on a military career. He wanted to become an officer. But he also wanted a break from the rigors of military discipline that was part of life at Benedictine, so rather than follow the dozen or so Benedictine graduates who headed straight into the Virginia Military Institute, he followed a different group of classmates and enrolled at Virginia Tech. Some people go to college and are immediately transformed by the exposure to new people and new ideas. This wasn’t Bannon’s experience at all. College seemed to make him a more vivid and intense version of the person he was when he arrived.
In an early display of the pugilistic style that would become his hallmark, Bannon, having previously evinced no interest in student politics, decided during his junior year to launch an insurgent campaign for president of the student government association. His preferred mode of politicking, then as now, was the all-out populist attack. He chose a female running mate, an uncommon move at the time, and printed up flyers charging his opponents with offering only “Platitudes, Promises and Slogans,” implying that they were in league with a distant, elitist university administration. Against this, Bannon’s flyers promised that he would “create change” through his own brand of “dynamic leadership.” His opponents in the race, veterans of student government, were taken aback by the ruthless upstart who had suddenly thrust himself into their midst. “It just wasn’t fun,” Marshall DeBerry, who ran against Bannon, recalled recently. “It was very negative stuff. . . . Upon reflection, Trump’s campaign seemed somewhat similar to the student body presidential campaign I faced in 1975.”
How Bannon’s opponents responded to his provocations also prefigured criticisms that would be widely directed at him later on, even by frustrated allies. “Don’t be fooled by Bannon. He has immense charisma, but lacks the ability to keep his head geared in any one particular direction long enough to accomplish anything,” Gary Clisham, the sitting SGA president, warned in a letter to the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times. “Mr. Steve Bannon has run amok every assignment given him.”
The letter outraged hot-blooded Bannon partisans, including his roommate Darrell Nevin, who shoved Clisham during a subsequent debate. (“Scuffle Occurs at Great Debate” read the headline in the Collegiate Times.) “I was young. I just thought, well, let’s push him off the stage,” Nevin recalled, with some embarrassment. “It was a bitter campaign.”
Bitter but, for Bannon, victorious: he carried more than 60 percent of the vote and found himself the insurgent class president.
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After graduating from Virginia Tech in 1976 with a degree in urban planning, Bannon was finally ready to join the military. He signed up for the Naval Reserve straightaway. The life that he imagined for himself as a junior naval officer—one that revolved around duty, honor, and patriotism—was nothing like what he encountered when he showed up at the Navy’s training center in Rhode Island in 1977. Bannon, not one given to modest ambitions, had visions of one day becoming secretary of defense. “When I got into the Navy,” he said, “I thought my shit didn’t stink because I’d been president of the student body at college. I get there, and it’s the [beginning of] the all-volunteer force, and I get ass
igned to the engineering department. I walk in and my entire division, my entire gang, basically looked like they had been given a choice between jail and the Navy.” He laughed. “They turned out to be great guys, but the all-volunteer force was just a different deal back then.”
Bannon expected his naval career to roughly resemble Richard Gere’s in An Officer and a Gentleman—a series of character-building trials and affirmations that would instill strength and valor, and reward him with the full measure of military prestige that he assumed he would merit. What he got instead more closely resembled Bill Murray’s experience in Stripes. But he readily adapted to the Navy as it was, prizing the camaraderie that develops among shipmates at sea and thriving amid the towel-snapping, chauvinistic naval culture of that era. Later on, Bannon would frequently express deep nostalgia for the wardroom culture of the Navy, and it is something that he would seek to re-create at every stage of his life afterward.
Bannon was billeted to the USS Paul F. Foster, a Spruance-class destroyer designed for antisubmarine warfare. Assigned to the Pacific Fleet and operating out of San Diego, the ship was deployed in 1978 and spent much of the next two years in the western Pacific and Indian oceans. The job of an antisubmarine destroyer is to trail aircraft carriers and protect them from enemies. Bannon spent his first deployment uneventfully in the Pacific, working as an auxiliary engineer. Sometimes, Soviet vessels would test the ship with cat-and-mouse games, but more often life at sea was filled with long stretches of tedium. He passed the time reading books on Zen Buddhism and playing basketball, where his ball-hogging style of play earned him the nickname “Coast to Coast.”
During Bannon’s second deployment, when he had become a navigator, the Paul F. Foster was ordered to the North Arabian Sea. Just past midnight on March 21, 1980, he was piloting the destroyer off the southern coast of Iran when it rendezvoused with the supercarrier USS Nimitz, which it was assigned to shadow.
The previous November, Iranian revolutionaries belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, an Iranian student group that backed the Ayatollah Khomeini, had stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-two American hostages. The crisis dominated American headlines and roiled the latter stages of Jimmy Carter’s troubled presidency. The Paul F. Foster and the Nimitz sailed to the Gulf of Oman, where they began preparations for the secret mission that was to become Carter’s response. The Nimitz carried eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters that were supposed to swoop into Tehran with Delta Force soldiers, who would free the American hostages in a lightning blitz code-named Operation Eagle Claw.
“We were there for the workup, day after day,” Bannon said. “There were two battle groups, one Camel Station, one Gonzo Station. The U.S. Navy had never really been there before, so we have aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, helicopters, just going everywhere.” Bannon’s faith in the capacity of his commanders had diminished throughout his time in the Navy, and the preparations he was witness to left him with an uneasy feeling about the mission’s prospects. “You could tell it was going to be a goat fuck,” he said.
It was. On April 24, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw commenced to almost immediate disaster. The eight Sea Stallions were supposed to fly to a staging area called Desert One in the remote Dasht-e Lut desert under cover of darkness. There the helicopters would refuel, wait out the day, and then ferry the Delta Force soldiers 260 miles further inland to Desert Two, just outside Tehran, the following evening. From there, the soldiers would drive into Tehran, storm the embassy, and rescue the hostages, whom they would spirit across the street to a soccer stadium, where helicopters would whip everyone back to the desert, and on to freedom. AC-130 gunships would blanket the sky over Tehran to provide supporting fire. Carrier Air Wing Eight, established at Gonzo Station, which was Bannon’s operating area, would take off from the Nimitz and provide air protection.
Almost nothing went according to plan. On the way to Desert One, one of the Sea Stallions was grounded in the desert when sensors detected a cracked rotor blade. The seven remaining helicopters pressed on, only to hit an unexpected sandstorm, causing two more of them to have to abandon the mission. At this point, commanders disagreed about whether to abort the rescue attempt. Eventually, Carter called it off. But as the team was pulling out of Desert One, one of the helicopters struck the tail of an EC-130 aircraft that had brought fuel to the staging area. The fiery explosion killed eight servicemen and badly burned two more. The remaining Sea Stallions had to be abandoned in the desert. The White House, humiliated, revealed the failed rescue operation the next day.
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Bannon was not a part of the Desert One debacle. To the disappointment of its crew, the Paul F. Foster was ordered to Pearl Harbor several days before Carter launched the ill-fated mission. Bannon and his shipmates learned about what happened while they were at sea. “We felt defeated,” said Andrew Green, who served aboard Bannon’s destroyer.
Bannon blamed Carter, whom he regarded with undisguised contempt. It was enough to shake him free of the loose affiliation he’d felt with his parents’ Democratic politics. “When I was in the service, I wasn’t really that political,” he said, “but then you see a guy like Carter, how fucked up things can get. My political views were formed by seeing how a weak leader like that could get America into the middle of a Middle East debacle.” Bannon felt as if he were waking up to fundamental truths about the world, truths that alarmed him. The motley assemblage of enlisted men who made up the all-volunteer force had disabused him of his romantic notion of naval life. Serving aboard the Paul F. Foster in the gulf, his darkening view of the wider world grew to encompass his civilian commanders—above all Carter, whose pusillanimous hesitancy, and failure of leadership when he did finally act, Bannon held directly responsible for damaging American prestige.
Bannon’s experience as a naval officer in the gulf did more than sour him on Democratic politics. It pushed him into a different party. He became enraptured with a hawkish, outspoken, confrontational, and struttingly pro-military Republican, Ronald Reagan, whose searing critique of Carter’s weakness matched his own views. Bannon’s years abroad also opened his eyes to what struck him as a gathering threat. It was not the sort of immediate, existential danger posed by the Soviet Union. Rather, this was a more distant menace that loomed just over the horizon: Islam. Anyone seeking to trace the pathogenesis of the Islamophobia that would grip Bannon thirty years hence can follow it back to Tehran and his time in the Middle East. The hostage crisis, he came to believe, was just the first hint of a hostility that could grow into something that would one day threaten the West—something that, he would finally conclude thirty-five years later, urgently necessitated “a global war against Islamic fascism.”
“It was not hard to see, as a junior officer, sitting there, that [the threat] was just going to be huge,” said Bannon. “We’d pull into a place like Karachi, Pakistan—this is 1979, and I’ll never forget it—the British guys came on board, because they still ran the port. The city had 10 million people at the time. We’d get out there, and 8 million of them had to be below the age of fifteen. It was an eye-opener. We’d been other places like the Philippines where there was mass poverty. But it was nothing like the Middle East. It was just a complete eye-opener. It was the other end of the earth.”
In fact, he could hardly comprehend that places like Pakistan and Iran were terrestrial at all, so otherworldly was this strange and forbidding place whose sudden aggressions had summoned the full might of the U.S. military, flawed though its civilian leaders might have been. “The only way I can describe Iran,” Bannon recalled, “is that it looked like the moon. You’re literally months away from home, steaming across the ocean, these vast expanses, you get to this place and it was like you’d landed on the moon. It was like the fifth century—completely primeval.”
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After the Paul F. Foster arrived back in San Diego, Bannon decided that
he had had enough of sea duty. Energized by Reagan’s election and eager to join the new administration, he transferred to a job in the Pentagon. On the same day that Reagan was sworn into office, Bannon began serving as an assistant in the office of the chief of naval operations. “I came back to the U.S. and saw how Reagan inspired the country,” he said. “I was just a huge Reagan admirer.” As disillusioned as he had become under Carter, Bannon was thrilled by Reagan’s steep increase in the military budget, and though he held a low-level position, he had a front-row seat and a security clearance to watch as the Navy figured out how to distribute this largesse and strengthen its forces.
To get ahead in the administration, he started working toward a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University in the evenings. “We were all very involved in the Navy budget, working with the senior admirals,” said Peter Harris, who worked alongside Bannon in the Pentagon and attended the same Georgetown program. “It was a good time to understand how the Navy formulates its policies and looks at the force structure twenty years out.”
Somewhere along the way, however, Bannon began to chafe at the limitations of his junior position and the sluggishness of the military hierarchy. He realized that it would be years—perhaps even decades—before the possibility of becoming an important decision-maker would even open up to him. “It was pretty evident at the time that as a uniformed officer, there was only so far that you could go,” he said. “You could work your entire career and really not have a job that gave you the freedom and flexibility to do something big.”
