‘Vision and Honor’: The Eric Greitens Myth by Zachary Roth for Talking Points Memo

‘Vision and Honor’: The Eric Greitens Myth

Talking Points Memo by Zachary Roth

May 14

In 2015, the Time magazine writer Joe Klein published his latest book, “Charlie Mike.” Named for the military slang meaning “Continue Mission,” it follows the efforts of a group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as they build a charity designed to help their fellow vets keep serving their country as volunteers.

The book’s central character is the charity’s founder, a former Navy SEAL named Eric Greitens, who Klein portrays as a kind of paragon of warrior-scholar virtue: physically brave, determined, and rugged, but also humble, loyal, morally upright, intellectually curious, and rigorously self-sacrificing — constantly pushing himself to do more in his quest to make the world better. 

Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar, starts by volunteering in refugee camps in Bosnia during school breaks. But he’s plagued by doubts about whether he’s truly giving his all. “He was serving others, but was this sort of service enough?” Klein writes.

Eventually, after coming upon a mass of human skeletons in Rwanda, evidence of a brutal massacre, Greitens realizes: “The innocent of the world needed heavily armed moral protection. Maybe the best way to save lives was to go to war.” That leads him to the SEALs.

During his training, Greitens, being Greitens, writes an essay about how the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson applies to the SEALs. In it, he complains that “an inordinately large portion of [training] is spent listening to stories of sex and drinking,” creating the dangerous idea that “what is ‘special’ about Naval Special Warfare is the way that team guys party, rather than the way we go to war.”

Once he gets the chance to lead men, Greitens sets a higher tone. “[F]rom the start,” Klein writes, “Eric intended that his command of the twelve-man Mark V detachment — his first SEAL assignment — would be exemplary. He had inherited an office cubicle lined with pictures of near-naked women on Harleys. He took down the pictures and replaced them with quotations from Churchill and Patton, and his favorite, from Thucydides.” (The quote is about how warriors should be scholars and vice versa.)

But lest readers get the idea that Greitens has a high opinion of himself, Klein adds: “Eric’s earnestness would have been gagging if it had come from a base of moral smugness. But he wasn’t at all smug. He didn’t act like an Oxford hotshot or a more-righteous-than-thou humanitarian. He was a pleasant surprise, in that way, to his fellow SEAL officers and also to his men.”

At one point during his time as a SEAL, Greitens learns that some of his men are doing drugs. The easy move, we’re told, would be to pass the problem on to his superiors, who would be expected to bury it. “But Eric simply could not do that,” Klein writes. “It would run counter to everything he believed about honor and responsibility.”

Instead, Greitens addresses the issue head-on with his men, leading some to be relieved of duty. Greitens pays a price for his principles — his relationship with SEAL leaders never recovers. The takeaway: “He was intent on living a life of consequence. He would not change who he was. But he was beginning to realize how tough a road he had chosen. He was an American anachronism, a credulous outlier in a society drifting toward cynicism.”

Back in the U.S., Greitens still yearns to find a way to serve. “He remembered the quote from Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ funeral oration: ‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.’”

Before long — having married an Asia policy expert who he values as an intellectual equal — Greitens is building his charity, The Mission Continues, helping his fellow vets, many wounded in action, to find ongoing meaning in their post-military lives.

The book ends with Greitens on the verge of launching a political career. But Klein makes clear that he’s no ordinary politician. “He wanted to run a campaign that would look and sound different,” Klein writes. “His campaign events would be service projects, to the extent that was possible.”

Ultimately: “He wanted his generation of veterans to be remembered for what they brought to civilian life — leadership skills, moral rigor, community feeling that had atrophied in the 60-year blaze of American affluence.”

Though Greitens is never quoted speaking to Klein, the book is written throughout in this very close third-person style, making clear that Klein had close access to Greitens’ state of mind throughout the events described. “My greatest thanks, obviously, go to Eric Greitens, whose vision and honor provide the backbone and spirit of this book,” Klein writes in the acknowledgments, which are dated February 2015.

The following month, Greitens, who is now the Republican governor of Missouri after a campaign where he ran as a truth-telling outsider, would invite his hairdresser to the basement of the St. Louis home he shared with his wife and young son. According to the woman, Greitens took a partially nude picture of her, which he threatened to release if she revealed their affair. Then, she has said, he pressured her to perform oral sex as she cried on the floor. Greitens has said it was a consensual affair that his wife has forgiven him for.

Greitens is set to go on trial for the blackmail allegation starting Wednesday — TPM’s Allegra Kirkland will be in the courtroom. He’s also been charged with stealing a list of donors for The Mission Continues and using it to raise money for his run for governor, a potentially serious violation of campaign finance law.

It’s worth noting that Greitens isn’t the first self-styled military intellectual — one who talks a big game about duty, honor, and sacrifice but fails to live up to those values in the real world — that Klein has fallen for. In 2007, Klein wrote a worshipful story for Time on David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describing him as an “intellectual” whose counter-insurgency strategy represented a more humane, enlightened, and effective form of warfare. When Petraeus left the military in 2011 to become CIA director, Klein praised his “historic service to our country.” Petraeus resigned a year later, admitting to an extra-marital affair with the woman he had chosen to be his official biographer. Through the affair, the woman gained access to substantial amounts of classified information, an investigation found.

But the larger point is about Greitens. He appears to have done a masterful job portraying himself to an experienced political reporter as the ultimate straight arrow, motivated only by an internal drive to serve and constantly demanding more from himself. He offered a similar image to Missouri voters. Whatever happens in this week’s trial, it’s now clear that that picture was, to put it very generously, incomplete.