Josh Hawley: A Portrait of Selling One's Soul

I have been deeply immersed in politics for close to 30 years after growing up in a politically engaged family. Over that period I have met politicians on both sides of the political isle the majority of whom saw politics as a means to make things better for their community and the country - former GOP U.S. senator John Warner is one example on the GOP side and Governor Ralph Northam (a close friend) is one on the Democrat side of the isle. Neither - and there are others like them - was consumed first and foremost by a lust for power and personal ambition. Such seemingly is not the case with Josh Hawley who, based on a long piece in Politico Magazine, is consumed with ambition and a pursuit of power and is willing to prostitute himself and sell his soul to further his over weening ambition and lust for power.  In the piece former fellow students and professors express shock at Hawley's behavior in supporting Donald Trump and inciting an insurrection that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Based on the article and other things I have reviewed, Hawley - who is vitriolically anti-gay and seemingly doth protest too loudly - strikes me as a more calculating and less crazed and less extreme Ken Cuccinelli who I have always viewed as a self-loathing closet case. I may be wrong, but my intuition (gaydar, if you will) suggests Hawley appears to be of the same pattern as Rick Santorum, Cuccinelli and Mike Pence.  Here are article highlights:

The Stanford historian David M. Kennedy has spent a career as an authority on American society and politics; winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote one of the most popular textbooks on American history and has delved into a number of controversies and political movements. But he has struggled to come up with any analogue from the past for what he describes as the “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “This is a unique moment,” he says, “where a degree of insanity and irrationality has infected a large enough sector of our body politic that we’re really sick. I think we are politically sick, and I use that word advisedly.”

Kennedy doesn’t see the Capitol rioters as the only symptom, and he doesn’t hold them solely responsible for the country’s current malady. Blame—and, he says, “shame”—also lie with elected leaders who furthered President Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election. And among the most prominent of them is one of Kennedy’s former students, “arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years”: Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

From 1998 to 2002, Kennedy was Hawley’s adviser at Stanford. Hawley, a history major who graduated with honors and wrote a thesis about Theodore Roosevelt, wasn’t just another young man in a hurry, passing through a top university. Kennedy remembers him as deeply engaged and thoughtful, and a serious scholar of the Constitution.

Then, after the election, the professor watched in shock as his former star student became the first senator to say he would challenge the certification of Joe Biden’s win, openly trying to prevent the people’s chosen president from taking office. On January 6, Hawley was photographed giving a raised fist to protesters outside the Capitol as he walked in, planning to object to the electoral results. Even after the rioters breached the Senate chamber and violently interrupted the process, he refused to backtrack on his claims, refuted by court ruling after court ruling, of “irregularities” and “fraud” in the election.

“I absolutely could not have predicted that the bright, idealistic, clear-thinking young student that I knew would follow this path,” says Kennedy.

Conversations with more than a dozen of Hawley’s Stanford classmates and a half-dozen faculty members who knew him all raise versions of the same question: What happened to the person they knew?

Like Kennedy, they paint a portrait of a studious intellectual who was ambitious but principled. At a largely liberal, secular campus, Hawley was open about being a conservative Christian—but not dogmatically so. Many say they simply can’t square the man they knew with the one they’ve seen splashed across their TV screens and social media feeds in the past few weeks.

Hawley’s response to the election has already gotten him denounced by his longtime political mentor in Missouri, called to resign or be expelled by some of his Senate colleagues, vilified by columnists and editorial boards across the political spectrum, and condemned by more than a thousand of his fellow alumni. Meanwhile, he’s been embraced by the likes of Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson. How has a man educated at some of America’s most prestigious institutions ended up positioning himself as an anti-elite heir to Trump?

Some of the explanation for his transformation lies in his journey into elected politics since he left Stanford, climbing from Yale Law grad to attorney general of Missouri to senator in just over a decade. Part of the answer also lies in the particular politics of our era, when Trump has pulled his party away from its longtime policy values and moved it sharply in a more populist direction. But the years Hawley spent in college, despite the noticeable differences in his character, offer some insights into his more recent behavior.

It was no secret that Hawley had his eyes on public office from a very early age, and, if anything, the image his undergraduate peers and professors most often saw back then was one carefully crafted to help get him there. It’s possible, if not likely, that Hawley’s rebranding is just another instance in a long line of moves to position himself, ultimately, for the presidency.

“It’s a pretty cynical calculation,” says Kennedy. “But that’s the only explanation I think that fits the facts.”

Hawley stood out early on. As a prep school student before college, he had already written several political columns for his hometown newspaper, and at Stanford, he joined the Stanford Review, the right-wing student publication founded more than a decade earlier by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel. There are few indications Hawley was particularly interested in or concerned about the burgeoning Big Tech scene, as he is today. But, unlike the vast majority of his peers at the time, he was clearly a conservative and inclined toward politics.

“He was very certain of his political ideology, even at that age, even at 18,” says Brooke Eisele, who also wrote for the Review and was a close friend of Hawley’s from the time they both lived in the same freshman dorm. “I think a lot of us came in with our predispositions and kind of felt things out and shaped ourselves there. He came in with a rock-solid view of the world.”

He wasn’t like one of these people like Stephen Miller, who was excoriating liberals and fueling culture wars on campus, at least not that I was aware of,” says a classmate who knew Hawley but spoke only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of being targeted violently by supporters of the senator.

Still, some classmates say, there were hints of Hawley’s current brand of politics, which has a populist tinge but appears to be anchored by a Christian nationalist viewpoint. Several of them remember him as someone who took his evangelical faith seriously enough to shape his civic worldview. Colin Mathewson, who did Bible study with Hawley when they lived in the same freshman dorm and was his roommate one summer in D.C., when Hawley interned at the Heritage Foundation, says Hawley’s politics seemed to come “from a religious source and had a religious kind of purpose to it. In my experience with Josh, the politics were secondary to what the sort of religious truth was.”

Other classmates, however, say that while Hawley was ardently against abortion, his faith during college seemed less an obvious motivation for his political aspirations and more a guide for his social interactions. Friends of Hawley’s told POLITICO they didn’t ever see Hawley drink, smoke or “bring a girl back” to his dorm room. By many accounts, he preferred to stay in and study on weekend nights than to go out and party.

Gregory, the historian, says he remembers making a prediction to colleagues at the time Hawley was a student: “He would eventually become at least a U.S. senator,” Gregory guessed. “It sounds like a crazy thing to say about any undergraduate, but he really was that extraordinary.”

The classmate who spoke to POLITICO anonymously for fear of violence suggested that image was at least partly cultivated. Hawley would make a point to meet with professors outside of class, to seek out prestigious advisers and to win academic awards, the classmate said, adding, “It was clear he was positioning himself for advancement.”

Not everyone admired Hawley’s focus on meticulously fashioning his profile. As soon as he arrived on campus, he joined the freshman men’s rowing team—a grueling experience, according to teammates, that included early mornings on the water and afternoon workouts in the gym.

One teammate, who asked not to be named, also for fear of retribution from Hawley’s supporters, felt Hawley complained too much at practice and didn’t put in the same effort as others. “There was a lot of entitlement mentality,” the rower says. “Like, ‘This should be different because I want it to be different.’ I also got that he was more interested in appearing to be an athlete than actually being an athlete.”

Hawley only lasted weeks on the team before quitting. Bard Luippold, another rower, says Hawley cited a shoulder injury from an exercise that wasn’t part of the team’s training regimen. “I just felt like Josh didn’t want to stay with us, like he didn’t want to make it work, and that he had chosen himself over the team,” Luippold recalls. “That impression stuck with me.” A third crew teammate, who says he is surprised that Hawley refers to himself as a college rower to this day, adds, “When you look at what happened over the last year, maybe he’s just really not a good team player overall.”

On January 4, a group of prominent historians and constitutional scholars put out a statement warning against anti-democratic efforts to oppose the election certification. Two of the signatories were Hawley’s mentors at Stanford, Kennedy and Rakove. Yet two days later, Hawley went ahead with his challenge anyway—a decision Kennedy calls “irresponsible,” “pigheaded” and “absolutely reprehensible.” Rakove describes it as “despicable.”

To me, it’s a great mystery why someone so young with so much promise would prostitute himself or compromise himself so early when he didn’t really have to do it. He was not politically dependent on Trump to make his career in Missouri politics,” adds Rakove. “But I’m not as surprised as I am depressed.”

Hawley’s professors and classmates have found themselves poring over their memories of the now-senator—considering the thinkers he studied, and the ideas he appeared to take seriously—and feeling even more confused about why he seems to have emerged to stand so strongly against those principles.

“Hawley is misrepresenting basic elements of free speech and constitutional democracy, and he knows better than that,” says Jim Steyer, another Stanford professor who didn’t teach Hawley but remembers him as a student. “He knew better as a freshman at Stanford, for gosh sake.”

“All I feel is a sense of just utter bewilderment and tremendous sadness,” says Gregory, the history professor who is now at Notre Dame.

Many classmates who knew Hawley express dismay that he came out as a Trump supporter to begin with.

“It’s been bothering me,” says Eisele, who was once a close friend, “just trying to square the current reality with my memory of him when he was younger. The Josh I knew in college was very logical and he had a deep respect for democratic institutions and the constitution.”

“He’s extremely sharp and always thinking two steps ahead, so the only thing I can think is that he knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s calculating that it’s going to help his political career,” Eisele says. “That’s the part I didn’t see when we were younger. I guess I didn’t see the calculation. Maybe I was just naïve.”

Perhaps most distressed of all is literatures, cultures and languages professor Elizabeth Bernhardt, who says she knew Hawley during all four years he was at Stanford and later attended his wedding. . . . Bernhardt’s class was called “Letters and Diaries of Resistance in Fascist Germany,” and she says it earned the subtitle from students of “a course about doing the right thing.” The first sentence of the syllabus in 1999, when Hawley took the class, was: “How one develops the courage to do what is right and maintains the strength to resist evil in the face of personal persecution are fundamental human dilemmas.” Through reading a series of letters, diaries and memoirs from Nazi Germany, the syllabus continues, students were exposed to individuals who had “the courage, the intellectual and/or spiritual means, or the strength to speak and act against the evil with which they were confronted.”

“This was a smart person, the kind of person that you want to have in class, but the one that you hope goes on the right road, not the wrong road. I would have thought that he was going to end up being the most brilliant statesman that I could imagine,” Bernhardt said. “I just didn’t expect a mindless follower.”

Beware of anyone so blinded by ambition and so obsessed with their profile. I was guilty of the latter during my years in the closet and I can only assume (in my opinion) Hawley has something to hide besides trying to further his overweening ambition.