By Ralph Ranalli
Once a week, Rye Barcott MPA/MBA 2009 would walk down Mt. Auburn Street to Professor David Gergen’s home on nearby Ash Street, where he would choose a book from what had become his personal lending library.
Barcott, a Reynolds Social Enterprise Fellow, tried but did not get into Gergen’s famously oversubscribed seminar on American politics. So instead, he pitched Gergen on the idea of an independent study. Gergen replied: “Well, I’ve never done that, but I have all these books in my library. You can just come by, pick a book, read it, and then let’s discuss it.”
That arrangement began a mentorship, a friendship, and ultimately a collaborative relationship that lasted until Gergen, a major figure in politics who advised four different presidential administrations, died last year. One of the earliest books they discussed was John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorensen’s Profiles in Courage, which Barcott says “planted the seed of asking myself: What does courage look like in the political arena?”
Barcott, a former Marine who served tours in Africa and the Middle East, is still exploring the nature of courage. He’s doing so through both a new book and With Honor, the cross-partisan nonprofit and political action organization he co-founded in 2017 that works to recruit, train, elect, and reelect veterans who pledge to work across party lines. And he says he’s still convinced courage has an important role to play in the future of American democracy.
“The broader point is to create more pathways to service.”
His book, Courage Can Save Us: 10 Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future, profiles politicians—five Democrats and five Republicans—who Barcott believes are navigating public life with integrity in an era that makes doing so extraordinarily difficult. Of the 10, eight are U.S. members of Congress (including two HKS alumni: Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton MPA 2011 and Texas Republican Daniel Crenshaw MC/MPA 2017) and two are governors (Democrat Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Wes Moore of Maryland).
Another profile in the book is U.S. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who is not a military veteran but a former FBI agent. Barcott says With Honor has recently expanded its support of candidates beyond military veterans to include people who have dedicated themselves to other public service roles.
“The broader point is to create more pathways to service,” says Barcott, who adds that people who have served in federal law enforcement, in the State Department, or in the CIA overseas are now eligible for With Honor support, with possible further expansion in the future. “I’d love to see us domore with AmeriCorps, specifically—we were very supportive of expanding AmeriCorps during COVID.”
Barcott admits that the group’s aspirations and idealism have been tempered by political realities in Washington, including the Trump administration’s attempts to cut AmeriCorps funding and the extent to which polarization on Capitol Hill is a structural problem. The opportunities for members from opposing parties to actually talk to each other—let alone build trust—have been shrinking, he says. “It feels dysfunctional from the outside,” he says of Congress. “In some ways it’s even more dysfunctional on the inside.”
That’s why he says some of With Honor’s most impactful interventions have been organizing congressional delegations to places like Ukraine, where members are physically removed from the partisan storm and pushed into proximity with each other. “It’s one of the few times they’re actually spending serious time together,” he says. He also credits the Kennedy School’s Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress for playing a similar, important role.
Despite the headwinds—including having to stop supporting some members for not living up to the group’s pledge of integrity, civility, and courage—Barcott is proud of what the cross-partisan caucus has achieved. That includes helping pass roughly 200 pieces of legislation, including Ukraine assistance packages, the NATO Support Act that restricted executive withdrawal from the alliance, expanding Afghan special immigrant visas, and implementing the 988 suicide prevention hotline.
And despite a year of community and personal loss that included another mentor, Professor Joseph Nye, a giant of geopolitical thought who coined the term “soft power,” and Gergen’s passing a month later, Barcott says he still draws strength from the relationships he built at HKS. That includes mentors and public servants, but also others in the broader Kennedy School community, especially friends from his fellowship at the Center for Public Leadership.
“That was really part of David’s vision—that you’re going to bring together people that will find ways to contribute to public life in different ways and stay together as a community,” he says.
This article was originally published by the Harvard Kennedy School. Read it here.