Opinion: Tilling Honor in a Political Landscape Barren of It

Posted on by Abigail Trotter

With JD Vance as vice president and Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, now probably isn’t the best time to argue for more veterans in public service.

But Rye Barcott wants to make the case anyway. It’s a persuasive one.

He points out that as a general rule, Americans who’ve served in the military have forged bonds with and learned to respect people from diverse backgrounds and different places. The uniform can unite those who wear it as much as anything else divides them.

Broadly speaking, they have had certain positive values, such as discipline and teamwork, drilled into them.

“There’s also a degree of humility that military service instills,” Barcott, a 47-year-old former Marine, told me during a two-hour conversation in North Carolina, where we both live, just over a week ago. “You have served something that is larger than yourself.” And you’ve done that, he added, at potential risk, having accepted the idea that the public good may demand personal sacrifice.

Imagine America if more politicians genuinely endorsed and acted on that principle.

Barcott has written a thoughtful, hopeful book, “Courage Can Save US: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future,” that’s being published this week. It profiles current office holders — half of them Democrats, half of them Republicans — and suggests that qualities honed in the military (or, in one congressman’s case, the F.B.I.) positioned them to be less partisan, more independent, more civic-minded leaders.

The book also reflects Barcott’s passion project. He’s the chief executive officer and one of the founders of With Honor, a nonpartisan group that, since 2018, has encouraged more men and women who’ve worn the uniform or performed similar government service — such as defense, law enforcement or intelligence work — to run for political office. To date, With Honor has supported more than 250 such candidates with more than $100 million across federal, state and local races. Those candidates must first sign a pledge to conduct themselves with civility, integrity and the courage to work across party lines.

I was curious about Barcott’s perspective because we need more politicians with less vanity, less stridency, less pettiness. We need valor in a political landscape often barren of it. If recruiting a greater number of veterans improves the odds of getting that, I’m for it.

It might. I don’t think there’s any definitive proof, but there’s this: On Wednesday, four House Republicans mustered the moxie to break party ranks and voted to direct President Trump to get congressional approval for the sustained engagement of American combat troops with Iran. Two of those Republicans, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio, each served in the military for more than a decade. A third, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, is the former F.B.I. agent in Barcott’s book; his work for the bureau included counterterrorism operations abroad. (The fourth dissident was Thomas Massie of Kentucky.)

Barcott’s nine profile subjects in addition to Fitzpatrick are the Democratic governors Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Wes Moore of Maryland; the Republican House members John James of Michigan, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Dan Crenshaw of Texas; the Democratic House members Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Jared Golden of Maine; Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona; and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana.

There are flaws, failures and disappointments aplenty among those politicians. But there’s also evidence of conscience and of openness to contrary views. In aggregate, they’re a more impressive bunch than any random selection of 10 elected officials.

Although Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, has voted in line with President Trump since his return to the White House in January 2025, he publicly condemned him in early 2021 for his incendiary and bogus claims about a stolen election, and he’s known for his willingness to tangle with fellow Republicans. This year, Trump refused to endorse Crenshaw’s re-election bid, and Crenshaw lost his primary three months ago to a far-right challenger.

Bacon, a former Air Force brigadier general who represents a district that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, has a bolder reputation than Crenshaw’s for statements that challenge other Republicans, including Trump. “He’s taken a stance on stuff like the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico,” Barcott said. “He was the only Republican to vote against that. He basically said it was a silly idea.”

The exact word Bacon used was “juvenile.” Candor like that has earned him harassment and threats; at one point, Bacon’s wife slept with a loaded gun within reach. He announced last year that he would leave the House at the end of this term, his fifth.

On the Democratic side, Moulton, a former Marine, sometimes quarreled with the Biden administration and has pointedly questioned Democratic orthodoxy. Kelly, a retired astronaut and naval officer, has also broken with his party at times but, more notably, drew threats from Hegseth of a court-martial, a demotion in rank and a reduction in retirement pay for participating in a 2025 video that reminded troops that they had not only the right but also the duty to disobey illegal orders.

Not all veterans who run for office are interested in flexing political independence or in taking With Honor’s pledge, much as the impulse to join the military is, for some people, less altruistic than self-aggrandizing, less philosophical than practical, less patriotic than jingoistic. Veterans aren’t axiomatically virtuous and valorous. And some have a take on military culture that’s exclusionary, discriminatory, censorious. Hegseth, a bellicose theocrat, has gone out of his way to marginalize Black and female officers.

“Military service also leaves some pretty deep scars,” Barcott said. “Mental health issues are pretty significant across the military.” That’s how Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the crucial U.S. Senate race in Maine, has explained disturbing social media posts and other ugly behavior in his past, though he says that he is now in much better shape, and his admirers emphasize that he stepped up to serve his country and put himself in harm’s way in the first place.

The prevalence of veterans in Congress has declined significantly over the past half century, during which Americans’ respect for Congress has also plummeted. In the mid-1970s, about 75 percent of senators and House members had served in the military. Now, it’s just under 20 percent.

From George Washington through George H.W. Bush, the overwhelming majority of our presidents were veterans. But since then, it’s the opposite.

Some potential contenders for the presidency in 2028 are veterans. On the Republican side, there’s Vance, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and, if the stench of his 2024 humiliation fades sufficiently, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Among Democrats, there’s Kelly, Moore, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and — if you count C.I.A. and Defense Department work — Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

I realize there’s only one woman on that list, just as there’s only one woman in Barcott’s book, and that’s another reason not to give too many political bonus points to veterans who run for office. Given the composition of our military, veterans are more likely to be male than female, and I don’t think we’d benefit at all from fewer women in Congress and statehouses.

But I’m inspired by many of the veterans in politics with whom I’ve interacted. I think of Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, whom I once pitched as Biden’s ideal 2020 running mate. I think of Bob Kerrey, who was the governor of Nebraska and later represented the state in the Senate. I’ve written about his early and honorable advocacy for gay marriage.

They, like many other veterans, tempered individual ambition with a sense of common mission. I spotted the military’s fingerprints in that. And I liked what I saw.

This op-ed was originally published by The New York Times. Read it here.

Rye Barcott MPA/MBA 2009: Courage and honor

Posted on by Abigail Trotter

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.”

Rye Barcott MPA/MBA 2009

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.

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