BOOKS: Shortest Way Home

Pete Buttigieg’s memoir, Shortest Way Home, is obviously aimed at introducing the candidate to the American electorate, but his whole outlook is such a breath of fresh air, and he is such an extraordinary person, that his book was an absolute pleasure to read (or actually, listen to him read it to me, which is even better). In fact, I’ve listened to it twice through. If you’re not familiar with “Mayor Pete”, the intriguing nutshell is this: born and raised in the “rust belt” town of South Bend, Indiana, he attended Harvard then Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was on track to become a very rich and very successful business consultant at McKinsey, but a strong desire for a more meaningful career of public service brought him back to Indiana, where he won election as mayor of South Bend, just as Newsweek named it one of America’s “dying cities”. There he has lead the city to a resurgence of economic growth, new investment, elimination of blight, and turned abandoned auto factories into a “Silicon Prairie”. He also publicly came out as gay shortly before standing for re-election, and shortly after returning from seven months in Afghanistan as a Navy Reserve lieutenant. But that’s just the teaser. The real joy of this book is learning what shaped him, seeing how such seemingly divergent aspects all converge in one person. As he tells his story, a dazzlingly brilliant mind powered by an engaging curiosity is on display, but disarmingly tempered with an earnest humility. He’s up front with many lessons learned through hard experience, and he’s quick to give credit and praise to others. He’s also clearly a man in love, and some of the best parts are when he’s talking about the object of his love. There’s a beautiful chapter about how he met and courted his husband, but long before that, his first-and-always love is his native city of South Bend. The first chapter of the book, called “The South Bend I Grew Up In”, is a free-ranging and at times elegiac description of the city’s 150-year history interwoven with his own experiences growing up in it. In later chapter, he takes the reader along on his morning run, and it’s like getting a personal tour of the city from its biggest fan. I can’t say South Bend had ever been on my bucket list before, but he makes it sound compelling. Of course there’s politics in this book, but politics at a city level reflects little of the red/blue partisan divide, and is much more about pragmatic problem solving like how best to clean up a blighted neighborhood, how best to revitalize a dying city, or simply how to get the snow plowed. As mayor of a city in a very red state, he talks about how he worked successfully with Republican governors, even Mike Pence. There were lessons there in how being too committed to ideology can get in the way of getting good things done. His closing chapter is a musing about if he could go back in time to see the South Bend of previous generations, and if he could bring the mayors of those eras into the present, what those conversations would be like. And in the process, he talks about the myth of the “golden age”, and why wanting to go back to a time when a mighty Studebaker factory employed a thriving city, looking for another Studebaker to “make South Bend great again”, is “looking for greatness in all the wrong places”. Rather than looking to the past for specific solutions, expecting that what worked well for past challenges would work again for the very different set of present challenges, what works is to apply the same grit and creativity used in past successes to come up with new solutions appropriate to our time and place. It’s a fittingly optimistic and forward-looking grace note to close his book.