I met Chris Gibson early in his first congressional race, at a campaign breakfast my family hosted at our house in upstate New York in April 2010. The sun was out that morning but winter was still in the air, as it often is there at that time of year. The fields and orchards of the Hudson River valley all around us had been the greatest food basket of the American Revolution. Now here was a man who stood before a little gathering of local farmers and small-business owners, perhaps 50 people in total, speaking to us of the founding.
Gibson grew up in Kinderhook, New York, the son of an oft-unemployed Irish Catholic union mechanic. As a teenager Gibson mopped floors in a diner and did odd jobs. The day after his 17th birthday, he joined the Army National Guard, and after college and ROTC, he took his officer’s commission at 22. He was deployed in the Gulf war and Kosovo, earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell, taught at West Point, and found time to start a family. He served several combat tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne and by 2009 was a decorated brigade commander on a clear path to the stars and pension of a general officer. Instead, he retired from the Army and plunged himself and his family into the risk and tawdriness of electoral politics, to run as a Republican in a longshot campaign for a House seat.
In his breakfast remarks to our group, Gibson spoke movingly of two of his paratroopers, Zachary Wobler and Chris Pusateri, who had died in Mosul in 2005—discussing what they had died for and why we were all there that morning. America, Gibson said, “was an exceptional nation at birth.” Our country had created immeasurably more freedom, happiness, and prosperity than any other on earth. And so it should be, he said, since our republican system of government reflects the reason and liberty with which we have been endowed by our Creator.
At the time he met with us, Gibson was struggling against the heavyweight funding and organization of a deep-pocketed Democratic incumbent. Gibson was about 20 points behind in the polls, having started campaigning late in the season, soon after leaving the Army. He had no organization, no campaign money, and insignificant personal funds to draw from. Eschewing the “dialing for dollars” that can chain candidates to the telephone for several hours a day, Gibson hit the road, driving all over the nearly 300-mile north-south stretch of what was then New York’s 20th Congressional District.
By September 2010, Gibson was still 17 points behind his opponent, Rep. Scott Murphy. But Gibson’s grassroots fundraising and fervent volunteers were catching the eye of the NRCC. Then came one of the more dramatic late-round knockout blows in recent political history. Murphy had been running attack ads for weeks, something Gibson never did. The Harvard-educated venture-capitalist millionaire accused Gibson of embracing big-business-driven policies that would ship American jobs overseas. In a debate a month before the election, Gibson was ready for that line of attack: “Scott,” he said, turning to face Murphy, “for the record, the only thing I’ve shipped overseas in the last decade was me and my paratroopers, to fight for your freedom!”
The crowd loved it and so did local media; this was a clincher. (The best part: It was Gibson’s 11-year-old daughter who came up with the line, after hearing one of the attack ads on the radio while the family was driving to a cookout.) A month later, Gibson won the election by 10 points, recording a 26-point swing in the final weeks.
It was not his last impressive political victory. Thanks to redistricting, Gibson had to run in 2012 in a constituency that was about 60 percent new to him. He managed to win by six points in the same election that saw his district vote for President Obama’s reelection by six points. And in November 2014, even though his Democratic opponent outspent him 2-1, Gibson won 63-35—a margin of victory that would be the envy of any inner-city Democrat or Bible Belt Republican. As the New York Times wrote a few days before the 2014 election, Gibson offered a “case study of how a Republican can cultivate, win over and retain an unusually high level of support from Democrats in a swing district, while adhering to Republican positions.”
Having limited himself in advance to no more than four terms, Gibson served out that third term and then left Congress a year ago.
* *
The title of Gibson’s new book Rally Point is taken from a military term for “an easily identifiable point on the ground at which units can reassemble and reorganize if they become dispersed.” The idea is clear: We may feel that our society is fracturing, but Gibson wants to suggest there are ideas, old and new, that should pull us together. The book is partly a personal and political memoir and partly an argument for the kind of big-tent, founding-based conservatism that, at least for him, worked at the ballot box.
About a fifth of the book discusses specific policy proposals that will make sense to any voter in the electoral sweet spot between JFK Democrat and Reagan Republican: Congress needs to rein in the regulators, we need another aircraft carrier, the business tax should not be the highest on earth, and so on. This is all reasonable stuff.
But one day these policy-focused passages in Rally Point will be dated. This will be a pity, because the rest of the book deserves to live in the public eye for years to come—for two reasons.
First, it provides a touching and historically valuable sketch of a certain kind of contemporary American life.
In tears, his ear cupped to the inside of his bedroom door, a 9-year old boy—Gibson—listens to the last inning of the 1973 World Series, featuring his beloved Mets in their “Ya Gotta Believe” season; his father, seemingly embittered after years of unemployment, had sent him to his room for whining about the game.
Fourteen years later, as a young infantry captain, Gibson stands 50 feet from Ronald Reagan in Berlin as the president calls on the Soviet leader to “tear down this wall!”
Together with this officer, older now and commanding thousands, we walk the streets of Mosul, a little safer after a wounded insurgent—surprised that his American captors had patched him up rather than abused him—helped the paratroopers eliminate a vicious al Qaeda cell. And we join the officer at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, N.C., his “formation of hardened paratroopers standing at rigid attention” before him as they honor one of their dead from Iraq—and as a boy of 7, a relative of the fallen man, stands there crying with them.
Back home a few years later, cleaning out the stalls of a friend’s dairy cattle, Gibson realizes that the work is perfect training for Congress.
For all the policy and politics in this book, the Plato and Franklin and Mencken, there are times in it when the deceptively simple storytelling makes you laugh and times when it might make you cry. Gibson has a real gift for this kind of writing and should do more of it.
* *
The second reason Rally Point deserves to be widely and enduringly read is its examination of America’s “exceptional” nature. The book offers as elegant a summary of the legacy and political philosophy of the founding as you will find anywhere. Any responsible citizen knows all about the Connecticut Compromise, naturally. Gibson has that rare gift of illuminating more obscure episodes, like the Newburgh conspiracy of 1783 or the Schechter decision of 1935, with insights that make us actually want to read about them.
Much of the value in these passages comes from Gibson’s elaboration on ideas and stories that might at first seem familiar. Martin Luther King Jr. comes up in the context of Gibson’s recollecting his own father’s disappointments at a life all too often jobless. It is always worth remembering King’s belief in work’s essential dignity, but how many of us remember his conviction that the man called to be a street sweeper “should sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth” will pause to praise him?
How about our market-driven political economy? We should understand it as combining Enlightenment thinking with early-Romantic ideas—not pure capitalism, but a capitalism that understands a role for community, family, and church in providing for our welfare. We are, Gibson says, Locke “by day” and Rousseau “by night.”
I will never forget Gibson standing on my lawn in early 2010, reminding us that of course the American dream lives on—that he knew this because he had lived it, embodied it. When Gibson talks in this book about Cincinnatus, he incidentally reminds us that the Roman farmer-general is said to have enacted his famous retirement drama twice, years apart. Let us hope Gibson has remembered this bit of history as well as the many others in this excellent book.
Bartle Bull writes about culture and current affairs in numerous publications.
