He campaigned partly by pedaling around the district on a single-speed bicycle. He started running for Congress in 1988 when he was all of 29 and lost. “But the great American story is that a guy like Mike Pence,” one attorney told Mayer in 2017, “is now vice president.” 21. In the Indianapolis legal world, wrote Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, there was a certain hierarchy, and he was not near the top. He was an unremarkable lawyer, handling mostly small-claims and family cases. After six years, though, they finally conceived, and they have three children - Michael Jr. They struggled to have kids, paying $10,000 for fertility treatments that were an IVF alternative approved by the Catholic church. They were married in 1985 in a Catholic ceremony. Nine months after they started dating, he proposed by hiding a ring in a loaf of bread, which they later shellacked. A few days later they went ice skating at the Indianapolis fairgrounds. She invited him over for dinner and made him a taco salad. The first time he called her he hung up without saying a word. He met Karen Sue Batten at a Catholic church in Indianapolis in 1983. “Michael’s hilarious,” his mother once said. In law school, as in college, as in high school, he dabbled in cartooning. “I wouldn’t wish it on a dog I didn’t like.” 17. It was a bad experience,” he said in 1994. He didn’t like it much but muddled through. He had to take the LSAT twice to score well enough to get into Indiana University’s law school. The fall of his senior year he voted for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan and wrote his senior thesis on “The Religious Expressions of Abraham Lincoln” - a 37-page paper biographer Tom LoBianco described as “long-winded and plodding, with a careful approach to the research but an apprehension to come to clear conclusions.” 16.Īfter graduation he thought about becoming a Catholic priest. One time an associate dean arrived to bust up a party. He joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity - the Fijis - and was elected the president of the frat as a sophomore. But he also in the spring of his freshman year attended a Christian music festival in Kentucky with some evangelical friends and began a transition to having “ a deep realization that what had happened on the cross in some infinitesimal way had happened for me.” 14. 13.Īt Hanover College, a small, conservative, Presbyterian school in Hanover, Indiana, he attended Catholic Mass on Sunday nights. He showed promise, however, in public speaking, performing well in competitions put on by the local Optimist Club and the National Forensic League. His family called him “Bubbles” because ( as Greg Pence put it) “he was chubby and funny.” 12.Īt Columbus North High School he was mostly a C student and “the fourth-string center” on the football team. He volunteered as a youth coordinator for the Bartholomew County Democratic Party. “In my early youth,” he once told Craig Fehrman, “I was very inspired by the life of John Kennedy.” He made a JFK “memory box” with pictures and clippings. From a family of Irish Catholic Democrats, one of his heroes as a boy was the nation’s first Irish Catholic president. He (along with his brothers) was an altar boy at St. His mother was a homemaker at the time, and a self-described “Stepford wife.” At the dinner table, the kids couldn’t speak. “He’d grab you if you didn’t,” Greg Pence has recalled. He demanded that they stand whenever an adult entered a room. He seldom showed up to his sons’ activities. His father was a veteran of the Korean War who ran a chain of gas stations. Richard Michael Cawley was an immigrant from Ireland who became a bus driver in Chicago and taught his grandkids to recite “Humpty Dumpty” in Gaelic. Michael Richard Pence was born in Columbus, Ind., an hour or so south of Indianapolis, on Jthe third of four sons and six children. “Ambition,” in the estimation of the former Democratic minority leader of the Indiana House of Representatives, “got the best of him.” 6. “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” Pence often says. “People know Mike Pence,” said one of the leaders of a pro-Pence super PAC. “I’ve known him for 30 years,” a former longtime neighbor told one of his biographers, “and I still don’t know him.” 3. “You invariably think, ‘I need to be like someone who is interesting.’” 2. “There is a temptation, intentionally or unintentionally, to imitate people you respect,” he once said. He does, they report, commendable impressions of George W. People who have spent time with him say he’s a great mimic. Here, drawn from interviews he’s done, the most revealing profiles written over the years, a pair of biographies and his recent pre-campaign memoir, is a Mike Pence brush-up.
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