John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania, is 6’8”, bald, wears a Carhartt hoodie and long shorts around the Capitol. He looks like a beaten-up wrestler from the WWE.
For a successful politician he appears and acts like a man from another planet.
But after reading a powerful excerpt from his new book about himself, “Unfettered,” my view of him as an eccentric looking to build a national reputation, has changed radically.
Fetterman, after getting an MBA and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard, volunteered for AmeriCorps and worked in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a declining steel town. In 2006, he ran for mayor, a job he held for 13 years, until running for Lieutenant Governor. He won and served until running for the Senate in 2022.
This is where the excerpt published in The Free Press began.
On May 13, four days before the Democratic primary, he and his wife, Gisele, were on their way to the first campaign event of the day near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Gisele glanced over at him and saw his mouth was drooping slightly. She had seen a public service announcement on strokes, and it had stayed with her.
She immediately told the State Trooper who was driving them that she thought her husband was having a stroke. John thought she was crazy, but she was adamant, and they drove to the Lancaster General Hospital, which had a specialty in strokes. Had Gisele not noticed and had not remembered the symptom, or if they had been further away from the hospital, he might have died.
But as John wrote in his memoir, “He did anyway.”
His doctor discovered the clot blocking the left hemisphere of his brain and extracted it.
Four days later, the day of the primary, doctors implanted a defibrillator and pacemaker.
Fetterman won the election decisively.
He opted to stay in to run against the Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz.
It was a bruising campaign, with Oz, Fox and MSNBC all mocking him for staying in while still suffering in the aftermath of the stroke.
Despite the emotional beating he endured, and polls all showing him trailing, he won the election to become Senator of Pennsylvania.
Yet Fetterman wrote in his newly published book that he felt like he should have quit.
After taking office he became extremely depressed. He wanted to just go into a dark room to sleep and hide.
The vicious attacks had gotten into his head. He felt ashamed. He says he looked for ways to hate himself. His relationship with his wife suffered. He barely ate. He considered suicide.
He felt disoriented. He felt he couldn’t go home to his wife and family in his present state. He ultimately moved in with his parents, sleeping in the basement like he had done as a teenager.
“I had nowhere else to go,” he wrote.
On February 15, 2023, not long after taking office, he checked into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for inpatient care.
His brother Gregg visited him and was shocked. “John was despondent, just truly broken,” he recalled.
Fetterman writes that he slowly recovered. He read the book “Understanding Depression.” He walked around the healing garden on the roof.
But he was terrified to see his family.
A young therapist talked to him about seeing his wife and children, but he refused.
He just could not bring himself to see them. He was too scared and scarred.
But the next day, a young therapist came by and stepped out of her professional being.
Fetterman writes that she said the most important words he had ever heard:
“Children need their daddy.”
He played it over and over in his head. He clung to it.
They met in the Wendy’s on the first floor, and his kids gave him post-it notes saying, “DADDY you are becoming HAPPIER. YOU WILL GET BETTER. Peekaboo, I love you. It’s time to come home.”
Three weeks later, 44 days after being admitted, he went home.
Two and a half years later, this week, John Fetterman is an important national figure–one of eight Democrats in the Senate to vote to end the latest government shutdown.
His emotional struggles are not over. There have been other times he has considered suicide.
But he has used his prominence and this powerful book, which brought tears to my eyes, to tell people they are not alone. You are not going crazy.
And I remember, “Children need their daddy.”
Fetterman is a wrestler, fighting one of the toughest battles there is.
Question: When have you had to step away from your business?
1 Comment
John Fetterman looks weird in vicious, bureaucratic DC. But this book shows him to be that rare authentic politician who has endured so much pain and trauma that he doesn’t give a damn about what his peers think of him. He seems truly Unfettered.