It was a running joke in his AP U.S. history class at Saint Joseph High School: Would Peter Buttigieg — the smartest kid in class, language whiz and devotee of John F. Kennedy — use his unusual last name in his eventual run for president of the United States? It was the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — It was a running joke in his AP U.S. history class at Saint Joseph High School: Would Peter Buttigieg — the smartest kid in class, language whiz and devotee of John F. Kennedy — use his unusual last name in his eventual run for president of the United States? Or would he have a better shot of winning the voters of the future if he went by Montgomery, his middle name?
“It was always understood,” says Patrick Bayliss, a friend from high school. “It was just kind of matter of fact that he was special and brilliant.” But Buttigieg grew up in another side of South Bend: the cluster of neighborhoods around the University of Notre Dame, home to thousands of students and professors. His parents had stable jobs at the elite Catholic school, and he was educated in private schools whiter and wealthier than the surrounding community.
Peter — the name he went by before he became known as “Mayor Pete” — was a curious and quiet toddler who learned to read at the age of 2 or 3, his mother, Anne Montgomery, said in an interview. The experience, she believes, was a lesson in “how cruel people can be” and helped steel him to insensitive comments later. “He won them over,” his mother says, by learning to prove himself without aggravating other kids.
By comparison, “we've been stuck and haven't made progress on a lot of the big issues,” Mueller said of his friend’s fixation with the Kennedy era. Peter had begun to learn French in Montessori and before he got to high school was well on his way to fluency. He also took up Spanish and on his own started learning to read Korean from a friend, Judy Kim.
Several people close to Buttigieg say they never knew he was gay until he came out in his 30s, after he returned from his military tour in Afghanistan. He said at a CNN town hall in October that he was well into his 20s before he acknowledged it to himself. He and his mom would joke together. He and his dad would obsess — and commiserate — over Notre Dame football. Politics and current events were “in the air” at his house, he says. His father would come home from work, pour himself a drink and open The New York Times. They’d watch the evening news together. Friends and colleagues from the university would come to dinner, and young Peter would join in the conversation.
He praised Sanders’ political courage in calling himself a “socialist” and for representing Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.” He also wrote that Sanders’ conviction and energy could bring people together in a political climate in which cynicism reigned.
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