Extended Interview: Co-Founder and CEO of With Honor Rye Barcott

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1:00Margaret Brennan:Joining us now is Ry Barkat, a Marine veteran who is the founder of With Honor, an organization that works to elect military veterans and others who've dedicated themselves to public service. In the last eight years, the organization says they've helped over 100 get elected. Currently, 50 of them serve in Congress. His new book is Courage Can Save Us, 10 Extraordinary Americans in the Fight for Our Future, profiling five Democrats, five Republicans, all of whom have had military service or in one case, FBI experience. Right. It's good to have you here. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. So we need saving.

1:35Yes.

1:35Margaret Brennan:It sounds like. In your book, you profiled these 10 people, some of them currently, including Representative Don Bacon, who's on the program, and then two governors. What about them made you right? So I've been leaning with honor. I co-founded it with the late David Gergen and another Marine that I served with during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars about eight years ago. And through that period of time, we've helped recruit and train and help elect veterans that take our pledge to serve with integrity, civility and courage, including the courage to work across party lines at a difficult time to do so.

2:12Through that process, I've gotten to know many of them quite well. And so what I decided to do was select 10, an even balance of five and five, all of whom were in office at a very difficult, challenging time for the country, and really unpack where their courage came from and then look at moments of courage both in military service as well as in politics in elected office. Sometimes that courage is quieter. It's more of a moral courage versus a physical courage, which they may have encountered in the military. But that was my approach to this book, which I've written principally for students.

2:47I'd like to see more students being able to study courage. I define courage as a form of service, that it is taking risk in the service of something larger than yourself. It's not self-interested. It's serving what's referred to oftentimes as the common good.

3:04Margaret Brennan:Well, you do need to inspire younger people, it sounds like, because when we look at the polling, overall, 17 percent of Americans, according to Pew, trust the government in Washington to do what's right all or most of the time. Our own CBS polling has showed the younger generations dispirited. They're anxious about their futures. So how do you inspire them to join a system that they believe is broken? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of young people are they're feeling lonely. There's a lack of a sense of purpose. One of the great things that I found through military service was that it gives you a sense of something larger than yourself and a common mission with Americans from all different walks of life.

3:45So one of the key takeaways for the book is to find a route into public service, and that's one of the goals with this. The veterans, and the book obviously focuses on veterans, we have a partnership with Honor, the nonprofit that I lead, of which the proceeds of this book go to, it partners with Gallup every year and measures the trust in veterans. And veterans is one of the few groups within the United States. Nurses is the other that has particularly high trust across party lines. Again, I think that's because of the service mentality, and that's a special thing and something that we need to safeguard.

4:22Margaret Brennan:Do you worry about needing to safeguard that right now? I mean, a lot of the language we hear from the Pentagon is about the warrior ethos. It's about physical descriptions of what warrior ethos actually looks like. It's about lethality. That's not the thing you are characterizing here. Yeah, I mean, the beauty of the military is that it is a reflection of the United States. I mean, across all walks of life, every socioeconomic background, all different races and genders and ethnicities. And it needs to be that melting pot and that place. And that's what the 10 that I profile come from all different backgrounds.

5:04And I've found a common mission in service.

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6:26The forces are really going against us. And most Americans want courage but feel like they see very little of it or none of it. And what I wanted to shine a light on is to say that this still exists. It still exists. Here are 10 examples of it. It's hard. We need to celebrate it when it arises. And many concerns about the overall sort of structural factors that are making this more difficult. because people are humans. We're all flawed. These 10 are not perfect. There are many things that they do that folks will disagree with by nature because half of them are on one side and half are on the other.

7:02Margaret Brennan:So is there a single story among the 10 that stood out to you? Yeah, well, you're having Don Bacon on in a moment. And we just yesterday teamed up with him and Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, both of whom are in the book. And they have made a real stance on support for Ukraine. They took the unique position of forcing a discharge petition this week in order to maintain more support there. We actually traveled. To force Republican leadership to consider something they wouldn't have otherwise. That's right, yeah. And face, you know, that takes guts. You know, they have peers that are looking at them askance.

7:38I mean, I was exchanging notes with them this morning, but that is a core thing for them that they believe is right. And that's what courage comes down to, is doing the right thing in the face of risk, understanding the risks, and going forward with it. We actually traveled with both of them to both Keeve and Kharkiv, along with two Democrats, Salud Karbajal, who was there with us last night, and Jimmy Panetta. Jimmy Panetta and Don Bacon co-founded the Bipartisan Caucus of Veterans in the House that, with honor, my nonprofit works and supports. It's about 38 members of the House.

8:11Margaret Brennan:And there's some legislative issues they get behind. They were trying to help the Afghan allies as well. That's right. That's right. And one of the one of the first legislative priorities was established by one of the founding members, Seth Moulton. And I write about this in the book. It's another example that of courage that maybe takes a different form than people are used to. And that is the establishment of the nine eight eight national suicide hotline. Seth had the guts to come out and say, hey, I've had some problems with PTSD. You can seek help. It takes courage to to seek help and to say that that I that I need help.

8:43And so we've put that in place. We've helped grow and sustain it. And I think it's an example of something that got done across party lines that really makes a difference in a lot of people's lives.

8:54Margaret Brennan:You know, past military service doesn't guarantee a flawless life. I mean, you gestured to that. But we've been talking about this with candidates, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, for example, other lawmakers. Do you ever look at candidates and say, despite your service, I can't support you? We do. We only we usually only do about 10 percent of the overall vets that run this this year. There is more vets running than any year before. We'll announce the total numbers on Tuesday when the when the book announces. But it's it's an increase of over 30 percent across party lines. quite encouraging.

9:32Many of those vets are not running in races that are winnable. So that's one criteria. But really, fundamentally, we look at character. And you have to commit to this pledge to serve with integrity, civility, and courage. We watch how people conduct themselves on the campaign trail. We interview individuals that serve with them in the military under duress. And it's only about 10 percent of the veterans that make the cut. Once they serve in office, they really need to be committed to it. They have to maintain that trust across party lines. That doesn't mean that they'll agree on every issue. Most issues they don't, but they'll maintain trust and relationships.

10:09It doesn't always work. Some have decided to leave the caucus over the last eight years.

10:15Margaret Brennan:Have you had to ask them to leave? It's not my caucus. It's the members caucus. So the leadership of the caucus, people like Don Bacon and Jimmy Panetta have handled that. But there have been a few occasions because the The incentives, of course, in this place are not to govern. The incentives are to pick your culture war and issue and, you know, attack online. It's to be more partisan. You raise small dollars, et cetera. So it takes courage these days just to have relationships across party lines. It's silly to say that, but it is actually the case. There's an example in the book of Todd Young.

10:49Todd Young, of course, of Indiana. Yeah. So somebody reflected and I added it as a quote of the most impactful senator you've never heard of. Of course, in this town, a lot of people have heard of Todd Young because he's actually been a workhorse. He's gotten a lot done. The chips bill that he passed, he partnered with Senate minority leader, then majority leader Chuck Schumer. So you can imagine how uncomfortable that would be. He was leading the campaign arm for the Republicans at that time. But he focused on content and getting things done and is, I think, a model example and somebody that we should shine a light on.

11:22Margaret Brennan:Never heard of him because he's never come on Face the Nation, even though we ask for him all the time. But when you talk about the pledge, when we looked it up, the pledge is to bring civility to office, participate in a cross-partisan Veterans Caucus. You ask members also to pledge just to meet with a member of the opposing party once a month and then join them in significant bipartisan legislation. That's right. Can people actually dilute on that? I mean, it seems so basic. Congress isn't legislating these days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we amp it up and expand it more? I hope so. We have continued to grow and maintain that that cohesion, but it has been difficult.

12:01I mean, there have been many moments over the last eight years where relationships get frayed. I mean, January 6th was one example, many others. And this matters for the country, but it is not easy. And meeting alone is one thing, but then actually being willing to have the courage to put your name with another and say, we're going to do this and we're going to stand for this, even though I might get attacked for working with the enemy. I mean, it's a crazy thing. There's a survey out that 80 % of Republicans and Democrats, registered Republicans and Democrats, of course about 40 % of the country are non-affiliated.

12:40But among those that are affiliated, over 80 % refer to the other side as the enemy. I mean, that's what we're, and that's why with this book, I think courage can save us as a country. The us is the flag. It has a crack in it. It's not broken, but it has a crack in it. We're in a serious place as a nation. We're turning 250 years old. But at the end of the day, I believe this is an optimistic outlook. There are a lot of people that are still serving for the good of service, something that's larger than themselves.

13:11Margaret Brennan:So there are 98 veterans in Congress right now. You want to drive that number up? Yeah. So they're at historic low, but it's still larger than the population. So about 20 percent in Congress now. It used to be as high as 70 percent back with the World War II and career war generations. and they set a model for us. My late co-founder, who I miss dearly, David Gergen, a Navy veteran, often spoke about some of the relationships between veterans like Dan Inouye and Bob Dole, who forged a friendship recovering from wounds in World War II and then went on to encourage each other to run for office, different parties, and made a difference throughout their careers.

13:51We want to get back to that type of ethos of service, and this is one way to do it. It's not a silver bullet. I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet, but it's a constructive way forward for us.

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