And when the votes were counted, the winner was not the favorite—another unusually eager IOP participant, a determined worker in her own right, a woman who would go on to success as a trusted aide to two of the most famous women in politics. It was Buttigieg. To many who cast votes that night, the election marked a transformational moment—the debut of a young man who was steeped in history and political theory but had yet to actually apply those ideas in political combat.

“That election,” Heather Woodruff Grizzle, a year older than Buttigieg, who was the outgoing SAC vice president and is currently a strategist in New York, told me, “demonstrated that Peter really had the chops to do politics.”

As Buttigieg, the youngest of the Democratic field of (still) 15 hopefuls, has leapfrogged far more seasoned opponents to settle into the competition’s top tier, he has begun to take sharper attacks from both veteran politicians and his party’s progressive flank—accusations and insinuations that he’s a line-jumper, an opportunist trying to play at once the inside game and the outside game, glossing over finite qualifications with calmly delivered pledges of unity and an airy vision of the future.

People who knew him here at Harvard observed some of the earliest indications of this instinct for the political middle. But they also saw a serious-minded student coming of age at a time when politics suddenly mattered more than it had in perhaps a generation—and whose ideas were fashioned in response to a genuinely disruptive historical moment.

He got to Harvard in a year that pulsed with the unprecedented and highly divisive 2000 election and its contentious aftermath. His sophomore year began with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Throughout his junior and senior years, Buttigieg, along with the country generally, grappled with the global stakes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Buttigieg put the finishing touches on a capstone thesis about American foreign policy and good intentions gone bad, Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in his dorm room across the street from the IOP, activated as thefacebook.com a website that would change the way citizens organize themselves socially and politically. And at the end of that last semester, Buttigieg left amid a presidential election many viewed as a crucial referendum on America’s complicated attitudes about freedom, security and democracy. “People felt the importance,” IOP staffer Eric Andersen said, “of what was going on between 9/11 and really up through the election of 2004.”

It was this very particular meld of time and place, based on dives into the archives of the university and the IOP and more than 40 interviews with Buttigieg’s friends, roommates, classmates, faculty and staff, that forged the most enduring piece of his political education.

“The thing that most stood out during that time is that we saw, particularly with the Iraq War, that politics has consequences. … And I think that really was something that stuck with him."

“The thing that most stood out during that time is that we saw, particularly with the Iraq War, that politics has consequences,” said Jonathan Chavez, one year younger than Buttigieg and one of his good friends from the IOP. “That your voting or not voting is not just something that is sort of this game. That there really are sort of real-world dire consequences to action. And I think that really was something that stuck with him.”

From the IOP to his digs in Holworthy Hall in Harvard Yard and then Leverett House overlooking the Charles River to august, red-brick academic buildings to back booths in dive bars like Charlie’s Kitchen, Buttigieg was, said Jim Kloppenberg, one of his favorite and most influential professors, “sorting out how he thinks about politics.”

“A lot of his framework and intellectual scaffolding,” said Previn Warren, one of Buttigieg’s closest friends, “was shaped during those years.”

Buttigieg, Harvard College Class of 2004, would go on to be a Rhodes Scholar, a subordinate cog in a global consultancy, a reservist in the United States Navy, the mayor of a just barely medium-sized Midwestern city, and now the principal of an implacably precocious presidential candidacy. All those stops along the way, of course, lent him experiences that have animated his long-shot ascent in the bulging field. They also have served as lightning-rod sources of criticism from the progressive left for his “ best-and-bright-ness,” a frictionless Ivy League track, those critics say, that has produced a platform of guarded prescriptions for change—Medicare For All … Who Want It; free college … but not for everybody—and a general distrust of conflict that exacerbates political fissures. But nothing molded him and his worldview more permanently than his four years here. At a moment when many in his generation turned away from a political system they saw as unresponsive at best and unscrupulous at worst, he not only stayed in the fray but upped his involvement. And this sensibility that has been surprisingly appealing to more middle-of-the-road Democrats in states like Iowa and New Hampshire emerged during his time here.

He started in these elite environs as an untested academic. He ended as much an orator and operator, less theoretician, more fledgling politician. He railed against the timidity of the Democratic Party coming out of 2000, then embraced its safest, most centrist candidate in 2004. He spoke out against the Iraq invasion but would join a military becoming mired in two wars. The Buttigieg increasingly evident on the campaign trail today, politically liberal, tonally and temperamentally moderate, by predisposition an idealist and institutionalist but ultimately a pragmatist, came into sharp relief for the first time through what he did at Harvard.

Had Al Gore, not George W. Bush, won in 2000, Buttigieg has said, he “happily” would have become “a literary critic at some university.” That, of course, is not what happened, and so that’s not what he did. Instead, that fall, on the fourth floor of Holworthy, his roommates told me, Buttigieg cut out from the pages of the New York Times the red and blue map of the results of the election and taped it to the wall by the door.

“He was so fascinated by it,” Steve Koh said.

“I remember seeing that map a lot,” Pete Schwartzstein said.

And as November stretched into December, as people from coast to coast argued over Florida’s hanging chads and the popular vote versus the Electoral College and the Supreme Court made Bush the 43rd president, the map on the wall in the dorm was a constant graphic reminder of “this unnerving, unsettling sense,” said John Beshears, “that, gosh, this democratic process that we rely on is kind of fragile, and subject to these forces that you didn’t learn about in high school or earlier when you were talking about democracy.”

Buttigieg already was keenly interested in politics, but the remarkable events of his first semester injected a fresh energy and urgency. He quickly became a regular at the IOP. A brainy only child in South Bend, Indiana, he had grown up a JFK devotee, and the Institute of Politics acts as a kind of hands-on memorial to the assassinated president and Harvard grad. As a high school senior Buttigieg had won an essay contest, too, commissioned by the JFK library. It was about, of all people, Bernie Sanders—but Buttigieg admired Sanders, he made plain in what he wrote, not so much for his more radical roots or even the courage to self-identify as a “socialist” but for his attempts at “conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill.” Sanders, as the teenaged Buttigieg saw it, was by that stage of his career trying to change the system from within. And the institution within the institution of Harvard that Buttigieg plugged into first and the most was the JFK-inspired IOP.

Students who were juniors and the most active in the organization couldn’t help but notice him. “I remember thinking that he was very smart and then also gracious in a way that not every college student is,” Erin Ashwell said.

“I clearly remember kind of two types of people at the Institute of Politics,” Eugene Krupitsky said. “There were the kinds of people that walked in the door and you knew they were there because they were going to run for office someday and they were there to kind of learn it all and make connections.” These were the sorts of undergrads who incorporated into their AOL Instant Messenger handles the letters FPOA, for “future president of America,” one member of the Class of 2005 recalled. And at the IOP, said one student treasurer, there were “more wannabe senators than you could shake a stick at.” But the second sort of person, added Krupitsky, was someone like Buttigieg. “His approach, quite honestly, initially,” he said, “was really very much about intellectual curiosity.”

Buttigieg was a history and literature major, “Hist and Lit” in Harvard lingo, in part because of his parents—his father was an English professor, and his mother is a linguist—but also because “anything else I wanted to study,” he would explain, “I could study it through the guise of history.” In some sense, though, his most significant syllabus was the constant, high-profile programming at the IOP. Jason Sauer called it, “one part coed fraternity, one part political fantasy camp.” The forums that year included “ The Essence of Leadership,” “ The Challenges of the New Economy,” and “ The Future of the Supreme Court,” as well as an all but rolling seminar on the 2000 election—taught variously by scholars, strategists, combatants and candidates to come. And that year’s fellows—the rotating reporters and political and policy professionals brought in to be instructors and mentors—included Rick Davis, the manager of John McCain’s just-wrapped-up presidential bid, and Donna Brazile, who had run the show for Gore.

Davis taught a study group about the McCain campaign and campaigns in general—“polling, strategy, mobilization, legal, messaging,” he told me. It drew more than 100 students per session. One of them was Buttigieg. “I recall him being very eager, smart and motivated,” Davis said.

Buttigieg and other IOP enthusiasts treated it like their own little incubator of ideas.

“This wasn’t a place where we were just sort of learning about the past or talking about ideas in the abstract,” said Jason Semine, a classmate and friend of Buttigieg. “We were learning about events as they were occurring … so it was sort of a living, breathing thing.”

At a forum, in February of that year, Buttigieg had a question for Ted Sorensen, one of JFK’s closest advisers and speechwriters. Wearing a baggy, gray fleece pullover, Buttigieg waited in line to speak into a standing mic. His question, trying to tie together his twin interests of history and politics, was the last of the evening.

“My name is Peter Buttigieg. I’m a freshman here at the college. I have a sort of historical question for Mr. Sorensen,” he said.

“There’s this great scene toward the end of the movie,” he continued, referring to “ Thirteen Days,” about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had just come out. “You’ve been asked to write two speeches, one which was actually used and one in the event that there are [nuclear] airstrikes, and you’re explaining that you can’t even imagine how you would have explained airstrikes. … I wonder, as somebody who studies both history and politics, if you dared to prepare a way to explain airstrikes, and how you would have gone about doing that.”

“That’s a very interesting question,” Sorensen said. The answer given by Sorensen, who died in 2010, is worth watching in its entirety. It elicited ripples of laughter and applause. For Buttigieg, the takeaway, he would say through a spokesman going on two decades later, was clear: “the importance of words.”

The day before the start of his sophomore year, the World Trade Center towers fell, first the one, then the other, and Buttigieg and his roommates sat on their couches in their Leverett House suite and watched the TV between a pair of windows looking out on the Charles. “Stunned,” said Schwartzstein. “Angry,” said Koh.

Buttigieg’s friends say it changed him. If the outcome of the election of the year before had precipitated thorny questions concerning domestic politics, September 11, 2001, broadened significantly the scope and the stakes.

It “dominated the psychology,” Buttigieg would say, of the rest of his time in college.

“It fueled Peter,” Schwartzstein told me.

At the IOP, where the forum fare that year featured a question-and-answer assembly with Bill Clinton, discussions about the future of the Democratic and Republican parties and efforts to understand an utterly altered world (“ Public Service in the Aftermath of 9.11.01,” “ Afghanistan: A Turning Point for America,” “ Should Iraq be Next?”), Buttigieg turned his avidity into a leadership role. He became in December the chair of the Student Advisory Council’s community action committee, the goal of which was to foster connections between the IOP and the student body and the area in general. It suited Buttigieg. It was not, however, considered a spot from which to mount a run for SAC president.

“There were certain positions in the IOP that set you up to be president, and they were typically the leaders of certain big committees,” said Semine—like the one he was in charge of, forums, or fellows or study groups. But community action wasn’t one of them. It would be, said Jonathan Chavez, “like being the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and saying, ‘I’m going to run for president.’”

In addition to his community action tasks, Buttigieg was a project co-chair of the group of students that worked with pollster John Della Volpe on the IOP’s annual national survey of the views of politics and public service of college undergrads. (Also part of that group: Elise Stefanik, now the Republican congresswoman from New York who’s become one of President Trump’s most vociferous defenders.) Two of Buttigieg’s closest friends—Previn Warren, who is an attorney and a legal adviser now to his campaign, and Ganesh Sitaraman, a Vanderbilt law professor and longtime adviser to Elizabeth Warren—used the data from a series of polls to write and edit a book. Invisible Citizens, published in 2003, is a glimpse into much of what stimulated the friends’ running politics talk after the attacks.

“While September 11 initiated a noticeable spike in levels of civic awareness among high-school and college-aged Americans, it seems disturbingly clear that this interest is fading more rapidly with every passing day,” they wrote. “Young people have fallen back into an abyss of disinterest,” they said. So much had changed, but Buttigieg and his progressive friends were frustrated by what had not—“systemic problems,” they said in the book, “corporate malfeasance,” money’s outsize sway in politics, and “a choking centrism guised as bipartisanship.”

This wasn’t all Buttigieg was worried about.

He brooded over the coming war in Iraq.

And he was frustrated, too, by the Democrats’ general passivity, which had emerged in the wake of the 2000 election defeat, grown after September 11—and now, as the country headed toward midterms, become even more deferential to the creeping hawkishness in Washington.

“In those early Bush administration years, and after 9/11, certainly,” Jason Sauer told me, “he was someone who sort of was very interested in kind of getting the Democratic Party off its back foot to be a more assertive Democratic Party.”

“The Democrats were identifying themselves by what they oppose, rather than what they support,” said Andy Frank, an IOP friend, telling me it “deeply frustrates Peter—and has for a long time.”

“Democrats,” Buttigieg would write, “unsure of themselves, were afraid to sound like an opposition at all, and many carefully avoided opposing the Iraq War for fear of looking unpatriotic.”

Increasingly active with the Harvard College Democrats as well, Buttigieg became its internships director and the head of the subcommittee that supported the gubernatorial candidacy of Robert Reich—in this race pointedly siding with the cerebral, more liberal option.

In his “Hist and Lit” seminar, one of his instructors noticed small but significant changes in Buttigieg. He always was confident without coming off as arrogant, Rebecca Noel thought, and over the course of the year he turned notably “more talkative,” too.

That summer, back in Indiana, looking for ground-level political experience, Buttigieg volunteered for Democrat Jill Long Thompson’s ill-fated congressional campaign. The first weekend of September, just before the start of school, he hosted Sauer for a visit. Sauer had traveled from his home in Kentucky. Buttigieg took Sauer to Notre Dame Stadium to watch the Fighting Irish football team beat Purdue, and they had dinner at his parents’ book-filled house. Democrats from more conservative locales, the Harvard IOP friends sat on the patio in Buttigieg’s back yard and talked. “We stayed up all night and talked about sort of our concerns about the future of the Democratic Party in Kentucky and Indiana,” Sauer said. “We both sort of had at the forefront of our minds the increasing struggle as Democrats in red states.”

Becoming a political actor, though, and not just a thinker, took some coaxing. That’s Clarke Tucker’s recollection. Because that fall, he met Buttigieg in Annenberg Hall, in a café in the basement. Tucker was the president of the Student Advisory Council, and Buttigieg, now a junior, still was the chair of the lower-profile committee for community action.

“Did he show up burning to become SAC president? I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Tucker told me. Tucker is an attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, a Democrat and a former state representative who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year. Back then, though, he gauged Buttigieg’s desire to compete for the IOP’s top student office. “He didn’t come to me, or anybody else that I’m aware of, saying, ‘What can I do to win this election?’” he said. “I thought he would be a good leader for the IOP, and I did what I could to convince him to run. … Convince is probably a strong word. But I definitely encouraged and worked to get him to run.”

Once he was in, though, he ran to win. And on that evening of December 5, 2002—in the packed classroom, brimming with flushed-face intensity and smelling like scarfed-down pizza pies—Buttigieg mustered a speechmaking skill that was striking to people who had known him for two-plus years.

“There is nothing less than a crisis now in national youth engagement in politics,” Buttigieg said, a reference to his work on the polling project.

“The single biggest challenge is getting the arms and legs at the IOP to be part of the body,” he said, a nod to his community action work.

“He won over the room,” said his classmate Theresa House.

But the overarching theme of his speech, and the argument for his candidacy, I heard over and over from people who were there, was change. He could make that case partly because of something his friends had called “The Proposal.”

“I remember there being a faction,” said Heather Woodruff Grizzle, naming Sitaraman and Warren—and Joe Green, too, the gregarious, Hawaiian shirt-wearing roommate of then unknown Mark Zuckerberg. And then there was Buttigieg. “Peter, Ganesh and Previn came forward with ‘The Proposal,’” a student who also was heavily involved with the IOP told me.

This proposal advocated essentially for more open, less cliquish elections and ramped-up student say-so and power within the structure of the IOP—less busywork and fewer administrative chores, more reading and writing and assisting staff and professors on research. The manifesto, which had circulated to acclaim from some but the exasperation of others, contributed to the reputations of its authors. “Ganesh, Previn and Joe were all sort of agents of change, so to speak,” said Jason Semine. And Buttigieg, I was told, “was with them.”

As much as he was aligned, though, with the ringleaders of this reform effort, Buttigieg wasn’t seen as an agitator. He was lauded by nearly everybody at the IOP, then and now, for his deliberative, understated nature. He was, though, a believer in a more head-down inside game. In the run-up to the vote for leadership of SAC, Buttigieg displayed his talent for that inside game by approaching Semine—the forum committee chair who by virtue of that role had a relationship with a lot of underclassmen. In other words: persuadables. “And he wasn’t hiding the ball here,” Semine said of Buttigieg. “He was pretty clear: ‘Hey, I’ve got this election, I need to drum up votes…’” For Semine, who knew Buttigieg well, it was unexpected, and “pretty savvy,” he said.

This, people thought, was pretty savvy, too: When it came time to pick a running mate, Buttigieg pivoted away from the lefty, rabble-rousing connotations of “The Proposal.” Betsy Sykes was a Republican. The cross-party-lines pairing wasn’t that unusual—these were nonpartisan elections, and Tucker’s vice president was Woodruff Grizzle, also a Republican—but what else Sykes brought was her status as the chair of the fellows committee, another one of the primary leadership feeders. “Having Betsy as his running mate I think very much helped,” said Jonathan Chavez. Now, in the rough contours of this tight-knit electorate, Buttigieg had the votes to his left—plus more than he would have had to his right.

Buttigieg, too, was liked by the staff. The adult professionals who ran the operations of the IOP didn’t have SAC votes. But that’s not to say their approval didn’t carry some weight. And Buttigieg could be a measured intermediary between the two groups.

“You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face.”

“You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face,” Dan Glickman, the former congressman from Kansas who by then was the director of the IOP, told me. “Cathy and I used to talk about that,” said Glickman, referring to Cathy McLaughlin, then the executive director of the IOP, now the executive director for the Biden Institute. “Whenever we had an issue, she’d say, ‘Well, go talk to Pete.’”

Buttigieg’s opponent in the election, meanwhile, was Caroline Adler, “kind of like a Hillary Clinton type,” said House—intelligent, industrious, ultra-prepared. “ Tracy Flick,” said Chavez. Since Harvard, Adler, now Adler Morales, has worked for Clinton (on her 2008 presidential campaign and in the State Department) and for Michelle Obama (in the White House and still as her communications director). In December 2002, she was “the favorite going in,” Tucker said. But Buttigieg won, and Adler, according to a close friend, was “devastated.” Her allies stewed about unjust gender dynamics at work. She was ambitious, and showed it, and that was and remains, they said, dicier for a woman than for a man. Buttigieg, they said, along with pretty much everybody else I talked to for this story, was equally ambitious. He was just more subtle about it.

His first full month in his new position, at a forum with Senator Ted Kennedy, Buttigieg again approached the standing mic. Forum regulars had come to expect from Buttigieg a certain something.

“I was responsible for a thousand graduate students,” said Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy School dean at the time, “but I still noticed Peter, which is rare. … He would ask very searching questions and yet do it very respectfully and thoughtfully and seemed older than his years.”

“You could hear the commas and the semicolons,” said McCarthy’s wife, Marina McCarthy, a Democratic consultant.

Here Buttigieg faced Kennedy. “It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less,” he said ( around 51:30). “The tax cuts—just a smaller one—and the war—just maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war. And then there are voices like your own, which are more forceful in opposition. I wonder if you see this as a split in the Democratic Party, and how you think, politically speaking, in the next few years your party’s going to sort out what it thinks the meaning of ‘opposition’ is.”

“Well,” Kennedy responded, “I would certainly expect that those differences would be clearer—I think they are getting clearer—as time goes on, certainly with regards to the involvement in Iraq.”

That certainly was true for Buttigieg. “Opposition” to him on this front meant standing up and speaking out. In the middle of March, a week before the invasion of Iraq, he gave a speech to some 350 people in front of the Science Center at an “Emergency Anti-War Rally.”

“Bush wants us to remember American security but forget that there might be consequences to American security if we alienate all of our allies,” Buttigieg said, according to coverage in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He pointed to the signature spire of nearby Memorial Church, where names of alums killed in action are carved in marble. “They remind us of a time,” he said, “when we had to take up arms against another nation, and there may be a day we have to again, but that day isn’t today.”

It was a risk—particularly, perhaps, for anybody at all interested in a future run for elected office. “It was not a consensus view on the campus,” Semine said. “A lot of our peers shared it, but it was not consensus.”

What it was, too, was another something new—even for the people who knew Buttigieg the best.

“That was probably the first time I saw him speak in public,” roommate Pete Schwartzstein said. “And he definitely took on a different persona—like a very commanding tone.”

“The thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldn’t, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.”

“He was able to kind of straddle two worlds,” said Brian Goldsmith, a friend who was a year younger than Buttigieg (and popped up the other day on his list of bundlers). “One world was the very academic, intellectual world … but then the other thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldn’t, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.”

It was, thought Previn Warren, “a watershed moment.”

The summer before his senior year, Buttigieg was a research assistant for Harvard Kennedy School professor David King for a paper that would run in a book called Lights, Camera, Campaign! “When I look back on the students I have had,” King said when I met with him recently in his office, “he stands out as one of a handful. Like it’s a very, very, very small number. Truly outstanding. Really something. And you knew it within the first few days of spending time with him.” The paper Buttigieg helped King with dealt with Gore’s campaign in 2000 and specifically a whistle-stop bus-and-boat trip he took down the Mississippi River. Buttigieg crunched numbers from polls and campaign finance data that showed it helped Gore win Iowa and Wisconsin. “Kind of interesting,” King said with a smile, “that we wrote a paper about traveling through Iowa and generating votes.”

On and around campus that fall, Buttigieg and his roommates downed bottles of Sam Adams while rooting for the still-cursed Red Sox as they almost beat the hated Yankees in the baseball playoffs. At the same time, Buttigieg and his IOP mates followed along intently as Democrats mounted runs for president.

That year’s accelerating Democratic primary was not dissimilar to this year’s, a big, unwieldy field—albeit with “only” nine candidates—vying to oust an Oval Office occupant who had lost the popular vote and was seen by party aspirants and their supporters as inept and unfit. Buttigieg watched all the candidates come through the IOP for televised sit-downs with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, from John Edwards to John Kerry to Al Sharpton to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Buttigeg asked Gephardt a question about the youth vote. He lamented in conversations with King in his office the mealy-mouthed way in which Kerry had talked about his faith in a debate. In spite of that, though, and even though his stance on the war might have made him more simpatico with Dean than with Kerry, Buttigieg opted nonetheless to support the Massachusetts senator.

“He was liberal,” Brian Goldsmith said, “but he was an institutionalist. And he was pragmatic. And I do remember him thinking Kerry would be a much better choice for Democrats than Howard Dean in 2004.”

In classrooms and libraries, Buttigieg worked to cap what would prove to be his Rhodes-worthy résumé, earning a perfect score on a project in professor Alyssa Goodman’s class, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.” The title of his project? “Young People and Politics.” Goodman remembers Buttigieg well. “Very serious,” she told me. “Very disciplined.”

He took two classes that year from Jim Kloppenberg—“Social Thought in Modern America” in the fall; in the spring, “Democracy in America and Europe: An Intellectual History.” Kloppenberg and I had lunch one day earlier this month at the Grafton Street gastropub across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard Yard. Buttigieg was, he said, a frequent office hours visitor.

“I do think that those courses were helpful to him, as similar courses were to me, when I was an undergraduate,” Kloppenberg said, “just helping me become acquainted with the wider range of perspectives available in American history than the very narrow debate that is the focus of most mainstream politicians. And that was a period when people were wondering whether the wheels had come off”—the Bush presidency, September 11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Democrats seemingly not quite sure how to respond—“and so having a chance to think about that in relation to a century and a half of American thought was a useful thing for anybody who was interested in the public sphere as he was. … We were trying very much to sort out the relation between a commitment to democratic ideals, democratic politics, American history … and what should we do?”

That February, in his room in Kirkland House, Zuckerberg set up Facebook. Its vast political impact, of course, wouldn’t be apparent for years to come, but it was an immediate sensation among students at Harvard. Eric Lesser, a Massachusetts state senator who was a freshman at the time and already a Buttigieg mentee, told me he remembers being in Lamont Library that week. “I was just walking past the rows of desks,” he said, “and you just saw on, like, every laptop screen, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.” Buttigieg was the 287th person to register for Facebook, but that was little more than an accident of proximity. Because most of that month he crashed to finish his thesis, due March 1. He fell asleep with books on his chest, his roommates recalled. He kept in a drawer in his desk a bottle of Maker’s Mark, “for emergencies,” he would quip. “The Quiet American’s Errand Into the Wilderness”—that’s what his thesis was called. It’s about the legacy of Puritan thought on the American political character and Graham Greene and Vietnam (with an eye on Iraq) and ultimately about good intentions gone bad.

He also as a senior was responsible for twice-a-month columns in the Crimson in which he tried to tie down some of the strands of thought that had animated his entire time in college. Many people might wince at their undergraduate writings, but these in retrospect can read like some skeletal blueprint of the race he’s running right now.

The “antidote to fear” is “hope,” he wrote in September 2003. He worried about the Democrats running for president. “Until someone emerges in the American public eye as a decisively hopeful candidate, strong enough to remind voters that fearmongering plays into the hands of terrorists, yet positive enough to offer a meaningful alternative, the Democrats risk continued, perhaps fatal paralysis.”

“The trouble is that tearing down the President is not enough to elect a new one,” he wrote in January 2004. “Bush-haters often complain of the Orwellian quality of this administration’s approach to the truth. I agree, but the next time the White House announces that two plus two equals five, it won’t be enough to gasp, ‘You’re lying!’ Someone has to give the right answer.”

“Until they can convey their plans for the future,” he wrote that March, “Democrats have a complaint, not an argument.”

In May, his final column sounded like a vow. “Compassion,” “strength,” “morality”—all words, and not just words, he thought, that Democrats needed to reclaim from Republicans. “Columns are short,” Buttigieg concluded. “But time is expansive, and I know of nothing more worthy to fill the approaching years than the project to turn these principles from cliched and overused words into effective political values.”

His roommates, classmates, professors and the staff at the IOP figured Peter Buttigieg would become an academic, or maybe work in Washington, but as a behind-the-scenes brain more than an out-front face. More Ted Sorensen than JFK.

As it turned out, of course, he would chart his climb, every step of the path, through institutions, working that first summer in Arizona and New Mexico as a researcher for the Kerry campaign, then go to Oxford, then McKinsey, then city hall in his hometown, and now … plausible shots at wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and then who knows from there.

But here back in 2004, as spring began to flip to summer, who could be sure? Classes were done. The weather was warm. Kloppenberg met Buttigieg for a drink in the back of Charlie’s Kitchen.

“Where are you going to go?” he asked. “What are you going to do?”

Nancy Scola contributed to this report.