Monty Warner: The man behind the candidate
"On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
And to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
Mentally awake, and morally straight."
That's the Boy Scout Oath. Its companion, the Scout Law, holds that a Boy Scout is "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent."
At age 12, Monty Warner memorized these words and recited them countless times. So do all kids who join the Scouts, though most say them without total conviction.
Monty Warner, who went on to become an Eagle Scout, the highest rank attainable, was not like other kids.
* * *
Monty Warner is the fourth of six children, all boys, born to George B. "Brud" Warner Sr. and his late wife, Margie, who died in 2000.
The oldest, George Jr., known almost from birth as Buffy (killed in a fall this past June), was born in 1951. He was followed by Kasey the next year, Mac in 1955, Monty in 1956, Kris in 1962, and Ben in 1965.
They were raised in a leafy section of Charleston's South Hills, in a modest four-bedroom house Brud and Margie built the year Buffy was born. Brud, now 78, lives there still.
When, in 2001, Monty's U.S. Army career brought him back to West Virginia, he bought a house less than a half-mile from the family homeplace. On the road connecting them lives Kasey, now the U.S. Attorney for the state's southern district.
* * *
At the age of 14, Warner reached the ninth grade, he already knew he wanted to become an army officer, and to do it at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. This was 1970, the Vietnam war still raging, the year of the Kent State shootings and the invasion of Cambodia.
"I never really considered anything else," he said recently. "To me, (the Army) was synonymous with being an adult."
Sen. Robert C. Byrd appointed him to West Point, and the Academy accepted him in December, months before most students are formally admitted.
"I asked up at West Point, how come?" Warner's father Brud recalled. "They said, 'well, your kid started sending us his grades and his extracurricular activities when he was in the ninth grade. We got his grades every semester, and by the time he got to be a senior, we knew what we wanted. We had a complete portfolio on him.'"
Monty's oldest son, Payne, 18, is now a first-year cadet at West Point.
* * *
Cadets get up early. It becomes a habit.
Now 48, Warner likes to arrive at the Charleston YMCA when the doors open at 5:30 a.m. One day last month, he agreed to let a reporter tag along. His staff passed the word to be at Warner's door at 5:15 a.m.
At 5:15 sharp, the reporter pulled up in front. Warner was sitting in the driver's seat of his green Chevy Trailblazer, engine running.
* * *
Warner is a great bear of a man, standing over six feet tall and weighing more than 200 lbs. His belly sags a bit, but less so than most 48-year-olds. His bulk is in his shoulders and chest.
At the Charleston Y, he emerged from his car already dressed in exercise clothes: yellow shirt with a "Warner for Governor" logo, the sleeves cut off; black shorts; white running shoes, no socks. After making small talk with other early birds, including his brother Kasey, he stashed his work clothes in a locker and headed for the aerobic machines.
For 15 minutes he paged deliberately through the Charleston Gazette, his feet pumping a stair-stepper, loosening up for the real workout ahead. It began with pushups -- lots of them, fast. A pause after 80, then ten more. Then four. Then six. One hundred total. The same with sit-ups, 100 of them, but with no pauses.
On to the weight machines. He moved three-quarters of the weight stack on most of them, the entire stack on some. Ten reps apiece, lifting, squeezing, pressing. He grimaced and grunted, a sheen of sweat covering his face and arms, wetting his shirt.
By then it was past 6:00. According to the schedule his press aide, Kristina Grabosky, had given him, he was supposed to heading toward Huntington at 6:15. But Warner's routine always includes a swim. We'll leave at 6:45, he told Grabosky.
He slipped into the pool and commenced backstroking, length after length, slapping the water with his hands. Grabosky nervously watched a wall clock tick past 6:30. Finally, she walked over to Warner's lane and told him he had to stop.
"I get in a trance and lose all sense of time," he said.
* * *
The Warner campaign makes a big point of the fact that he's not a career politician. A day spent with him, and interviews with friends and relatives, suggests that's true, though not necessarily in ways that help his election prospects.
One morning last month, President Bush was scheduled to appear in Huntington for a rally. Warner, accompanied by his wife Janie and two aides, arrived about two hours early to greet the expected 10,000 Bush supporters.
At rest, Warner's face is a scowl, his mouth a thin-lipped, inverted V. He smiles by baring his teeth, mirth visible mainly in his crinkled-up eyes. It's not a face likely to win many votes.
Pretty or not, it was on constant display as Warner bounded up to people, saying, "Monty Warner, running for governor... Monty Warner, running for governor."
As the trickle became a throng, he couldn't greet everyone. He wore nothing with his name on it. His campaign hasn't been able to afford big TV or newspaper ads, so many people, even Republicans, would not know what he looks like.
A political pro might have at least worn a campaign button. Instead, Warner's lapel sported a pair of tiny hands cast in gold, recognizable only up close. "They're the hands of a fetus in the first trimester," he explained.
* * *
Entering the arena, Warner and his entourage were directed to the VIP area behind the podium. It was jammed with people, but after greeting a few acquaintances, he stopped campaigning, apparently caught up in the rock-star atmosphere of modern presidential appearances.
Bush was late. Warner struck up a conversation with a young woman, then picked up her daughter, a pretty three-year-old with blonde curls, and cradled her on his shoulder. A half-hour later, Bush appeared to wild applause.
Warner, beaming and holding the girl high overhead, leaned toward the president as he made his way along the aisle, shaking hands. Warner and Bush had met at earlier appearances in the state; surely the president would recognize him, speak to him. But Bush only saw people right along the railing, and Warner was a row back. Their eyes never met, the president moved on toward the podium, and Warner's smile faded away.
* * *
An ironclad rule in running for statewide office is that a candidate must spend X amount of time each day raising funds.
"There's nobody like the candidate to ask for money," said Kris Warner, the state Republican Party chairman. For this candidate, however, X is frequently zero.
"Monty won't do it," Kris Warner said. "He will not put anybody on the spot."
According to election finance reports, Democratic candidate Joe Manchin raised more than $1 million in the three months ended September 10, while the Warner campaign took in barely $170,000.
"That may prove damaging on November 2," Kris Warner said.
* * *
"He was an animal on the basketball court," chuckled brother Mac, talking about playground games with Monty. "I learned it was a contact game."
Tom Heywood, a high school pal and still a close friend, said Monty Warner's competitiveness extended to the backyard pool when they were teens. "We played this game (in the pool). We called them commando races. The winner was the first one to finish eight laps -- and there were no other rules," he said, laughing. "Monty never lost a race."
He especially liked football, where his size and willingness (even eagerness) to knock people down made him a standout. He still plays: every year but one since high school, he has organized a game played the Saturday after Christmas, among his high school buddies and brothers, and now their children.
He also spent 29 years in an organization with a long winning tradition, the U.S. Army.
* * *
Warner, the Army man, is drawn to other veterans. Working the crowd at the Bush rally, he stopped to talk with each and every man (always a man) wearing a hat or a T-shirt suggesting he'd been in the military. Warner would make conversation with each and every one, even when it meant letting five or ten other people pass ungreeted.
"Where did you serve? How long were you in?" The man would tell him, and Warner would cackle, "I did 25 years of hard time!" The man would always laugh with him.
Once, a campaign worker escorted two older women toward him for an introduction. They were within a few yards when Warner spotted a man behind them in a veteran's cap. Warner brushed past the women to speak with him. He hadn't seen them.
But the women waited patiently, if awkwardly, for Warner to finish joking with the man. He spent a few moments with them, and they walked on, smiling.
* * *
Amazingly, Warner hardly ever swears, despite a lifetime with the Army and his father, who would need frequent bleeping if he were a TV show.
"Mom tried to raise us better," he said. "She had a penchant for washing our mouths out with soap." He was not speaking figuratively, recounting in minute detail her method: "Mom would scrape that bar of soap enough times around the mouth and under the teeth...."
The Warners' discipline contrasts sharply with the idea of the 1960s as a permissive era. Warner remembered infractions bringing a double dose of posterior walloping. He described his mother cutting a branch from a forsythia bush for an initial treatment, with his father later applying strokes with his old WVU Phi Kappa Psi fraternity paddle.
Warner said all this without a hint of rancor. "Love unconditional came from Mom," and about Brud Warner, he said, "I always felt I was in the presence of a great man," he said. Children have to be disciplined, he said, "or you're not teaching them what they need to be taught." He has given physical punishments to this own children, into their teens.
* * *
Monty Warner is not averse to the occasional beer, but he said he's never touched marijuana or anything else psychoactive. By high school he was already known as a straight arrow. Classmates "looked at me as a little bit differerent"; nobody ever offered him a toke on a joint. "The kinds of peer pressures others succumbed to," he said he never felt.
* * *
Warner has been married 19 years to the former Janie Martin, a Fayette County native. They met in 1982. He was home on leave. She was working in Cleve Benedict's Republican campaign to unseat Sen. Byrd. They hit it off, dated when they could, communicated long distance, and married in 1985.
On the campaign trail, she works to support Monty, just as she did throughout his Army career. "She had an MBA and could have done anything she wanted," he said.
But, Janie explained, "Monty and I made the decision early on" that she wouldn't take a job outside the home. Instead, she devoted herself to raising their children and doing volunteer work. That frequently overlapped: helping the kids' soccer teams, for example, is now a major outlet for her.
At the Bush rally, she spent much more time watching Monty engage with people than doing it herself. Asked if she thought he enjoyed it as much as he appeared, she replied, "He loves people." If it wasn't fun, "he wouldn't be laughing and giggling," which he was.
* * *
None of the Warner boys ever got an allowance. Said Monty, "When you came of age, you went to work." In the Warner household, age came early, between five and seven years old. Work always supported the family.
Brud Warner was an inveterate entrepreneur. He ran an office supply company, a print shop and a string of community newspapers. Most of the Warner boys, especially the middle ones, served as press operators for smaller print jobs that came in.
"Coming of age for me was old enough to run the newspaper press. I'd go to school with printers ink under my finger nails," he said. And if there wasn't work in the business, something always needed doing in the garden or around the house.
The Warner kids each kept a notebook in which they recorded all the jobs they had done. Each week, Brud Warner would go over the notebooks and pay up.
Monty Warner accepted this as the natural order of things. He's contemptuous of people who want money without working for it. Gambling offends him. So does the workers compensation system, which he thinks tolerates cheaters. He even has harsh words for the economic development grants doled out by the governor's office, which he called "corporate welfare." It's something for nothing.
* * *
On September 10, Warner paid a visit to the Huntington office of a financial services company called Applied Card Services. Among other things, the firm handles collections on credit card debt. It has been accused in several states, including West Virginia, of using harassing and abusive tactics on customers behind on their payments.
The firm has settled out of court in many states, but a suit in West Virginia filed by Attorney General Darrell McGraw is still pending. The Huntington office manager, Brian Hildebrandt, invited Warner to hear the company's side. Warner's campaign is largely built on attacking cronyism in state government and lawsuits that damage business interests, with McGraw -- whose brother Warren is chief justice of the state's Supreme Court -- a frequent target. So Hildebrandt was expecting Warner to be sympathetic.
He was not disappointed. Warner listened, mouth set in a grim line, while Hildebrandt summarized the situation -- the firm's owner will close the Huntington facility, putting its nearly 600 employees out of work, unless McGraw reduces his settlement demands. Warner then began speaking, looking angry, jaw muscles quivering. He condemned McGraw and the legal system for putting jobs at risk and driving industry away.
Before walking into the building, Warner indicated that he knew virtually nothing about the company or the lawsuit. If he had any curiosity about whether the company might indeed have abused or harassed people, he didn't show it.
* * *
Warner returned to West Virginia thinking he would retire in two years. His assignment as inspector general of the national guard took him all over the state, talking to people, learning about their problems. He said it woke him up to the problems that have held the state down for so long.
Chief among them, in his view: political and judicial systems wracked by corruption. He decided that when he left the Army, he would devote himself to fixing them. But how?
At a family meeting in late 2002, the Warner brothers' discussion turned towards the state's economic troubles. They agreed that West Virginia needed new leadership. Under the family credo -- if something needs doing, you do it -- the idea surfaced that one of them should run for governor. Brother Buffy was the first to say it should be Monty, Kris Warner said, and after some discussion the others concurred.
Except for Monty. He sought advice from a group of his own, some of them old high school chums, and including some prominent Democrats.
Unsure that he was the best man for the job, and could be elected, Monty asked one of them group, a man he considered "finest and most talented person I knew," to run.
That was Tom Heywood, a Charleston lawyer and Democrat who had been Gov. Gaston Caperton's chief of staff.
Monty Warner recalled, "I said, we need you. The state of West Virginia, 1.8 million people, are crying out for your talent." Heywood immediately declined, but Warner implored him to think it over for 30 days.
Warner said he went back to Heywood a month later and asked, "Will you please do this, for all of us in West Virginia?"
"No, I cannot at this time," Heywood replied.
"Then I will. I must," Warner told him. "I'm duty-driven to give our people what they are due." (Both Warner and Heywood confirmed this account.)
On June 30, 2003, Warner's retirement from the U.S. Army took effect. Early the next morning, Warner filed pre-candidacy papers for the governorship.
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