Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump
How he became a heartland evangelical—and the President’s most loyal soldier.
After marrying his college sweetheart, Leslie Libert, the weekend he graduated, Pompeo took a prestigious posting as a tank commander in the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which patrolled the border between East and West in Germany. Five years later, with the end of the Cold War, the border was gone and Pompeo left the military, having risen to the rank of captain. He went to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review, then moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the blue-chip firm Williams & Connolly.
In the late nineties, however, Pompeo radically changed his life. He quit the law firm after two years and divorced his wife. (He kept the dog, Byron; she got the cat, Keats.) He moved to Kansas, his late mother’s home state, where, in early 1997, he and “three of my best friends in the whole world” from West Point, as he put it recently, started a company, Thayer Aerospace. Their aim was to acquire firms that manufactured specialized machinery for aviation companies clustered in Wichita, a city known as “the air capital of the world.” Pompeo became Thayer’s C.E.O.
While buying one of the companies for the new firm, he met Susan Justice Mostrous, a former Wichita State University homecoming queen. As the vice-president of a local bank, she was sitting on the other side of the negotiating table. “It’s true,” Pompeo told an interviewer, jokingly. “She took my money twice.” In 2000, he and Susan married and he adopted her son from her second marriage.
Read more at The New Yorker .
