As luck had it, Jason Kander’s book tour in New York coincided with a family wedding. The star turn was his 95-year-old great-uncle, composer John Kander, who performed Married from Cabaret, the revered musical he wrote with lyricist Fred Ebb.
“It was very cool,” smiles Kander, a day after breakfasting with his famous relative. “He’s still writing: he’s got a musical coming out next year. He is my life goal. People who meet him probably figure he’s in his late 70s. He always says if you just keep doing what you love, it will keep you young. There’s something to that.”
Jason Kander is only 41 but already well into his third act. His new, unflinchingly honest memoir tracks his journey from soldiering in Afghanistan to politicking in his native Missouri, from sitting in the Oval Office with Barack Obama to being put on suicide watch in a windowless cell.
Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD tells how Kander endured post-traumatic stress disorder for 11 years – and kept it secret from everyone. The more his political star shone, the darker his hinterland became. He tried to outrun his demons by seeking elected office, including the presidency, until an epiphany led him to finally confront his mental illness.
“I went to get help because, if I didn’t go get help, I was probably going to kill myself,” says Kander, wearing a grey “army” T-shirt and speaking via Zoom from a functional New York hotel room.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh, man, if I’d hung around, maybe I’d be president!’ If I’d hung around and not got help, I’d probably be dead. Instead I’m really enjoying my life and I wasn’t before. It’s not to say I’ll never run. It’s just to say, I’m glad I didn’t then and, if I ever do choose to run, I’ll be doing it as a person who has dealt with their shit. And maybe we need more of that.”
Kander trained as a lawyer but, after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, felt the compulsion to serve and be tested like his grandfather and other relatives. To his surprise, he loved the military with its sense of order and mission.
He spent four months in Afghanistan in 2006-07 and was not involved in firefights or direct combat (later a source of constant guilt that he somehow wasn’t worthy of PTSD). His work as an intelligence officer involved going with an interpreter to meetings in remote locations with people who might be “bad guys” linked to the Taliban, terrorism or corruption. The prospect of being kidnapped and killed was real.
“I was 25 years old and it was an exhilarating experience and that’s why they don’t send 41-year-old fathers of two to war,” he reflects. “If I went into those meetings now, I’d be very aware of everything I had to lose but also probably very aware of how much danger I was in.”
When he got home to Kansas City, Kander turned to politics in search of the same sense of purpose and belonging to something bigger than himself. Knocking on thousands of doors, he outworked and outcampaigned rivals to win election to the Missouri state house of representatives and, later, as secretary of state.
In 2016 he ran for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, Roy Blunt, and caught national attention with a campaign ad in which he assembled an AR-15 rifle while blindfolded and advocating for background checks on gun buyers. Kander still lost but by a much narrower margin than Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the same state.
PTSD trailed him like a shadow, however.
There was insomnia and night terrors: bad dreams in which he was back in Afghanistan with someone rushing into a room, taking him captive and lining him up for a beheading video on YouTube. Over time these evolved into fears about home invaders threatening his family.
There were nights when Kander patrolled the house with a loaded gun. He had symptoms such as back pain, a twitch in his left eyelid and an aversion to sitting in restaurants with his back to the door.
“It’s exhausting to be on alert all the time and then, when you combine that with about 10 years without a good night’s sleep, you just get worn out. When you get worn out enough and have all these other feelings of shame and guilt and then you’re having these symptoms, eventually you get depressed. When you’re depressed long enough, eventually you have suicidal thoughts.”
His political career, he assesses now, was a quest for redemption. “I had this idea that I hadn’t done enough for my country, I was an irredeemable piece of shit personally and, while I was achieving all these things politically, people didn’t really know that I was completely undeserving of this praise or adulation.”
The Hollywood version of redemption for Kander would have had him winning the presidency and casting PTSD aside on inauguration day. And for a while it seemed possible. When, in his final Oval Office interview, Obama was asked who gave him hope for the future of the country, Kander’s was the first name on his lips. The pair had a private meeting in which Obama gave “mentorship-type advice”.
Kander was exalted as the Democrats’ new hope, a veteran from the heartland who could provide the antidote to forces that put Trump in the White House. He made frequent visits to early presidential nominating states; his Twitter bio says he “sorta ran for president”.
But after a major speech in New Hampshire, things unravelled.
“Like any other addict who is not dealing with their own trauma, their own underlying stuff, I was addicted to the adulation, to the crowds, to performing and to the adrenaline that came with it. The only time I felt truly present was when I was in front of a crowd or doing an interview that really mattered.
“Those endorphin highs generally for a long time worked in the sense that they would hold me over until the next one. So when I had this moment that was the zenith of my career as a political performer and it lasted about 12 hours, I realised that was a real problem. This wasn’t working any more.”
When someone suggested that he lower his sights and run for mayor of Kansas City instead, Kander grabbed the chance to ease the pressure. He was comfortably ahead in the polls and in fundraising when, on 1 October 2018, he walked into the Kansas City Veterans Affairs medical center and acknowledged suicidal thoughts going back 10 years.
He was duly put in a windowless cell with pale-green walls and dressed in dark-green scrubs that were about five sizes too big. “So this was suicide watch,” he writes.
Most of the staff instantly recognised him but a young resident psychiatrist did not. For half an hour, Kander bared his soul about the night terrors and his consuming fear of someone hurting himself and his family. Then the psychiatrist asked: “Do you have a particularly stressful job or something?”
Kander said he was in politics and explained: “I almost ran for president, but then decided to run for mayor instead, and tomorrow I’m planning on calling that off.”
Confused, the psychiatrist said: “You were going to run for president? Of what?”
Kander told him: “Of the United States.”
The psychiatrist asked: “Who told you that you could run for president?”
Now irritated, Kander said: “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I mean, I spent an hour and a half talking it over one on one with Obama in his office, and he seemed to think it was a pretty good idea.”
The psychiatrist sat back in his chair and remarked: “Barack Obama told you that you could run for president? So how often would you say you hear voices?”
Kander can laugh about the exchange now and includes it in his book.
The therapy has worked wonders – “It’s getting a master’s in yourself,” is how his great-uncle John described it – and allowed him to rediscover the joys of marriage (his Ukrainian-born wife, Diana, contributes moving passages in the book), fatherhood (their children are eight and one) and baseball (he coaches a little league team).
“The difference is now I will frequently choose to sit facing the door but I can sit with my back to the door usually without fidgeting a great deal. I generally don’t get the twitch in my eye. I generally don’t have, most of the time, nightmares.
“PTSD treatment is not about getting cured. It’s about getting to the point where the symptoms of PTSD don’t disrupt your life and that’s what I was able to achieve in therapy.”
Kander is also better equipped to deal with difficult ruptures such as last year’s chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He admits: “At first it was quite triggering and then I got very involved in evacuating people I care about from the country. That experience was newly traumatic and I had to go back and see my therapist again but I’m glad I did. It’s not simple but now I have the tools to navigate that.”
Kander is the president of national expansion at Veterans Community Project, a non-profit organisation to which he will donate all the book’s royalties, and host of Majority 54, a political podcast.
Kander has little time for the perennial moderates v progressives narrative dividing the Democratic party. “Everybody is engaged in this debate about whether the party needs to go further to the left or stay closer to the middle and they’re all completely missing the point. That’s not what’s going on in the part of the country I live in. You don’t get points for being less liberal; you get points for caring about what people are going through.”
Kander says he wrote Invisible Storm because it was the book he would have wanted to read 14 years ago. He hopes it will encourage people to confront their own problems and understand that recovery and post-PTSD growth are possible.
But given the bottomless cynicism in politics today, there will doubtless be somebody somewhere who theorises that the book is a calculated move towards resurrecting Kander’s career, perhaps even his White House ambitions.
He finds that idea absurd.
“I wrote this book understanding that if I ever get the desire to run for president again, people are going to say we can’t have a president who could end up stalking the White House at night because he’s worried about intruders,” he says. “If I ever run, it will be on me to be like, ‘I don’t have to do that any more because I got therapy.’
“Yeah, that’s probably not the ideal debate to have in a presidential campaign. But I made the decision that if this book turns out to be something that precludes me from ever being able to to run for president but, if it helps a lot of people and saves a lot of lives, that is absolutely a trade I’m willing to make.”
• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
