The Assembly: “In college, Eric Greitens might have seemed too good to be true.
He was a founding member of Duke University’s Honor Council who designed his own major to study ethics; worked with refugees and poor people in several countries; took up boxing under the tutelage of a crusty Army veteran; was named one of the top 20 students in the country by USA Today; earned a Harry S. Truman Scholarship for public service; and was on his way to Oxford University with a Rhodes Scholarship.
In the summer of 1995, after his junior year at Duke, Greitens accompanied one of his professors to Rwanda to work with refugees. The country in east-central Africa had been devastated by genocide, with as many as 800,000 people killed, mostly of the Tutsi minority.
Greitens traveled with U.N. workers as they visited humanitarian projects and refugee camps across the country, and took photographs and notes. “These women had suffered more than I could imagine,” he wrote later about a group of refugees at a health-care clinic, “and still they welcomed me, told me their stories.”
The professor who took him to Rwanda, Neil Boothby, said young Greitens was thoughtful, collaborative, and morally concerned.
“Eric was attempting to put together a set of experiences that would provide him with the knowledge and the experience to do something significant,” Boothby told The Assembly. “The Eric that I knew was character building.”
Now, as Greitens seeks a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri amid personal scandal and political reinvention, Boothby and others who knew him at Duke are re-evaluating what they thought they knew about him. Boothby, who nominated Greitens for the USA Today honor, said he “has dishonored himself””