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Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira

Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack. A young ensign—“real eager to get off that ship and get into action,” in the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his younger brother, who one day would be my father.

Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood. His scrawl consumed five pages of Navy stationery.

“It’s growing on me with increasing rapidity that you’re about set to go to college,” he wrote to his brother, Dick, then living with my grandparents in Salem, Massachusetts, “and tho I’m one hell of a guy to talk—and tho I hate preaching—let me just write this & we’ll call it quits.”

He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.

“What you’ll learn in college won’t be worth a God-damned,” Phil told Dick. “But you’ll learn a way of life perhaps—a way to get on with people—an appreciation perhaps for just one thing: music, art, a book—all of this is bound to be unconscious learning—it’s part of a liberal education in the broad sense of the term.”

But that wasn’t the end of it, far from it. “If you went to a trade school you’d have one thing you could do & know—& you’d miss the whole world of beauty,” he went on. “In a liberal school you know ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy—You can always learn to be a mechanic or a pill mixer etc.,” but it’s only when you’re of college age “that you can learn that life has beauty & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “struggle, war: economic if not actual—Don’t give up the idea & ideals of a liberal school—they’re too precious—too rare—too important.”

Roughly a month after Phil wrote this letter, the Crescent City saw its first action, off Efate, in New Hebrides, and before long the attack transport set off for Guadalcanal and the initial assault landings in August, on an insect-infected island that was destined to be the site of a brutal six-month jungle struggle in unforgiving heat against determined Japanese fighters.

In September 1942, during the Guadalcanal campaign, Phil wrote another letter, this one to his favorite Dartmouth professor, the sociologist George F. Theriault. “I’ve had lots of time to think out here,” he told Theriault, before adding, “A decent liberal arts education based on the Social Sciences is all a lot of us have left—and more and more becomes the only possible background on which to view all this”—the “all this” referring to the war and what it was about. He told Theriault, who was passionate about preserving the place of literature and the social sciences in Dartmouth’s wartime curriculum, that “no greater mistake could be made than to shunt all the fellows off into ‘war courses’ and neglect the fine, decent, really important things we had a chance to come to know.”

A little more than four months later, Phil was dead. He was on a PT boat by then, and on a night in early February, his boat—PT-111—ran into the searchlight of a Japanese destroyer off the northwest tip of Guadalcanal. Phil was gunned down. But before he died, he had made it clear that the conflict that would claim his life was a struggle for the values he’d learned in college—and, just as important, a struggle for the beauty and fineness he had discovered during his undergraduate years.

“And if at the end of college: if there are still people in the world, around, who’d like to deny experiences like it to others,” he told my father, who would join the Navy before his own college years were completed, “why I hope that you—like me—think it’s all worth while to get in & fight for. One always has to protect the valuable in this world before he can enjoy it.”

Philip Alvan Shribman: the man who died for the liberal arts.

I have been preoccupied with Uncle Phil’s life and death for five decades. The advice he gave to my father from the Pacific has provided the buoys of my own life. The values he prized have become my values. His guidance has shaped the passage of my two daughters through life. And his words take on urgency at a time when liberal education and American democracy are under threat.

[From the June 1943 issue: Bring back the liberal arts]

During these five decades, I have searched for details of his life, sifting through letters and documents in my father’s file cabinet, and seeking out his classmates and shipmates. In the course of all this, I met James MacPherson, a retired New York City transit worker who encountered Phil on Tulagi, a tiny island in the Solomons that served as home to a squadron of PT boats, and who remembered him as “an affectionate guy, like a Henry Fonda or a Gary Cooper.” At a brewpub in Lawrence, Kansas, I bought lunch for Bertha Lou (Logan) Summers, who likely would have become Phil’s wife if they’d had world enough and time.

I spoke with Robert R. Dockson, later the dean of the business school at the University of Southern California, who was Phil’s roommate on the Crescent City and his tentmate on Tulagi. “We were kids then,” he told me, describing how the two of them would sit on the shore and watch sea battles from afar, all the while complaining about the mud that encircled them. “Those were pretty lonely days.” I corresponded with John C. Everett, who went on to run a textile company and who glimpsed his Dartmouth classmate on the beach at Tulagi through his binoculars. Across 100 yards of water, they waved to each other and, by signal lamp, agreed to meet as soon as possible. Within days, Phil was dead.

And in my very first hours on the Dartmouth campus as a freshman myself—this was 52 years ago—I knocked on the door of GeorgeF. Theriault. It was answered by a lanky man with long gray hair and an emphysemic cough.

“Professor Theriault,” I said. “My name is David Shribman.” He seemed astonished, for how could his former student, who had died 29 years earlier, have a child, the freshman at his door? “No, you could not be.”

He’d had no idea that Phil’s brother had a son. Now the son was standing in the very building, Silsby Hall, where Phil, as an undergraduate, would have taken courses. And so began a remarkable friendship, student and professor, conducted over lunches and dinners, on campus and off, and occasionally at his home, presided over by his wife, Ray Grant Theriault, who told me that one day, on a ski expedition, a student named Phil Shribman, unaware that the woman in the fetching ski outfit was his professor’s wife, had asked her out on a date.

That freshman year, I typed out some of the words from Phil’s letters, fastened them to a piece of cardboard with a squirt of Elmer’s glue, and placed the primitive commemorative plaque on the bulletin board of my room. I kept it in sight until the day I graduated, and I have held on to it ever since.

Phil’s father—my grandfather Max Shribman—was a gentle Russian immigrant in Salem, where the family had washed ashore in 1896. He made a modest, small-city success for himself in real estate and insurance, comfortable enough to purchase the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics that today sit on my bookshelves. To his sons he passed on his reverence—a pure, innocent love—for the idea of college, for the discipline and the leisure that campus life offers, for the chance to take a quiet breath of fresh air before joining life’s struggles.

In the dozen years I knew my grandfather, I heard him talk of the past only a few times, and each of those reminiscences was about the old days, when his two boys were in college. He loved those years, and I came to love what they meant to him.

Foreground: A PT boat in the North Pacific. Inset: Phil (center) among Solomon Islanders, shortly before his death. Background: Dartmouth College. (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; PhotoQuest / Getty; Library of Congress / Getty.)

The three Dartmouth alumni who interviewed Phil in the winter of 1937 told the admissions office that he was “a good, all around boy, bright, alert and a pleasant personality.” His formal college application was a simple affair. He said he thought about becoming a chemist or a doctor and was interested in current affairs and scientific matters. The form contained this sentence, in his own handwriting: “I am of Hebrew descent.”

The college where he matriculated in the fall of 1937 had no foreign-study programs, no battery of psychologists, no course-evaluation forms—just classrooms with chairs bolted to the floor and, in winter, duckboards fastened to the steps of classroom buildings to fend off the snow and ice. The freshman class had 680 students, a little more than half the current size. Freshmen wore beanies. The year Phil arrived, the football team finished the season with an unbeaten record and was invited to play in the Rose Bowl—but declined the offer because, as President Ernest Martin Hopkins would explain, “if one held to the fundamental philosophy of college men incidentally playing football as against football players incidentally going to college, most of the evils of intercollegiate competition would be avoided.” This was a long time ago.

The theme of the convocation address that Hopkins delivered at the beginning of Phil’s freshman year dealt with the aims of a liberal-arts education; he spoke of “what a liberal college is, what its objectives are, what its ideals are, why its procedures exist.” That day, sitting with his new classmates in Webster Hall, Phil heard Hopkins say that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to make someone a better banker or lawyer but rather to foster a “mental enlargement which shall enable you to be a bigger man, wherever the path of life leads you.”

Phil’s own liberal-arts education was demanding, and broad. He took courses in English, French, philosophy, astronomy, economics, psychology, music, and sociology (which eventually became his major). His grades were varied: C’s in freshman English, lots of A’s in sociology, on one occasion a D in French.

He was a member of Pi Lambda Phi, the first fraternity at Dartmouth to accept Jewish students. He was in the debate club. He went to football games, joining the annual migration to the Dartmouth-Harvard contest, which in those days was always played in Boston. He was one of the Dartmouth boys who in October 1940 toppled the wooden goalposts after Earl “Red” Blaik’s last Dartmouth team prevailed against Harvard, 7–6. (Blaik would decamp to West Point the next year, a sign of impending war.) The shard of wood Phil snared after the final whistle now is nailed on my wall, just feet from where I am writing this.

The young man who on his application said he was “of Hebrew descent” took as his honors thesis topic “American anti-Semitism.” The thesis was submitted in January 1941, as the Nazi regime pursued the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities and refined the techniques of murdering Europe’s Jews. Later that year, the aviator Charles Lindbergh would deliver his infamous anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa.

The United States issued a draft-registration order in September 1940, only days before classes commenced in Phil’s senior year; a month earlier, Phil had enlisted as an apprentice seaman in the Naval Reserve. President Hopkins had assured the Army and Navy that Dartmouth would be responsive to any needs the two services expressed. In the spring of 1941, a student wrote an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Now we have waited long enough …”) that was published on the front page of the campus newspaper. It was read into the Congressional Record. The United States wasn’t yet at war, but the campus almost was.

Dartmouth’s Class Day, which takes place in a sylvan amphitheater just before commencement, ordinarily is a joyous occasion. Class Day 1941 was unlike any before or since. Charles B. McLane—the captain of the ski team, who became a member of the fabled 10th Mountain Division before returning to Dartmouth as a professor—delivered the Address to the College (an assignment that 35 years later would come to me). He said that “the strength and assurance of democracy” lies in his classmates’ “being able to believe in and being willing to fight for” the “uncomplicated things we know and believe in today.” That weekend, Hopkins delivered his commencement address:

Men of 1941, sons of this fostering mother of the north-country which we call Dartmouth, it is your generation that will determine, not in middle life but tomorrow, next year, or at the latest within a few brief years, whether the preconceptions you impose upon facts, the faults you visualize in democracy, and the ruthlessness you ignore in totalitarianism shall paralyze your will to defend the one and to defeat the other or whether with eyes wide open to reality, you accept freedom as an obligation as well as a privilege and accept the role for yourself of defenders of the faith.

Shortly after the class of 1941 dispersed, Hopkins would write that “the liberal arts college now has a clear duty to do all it can to aid in national defense; at the same time it would be derelict in its most important obligation if it lost sight of the purposes for which it primarily exists and the coming generation’s need for college-trained men.”

By the time Phil died, a Naval Training School had opened on campus with a staff of about 100, and headquarters in College Hall. Alumni Gymnasium became the site of instruction in seamanship, ordnance, and navigation. Dartmouth eventually added to its curriculum such courses as nautical astronomy, naval history and elementary strategy, and naval organization.

It was that precarious balance between preparing men for war and preserving the liberal arts that Phil sought to defend.

Death came to my uncle with suddenness but not with surprise. His Dartmouth contemporary John Manley once told me that Phil had had a premonition that he would die in the conflict.

After graduation, Phil was assigned to the Crescent City and appointed lieutenant (junior grade). “I can see him today—tall & slender, with reddish brown hair and some freckles, a smile always, irreverent behavior,” his shipmate William Trippet, who would become a real-estate agent in Sacramento, California, wrote me 30 years ago.

During the Guadalcanal campaign, the Crescent City made 14 trips bringing men and supplies to the island. Phil wrote to his parents in September, a month into the fighting, to assure them that he was doing fine. He was, of course, thinner, and yet he had grown. He recalled that he was reminded continually of a letter printed in the newspaper during the last war from a serviceman to his family; it had been sitting around somewhere at home, back in Salem. “Little then,” he wrote, “did I think I would ever sit down in the midst of a war and … put down a little of what a person thinks.” His own letter was spare, meant only as a “personal sort of thing, like I was back in our living room telling it to you.” He spoke of being in close quarters for 60 days; of seeing men die; of settling down someday with the right girl. Here was a boy who had grown up.

“They say that the Navy, esp. in wartime, either makes a man or shows that no man will be made,” he wrote. “As to what the outcome on my part will be I will have to leave that to someone else and until it’s over.”

On January 5, 1943, he was transferred to the PT-boat squadron, an assignment he had wanted. PT boats have an audacious aura because of the experience of John F. Kennedy, who commanded one—PT-109. They were perhaps the flimsiest element of the American naval force—usually a mere 80 feet long, outfitted with machine guns and four 21-inch-diameter torpedoes, and capable of zipping through the sea at more than 40 knots. The Navy’s approximately 600 PT boats were designed to be the seaborne equivalent of guerrilla warriors, able to ambush and scoot away quickly. But they were no match for what became known as the Tokyo Express, the Japanese warships that bore down on Guadalcanal.

On the island of Tulagi, an American staging area for the Guadalcanal battle, Phil lived in a bamboo-and-banana-leaf shack measuring about 12 by 15 feet and sitting some four feet off the ground. “Sweat rolls freely in January,” he reported in a letter to Theriault. Among his neighbors in the shack were a nest of hornets, one of spiders, and two of ants—“companionable,” he wrote, “so we let them be.” Little else is known of his life on Tulagi in those last few months. A single photograph survives, showing Phil standing tall among a group of Solomon Islanders.

On February 1, 1943, an Allied coast watcher reported seeing as many as 20 Japanese destroyers in the Slot, the name given to the maritime route used by the Japanese for the resupply of Guadalcanal. That night, American PT boats set out as part of a larger effort to intercept the destroyers. PT-111 was among them. John Clagett, the commander, steered his craft away from the base. The boat was jarred by an exploding bomb nearby. Eventually he found a target, a Japanese destroyer moving on a southeasterly course, three miles east of Cape Esperance. PT-111 fired all four of its torpedoes from close quarters and then maneuvered away. Whether the torpedoes did any damage is unknown. But shellfire from a destroyer hit Clagett’s boat, which exploded in flames. Ten members of the 12-man crew survived, some rescued the next morning after nine hours in the water. One member, legs broken, likely was taken by sharks. Phil himself seems to have been killed outright in the attack. PT-111 sank into Iron Bottom Sound.

Back in Salem, a telegram arrived at 5 Savoy Road. “The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son Lieutenant Junior Grade Philip Alvan Shribman United States Naval Reserve is missing following action in the performance of his duty in the service of his country.”

I can only imagine the scene when this message arrived. Did the Western Union man drive down the street, stop at the white house on the left, climb the concrete stairs, and deliver the telegram? Did someone from the Navy visit? My father was away, at Dartmouth. I know only this: That moment was the hinge of my grandparents’ lives.

A few blocks away from their house, an obelisk erected to honor the 2,105 veterans from St. Joseph’s Parish who served in the two world wars stands on a median between Washington and Lafayette Streets. When I was a cub reporter for the Salem Evening News, I would pass the monument and see the inscription on one side: TIME WILL NOT DIM. I think about that legend constantly. Time did not dim the force of that loss.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. sent a note saluting Phil for having “gone to join the heroes who have built America.” That may have been a form letter, but the note from Phil’s Crescent City shipmate Zalmon Garfield, later the executive assistant to Milton Shapp, Pennsylvania’s first Jewish governor, was not. Garfield wrote on behalf of his shipmates about the respect and admiration they had for Phil:

Some of these men are ignorant, some of them callous; en masse, however, their judgment of their officers is uncannily unerring … It is a strange day in which we live, watching the gods toss their finest works into a chasm of their own building. We can only wonder, mourn briefly and work very hard to replace the loss.

Republican Representative George J. Bates of Salem was visiting injured American combatants in West Coast hospitals shortly after the delivery of that fateful telegram and, in a remarkable coincidence, encountered John Clagett, Phil’s commander on PT-111, recuperating from his injuries. “Tell Philip’s father that his son was one of the most courageous men I have ever seen in action,” the commander told the congressman.

With the news of Phil’s death, Bertha Lou Logan entered my grandparents’ lives. Her father, a football coach and high-school principal, had raised her alone after her mother died in childbirth. She had met Phil at the Grand Canyon in July 1939. He was traveling with Dartmouth classmates; she was there with family. As the two parties moved west, Phil and Bertha Lou left notes for each other at post offices. Eventually Bertha Lou took a waitressing job at Loch Lyme Lodge, near Dartmouth. Later, in Chicago, when Phil was in midshipmen’s school, he and Bertha Lou would walk by the lake. She was the girl he wanted. He was the boy soon to be rendered unattainable.

Bertha Lou Logan; a letter from Philip to his brother, Dick Shribman, written aboard the USS Crescent City in 1942 (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Patstock / Getty.)

After Phil died, Bertha Lou wrote Max and Anna Shribman, whom she had never met. She took the train to Salem, and my dad picked her up at the station. She lived in my grandparents’ house for some while, the three of them united in a triangle of grief. “It took me a long time to get over him,” Bertha Lou told me when I met her in Kansas decades later.

In 1958, John Clagett wrote a novel titled The Slot about life aboard a PT boat during World War II. He was by then an English professor at Middlebury College. “These days are dead,” he wrote in an author’s note. “We hated them then, we would not have them come again; but after fifteen years may we not look back at them for a few hours and say—Those were days that counted in our lives.” And, in a different way, in mine.

For three-quarters of a century, historians have sorted through the “war aims” of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. In college and graduate school, and in a lifetime of reading, I have examined much of that scholarship. But for Americans, the war was also about more than carefully stated aims—it was about far simpler things, really, but no less grand. Texaco had it right in a 1942 magazine advertisement that depicted a man carrying Army gear and saying, “I’m fighting for my right to boo the Dodgers.” Phil might have added that it was also about the right to feel joy pulling down a goalpost in a dreaded rival’s home stadium; the right to struggle with explaining in what respects Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert were realists; the right to get a C in English and a D in French.

“Look around you—keep your eyes open—try to see what’s what—hold onto the things that you know to be right,” Phil wrote to my father in what could be a user’s guide to the liberal arts. “They’ll shake your faith in a lot of the things you now think are right—That’s good—& part of education—but look around & try to make up your own ideas on life & its values.”

In 1947, five years after that letter was written, my grandfather sent some money to Dartmouth to establish a scholarship in his son’s name—specifically, to support a student from the Salem area. The scholarship continues, and every year the family receives a letter about the person awarded the scholarship. I have a pile of them.

One of the recipients of that scholarship was Paul Andrews. He took the classic liberal-arts route that Phil would have endorsed—psychology, meteorology, music—and today is a school superintendent in central Oregon. Another was Matthew Kimble—history, religion, biology—who would chair the psychology department at Middlebury. A third is Christine Finn—drama, economics, organic chemistry. She is now a psychiatry professor at Dartmouth’s medical school. Another is Jeffrey Coots—astronomy, mythology, American literature—who specializes in public health and safety at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. You could say that Phil won World War II after all.

[Read: How the liberal arts help veterans thrive]

I have been delving into Uncle Phil’s life for years. Some of the very sentences in this account I wrote more than half a century ago, the product of an 18-year-old’s effort to repay a debt to an uncle he never knew. Those sentences stood up well. So has my faith. And so, too, has my belief that, as Uncle Phil put it from the Pacific War 80 years ago, “you know actually it’s the things I (and everyone else) always took for granted that are the things the country is now fighting to keep—and it’s going to be hard to do.”

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts.”

Usually, you need about 10 minutes to walk from the Rayburn House Office Building to the House Chamber. But if you’re running from a reporter, it’ll only take you five.

When Matt Gaetz spotted me outside his office door one afternoon early last November, he popped in his AirPods and started speed walking down the hall. I took off after him, waving and smiling like the good-natured midwesterner I am. “Congressman, hi,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d worn shoes with arch support. “I just wanted to introduce myself!” I had prepared a long list of questions, hoping for a thoughtful conversation but ready for a tense one. He was a firebrand, after all, or so said the title of his 2020 memoir, Firebrand.

Gaetz is a creature of our time: versed in the art of performance politics and eager to blow up anything to get a little something. He landed in Washington, D.C., as a freshman nobody from the Florida Panhandle, relegated to the back benches of Congress. Seven years later, he’s toppled one House speaker and helped install a new one. He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.

I had tried repeatedly to schedule an interview with Gaetz. His staff had suggested that he might be willing to sit down with me. But there the firebrand was, that day in November, running away from me in his white-soled Cole Haans. Gaetz broke into a light jog down the escalator, then flew through the long tunnel linking the Rayburn offices to the House Chamber. Finally, I caught up with him at the members-only elevator, my heart pounding. I stretched out my hand. He left it hanging. We got on the elevator together, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

“Are you … afraid of me?” I asked, incredulous. Finally, he made eye contact and glared. Then the doors opened, and he walked out toward the chamber.

Gaetz speaks to the media on the House steps after Kevin McCarthy’s ousting.(Bill Clark / Getty)

Two incidents have defined Gaetz’s tenure in Congress and helped make him a household name. The first was the Department of Justice’s 2020 investigation into whether he had sex with a minor and violated sex-trafficking laws. Gaetz has repeatedly and vehemently denied the claims. That probe was dropped in early 2023, but the House Ethics Committee is still investigating those claims, as well as others—including allegations that Gaetz shared sexual images with colleagues. One video, multiple sources told me, showed a young woman hula-hooping naked. A former Gaetz staffer told me he had watched from the back seat of a van as another aide showed the hula-hooping video to a member of Congress. “Matt sent this to me, and you’re missing out,” the aide had said. (A spokesperson for Gaetz declined to comment for this article, saying that it “contains verifiable errors and laundered rumors” without identifying any. “Be best,” he wrote.)

The investigations seem to have angered and hardened Gaetz. There was a time when he wouldn’t have run away from any reporter. But since the allegations became public, Gaetz has tightened his alliance with the MAGA right, and his rhetoric has grown more cynical. He has become one of the most prominent voices of Trumpian authoritarianism. Warming up the crowd for Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair last August, Gaetz declared that “only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”

Gaetz has all the features—prominent brow, bouffant hair, thin-lipped smirk—of an action-movie villain, and at times he’s seemed to cultivate that impression. The second defining event of his time in Congress thus far came in early October, when he filed a motion to kick Kevin McCarthy out of the House speaker’s chair. The motion passed with the help of 208 Democrats and eight Republicans. But not before McCarthy’s allies had each taken a turn at the microphone, defending his leadership and calling Gaetz a selfish, grifting, fake conservative. McCarthy’s supporters had blocked all of the microphones on the Republican side, so Gaetz was forced to sit with the Democrats. A few lawmakers spoke in support of his cause, but mostly Gaetz fought alone: one man against a field of his own teammates.

[Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved]

Gaetz didn’t seem to mind. He smiled as he took notes on a legal pad. He displayed no alarm at the fact that every set of eyeballs in the chamber was trained on him, many squinted in rage. He was accustomed to the feeling.

Earlier this week, McCarthy lashed out at Gaetz, telling an interviewer that he’d been ousted from the speakership because “one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal, and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it. Now, did he do it or not? I don’t know. But Ethics was looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.”

In response, Gaetz posted on X: “Kevin McCarthy is a liar. That’s why he is no longer speaker.”

Few items in Gaetz’s biography are more on the nose than the fact that his childhood vacation home—which his family still owns—was the pink-and-yellow-trimmed house along the Gulf of Mexico that was used to film the The Truman Show, the movie about a man whose entire life is a performance for public consumption.

But for most of the year, Gaetz and his family lived near Fort Walton Beach, a part of the Florida Panhandle that’s all white sand and rumbling speed boats—a “redneck riviera,” as one local put it. The area, which now makes up a major part of Gaetz’s congressional district, has a huge military base, and one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the U.S.; it’s also one of the most Republican districts in the country.

If a person’s identity solidifies during adolescence, then Gaetz’s crystallized inside the redbrick walls of Niceville High School. As a teenager, he was chubby, with crooked teeth and acne. He didn’t have many friends. What he did have was the debate team.

Gaetz as a teenager, with his former friend Erin Scot on the right. (Courtesy of Erin Scot)

“We tolerated him,” more than one former debate-club member said when I asked about Gaetz. (Most of them spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from Gaetz or his father.) Gaetz could be charming and funny, they told me, but he was also arrogant, a know-it-all. “He would pick debates with people over things that didn’t matter, because he just wanted to,” one former teammate said.

Gaetz also liked to flaunt his family’s wealth. For decades, his father, Don Gaetz, ran a hospice company, which he sold in 2004 for almost half a billion dollars. (The company was later sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly filing false Medicare claims; the lawsuit was settled.) Don was the superintendent of the Okaloosa County School District before being elected to the state Senate in 2006, where he became president. He was a founding member and later chair of the powerful Triumph Gulf Coast board, a nonprofit that doles out funds to local development projects; according to some sources, he still has a heavy hand in it. The counties that make up the panhandle, one lobbyist told me, “are owned by the Gaetzes.”

Matt had a credit card in high school, which was relatively rare in the late 1990s, and he bragged about his “real-estate portfolio,” Erin Scot, a former friend of Gaetz’s, told me. “He was obviously much more well off than basically anyone else, or at least wanted us to think he was.” Once, Gaetz got into an argument with a student who had been accepted to the prestigious Dartmouth debate camp, another classmate said. The fight snowballed until Gaetz threatened to have his father, who was on the school board, call Dartmouth and rescind the student’s application.

Gaetz mostly participated in policy debate. Each year, the National Forensic League announced a new policy resolution—strengthening relations with China, promoting renewable energy—and debaters worked in pairs to build a case both for and against it. To win, debaters had to speak louder, faster, and longer than anyone else. During his senior year, Gaetz won a statewide competition. He wasn’t just good at debate, a former teammate told me: “That was who he was.”

Marilyn McGill, his high-school-debate coach, fondly remembers a teenage Gaetz happily pushing a dolly stacked with bins of evidence on and off the L train in Chicago—and another time dodging snow drifts during a blizzard in Boston. “Matt never complained,” she said. Another year, Gaetz was so eager to attend a tournament in New Orleans that McGill and her husband drove him there with some other debaters in the family RV. “This is the only way to travel, Mr. McGill!” Gaetz shouted from the back.

McGill gushed about her student in our interview. But when I asked what she thought of him now, the former teacher didn’t have much to offer on the record. “He certainly commands the stage still,” she said. “How about that?”

After high school, Gaetz went to Florida State University, where he majored in interdisciplinary sciences, continued debating, and got involved in student government. I had difficulty finding people from Gaetz’s college years who were willing to talk with me; I reached out to old friends and didn’t hear back. Gaetz’s own communications team sent over a list of people I could reach out to; only one replied.

During the summer after his freshman year, Gaetz spent a lot of time at home, hanging out with Scot and some other friends from Niceville. Sometimes, Gaetz would drive them out on his motorboat to Crab Island, where they’d cannonball into the clear, shallow water of the Choctawhatchee Bay. Other days, Gaetz would take them mudding in his Jeep. Somewhere around then, Scot told Gaetz that she was gay, and the revelation didn’t faze him. This meant a lot to her.

Still, Gaetz could get on his friends’ nerves. He referred to one of Scot’s female friends on the debate team using the old Seinfeld insult “man hands.” Once, he noticed peach fuzz on a girl’s face and made fun of her behind her back for having a beard. Gaetz would occasionally offer unsolicited advice on how his friends should respond if they were ever pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving: Refuse to take a Breathalyzer test. Chug a beer in front of the officer to make it more difficult to tell if they’d been drinking earlier in the night. It was immature kid stuff, Scot said. “Most of us grew out of it. He made a career of it.”

After graduating from FSU in 2003, Gaetz enrolled at William and Mary Law School in Virginia. Unlike his classmates, who rented apartments with roommates or lived in campus housing, property records show that Gaetz bought a two-story brick Colonial with a grand entranceway and white Grecian columns in the sun room. It was the ultimate bachelor pad: a maze of high-ceilinged rooms for weekend ragers, with a beer-pong table and a kegerator, according to one former law-school acquaintance. Back then, the acquaintance said, Gaetz had a reputation for bragging about his sexual conquests.

The last time Scot saw Gaetz was at a friend’s wedding in March 2009, two years after he’d graduated from law school and one year into what would be a very short-lived gig as an attorney at a private firm in Fort Walton Beach. By that point, Gaetz had already started planning his political career, which would begin, officially, a few months later with a special-election bid for the state House. Also by that point, Gaetz had been arrested on charges of drunk driving after leaving a nightclub on Okaloosa Island called the Swamp. He’d followed his own advice and refused a Breathalyzer test. (Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges, and Gaetz’s license was reinstated after only a few weeks.)

At the wedding, Scot was eager to catch up with Gaetz. A photo from the night of the rehearsal dinner shows Gaetz, in a cream-colored suit jacket, wrapping his arm around her. She was excited to show him a picture of her girlfriend, whom he’d never met. She says that later, at the bar, Gaetz passed around an image of his own: a cellphone photo of a recent hookup, staring up topless from his bed.

There used to be a restaurant called the 101 on College Avenue in Tallahassee, just steps from the state capitol. Customer favorites included happy-hour martinis and buffalo-chicken pizza. Gaetz and his buddies in the legislature would hold court there after votes, friends and colleagues from that time told me.

Gaetz had been elected to the state House, after raising almost half a million dollars—including $100,000 of his own money, and support from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who had formerly represented the district and was a friend of the Gaetzes. In the general election, Gaetz defeated his Democratic opponent by more than 30 points; he would go on to run unopposed for a full term in 2010, in 2012, and again in 2014.

During this period, a group of young Republican lawmakers partook in what several of my sources referred to as the “Points Game,” which involved earning points for sleeping with women (and which has been previously covered by local outlets). As the journalist Marc Caputo has reported, the scoring system went like this: one point for hooking up with a lobbyist, three points for a fellow legislator, six for a married fellow legislator, and so on. Gaetz and his friends all played the game, at least three people confirmed to me, although none could tell me exactly where Gaetz stood on the scoreboard. (Gaetz has denied creating, having knowledge of, or participating in the game.)

Matt Gaetz with his father, Don Gaetz, in 2014. (Phil Sears / AP)

At the time, Don Gaetz was president of the Florida Senate, and the father-and-son pair was referred to, mostly behind their backs but sometimes to their faces, as Daddy Gaetz and Baby Gaetz. The latter had a tendency to barge in on his father’s meetings, hop on the couch, and prop his feet up, Ryan Wiggins, a former political consultant who used to work with Matt Gaetz, told me. Because of their relationship, Matt “had a level of power that was very, very resented in Tallahassee,” she said.

Gaetz wasn’t interested in his father’s traditional, mild-mannered Republicanism, though. Like any good Florida conservative, the younger Gaetz was a devoted gun-rights supporter and a passionate defender of the state’s stand-your-ground law. As chair of the state House’s Finance and Tax Committee, he pushed for a $1 billion statewide-tax-cut package. But Gaetz talked often about wanting the GOP to be more modern: to acknowledge climate change, to get younger people involved. Toward that end, he sometimes forged alliances with Democrats. “If you went and sat down with him one-on-one,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who worked with Gaetz in the state legislature, “he could be very likable.”

Schale, who had epilepsy as a child, was happy to see Gaetz become one of a handful of Republicans to support the Charlotte’s Web bill, which legalized a cannabis extract for epilepsy treatment. Gaetz also befriended Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who is Gaetz’s current colleague in Congress, when they worked together to pass a bill strengthening animal-cruelty laws. “You could go into his office and say, ‘Hey man, I think you’re full of shit on that,’” Schale said. “And he’d say, ‘All right, tell me why.’ I kinda liked that.”

Gaetz seemed to relish the sport of politics—the logistics of floor debates and the particulars of parliamentary procedure. He argued down his own colleagues and tore up amendments brought by both parties. Sometimes friends would challenge Gaetz to a game: They’d give him a minute to scan some bill he wasn’t familiar with, one former colleague told me, and then make him riff on it on the House floor.

Gaetz had a knack for calling attention to himself. He would take unpopular positions, sometimes apparently just to make people mad. He was one of two lawmakers to vote against a state bill criminalizing revenge porn. And even when his own Republican colleague proposed reviewing Florida’s stand-your-ground law after the killing of Trayvon Martin, Gaetz said he refused to change “one damn comma” of the legislation.

Plus, “he understood the power of social media before almost anyone else,” Peter Schorsch, a publisher and former political consultant, told me. Gaetz was firing off inflammatory tweets and Facebook posts even in the early days of those apps. All of it was purposeful, by design, the people I spoke with told me—the debating, the tweeting, the attention getting. Gaetz was confident that he was meant for something bigger. “The goal then,” Schorsch said, “was to be where he is now.”

In 2015, while Donald Trump was descending the golden Trump Tower escalator, Gaetz was halfway through his third full term in the Florida House, pondering his next move. His father would retire soon from the Florida Senate, and Gaetz had already announced his intention to run for the seat. But then Jeff Miller, the Republican representative from Gaetz’s hometown district, decided to leave Congress.

Gaetz had endorsed former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the GOP primary. (“I like action, not just talk. #allinforjeb,” he’d tweeted in August 2015.) But by March, Bush had dropped out. Left with the choice of Trump, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, or then–Ohio Governor John Kasich, Gaetz embraced the man he said was best suited to disrupt the stale workings of Washington, D.C.

In the same statement announcing he was running for Congress, Gaetz declared that he was #allin for Trump.

At first, Gaetz was miserable in Congress. Almost a year after being elected, at 34—he’d defeated his Democratic opponent by almost 40 points—Gaetz complained about his predicament to Schale. He’d never dealt with being a freshman member on the backbench. “He hated everything about it,” Schale told me.

In Gaetz’s telling, the money turned him off most. Given the makeup of his district, he wanted to be on the Armed Services Committee. But good committee assignments required donations: When Gaetz asked McCarthy about it, the majority leader advised that he raise $75,000 and send it to the National Republican Congressional Committee, Gaetz wrote in Firebrand. He sent twice that much to the NRCC, he wrote, and made it onto both the Armed Services and the Judiciary Committees. But he claimed to be disgusted by the system.

During those first miserable months, Schale wondered how his colleague would handle his newfound irrelevance. “I would’ve told you he’d do one of two things: He would either retire or he was going to light himself on fire,” Schale told me. “He chose to light himself on fire.”

It can take years to rise up through the ranks of a committee, build trust with colleagues, and start sponsoring legislation to earn the kind of attention and influence that Gaetz craved. He wanted a more direct route. So his team developed a strategy: He would circumvent the traditional path of a freshman lawmaker and speak straight to the American people.

Gaetz and Trump in 2022. (Megan Varner / Getty)

This meant being on television as much as possible. Gaetz went after the most hot-button cultural issue at the time: NFL players kneeling for the anthem. “We used that as our initial hook to start booking media,” one former staff member told me. One of his early appearances was a brief two-question interview with Tucker Carlson. Though Carlson mispronounced his name as “Getts” (it’s pronounced “Gates”), the congressman spoke with a brusque confidence. “Rather than taking a knee, we ought to see professional athletes taking a stand and actually supporting this country,” he said.

From there, the TV invites flooded in. Gaetz would go on any network to talk about anything as long as the broadcast was live and he knew the topic ahead of time. He had become a loud Trump defender—introducing a resolution to force Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign and even joining an effort to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. A white board in his office displayed a list of media outlets and two columns of numbers: how many hits Gaetz wanted to do each week at any given outlet and how many he’d already completed. Around his office, he liked to quote from one of his favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in a faux southern accent: “We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re mass communicating!’’

Soon, the president was calling. Trump asked Gaetz for policy advice, and suggested ways that Gaetz could highlight the MAGA agenda on television. Sometimes, when the president rang and Gaetz wasn’t near the phone, his aides would sprint around the Capitol complex looking for him, in a race against Trump’s short attention span, another former staffer told me. Gaetz claimed in his book that he once even took a call from Trump while “in the throes of passion.”

With his new influence, Gaetz helped launch Ron DeSantis’s political career. In 2017, he urged Trump to endorse DeSantis for Florida governor. At the time, DeSantis was struggling in the Republican primary, but after receiving Trump’s approval, he shot ahead. DeSantis made Gaetz a top campaign adviser.

[From the May 2023 issue: How freedom-loving Florida fell for Ron DeSantis]

Gaetz would occasionally travel with the president on Air Force One, writing mini briefings or speeches on short notice. Trump was angry when Gaetz voted to limit the president’s powers to take military action, but the two worked it out. “Lincoln had the great General Grant … and I have Matt Gaetz!” Trump told a group of lawmakers at the White House Christmas party in 2019, according to Firebrand.

The two had a genuine relationship, people close to Gaetz told me. From his father, Gaetz had learned to be cunning and competitive. But he was never going to be a country-club Republican. “He’s aspirationally redneck,” said Gaetz’s friend Charles Johnson, a blogger and tech investor who became famous as an alt-right troll. (Johnson once supported Trump but says he now backs Joe Biden.) Trump, despite his wealth and New York upbringing, “is the redneck father Matt never had,” Johnson told me.

HBO’s The Swamp, a documentary that chronicled the efforts of a handful of House Republicans agitating for various reforms, takes viewers behind the scenes of Gaetz’s early months in Congress, when he lived in his office and slept four nights a week on a narrow cot pushed into a converted closet. Gaetz is likable in the documentary, coming off as a cheerful warrior and a political underdog. But the most striking moment is when he answers a call from President Trump, who praises him for some TV hit or other. When Gaetz hangs up the phone, he is beaming. “He’s very happy,” Gaetz tells the camera, before looking away, lost in giddy reflection.

Gaetz has positioned himself as a sort of libertarian populist. He’s proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, but he’s not a climate-change denier, and has supported legislation that would encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily. He has consistently opposed American intervention in foreign wars, and he advocates fewer restrictions on marijuana possession and distribution. He still allies himself with Democrats when it’s convenient: He defended a former colleague, Democratic Representative Katie Hill, when she was embroiled in a revenge-porn scandal and forged an unlikely alliance with Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over their desire for a ban on congressional stock trading.

In his book, Gaetz argues that too many members of Congress represent entrenched special interests over regular people, and too much legislation is the result of cozy relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists. In 2020, he announced that he was swearing off all federal PAC money. (It has always been difficult, though, to take Gaetz’s yearning for reform seriously when his political idol is Trump, a man who not only refused to divest from his own business interests as president but who promised to “drain the swamp” before appointing a staggering number of lobbyists to positions in his government).

Gaetz’s personal life began making headlines for the first time in 2020. That summer, the 38-year-old announced, rather suddenly, that he had a “son” named Nestor Galban, a 19-year-old immigrant from Cuba. Gaetz had dated Galban’s older sister May, and when the couple broke up, Galban moved in and had lived with him since around 2013. “Though we share no blood, and no legal paperwork defines our family relationship, he is my son in every sense of the word,” Gaetz wrote in his book.

Later in 2020, Gaetz met a petite blonde named Ginger Luckey at a party at Mar-a-Lago. Luckey, who is 12 years younger than Gaetz, grew up in Long Beach, California, and works for the consultancy giant KPMG. In the early days of their relationship, she was charmingly naive about politics, Gaetz wrote in his book: During one dinner with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Luckey was excited to discover that Carlson hosted his own show. “What is it about?” she’d asked.

Luckey is hyper-disciplined and extremely type A, “the kind of person who will get you out of bed to work out whether you like it or not,” Johnson said. Luckey tweets about sustainable fashion and avoiding seed oils, and she softens Gaetz’s sharp edges. She longboards and sings—once, she kicked off a Trump book-release party with a delicate rendition of “God Bless America.” Gaetz asked Luckey to marry him in December 2020 on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. When she said yes, Trump sent over a bottle of champagne.

Three months later, in late March 2021, news broke that the Department of Justice was looking into allegations that Gaetz had paid for sex with women in 2018. One claim held that Gaetz’s friend, the Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, had recruited women online and had sex with them before referring them to Gaetz, who slept with them too. But the most serious allegation was that Gaetz had had sex with a girl under the age of 18, and had flown her to the Bahamas for a vacation. By the time Gaetz proposed to Luckey, the FBI had reportedly confiscated his phone.

Gaetz and wife, Ginger Luckey, arrive at a Trump rally in 2023. (Alon Skuy / Getty)

Gaetz has denied paying for sex or engaging in sex with a minor. But Greenberg would go on to be charged with a set of federal crimes and ultimately plead guilty to sex trafficking a child. On April 6, The New York Times reported that Gaetz had requested a blanket pardon from the Trump White House in the final weeks of his administration, which was not granted.

Other sordid claims have spilled out since. “He used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” one former Republican lawmaker told me. “He’d show me a video, and I’d say, ‘That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?” (The video, according to the former lawmaker, showed the hula-hooping woman.) Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide, wrote in her memoir that Gaetz knocked on her cabin door one night during a Camp David retreat and asked Hutchinson to help escort him back to his cabin. (Gaetz has denied this.)

On social media, people called Gaetz a pedophile and a rapist; commenters on Luckey’s Instagram photos demanded to know how she could possibly date him. In many political circles, Gaetz became untouchable. He was “radioactive in Tallahassee,” one prominent Florida Republican official told me, and for a while, he stopped being invited on Fox News. Around this time, DeSantis cut Gaetz out of his inner circle. His wife, Casey, had “told Ron that he was persona non grata,” Schorsch told me. “She hated all the sex stories that came out.” (Others have suggested that Gaetz fell out with DeSantis after a power struggle with the governor’s former chief of staff.)

The ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation could have further consequences for Gaetz. The committee may ultimately recommend some kind of punishment for him—whether a formal reprimand, a censure, or even expulsion from Congress—to be voted on by the whole House.

Gaetz’s response to the investigation has been ferocious denial. He has blamed the allegations on a “deep state” plot or part of an “organized criminal extortion” against him. His team blasted out emails accusing the left of “coming” for him. But privately, in the spring of 2021, Gaetz was despondent. He worried that Luckey would call off their engagement. “She’s for sure going to leave me,” Johnson said Gaetz told him in the days after the stories broke.

But Luckey didn’t leave. In a series of TikToks posted that summer, one of her sisters called Gaetz “creepy” and “a literal pedophile.” “My estranged sister is mentally unwell,” Luckey told The Daily Beast in response.

Gaetz and Luckey married in August of 2021, earlier than they’d planned. It was a small ceremony on Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles. On the couple’s one-year anniversary, Luckey posted a picture of the two of them in the sunshine on their wedding day, Luckey in a low-cut white dress and Gaetz in a gray suit. “Power couple!!” then-Representative Madison Cawthorn wrote. Below, someone else commented, “He’s using you girl.”

Rather than cowing him, the allegations seemed to give Gaetz a burst of vengeful energy. He tightened his inner circle and leaned harder than ever into the guerilla persona he’d begun to develop. No longer welcome in many greenrooms, Gaetz became a regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast before launching a podcast of his own. He set off on an America First Tour with the fellow Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene. The two traveled state to state, alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election and declaring Trump the rightful president of the United States. People from both parties now viewed Gaetz as a villain. It was as if Gaetz thought, Why not go all in?

Republicans faced disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections, and by the time January rolled around, their slim House majority meant that each individual member had more leverage. In January 2023, Gaetz took advantage, leading a handful of Republican dissidents in opposing Kevin McCarthy’s ascendance to the speakership. He and his allies forced McCarthy to undergo 14 House votes before they finally gave in on the 15th round. Things were so tense that, at one point, Republican Mike Rogers of Alabama lunged at Gaetz and had to be restrained by another member. But Gaetz had gotten what he’d wanted. Among other concessions, McCarthy had agreed to restore a rule allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker. It would be McCarthy’s downfall.

In October, Gaetz strode to the front of the House Chamber and formally filed a motion to oust his own conference leader. McCarthy had failed to do enough to curb government spending and oppose the Democrats, Gaetz told reporters. He announced that McCarthy was “the product of a corrupt system.” As a government shutdown loomed, the 41-year-old Florida Republican attempted an aggressive maneuver that had never once been successful in the history of Congress: using a motion to vacate the speaker of the House. Twenty-four hours later, McCarthy was out.

Ultimately, the evangelical MAGA-ite Mike Johnson of Louisiana was chosen as the Republicans’ new leader. With the election of Johnson, Gaetz had removed a personal foe, skirted the establishment, and given Trumpism a loud—and legitimate—microphone. “The swamp is on the run,” Gaetz said on War Room. “MAGA is ascendant.” This had been Gaetz’s plan all along, Bannon told me afterward. In January 2023, he had been “setting the trap.” Now he was executing on his vision. Gaetz had ushered in a new “minoritarian vanguardism,” Bannon told me, proudly. “They’ll teach this in textbooks.”

Rather than cowing him, the allegations seemed to give Gaetz a burst of vengeful energy. (Photograph by Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Gaetz has options going forward. If the former president is reelected in November, Gaetz “could very easily serve in the Trump administration,” Charles Johnson told me. But most people think Gaetz’s next move is obvious: He’ll leave Congress and run for governor of Florida in 2026. Even though he’s publicly denied his interest in the job, privately, Gaetz appears to have made his intentions known. “I am 100 percent confident that that is his plan,” one former Florida Republican leader told me. Gaetz looks to be on cruise control until then, committed to making moves that will please the MAGA base and set him up for success in two years.

The Republican field in Florida is full of potential gubernatorial primary candidates. Possible rivals for Gaetz include Representative Byron Donalds, state Attorney General Ashley Moody, and even Casey DeSantis. But in Florida, Gaetz is more famous than all of them, and closer to the white-hot center of the MAGA movement. If he gets Trump’s endorsement, Gaetz could have a real shot at winning the primary and, ultimately, the governor’s mansion.

On October 24, Mike Johnson spoke at a press conference after being nominated for speaker. He hadn’t been elected yet, but everyone knew he had the votes. Flanked by grinning lawmakers from across the spectrum of his party—Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace—he promised a “new form of government” that would quickly kick into gear to serve the American people. Johnson’s colleagues applauded when he pledged to stand with Israel, and they booed together, jovially, when a reporter asked about Johnson’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Watching on my computer at home, I couldn’t find Gaetz right away. But then the C-SPAN camera zoomed out and there he was, in the back, behind cowboy-hat-wearing John Carter of Texas. I had to squint to see Gaetz. He looked small compared with the others, in his dark suit and slicked-back hair. Once, he stood on his tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the would-be speaker, several rows ahead.

Despite his very central role in Johnson’s rise, Gaetz had been relegated to the far reaches of the gathering, behind several of his colleagues who had strongly opposed removing McCarthy. But Gaetz didn’t seem to mind. He clapped with the rest of them, and even pumped his fist in celebration. Most of the time, his mouth was upturned in a slight smile. He was in the back now, but he wouldn’t be there long.

In the spring of 1825, Ludwig van Beethoven was struck by a gut ailment so severe that he thought he might die. That summer, after he recovered, he returned to the string quartet he’d been writing before his illness—Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132—and added a new segment inspired by his survival. To this day, the piece is known for the slowly unfolding, baffled joy of its third movement, where the music seems to trace the shuffling steps of an invalid breathing fresh air for the first time in weeks. Beethoven would call it Heiliger Dankgesang, a “holy song of thanksgiving.”

He wrote in the mornings when the light was good, on rag paper thick enough that he could scrape off mistakes with a knife. His handwriting was notoriously chaotic: He couldn’t draw a set of parallel lines if his life depended on it. The maestro is said to have used his pencil not only to write with, but also to feel the vibrations of his piano, pressing one end of the wooden rod to the instrument while holding the other end between his teeth. He was by now profoundly deaf; in less than two years, he would be dead.

Once he finished a composition, Beethoven would hand off the manuscript to a copyist, who’d write it all out again, this time legibly. After Beethoven corrected any mistakes the copyist made—berating the man the whole time—the score would go to a publishing house where, after more last-minute changes from the composer, an engraver would trace it, backwards, onto a copper sheet. From there, the score would be published and republished, appearing in largely the same form on music stands across the world even to this day.

But even discounting those final revisions, the Opus 132 that the world came to know was not exactly the Opus 132 that Beethoven handed to his copyist. The composer littered his original score with unusual markings that the copyist simply ignored. Below one staff, for example, Beethoven jotted “ffmo”—a tag that wasn't a standard part of musical notation, and wasn't used by any other major composer. In another place, he drew an odd shape like an elongated diamond, also a nonstandard notation. None of these marks made it into even the first clean copy, let alone the published version. Almost no one would see those marks in the roughly 200 years after Beethoven first scribbled them down.

Then, one evening in 2013, the violinist Nicholas Kitchen was in New Mexico coaching a quartet through Opus 132. Kitchen is a man of obsessions; one of them is playing from a composer’s original handwritten manuscripts, rather than printed music, so he had a facsimile edition on hand. The errant “ffmo” caught the eye of the quartet’s cellist. “What’s this?” she asked.

As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted; later, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.

For most of the past two centuries, Beethoven’s original handwritten manuscripts have been difficult, if not impossible, for musicians to access. Few could afford a trip to view them at archives in Vienna or Berlin, and facsimile editions were prohibitively expensive. Scholars hadn’t bothered taking a look: By the time musicology arose as a discipline, Beethoven was seen as passé, says Lewis Lockwood, a Harvard professor emeritus and co-director of the Boston University Center for Beethoven Research. “There is no army of Beethoven scholars,” Lockwood told me. “It’s a tiny field … terra incognita.”

Kitchen is not a scholar. A boyish 57-year-old with a shock of bushy white hair, he’s a working musician and a faculty member at New England Conservatory, where my parents also taught. The Boston classical-music world is a small one—almost everyone I interviewed for this story is friendly with my violist mother and pianist father—and Kitchen is well known and well respected in those circles. Prior to reporting this story, I’d heard him perform with his quartet many times, although I didn’t know him personally.

That said, I was aware that Kitchen had a bit of a reputation as, if not an eccentric, at least an enthusiastic innovator. Around 2007 he persuaded the ensemble he co-founded, the Borromeo Quartet, to play from full scores instead of parts, because he felt it enriched the performance. A full score doesn’t fit on a music stand, so the group was among the first to play from laptops, and later iPads, in performance.

Around the same time, scans of Beethoven manuscripts began to appear on a wiki site for musicians called the International Music Score Library Project. The only thing better than playing from a full score, Kitchen believed, was playing from a handwritten original full score—the closest glimpse possible of the composer’s working mind. “Just by reading the manuscript, you are instantly exposed to an archaeology of ideas,” Kitchen told me. “You’re tracing what was crossed out—an option tried and not used, one tried and refused, then brought back—all these processes that are instantly visible.”

The more Kitchen played directly from Beethoven’s chaotic handwriting, the more anomalous notations he found. Initially, Kitchen didn’t know what to make of them. “My first thought was, ‘Well, it may be the equivalent of a doodle,’” he said. But once he began to study Beethoven’s scores more systematically, he realized just how prevalent—and how consistent—many of these strange markings were across the composer’s 25 years of work.

Kitchen began to develop a theory about what he was seeing. The marks mostly seemed to concern intensity. Some appeared to indicate extra forcefulness: Beethoven used the standard f and ff for forte, “loud,” and fortissimo, “very loud,” but also sometimes wrote ffmo or fff. He occasionally underlined the standard p or pp for piano and pianissimo, “soft” and “very soft,” as if emphasizing them.

Kitchen would eventually identify 23 degrees of dynamics (and counting), from fff—thunderous—to ppp—a whisper. He found four kinds of staccato, two kinds of dynamic swells, marks to indicate different ways of grouping notes together, marks to reinforce crescendos and diminuendos. Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to “living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,” an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression—and thus emotion—in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries.

Whenever people have tried to invent a way of writing music down, the solution has been imperfect. Jewish, Vedic, Buddhist, and Christian traditions all searched for ways to keep sacred melodies from mutating over time; each ended up inventing a set of symbols for different musical phrases, which worked as long as you already knew all the phrases. Other cultures evolved away from notation. In classical Indian music, for example, every soloist’s performance is meant to be improvised and unrepeatable.

In Europe, however, musical values began to emphasize not spontaneity but polyphony: ever more complex harmony and counterpoint performed by ever larger ensembles. For these ensembles to play together, they needed some kind of visual graph to coordinate who plays what when. The result evolved into the notation system in global use today—an extraordinarily lossless information-compression technology, unique in its capacity to precisely record even music that has never been played, only imagined. Orchestras in Beethoven’s time, as well as now, needed only the score to play something remarkably similar to what the composer heard in their mind. It’s as close as humans have come, perhaps, to telepathy.

By Beethoven’s time, composers had developed ways to communicate not just pitch, duration, and tempo, but the emotion they wanted their music to evoke. Dynamic markings shaped like hairpins indicated when the music should swell and when it should ebb. A corpus of Italian words such as andante, dolce, and vivace became technical terms to guide the musician’s performance. The effect was a lot like the old religious systems: If you already knew how andante was supposed to sound, then you knew how to play something marked andante. But compared with the rest of the notation system, such descriptions are subjective. How passionate is appassionato, exactly?

Someone like Beethoven, a man of extreme moods, might very well have chafed against these restraints. It’s not a stretch to conclude, as Kitchen has, that Beethoven would feel the need to invent a method of more perfectly conveying how he intended his music to be played.

But whether Kitchen is correct remains up for debate. Jonathan Del Mar, a Beethoven scholar who has worked extensively with the composer’s manuscripts, told me in an email that any anomalous marks in Beethoven’s manuscripts were merely “cosmetic variants” of standard notations. Beethoven was a stickler for precision, Del Mar explained, especially when it came to his music, and if he’d cared about these marks, he would have made sure they appeared in the published versions. “I am absolutely convinced that, indeed, no difference of meaning was intended,” Del Mar wrote.

Jeremy Yudkin, Lockwood’s co-director at the Center for Beethoven Studies, also initially viewed Kitchen with skepticism. “When I first talked to him, I thought he was nuts,” Yudkin told me. But Kitchen’s close and careful research won him over. Yudkin now believes that Kitchen has discovered a previously unknown layer of meaning in Beethoven’s manuscripts: “There are gradations of expression, a vast spectrum of expression, that music scholars and performers ought to take into account,” he said.

As to why the marks never made it into the composer’s printed scores, Yudkin thinks Beethoven may have accepted that his large personal vocabulary of symbols and abbreviations wouldn’t be easily deciphered by others. Perhaps, Yudkin suggested, he included the marks in his manuscripts simply for his own satisfaction. “You put things in a diary,” Yudkin said, because it yields “a mental satisfaction and emotional satisfaction in being able to express what it is that you feel. And no one else has to see it.”

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Over the past few years, Kitchen and the Borromeo Quartet have presented a series of Beethoven concerts prefaced by brief lectures on his findings, but other than that, and his presentations at BU, he hasn’t spent much time sharing his ideas with the world. Instead, he’s been preparing his own set of Beethoven scores that will include all the marks left out of earlier editions. He wants other musicians to be able to see them easily, without needing to decipher Beethoven’s scrawl. “And then,” he said, “people can argue about all those things as much as they want.”

As I was working on this story, I asked my father, the pianist, why he thought Western notation had developed to such specificity, even before Beethoven’s time. He told me he thought it was because of a change in composers’ perspective: Where before they’d been composing anonymously for the Church, as music became more secular, composers’ names became more prominent. “They started to think about how people would play their work after their deaths,” he said.

For Kitchen, that’s precisely the point of studying Beethoven’s markings. If written notation can encode music, he told me, music can encode human feelings. Therefore, written music can actually transplant “a living emotion” from one mind to another. It’s not just telepathy: Music allows a sliver of immortality.

At this point, Kitchen believes he knows the code well enough that he can hear it in music. Once, at a concert in Hong Kong, he was listening to a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57—the “Appassionata.” He noticed an unstable chord that seemed especially ominous and unsettling—the kind of quiet but emotionally powerful moment that Beethoven often noted with one of his bespoke abbreviations.

“I said, ‘I bet you that’s a two-line pianissimo,’” Kitchen recalled. After the performance, he checked. Sure enough: Scrawled below the disconcerting bass note troubling the otherwise serene chord, Beethoven had written a double-underlined pp. Two hundred years later, maybe Kitchen finally understood exactly what he’d meant.