<p>By John Krull TheStatehouseFile.com INDIANAPOLIS – Andrea Neal didn’t plan to write a book about Mike Pence. Neal, a longtime teacher and veteran journalist, talks with me over the air about how her new biography, “Pence: The Path to Power,” came to be. Neal says she was driving in her car when she received a […]</p>
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<p>INDIANAPOLIS – Andrea Neal didn’t plan to write a book about Mike Pence.</p>
<p>Neal, a longtime teacher and veteran journalist, talks with me over the air about how her new biography, “Pence: The Path to Power,” came to be.</p>
<p>Neal says she was driving in her car when she received a call from an editor with Indiana University Press. The editor asked if Neal would be interested in doing a biography about a famous Hoosier.</p>
<p>Neal said yes and suggested figures prominent in Indiana history, most of them from the 19<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>The editor said they already had someone in mind.</p>
<p>Pence.</p>
<p>The controversial former Indiana governor and current vice president of the United States.</p>
<p>At first, Neal says, she had her doubts.</p>
<p>She didn’t know if she wanted to write the life story of someone still living, particularly one who is such a lightning rod. She thought it might be hard to craft the story when one doesn’t know the ending. And time and distance have a way of quieting the noise that accompanies present controversies, allowing for more thoughtful analysis.</p>
<p>She debated the question with herself for 10 days.</p>
<p>Then said yes.</p>
<p>The result is a look at Mike Pence’s rise to prominence that is as close as we will get to his view of his climb until he writes his own memoirs. Although Neal did not talk with the vice president for the book, she did interview at length many of his longtime intimates, quite a few of whom offer penetrating insights into the man who describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”</p>
<p>The portrait that emerges of the man is more complicated than that.</p>
<p>Neal traces Pence’s fascination with politics, a near-obsession that developed early, almost from the time he could walk. She also establishes that the vice president has a mind of more intellectual heft than many perceive. He is a man well-grounded in conservative and libertarian thought and research.</p>
<p>The most fascinating parts of the book are the sections in which Pence struggles to serve two masters — his religious faith and his political ambition.</p>
<p>Pence presents himself as a man whose actions always are dictated by his faith. His critics call that nonsense and accuse him, often and loudly, of hypocrisy.</p>
<p>The truth, as it almost always is, is messier than either easy interpretation.</p>
<p>Neal wrestles with Pence’s contradictions — his fierce condemnations of Bill Clinton and a female Air Force general for committing adultery and his cooing reassurances to President Donald Trump for the same transgressions, with both the condemnation and the reassurance being offered in the name of faith — without really resolving them.</p>
<p>Perhaps that is because no resolution is possible.</p>
<p>Neal speaks both over the air and in the book of Pence’s ambition and of his faith. She is convinced — and convinces the reader in her book — that both are genuine.</p>
<p>To make these two powerful forces cohabitate within one human heart, Pence finds ways to make them malleable. There are times his religious convictions bend to the dictates of his political career. There also are times his political ambitions take a back seat to the dictates of his conscience.</p>
<p>His admirers see this pattern as evidence he is a man of faith skilled at adapting that faith to meet worldly challenges. His detractors see the same things and call him a career politician adept at rationalization.</p>
<p>This dichotomy plays out in the calls and notes that come in from listeners.</p>
<p>One caller, his voice quivering with anger, calls Pence a hypocrite. Another says he has no doubt about the vice president’s faith and moral convictions.</p>
<p>I ask Neal if it was difficult to tell the story of a person who provokes such strong reactions. When it comes to Mike Pence, it seems there is no middle ground.</p>
<p>She says she worked not to get caught up in the drama, but just to tell the story as it unfolded.</p>
<p>It’s the story of Mike Pence, a figure who is neither monster nor savior.</p>
<p>It’s the story of a man, flawed in some ways, favored in others, who has made an improbable climb.</p>
<p>But is still just a man.</p>
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