WaPo | One month before his suicide, Tom Schweich announced that he was
running for governor. He looked pale and tired, with dark crescents
under his eyes, but he spoke with precision and force. He told
supporters he had learned to fight liberals by attending Harvard and
Yale, to fight corruption by serving as state auditor, and to fight
terrorism by serving the U.S. government in Afghanistan.
“At the
State Department, I negotiated with everybody from Chinese bureaucrats
to Afghan warlords,” he said. “And I’ll tell you: Negotiating with
Afghan warlords was really good practice for Missouri politics.”
On
the morning of Feb. 26, Schweich put a .22-caliber handgun to his left
temple and pulled the trigger. He left behind a wife, two children and a
Missouri Republican Party divided over the meaning of his death.
Four weeks later, Schweich’s loyal spokesman, Spence Jackson,
also fatally shot himself. The two suicides stunned political observers
far beyond Missouri’s borders and drew attention to the darkest
undercurrent of a race that had quickly turned nasty: allegations that
one of Schweich’s GOP rivals had made an insidious appeal to
anti-Semitism.
The rival denied the charge, and a police report
released this week found little evidence of a sustained campaign. But
Schweich’s friends insist that the whispered bigotry was real and that
it devastated the emotionally fragile Schweich
— who, the report said, had threatened suicide in the past. As the
governor’s race continues without him, his death has sparked a debate in
Missouri over the ugliness and innuendo that pervade modern politics.
