EXCERPT
The Weirdness of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s Reluctant Leader
The head of the National Rifle Association can’t shoot, can’t schmooze, and has the “backbone of a chocolate eclair,” says a former board member—yet commands one of the most influential right-wing organizations in politics. In his new book, Misfire, Tim Mak outlines LaPierre’s fall upward.
“Where the fuck is Wayne?”
It’s a question that everyone close to Wayne LaPierre has asked from time to time. The answer is usually “I have no idea,” followed by another series of profanities. The bookish NRA executive has a habit of disappearing in times of stress. But this question, this Saturday in the late summer of 1998, was different. It was his wedding day, and he was missing at the worst time. Wayne had gotten cold feet.
Wayne’s conduct in the time leading up to his wedding with Susan was, to any outside observer, absolutely humiliating. He scurried around, according to a witness, nervously polling anyone he ran into about whether he should go through with it. He asked his staff. He asked a secretary. He asked his friends. To anyone watching, it was clear he was looking for a way out of a wedding that he had felt pressured into by the bride. According to two close friends of Wayne’s, Susan had sent out the invitations for the wedding without telling him.
When Wayne was finally found on the day of the wedding, he said he didn’t want to get married. The best man honored that by placing a single, crisp hundred-dollar bill on the dashboard of his car, a Jeep Wagoneer. With the engine running, Wayne’s best man told him they could leave whenever he wanted. The best man later recounted to friends that he offered to drive Wayne away.
But Wayne was ultimately persuaded not to leave by Susan and the priest. Wayne was a remarkably weak-willed man, friends said, and could be counted on to yield to any demand if it was issued strenuously and loudly enough. This in itself might not have been so consequential if he hadn’t risen to head what would become a $400-million-a-year firearm advocacy organization.
Wayne Robert LaPierre Jr. was born in 1949 in Schenectady, New York, but was raised in Roanoke, Virginia, in a firearm-free household. Raised Catholic, he graduated from Patrick Henry High School and attended the Roman Catholic Siena College, his father’s alma mater.
While Vietnam War protests raged on college campuses, Wayne landed an internship with a New York state legislator. He managed to avoid the military draft while in college through a student deferment. He also later received a medical deferment—the same categorization as Donald Trump’s—although the exact reason for this is unknown.
Wayne is an awkward egghead type, and it’s not hard to imagine that with a few different twists of fate he would have ended up as a college professor teaching political science, rather than rising to become one of the nation’s most controversial gun rights advocates. He had a soft spot for children and was employed as a substitute special education teacher in Troy, New York, with poor and developmentally disabled students. In 1973 he started a Ph.D. at Boston University but dropped out to help a Democrat run for the Virginia state legislature; a few years later he received an M.A. in political science from Boston College.
His professorial demeanor is not well suited for leadership of a massive, powerful organization. He is easily bullied and doesn’t have the ability to make firm commitments, or to keep his promises once he makes them. Perhaps the best description came from former NRA board member Wayne Anthony Ross, who said that Wayne had the “backbone of a chocolate eclair.”
He has no core and has a reputation for never being able to say no, especially to the wrong people, NRA insiders said. He disdains the stresses of controversy—internal intrigue most of all—but by being unable to grow a spine and turn down bad ideas, he ends up causing a substantial portion of the drama inside the NRA described in this book. NRA insiders used to joke that even if you came into Wayne’s office with a red nose and big rubber shoes, you could get him to approve an expenditure if you pressured him enough. In other words: if you could get in to see him, you could eventually get him to write a check. Wayne could never deliver critical news, and if it was absolutely necessary to do so, he would designate someone else to do it—then panic later over whether it was the right decision.
If he had not been a professor or an academic, there’s a chance that his life could have led him to another passion: confections. He’s expressed numerous times to friends that he would like nothing more than to retire and open up an ice-cream shop in New England. His heart was never really that much into gun rights advocacy. In 1995, four years into his role as the top leader at the NRA, he told the Los Angeles Times that the job was all-consuming, that he didn’t want to live this sort of life, and that he couldn’t wait to move to northern Maine to open up his ice-cream shop. “Your life goes by,” he mused. A quarter century later, he still holds the top role at the NRA, but ice cream remains in the background: when the New York attorney general’s office probed his expenses, investigators found that Wayne spent substantial amounts of money sending friends Graeter’s ice cream for Christmas, all on his nonprofit organization’s dime.
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Originally a Democrat, like a substantial portion of the National Rifle Association’s longest-serving staff, Wayne was active with the Roanoke Democrats in college but declined a job offer from the office of Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Instead, he got a job at the NRA. The NRA building at the time was right across the street from the Democratic National Committee, and so he walked right in and ran into some staff that he knew from his work in politics. They were looking for a Democratic lobbyist, so he signed on right away.
Wayne is a clumsy, meek, spastic man with a weak handshake, those who know him personally say. When he first started at the NRA, he was known for his wrinkled suits and detached gaze. Yet he was repeatedly promoted despite displaying no sense of professional ambition or charisma. After starting as a state-level lobbyist in 1978, he was promoted to head the state-level lobbying department in 1979 and then to direct the NRA’s federal lobbying the next year.
It was like pulling teeth to get him to take a promotion, said John Aquilino, the NRA staffer who helped hire Wayne in the 1970s. “I’ve talked people out of murder, and this was harder,” Aquilino said, recalling when he approached Wayne to head up the NRA’s federal lobbying department. “Gee, I don’t know,” Wayne replied. It was only through reverse psychology that Aquilino was able to get him to agree: after Aquilino told Wayne not to worry about the promotion after all, Wayne was a lot more interested in the role.
His contemporaries describe him as a skilled lobbyist and strategic thinker, if a bit odd and absentminded. While a lobbyist on Capitol Hill in the 1980s, he earned the nickname “Shoes” because he wore black Florsheim wingtips, unpolished and noticeably scuffed. He paid no attention to his clothing, wearing nondescript, rumpled pin-striped suits. But he managed to cajole lawmakers, and he became good at it. This was true even though he didn’t partake in the Washington, D.C. hobby of drinking alcohol, aside from an occasional sip of champagne. Wayne would sip on soft drinks and buy members of Congress liquor—and was never ostracized for not taking part.
The stories of Wayne’s inattentive personality are plentiful. He had a habit of utterly disassociating from the world around him and was allergic to practicality. In the 1990s, Aquilino ran into his former subordinate at Reagan National Airport, near D.C. Wayne was sitting on the floor, his head in his hands, totally overwhelmed. He had lost his itinerary, or he had been insufficiently informed about what it was, and had no idea what he was doing or how to fix the problem.
During that same decade, LaPierre slept in and missed a golf outing with former vice president Dan Quayle—a pretty important meeting for an NRA lobbyist. Wayne’s excuse for missing it was not very good: he wasn’t aware of the makeup of the golf foursome. “Quayle gets out there and he starts walking around the cart . . . going, ‘Where’s Wayne?’” LaPierre recalled later in an interview.
In the early 1990s, Wayne’s house was burglarized. The local police called NRA headquarters to inform him. Wayne wasn’t there at the time, so his staff took a message. When he arrived at the office, he was told to urgently call the police about the burglary at his home. “That’s funny,” Wayne said. “I was just there. I didn’t notice a thing.”
One joke told in NRA circles was that you would only be able to make eye contact with him if you lay on the floor while the two of you were talking. In social settings, the same scatterbrained Wayne would emerge. He would almost begin to automate his interactions in crowds: “Hi. I’m Wayne LaPierre,” he repeatedly told guests at one function, and continued this even when he came across his longtime associate Chris Cox, the head of the NRA’s lobbying arm. They had known each other since the ‘90s. “Hi. I’m Wayne LaPierre!” Wayne said. Cox responded in consternation, “Wayne, what are you talking about?”
Wayne also has an obsessive personality when it comes to documenting the world around him. He doesn’t take notes on any electronic devices but instead always carries four colored Sharpies and yellow legal pads. He scribbles constantly during meetings, using a color-coded system that only he can decipher. The terrible handwriting further obfuscates the meaning of the notes. “It was when he was in conversation and thinking,” a Wayne associate said. “I think for him, writing like that . . . that helped him think.” The practice grew so cumbersome that Wayne would carry a roller duffle bag, the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, specifically to carry the pads, and pull out different pads depending on the topic.
Wayne has a history of hoarding everything: he would attend political events and leave with a stack of notes, agenda items, and brochures. When Wayne was the head of the NRA’s federal lobbying team, Aquilino once emerged into the office’s lobby to find a long line of pads and congressional publications lining the floor from the elevator, through the lobby, to the curb. Wayne had rushed to a car and had been oblivious to the fact that he was leaving a trail of documents behind him.
Wayne’s note-taking habit led to voluminous stacks of yellow legal pads. He once had an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, that appeared to be largely for his collection: filled with boxes, legal pads, and writing utensils—a collection of all the things he took out of his office and dumped there. It wasn’t clear whether he ever lived there, or it was just a place to accumulate mail and papers.
He no longer has that apartment. His garage at his home in Virginia was once stuffed with these pads, filling up to fifteen bins, often organized by year. In a room near his NRA HQ office, yet more yellow pads were stacked up between his desk and the executive bathroom, in a pile approximately four and a half feet tall and six feet wide—yet he had the uncanny ability to find precisely what he was looking for in those messy stacks. The various government investigators looking into his conduct may have been stymied by this cumbersome system.
“It’s kind of my own shorthand. It’s hard to read if you’re not me, but I can read it,” Wayne once said when questioned by lawyers. “I used to keep them in my house. . . . They’re all with the attorneys now.”
He doesn’t use computers at all, and doesn’t text as a means of communication. Rather than read emails, he would have his staff compile printouts of clippings and messages that might interest him. He was stuck in the analog age.
Wayne would be spotted far more often with his legal pads than with a pistol. He looks at guns through the lens of politics—as a political junkie, not as a lover of firearms. Some gun aficionados love the way it sounds when a rifle’s charging handle is released, allowing the bolt carrier to slide forward with a metallic clang. Wayne’s not the type to notice that kind of thing. He couldn’t care less about the technicalities or features of guns, and when given the choice would far prefer to sit quietly in a gazebo than take aim on an outdoor firing range.
This was obvious from the start. In the early 1980s, after Wayne had already been at the NRA for several years, his boss, the prominent gun rights activist Neal Knox, offered to take him skeet shooting near Damascus, Maryland. Wayne showed up with an embarrassing, poorly maintained single-barreled shotgun, not fit for use. Visible rust coated the outside. The older Knox condescendingly examined the offending firearm, popped the hood of his 1978 Cadillac Seville, and swiped some oil from the dipstick to lubricate the shotgun and improve its general appearance. As a lobbyist at the NRA Wayne would have been able to get a decent shotgun; he just never cared enough to do it, or to take care of the one he had. He was just not a gun guy, those that know him say.
Stories about his dangerous gun-handling behavior have become NRA lore. An old joke circulated around NRA HQ: “The safest place you could be when Wayne had a gun was between Wayne and the target.” Staff described ducking and weaving during a video shoot because Wayne was waving the muzzle of his rifle around carelessly. When an engineer called for a sound check, Wayne swung his rifle around with him, pointing it directly at the engineer. Alarmed at his lack of muzzle awareness, someone hurriedly confiscated his weapon. The anecdote evolved into yet another joke: those who underperformed at work were told they might have to “go hunting with Wayne.”
During one hunting trip in Africa, Wayne illustrated his general incompetence with firearms. Video later leaked to The New Yorker showed this had cruel consequences. While tracking African bush elephants in 2013, he shot and wounded one of the large mammals, sending it crashing to the ground. “All right.” He exhaled nervously. Approaching to close range, he attempted three times to fire a fatal round into the elephant, per his guide’s suggestions. He missed the intended target all three times, drawing a chuckle from the guide. Wayne’s friend had to step in to deal the final blow. As they surveyed the carcass, the guide said, “I didn’t think you were going to shoot, because I was telling you to wait. Maybe you didn’t hear me with those earplugs,” Wayne replied, “You said ‘wait’? Oh, I didn’t hear you.” Throughout the video, Wayne appeared edgy, tense and anxious—far from the competent outdoorsman image he had tried to convey to the public.
For all his flaws, he had remarkably few vices aside from ice cream. He didn’t smoke, drink, or chase women who were not his wife. When news circulated in 2019 that the NRA had paid for the apartment of a young female intern who worked with him, online gun forums lit up with speculation of a lurid affair. Wayne’s not the type. Not only is he not lecherous, but those who interact with him get the sense he doesn’t like to touch people at all.
When his associates learned that he was dating Susan, who would become his second wife, the first reaction was one of shock. Many hadn’t even been aware that he’d been married before. “He’s just asexual—you know, like an amoeba,” was how one NRA lobbyist who worked with Wayne described him.
“Holy shit—Wayne knows an attractive girl? I thought he was a eunuch,” Aquilino said, describing his reaction at the time. “I never thought of him having normal urges that humans have.”
From
Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA by Tim Mak with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Tim Mak.
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