Pete Buttigieg

Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg ( born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former naval officer who is currently serving as the 19th United States Secretary of Transportation.

Pete Buttigieg, the only child of Jennifer Anne (Montgomery) and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II, was born on January 19, 1982, in South Bend, Indiana.

His mother uses the name Anne Montgomery.

His parents met and married while employed as faculty at New Mexico State University.

His father was born in Hamrun, Malta, and emigrated to the United States to pursue his doctorate.

Buttigieg's father embarked on a career as a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame near South Bend.

Buttigieg's mother also taught at the University of Notre Dame for 29 years.

His father was a translator and editor of the three-volume English edition of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and influenced his pursuit of literature in college.

Buttigieg was valedictorian of the class of 2000 at St.Joseph High School in South Bend.

That year, he won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's Profiles in Courage essay contest.

He traveled to Boston to accept the award and met Caroline Kennedy and other members of President Kennedy's family.

The subject of his winning essay was the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of only two independent politicians in Congress.

In 2000, Buttigieg was also chosen as one of two student delegates from Indiana to the United States Senate Youth Program, an annual scholarship competition sponsored jointly by the U.S. Senate and the Hearst Foundations.

After graduating from St. Joseph High School, Buttigieg attended Harvard University, where he majored in history and literature.

He became president of the Student Advisory Committee of the Harvard Institute of Politics and worked on the institute's annual study of youth attitudes on politics.

He wrote his undergraduate thesis, titled The Quiet American's Errand into the Wilderness, on the influence of Puritanism on U.S. foreign policy as reflected in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American.

He also interned for Democrat Jill Long Thompson during her unsuccessful 2002 congressional bid.

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2004, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Buttigieg was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford.

After college, Buttigieg worked on John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign as a policy and research specialist for several months in Arizona and New Mexico.

In 2007, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics, and economics after studying at Pembroke College, Oxford.

At Oxford, he was an editor of the Oxford International Review, and was a co-founder and member of the Democratic Renaissance Project, an informal debate and discussion group of approximately a dozen Oxford students.

Before graduating from college, Buttigieg was an investigative intern at WMAQ-TV, Chicago's NBC News affiliate.

From 2009 to 2017, he was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant.

Before being elected as mayor of South Bend in 2011, Buttigieg worked on the political campaigns of Democrats Jill Long Thompson, Joe Donnelly, and John Kerry, and ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for Indiana state treasurer in 2010.

A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020, which earned him the nickname "Mayor Pete".

Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford, attending the latter on a Rhodes Scholarship.

He was mobilized and deployed to the War in Afghanistan for seven months in 2014.

While serving as South Bend's mayor, Buttigieg came out as gay in 2015.

He married Chasten Glezman, a schoolteacher and writer, in June 2018.

Buttigieg declined to seek a third term as mayor.

Buttigieg ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, launching his campaign for the 2020 United States presidential election on April 14, 2019.

He became one of the first openly gay men to launch a major party presidential campaign.

Despite initially low expectations, he gained significant momentum in mid-2019 when he participated in several town hall meetings and television debates.

Buttigieg narrowly won the Iowa caucuses and placed a close second in the New Hampshire primary.

By winning Iowa, he became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus.

Buttigieg dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day.

President-elect Biden named Buttigieg as his nominee for Secretary of Transportation in December 2020.

His nomination was confirmed on February 2, 2021, by a vote of 86–13, making him the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

Nominated at age 38, he is also the youngest Cabinet member in the Biden administration and the youngest person ever to serve as Secretary of Transportation.