Sen. Fetterman’s memoir tries to beef up the case for Fettermania

By Oliver Bateman
Real Clear Wire

Hulking Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman’s memoir is equal parts confession, campaign text, and brand maintenance. It beefs up the public story that has carried this biggest of big boys through a string of against-all-odds wins, while also revealing a fragile private narrative about shame, size, and survival. Read skeptically, "Unfettered" clarifies why his pro wrestling sideshow act plays in a purple state. He remains a Democrat who breaks with the tribe when it suits him, a politician who dresses like a trucker and talks like a union steward one day only to vote like a centrist the next, a child of eastern privilege whose “working-class” persona infuriates critics yet continues to resonate across the divides that matter in down-at-the-heels places like Pittsburgh.

Fetterman opens with that huge body of his. He is “six foot eight,” which makes him “the second tallest senator in American history” — and the tallest ever elected by a popular vote, because 6’9” former Alabama U.S. Sen. Luther “Big Bunny” Strange was appointed to the position — with ears that “stick out like the flaps of a jet wing.” His circus tent-sized hoodie-and-shorts uniform is presented not as costume but as armor for someone who distrusts rooms where the suit signals rank and good manners. 

The Senate dress-code episode related to this lowbrow garb — one of the more trivial storms in the exceedingly trivial history of modern politics — gets a full recounting. He acknowledges the controversy and describes how on September 27, 2023, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution formalizing a dress code after the backlash over his slovenly attire, an outcome he presents with a comedic shrug and a note that voters had more pressing concerns. He claims his initial motive was practical: he wanted to make a flight, needed to wear comfortable clothing (men of such brobdingnagian size desire comfort above all), and disliked changing. The more Washington insiders fulminated over his common-slob outfit, the more he reduced the entire spasm to a joke about shorts and sanctimony.

Under the performance we learn about a childhood that sounds, at times, bleak. He writes of being tall early, isolated, bullied, and ashamed. He lingers on the old humiliations — no Valentines, the retreat to the library, a list rating boys’ looks that gave him a “two” — as groundwork for the adult depression that has haunted him. 

Football arrives late and reframes him, though he was anything but a gridiron star. In fact, he did not play until junior year of high school, took a beating, then hit the weight room, soon posting some very respectable powerlifting numbers, and landed a starting job. At Division III Albright College, he became no. 79 on the Lions’ offensive line, “legendary for my quickness,” with a coach’s deadpan compliment — “Fetterman, you have deceptive speed. You’re slower than you look” — that the ex-jock in him quotes with evident relish. The story of his solid but largely unremarkable sports career gives him a classic American locker-room origin — it’s reminiscent of Richard Nixon playing ball at Whittier College or Ronald Reagan at Eureka College — and it sketches the habits he later uses as a candidate: accept pain, rise, repeat. It also sharpens a recurring theme in the book: loyalty, bordering on obsession. He is “the Jolly Green Giant type” until the team’s honor is threatened and he desperately wants readers to believe this is still his operative principle.

The Braddock chapters try to settle the most persistent argument about Fetterman’s authenticity. A carpetbagger from the eastern part of the state, Fetterman recounts moving into the basement of an abandoned church in the rusted-out mill town around 2001, living with “no sustained heat,” cheap lamps, ice in the toilet on winter mornings, and Taco Bell for dinner. He presents this not as larp or cosplay but as service. He adds a family portrait to defuse the “trust-fund baby” label, describing a solidly middle-class upbringing in York, Pennsylvania: a well-off but grounded insurance company owner father who was “exceedingly generous,” and parental help that continued while he later tried to build something in a town that had been forgotten. 

Still, Fetterman has long drawn the charge from me and others that his look, his tattoos, and even the Levi’s “Ready to Work” campaign that pumped money into Braddock added up to an aesthetic more than an accomplishment. Fetterman addresses the Levi’s grant directly, credits a roughly $1 million pledge, and says he never took a salary from his nonprofit, Braddock Redux. He also admits locals sometimes saw him as a white outsider (the 1,600-person town is 75% black) with a gentrifier’s gaze. Outside reporting over the years noted how few households actually moved in and treated the Braddock revival as more press than progress. His account certainly does not rebut that record, but it situates his decisions in the violence of the place as he experienced it.

Violence is everywhere in the Braddock material. He memorializes victims with forearm ink and returns to the night a pizza delivery man, Christopher Williams, was killed shortly after Fetterman became mayor. Williams had gotten married three months earlier and was delivering pizzas to make extra money. The writing is at its best as he describes the senselessness of the killing, which led to his mayoral run, a limited-turnout contest he won by a single provisional ballot. This is how he wants the reader to think about his politics: born of grief, executed by grind. 

The 2013 “shotgun incident” appears as it must. Fetterman hears what he believes are shots; he sees someone in a ski mask running toward an elementary school; he calls 911, pursues the man, and prevents him from leaving until police arrive. The man is unarmed. Fetterman insists he never pointed the weapon at him but that he would do the same again. He later ties the episode to the onset of the depression that almost ended his Senate run years later. The rendering is vivid and wounded, but as a brief for those who have passed judgment on his conduct, it is unpersuasive.

The incident would return to haunt him in the 2022 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, when his opponents — straight-out-of-central-casting congressman Conor Lamb and far-left state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta — “seized on the incident” only to watch Fetterman’s poll numbers rose. The big man writes bitterly that they accused him “of racism (without directly saying it),” a charge he insists “they knew was false.” He refused to apologize, framing it as a choice between believing him or “the words of someone who, after the incident in question, held a woman at knifepoint and was convicted of kidnapping.” My relatives, many of whom had previously condemned him as a larping outsider, bought this story hook, line, and sinker. Lamb’s negative advertising turned those sons and daughters of the Washington County soil into dyed-in-the-wool Fettermaniacs. 

The Board of Pardons chapter covers his most substantive record in statewide office and his deepest clash with the Democratic establishment in Harrisburg. After toppling incumbent Democrat Mike Stack and winning a landslide election as lieutenant governor alongside Gov. Tom Wolf in 2018, Fetterman automatically became chairman of the state’s five-member Board of Pardons. There, he served alongside Josh Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s fast-rising attorney general. 

Fetterman describes how he and Shapiro “were mostly in sync” and “agreed far more than we disagreed” during their early months on the board. September 13, 2019, marked a breakthrough when nine inmates serving life without parole were recommended for release — more in one day than in the previous twenty-four years. But the exceptions proved defining. Where Fetterman believed in second chances and was “willing to stake my political career on it,” he writes that “Shapiro was far more cautious, and at a certain point, I began to think that what was influencing him was not mere caution but political ambition.”

The charge is direct: Fetterman believes Shapiro’s reluctance to support commutations stemmed “not [from] the facts of a given case as much as a fear that someone whose sentence he’d commuted would go on to commit terrible violence on the outside.”

The breaking point came with the Horton brothers case in December 2019. Dennis and Lee Horton had served twenty-seven years for a murder they maintained they didn’t commit. The Department of Corrections called them “the best inmates we have out of thousands,” the Philadelphia DA supported their release, and the warden said he’d take them to dinner if freed. Yet they were initially voted down. When their case came up for reconsideration in September 2020, Shapiro wanted to delay the vote, citing missing trial transcripts. Fetterman exploded, calling Shapiro “a fucking asshole” on what he didn’t realize was still a hot mic. My relatives liked that, too. 

In a private meeting between hearings, Fetterman threw his weight around, delivering an ultimatum: if Shapiro didn’t change his vote on the Hortons, Fetterman would challenge him in the 2022 gubernatorial primary, forcing “a contested primary that would be draining and expensive.” By December 2020, Shapiro reversed course, voting for the Hortons’ commutation. “What caused Shapiro’s change of heart?” Fetterman asks. “Nothing new had come to light.”

The specter haunting their disagreement was Reginald McFadden, whose 1994 murder spree after commutation destroyed Bob Casey Sr. protege Mark Singel’s gubernatorial campaign and fundamentally changed Pennsylvania’s approach to pardons. Where Fetterman saw model prisoners who had served decades and posed no threat, Shapiro apparently saw these two Hortons as potential Willie Hortons — the recidivist Massachusetts murderer whose early release had launched a successful political campaigning career for Lee Atwater and likely cost early frontrunner Michael Dukakis the White House in 1988. Fetterman frames this as a philosophical divide about justice versus politics, writing that “the cordiality we had shown each other as we worked side by side turned into acrimony, and ultimately, confrontation” from which he and Shapiro “have never recovered.”

His treatment of the 2022 Senate campaign narrative is unsparing in those places that flatter him and defensive where it does not. He admits the post-stroke debate against Republican Mehmet Oz was a “debacle” — that’s not the half of it; it was worse than the performance that forced Joe Biden out of the presidential race two years later — but he attributes it partly to his stroke-impacted reliance on closed-caption technology and the cruelty of the media’s subsequent coverage. The better sections at least credit his critics for noticing what voters noticed on stage, while the weaker ones (i.e., most of them) re-litigate press grievances, particularly against NBC’s Dasha Burns, who had said that Fetterman appeared unable to understand basic small talk during their October 2022 interview. Still, when he writes about his convalescence and the cruel binary that social media demanded — ”vegetable” or “victim” — even readers like myself who thought he should have withdrawn recognize the cost.

Fetterman’s mental problems are at the heart of the book. He grudgingly names the depression that plagued him, admits he scoffed at therapy, and describes the moment he sat by the Rankin Bridge and considered ending his life. Later, after government-subsidized treatment in Walter Reed Medical Center, he returns to the bridge by bike and discovers that it is “just another bridge.” To his credit in this therapy-saturated society, he does not appear to confuse recovery with virtue.

What, then, of the “maverick” who can appeal to my swing-voting relatives as readily as to disaffected progressives who once cheered his Bernie Sanders-era affect? Fetterman, who was never actually a member of the Democratic Socialists of America despite members’ early interest in him, leans into aisle-crossing as a kind of Nicene creed for politics. He calls for more deals and fewer purity plays throughout the book. He was the first Democratic senator to demand crooked New Jersey U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez’s resignation after the indictment, a move that set his tone in the caucus as someone willing to draw blood at home. He supports Israel without apologies, down to draping himself in its flag, and accepts the left’s anger with a measure of good humor. He has hammered his party on border politics and backed elements of a GOP-favored approach. Those choices won him enemies where his earliest fans once lived and admirers — Fettermaniacs, if you will — in places Democrats rarely look for them.

This shift has a history. In 2016 he boasted that he was the only Pennsylvania Senate candidate backing Sanders. Local DSA activists and adjacent groups were part of the coalition that first pushed his name into statewide view, even if chapters later withheld formal endorsements. After October 7, and after his border talk hardened, the distance between that early coalition and the current senator became a chasm. The book recognizes the blowback and dismisses it, as he does whenever activists confront him: He simply repeats that he would rather keep his bargain with working-class voters who want a strong border and strong support for Israel than mollify the coalition that saw him as a vehicle for movement politics.

The puzzle is why the “fake working-class” charge has not sunk him with the voters who might take offense at fakery, as I always thought it would. The answer, I now realize, is buried in the polluted Braddock soil and then explored throughout this book: the man has presence. All 300-plus pounds of him were present in that ruined town when other reformers were not. He brawled it out on the Board of Pardons when he could have sought safer headlines. 

Authenticity, in his case, is not about his “rich-kid makes good by doing well” biography but instead by his proximity to the action. Voters in a post-industrial state like Pennsylvania judge “realness” by who shows up and who takes a punch, as Fetterman has dealt with the blows thrown at him by the betrayal of his big body. The voters’ instinct is not always accurate, and often it is gamed. In Fetterman’s case, some of it has also been earned. I’ve argued that “Fettermania” thrives because he breaks the normal rules and still feels familiar to swing voters who want a blunt instrument to use against decadence and drift. The memoir reinforces that reading.

Wife Gisele Fetterman’s brief first-person interlude is clear-eyed about her husband’s collapse, her frustration that he could not “simply pull himself up,” and the way a family absorbs a public health crisis. Her voice, perceived by many to be more progressive than his, serves as useful ballast. It keeps the book from turning into a monologue entirely about media mistreatment by offering a record of how a household survived a political year that would have crushed many families.

When the narrative turns to Washington, he says his preferred style does not fit the Senate. He is “not collegial,” still finding his way, still more comfortable as an advocate than as a glad-hander or “whip” for votes. He also describes unexpected kindnesses across the aisle, a reminder that public performance often conceals private decency, and he credits colleagues whose politics he does not share for reaching out when he was hospitalized. He will not sentimentalize the institution, but does not paint it as terminal.

The result is a complicated document. It is not a literary memoir, though its plain style suits its subject. It is not a policy book, though the sections on felony murder and pardons have weight. It is not pure campaign propaganda, though it is punctuated with lines that will appear in stump speeches. It is something more direct: a sustained case for a kind of politics that privileges presence, tolerates contradiction, and regards ideological policing as a luxury for safer times. Whether you share that view, the story is coherent. It explains how a man who once presented as a left-populist tribune could become one of the most outspoken pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate and still improve his standing with the voters who decide Pennsylvania. It also explains why early DSA-adjacent admirers now protest outside his offices, and why they will keep doing so.

None of this resolves the central question of “authenticity.” Fetterman’s working-class slouch, the hoodie, the tattoos for murder victims, the cargo shorts in winter while standing alongside President Biden, the studied profanity, the toe picking during an interview for a New York Magazine feature — every piece invites the charge that he knows exactly what he is doing. The book shows us that he has his reasons. If his outfit helps him get from one end of the day to the other and past his crippling depression, he will keep wearing it. You can call that fake if you like, but my uncle in Ellsworth would call it consistency. 

A final judgment on the book depends on a reader’s tolerance for the voice that Friday Night Lights bestselling author Buzz Bissinger helped him find. If you hear only sour grapes, you will put it down early. If you hear the struggle it took to get from contemplating suicide at the Rankin Bridge to “It’s just another bridge,” you may grant him the benefit of the doubt when he’s at his most pugnacious. Unfettered is a record of how he wound up where he is, why he is staying (and possibly even climbing higher), and what he has been willing to shed to keep his footing in a state that punishes wobble for partisan gain and rewards stubbornness (or spite) that can be spun as principle. It is, in that sense, an honest book.