When Nikki Haley acknowledged her depressing third-place defeat in the Iowa caucuses this month, the first person she thanked was nearly 8,000 miles away.
“I want to say to my husband, who is deployed and who I know may or may not be seeing this right now, Michael, I love you,” she said while standing in front of a row of American flags. “What keeps me up at night is that we sleep under the same stars.”
It was an unusually personal and almost sweet remark for a politician known for her tough exterior. But it was hardly out of place.
Even in his absence, Maj. Michael Haley, a National Guardsman volunteering for a year in Africa, has played an outsized role in his wife’s increasingly lonely attempt to wrest the Republican nomination from former President Donald J. Trump.
In almost every campaign speech, Ms. Haley describes her husband and his military career as one of her motivations for running. In her promises to improve health care for veterans, she often refers to his struggles after returning from a war zone. She suspects his work has influenced her foreign policy.
But despite this prominent position, Major Haley himself remains a blank slate. While other candidates’ spouses — with the notable exception of Melania Trump — traveled miles across Iowa and New Hampshire last year to humanize their other halves, he avoided the intense scrutiny as well as public speeches, photo ops and interviews that come with campaigns.
Those who know him say it’s just the way he likes it. Major Haley, a former foster child who met his wife at the age of 19, has since largely committed himself to her ambitions.
While her career marched upward, his career meandered; He worked for her parents and ran a difficult barter business before joining the military. He was recently involved in a casino deal and currently has an unclear role at a small defense contractor.
Until this year, he had always campaigned alongside her, although largely out of the spotlight.
“He’s completely comfortable with the rock that Nikki is leaning on in the background,” said Rob Godfrey, who worked as Ms. Haley’s spokeswoman during her two campaigns for governor of South Carolina and for most of her time in that office.
Major Haley rarely speaks to the news media and declined an interview request. When asked about his deployment in June, he told the Associated Press that he “can’t help but think of giving a year with my comrades, as many have done before me, to give a life to my family.” in freedom.” is worth everything that comes with it.”
Ms. Haley turned to her husband as a “touchstone for important questions” at key moments in her career, Mr. Godfrey said.
In the days after a racist gunman killed nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Ms. Haley, after consulting with Major Haley, decided to push for the removal of the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, Mr. Godfrey said .
“There was no question: Nikki wanted to talk to the person she trusted most about what to do,” Mr Godfrey said.
Major Haley’s politics appear to reflect his wife’s; In the past, he has occasionally used social media to criticize their political opponents or Democratic officials.
Friends describe him as a golfer, soccer fan and avid hunter who enjoys posting pictures of alligators he has killed. The couple’s son, Nalin, a college graduate, described his father as a joker and lover of “the typical dad jokes” in an interview with The New York Times.
His father watched every debate from Camp Lemonnier, the sprawling military base in Djibouti where he was stationed, Mr. Haley said, and he had a habit of turning photos of his family or his wife’s co-workers into memes that he shared online. “Sometimes they’re really funny, or they’re really bad,” he said. “There is no in-between.”
Major Haley, 53, didn’t have an easy start in life. His biological father was an alcoholic who had problems with the law. His earliest years were spent in Ohio, where he lived in a house that often had no electricity or running water, Ms. Haley wrote in her 2012 book “Can’t Is Not An Option.”
When he was three years old, his mother suffered a severe brain injury and Major Haley was placed in a nursing home with two of his sisters, while the two oldest siblings were placed in another home.
The next year, he and his younger sister Lee Anne were adopted by Bill and Carole Haley. Bill was the manager of a steel mill and Carole was a teacher. It would take Michael 15 years to locate the rest of his brothers and sisters, Ms. Haley wrote.
Major Haley met his future wife in college when she was a freshman studying accounting at Clemson University and he was enrolled at Anderson University, a small Christian school nearby.
At the time, Major Haley had the same first name as his adoptive father, Bill. But Ms. Haley recounts in her memoirs that shortly after their relationship began, she told him, “You just don’t look like a Bill.” She chose instead to call him by his middle name, Michael, and that stuck, she wrote.
The couple faced opposition from Ms. Haley’s parents, who are Sikh immigrants from India and wanted their daughter to marry someone of the same religion. But in 1996, two years after he proposed, they married in separate Sikh and Christian ceremonies and eventually settled in Lexington, SC
Both worked for their parents’ clothing company, Exotica International. Major Haley headed the men’s clothing department while Mrs. Haley was in charge of accounting. When she turned to politics, he invested in barter. As they raised their two children – Nalin has an older sister, Rena – the family business was struggling and money was tight.
In 2006, when Ms. Haley was a state representative for the first time, Major Haley graduated from college and soon joined the South Carolina Army National Guard as a 36-year-old lieutenant, older than most new officers.
The military provided him with a permanent position and a modest income. In 2007, he accepted a full-time position as a federal military technician, working in human resources on measures to promote diversity in the Guard and protect against discrimination based on race, gender or disability.
Major Haley remained in office when he became South Carolina’s first gentleman – the state’s first – in 2010, after an ugly election campaign in which Ms. Haley was forced to deny allegations of marital infidelity. He used his role to advocate for issues close to home — changes to adoption laws and veterans services — but largely focused on his family.
“He’s not a retail politician,” said Ted Pitts, a friend and fellow Guardsman who is also a former state representative. “He is committed to the family and puts a lot of time and effort into making sure the family is taken care of.”
In 2012, the third-deadliest year for U.S. troops during the war in Afghanistan, Major Haley raised his hand for a mission to teach the country’s farmers to grow and sell crops other than opium. While many National Guard deployments are mandatory, this one was entirely voluntary, said Dwight Bradham, a retired major who helped oversee the agribusiness team’s work.
(When news of his deployment broke, Ms. Haley took to Facebook and posted the lyrics to the hair metal band Poison’s 1988 ballad “Every Rose Has a Thorn.”)
Major Haley, then a captain, was deployed to Helmand Province in January 2013. Although he was not in a combat unit, he did have a few encounters with roadside bombs. “The explosions gave the people there a little bit of a concussion,” said Lt. Col. Scott Ward, now retired but serving as commanding officer of the agriculture mission.
Everyone knew who he was, but he “didn’t sit back and try to get special treatment because of his wife,” Major Bradham said. “He’s a soldier.”
Ms. Haley often describes her husband’s return to work as difficult. “When Michael returned from Afghanistan, loud noises startled him,” Ms. Haley said in a complaint published in December. “He couldn’t be in crowds. The transition was hard.”
Friends describe how Major Haley, who received a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, slipped into his next role without any obvious signs of stress. When Ms. Haley became ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, he accompanied his wife at diplomatic events and dinners as well as on official trips abroad.
Since the couple’s return to South Carolina in late 2018, Major Haley has kept a lower profile. Friends say he was closely involved in the care of Ms. Haley’s parents. Financial disclosures show he runs a company that manages income from his wife’s speeches and book sales as well as a family investment portfolio.
In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that he was among several politically connected figures who owned shares in a company that received a share of slot machine winnings at a tribal casino in North Carolina. Others interested included John B. Clyburn, a brother of Rep. James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, and Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic political activist, the newspaper reported.
Wallace Cheves, a developer who led the project, said Major Haley received his share in exchange for cybersecurity services.
“He was an advisor to an advisor who worked with the tribe,” Mr. Cheves said in response to questions.
Financial disclosures show he also owns a stake worth up to $500,000 in Allied Defense, a company registered with the federal government as a veteran-owned manufacturer of armored military vehicles, tanks and tank components. But there don’t appear to be any federal contracts.
The Haley campaign declined to comment on Major Haley’s cybersecurity background or disclose information about his involvement with the defense firm.
Major Haley was deployed again last June, this time to Djibouti, a base for counterterrorism operations in Africa. He joined the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade as the mission planning officer. Since he was not part of the unit, he would have had to apply for this assignment, according to several former guardsmen.
The deployment has caused him to miss much of his wife’s campaign – her weeks of joy, her stellar debate performances, her poor showing in Iowa, her defeat in New Hampshire and now intense pressure from her Republican colleagues to drop out.
“There is never a good time to deploy,” Ms. Haley wrote on social media after she, along with several hundred other soldiers, bid farewell to her husband in June at a ceremony at the Citadel, a military college in Charleston.
“How blessed are we to live in a country where men and women are willing to sacrifice and stand up to defend our freedoms?” she wrote.
Jazmine Ulloa and Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.
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2024-02-04 10:57:55
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