Marine veteran Rye Barcott urges public service in new book

Marine veteran Rye Barcott is trying to turn public service into a political brand with staying power. In a June 7 interview on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, the With Honor co-founder said one of the central ideas behind his new book is "to find a route into public service, and that's one of the goals with this."

That pitch matters because With Honor is built around a specific theory of political change: veterans can be recruited, trained and marketed as cross-partisan problem-solvers, then sent into Congress with a message of civility, integrity and courage. The group says candidates must take the With Honor Pledge and clear an in-depth, multi-stage vetting process, a sign that the organization is not simply celebrating military service but trying to standardize it into a political pipeline.

Barcott co-founded With Honor in 2017 with Marine Corps veteran Peter Dixon and the late David Gergen, the longtime presidential adviser and Navy veteran. The organization says it focuses especially on Congress, where polarization has hardened into a defining feature of Washington politics. Its model suggests that military service can be translated into a bipartisan public-service brand, but the real test is whether that brand changes who runs, who wins and how lawmakers behave once they get to Capitol Hill.

Barcott’s new book, Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future, is scheduled for publication June 9, 2026 by Bloomsbury. The book profiles ten elected American leaders, split evenly between five Republicans and five Democrats, and includes nine military veterans and one former FBI agent. Publisher copy frames the project as a portrait of a bipartisan generation of post-9/11 leaders trying to rise above polarization and a culture of contempt, timed to the lead-up to America’s 250th anniversary.

Promotional material says the book spotlights nine veterans and an FBI agent currently serving in elected office across the country, underscoring Barcott’s broader argument that elected office itself can be an act of courage. The challenge for that argument is measurable impact: with With Honor’s vetting, recruiting and congressional focus, the group is betting that veterans can become more than a symbolic rebuttal to dysfunction and instead a durable pipeline for the next generation of officeholders.