If there’s one other thing everyone knows about Amy McGrath, aside from her distaste for Mitch McConnell, it’s that she was a fighter pilot. Ever since she was a 13-year-old girl in Edgewood, Kentucky (population: 8,700) and watched a documentary about fighter jets, McGrath wanted to fly in combat.
At that time, the Combat Exclusion Policy meant that women couldn’t serve as aviators. And so a young McGrath wrote op-eds to local papers and letters to her representatives arguing her case. (One of those letters went to McConnell, who, she loves to point out, never responded to her inquiry.) Sen. Jim Bunning, a Republican, wrote back that “women ought to be protected and not allowed to serve in combat.”
The Democrats she reached out to were more understanding, McGrath said, explaining that they felt the best person, regardless of gender, should be able to serve. “That was my first understanding of the difference between political parties. I knew one side said, ‘No,” and the other side said, ‘Maybe.’”
She graduated from an all-girls Catholic high school in 1993 — the same year the Exclusion Policy was finally lifted for aviation — and was admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where she majored in political science. “It was very evident from the get-go that she had dedication, a strong work ethic, and a hunger for knowledge,” said Fairleigh, McGrath’s former classmate. McGrath doesn’t feign humility when looking back on those years either: “I was going to join and work so hard and be so good that they couldn’t tell me no,” she said. “I was going to get in there and change it myself.”
Though the doors were technically open to women becoming pilots, other obstacles remained. “There was a lot of discrimination against women,” said Col. Ché Bolden, who supervised McGrath in the Marine Corps. “I’m not proud of it, but there’s a long history of misogyny. She withstood a lot of that for her four years at the Academy.” When she graduated and joined the Marine Corps, she encountered plenty of that, too, as well as the demands of becoming a fighter pilot.
“I remember saying, ‘Well, I think I want to have another kid, sir.’ And him saying, ‘The Marine Corps doesn’t want you to have another kid.’”
She persisted, joining the Marine Corps and becoming the first woman to fly a combat mission in an F/A-18. Some critics have pointed out that she didn’t fly the F/A-18s herself, but sat in the backseat because of her eyesight. Fairleigh, who had the same job, contextualized it: “You’ve seen Top Gun? We were Goose.” (McGrath’s own call sign was Krusty, nicknamed for the Simpsons clown because of the way her hair stuck out of her helmet.) She later had corrective eye surgery, which enabled her to move to the front seat in 2004 and finally become Maverick.
McGrath flew for 12 years in 89 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus an operational tour in Japan. She speaks fervently about her time in the military, bragging in campaign ads about targeted bombings over al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds. Yet her approach to war is not entirely jingoistic. “I believe that her take was that there was much more that we, as Americans, could have done or could be doing when we’re in countries like that,” Bolden said. “She wanted to demonstrate that there was something else to us besides a bunch of people running around in heavy kit and weapons.” In recent years, she’s also called for an investigation into the United States’ decision to enter the Iraq War and for more checks and balances before military strikes.
In 2009, she married Navy pilot Erik Henderson. (He’s a lifelong Republican. When McGrath talks about it, she just shrugs. “That’s America, man.”) The two of them briefly deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and, by the fall, she returned to the States and became a congressional fellow for San Diego representative Susan Davis. She later worked at the Pentagon, where she was the interagency policy lead for the Headquarters Marine Corps, acting as a liaison between her branch of the military and agencies like the State Department, the Justice Department, and the CIA. Her career took a decisive shift after the birth of her son, Teddy. He was about six months old when her general offered her yet another rung to climb: leading a flying squadron in Beaufort, South Carolina, or San Diego, California. “I remember saying, ‘Well, I think I want to have another kid, sir,’” she told me.” And him saying, ‘The Marine Corps doesn’t want you to have another kid.’” She talks about this decision with a noticeable wistfulness — a man wouldn’t have had to make that choice, she said. “I remember the general saying, ‘Okay, you know what you’re doing, right? You know what you’re doing to your career?” Of course she knew.
After earning a master’s in international and global studies from Johns Hopkins University, McGrath then spent three years, from 2014 to 2017, teaching political science at the Naval Academy. Entering politics didn’t occur to McGrath until the 2016 election. She pins the move into politics and back to her home state on two factors: the erosion of democratic ideals (“So many people had lost faith in the leaders of, really, both political parties”), and her father’s declining health (“I hadn’t [lived] near him in 24 years, and I had three kids at this time who hadn’t seen their grandparents very much”).
Amy McGrath takes calls at her home in Georgetown, KY.
McGrath and her family moved to Georgetown, KY, where she launched a campaign to take on the 6th district congressional Republican incumbent, Andy Barr. The odds were stacked against her from the start in a heavily red district, and as a candidate with no name recognition running against Lexington mayor Jim Gray for the Democratic nomination. When Gray aired an attack ad claiming that McGrath hadn’t spent enough time living in the district (and, in fact, she hadn’t finished unpacking by the time she rolled out her campaign), veterans groups hit back, saying that her time in the service shouldn’t be held against her. “People were ready to be woken up and ready to be inspired,” McGrath said. “That’s what I did in 2018.” The campaign was filled with highs — she took gambles on a few ads that went viral, and won the Dem nomination — and some heartbreaking lows — her father died unexpectedly about a month before the primary and she ultimately lost the election by three points.
Bolden — whose father, former NASA administrator and astronaut Charles Bolden, endorsed McGrath — said she went into fighter-pilot mode after the defeat. “After a firefight, you always debrief. What did we do well? And what could we have done better? She took the time to do that, and realized how close she’d gotten.” In her first-ever foray into politics, she’d moved the district nearly 20 points.
Once she dusted herself off, Democrats, keen to how well she’d done, began courting her for another run. As early as February 2019, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was recruiting McGrath for a Senate race, this time against a much more powerful Goliath.