Usha Vance said that when she was first asked to introduce her husband, vice presidential nominee JD Vance, at the Republican National Convention, she was “at a loss.” What could she add to the Ron Howard movie that had already been made about his life and his own bestselling memoir?
In her five-minute speech, she settled on giving the thousands attending the RNC and the millions watching the convention a glimpse of what he was like when she met him — before the VP nomination, the Ohio Senate seat, and before “Hillbilly Elegy.”
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The two met at Yale Law School when “he was fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the GI Bill,” Usha Vance said.
JD Vance served in the Marine Corps, enlisting in 2003 and serving until 2007. Usha Vance attended Yale for both her undergraduate and law degrees, and holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge. She also clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court.
“We were friends first, because, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD? He was, then as now, the most interesting person I knew, a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School, a tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie ‘Babe,’ Usha Vance said.
She recalled that he was also “the most determined person I knew,” with an “overriding ambition to become a husband and a father.”
Usha Vance’s upbringing was far different from her husband’s, she told the crowd. A San Diego native, she grew up in a stable, tight-knit family. Her father is an aerospace engineer and her mother is a provost at the University of California San Diego.
“That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry is a testament to this great country,” she said. “It is also a testament to JD, and it tells you something about who he is.”
“When JD met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Usha Vance added. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.” And she said that even though “he’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet,” saying he had even learned to cook Indian food from her mother.
“The JD I knew then is the same JD you see today, except for that beard,” she said, “and his goals in this new role are the same that he has pursued for our family: to keep people safe, to create opportunities to build a better life, and to solve problems with an open mind.”
“It’s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find (ourselves) in this position, but it’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American Dream, a boy from Middletown, Ohio,” she said.
Emily Hung contributed to this report.