The rise and fall of Eric Greitens, the GOP star whose career is crumbling amid scandal

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens’s booking in a St. Louis jail on Thursday on charges that he photographed a woman nude and attempted to blackmail her marked a stunning low point in a political career that had, until then, followed a sharply upward trajectory.

Though Greitens, a Republican, has so far resisted resigning, the career of the man many considered to be a rising star in the party is on life support. His national ambitions are likely vanquished.

It wasn’t always this way. Greitens’s sharp fall contrasts with his staggering rise to the national political scene. Here is his story.

Greitens’s outsize career plans were evident from his earliest days. He even had a lofty professional goal in mind as a kindergartener, according to a former teacher.

“When I would read the little kindergarten books, ‘What I want to be when I grow up,’ and at the end, I would go around the circle and ask the children what they wanted to be, I remember this: He wanted to be president,” Anne Richardson, Greitens’s kindergarten teacher, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2016. “He was the only kid I ever remember saying that.”

Source: washingtonpost