According to numerous media reports, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is currently vetting retired Admiral James Stavridis as her potential running mate.
Stavridis is a retired four-star Navy admiral who served as the 16th supreme allied commander at NATO.
The New York Times said that sources close to Secretary Clinton say she was always likely to have someone with military experience on her vice-presidential shortlist, and Mr. Stavridis, currently the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, fits the description.
NBC News and other major news organizations have also confirmed from their sources inside the campaign that Stavridis
Both the Clinton campaign and Stavridis declined to comment.
Stavridis’ grandparents were Greeks from Pontus who escaped the genocide in the early 1900s and emigrated to the United States.
His 2008 book, Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a First Command, goes into more detail about his Greek refugee origins. He wrote,
In the early 1920’s, my grandfather, a short, stocky Greek schoolteacher named Dimitrios Stavridis, was expelled from Turkey as part of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (read pogrom) directed against Greeks living in the remains of the Ottoman Empire. He barely escaped with his life in a small boat crossing the Aegean Sea to Athens and thence to Ellis Island. His brother was not so lucky and was killed by the Turks as part of the violence directed at the Greek minority.
A NATO exercise off the coast of modern Turkey was the “most amazing historical irony [he] could imagine,” and prompted Stavridis to write of his grandfather: “His grandson, who speaks barely a few words of Greek, returns in command of a billion-dollar destroyer to the very city – Smyrna, now called İzmir – from which he sailed in a refugee craft all those years ago.”
