Howard Stark and his ‘friends’

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Rewatching Agent Carter, I got the thought about how Howard uses the term ‘friend’. I feel like he views everyone as his friend. Wait! Hear me out on this!

So, basing myself slightly off of this post and what’s said in the series, it’s clear that Howard did not have a happy, carefree childhood. He likely grew up Jewish, he clearly states that there’s a ceiling for people like him, and he’s had to learn to lie to advance.

But let’s back up.

Howard Stark is clearly a genius. He’s not exactly street-smart,  and he has this enhanced IQ that wasn’t well-suited for the area. So what friends did he have growing up?

Well, none and several. He probably had no friends in his neighborhood. Here was this boy, arguably smarter than everyone around him, who wanted out and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. And how better to get out than to make friends with the right people. I mean, everybody wants something and Howard was smart enough to make sure that he was the one who got it for them, even if he had to steal (or get someone else to steal it for him – sound familiar?). He became everyone’s new best friend.

Now don’t get me wrong. He knew they weren’t really his friends. He’s not stupid. But friendship, to Howard, became this thing. Anyone was a ‘friend’ because everyone had something they wanted. And they were often willing to pay for that.

So he used this idea he had crafted of friendship to climb his way out of his old life. He probably told himself that he was going to help people when he got out. But living a lie, stealing to get a better position… it weighed on Howard until the idea of ‘helping people’ once he was where he wanted to be became just another lie, one that he told himself.

So what happened later? Well, he met Edwin Jarvis. Like so many others, there was something that Jarvis wanted. But see, what Jarvis wanted wasn’t something petty and material. What Jarvis wanted was to save the woman he loved from ending up another casualty of war. Jarvis did something that made Howard turn his head. He risked his own life to save that of another.

Why this made Howard stop, I can only guess. But something clearly changed in Howard after that. Suddenly it wasn’t only about the money. He remembered that it was about saving people. Helping them. Oh sure, he was terrible at it a lot. He has no idea how to connect with real people.

He knows, of course, that everyone is a potential ‘friend’, but there are only a handful of people who go beyond his idea of friendship. In fact, he can count them on one hand. Edwin Jarvis. Peggy Carter. Steve Rogers. These are the three people who showed him that humans aren’t only petty creatures out for themselves and he really has no idea how to handle that. 

So when he calls Peggy and Jarvis his favorites, I don’t think that’s just a sentiment. When he says to Peggy there’s no one else he can trust with the mission of clearing his name, there’s no doubt in my mind that he believes that. Because to him, there’s nobody else he trusts.