Jim Webb: Navy Cross Marine, Navy Secretary Who Quit, and the GI Bill

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Jim Webb was born in Missouri in 1946 into a military family with Scots-Irish roots; his father flew B-17 and B-29 bombers in World War II and cargo planes in the Berlin Airlift. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1968, he led a Marine platoon in Vietnam, earned the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts, and was medically retired because of his wounds. He earned a Georgetown law degree, worked for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, and published a successful 1978 combat novel. Under Ronald Reagan he became the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and the first Naval Academy graduate to serve as Secretary of the Navy, resigning in 1988 rather than approve cuts to the 600 ship fleet.

Seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion he warned that it had no exit strategy. In 2006 he ran for Senate in Virginia as a Democrat, wearing his son's combat boots, and after incumbent George Allen called a Webb staffer macaca, a slur, Webb won by less than half a percent, giving Democrats control of the Senate. At a White House reception he told President George W. Bush he wanted the troops out when asked about his Marine son in Iraq. He wrote what became the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, passed in 2008, and in 2009 met Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, returning with detained American John Yettaw. He left after one term and ended a 2015 Democratic presidential bid in October.

• His Navy Cross citation from July 1969 describes capturing three enemy soldiers, clearing a bunker with a Claymore mine and shielding a fellow Marine from a grenade.
• Allen's campaign cited his 1979 article opposing women in combat and explicit passages from his novels.
• He and President Bush later met privately in the Oval Office after his son came home.
• He pointed out that the United States held about 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners.
• He speaks Vietnamese and is married to a Vietnamese American lawyer who fled the fall of Saigon.