Bob Kerrey: Medal of Honor, the Thanh Phong Raid, and The New School

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Bob Kerrey was born in 1943 and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, and earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska in 1966 before joining the Navy and SEAL Team One. On March 14, 1969, his team climbed a 350 foot cliff at night on an island in Nha Trang Bay; a grenade shattered his right leg, and he directed a crossfire and the defense of an extraction site until evacuated, earning the Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon in 1970. Weeks earlier, on February 25, 1969, his team raided the village of Thanh Phong. Kerrey described receiving fire and later finding over a dozen dead women and children, teammate Gerhard Klann said civilians were rounded up and killed on orders, and Vietnamese survivors gave their own accounts. The raid earned a Bronze Star and became public in 2001.

Kerrey built restaurants, fitness centers, and a bowling alley in Nebraska, won the governorship as a Democrat in 1982 with 51 percent, and served one term. In the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2001 he sat on intelligence, finance, and appropriations, cast the deciding vote for Bill Clinton's 1993 budget, and voted in 1999 to repeal Glass-Steagall. He ran for president in 1992, winning South Dakota. As president of The New School from 2001 to 2011 he doubled the endowment but drew a faculty no confidence vote and student occupations. Critics forced his exit from the Fulbright University Vietnam board, and in 2026 released emails showed contacts with Jeffrey Epstein.

• Asked about his romance with Debra Winger, he said she swept him off his foot.
• In 1986 he had the National Guard park a tank on the tracks to stop an unannounced nuclear waste shipment through Nebraska.
• He called himself agnostic in 2012 though his official biography had listed him as Presbyterian.
• By 2010 his compensation topped $3 million, the highest of any private college president.
• In February 2026 he resigned as chairman of the clean energy startup Monolith.