James Webb’s Never-Ending War
As night settles between the mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state’s southwestern corner, Sen. James Webb’s people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse. They’re coal miners and miners’ wives, a third of them in the camouflage strike gear of the United Mine Workers, many of them wearing ball caps declaring them veterans of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. A leather-skinned veteran named Eldridge tells me in a raspy whisper that he voted for Webb because Webb, a novelist and historian, had gotten these people, mountain people, right in his most recent book, a best-selling history of the Scots-Irish in America called Born Fighting. “We’ve got our own ghosts and goblins,” Eldridge says, and he thinks Webb sees them. “He has the Second Sight.”
Eldridge is the third person this evening to cite the supernatural – a kind of cultural memory, maybe – as a reason for supporting Webb, a fact that doesn’t surprise Virginia’s new Democratic senator. “My grandmother taught me my ghosts,” he tells me, his voice a low, considered rumble.
The miners file into the courtroom, and Webb takes his place at the front, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His natural expression is one of restrained anger, his ruddy face tucked into a bull neck as if to emphasize the glower of his foggy blue eyes. He’s handsome like Jimmy Cagney, but with a jaw that would dent an anvil. For years he kept a punching bag close to his desk, and at sixty-one he still looks like he could, and gladly would, hold his own in a bar brawl. Earlier that day, he’d donned a headlamp for a quarter-mile descent into Laurel Mountain Deep Mine, and at the courthouse his neck is still gray with coal dust from his trip underground.
A local politico, ballooning out of a Kelly green blazer, asks the Russell County Democratic Committee to stand. Up rise the miners in their labor fatigues. “We’re all claiming cousins with you now,” says green blazer, and Webb blushes and smiles; three of his actual cousins, including a small-town big named Jimmy Webb, are in the crowd.
Webb’s family – his “blood,” he says – has lived in the hollows of Big Moccasin Gap, as the area is called, for more than 200 years, but Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. When he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1964, he listed thirty-three home addresses on his application. His father was an Air Force officer and a veteran of World War II; Webb was a Marine officer in Vietnam; and his son, Jimmy, is a Marine just returned from Iraq, where he fought in Ramadi. Last year Webb campaigned wearing a pair of Jimmy’s combat boots to remind himself why he was running: to end the war. He refuses to talk to the public about his son. When asked about the boots, he’d say that was the wrong question: “It’s not why I’m wearing the boots, it’s why I’m wearing the necktie.”
When he ran for public office, Webb didn’t campaign on his military record, he simply offered himself as a fighter. In Fields of Fire, Webb’s first novel and one of the best depictions of combat in Vietnam, the protagonist, Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges, sums up his approach to confrontation: “I fight,” the character declares, “because we have always fought. It doesn’t matter who.” In Vietnam, Webb became the most highly decorated Marine from his Naval Academy class: two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, the Silver Star and the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. He’s enamored of what he calls the “warrior aristocracy” tradition of the Scots-Irish, and he made captain at age twenty-three, though he thinks of himself as an enlisted man – one soldier among many.
Webb loves war. He’s been studying military history as long as he can read. He loves war so much he can’t stand to see one bungled as badly as Bush has the one in Iraq. In place of a plan, Bush offers a posture; where there should have been a strategy, there was only ideology. That’s what makes Webb so angry about Iraq. It’s not a fight, it’s a cause, either a wonk’s dream or an oilman’s conspiracy, depending on how worked up Webb is when you ask him. There’s only the cause driving this stupidity into the sand, not the needs of a nation. It’s the work of the elites Webb has always hated. “America’s top tier … are literally living in a different country,” Webb charges. “Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to war.”
Just a few years ago, Webb described America’s elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were “cultural Marxists,” and “the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood” were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means “the military-industrial complex,” and “the Cheney factor,” the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class – sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China – are becoming interwoven in his mind. Iraq has aligned his angers.
For years Webb worked for Republicans, a career that culminated in a stint as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. But when his old nemesis Oliver North, a Naval Academy classmate whom he has despised for decades, ran for Senate in 1994, Webb campaigned for Democrat Chuck Robb just to stop him, and he started identifying himself as an independent. For his own campaign in 2006, he billed himself as a Reagan Democrat. Barely a year later, he’s a “Jacksonian Democrat,” after Andrew Jackson – other man of war who went to Washington at the head of a populist crusade. His authorial “James” shortened now to a folksy “Jim,” Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he’s taking many of his old views with him: his dedication to military power, the chip he carries on his shoulder on behalf of the Southern white man he believes is the “whipping boy” for American racism, and most of all, the populism that hates both the Democratic and Republican upper classes.
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