Chapter One Chapter One The Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol was completed in 1800, renovated in 1811, burned by British troops during their rampage of Washington in 1814, and reconstructed for the first time in 1826. In 1850 Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi introduced legislation to significantly enlarge the Capitol. This enlargement was finally finished in 1868, following the Civil War, during which then former senator Jefferson Davis rather ironically had become president of the Confederacy. As the country has grown and evolved from that time, so has the Capitol, as well as the sprawling grounds that surround it. A series of modernizations moved the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court out of the Capitol building into their own mammoth neoclassical structures. These modernizations also brought about a vast complex of six separate office buildings where the members of the House and Senate and their ever-growing staffs now carry out their obligations, and where, every now and then, one of them becomes forever remembered for some embarrassing personal escapade or political scheme.
The building and the grounds that surround it are a wonder to behold, extending eastward beyond the Supreme Court building and westward past the Washington Monument, all the way across the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and the very edge of the Potomac River. There are few places in the world that can match the quiet splendor of these landmarks, especially when they are lit up in the dark of night for the world to see. This is not a craven political statement; rather it is the frank, almost unwilling admission of one who was raised from his earliest days to mistrust any form of elitism and to make fun of pretentious symbols.
Even the deepest cynic cannot deny the transcendent power of this place. It is almost as if those who designed and built the Capitol had opened up their hearts in a form of romantic innocence, risking the chance that they would be rejected by future generations for having been corny Harlequin-romancers if they were proved wrong, in the gamble that they might remake the world’s comprehension of American-style democracy if they were shown to be right.
And they were not wrong.
If you are a thinking American, it is a humbling experience to spend time inside the dark, cool confines of the building itself. During my time in the Senate I walked through this building every day, indeed sometimes a half-dozen times a day, and still after all those years its majesty overwhelms me. No matter how many times I traversed its passages, no matter how burdened I felt under the weight of the laborious or silly issues of day-to-day politics, the history that lives inside this building always rescued me from the temptation to feel as though we in the Senate were mindlessly treading water rather than working to solve the problems of the country. History was being made here, whether or not we felt the truth of that as we barked and quibbled among ourselves on any given day.
When I stop and think about why I continue to feel this way, I usually end up remembering my father, the first Webb after generations in the Appalachian Mountains to finish high school and then the first to finish college following twenty-six years of intermittent night school. The Old Man would have been busting his buttons to see me walking these halls as the equal of giants whose names he had known only through history books and newspapers. I still roll my eyes and laugh to myself, imagining the daily phone calls I would have received had my father lived to see me become a member of the U.S. Senate. Truly he would have irritated the hell out of my staff. He would never have left me alone. He would have called me every day, bursting with ideas, providing advice, challenging me with crude jokes, and quoting from the key phrases of editorial writers who hated me.
James Henry Webb Sr. was not an easy man to please. He gave me no slack in the days of my boyhood as our family moved from town to town, from military base to military base, and I from school to school to school. Complaints were not in order. My siblings and I grew up with certainties that he, and especially my mother, could never have imagined: there was always food on the table; I never lacked for clean clothes; from the time I was twelve, there was always a job somewhere if I knew how to hustle. And he never let us forget that we were living in the greatest country on earth, a country that our rock-hard ancestors had pioneered, one stark mountain and one wide river and one war at a time.
When it hurts, just grit your teeth and take it. Don’t you ever back down. Never start a fight, but if somebody else does, never run away. If you run from a bully you will never stop running, but if you fight he won’t risk coming back at you again. Stand up. Fight back. Mark him. Give him something to remember every morning when he looks into the mirror. Then even if you lose you win. And by the way, if you ever run from a fight I will personally beat your ass.
My father was not exactly a mellow guy. He did not spare the rod. But he taught me early that there is no substitute for moral courage, whatever the cost, and that the ultimate duty of every leader is to take care of the people who rely on him when otherwise they would be forgotten or abandoned. Courage in the face of those above you and loyalty to those below you were my father’s inalterable standards, the only true way to measure the worth of another human being.
I had fought my way into the Senate based exactly on those principles. I was not recruited to run for political office, which was one of the odd attractions of running in the first place. I took the gamble precisely because I could not accept the idea that a country such as America should be governed by a club of insiders who manipulate public opinion in order to serve the interests of hidden elites who hold the reins of power. I did not solve this problem in a mere six years, but I did nudge it here and there, even as my concerns about it only grew stronger.
• • •
I knew what my dad would be saying to me at this moment if he were still alive. He would be aggravated beyond words that I had declined to run for reelection. He would not be able to resist sending a verbal barrage my way on the very day that I was heading to the Senate floor for the final time in order to congratulate the person who would now be taking my seat:
What the HELL is going on in your brain, Sonny Boy? After you fought so hard to get here, what are you doing walking away from it, just when you reached the top of your game? There are no instant replays in life! You are not coming back! Didn’t I teach you a damn thing?
I would have listened to him for a while, nodding now and then as a measure of respect, finally telling him to stop being such an irritable, cantankerous bastard. We had argued with sharp, combative humor for decades about everything from poetry to baseball to history, and especially about the unpredictability of my so-called career. But for me, in this imagined debate the answer would have been easy:
Dad, seriously. We’re talking about an institution with a 6 percent approval rating, and I can’t figure out why anybody would want to be in that 6 percent.
• • •
On this final morning the corridor in front of my Russell Building office was eerily quiet. I was arriving without a briefcase, and indeed without portfolio. I did not belong here anymore. I had already become an interloper in a place that until yesterday had been my personal fiefdom and even my second home. No staff members greeted me. Actually I did not even have a staff anymore, as of this very morning. But none of that really mattered. I had not come here to be escorted, briefed, coffeed up, or attended to. All I wanted was to walk through my personal office spaces one last time, in the rare calm of a do-nothing morning, before the office as it was now constructed and I myself disappeared into the dry annals of Senate history.
I reached Russell 248, which had been my office’s main reception room. My heavy brass nameplate was still bolted face-high onto the wall outside the door, just where it had been posted in the Russell Building for the past six years:
SENATOR
Jim Webb
Virginia
Three flags had always stood next to my door: the American flag, the flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the flag of remembrance for those still missing or unaccounted for on our nation’s battlefields. They were gone now, wrapped up and shipped away. Senate maintenance personnel would soon unbolt my nameplate from the wall and have it hand-delivered to my home. The high-ceilinged marble hallway was lined with large trash bins piled to the top with mounds of memories—discarded papers, binders, and odd pieces of cardboard, all the refuse and political detritus from six years of intense staff functioning. Until a few days ago the office spaces were occupied by more than two dozen energetic staff members of all ages and backgrounds, united by their desire to serve our country and to carry out the goals that I had laid before them.
I had put a lot of energy into the selection and development of my staff. I had personally interviewed every person who served on it, from receptionist to chief of staff, including those who worked in the distant regional offices in Richmond, Virginia Beach, Roanoke, Danville, and in the far southwest heartland of the Appalachian Mountains, whose struggling coal mines and disappearing tobacco fields are nearer to Detroit than they are to Washington. I personally invested myself in each of their futures, in the same spirit that I once took pride in the career evolution of what I termed “Webb-trained Marines.” More than any memorial highway or bridge or piece of legislation, these people and the principles of leadership and political philosophy that hopefully I imbued in them will remain the most important legacy of my time in the Senate.
They were gone, off to other things. The desks and tables they had occupied were empty and bare, as were the now nail-bitten walls. Their computers had been scanned, stripped of all data, and removed. The “landline” phones had been taken out. Personal cell phones had been returned, the numbers rendered inoperable. And on January 2, like a surrendering army, every staff member had formally turned in all room keys to the Senate sergeant at arms.
I left the corridor, walking inside the main reception room. The walls of the room had been filled with my personal memorabilia: photographs dating to my time in Vietnam, including one in which I stood shirtless in front of an enemy bunker, hard-eyed, gaunt, and bearded, a reminder that we should always respect military sacrifice but never glamorize its toll; a dozen framed newspaper and magazine articles; the Publishers Weekly cover from July 10, 1978, announcing my novel Fields of Fire as “the most powerful war novel in a generation”; the tally card from the final roll-call vote when we passed the historic Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008; and some classic eighty-year-old black-and-white photos taken in the coal fields of southwest Virginia.
I stuck my head into the conference room next door. The room was dark, made darker still by the high wooden cabinet on one wall and the long table that filled the center of the room. Nineteen stiff-backed chairs lined the conference table, eight on each side, two on the far end, and another just inside the door, where I sat during our meetings. A shaft of grey light from a courtyard window illuminated the tabletop as if it were a dull mirror. I could see faint smudges on the table from the hands of people who had once sat in its chairs. These walls also had been filled with dozens of plaques, photos, and memorabilia, all of which had now been taken down, bubble-wrapped, boxed up, and sent away.
I had spent uncountable hours at this table, meeting with schoolkids, religious leaders, business executives, community organizers, union members, university presidents, military commanders, advocates of prison reform, law enforcement officials, judges, political figures, ambassadors and foreign ministers, and, of course, the story-seeking members of the media. Not even counting unscheduled meetings with members of my staff, which numbered in the hundreds in a typical week, during my time in the Senate I had taken 5,005 official meetings in my office, as well as 2,300 personal meetings and 675 interviews with the media. Almost all of them had taken place inside this now-shadowed room. Since we’re counting, I also attended 1,078 committee hearings, appeared at 264 formal speaking engagements, and spoke at 358 political events. And on the Senate floor I had taken more than 1,800 roll-call votes.
I crossed the hallway into Room 247, for another hour or so still my personal office. Three desks inside the narrow anteroom had housed the immediate nerve center of my staff: the press secretary, my scheduler, and my executive assistant. Across from the desks a small closet held a microwave oven, a small fridge, and room for storage. Curious, I looked inside the closet and confirmed that it was still a crumby, noodle-infested mess. The latest human occupants were gone, but the Senate roaches soldiered on.
At the back of the room I turned into a short breezeway, walking past a small closet and my private bathroom before entering my personal office. There I was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of memories and emotion.
Now stripped bare of all my personal memorabilia, the contrast with the intimacy of the years I had spent in this room gave a hard edge to the reality of my departure. My desk was just inside the door. The age-old fireplace marked the middle of the far wall, a gigantic, gold-framed mirror above it. The shelves, credenzas, chairs, and circular working table remained in place. And yet everything had become sterile and depersonalized.
This sudden emotion was a surprise, since my wife Hong and I had decided nearly two years before that six years in the Senate was enough, and that once we made the final decision to leave we would not second-guess it. The tangible effects that had warmed this room were gone, but I could see them still: the hundreds of books on the shelves, the underlined and earmarked papers that had been piled upon my desk, the personal computer, the phone with its intercom connections to personal staff, the TV set against the wall by my desk, the notepads and ever-revolving stacks of memos from my staff, and the dozens of family photos that had surrounded the walls and tables around my chair, nestling me into my daily routine.
I reached my desk and ran my hand along its right-hand corner. The desk was beautiful, huge and ornate, a piece of history, as are so many objects in the Senate. My fingers traversed more than a dozen small gashes in the wood. I smiled to myself, for this was another private remembrance: in those gashes in that desktop corner was an unforgettable, defining memory.
For the past six years I had kept two objects on this corner of my desk, unspoken reminders for everyone to see and for those who were intuitive enough to contemplate. The first was a beautiful gold-embossed Bible inscribed with my name on the cover, a gift to me from my friend Barry Black, the chaplain of the Senate. The long cloth ribbon inside its pages had been permanently kept at the paragraphs of the second chapter of the book of James, verses 14–18, which defined for me the overriding reasons that I had decided to run for the Senate. Part of those verses reads, “And what good is faith without works? Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”
The second object was a traditional black-bladed, leather-handled Marine Corps combat knife, which I had jammed into the time-hardened wood of the desk itself, just behind the Bible.
At some moment during just about every day, the Bible and the bayonet would catch my eye, both reminding me of why I was sitting at the desk in the first place. I have led a sometimes hard and complicated life, but I am strong in my faith. I also know what it’s like to fight in a philosophically controversial war and to have shed my blood on a faraway battlefield. I came to understand at a very young age that moral complexities are an inseparable part of hard face-to-face combat. These twin realities deepened not only my faith but my respect for the burden of military service, irrespective of the political decisions that impel it.
Some would look at the Bible and wonder about the bayonet. Some would look at the bayonet and wonder about the Bible. For me, they go together. And all I have asked, as the ancient philosopher intoned, is not to be understood too quickly.
From the window behind my desk I looked out at the expansive park that stretched across the street, up to Constitution Avenue. My office window was a great vantage point from which to watch the frequent political rallies that were held in the park. I have always taken comfort in these rallies, no matter their political viewpoint, for they represent the greatness of an America where at least most of the time we can vent our ideas and even our anger with bullhorns rather than bullets. The park was quiet today, on the morning when new senators would be sworn in and others would say good-bye.
I turned away from the window and sat in the thick, high-backed leather chair that for years had been my private senatorial throne. Without deciding, I swiveled the chair around toward my desk. Like a modern-day Ozymandias, I surveyed my empty empire, knowing this would be the last time I would sit at this desk and probably the last time I would ever even be in this room. I looked at the clock on the far wall. It was fifteen minutes before eleven, when the swearing-in proceedings for the newly elected senators would begin. I needed to make my way to the Senate floor.
A thought from my childhood struck me: I began wondering if after all of this preparation I had left anything behind. It was the last thought my father would always raise whenever we moved, or even if we simply vacated the latest ten-bucks-a-night motel room—both of which we often did. You always forget something. That was my pa’s mantra, and he was almost always right: a favorite baseball cap in one remote closet, a dollar bill on the floor, or maybe a bar of store-bought soap in the shower. Such a final search had become a longtime family game.
I pulled out all the drawers in my desk, finding each of them empty—nothing in there, not even a paper clip. I searched the two wide drawers underneath the end tables that flanked the window behind my desk; once filled with personal files, they too were empty. My staff had done a thorough job, shipping more than sixty large crates and smaller boxes to my home and to my writing office in Virginia. Walking across the carpeted room, I reached the wide credenza that stood along the far wall. Empty. Then I opened up the minifridge inside its left-hand cabinet door.
Bingo. Four beers and a plastic container of rice had been left inside. I laughed aloud, delighted at this discovery, for here were the truth-tellers of my Senate tenure. The rice box had been prepared months ago by my wife. It brought back memories not of gala banquets, grand speeches, or my frequent trips abroad but of the usual lunches at my desk, spent staring at a computer screen, catching up on emails and time-sensitive news. Hong had prepared the rice box because I had grown sick of the gut-roiling daily specials from the Senate cafeteria. And the beers made me remember all the frustrating, ridiculous late nights sitting bored and restless in the office, waiting for the majority and minority leaders to schedule usually meaningless votes on the Senate floor so that we might finally go home.
My first thought as I pulled the objects from the fridge was that Hong, who had escaped South Vietnam on a fishing boat following the communist takeover in 1975 and spent time in two refugee camps after her family was saved at sea by our Navy, would insist that I bring the container home. The thought struck a suddenly fragile nerve. The very normality of thinking to bring a container home reminded me that this was the last time I ever would actually be going home from the Senate.
I picked up the rice container and dismissed the thought as quickly as I had entertained it, for again I heard my father’s voice: If you’re going to miss it, then maybe you should have stayed, Sonny Boy.
No. It was definitely time to go.
I now had ten minutes to stash the container in my car and then make my way to the Senate floor. My private visit was over. I would never again return to this room. But I was leaving the Senate with what, for me, was the ultimate satisfaction. I had lived up to every promise I had made when I had asked people to elect me a little more than six years before. I had never backed down. I had never said a word that I did not mean. And I had never cut a political deal.
Good-bye was over. I walked out the door, heading for the Senate floor. I would bring the rice container home. But I left the beer for the cleanup crew.