Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On I Heard My Country

Of fixing americas broken criminal justice system. Atlantic magazine named him one of great thinkers first half tackling prison reform. Having graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 in receiving a special commendation for his leadership contributions first in his class at the Marine Corps Officers Basic School he served as a rifle Platoon Company commander in vietnam and was awarded the navy cross, the silver star medal to bronze star medals and two purple hearts. He graduated from the Georgetown University law center in 1975. From 77 to 81 he served as counsel to the House Committee and Veterans Affairs. In 1984 he was appointed assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs in the 1987 he became secretary of the navy. In addition to his Public Service he has enjoyed a varied career as a writer and as a journalist he received an emmy award for his previous coverage of the u. S. Marines in beirut in 1983 and in 2004 was embedded with u. S. Military in afghanistan produced screenwriter and producer he wrote the original story for the film rules of engagement. He wrote 10 books of fiction and nonfiction including born fighting history of the scotchirish culture in america and fields of file field of fire. Tuesdays wall street journal robert scales right to many memoirs are exercises of selfregard if not selfaggrandisement. James webb i heard my country calling avoids this by giving his achievements later in life in the briefest brimming reference. Mr. Webb is intent on telling the story of his formative years as an air force brat and shipman and a marine in vietnam. The result is more than a personal reminiscence. Mr. Webbs narrative captures the experience of a generation of children raised during the cold war and embedded in another culture of americas expanded armed forces. The suite of this wonderful book makes it a alpha and omega of the cold wars truest children. He begins with pride and patriotism that comes from living with warrior fathers and ends with a ends with illusion dispelled by war in vietnam. Its a personal is a brilliant personal recollection that brings brings alive and forgotten period of american history. Ladies and gentlemen senator james webb. [applause] thank you very much david and i would like to start by saying that david is not only the archivist of our country and holding the repository of so many are National Treasures but also served our country in vietnam as a corpsman attached to the United States marines so im grateful for your service david. [applause] the National Archives has a special place for me as with so many others. Actually it was almost exactly three years ago today that we have a screening here for a twohour documentary that we were able to do on one of my books born fighting which is a cultural history of the scotchirish people beginning in scotland and into Northern Ireland and the settlements in the appalachian mountains. It was a great evening that might. There was a lot of very fine scotch whiskey because the scottish tv was one of the producers of the show. I also spent a lot of time in the National Archives during my student days at georgetown law and actually after that when i was a starving writer trying to get my book fields of fire published. It was rejected by a dozen publishers and we just kept going on it. My grandmother and im going to talk a little bit about her and i write quite a bit about her in this book, had raised us in the oral tradition. Every night before we went to bed she would tell the story about one of our ancestors and one of the things that happened over this great journey over the winding roads into eastern tennessee and western arkansas where she ended up. I asked her when i was 11 years old when she put it down in writing. She had written page after page of the family chronicles, dates like my great great grandfather enlisted in arkansas infantry in july sunday, 1861 etc. And so i spent a lot of time over here using her letter as a source document for a bit of our family history. In talking to david i think it was a lot easier to do today then it was then when you had to look at microfiche roles checking out one county as opposed to another. Im going to speak for a while about my book and why i decided to write this particular book and then im going to be happy to open up the form for any questions that you might have. Since i left the marine corps i spent almost exactly half of my life in Public Service and half of it out of Public Service. When im not in Public Service my profession has been as a writer and novelist and a journalist and otherwise. Those are not exactly the most compatible careers in the american system, the literary system versus the political system. Our style of democracy rather naturally creates a tension between the literary world and particularly the journalistic world and the governing world. So its been an accidental and somewhat unusual journey for me over the years to pull from one of the environments into the other end as i said it was accidental. When i left the marine corps and started studying at georgetown law i discovered his real passion for writing. My last year in the marine corps i was on medical hold in the secretary of navys office and i start writing as a part of my job for the first time and loved it and wrote three fulllength articles for military journals when i was in the pentagon and then in law school i found myself more fascinated with writing, the beauty of writing, capturing your own thoughts on the independence of it than i did with a lot of legal studies that i was being required to learn. At the same time i had been raised from a very young age to be a leader. Thats another theme that i tried to capture in this book, the impact that my father had on all of us having gone into the military during world war ii with no college. The first in our family actually to finish high school and then getting a commission in world war ii, becoming a pilot, flew b29s b17s and at the end of the war like so many of the citizen soldiers of the war when the country demobilized. In 1947 when he came to realize that we were going to have to have a larger military because of the cold war and other things that were going on, our country wasnt very excited about undertaking at the time after every war had mobilized until the end of world war ii. We had mobilized just in the aftermath of world war ii for decade my father chance by 1947 to go back in the military and fly again and from that point forward and for the next three and a half years, he was almost continually deployed. He was either overseas or in bases that did not have Family Housing at that time. And watching what he went through and watching the example he set every night at the dinner table when he was home really instilled in all of us a very vigorous feeling of love of country and understanding of sacrifice for your country and the greatest honor you can have is being able to serve your country. On the one hand i had fallen in love with writing but on the other id always been raised to leave. And so i would write for a while and then miss running something. I might go into Public Service for a little while and just write. I say this because when people asked why he decided not to run for reelection in the senate my answer really was this was the fourth time in my adult life that i had gone through the cycle. I spent time in the marine corps and that i left into law school and started writing and wrote fields of fire. I had the opportunity to work in the congress was on the Committee Counsel on the house budget committee. I was one of the first Vietnam Veterans to work on the council in the congress from 1987 to 91. When president reagan was elected i was offered the opportunity to interview for positions in the administration and i said four years is about right for me. I went back and wrote a book, did some journalism. Very enjoyable and interesting journalism and that i was then in beirut in 1983 when we were deployed to beirut. When the building blew up, they were killing more than two and 20 marines and one day. I just decided i think its time for me to stick my or in the water again. So i went into the Reagan Administration and had spent exactly four years to the day as a member of the Reagan Administration as assistant secretary of defense and the secretary of navy. Then it was time to go back and do some other things again. I did some work and did some more books and into southeast asia. And 06 i decided to run for the senate. We had a great run in the senate i think despite how frustrating our legislative process really is on many larger issues and then i decided i needed to take a break again. I stepped away and its healthy quite frankly. We took consciously a year with no interviews wrote no offense no political events to get the balance back and my independence back enduring that time i wrote this book. When i was trying to figure out what would be the best book to be working on during this period talking with my publisher one of the comments that are then made it as you know a lot of people know what you did in the senate but not a lot of people know the journey and how did you become who you are . How do any of us become who we are . What were the challenges we went through and what were the struggles that shaped us because we are all shaped by the events that affect us during our childhood and early adulthood. I also decided it would be a good chance to sort of work in the narrative of the cold war period. Theres really not that much that has been written about what it was like to grow up in that period particularly in the military looking up with all these events happening from sputnik to the berlin wall to the berlin airlift which my father flew in, the cuban missile crisis and the gradual lead into the war in vietnam. So i could see that i could tell that story and had my own early years story of going to the Naval Academy. I arrived at the Naval Academy with the class of 1968 and in the summer of 1964. Within a week after the time i arrived at the Naval Academy Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and within six weeks we have the gulf of time to incident in vietnam which began the escalation of the war in vietnam. The four years that i was at the Naval Academy in addition to learning how to live what is called the marble monastery, the world of restrictions as a Service Academy we also watched our country go through an enormous amount of turmoil from that. A 1964 to 1968. The Civil Rights Movement became more violent and reached its apex a couple of months before we graduated when Martin Luther king was assassinated in april, two months almost to the day before we graduated. The vietnam war became more heated. It reached its apex with the tet offensive in the end of january and beginning of january 1968. Lyndon johnson decided not to run for reelection as president drawing our political process into turmoil. That night we graduated Robert Kennedy was assassinated. This was just an incredible four years and yet the focus that we had with the people in my class and i think i can say this unanimously was that we had been called upon to learn how to lead to have the honor of serving her country at a time of great crisis. From the Naval Academy at great many of us went to the war in vietnam one way or the other. I write about vietnam in this book in a way that i havent written about it in any other book even though i have written an entire book on the combat environment of the marine corps. It was very difficult to write. As a lot of this book was. The other thing i wanted to do in this book was to really pay my respects to my family particularly my parents and my grandmother for what they had to endure in a different era and the impact that they have on all of us in terms of our future adulthood. When my dad went back into the military in 1947, as i said he was the ploy or enabled to live permanently with us for three and a half years. My mother at the time was 24 years old with four kids living in a town where she didnt know anyone. One of the things im proudest of in my professional career is during the times i have been in Public Service we worked really hard to put together a set of family benefits for the people who are in the military, Family Support programs on base and also offbase for when people are deployed. When we were growing up the military had changed so dramatically for the first time, keeping a large Standing Military around the world. The support structures just werent there. They were catching up constant constantly. During our childhood Family Support meant that our grandmother would come in and help our mother and my aunt who was younger at the time to help my mother. My grandmother was a real piece of work. I love her to death. She has lived with us from the time i was too until a time i was eight. My mother also grew up in east arkansas in the cotton fields of east arkansas. My mother was one of eight kids, three of them who died in childhood, not childbirth, childhood including one of her sisters who died of typhoid fever. Her father died when she was 10. My grandmother after a couple of years of utter poverty first found a job in northern little rock in an ammunition factory making artillery shells gearing up for world war ii. Then she heard about california like everybody in that part of the country at the time. She was forced to make something of a sophies choice. She had enough money for a oneway ticket to california and to bring one child with her. So she decided to bring her youngest child and left my younger brother was then and in arkansas. Brandy went out and became rosie the riveter. She had arms like popeye from working in the cotton fields for several years. They found that their size and strength she was a natural fit to go into the noses of these bombers as a riveter for people that were larger than she wouldnt fit. Then she moved, when my father was back in the military she moved to missouri which hadnt incredible impact on my life until i was eight years old. Weeping these stories together and how that impacted not just preparing to serve in the military myself but the whole formation of how you look at your country when you think about this. We moved more than two dozen times to different houses. We averaged a different house about every eight months growing up in the military that era. There was one period i went to nine Different Schools in five years. We were able to live the Positive Side of that. We were able to live in places like Montgomery Alabama when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning, to see that dynamic as it was emerging. We went out to vandenberg california when there was nothing. We lived in a wasteland is that bases being built. My dad was picked as a group of the first people to go out and start putting the program into place. Sputnik had gone up in the country had awakened to the fact that we were really in dire danger in terms of our Overall National security. I lived in omaha nebraska where i fought Golden Gloves and learned about the farming communities, did a lot of bird hunting in the search of things. So we got a look at just about all of the different cultures in our country. The downside of course was academically particularly it was i think it had an effect on all of us. We were starting in Different Schools in Different School systems etc. And the imbalance i would have to say that having learned about this country and having to learn how to operate and work with people of all different cultures was a great contribution that helps me as a leader first in the military and then later. The book ends actually with the beginning of this dual career that i did not select. I had attempted to stay in the marine corps after i was wounded and i finally left. I always thought i would be a career marine. I made one decision when i left the marine corps and that was i was going to walk on nobodys treadmill ever again. I was going to find one thing that i really cared about and do it until i found the next thing that i really cared about. So totally by accident i ended up with a school career. That is pretty much the book. I dont know what we are going to do next. Finding the next one thing that we want to do and my wife is with me. We have talked about this quite a bit and we will just have to see. I want to thank all of you for coming and im happy to take your questions. [applause] yes sir. [inaudible] antolino . I found that quite interesting when i read it. By the way i think they have asked people to come to the mics but i will repeat the question just for future questioners. Your question was about antolino. Okay, look the book is mostly about me growing up but its book ended with a beginning chapter and an ending chapter about the United States senate. I dont write personally about anyone that i served with. I actually told a lot of my fellow senators when i left they said you are going to write a book . I said you are all safe, dont worry. [laughter] i met every day with cap weinberger when he was secretary of the defense and you will never see a word that took place when the door was closed an