6 things to know about Jim Webb

Former Virginia senator Jim Webb speaks on Jun 30 in Baltimore. (Patrick Semansky, AP)

Democrat Jim Webb announced his presidential candidacy

Military decorations

Webb, a 1968 connoisseur of a Naval Academy, is a rarely flashy Vietnam veteran. He received the Navy Cross, a Silver Star, dual Bronze Stars and dual Purple Hearts for his service.

State of a Union response

In January 2007, not prolonged after holding his Senate seat, Webb was tapped to broach a Democratic response to President George W. Bush’s State of a Union Address. Webb resolved his remarks with a peppery conflict on Bush’s control of a Iraq war. Bush, Webb pronounced , “took us into this fight recklessly” and a republic was now “held warrant to a likely ­and likely ­ irregularity that has followed.”

Navy secretary

Webb, a former Republican, served as secretary of a Navy underneath a GOP administration. However, his reign was short-lived, and his depart from a post was not on a best of terms. Furious over Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci’s due bill request, Webb wrote in his abdication minute to President Ronald Reagan in Feb 1988 about Carlucci: “I am incompetent to support him privately or to urge this nice budget.”

Prolific author

Long before using for office, Webb was an author.  He’s created 10 books, including a acclaimed 1978 Vietnam novel Fields of Fire. 

Family

Webb, 69, is married to wife Hong Le Webb, a Vietnamese-American attorney who came to a United States as a child after Saigon fell. The integrate have one child together. Jim Webb has 3 children from before  marriages, and Hong Le Webb has a daughter from a before marriage.

One term

In early 2011, Webb announced he would not find re-election to a Senate, observant in a matter during a time that he’d “decided to lapse to a private sector.” Democrat Tim Kaine, a former governor, ran for a chair and degraded Allen, who was seeking to win behind a chair he’d mislaid to Webb 6 years earlier.

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