Webb learned how to run something as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. He isn’t afraid to speak up to a president. When Bush asked after Webb’s son, a Marine lance corporal fighting in Iraq, Webb said, “That’s between my boy and myself.”

In an interview on CBS, he explained, “There’s nothing harder than having your kid in combat and not knowing, every morning, not knowing whether he’s alive.”

His time in the Senate was devoted to veterans. Webb drove a modern GI bill through Congress while, as a lawyer, he represented veterans pro bono.

Their current treatment, he says, is a matter of poor leadership, not policy.

“One thing they teach you in the Marine Corps,” he said in an interview on Fox, is that “if you have a problem, put your good leaders on the problem.”