Don't Call Him Redneck

He went on to become assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and then secretary of the Navy. When he quit that post in a protest over budget cuts, he added screenwriting and producing to his résumé and spent 2 1/2 years trying to bring American businesses into Vietnam. And he kept writing books. In all, he has written six novels and, most recently, a book of nonfiction about Scotch-Irish culture. (That's not counting an academic book he wrote in law school, about U.S. military strategy in the Pacific.)

Campaign officials for Webb's opponent, Republican Sen. George Allen, have repeatedly referenced Webb's careers in writing and in movies, hoping these labels might imply he is out of touch, untrustworthy or -- perhaps worst of all in Virginia -- liberal. In a debate, Allen said Webb was more aligned with the "values of Hollywood" than the "values of Virginia." "Hollywood," of course, is itself a dirty word in the popular political lexicon, a kind of shorthand for things that are lefty, elitist and vaguely debauched.

The funny thing is, Webb -- a Democrat who became a Republican in the '70s and a Democrat again in recent years -- has been a largely conservative force both in movies and on the printed page. At various times he has eviscerated liberals, feminists, elites, academics and those who protested the Vietnam War. He has criticized Hollywood for its treatment of his people. By all rights, he should have alienated someone like Rob Reiner. Instead, Reiner has been giving money to his Senate bid. ("I've maxed out," Reiner says.) Much of what they share is a deep opposition to the Iraq war.

The project that took Webb and Reiner to the hills of southwestern Virginia is a script they'd been working on for a movie about this very subject. "Whiskey River" centers on an Iraq war soldier who hails from a world much like Gate City, Va., and what Reiner calls the "culture of service" this soldier comes from. It is also, Reiner says, about the fundamental unfairness of a war in which "only certain people have to sacrifice."

The notion of his people's sacrifice in wartime is a theme Webb has returned to again and again in his writing. In his 2004 book, "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America," Webb writes that the Scotch-Irish "have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war." In interviews, he recalls starting law school in 1972 and discovering that others were in "ethnocentric retreat." Everyone else knew who they were and where they came from, everyone else had ethnic pride, but the identity of Webb's own culture had been lost. He says his peers labeled him a white man of privilege, a WASP.

In the decades since, Webb has studied the migrations of his people, exulting in their fighting history and puzzling over their entrenched poverty. He is himself the product of a long line of military men, and his son Jimmy is a Marine in Iraq. Webb's dad was an Air Force officer who used to make 4-year-old Webb hit him, fist to fist, to prove he was tough. Webb once told an interviewer he used to have to stand "at attention" when his dad inspected his room:

"I'd say, 'Hey, Dad,' and he'd say, 'Shut up, you're a corporal.' "

Everybody's Villains

Webb can be grim and stiff in public. In a recent appearance to generate support among Hispanic voters for his Virginia Senate run, Webb looked off into the distance as speakers took the podium, his body rigid, looking about as relaxed as, well, a corporal standing at attention. When the crowd whooped and clapped for him, he didn't even smile.

But one-on-one, Webb can really talk. He breaks into spontaneous, growling recitation of a manly poem called "Do You Fear the Wind?" that he learned from his father, and launches into a disquisition on country music. He critiques the prose of Winston Churchill ("marvelous") and Teddy Roosevelt ("a little over the top"). His manner is relaxed, bordering on incautious. Regarding his early drafts of a particular book, he says (unsenatorially) that "they all sucked."

He recalls a magazine article he wrote in 1984: "We had the second-highest volume of mail of anything that Parade's ever published."

He talks about his love of poetry. Yeats. Pound. Dylan Thomas. He talks about his books. "In a lot of my writing, the narrative is in meter," Webb says. "I don't know if you've ever noticed that."

We hadn't. He pulls out a copy of "Fields of Fire" and reads aloud to demonstrate.