"The only time that he feels strongly about serving his country is during his waking hours," said former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey, a longtime friend and fellow veteran who is a recipient of the Medal of Honor. "I have no access to his dreams, but I've watched him awake and it never leaves him."
"Jim is not a politician," his friend Nelson Jones, a fellow Marine veteran, said simply. "But he serves."
"I realize it sounds like a cliché," said Walter Anderson, a former editor of Parade and a Vietnam vet himself who is Webb's longtime book editor. "The truth is it's who he is."
Friends—who form a core of advisers around him, with most members being fellow vets—agree that it's crucial he run for president. It's the kind of impulse that has a long history in the military mind. They compare Webb to a number of great men who answered the call: Horatio Nelson and George S. Patton. The writer Tom Wolfe said, in 2007, that Webb was de Gaulle facing Algeria. Anderson compares him to Churchill—party switcher, writer, head of the Navy—in 1939.
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Jim Webb, Webb Campaign Press Release - If Jim Webb Hates Politics So Much, Why Is He Running? Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/313027