STRUCTURING SENTENCES

"I'm a writer, I want to know where you're going with this," Jim Webb
says suspiciously at the beginning of our chat. He has been so many
things: tough guy, for sure; Ollie North's college boxing opponent,
Vietnam War hero, Navy secretary, senator, Republican . . . Democrat.
But he seems most eager to define himself as a man of letters, or at
least he does on this particular overcast day at his office, pausing
to talk for a few minutes about what could be his greatest
legislative legacy or a most uncharacteristic clunker.

The Democratic senator -- er, writer -- is accustomed to controlling
the narrative flow whether he's writing bestsellers or directing
troops on the battlefield. Yet now, this commanding presence enters a
less compliant arena, one in which he inevitably emerges as much as a
protagonist as an author. "I am, at bottom, a writer," he says,
invoking his default response. "I start with a theme, rather than a
plot." Webb wants to shape a plotline that, with each turn of the
page, draws America closer to reinventing its criminal justice system.

Questioning why the United States locks up so many of its youths, why
its prisons swell with disease and atrocities while fundamental
social problems persist in its streets, has earned Webb lavish praise
as a politician unafraid to be smeared as soft on crime.

And when a law-and-order type as rock-ribbed as Webb expresses
willingness to consider legalizing or decriminalizing drugs,
excitement follows. Still, for all the attaboys, ceding control of
how he or his ideas will be interpreted clearly makes Webb
uncomfortable. At 63, Jim Webb, is one year removed from withdrawing
his name from a list of possible running mates for then-Sen. Barack
Obama after much breathless speculation that he would be the fabled
Southern Democrat who could boost the ticket.

Webb looks much younger than his age, still every bit the picture of
the fit warrior, with red hair and a ruddy Scotch-Irish complexion.
Once he fixes that stare of his, sets that square jaw, there's little
doubt that he is used to giving the orders.

His voice starts somewhere deep in his throat, then emerges as a
confident rumble, adding to the aura of unquestioned authority, which
he asserts when the conversation turns to where his ideas about the
criminal justice system could be headed. "I don't want you to
perceive from an inverted syllogism where I'm going here," he says.
Even without Webb's reminders (or his casual use of syllogism, which
Merriam-Webster helped us to understand as "a deductive scheme of a
formal argument, consisting of a major and minor premise and a
conclusion"), it would be tough to miss the fact that he is, indeed, a writer.

A really good, really successful writer.

His crisp, muscular prose regularly lands him on fiction bestseller
lists and his stellar 1978 debut novel, "Fields of Fire," was
described at the time, by no less a light than Tom Wolfe, as the
"finest of the Vietnam novels."

Writing hasn't always burnished Webb's rep, though.

The next year, he wrote an article in Washingtonian magazine titled
"Women Can't Fight," arguing against women in combat leadership roles.

The article lingers as an easy prop for Webb's detractors, even
though he says he tripled the number of jobs open to women while
naval secretary and cracked down on sexual harassment. Webb's gifts
as a wordsmith -- occasional kerfuffles aside -- afford him a
platform unavailable to less literary senators.

When he decided to propose a massive reexamination of U.S. prisons
and criminal laws this past spring, he gave the usual floor speech.

Whereas other senators may get confined to that usually empty chamber
and its daytime C-SPAN audience, Webb went on from there to state his
case by writing a Parade magazine cover story titled "Why We Must Fix
Our Prisons," talking directly to its 30 million-plus Sunday readers.
"Our overcrowded, ill-managed prison systems are places of violence,
physical abuse, and hate, making them breeding grounds that
perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to
fear," the writer wrote. Lawmakers who haven't been decorated for
heroism on the battlefield -- and don't have that penetrating gaze --
might have less latitude to broach such themes.

But Webb gets a pass. "He's clearly not a liberal wimp," said Pat
Nolan of Prison Fellowship Ministries, founded by Charles Colson.
"That's what works about this politically. He's not doing this
because he bleeds for prisoners." On its face, Webb's proposal is
bolder in rhetoric than in practice, to put it mildly.

He wants to -- brace yourselves -- form a bipartisan commission! (The
proposal is included in a bill that has attracted more than two dozen
co-sponsors, but has yet to be voted on.) The commission is supposed
to, among other things, come up with recommendations for reducing the
overall incarceration rate, decreasing prison violence and improving
treatment of mental illness inside and outside prisons. But it is
commission duty No. 6 that keeps drawing attention, making Webb's
proposal an eye-catcher in the sea of congressional proposals that
might or might not go all the way: "Restructure the approach to
criminalization of, and incarceration as the result of, the
possession or use of illegal drugs, decreasing the demand for illicit
drugs, and improving the treatment for addiction." For once, Webb's
mastery of the English language doesn't sound so masterful.

This reads as arched-eyebrow intriguing, but gimme-a-break murky. Is
he saying that drugs should be decriminalized, or what? In the
Richmond interview, Webb clearly doesn't like where this line of
questioning is going. (After our meeting, his press rep sends an
e-mail, saying how uncomfortable they were and noting that the
tension was "palpable.") Webb scans for tripwires, parsing each
question tossed at him. Once, he says, a journalist tried to trick
him into hoisting a grenade to get some color for a piece.

He didn't fall for it. The senator grumbles that no one should fall
into the easy assumption that his interest in drug policy might be
inspired in some way by his time in Vietnam, a war so often depicted
on the big screen through a gauzy haze of pot smoke. "I saw far more
drugs at Georgetown Law Center than I ever saw in the military," says
Webb, who earned a law degree at Georgetown in 1975. Webb wants to
frame his project as a sweeping examination of the American criminal
justice system, a thoughtful study that defies simplification or
distillation. He notes that he doesn't want to "pre-judge" before the
commission has even been formed.

But he does provide a list of "findings" in his bill to get any
future commission started. Those findings, which echo Webb's speeches
and his public comments, describe a criminal justice system in
desperate need of repair.

He points out that 2.38 million people are locked up in the United
States, "five times the world's average incarceration rate," and that
7.3 million Americans are either incarcerated or on probation or
parole --"an increase of 290 percent since 1980." "Either we have the
most evil people on Earth living in the United States," Webb said
when he introduced his bill March 26, "or we are doing something
dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal
justice." In his bill, he goes on to state that high incarceration
rates have not lessened the availability of drugs and says that
"treating addiction will significantly help decrease demand." He also
paints a grim picture of life inside the nation's prisons, citing
high HIV rates among inmates and disturbing levels of sexual abuse
behind bars. But what about commission duty No. 6? This one looks
like it could be big. Does this mean he'd support decriminalizing or
legalizing drugs? "Everything should be on the table," Webb says.

And there it is -- damn the consequences! This is why, even as
editorialists in the mainstream media applaud his efforts to reform
the overall criminal justice system, he's also racking up headlines
in High Times magazine and getting shout-outs from the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws for his "candor and
political courage." Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, better known
by the acronym LEAP -- a group of current and former law enforcement
officers -- is running a petition on its Internet site in support of
Webb's commission. The petition and a video of Webb appear beneath
the group's signature pitch: photos of Al Capone ("Alcohol Smuggler")
and Pablo Escobar ("Drug Cartel"), accompanied by the line, "Same
problem . . . same solution.

Repeal Prohibition Now!" LEAP's Norman Stamper, a former chief of
police in Seattle, praises Webb as "a tough guy" and says "the hope
is that an honest, very critical examination of drug laws will lead
to the conclusion that prohibition doesn't work." Little public
opposition has emerged, though that might have more to do with the
bill's uncertain status than anything else. In the meantime, Webb
says he's been contacted about his proposal by the president and
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, both of whom gave encouraging signals.

And he is quietly amassing an eclectic band of supporters, ranging
from the influential -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada
- -- to the surprising -- conservative Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham
of South Carolina. On board, too, is Nolan, a former California state
lawmaker who did time in the 1990s for racketeering. Nolan sees
Webb's commission as a way to steer drug offenders to treatment
facilities, rather than warehousing them in prisons. Senate insiders
have been somewhat surprised about how seamlessly Webb has managed
the early stages of selling his bill to members of Congress ever wary
of being labeled as soft on crime.

His substantive, non-emotional, almost academic approach to the
discussion seems at odds with the brusque Jim Webb some have come to
expect, and even dread. Why, wasn't it just a three years ago that
Webb had his infamous set-to with then-President Bush at a White
House reception for new members of Congress? Bush asked Webb, whose
son is a Marine and was stationed in Iraq, "How's your boy?" Webb --
who had worn his son's combat boots every day during his upset 2006
Senate campaign -- responded, "That's between me and my boy." Later
he told The Washington Post, "I'm not particularly interested in
having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall."

"We were expecting him to be out in the parking lot having
fistfights," a high-ranking Senate aide said. "But that's not the way
it has been. He's impressed everyone with his preparation and his
composure." Still, Nolan says, "he's not warm and fuzzy.

He's not a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. He's kind of abrupt.

But I don't want somebody who is a glad-hander. I want somebody who
can get things done." But where to look for clues about how he might
do it? He is the writer, after all, so what does he write about
getting things through Congress? His latest book -- a nonfiction
entry -- is called "A Time to Fight," which sounds kind of feisty.

But there, in the text, we see a measure of restraint, even as the
writer is preparing for battle. "The United States Senate is composed
of 100 scorpions in a jar," the writer writes. "And one should be
very careful in deciding how and when to shake that jar."