Jim Webb almost killed a man with his bare hands, according to former aide

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Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who announced his long-shot campaign for president last week, prides himself on being a fighter — for the working class, for fallen soldiers on all sides, for America. But what voters may not know is that his penchant for pugilism extends to actual fights, the kind where people get beaten to a bloody pulp.

That's the accusation made by a former aide named Chase Untermeyer, who authored a little-known book about his time at the Pentagon called Inside Reagan's Navy. (Webb served as Reagan's secretary of the Navy.) Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast unearthed this tidbit from the book:

Untermeyer recounts a session in Webb's private office, during which the Navy secretary reminisced about a long-ago violent dustup with a ponytailed biker."I had him by the hair and was beating his head on the sidewalk when he suddenly went limp on me," Webb recounted. "Then it came to me: I had killed the f--king son of a bitch, and I would be put on report back at the Academy! So I revived him — whereupon he came to and kicked me in the head about 10 times 'til I was able to grab his leg... Moral: show no mercy in a fight." [The Daily Beast]

In the book, Webb is portrayed as a humorless, self-serious striver who is so convinced of his epic role in American history that he views insults to himself as "treason."