NEWSWEEK: "A Reluctant Rebel's Yell"

Newsweek has another good article about Senator Hagel on their website (that I believe will be in the Feb. 5th issue of the magazine) that is well worth a read. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

Viewed from afar, the stuff inside Hagel looks like the stuff that makes Republican presidential candidates. He is a third-generation party member who grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He says he was the only student in his Roman Catholic high school to support Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election—and when he cast his first vote, an absentee ballot from Vietnam, it was for Nixon's winning ticket in 1968. His conservative credentials are impeccable: according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted with the White House more times in 2006 than any other senator. He is manly, Middle American—and when he talks about military matters, he exudes the cool confidence of a warrior-statesman who knows that war is hell.
...
Hagel may be the one Republican who can fully separate the party from the troubled legacy of George W. Bush as the GOP looks to 2008.
...
The tale of Hagel's reluctant rebellion is the story of a man haunted by wars then and now—and of a party at a crossroads, weighing Hagel's past transgressions of disloyalty against the simple necessities of survival. Chuck Hagel has a lifetime of lessons in loyalty and war.

The piece is excellent and sheds a nice light onto the personallity of Chuck Hagel and how his life has influenced his work in Washington.