Semper Chai: General Robert Magnus

Gen. Robert Magnus is assistant commandant of the Marine Corps.

By Suzanne Kurtz

Situated deep within the E-ring of the Pentagon, the spacious office suite of Marine Corps Gen. Robert Magnus is surprisingly quiet. Uniformed aides work purposefully outside, while Magnus reminisces about his childhood.

He recalls his boyhood idol, a family friend who regaled him with stories of sinking World War II ships. But that veteran could not have imagined how such stories would inspire a small Jewish boy to scale the heights of the U.S. military.

When he assumed the duties of assistant commandant of the Marine Corps in September 2005, Magnus, 59, became second-in-command of 180,000 Marines and one of only five four-star generals in the Corps.

Despite a 38-year career in the military – where “almost all Marines’ accents start to drift down toward North Carolina, especially aviators,” he says – a faint New York accent belies his roots.

Genial, no-nonsense and a bit professorial, Magnus, was born in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, the youngest child of a bookkeeper and a seamstress. When the family moved to the working class, post-World War II community of Levittown, Long Island, “a mile and a half from a potato farm,” his secular Jewish upbringing was “ideal and lower-middle class.” And while his cousins across town may have been raised more traditionally observant, Magnus was sent to a Conservative Hebrew school three days a week and celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Hicksville Jewish Center on Long Island.

“It was a typical American Jewish home and very normal for Long Island,” he recalls.

But perhaps less normal was his decision to apply for an ROTC scholarship to attend the University of Virginia in 1965. “It wasn’t like [my family] said ‘Oh, great, my Jewish son isn’t going to be a doctor, dentist, lawyer or rabbi,” he says. “At that time, when I was going to college, we were well into Vietnam and except for a cousin-in-law; no one in my family had ever joined the military.”

Magnus was so committed to military service that he even admonished the Army doctor who offered him the coveted 4F classification on his ROTC physical. A bum trigger finger could have kept him out of Vietnam. Instead, Magnus told the stunned doctor: “What are you talking about? I want to go into the Marine Corps!”

At UVa, Magnus majored in modern European and Russian history, went to Jewish religious services in Charlottesville and fondly recalls the library at the campus Hillel where he was a member. However, when asked if he was a member of a Greek fraternity, Magnus responds proudly: “No! I was a GDI, a Gamma Delta Iota – a God-Damn Independent!”

After graduation in 1969, he married his high school sweetheart, Rose, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Heeding a friend’s challenge, Magnus studied aviation and learned to fly CH-46 Sea Knight transport helicopters. “I didn’t want to be an aviator,” he says. “I wasn’t against it, but I wanted to be a grunt. I wanted to be an infantry officer.”

But the rigor of learning to be an aviator taught him a wealth of skills beyond that of his civilian peers. “Aside from the fact that I was an aviator and a Marine, people on the outside [of the military] were envious of the experience I had had by the time I was a captain,” says Magnus. “What other place can you take a 22-year-old man or woman and literally give them the responsibility for the care, feeding, welfare and lives of 40 people? What a huge responsibility!”

Predictably, toward the end of the Vietnam War, his responsibilities only got huger. In 1973, Magnus served as an operations officer with a search-and-rescue detachment in Thailand, flying in the middle of the night “before we had night-vision goggles,” rescuing people left on the ground.

That harrowing time brought him “a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment” and earned the respect of his fellow Marines. Nevertheless in October 1974, Magnus left the Marine Corps to work on Wall Street. It would be a short 15-month absence.

“I thought I wanted to get out of the Marine Corps to make money. From my window on the 24th floor looking out over the East River, I realized three things: I really liked flying, I really liked leading people – especially Marines, and that Wall Street wasn’t for me,” remembers Magnus.

When he returned to the Marines, Magnus became a weapons and tactics instructor for other CH-46 helicopter aviators. The assignment prompted a friend to bestow on him a “call sign,” a nickname given to a military pilot as a substitute for the officer’s given name. “Fighter pilots and attack helicopter pilots all had call signs, but I was a transport helicopter pilot and we didn’t,” he explains. His friend insisted and Magnus became “Heeb,” short for “Hebrew.”

He would continue to use that call sign until three years ago when Rose prevailed on him to stop using it when signing off his e-mails. “She said there are going to be Jewish people who misunderstand and take offense,” says Magnus. “I said ‘I don’t care,’ but she was right and I don’t use it anymore.”

When asked if being Jewish was ever a liability in his expansive military career, Magnus’ answer is matter-of-fact: It has not. More pointedly, when asked about anti-Semitism, he recalls only one incident, years ago, when as a captain someone foolishly called him a “Jew boy.” His response: “I punched him in the face.”

One could argue that Magnus embraced being a Jew in the Marine Corps. Throughout his tours at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, he describes being “very active” in the base’s Jewish congregation. While serving as a lieutenant colonel squadron commander, he also led the Reform congregation and directed his children’s Hebrew school: “Though I was not competent to be a Hebrew school principal – but someone had to organize the classes.”

While admitting to being largely self-taught “Jewishly,” he adds, “I’ve also been fortunate in my career to not only know rabbis that were military chaplains, but several rabbis in the civilian community and from the Jewish Welfare Board.” Still Magnus concedes it is “very hard to be in the military in the United States and be an Orthodox Jew.”

“You can,” he says. “There are some who can. But it is pretty hard. And a lot of it is personal choice.”

“This is America. It’s not hard to be a religious anything,” he continues.

Magnus recently hosted an iftar (a Ramadan break-fast) at the Marine Corps barracks in Washington, D.C. At the second annual event, foreign Muslim military attachés, Muslim U.S. Department of Defense employees and his good friend, Kuwaiti Ambassador Al-Sabah, were in attendance. All knew Magnus was Jewish.

“It was great: a mutual education thing. We talked about brotherhood and common human values,” he says.

Outside his office, Magnus’ aides are getting antsy. A meeting with the secretary of the navy is looming as he answers another question of personal choice. Why then did he choose, perhaps the uncommon career, of a United States Marine?

Gen. Magnus is again matter-of-fact. Folding his hands in his lap, he answers: “It’s the greatest fraternity in the world.”

Not bad for a GDI.

Suzanne Kurtz is Hillel senior communications associate and editor of Hillel Campus Report.