Voting for War

The moment came at a funeral for a soldier. Republican Congressman Walter Jones (North Carolina, 3rd District) had voted to go to war in Iraq but had begun to question that decision, and the dubious claims by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. At the service for U.S. Marine Michael Bitz—killed three days into the war—Jones saw Bitz's two-year-old son, Joshua, and was overcome with grief. Jones, whose district is home to Camp Lejeune and two Marine Corps air stations, set out to learn the truth—and was compelled to publicly acknowledge he had made "a grievous mistake." "We were lied to about the justifications for going to war in Iraq," he writes. "I was lied to; the nation was lied to." In these pages, with insights from family, colleagues, and former members of the military, Jones recounts his journey to becoming a more independent thinker, a renegade within his party and a more faithful public servant.