John Marsh Jr.; former secretary of U.S. Army

John Marsh Jr., a conservative Virginia Democrat who interrupted his congressional career in the 1960s to serve his National Guard duty in Vietnam foxholes, became one of President Gerald Ford’s closest advisers and spent eight years as Army secretary under President Ronald Reagan, died Feb. 4 at an assisted-living center in Raphine, Virginia. He was 92.

Marsh had complications from a recent stroke, said his son, Dr. John “Rob” Marsh III.

Although not widely known outside the policymaking corridors of Washington – The New York Times called him one of the longest-serving but “least known” senior officials in the Defense Department – John Marsh Jr. was a powerful backstage player at the White House and the Pentagon during the 1970s and 1980s.

He retained the demeanor of the folksy, soft-spoken country lawyer he had been during his early career. But he was also shrewd and subtle – a “careful, almost soulful political operative,” as Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward once described him.

After a hardscrabble upbringing in the Shenandoah Valley, Marsh became a commissioned Army officer by 19, trained as a paratrooper, served 25 years in the Virginia National Guard. and devoted much of his adult life to military affairs.

In late 1966, during his second term in Congress, he volunteered for a month-long stint in the Vietnam highlands, never revealing to other soldiers that he held national office. (He served under the command of then-Lt. Col. Alexander Haig Jr., the future four-star Army general who became chief of staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ford and secretary of state under Reagan.)

On Capitol Hill, Marsh was a solid supporter of the Vietnam War and co-sponsored the bill that created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission in 1966. Increasingly ill at ease in a party that was tilting ever leftward, he declined to seek election to a fifth term in 1970.

“They required candidates for office to sign an oath that they would support the national ticket, which I refused to do,” he later told presidential historian Richard Norton Smith. “I was not putting up with that.”

In 1973, Nixon named Marsh assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, essentially the Pentagon’s chief lobbyist to Congress. The next year, he became a top assistant to then-Vice President Gerald Ford on national security matters. After Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, amid the threat of impeachment for Watergate-related offenses, Marsh spent three years as a Cabinet-level counselor to President Ford.

He was regarded as one of