Speakers
Jack Jacobs
Jack Jacobs will speak at The Common Good on September 20, 2012.
About Jack Jacobs:
Jack Howard Jacobs is a retired colonel in the United States Army and a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions during the Vietnam War. He currently serves as a military analyst for MSNBC and previously worked as an investment manager.
Jack Jacobs fought in the Vietnam where he was subsequently promoted to captain and awarded the Medal of Honor. The medal was formally presented to him by President Richard Nixon. In addition to the Medal of Honor, Jacobs received two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. In his memoir, Jacobs recounts that he had to use subterfuge to return to a combat role in Vietnam after being awarded the Medal of Honor, as the military was unwilling to assign Medal of Honor recipients to combat roles. Jacobs was a faculty member at the United States Military Academy in West Point, teaching international relations and comparative politics for three years, and at the National War College in Washington, D.C. He retired from the Army in 1987 as a colonel.
After his military retirement, Jacobs began a career in investment banking. He founded and was chief operating officer of AutoFinance Group, Inc., which dealt in the securitization of debt instruments. The company was later sold to KeyBank. He next worked as a managing director of Bankers Trust, overseeing the firm’s foreign exchange options and being involved in the institutional hedge fundbusiness until leaving the company in 1996. Jacobs is a principal in The Fitzroy Group, an investment and residential real estate development organization which operates in London. He is also on the board of directors for several smaller corporations.
Jacobs maintains involvement in several military-related organizations. He is vice chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation, a member of the board of trustees for the National World War II Museum, and holds the McDermott Chair of Politics at the U.S. Military Academy.
In October 2008, the Penguin Group published Jacobs’ memoir, If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice In America’s Time of Need,coauthored with New York Times best-selling author, Douglas Century, with a foreword by NBC Nightly News anchor and managing editor Brian Williams. The book won the 2010 Colby Award, recognizing a “first work of fiction or nonfiction that has made a significant contribution to the public’s understanding of intelligence operations, military history, or international affairs.”
In May 2012, Thomas Dunne Books published Jacobs’ Basic: Surviving Boot Camp and Basic Training, co-written with David Fisher. The book is a history of the American military’s basic training told mainly through oral histories of those who have gone through Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force initial training.
He is also a military analyst for NBC/MSNBC. In 2009 he appeared on The Colbert Report as part of the Doom Bunker segment.
Jacobs is married to Sue Jacobs, has a grown daughter and two sons, and lives in Far Hills, New Jersey. He has also been a resident of the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey.
