We learned today that John T “Jack” Reed, West Point class of 1968, Harvard Business School class of 1977, died on January 31st, 2026.
John’s writing was influential in our own life and career. His Army articles changed our entire career trajectory and life plans in about 45 minutes’ reading in the MWR internet cafe in Bagram. We appreciated his insightful and no-bullshit approach to topics including West Point, the Army, and follow-on life decisions. He was a prolific author on real-estate, football coaching, and how to live your life. He brought a unique lens and viewpoint to military topics. Jack was truly an independent character and thinker, his own man, and a patriot.
While he supported West Point, a lot of his writing comes across as “tough love” to an institution with which he had a deep if sometimes conflicted emotional bond. We saw him as an idealist, as someone who saw what the Army promised to be, became disillusioned with the reality of the institution and fallibility of its people, and strove to improve it through his candid thoughts and analysis.
John’s Army writing focused on the gaps between what the Army said and what it did. His real-estate books are dense with hard lessons he learned in that ever-so-idiosyncratic industry. And JTR’s Succeeding, of course, is what Dad would have written if Dad wrote a companion piece to Aristotle on how to live a good life.
We were fortunate enough to have drawn his attention here at usmaData, where he gave his thoughts and recommendations in public and direct messages. We always appreciated it. Thank you Jack for your contributions and life’s work.
From his Facebook page:
“John Theodore Reed
July 5, 1946 – January 31, 2026
Message written by John on January 9, 2026
If you are reading this, I am deceased. I had a brain seizure 12/26/26 after coming home from restaurant breakfast and my morning 5,000 steps.
That incident per se did not kill me. My good wife found me lying on the floor of my home office unconscious. She called 911. I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital.
Was I 100% when I came home? No. What percent? I had trouble finding some words. I do not recommend it. But I could still enjoy conversations and often outremember my interlocutors.
I still enjoy our usually great weather. And my family and friends.
I was born 7/5/46, 9 months to the day after my draftee father returned home from WW II in Europe. Point man of the Baby Boom. Birthplace: Camden, NJ.
I have two younger brothers. They live in Fort Collins, CO. They married and produced a half dozen nieces and nephews.
After high school class of 1964, I joined the West Point Class of 1968. That was an intense experience and formed powerful bonds among classmates. I turned out to be the most prolific author in West Point’s 1802 to now history.
I did a little more than four years as an army officer, 1968-1972. I met my wife Marty in 1972 by inviting her best friend to a lunch date. I saw the best friend’s photo in their college
yearbook. She was married.
Marty and I met Sunday Thanksgiving weekend 1972. We started living together in 1973, well before our parents thought that was a nice thing to do. We got married 5/31/1975 and celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last May.
We have three sons. The oldest, Dan, got married and they have a 15-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son. Dan played Ivy League football at Columbia. His wife graduated from UC Davis.
Our middle son Steve graduated from UC Santa Barbara and our youngest son Mike, graduated from University of Arizona. Dan and Mike live in our East Bay San Francisco suburbs; Steve lives in NYC.
Politically, I am a Milton Friedman libertarian and registered as such. His most famous book and TV project was Free To Choose which was about the right of free people to buy what they could afford from whom they chose. The TV series began with Friedman in front of a bad inner city NYC public school.
Then the camera spun around 180 degrees showing an excellent same age PRIVATE school. Why the difference? The parents were forced by government to pay for the public school, but they were free to choose to send their kids to the Catholic school across the street.
The phrase “free to choose” later came to be a slogan of the abortion rights movement. But when Friedman used it, it referred to the right to patronize the private businesses you preferred.
America is the best nation on earth because of our right to live our lives the way we see fit, not as ordered by government. This is manifest in our wealth, average volume standard of living, upward mobility seen in the lives of many, and the never-ending stream of immigrants pursuing the American Dream.
I am here exhibiting the eloquence of the condemned. I hope you and yours profit from it.
You should stay sober, get educated, stay out of trouble, work hard, and choose your own way of life. Pay for YOUR family’s needs. If you wish, and can afford it, voluntarily contribute to the lives of your friends and neighbors.
But fight against those who would “draft” you involuntarily into an “army” obligated to give free money and time to politically powerful strangers.
Failure to resist such things is now on the verge of bankrupting federal entitlement programs. The federal government cannot afford to pay social security benefits that, as now on average, far exceed both the contributions made to the fund and the interest earned on those contributions.”
Marty’s Note: We thank HospiceEastBay.org, a nonprofit #94-2515405, for facilitating Jack to remain at home these past few weeks as he wished.
OBITUARY
Alamo resident John T. Reed, also known as Jack Reed, an author, coach, journalist, and real estate investment analyst whose candid assessments of get-rich-quick real estate gurus made him a popular and controversial media commentator, died Jan 31 2026, at his home, of complications resulting from a stroke. He was 79.
The author of thousands of articles, more than 30 books and a real estate investment newsletter, Mr. Reed also appeared on radio and television broadcasts, including 60 Minutes, Larry King Live and Good Morning America. Known for telling it like it is, he devoted many pages on his website to ferreting out charlatans, titling one, “John T. Reed’s Real Estate B.S. Artist Detection Checklist.”
He coached East Bay football teams at Monte Vista High School in
Danville, Granada High School in Livermore, and Miramonte High School in Orinda. He also coached men’s volleyball at Miramonte and dozens of his sons’ youth football, baseball, and soccer teams. He most recently coached girls flag football at Alhambra High School with his son Dan.
Born in Camden, New Jersey, to Marion Simonsick Reed and Theodore Reed, who predeceased him, young Johnny was one of three boys whose father managed a Five & Dime store and whose mother worked as a secretary. His father was an alcoholic. John, in reaction, never took a drink in his life.
After visiting a favorite uncle who managed the Thayer Hotel at West Point and falling in love with the place, John applied to his Congressman for a nomination to the US Military Academy. He passed the academic and physical tests and received an appointment in 1964.
He graduated in 1968, bought his first rental property with money he’d saved, and a year later was sent to Vietnam where he was a communications-platoon leader. His Vietnam tour coincided with the invasions of Laos and Cambodia and the beginning of the slow withdrawal of American ground forces.
“I drove through an ambush once,” he recalled, “but the enemy let me pass – apparently because they did not want to waste it on just a first lieutenant and a sergeant first class.” They ambushed a truck convoy 15 minutes behind him.
After his discharge from the Army, he worked as a real estate agent and property manager in southern New Jersey. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s he acquired apartment buildings. Mr. Reed went to Harvard Business School, graduating in 1977 with an MBA.
Real estate investment appealed to Mr. Reed because he felt it offered an opportunity to become financially independent while he was still young. At Harvard he discovered writing, which, he said, “beats working for a living.”
In 1975 he married Marty Tunnell. The two met through “The System” – a strategy he and his West Point roommate invented for meeting attractive single women – a more difficult trick than normal for cadets at then-all-male West Point and bachelor Army officers stationed at rural Army bases. “The System” involved combing through college yearbooks and local newspapers, sending each girl a written lunch invitation and making a follow-up phone call. After dating dozens of women by this method, a woman whom he’d contacted, who turned out to be already married, suggested he call Marty – who ultimately became his life partner and with whom he had three sons.
Mr. Reed had a worldwide circle of admirers and many critics. On his website he pilloried get-rich-quick gurus who recommended such strategies as unethical no-money-down investing and who preyed on the gullible. News media from Canada to Europe to South Korea interviewed him. Someone in Indonesia translated some of his work into an unauthorized book.
When a con man he had criticized sued him for defamation in an effort to silence him, Mr. Reed represented himself and tenaciously investigated the fellow. He examined legal records in multiple courthouses on the East Coast, unearthing his opponent’s spectacular history of skullduggery. Using the Internet to post the story, he received unsolicited legal assistance and tips including the man’s incarceration history. The case was eventually settled out of court.
As a work-at-home father, Mr. Reed was a Mr. Mom who disciplined his three sons with tough love.
Asked before his death how his epitaph might read, he said: “He retained his youthful idealism and adhered to his personal code until he died.”
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Ogden Tunnell of Alamo; son and daughter-in-law, Daniel and Linda Reed; sons, Steven Reed and Michael Reed; brothers, William Reed and James Reed, both of Fort Collins, CO; and his granddaughter and grandson, Courtney and Travis Reed.