Shortly before Gen. James Amos took over as the Marine Corps’ top officer in 2010, he visited all seven of his surviving four-star predecessors, seeking their guidance and counsel on what was important to remember as the service’s commandant. But it was a stark warning from one of them — Gen. Carl Mundy, commandant from 1991 to 1995 — that Amos recalled later in a room full of Marines at the legendary training grounds at Parris Island, S.C.

“If you fail to maintain the spiritual health of the Corps,” Amos recalled Mundy saying, “you will have failed as the 35th commandant.”

That anecdote is captured in a transcript of Amos’s April 2012 speech at Parris Island. In it, the general called pointedly for Marines to do more to prevent sexual assault, hazing, domestic abuse, and other social ills. He added that Marines have a special characteristic that allows them to “make the right decision each and every time,” even when it is unpopular or difficult.

But with less than a year left in Amos’s tenure as commandant, it is his own ethics that have been called into question by everyone from rank-and-file troops to members of Congress. The accusations range from abuse of power, to illegally classifying evidence to cover up mistakes, to squashing Marines with the temerity to protest. The office of the commandant, typically revered by Marines across the world and many on Capitol Hill, remains under investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general and is being battered by the media at a time when Amos must make the Marine Corps’ case to Congress on why it deserves money to buy new high-tech vehicles, preserve troop levels, and refurbish equipment that is battered after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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