McCain, who
has died at the age of 81, was a naval bomber pilot, prisoner of war,
conservative maverick, giant of the Senate, twice-defeated presidential
candidate and an abrasive American hero with a twinkle in his eye.
The Arizonan
warrior politician, who survived plane crashes, several bouts of skin cancer
and brushes with political oblivion, often seemed to be perpetually waging a
race against time and his own mortality while striving to ensure that his
five-and-a-half years as a Vietnam prisoner of war did not stand as the
defining experience of his life.
He spent his
last few months out of the public eye in his adopted home state of Arizona,
reflecting on the meaning of his life and accepting visits from a stream of
friends and old political combatants.
In a memoir
published in May, McCain wrote that he hated to leave the world, but had no
complaints.
"It's
been quite a ride. I've known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a
war, and helped make peace," McCain wrote. "I've lived very well and
I've been deprived of all comforts. I've been as lonely as a person can be and
I've enjoyed the company of heroes. I've suffered the deepest despair and
experienced the highest exultation.
"I made
a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my
times."
McCain had
not been in Washington since December, leaving a vacuum in the corridors of the
Senate and the television news studios he roamed for decades.
In recent
months, he was not completely quiet, however, blasting President Donald Trump
in a series of tweets and statements that showed that while he was ailing he
had lost none of his appetite for the political fight.
The Arizona
Senator repeatedly made clear that he saw Trump and his America First ideology
as a departure from the values and traditions of global leadership that he saw
epitomized in the United States.
CNN reported
in May, that the McCains did not want Trump at his funeral. Former rivals and
Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had been asked to give eulogies,
people close to both former presidents and a source close to the senator
confirmed to CNN.
McCain's two
losing presidential campaigns meant he fell short of the ultimate political
prize, one his story once seemed to promise after he came home from Vietnam and
caught the political bug. In the end, he became a scourge of presidents rather
than President himself.
At the time
of his death, he was largely an anomaly in his own party -- as one of the few
Republicans willing to criticize Trump and a believer in the idealized
"shining city on a hill" brand of conservatism exemplified by his
hero Ronald Reagan that has been dislodged by the nativist and polarizing
instincts of the current President. He was also a throwback to an earlier era
when political leaders, without betraying their own ideology, were willing on
occasion to cross partisan lines.
In a
Washington career that spanned 40 years, first as a Navy Senate liaison, then
as a member of the House and finally as the occupant of the Senate seat he took
over from Barry Goldwater, McCain was a conservative and a foreign policy hawk.
But he was not always a reliable Republican vote, and sometimes in a career
that stretched into a sixth Senate term, he confounded party leaders with his
maverick stands. He defied party orthodoxy to embrace campaign finance reform,
and excoriated President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
for not taking enough troops to Iraq.
After Obama
ended McCain's second White House race in 2008, the senator blasted the new
President's troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, causing critics to
carp that he had not yet reconciled the bitterness he felt in defeat. McCain
had supported the invasion of Iraq carried out by the Bush administration in
2003, but admitted in his memoir "The Restless Wave" that the
rationale, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was wrong.
"The
war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can't be judged as
anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my
share of the blame for it," he wrote.
More
recently, as death approached, he became a strident critic of Trump, who had
once said he didn't consider the Arizona senator a war hero because he had been
captured.
McCain
questioned why Trump was solicitous of Vladimir Putin, whom he regarded as an
unreformed KGB apparatchik.
In one of
his final public acts, he blasted Trump's cozy summit with the Russian
President in July, blasting it as "one of the most disgraceful
performances by an American president in memory."
"The
damage inflicted by President Trump's naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and
sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the
summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake," he said in a statement.
In July
2017, McCain returned from brain surgery to the Senate floor to lambaste
"bombastic loudmouths" on the television, radio and internet and
plead for a return to a more civilized political age, when compromise and
regular order forged bipartisan solutions.
Then, in
September, in a poignant speech that seemed designed to echo down the ages
after he was gone, McCain reminded his colleagues they were a check on
executive power: "We are not the President's subordinates," he said.
"We are his equals."
In a final act
of defiant independence, McCain, with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture on the
Senate floor in September, cast the vote that scuttled the GOP's effort to
repeal and replace Obamacare, causing fury within his party -- a move that
prompted Trump, to the fury of McCain's family to repeatedly single him out in
campaign rallies.
When the
President signed McCain's last legislative triumph in August, the John S.
McCain National Defense Authorization Act, he did not even mention the Arizona
senator.
'I wasn't my
own man anymore; I was my country's'
John Sidney
McCain III, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, entered the world on August
29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, a birthplace that years later would cause a
brief campaign kerfuffle over whether he was a natural born citizen and thus
eligible to be elected president.
His habit of
insubordination despite his military pedigree emerged at the Naval Academy,
where he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.
"My
superiors didn't hold me in very high esteem in those days. Their disapproval
was measured in the hundreds of miles of extra duty I marched in my time
here," McCain told graduates at Annapolis in October of last year.
By 1967,
McCain was in the Pacific and escaped death in a massive fire aboard the USS
Forrestal aircraft carrier. Months later, he was shot down in his Skyhawk jet
over North Vietnam and parachuted into a lake near Hanoi, breaking both arms
and a leg, and was captured by communist soldiers. In captivity, McCain was
tortured and beaten, an experience that left him with lifelong injuries,
including severely restricted movement of his arms. He kept himself sane by
tapping on a wall to communicate with a fellow prisoner in a neighboring cell.
Later, he refused the offer of a preferential release, made because his father
was an admiral, until his comrades could also come home, eventually returning
in 1973 to a nation politically torn by the war.
His period
in captivity set the course of his life.
"I fell
in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's," McCain
said in his 2008 Republican National Convention speech.
"I
loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting
for. I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my
country's."
After
turning to politics, McCain served in the House from 1983, won an Arizona US
Senate seat in 1986 and established himself as a down-the-line conservative in
the age of Ronald Reagan. But his political career almost fizzled before it
began when he was among the Keating Five group of senators accused of
interfering with regulators in a campaign finance case. He was cleared of
wrongdoing, but the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded him for poor judgment,
an experience that led to him becoming a pioneer of campaign finance reform.
He didn't
forget his time in Vietnam.
In an act of
reconciliation, McCain joined Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a
fellow decorated Vietnam War veteran, to help end the US trade embargo on its
former southeast Asian enemy in a process that led to the eventual reopening of
diplomatic relations.
By 2000,
McCain set his sights on the White House and ran as a maverick Republican,
holding court for hours in candid back-and-forth sessions with reporters on his
campaign bus, dubbed the "Straight Talk Express." In years to come,
he would joke that his adoring press pack was his "base."
After
skipping Iowa over his long opposition to ethanol subsidies, McCain forged a
victory over establishment favorite and then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in New
Hampshire after a string of town hall meetings with voters.
But his
effort hit a brick wall in South Carolina, where the campaign turned negative
and McCain's independent streak hurt him in a state with more core
conservatives and fewer independents. Bush got back on track with a primary win
that set him on the road to the nomination.
The maverick
of the Senate
Back in the
Senate, McCain heard the call of war again, as American foreign policy was
transformed after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, and he became a
forceful proponent of the US use of force overseas. He backed US interventions
in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Americans tired of war, McCain warned that more
troops were needed, demanding a surge in forces that Bush later adopted.
When it
appeared that his hawkish views were at odds with the electorate and could
damage his nascent 2008 presidential bid, McCain answered: "I would rather
lose a campaign than a war."
But,
influenced by his experience of torture in Vietnam, McCain was a forceful
critic of the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA on terror
suspects, believing they were contrary to American values and damaged the US
image abroad.
It was a
typical example of the Arizona senator adopting a position that appeared
antithetical to his political interests or ran counter to the perceived wisdom
of his party.
After the
Keating Five scandal, he joined a crusade with Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of
Wisconsin to introduce new restrictions on "soft" and corporate money
in political campaigns.
Later,
McCain teamed up with his great friend, late Massachusetts Democratic Sen.
Edward Kennedy on a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants. The measure failed, however, over building grassroots
antipathy to such a move in the GOP, which would later play a major role in the
Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
McCain set
his sights on the White House again during Bush's second term. By 2007, his
campaign was all but broke. But he fired up the Straight Talk Express again and
pulled off another famous comeback, barnstorming to victory once more in the
New Hampshire primary.
This time,
he also won South Carolina, and beat a fading Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani in
Florida before effectively clinching the nomination with a clutch of wins on
Super Tuesday.
That
November, McCain came up against the historic appeal of a much younger and more
eloquent rival, Obama. Mocking the Illinois senator in ads as "the biggest
celebrity in the world," McCain questioned whether his popular foe was
ready to lead.
Seeking to
rebrand himself in a change election, McCain stunned the political world by
picking little-known Sarah Palin as his running mate. The Alaska governor
delivered a spellbinding convention speech, and for several weeks it seemed as
if McCain's gamble worked.
But a series
of gaffes turned Palin into a figure of ridicule and undercut McCain's
contention that his ticket, and not Obama's, was best qualified to lead in a
dangerous world. McCain, however, would not say that he regretted picking
Palin.
But in his
new memoir, "The Restless Wave," and in a separate documentary,
McCain said he wished he had ignored the advice of his advisers and listened to
his gut and chosen Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a
Democrat-turned-independent, calling it "another mistake that I
made."
But McCain
also rose above the ugliness of the campaign. On one occasion, he cut off a
supporter at a town hall event who said she could not trust Obama because she
thought he was an Arab, amid conspiracy theories suggesting that the Democrat
had not been not born in America.
"No
ma'am, he's a decent family man, citizen, who I just happen to have
disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all
about," McCain said.
He dealt
with his defeat by throwing himself back into life in the Senate. In later
years he described how it felt to lose, telling anyone who asked, "After I
lost ... I slept like a baby — sleep two hours, wake up and cry."
But his
relationship with Obama was tense, with the President snubbing his former foe
in a health care summit in 2010 by telling him "the election's over."
The Arizona
senator emerged as a fierce critic of Obama's worldview, prompting Democrats to
complain that McCain was the embodiment of a Republican reflex to respond to
every global problem with military force, which had led America into
misadventures like the war in Iraq.
McCain's
robust foreign policy views were reflected on the walls of his Senate
conference room, which featured letters and photos from the likes of Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, leaders who didn't suffer critics gladly.
Still,
McCain was also a throwback, enjoying friendships with rivals across the
political aisle, and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie of the Senate,
where he invariably held court to a crowd between votes.
Sometimes
things got testy with his Democratic pals, including when he confronted Hillary
Clinton and fellow Vietnam War veteran Kerry during hearings of the Senate
Armed Services Committee while they served as secretaries of state under Obama.
'He served
his country ... and, I hope we could add, honorably'
The
Republicans' recapture of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections gave McCain
a chance to rewrite the final chapter of his career.
He at last
took the gavel of the Armed Services Committee, an assignment he had long
coveted. His prominent position was seen as one reason he ran for re-election
in 2016.
But he knew
his time was limited.
"Every
single day," McCain told The New York Times in 2015, "is a day less
that I am going to be able to serve in the Senate."
Still,
despite saying he was "older than dirt," McCain made few concessions
to his age. Even after turning 80, he maintained a punishing schedule of world
travel, conferring with top leaders and heading to war zones in trips that left
his younger congressional colleagues exhausted.
He would
blitz Sunday talk shows, direct from Arizona in the dawn hours. When Trump was
elected, McCain took it upon himself to reassure world leaders, visiting
multiple countries in the first six months of 2017 before his diagnosis.
His
sidekick, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told CNN the hectic pace
had taken a toll.
"You
know he just wore himself out traveling all around the world," Graham
said.
McCain, who
was divorced from his first wife, Carol, in 1980, is survived by his wife,
Cindy, and seven children, including three sons who continued the family
tradition of serving in the armed forces and a daughter, Meghan, who is a
presenter on ABC's "The View." His mother, Roberta, aged 106, is also
still living.
For his
military service, he was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Legion
of Merit, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He faced his
final diagnosis with characteristic courage, telling CNN's Jake Tapper that
"every life has to end one way or another."
Asked how he
wanted to be remembered, McCain said: "He served his country, and not
always right -- made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of errors -- but served his
country, and, I hope we could add, honorably."
McCain, who
will be remembered as much for his combative nature as his political
achievements, summed up the meaning of a life forged in the example of his
political hero Theodore Roosevelt when he stood before the flag-draped coffin
of his friend and foe, Sen. Kennedy, in 2009, his late colleague from
Massachusetts, who died from the same form of brain cancer that eventually
killed McCain.
"Ted
and I shared the sentiment that a fight not joined was a fight not
enjoyed."
CNN
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