"My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a
submariner," McCain wrote (with his speechwriter Mark Salter)
in his best-selling memoir "Faith of My Fathers."
"They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been
the most lasting ambition of my life." Three years later, he
would write this about his presidential longings: "In truth, I
had had the ambition for a long time[I]t
had been there, in the back of my mind, for years, as if it were
simply a symptom of my natural restlessness."Those two
ambitions bracket the career and animate the psychic journey of John
Sidney McCain III.
Born in 1936 on a submarine base in the Panama Canal Zone, the
admiral's son gave full meaning to the term "Navy brat."
He graduated fifth from the bottom of his Naval Academy class, and
of his days as a naval pilot he would write, "I liked to fly,
but not much more than I liked to have a good time."
Prisoner-of-War
Still, the aviator had distinguished himself with 22 bombing
missions over North Vietnam by the morning of October 26, 1967, when
he joined an aerial raid on a Hanoi power plant. McCain's A-4 was
shot out of the sky. He survived the landing, only to be seized
immediately, pummeled and dragged off to the infamous "Hanoi
Hilton" prison.
McCain endured five and one-half years of beatings and assorted
other cruelties rather than accept release early and become a
propagandist for his captors and thereby dishonor his fellow POWs -
and his father, Adm. John S. McCain Sr., who was head of the Navy's
Pacific Command. McCain emerged from the experience in 1973 having
lost full mobility in his arms and legs. But a far deeper
transformation had occurred in the rebellious flyboy, as McCain
would declare in his 2008 nomination speech: "I was never the
same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's."
Political Beginnings
By 1980, Cpt. McCain had acquired a taste for politics. He was now
the Navy's legislative liaison to the U.S. Senate, divorced from his
wife Carol and remarried that same year to Cindy Hensley, heiress to
a lucrative beer distributorship in Phoenix. Two of his groomsmen at
the wedding, Senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Bill Cohen (R-Maine),
provided valuable counsel on how to jumpstart a campaign.
McCain's new father-in-law gave him a job at the Hensley Company
in Phoenix so as to establish residency in the soon-to-be-vacated
1st Congressional District. Armed with money, a heavily-decorated
war hero's sheen and powerful connections - Ronald and Nancy Reagan
among them - the political novice and Arizona carpetbagger prevailed
in 1982 over a field of far more experienced candidates.
After two terms, he sought another seat about to be vacated - that
of the legendary U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R) - and was elected in
1986.
Keating Five
Barely two years into his first term, McCain's political career
was all but throttled by scandal. His associations with failed
savings-and-loan operator, campaign benefactor and eventual federal
inmate Charles Keating led McCain and four senatorial colleagues to
be dubbed the Keating Five. But a Senate ethics investigation
exonerated McCain in 1991, and he won re-election a year later.
Much as the POW had gained strength from his deprivations, the
penitent senator turned embarrassment into a positive, thereafter
proffering his taint as evidence of corruption endemic to
Washington. Denunciations of pork-barrel spending and "soft
money" (general campaign donations to parties rather than to
candidates) soon became staples of McCain's floor speeches.
2000 Presidential Race
His chidings did not, he would often observe, win him the
distinction of "Miss Congeniality" in the Senate. But they
did elevate his national profile - enough so that a few weeks after
winning a third term in 1998, McCain decided to run for president.
"We might not win, but we're going to have a hell of a lot of
fun," the dark-horse candidate promised his recruits.As it
developed, frontrunner George W. Bush's buttoned-up campaign proved
to be an exquisite foil for McCain's free-wheeling crusade, replete
with rollicking town-hall gatherings and endless press conferences
aboard his Straight Talk Express.
McCain cold-cocked the Texas governor in the February 1, 2000, New
Hampshire primary, 50 to 32 percent.The gloves came off in the South
Carolina primary, however. George W. Bush's heavily-funded
supporters assaulted him with character attacks - even going so far
as to accuse him, in the racially-charged state, of fathering an
African-American child out of wedlock. McCain's famous temper got
the better of him.
A few days after his biting concession speech in South Carolina,
McCain gave a speech in Virginia Beach during which he referred to
his foes in the religious right as "agents of
intolerance." That comment would trouble and drive his future
political preparations. Bush all but swept the remaining primaries.
McCain bowed out on March 8, 2004, and grudgingly endorsed his
opponent two months later.
Relationship With George W. Bush
McCain's relationship with President Bush began tenuously. The
senator voted against Bush's 2001 tax cuts for wealthier Americans,
while the latter opposed the former's campaign finance reform bill.
When Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) approached
McCain in May 2001 about switching parties, McCain did not
immediately say no. But the September 11 attacks threw the
Republican hawk firmly into Bush's corner.
And when the president began to cite Saddam Hussein's Iraq as
among the terrorist-sponsoring countries in the "axis of
evil," McCain - a co-author of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act -
soon became an energetic co-sponsor of the 2002 resolution
authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. As the prosecution of
the war began to go afoul, however, McCain emerged as a trenchant
critic, particularly of inadequate troop levels and the use of
torture on detainees.
2008 Campaign
By 2006, McCain had positioned himself as Bush's heir apparent and
was off and running for 2008. He extended an olive branch to social
conservatives by speaking at "agent of intolerance" Jerry
Falwell's Liberty University. He also put several of Bush's campaign
strategists on his payroll. But by 2007, his boosterism of the
deeply unpopular troop surge in Iraq offended independent voters,
while the right flank of his party bridled at McCain's
co-sponsorship of a bill providing a temporary guest worker program
for immigrants.
The media, long perceived as indulgent of the voluble McCain,
became increasingly critical. Meanwhile, the senator's
"organic" (as his speechwriter Mark Salter would term it)
brand of management proved ill-suited to a presidential campaign.
Petty squabbling and slipshod budgeting conspired with the external
woes to detonate the McCain campaign in July 2007. Senior staffers
walked out and the media declared McCain's candidacy terminated.
Penniless and short-staffed, McCain soldiered on. His "No
Surrender Tour" linked the candidate's unrepentant advocacy of
the Iraq surge to his bravery as a POW. Gradually, his fortunes
began to improve as Iraq's did, and as his Republican opponents
faltered one by one. His chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, retooled
the campaign into one that unapologetically threw sharp elbows, both
at the opposition and at the media. With surprising ease, McCain
wrapped up the GOP nomination in March 2008, becoming the
standard-bearer of the Republican Party that never quite embraced
him, and vice versa.
McCain's Democratic counterpart, a rhetorically smooth 46-year old
African-American senator with less than four years of experience on
the national stage, appeared vulnerable to the McCain campaign, and
was not terribly respected by McCain himself. His advisers adopted
the slogan "Country First" - a paean to McCain's heroism
and political independence, and a thinly-veiled attack on Barack
Obama's ephemeral celebrity, which the McCain media team underscored
in ads that compared the Democrat to starlets Paris Hilton and
Britney Spears. But Obama had one story - that he offered change;
McCain offered a third term of Bush - and he stuck to it.
By contrast, the famous Arizona senator seemed to become
increasingly unrecognizable as his campaign underwent a series of
narrative shifts. One minute he was a temperate consensus-forger who
spoke gravely of the need for national security experience in a
post-9/11 world. The next minute he was choosing as his running-mate
a foreign policy neophyte, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), and
pronouncing them a "team of mavericks" who would
"shake up Washington."
A brief post-Republican National Convention bounce in the polls
attributable to fascination with Palin collapsed as the financial
markets did in late September 2008. McCain's ill-advised declaration
that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" was
compounded by his politically-transparent decision to suspend his
campaign so as to hammer out a legislative remedy to the financial
crisis.
And though McCain had shown admirable restraint in not attacking
Obama for his associations with controversial pastor Jeremiah
Wright, the waning weeks of his campaign found the senator linking
his opponent to socialist views, while his running-mate accused
Obama of "palling around with terrorists."
In an election cycle that augured doom for Republicans, McCain
faced daunting odds regardless. But in abandoning the political high
road where he had long traveled, McCain seemed to have discarded his
ace in the hole: his authenticity. Obama won decisively, 53 to 46
percent.
Lest
he be freeze-framed by the bitterness of defeat, McCain delivered a
concession speech on election night in Phoenix that was widely
praised for its graciousness. Of the victor, he said, "I urge
all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating
him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest
effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary
compromises, to bridge our differences"
And with those words, McCain signaled that he would return to a
posture of statesmanship.
2010 Senate Campaign
McCain took nothing for granted in his fight for a 5th term, when
he faced a fierce primary fight from ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.)
and a lesser-known Tea Party candidate in a year when several
less-prepared incumbents were ousted.
He stumped the state and lured big names to help him, including
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), former running-mate Sarah Palin and
ex-2008 presidential rival Mitt Romney.
He also hit Hayworth mercilessly as a big-spender, and tacked
decidedly right on hot-button issues like immigration.
McCain won, 56 to 32 percent.
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