The McCain Makeover

When McCain began organizing his 2000 race, he had 3 percent name recognition and virtually no treasury. People vaguely knew his biography -- that his father and grandfather were Navy admirals and that he himself was a Vietnam War hero. He had come home from a Hanoi prison to a hero's welcome in 1973 and landed a job as the Navy's liaison officer to the Senate, where he studied national security policy at the foot of masters such as Sens. Scoop Jackson and John Tower. He also divorced his first wife, Carol -- in one of his many acts of self-confession, he has admitted he was unfaithful -- and married Cindy Hensley, whose politically well-connected father owned Arizona's largest beer distributorship. McCain moved there to seek political office. He won a congressional seat in 1982, then was elected to Barry Goldwater's Senate seat in 1986 when the conservative icon retired.

His political career was nearly derailed by scandal a few years later. McCain was the sole Republican among the "Keating Five" -- senators accused of intervening with federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, an Arizona savings-and-loan magnate whose financial failure in the late 1980s cost tax-payers $2 billion. McCain was cleared of wrongdoing by a Senate investigation, but he was deemed to have used "poor judgment." He calls his involvement with Keating "the worst mistake of my life." Afterward, he emerged as the Senate's most ardent champion of campaign finance reform.

McCain says he didn't really think about running for president until he'd finished campaigning for his friend and GOP nominee Bob Dole in 1996. He says he simply believed his military and political experience made him the best-equipped candidate to restore America's confidence in its public institutions.

By 1998, he was ready. Besides Weaver, he hired another veteran Republican operator, Rick Davis, to be his campaign manager. Both men had had run-ins with Karl Rove and the Bush political machine, and each was intrigued by the challenge of going up against it. McCain's campaign had only one asset: a spirited, experienced candidate with a large store of foreign policy expertise and the ability to think fast on his feet.

"Every presidential campaign has to be designed around the candidate," says Davis. "You can run for dogcatcher, and nobody will ever know who you really are. You run for president, and you are stripped bare. Those klieg lights are so bright. So we just built it around John, who he was, what he was."

To underline who he was, McCain and his longtime chief aide, Mark Salter, wrote Faith of My Fathers , a stirring yet self-deprecatory account of his life and times that emphasized the McCain family tradition of military service and patriotic sacrifice. Most campaign biography books die a quick death. Faith of My Fathers , which appeared in 1999, was a bestseller.

With little money to buy ads, Davis, Weaver and company concentrated instead on earning their ebullient candidate lots of free coverage in newspapers, magazines and on television. "We knew that John could carry on a conversation with any reporter for 24 hours a day," says Davis. "So we based our whole campaign model on 'earned media.' If a reporter wanted to fly with him or get an interview, we'd say: 'He's going to the West Coast. You can sit next to him on the plane; you can have the hotel room next to his; you can be in the car with him the entire time.'"

The same strategy produced the campaign bus, dubbed "Straight Talk Express," in which McCain, positioned in a red leather swivel chair like a prime minister, held a running all-day news conference for the media pack. All of it was on the record, much of it lively and self-lacerating.

"This was not the model of choice," says Weaver. "It was the necessity model."

There were times when the unexpurgated McCain drove the staff crazy. Weaver recalls early on in New Hampshire when a textile worker at a town hall meeting expressed concern that his children wouldn't be able to work at the local mill because foreign companies were taking away jobs. "John told the man frankly that he hoped he had a higher ambition for his children than to be textile workers. Salter and I just got up and left the room shaking our heads" at the bluntness.

When McCain beat Bush in New Hampshire by 19 percentage points, the Straight Talk Express became the hottest ticket in mediadom. Television news anchors and media executives vied with working journalists for seats. McCain's staff had to organize lists of reservations like the maitre d' at L'Escargot.

The wheels came off in South Carolina. The Bush machine and its legions poured millions into the campaign there. Anonymous fliers claimed McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child with a prostitute, that he was mentally unstable because of his POW experience and that his wife, Cindy, was a drug addict (she acknowledged she had become addicted to painkillers for a time after back surgery). Republican interest groups, angered by McCain's championing of campaign finance reform, targeted him as well.