A Family Duty

Finally, tracked down by one of his father's aides, he is spotted maneuvering through the crowd. An amiable young man with his mother's fair coloring and sharp features, he is clad in a white shirt, a black tie and a black service coat with golden anchors on the collar. He is wearing a nameplate that reads "McCain '09," a reference to his graduating class.

Father and son head for a quieter part of the room. McCain again takes out his cellphone and calls his wife, Cindy, who is recuperating from knee surgery back home in Phoenix. She hasn't missed an Army-Navy game in years and is feeling low. McCain puts his son on the phone.

"Hey, Mom," Jack says. "How are you?"

The senator rubs the midshipman's chin and asks whether he has shaved.

"I shaved this morning!" he says with a laugh.

A well-wisher approaches. McCain takes a step back and says what he has been waiting to say all morning: "This is my son Jack."

* * *

One summer when he was a student at the Naval Academy, John McCain went to his parents' home on Capitol Hill and asked his father to describe his experiences in World War II.

McCain was 5 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His grandfather John Sidney McCain Sr. was a crusty, Popeye-like figure known as "Slew" who rolled his own cigarettes and drank, swore and gambled "at every opportunity," McCain wrote in his book. A pioneer and leader in naval aviation, Slew McCain was on the deck of the USS Missouri during the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.

McCain's father, meanwhile, had been a commander of submarines and had stories of his own. But McCain seldom asked him about the war. It was a form of silent protest. He knew he was destined for the Navy and says he was rebelling against the forces that were propelling him there.

"When I was growing up," McCain says, "it was expected I was going to go to the Naval Academy. It was just one of those things. I can remember as a little kid friends of my dad saying, 'Well, what class is he going to be?' "

In high school, McCain mentioned that he might like to go to Princeton. "It was out of the question," he says. His father drove him to the academy for orientation, according to McCain biographer Robert Timberg.