Seeing White House From a Cell in Hanoi

By Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2008; A01

To endure their long ordeal, John McCain and the other U.S. servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: "If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay."

Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. "He was talking about his father to us and then he said: 'I want to be president of the United States. Someday I'm going to be president,' " Stratton recalls. "If the cell wasn't so small, we'd have been rolling around laughing."

His friend, thought Stratton, ought to be concentrating far less on his fantasy and more on how to redirect a naval career that had been adrift before he was shot down over Hanoi. "We reminded him that he had dug himself a big hole with his demerits in the past and nearly being the bottom man of his class at the Naval Academy," Stratton recalls. "And now he was talking about being president? 'Come on, John. Get your career straightened out.' "

Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father's perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service's highest uniformed position, didn't always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed.

"Pursuit of command," as McCain often referred to it, was an ethos bordering on obsession in his family, and it was in Vietnam that he embraced it. But though McCain was the son and grandson of admirals, he decided his pursuit would be in another arena -- politics, where he would come to define success not in terms of ideas or legislation but in fulfilling his family's ideals of leadership and character.

Over the next few years, according to the recollections of men who knew him well, McCain didn't vacillate over conflicting career paths as much as lurch from one to the other, depending on how much he was despairing at a given moment about his reputation in the Navy, or how he was gauging his relative chances for leadership in politics vs. the military.

He hadn't come any closer to deciding on his future when, in March 1973, a peace accord gave the POWs their freedom and McCain was suddenly flying home toward a reunion with his wife, Carol, and their three children in Florida. Even before their plane reached the mainland, McCain and the other POWs received an inkling of the country's fascination with them: When they made a stop in Hawaii, the tarmac was bathed in lights and ringed by television cameras.

The national jubilation and intense media coverage that greeted the returning men only heightened McCain's indecision about his future. He discovered he had new status, new friends and, potentially, new career opportunities outside the military. A president, a magnate and a powerful governor all wanted to fete him and the other POWs. President Richard M. Nixon issued orders to arrange for a gala White House dinner. Ross Perot, a Naval Academy graduate and billionaire entrepreneur, followed up on the financial assistance he had given to Carol McCain and some other POW wives during their husbands' captivity by throwing a huge party for the freed men.

California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who had developed a keen interest in the POWs, chose McCain to be the principal speaker at a prayer breakfast that he was having in Sacramento for about 1,000 businessmen and civic leaders. Reagan introduced him as a war hero and personal inspiration, and McCain spent most of his short speech recounting how he'd been held for a while in a stiflingly hot box placed outside under a broiling sun.

"He talked about the desperation of the situation, and about the box being the size of nothing more than a couple of coffins," remembers Nancy Clark Reynolds, a former Reagan aide. "Then he said something about finding a prayer scratched on the side of this box by a previous prisoner and how much that'd helped him. . . . He recited the prayer. By then everybody in there was crying. Ronald Reagan, too. If you were watching it, you realized the power of John McCain's story."

During the whirlwind of well-wishers and media that greeted his return to his Florida home, McCain told neighbors he was eager to get back to active duty. But within a few weeks, he confided to another naval officer that he planned to retire from the Navy as soon as he reached the 20-year mark necessary for obtaining a pension. He had new plans, he said cryptically.

Bob Fitzsimmons, who had served as a liaison between the Navy and Carol McCain during her husband's captivity, expressed surprise. "John, why the hell would you want to do anything like that? Your father and grandfather are four-star admirals -- you could do a lot in the Navy," he recalls saying.

As Fitzsimmons remembers, McCain simply shook his head and said: "Nope, that's not what I want to do. I've got other plans. I've had a lot of time to think about it. I know what I'm doing."

Testing the Waters

In 1976, despite the grumblings of some officers who believed that his family name had won him what his qualifications could not, McCain became the commanding officer of a large naval aviator training squadron at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Fla. The squadron, VA-174, had seldom received stellar performance reports -- a consequence of allowing too many disabled aircraft to sit in hangars, which left it unable to provide enough training hours to please the Navy. Under McCain, the squadron's training hours rose, as the maintenance department fixed the ailing planes and got them into the air.

Meanwhile, McCain explored the possibilities of a political career. Intrigued by the electoral ambitions of several other Vietnam veterans, he had called former POW Leo Thorsness, who had won South Dakota's 1974 Republican senatorial primary, earning the right to face off against George S. McGovern, the antiwar senator and the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee. "McCain gave us his congratulations," remembers John LeBoutillier, a Thorsness campaign aide who went on to become a New York congressman. "He was very excited about politics -- he wanted to get into the game."

In early 1976, a group of GOP businessmen from the Jacksonville area urged McCain to run for Congress, though other influential Republicans, including former Florida state senator Tom Slade, cautioned him against running in a hopeless race against a popular Democratic incumbent, Charlie Bennett. A World War II veteran and reliable defense establishment supporter, Bennett thrived in a district where Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans.

McCain went to Slade and said, as the local Republican leader recalls, "I think I can beat Charlie Bennett."

Slade responded bluntly: "If you think so, John, you're the only man on Earth who does."

Other Republican leaders, citing private polls, told McCain he needed to serve in another office and build his political profile before running for Congress. But McCain was insistent. He told classmates from the Naval Academy of the interest in his potential candidacy, to which one of his closest academy friends, Chuck Larson, voiced his incredulity. "John, that'd be the stupidest thing you could do," the future four-star admiral recalls telling McCain. "You have 18 years or so in the Navy. You should stay in for the 20 years at least and get the pension. Where is the money for this race? Where is your organization? John, get your pension."

A disappointed McCain made it clear that he wasn't giving up on his dream, merely deferring it. When Slade reiterated his view of Bennett's invincibility, McCain retorted, "Well, if I can't beat him, then I'll find somebody else I can whip."

By 1977, McCain was looking beyond Florida, letting the Navy brass know he was interested in coming to Washington and working, as his father once had, as a naval liaison to Congress. But while the elder McCain had operated as chief of legislative affairs for the Navy, his son would serve, if chosen, in a subordinate capacity.

The decision to hire McCain fell largely to the commander of naval operations, four-star Adm. James Holloway, who had known Jack McCain during his liaison days and thought that his son might be aptly suited for the same line of work. "John was a personable young guy who had been brought up in the right atmosphere," Holloway recalls. "I mean, he had that kind of social education that came from seeing his parents entertain a lot of people from Congress. . . . He had good genes, and he also had a good sense of humor and social skills at a cocktail party. He was a guy who could play poker and help with arrangements, a good fellow."

The new job demanded conflicting loyalties, not an unusual dilemma for naval liaisons. On the one hand, he was supposed to represent the wishes of the Navy secretary and the country's commander in chief, President Jimmy Carter. But Carter and Navy Secretary W. Graham Claytor Jr. had a view of the defense establishment that was at odds with that of the Navy's brass, who chafed against the administration's trimming of defense expenditures and its reluctance to support appropriations for several big-ticket defense projects.

Carter, himself a Naval Academy graduate, struck McCain as a misguided and ineffectual chief executive. Behind the scenes, the liaison joined high-ranking naval officers in stealthily performing end runs around the administration, lobbying senators on behalf of defense appropriations resisted by Carter, including funding for a new $2 billion nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. McCain's efforts brought him closer to Senate hawks, particularly Texan John Tower, then the leader of the Republican minority on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Tower saw McCain as a genuine war hero," remembers Rhett Dawson, who was an aide to Tower. "He was looking to McCain for great things from the moment he got there."

The senator frequently went out of his way to pop into the liaison's cramped office for a drink and a long chat. McCain had become the older man's tonic, Tower aides thought -- a raconteur with an endless supply of exotic tales, a bon vivant as comfortable having a shot of whiskey as he was discussing Hemingway and recounting the adrenaline rush that went with flying in combat.

"Tower took delight in McCain's enthusiasm about everything," Dawson recalls. "And McCain turned to Tower for advice about a lot, political and personal." But, as much as mutual affection, the business of politics drove Tower toward McCain. "Tower prided himself on having a good eye for political horseflesh, and he thought he saw something in McCain," Dawson says. "A lot of people thought he had the right background to be a candidate."

Among those drawn to McCain was Sen. William S. Cohen, a Republican best known during the 1970s as the Maine congressman who bucked the prevailing sentiment of his party during the Watergate scandal by voting for articles of impeachment against Nixon. Not even Cohen's 1978 election to the Senate had softened the grudges of powerful Republicans. "I was an outcast," recalls Cohen, who, looking at McCain, thought he detected a kindred political spirit. "I saw John as somebody drawn to the unorthodox. . . . He was not going to be a party-line guy."

The two men became close, and soon McCain was talking about his worries over what to do next with his career. His war-damaged shoulders prevented him from reaching high enough above his head in a cockpit to pull an ejection lever, leaving him unable to continue flying. And if he couldn't fly, he couldn't lead a carrier or battle group at sea, which, in the opinion of many high-ranking naval officers, was a prerequisite to becoming an admiral for someone in McCain's position.

Meanwhile, his personal life was in chaos, his marriage collapsing. Unknown to his family's circle of friends, McCain had spent time with other women, including his future wife, a 24-year-old special-education teacher and Arizona native named Cindy Hensley, a tall, blond beauty he'd met in Hawaii while on liaison business. The McCains' breakup escaped public notice. They divorced in 1980 and during that same year McCain prepared to marry Cindy, whose Phoenix-based father, Jim Hensley, owned a flourishing Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship.

Leaving the Navy

As McCain transformed his private life, he was moving toward a career change, looking for a new path to leadership. In late 1980, he started talking seriously to Cohen about the possibility of running for a House seat. "He thought Congress was a mess and that he could do better than some of the people there," Cohen recalls.

In early 1981, shortly after taking office, the Reagan administration's new Navy secretary, John Lehman, asked to see McCain. Eager to keep the supportive liaison in the Navy, Lehman sought to reassure McCain that he was on his way to becoming an admiral. But Lehman couldn't guarantee that McCain would rise to four stars, and McCain's doubts about reaching his father's and grandfather's status overrode all other considerations.

He listened for a while longer before telling Lehman he was leaving the Navy. "I think he'd made up his mind before he ever saw me," Lehman says. "He'd been excited by what he saw on the Hill, I think."

As his liaison days wound down, McCain spent more time with Tower and Cohen, plotting strategy for a 1982 House race. But where should McCain run? "We discussed Florida, because he'd been a resident there," Cohen remembers. "But the thinking became that he should run in Arizona. . . . His wife was from there. And Arizona was conservative."

Arizona also appeared attractive for reasons that had nothing to do with ideology: Its population was booming, which meant it would receive one new congressional seat in time for the 1982 elections. Equally important, its explosive growth rate -- behind only Nevada's and Alaska's -- meant that more than 950,000 residents would be moving to Arizona during the 1980s, a whole new bloc of voters that McCain and his allies believed would be unmoved by charges that a political upstart from out of state was a carpetbagger.

In early 1981, a recommendation from Cohen led to the first meeting between McCain and political strategist Jay Smith, whose firm had orchestrated several winning congressional and gubernatorial campaigns for Republicans. As a past press secretary to a revered Arizona congressman, former Republican House leader John Rhodes, Smith knew the key Arizonans in need of wooing.

But Smith was skeptical about an outsider moving to Arizona and running for a congressional seat that didn't yet exist. "Where in Arizona are you going to do this?" Smith asked him, as the strategist recalls.

" 'We'll figure that out,' " McCain answered.

McCain hoped Arizona's new congressional seat would be placed in especially conservative Maricopa County, which included the Phoenix area. His father-in-law's beer distributorship was there, which meant his campaign could tap into Jim Hensley's extensive business and political contacts. But Smith already suspected the new district would be created around more moderate Tucson, where McCain's chances of winning wouldn't be nearly as good.

Smith and McCain settled on a plan that would have him make use of his wife's and father-in-law's contacts, and to speak about his military experiences and war years to as many civic organizations as possible, while being careful not to betray his political aspirations too early. "I said that Cindy and her father would know a lot of people, and that he should do Rotary, Kiwanis, VFWs, places like that," Smith says. "And he did. But I kept getting reports from the field that he was telling people he wanted to run for Congress. He knew he was torturing me."

Long before McCain could commit to a race, he needed to formally resign from the Navy, a ritual that included breaking the news to his pained father, who had long dreamed of his son's ascension to admiral. His mother expressed disdain for his decision, friends recall. She had known congressmen for years, she told him. She had hosted them in her home. And while she liked a great many of the men, few of them could compare, in stature or accomplishment, to extraordinary naval officers, she said.

Her indignation was yet another reminder of McCain's burdens. The shadows of his father and grandfather, which had loomed so large over him all his life, would not recede simply because he was leaving the Navy.

In March 1981, his father died. That same week, at his naval retirement party, a misty McCain paused from talking about his own career to wish aloud that his father could be there with him. He swallowed hard, attendees remember. It was a jarring few days. He spoke at his father's funeral and, on the same afternoon, had to drive to the Pentagon to turn over his naval ID, his retirement by then official, the day marking the first time in anyone's memory that a McCain was not serving somewhere in the armed forces.

With his dad laid to rest, his mother held a reception that afternoon for close friends and family members at their Washington home. Several guests asked to see John, to which his mother said that he and Cindy were already gone. John had needed to fly back to Arizona to take care of some political business, she added.

A Future in Politics

Jay Smith and other friends remember that McCain's entry into politics preceded his discovery of a complete set of policy positions, particularly on social and economic matters. While laying the groundwork for the 1982 congressional race, he told Smith that he didn't have a stance on abortion. When Smith responded that he needed to have one, McCain said he could see both sides. "He wasn't an issues guy," Smith recalls. "Abortion wasn't an issue that he cared about or had thought much about. . . . We went through that on a lot of different things."

Friends dating to his days as a midshipman at the Naval Academy can't remember McCain ever espousing a political philosophy, so it wasn't a surprise that ideology played almost no role in propelling him into politics.

As he formulated strategy, he went to work for his father-in-law's company as a public relations man, talking about the virtues of a good beer and his career in the military. He spent many of his lunch hours during late 1981 at his father-in-law's country club, meeting Arizona Republican businessmen and building his contact list, just as Smith had recommended. Still, Smith thought he was talking far too much and too soon about his ambitions, and remembers wincing when he heard that a state Republican Party leader had introduced McCain to Vice President George H.W. Bush as "one of our upcoming congressional candidates."

There was a bigger worry. In a blow to McCain's grand plan, Arizona's new congressional seat had been placed in the Tucson area rather than Phoenix. But McCain and Smith still entertained a last hope. For a year, Arizona political observers had speculated that John Rhodes, the dean of the state's House delegation, might be close to retiring from Congress. If Rhodes were to step aside, his solidly Republican 1st District seat in Maricopa County would be ideal turf for McCain.

In January 1982, with the Rhodes retirement rumors at their peak, Smith was monitoring a Rhodes news conference while talking on the phone with McCain. Learning that Rhodes would not be seeking reelection, the two men shouted excitedly. Later that same day, during another phone conversation, Smith could hear McCain talking to his wife in the background. "Did you buy the house?" McCain asked her.

In the next instant, McCain told Smith, "Cindy just bought us a house in the 1st District."

Eager to pay a courtesy visit to Rhodes before announcing his candidacy, McCain traveled back to Washington. Rhodes was a Washington anomaly: an unflashy workhorse who resisted Sunday-morning TV appearances in favor of policy study and family time. His mastery of the legislative labyrinth had made Rhodes a devout believer in the benefits of experience -- and patience.

Rhodes shook McCain's hand and told him that he had a promising future in Arizona politics. But, just as a few Florida Republicans had done in 1976 when McCain pondered a run there, Rhodes raised the subject of McCain's lack of political seasoning. "Have you considered running for the state legislature, so you can get a little more experience?" Rhodes asked.

At the meeting's end, as soon as he made it out of Rhodes's office, McCain leaned over to a companion, Rep. Robin Beard of Tennessee, and delivered his response to Rhodes's suggestion: "No way." He was running for Congress, whether the legend approved or not.

McCain ended up having three primary-election opponents, but he enjoyed the advantages that counted most in the race: the largest campaign war chest; support from his father-in-law's and wife's well-heeled friends and associates, including a Phoenix real estate developer named Charles Keating, who would help to raise more than $100,000; a skillful TV ad campaign from Jay Smith that featured a clip of a limping McCain taking his first steps on American soil after his release from Hanoi; glowing video testimonials from national figures such as Cohen and Tower, the latter of whom came into the 1st District to campaign for McCain; and flattering media attention.

In an irony for the man whose future presidential campaigns would cast him as a Washington outsider dedicated to slashing pork-barrel spending, McCain asserted that his Capitol connections had already been put to good use in protecting the flow of federal money into the 1st District. Alluding to his work as naval liaison and his influence since with powerful Washington lawmakers, he said he had already helped to preserve defense-related jobs for the district.

"The campaign didn't really have a big issue dividing the candidates," Smith recalls. "Everyone was kind of running as a Reagan Republican. So the question became who was best qualified. John made a big deal of the point that he was the only one with Washington experience."

But problems arose. Detractors began privately raising questions about his personal life. Quietly contemptuous about McCain's candidacy, an aide to a prominent Arizona Republican contacted a McCain primary opponent, state Sen. Jim Mack, and said that Carol McCain wanted to speak to Mack about what it had been like to be married to John McCain.

As Mack remembers, he called Carol McCain one evening at the Reagan White House, where she worked as the director of the visitors' office. When Mack broached the subject of her former spouse and their marriage, an outraged Carol McCain asked him what kind of man would stoop so low as to try drawing a woman into such a conversation. "As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was wrong," Mack recalls. "John got upset. I don't blame him."

Any public discussion of Carol McCain carried the potential of a costly political embarrassment for McCain. He responded to the news of Mack's call in the same style that he had often employed during high school and college confrontations, delivering a private warning to the rival. "If you ever do that again, or contact any other member of my family, I'll beat the [expletive] out of you," Mack recalls McCain saying to him.

Reports of Mack's call to Carol McCain, and an oblique reference to McCain's subsequent threat, made it into a local paper. "I think it might have helped John, actually," Smith recalls. "He looked like a strong family guy."

A pleased McCain casually mentioned to aides that Mack had failed to show at some subsequent candidate forums. Privately, McCain scorned Mack, viewing the rival's political credentials as sparse when measured against his own experiences on Capitol Hill and in the Navy, a former aide remembers.

Already, McCain had come to see political races, like politics itself, in terms of virtue vs. vice -- virtue deriving from what he regarded as his demonstrable background of leadership vs. the vice of opponents' political expediency and their paucity of meaningful experience. He viewed the 1982 campaign less as an ideological battle than a test of which candidate was most worthy of command. "He needs to make enemies of the people he's going against in order to get fired up," says Jon Hinz, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party.

As the campaign neared its end, McCain appeared to be a slight favorite. Then real trouble struck. Critics charged that he had taken credit for the legislative accomplishments of others, particularly Barry Goldwater, the state's iconic senior senator who had remained neutral in the 1st District race. His foes cited the McCain campaign's assertion that, with the use of his Washington connections, he had helped to save hundreds of job at the Hughes Helicopters facility in the 1st District city of Mesa, by protecting a lucrative Army contract from a congressional budgetary ax.

Reports began circulating that Goldwater and several of his aides thought that McCain had grossly exaggerated his role in protecting the key helicopter project at Hughes. During the last weekend before the September primary, the senator's office sent out a telegram to McCain's three opponents that detailed Goldwater's efforts on behalf of the helicopter contract while dismissing McCain's influence. The telegram betrayed Goldwater's mixed feelings about McCain, whose military service he deeply admired but whose overnight leap into a campaign for the 1st District seat offended him as undeserved, friends say. "Goldwater said privately that McCain was a carpetbagger," recalls Nixon White House counsel John Dean, a close family friend of the Goldwaters.

On the eve of the 1982 primary, the Goldwater telegram had the makings of a crisis, testing McCain's ability to make effective use of his political connections and defuse a political bomb. As Smith remembers, after Goldwater's office released the telegram, McCain called Tower, who happened to be in Europe with Goldwater and other members of a congressional delegation. Tower, who already had credited McCain with helping to save the helicopter project, now came to his friend's rescue.

"Tower got to Goldwater, and Goldwater said that he had authorized the telegram, though not personally drafted it," Smith recounts. "Tower extracted a promise from Goldwater that he would not make himself available for any discussion with Arizona media."

Catastrophe was averted. On primary day, McCain won with just 32 percent in the crowded Republican field. Victory over the Democratic nominee in November would be a mere formality. Grant Woods, a key aide who had already been selected as McCain's chief congressional aide for Arizona, reminded McCain of the latest political scuttlebutt: Goldwater was virtually certain to retire from his Senate seat at the end of his term in 1986. "We ought to be thinking of that race," Woods told his new boss, and McCain heartily agreed.

Four years later, enjoying a big lead in the polls on the eve of that Senate election, McCain turned to an aide who had asked whether, all things being equal, he'd rather be the commander of a naval fleet squadron than a senator. "Well, all things aren't equal," McCain began. "But if I keep this lead, win and become senator, maybe my mother will finally get off my back for leaving the Navy."

Ahead was something he couldn't see, the crucible of his life, a brush with a political nightmare that would come to be known as the Keating Five scandal. For the moment he could envision nothing but a shimmering future. He had already permitted himself to dream aloud to aides about the possibility of being tapped as a vice presidential nominee in 1988, if his winning margin in the 1986 Senate race were large enough. If he became vice president, a presidential race would certainly be in the offing. And if he lost at any point, they would all simply keep moving forward, doggedly. The pursuit of command had just begun.