Path to Power
“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 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 governor Sarah Palin, 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.
