John McCain

John McCain: The Prisoner Who Refused to Leave

In mid-1968 the North Vietnamese offered a broken, emaciated navy pilot an early ticket out of Hỏa Lò Prison. His father had just taken senior command, and the propaganda value of releasing an admiral's son was obvious. John McCain said no. He stayed another four and a half years, through beatings that began that August and left him permanently unable to raise his arms above his head. Nearly everything Americans later projected onto him was already legible in that refusal.

A Son of Admirals

He was born on August 29, 1936, at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, into a family that had given the navy two four-star admirals: his father, John S. McCain Jr., and his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr. A navy childhood meant roughly twenty schools before he finished at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1954. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958 ranked 894th in a class of 899 — a standing he cultivated rather than regretted. His tested IQ fell between 128 and 133; he devoured literature and history and could not manage mathematics. He later wrote of his "pretended indifference" to the family legacy, conceding that the indifference was a performance.

The temperament arrived early: as a toddler he held his breath during tantrums until he blacked out.

Forrestal, and the Twenty-Third Mission

He completed flight training in 1960 and flew A-1 Skyraiders from the carriers Intrepid and Enterprise before reaching combat in mid-1967 aboard the USS Forrestal. On July 29 that year, fire tore through the Forrestal's flight deck; bomb fragments struck McCain in the legs and chest, and 134 sailors died. He transferred to the USS Oriskany, earning a Bronze Star. On October 26, on his twenty-third bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down. The ejection fractured both arms and a leg; North Vietnamese soldiers bayoneted and beat him before he was carried to Hỏa Lò.

He was held until March 14, 1973 — five and a half years, nearly half of them in solitary confinement, communication reduced to tapping on walls. What distinguished his later account was its refusal of heroic gloss. Tortured into signing propaganda statements, he did not pretend otherwise; he said that every man has his breaking point, and described reaching his. He came home emaciated and permanently disabled.

Arizona, and the Manufacture of a Politician

He retired from the navy as a captain on April 1, 1981, and became public relations vice president at his father-in-law's Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Arizona — a post that functioned mainly as a machine for building political contacts. He won Arizona's 1st congressional district in 1982, served two House terms, and in 1986 took the Senate seat Barry Goldwater had held for three decades.

Then came the near-ruin. Between 1982 and 1987 McCain accepted $112,000 in lawful contributions from Charles Keating Jr. and associates at Lincoln Savings and Loan, plus flights on Keating's jets he repaid only in 1989; in 1987 he met federal regulators investigating Lincoln. The Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of impropriety but rebuked him for "poor judgment." The humiliation was the hinge of his career.

The Reformer

From 1994 he worked with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold on gutting "soft money," the unlimited donations flowing to party committees. Filibustered repeatedly, the bill passed both houses in March 2002 and remains his largest legislative achievement; the two men shared the 1999 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He attacked pork-barrel spending, pushed through the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, helped expose the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, chaired the Commerce Committee twice, and took the Armed Services gavel in 2015.

Two Runs at the White House

He announced his first presidential campaign in Nashua, New Hampshire, on September 27, 1999, and won the state's primary with 49 percent to George W. Bush's 30. South Carolina destroyed him. On February 19, 2000, he lost 42 to 53 amid an anonymous smear campaign alleging variously that he had fathered a Black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict, and that he was a mentally unstable Manchurian candidate. He withdrew on March 9 and endorsed Bush anyway.

The second run he won. Announcing at Portsmouth on April 25, 2007, he took New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, and clinched the nomination on March 4, 2008. On August 29 he named Alaska governor Sarah Palin his running mate — the first Republican and only the second major-party nominee after Walter Mondale to choose a woman. The surge curdled as independents balked at her qualifications, and McCain later said he regretted not picking Joe Lieberman.

One moment outlived the loss. At a Minnesota rally, a supporter told him she distrusted Barack Obama "because he's an Arab." McCain took the microphone back: "No ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." Outspent four to one, he lost on November 4 by 365 electoral votes to 173. Had he won, he would have been the oldest president ever inaugurated.

Torture, Trump, and the Thumb

His most consequential later work traced back to Hỏa Lò. In October 2005 he attached the McCain Detainee Amendment to a defense appropriations bill, confining military interrogation to techniques listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual; the Senate backed it 90 to 9. Bush, who had threatened a veto, relented that December, saying the law would "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture." His immigration reform partnership with Ted Kennedy was less lucky: bills in 2005, 2006, and 2007 all died. In 2017, having opposed the Affordable Care Act for years, he cast the deciding vote against the Republican bill that would have partially repealed it. He had refused to back Donald Trump in 2016 and spent his last years among the administration's sharpest critics.

Why John Is Called a Genius

Applied to McCain, the word buckles, and it should. He finished 894th of 899 at Annapolis, and a tested IQ in the high 120s is bright and ordinary. No serious observer called him an intellectual, and he never claimed to be one. Whatever genius attaches to him is not cognitive.

What he had instead was a narrow, unusual competence: an instinct for the moment when a reputation is worth spending, and the nerve to spend it. Refusing release in 1968 and turning his thumb down on health care repeal in 2017 are the same act performed forty-nine years apart — a judgment that the cost of compliance exceeded the cost of pain. Correcting a supporter about Obama's decency, while losing, was that instinct in miniature. It is a moral reflex more than a mental one, and it is rarer than intelligence.

The counter-case is strong. The reflex was wildly inconsistent. He took Keating's money and Keating's jets. He picked Palin and regretted it. He endorsed the man whose allies had destroyed him in South Carolina. A colleague complained that if you disagreed with him, "you're wrong." An aide said he enjoyed the fight for its own sake — a description of appetite, not discernment. Temperament is not intellect, and a talent for defiance is not a mind.

Legacy

He died on August 25, 2018, at his Arizona ranch, aged 81, having discontinued treatment for the glioblastoma diagnosed the previous July. His decorations included a Silver Star, a Distinguished Flying Cross, two Purple Hearts and a Prisoner of War Medal. The word that stuck was "maverick," a label he alternately courted and resented. What he actually bequeathed was narrower and harder: a demonstration, repeated over half a century, that a politician can survive being disliked by his own side.