John McCain

John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936, at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed ^[1]. The Navy ran deep in the family. His grandfather, John S. McCain Sr., and his father, John S. McCain Jr., both reached the rank of four-star admiral, the first father and son pair in American history to do so ^[2]. The family moved constantly between naval postings, and the young McCain attended roughly twenty schools before settling at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, where he graduated in 1954 ^[1].

He entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis that same year, following the path his father and grandfather had taken. McCain was a rebellious midshipman who accumulated demerits at a prodigious rate and graduated in 1958 ranked fifth from the bottom of his class of 899 ^[2]. His academic standing masked real ability. Classmates remembered him as quick-witted and fiercely loyal, qualities that would define his public life. After Annapolis he trained as a naval aviator at Pensacola, Florida, earning his wings and a reputation for flying with more nerve than caution ^[3].

McCain's combat career nearly ended before it began. On July 29, 1967, he was preparing for a bombing mission aboard the carrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin when a rocket accidentally fired across the flight deck, striking near his aircraft and setting off a chain of explosions. The fire killed 134 sailors, one of the worst disasters in modern Navy history, and McCain escaped his burning plane with minor injuries ^[3].

Three months later, on October 26, 1967, his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi during his 23rd bombing run. McCain ejected, breaking both arms and a leg, and landed in Truc Bach Lake in the middle of the city. He was pulled from the water by an angry crowd, bayoneted, and taken to Hoa Lo Prison, the compound American prisoners sardonically called the Hanoi Hilton ^[4].

His captors soon learned that his father commanded American naval forces in the Pacific, and in mid-1968 they offered McCain early release as a propaganda gesture. He refused, citing the military code of conduct that required prisoners to be released in order of capture ^[4]. The refusal cost him dearly. He endured repeated torture, including rope bindings and beatings, and spent two years in solitary confinement. Under extreme duress he signed a forced confession, an episode he later wrote about with unusual candor, saying he had learned the limits of his own endurance ^[5]. He was released with other prisoners on March 14, 1973, after five and a half years in captivity, permanently unable to raise his arms above his head ^[4].

After returning home, McCain underwent months of painful rehabilitation and requalified as a pilot. He commanded a training squadron in Florida and then served as the Navy's liaison to the United States Senate from 1977 to 1981, an assignment that gave him a close view of politics and a taste for it ^[1]. He retired from the Navy in 1981 as a captain, his injuries having closed off any realistic hope of following his father and grandfather to admiral's rank. His decorations included the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart ^[3].

McCain moved to Arizona, the home state of his second wife, Cindy Hensley, and went to work for her father's beer distributorship in Phoenix. In 1982 he won a seat in the House of Representatives from Arizona's first district, deflecting charges of carpetbagging with the memorable retort that the place he had lived longest in his life was Hanoi ^[2]. Two elections later, in 1986, he won the Senate seat vacated by the retiring Barry Goldwater, beginning a Senate career that would span more than three decades ^[1].

His rise was nearly derailed early. McCain was one of five senators investigated in the Keating Five scandal for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan executive Charles Keating, a campaign donor. The Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of impropriety in 1991 but faulted his judgment ^[6]. The episode stung him deeply and shaped the reformist streak that later defined his career, particularly his long crusade to limit the influence of money in politics.

Any honest accounting of John McCain achievements begins with legislation and reconciliation. Working with Democratic senator John Kerry, a fellow Vietnam veteran, McCain led the effort during the early 1990s to account for missing American servicemen and to normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which President Bill Clinton announced in 1995 ^[1]. That a former prisoner of war championed reconciliation with his captors' country gave the effort a moral weight few others could have supplied.

His signature legislative accomplishment was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, universally known as McCain-Feingold, written with Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. The law banned unregulated soft money contributions to national political parties, the most sweeping change to campaign finance rules in a generation ^[6]. McCain also pushed through the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibited cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody, drawing directly on his own experience of torture ^[5].

McCain sought the presidency twice. In 2000 he ran an insurgent primary campaign against George W. Bush from a bus he called the Straight Talk Express, winning New Hampshire by a wide margin before losing a bitter South Carolina contest and eventually the nomination ^[2]. In 2008 he captured the Republican nomination, chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, and lost the general election to Barack Obama, taking 173 electoral votes to Obama's 365 ^[1]. His concession speech that November, gracious and generous toward the first Black president-elect, was widely praised as one of the finest of its kind ^[7].

McCain married Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia, in 1965, and adopted her two sons, Doug and Andy. The couple had a daughter, Sidney, in 1966. Carol was badly injured in a car accident while he was imprisoned, a fact his captors never told him. The marriage did not survive his return, and they divorced in 1980, a failure McCain later attributed to his own selfishness ^[2].

He married Cindy Hensley in May 1980. They raised four children: Meghan, who became a television commentator and writer; John Sidney IV, known as Jack, who attended the Naval Academy; James, who served in the Marine Corps; and Bridget, whom Cindy brought home from a Bangladeshi orphanage run by Mother Teresa's order and whom the couple adopted ^[1]. Cindy McCain later served as United States ambassador to the UN food agencies in Rome and as executive director of the World Food Programme.

McCain wrote several books with his longtime aide Mark Salter, beginning with the family memoir Faith of My Fathers in 1999, which became a bestseller and a television film ^[5]. Friends and adversaries alike described a man of volcanic temper, sharp humor, and restless energy who kept a ranch near Sedona, Arizona, where he grilled ribs for visiting reporters and colleagues from both parties.

McCain remained a dominant voice on military and foreign affairs through his final decade, chairing the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2015 and pressing for a hard line against Russia after its seizure of Crimea. He won a sixth Senate term in 2016 at age 80 ^[1]. His relationship with Donald Trump was openly hostile. Trump mocked his war record in 2015, saying he preferred people who were not captured, and McCain answered over the following years with pointed criticism of the president's conduct toward allies and adversaries ^[7].

In July 2017, surgeons removing a blood clot above his left eye discovered glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer ^[7]. Days later McCain returned to Washington and cast the decisive early-morning vote, a downturned thumb on the Senate floor, that killed the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement, arguing the bill had skipped regular order and bipartisan process ^[1].

He spent his last months at his ranch in Cornville, Arizona, receiving friends and finishing a final memoir, The Restless Wave. McCain died there on August 25, 2018, four days before turning 82 ^[1]. He lay in state in the Arizona Capitol and the United States Capitol Rotunda, and his funeral at Washington National Cathedral featured eulogies from two former presidents who had defeated him, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a pairing McCain had arranged himself ^[7]. He was buried at the Naval Academy cemetery in Annapolis beside his classmate and lifelong friend Admiral Chuck Larson.

The essential John McCain facts, five and a half years in a Hanoi prison, 35 years in Congress, two presidential campaigns, only begin to explain his hold on the American imagination. His refusal of early release from captivity became the founding story of a public identity built on honor, and his willingness to buck his own party, on campaign finance, immigration, torture, and health care, made the word maverick almost his personal property ^[2].

Critics saw contradictions. He supported the Iraq War long after most Americans had turned against it, and his selection of Sarah Palin in 2008 was blamed by some for accelerating the populist turn in Republican politics he later lamented ^[7]. McCain himself acknowledged mistakes freely, an unusual habit in his profession, and his memoirs are notable for their self-criticism ^[5].

His name endures in law and steel. The National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 was named in his honor, as was the destroyer USS John S. McCain, which he shares with his father and grandfather. Streets in Hanoi hold a marker at the lake where he was pulled from the water, and readers of any John McCain biography encounter a recurring theme he stated plainly in his farewell letter to Americans: that a life is enriched by serving a cause greater than oneself ^[7].