McCain proves a fighter to very end
SENATOR John McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp and later turned his rebellious streak into a 35-year political career that took him to Congress and the Republican presidential nomination, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for more than a year. He was 81.
Mr McCain, with his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, was an outspoken voice on politics to the end, unflinching in his criticism of fellow Republican, President Donald Trump.
He was elected to the Senate from Arizona six times but twice thwarted in seeking the presidency.
An upstart presidential bid in 2000 didn’t last long. Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Barack Obama.
Mr McCain chose a littleknown Alaska governor as his running mate in that race, and turned Sarah Palin into a national political figure.
After losing to Mr Obama in an electoral landslide, Mr McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign.
In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, he punched back hard at critics, including Mr Trump.
The scion of a decorated military family, Mr McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive US military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to “defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America”.
Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, The Restless Wave, Mr McCain wrote of the world he inhabited: “I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace . ... I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”
John Sidney McCain III was born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed in the military.
He followed his father and grandfather into the Naval Academy, where he enrolled in what he described a “fouryear course of insubordination and rebellion”.
On October 1967, McCain was on his 23rd bombing round over North Vietnam when he was shot out of the sky and taken prisoner.
Year upon year of solitary confinement, deprivation, beatings and other acts of torture left Mr McCain so despairing that at one point he weakly attempted suicide.
But he also later wrote that his captors had spared him the worst of the abuse inflicted on PoWs because his father was a famous admiral.
“I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival,” he wrote in one of his books.