In a capital of cowards, McCain is heroic

John McCain is dying. He is slipping away, slowly, with clarity and courage. In his long, feverish life nothing has become him, as Shakespeare said, like the leaving it.

This is not yet a deathwatch. Those who have seen him recently at his ranch in Sedona, Ariz., are measured in their words. In discussing his condition, they speak cheerfully. They treat his last passage with respect.

All we know is that he has Stage 4 brain cancer, he has had surgery and treatment, and he says this will be his last term in the Senate. No one seriously expects him to return to work in Washington.

His long recessional from public life began months ago. He may have only weeks left; brain cancer, which also killed Sen. Edward Kennedy, McCain’s friend, is relentless and unsparing. But as McCain goes out, we see his life anew — 81 years as a soldier, politician and iconoclast.

At the same time, we see the hothouse in which he lives, shaped by a president he loathes. In McCain’s demise, we find a peculiarly American moment.

The last few days have brought a torrent of news from Sedona. Friends are saying goodbye. To Joe Biden, McCain’s former colleague in the Senate, McCain offered encouragement to run in 2020. Biden, always sentimental, returned his advice with smiles, thanks and tears.

This month McCain is publishing The Restless Wave, reflecting on his life and politics, lamenting the decline of public civility. On Trump, who once declared that McCain was no war hero in Vietnam because he was captured, McCain is restrained. No name-calling or score-settling.

As he lies dying, McCain could have taken his grudge to his memoir, making it less a last testament than a parting shot. He questions Trump’s judgment, but he could have called Trump what he is: a scourge on the presidency, an unprecedented affliction of avarice, vanity, venality and ignorance. McCain, gamely, resists.

Then again, he got his revenge, served cold, on the floor of the Senate last July. With great drama, he cast the decisive vote against the repeal of Obamacare. It denied Trump a legislative victory. It was a sweet moment.

McCain doesn’t want Trump at his funeral; VicePresident Mike Pence can come, he has told his family, but not Trump. Pointedly, McCain has asked Barack Obama to give his eulogy. That Obama defeated McCain for the presidency in 2008 shows how things still work in this country among decent people.

McCain has lived a consequential, combative life. In his last days, he tells The New York Times about the authors who have influenced him: Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), F. Scott Fitzgerald, (The Great Gatsby), and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). How refreshing it is to hear a politician talk seriously about books.

And what an honour it was, as a reporter, to watch McCain running for the presidency in 2000 — to sit on his campaign bus, known as the “Straight Talk Express,” and to hear him talk, unbound, for hours. And later, in 2008, to follow him again. We learned that McCain could be erratic, intemperate and impulsive — but also deeply human and very funny.

Oh, progressives can carp that McCain is not the icon that death will make him, and they are right. He gave America the silly Sarah Palin — the single greatest mistake of his political career. He voted for too many bad bills and too many bad cabinet and judicial nominees.

But that no long matters. His crowded hour is ebbing away. He leaves a city, and a country, a fallen giant among the dwarfs. His life was imperfect, as left and right will remind us amid the hagiography in the media we can expect when it is over.

But let us say this: In a capital of cowards, careerists, blackguards and partisans, John McCain is honest, heroic and patriotic. He is a roman candle in the Washington sky. Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.