'Warts & all' politician
LOS ANGELES: Arizona Senator John McCain, who survived five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to become one of the highestprofile, most confounding and pugnacious personalities in American politics — a onetime Republican presidential standardbearer who alternately trampled and embraced GOP orthodoxy — has died. He was 81.
McCain, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in July 2017, died yesterday, his office confirmed in a statement.
Although he spent more than three decades in Congress representing his adopted home state, McCain was hardly a stampedfromthemould politician. At a time when the country grew increasingly tribal and partisan, he drew admiration and antagonism from both parties.
‘‘Warts and all, he was an iconic figure,’’ said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst who followed McCain’s political career from the lawmaker’s arrival in Washington in the early 1980s.
‘‘As irascible and curmudgeonly as he could be, he was real. There was an authenticity.’’
With a volcanic temper and almost demonically wilful streak — ‘‘one who doesn’t mind getting up on the high wire and doesn’t mind fighting’’, McCain once said of himself — his career as a hellraiser in the Navy and iconoclast in the Senate often read more like a picaresque novel than the shelfload of books inspired by his harrowing life story.
In addition to his confinement as a prisoner of war, marked by years of torture and solitary confinement, McCain survived nearbanishment from the Naval Academy, three plane crashes, a divorce caused by his philandering, a careerthreatening Senate scandal, two unsuccessful tries for the White House and a legislative record marked by at least as many setbacks as victories.
He was described (and described himself) as a charmer, a wise guy, an underachiever, a warrior, a hero, a coward, a straighttalker, a shapeshifter and, perhaps more than any label, a maverick.
He was conservative in coloration and stood firmly by his beliefs, even when it contravened the wishes of his party’s leadership. He fought bitterly with rightwing elements of the GOP — over immigration, gay rights, over global warming.
In July 2017, he cast the decisive vote killing Republicans’ longcherished hope of repealing the Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare, as they derided it — marching on to the Senate floor, turning a thumb down and delivering a forceful ‘‘No’’ as the chamber erupted in gasps.
His relationship with President Donald Trump was not good. Trump derided his wartime heroism during the 2016 campaign — ‘‘I like people who weren’t captured’’ — and McCain did not hide his contempt.
‘‘Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,’’ McCain tweeted of Trump’s kidgloves approach to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a July meeting.
McCain said in The Restless Wave, the last of several books he wrote: ‘‘He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,’’ he said of Trump. ‘‘The appearance of toughness, or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.’’
In September 2017, McCain was asked how he would like to be remembered. He said he wanted to be remembered as someone who served his country. ‘‘I hope we could add, honourably’’. — TCA
❛ I hope we could add, honourably’’. In September 2017, Senator John McCain was asked how he would like to be remembered. He said he wanted to be remembered as someone who served his country. ‘‘I hope we could add, honourably’’.