John McCain dies of brain cancer
Senator John McCain dies aged 81 of brain cancer
Senator John McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp with jutjawed defiance and later turned his rebellious streak into a
35-year political career that took him to Congress and the Republican presidential nomination, died yesterday after battling brain cancer for more than a year. He was 81.
McCain, with his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, was a fearless and outspoken voice on policy and politics to the end, unswerving in his defence of democratic values and unflinching in his criticism of his 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.
McCain chose a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate in that race, and turned Sarah Palin into a national political figure.
After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.
The scion of a decorated military family, 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.’’
Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: ‘‘That I made a major contribution to the defence of the nation.’’
One dramatic vote he cast in the twilight of his career in 2017 will not soon be forgotten, either: As the decisive ‘‘no’’ on Senate
‘‘I hate to leave it (the world). 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.’’ John McCain
GOP legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, McCain became the unlikely saviour of Obama’s trademark legislative achievement.
Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, The Restless
Wave, 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.’’
Throughout his long tenure in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, ‘‘Get out of here, you low-life scum.’’
By the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trump’s presidency, the two men were openly at odds. Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because ‘‘there’s no point in it.’’
By then, McCain had disclosed his brain cancer diagnosis and returned to Arizona to seek treatment. His vote to kill the GOP’s years-long Obamacare repeal drive — an issue McCain himself had campaigned on — came not long after the diagnosis, a surprising capstone to his legislative career.
On August 13, Trump signed into law a US$716 billion defence policy bill named in honor of the senator.
Trump signed the John S. McCain National Defence Authorisation Act in a ceremony at a military base in New York — without one mention of McCain.
John Sidney McCain III was born in 1936 in the Panana Canal zone, where his father was stationed in the military.
He followed his father and grandfather, the Navy’s first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, to the Naval Academy, where he enrolled in what he described a ‘‘four-year 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 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.
When McCain’s Vietnamese captors offered him early release as a propaganda ploy, McCain refused to play along, insisting that those captured first should be the first set free.
In his darkest hour in Vietnam, McCain’s will had been broken and he signed a confession that said, ‘‘I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate.’’
Even then, though, McCain refused to make an audio recording of his confession and used stilted written language to signal he had signed it under duress. And, to the end of his captivity, he continued to exasperate his captors with his defiance.