An officer, gentleman, senator
AT lunch in the Senate Dining Room, the man knocked on the table in a burst of taps.
Sen. John McCain (Republican, Arizona), showed his press secretary and me how he communicated with other prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton: Morse code. And he smiled impishly.
McCain lays dying of a rare brain tumor, like the one that took the life of Sen. Edward Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts), in 2009. Last summer, McCain came back after his grim diagnosis, head bandaged, to save Obamacare—by a thumbs-down
Ninety-nine gasps. Not only did McCain defy President Trump, but also he single-handedly salvaged the signature law of President Obama, who defeated him in 2008. Call it largeness of character, seldom seen in the marble halls.
Resting on his ranch, McCain remains the most vocal Senate Republican resisting Trump. ( The second is Arizona’s Jeff Flake.) He’s not welcome at the senator’s funeral. McCain’s absence means his party’s majority hangs by a thread, 50- 49.
A forthcoming May 22 memoir, promises dearly. He deserved to lose.
Remember campaign finance reform? A noble thing, the law championed by McCain and Democratic co-author Russell Feingold. McCain reached out to the young Wisconsin Democrat, the best of the crop across the aisle.
I know that because he told me in an early morning phone interview. There were not many senators who made time for a rookie reporter ( for The Hill) to sing praises of a junior senator from the other side. McCain’s exuberance, early in the morning, was real.
McCain, born to privilege, squandered much in a misspent youth at the Naval Academy. His suffering and valor in North Vietnam gave him a restless redemption.
Shot out of the sky, McCain spent five years there; starting with broken bones, surviving under brutal conditions, tortured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong. His North Vietnamese captors gave him chances to be freed
It’s no secret that Hill reporters felt a rush of kindred spirits with McCain. We crowded around him by the Senate elevators, and he liked us, too. He’d share what he knew about anything we asked, with gusto and relish. He seemed to greet every day with uncommon intensity, as if making up for lost time. Republicans loved him not so much, for never being a company man. Not for nothing did McCain call the press “my base.”
Curiously, when McCain took over the Armed Services Committee, that plummy chair, the rebel was gone. He presided over Pentagon business as usual. However, McCain marked my generation of journalists, especially those who covered him on presidential campaign quests. David Von Drehle also wrote a farewell salute on the
op-ed page. Years ago, Michael Lewis found a devilish glee in McCain’s subversiveness.
To share a personal note, when McCain heard who broke