Obama’s tribute to senator McCain

IDEALIST: ‘SOMETHING NOBLE’ ABOUT POLITICAL BATTLES

Widely respected politician succumbs to brain cancer, aged 81.

Washington

US Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2008 as a self-styled maverick Republican and became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, died on Saturday, aged 81.

A senator for Arizona for more than three decades, McCain had been suffering from glioblastoma, a brain cancer, since July 2017 and had not been at the US Capitol this year.

His family said on Friday that McCain was discontinuing cancer treatment.

He died on Saturday afternoon with his wife Cindy and other family members at his bedside.

“At his death, he had served the United States of America faithfully for sixty years,” said a statement from his office.

Flags were flying at half-mast at the White House yesterday morning, hours after Trump tweeted his “deepest sympathies and respect” to McCain’s family.

McCain will lie in state in both Phoenix, Arizona, and in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC.

He will receive a full dress funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral, where Vice President Mike Pence is expected to represent the current administration, before being buried in Annapolis, Maryland, his family said.

Paying tribute to his one-time election opponent, former President Barack Obama described McCain as an idealist and said there was “something noble” about their political battles.

“My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years,” Cindy McCain wrote on Twitter. “He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the place he loved best.”

Alternatively affable and cantankerous, McCain had been in the public eye since the 1960s when, as a naval aviator, he was shot down in the Vietnam War and tortured by his North Vietnamese communist captors during fiveand-a-half years as a prisoner.

He was edged out by George W Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 but became his party’s White House candidate eight years later.

After gambling on Sarah Palin as his running mate, McCain lost to Obama, who became the first black US president.

Obama said that he and McCain, despite their “completely different backgrounds” and political differences, shared “a fidelity to something higher – the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants have fought, marched and sacrificed”. – Reuters