Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Washington’s tender tribute
Eulogies hail two-time GOP presidential candidate’s love of country, call for honor
‘ What better way to get a last laugh than to make George (Bush) and I say nice things about him to a national audience? ’ Barack Obama Former president
WASHINGTON — Official Washington gathered at the National Cathedral Saturday to say farewell to Sen. John McCain, capping days of tributes to the war hero and twotime Republican presidential candidate who died last week of brain cancer at 81.
Two former presidents who prevented McCain from winning that office, Demo-
crat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush, delivered eulogies to the six-term Arizona senator before 2,500 invited guests. Their keynote role was McCain’s idea — his final, poignant nod to the bipartisanship that was his hallmark. It was also an implicit yet clear rebuke of the current president, an undercurrent that also ran through the eulogists’ remarks.
“He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators,” said Bush, who defeated McCain in a rancorous race for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination that left McCain embittered for several years. “He was honorable, always recognizing that his opponents were still patriots and human beings.”
“Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power,” Bush said.
Obama, who defeated McCain in 2008 after the senator won his party’s nomination, said of McCain’s choice of his two former adversaries as eulogists: “What better way to get a last laugh than to make George and I say nice things about him to a national audience?”
Despite their many differences on foreign policy, Obama said, “We stood together on America’s role as the one indispensable nation, believing that with great power and great blessings comes great responsibilities.”
In his dying weeks and months, McCain presided over many of the preparations for his remembrance, including an abundance of symbolic touchstones from his life and career, and the instruction that the current president not be included. While President Donald Trump was absent, the implicit criticisms in the past presidents’ remarks, and others’, made him a presence.
“So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage,” Obama said. “It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear.”
“John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”
Daughter Meghan McCain delivered the first of the eulogies and, during her emotional recollections of her father, she expressed a clear rebuke of the current president: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”
That evoked the first applause from an audience that included some administration officials, among them Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
On Saturday morning, a rainstorm had let up when the hearse bearing his casket across town from the Capitol to the cathedral stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where McCain’s wife of 38 years, Cindy, left a wreath of red and white roses accented with blue flowers, and a ribbon that read, “In honor of all who served.” McCain endured nearly six years of torture in captivity after being shot down as a Navy pilot over Hanoi, but later became a champion of postwar reconciliation and was a widely admired figure in Vietnam.
The senator’s wife was escorted down the inclined walkway alongside the Vietnam Memorial wall by Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, two former Marine generals McCain knew well and whose appointment to Trump’s Cabinet reassured the senator even as he expressed doubts about the president’s fitness for office. At the deepest point of the monument, where the wall angles, a sailor placed the wreath on a stand and the small group, which included McCain’s seven children, paused for prayer.
As they slowly walked back to the motorcade, assembled tourists broke into applause.
The memorial service at Washington National Cathedral was intended as a cap to public commemorations that began Wednesday in Phoenix, in his adopted home state of Arizona. The McCain family plans a private burial service on Sunday at the Naval Academy in Annapolis,
Maryland, where the senator, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, graduated in 1958.
Invited guests, including foreign dignitaries, military officials and McCain’s political associates, escorted by Naval Academy cadets in dress whites, began filling the cathedral’s pews two hours before the start of the service. Among the attendees were Bill and Hillary Clinton and former Sens. Robert Dole, the longtime Republican Senate leader, and Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat whom McCain later said he would have preferred as his 2008 vice presidential running mate, rather than Sarah Palin, who was not invited.
Lieberman, in his eulogy, said of McCain: “He regularly reached across party lines because he knew that was the only way to solve problems.”
The pallbearers chosen reflected the senator’s diverse friendships, including Biden, his Democratic Senate colleague and Obama’s vice president; Russian dissident Victor Kara-Murza, and actor-filmmaker Warren Beatty.
The funeral follows elegiac commemorations that began Wednesday in McCain’s home state of Arizona and continued on to the Capitol Rotunda, where his body lay in state Friday, an honor accorded to few Americans. Members of both parties praised the late lawmaker as the embodiment of the traditional ideals of patriotism and civility in a bitterly polarized political era.
The president’s absence from the funeral reflected McCain’s belief that Trump violates those ideals, and the president returned McCain’s enmity. Tributes this week, and McCain’s posthumous farewell delivered Monday by a longtime aide, avoided mentioning Trump by name but lamented the divisiveness in the nation’s capital and beyond that the president has come to represent.
Trump, who had said that McCain did not qualify as a war hero just because of his captivity in North Vietnam, had publicly mocked McCain to the end at political rallies. On Friday, as McCain for the last time was brought to the Capitol where he’d served in the House and Senate, Trump attended a fundraiser in North Carolina.
It was nearly a year ago that McCain received his grim diagnosis of an aggressive glioblastoma, the same type of brain tumor that killed his friend, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, in 2009. His family announced Aug. 24 that medical treatment for his cancer was being discontinued; the next day, he was dead.