The late John Mccain was a hero and a classy man

FOUR years before John Mccain sought the presidency in 2000, he chaired Texas Sen. Phil Gramm’s campaign, and things were not going well. Despite a major effort, the Texas senator finished well behind Sen. Bob Dole in a Florida straw poll, and his chairman was venting to the surrounding reporters.

“You never took him seriously,” Mccain said, looking straight at me. “You haven’t been fair to him.”

Two days later, my office phone rang back in Washington, and it was Sen. McCain, calling to apologize, acknowledging his black mood stemmed from his candidate’s poor showing.

That was John Mccain, fiery as an advocate but unusually candid for a major Washington politician. His fierce temper prompted his hometown Arizona Republic to question “whether McCain has the temperament, and the political approach and skills” to be president.

In a sense, Mccain exemplified the dual personalities of many top politicians. On one hand, he was the ultimate maverick, who sometimes stood solitarily against his party on what he regarded as a matter of principle. That happened last July when he denounced the Senate’s rush to legislative judgment in repealing Obamacare and cast the crucial vote to block it.

But he was also a loyal Republican, who voted in 2017 for a tax cut bill he had to know would balloon the federal deficit before the brain cancer that killed him forced him to leave the Senate and go home to Arizona.

The contrast between the two Mccains was evident in his two presidential bids.

In 2000, when he gave eventual winner George W. Bush an unexpectedly strong challenge, he charmed reporters by spending hours on his campaign bus, the “Straight Talk Express,” answering questions on every possible subject and holding 114 town meetings in New Hampshire alone. He called for campaign finance reform and challenged GOP orthodoxy on tax cuts, at some political cost. Later, he formed an occasional Senate alliance with New York’s newly elected Democratic senator, Hillary Clinton.

But then he brought his politics more in line with Republican orthodoxy, reconciling with Bush and campaigning strongly for him in 2004, so that in 2008 he ran as an establishment Republican with support of the institutional party. In picking a running mate, he engaged in one last act of political rebellion, choosing the inexperienced governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate after political advisers told him that it was impossible for him to choose Joe Lieberman because of the Democrat’s support of abortion rights.

Palin’s choice damaged his campaign, along with his inept response to the 2008 financial crisis, and he was easily defeated by Barack Obama. But in losing, he left behind what became the most vivid demonstration of his innate decency by defending Obama as “a decent family man” with whom he had disagreements, when a supporter questioned his Americanism.

At the Naval Academy, the son and grandson of top-ranking admirals was a rebel — and a low-ranking student. And it was hardly surprising he brought a fierce temper and occasional black moods to politics, given his five years as a prisoner of brutal North Vietnamese captors after he was shot down on a 1967 bombing mission.

As a senator, Mccain worked with another war veteran, Democrat John Kerry, to restore U.S. relations with the communist government of Vietnam. But he said he forgave neither the Vietnamese government nor the prison guards who brutalized him, “because of what they did to some of my friends — including killing some of them.”

On a personal level, though, Mccain sought to bury old enmities, both from the war and in his personal life. When the late Robert Timberg published his epic account of the careers of Mccain and four other Naval Academy graduates, “The Nightingale’s Song,” my wife Susan Page and I gave a book party for Timberg, our longtime friend and colleague. Mccain turned up, as did Carol, his divorced first wife, and they mixed easily, despite their bitter post-vietnam divorce.

Not only a hero, but a classy man was John McCain. We have too few in current public life.

Carl Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him at carl.p.leubsdorf@ gmail.com.