McCain pulls no punches in last book
OLD FRIENDS and colleagues are visiting John McCain’s Arizona home these days to say goodbye.
The resilient Vietnam War hero and cheerfully combative six-term senator is battling brain cancer, and calmly admits this is one fight he won’t win.
It was no surprise that McCain wants Donald Trump nowhere near his funeral. But before he takes leave, the senator has a few other things left to say to America.
“The Restless Wave” is the seventh and final book McCain has written with longtime collaborator Mark Salter. Focused on his past 20 years of public life and a few major topics, it’s McCain on McCain, even more uncensored than usual.
Which makes it fun, no matter your politics.
The press? Full of “routine liberal bias.” The current President’s top advisers? “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside the White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub.”
If you’re wondering how the infamous “pee tape dossier” got out, it was McCain’s doing. He heard about it from a British diplomat, sent someone to England to get a copy, and passed it to then-FBI Director James Comey.
“And I would do it again,” McCain says. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
While the old warrior settles some scores, his sense of loyalty remains ironclad.
Despite all the stories during the 2008 campaign about Sarah Palin going rogue, McCain is nothing but gentlemanly about his running mate, praising her energy and charisma.
If she occasionally stumbled, “those mistakes are on me,” he says. “She didn’t put herself on the ticket. I did.”
Although Palin gave the McCain campaign some instant buzz, she failed to provide the genuine lift it needed. The choice also seemed to bring out rabid right-wingers who accused Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim.
While the veteran Republican senator discouraged them — publicly assuring one fearful supporter that his rival was “a decent family man” — ugliness stuck to McCain.
Civil rights icon Rep. “John Lewis, a personal hero of mine, accused our campaign of sowing hatred, compared me to (segregationist Alabama Gov.) George Wallace, and said that, like Wallace, we were creating the kind of political atmosphere that got four little girls killed in a Birmingham church,” writes McCain.
“I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t forgive it. I still can’t.”
The media, McCain says, treated him unfairly, too; the press fell hard for Obama back in the primaries, and kept “a finger on the scale” going forward.
But, as McCain acknowledges, the he also himself had once benefited from press favoritism. To even worry about slanted coverage now, in this new era of “crackpot websites” and Russian propaganda, “seems almost quaint.”
While McCain’s rehash of the 2008 race is only one part of “The Restless Wave,” it’s likely to be the liveliest for many readers. And while the book is meant to give McCain the last word, sometimes he rehashes policy debates long settled.
The book is at its best is when he speaks plainly from the heart about subjects he cares deeply about: The torture of suspected terrorists and enemy combatants, the treatment undocumented immigrants.
McCain’s interest in the humane treatment of prisoners of war isn’t theoretical. He was shot down in North Vietnam and brutally abused for more than five years.
The idea that Americans are now doing to captives what the Viet Cong once did to him fills McCain with rage.
He angrily recounts interrogations of Muslim suspects that included “force-feeding and hydrating prisoners anally, and rectal examinations using ‘excessive force.’ ”
One man was abused so badly that he lost an eye. Another was of shown a picture of his captured pregnant wife, naked and bound to a chair, her mouth duct-taped shut.
McCain talks of sitting in a room with Vice President Dick Cheney as he defended similar, sanctioned practices, including depriving men of sleep for as long as five days at a time.
“I had a friend, a Marine, who was kept awake for a week,” McCain shot back. “It almost killed him.”
But the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” continued — even though, McCain argues, it went against this country’s core value of protecting human dignity and ensuring equal justice