AN AMERICAN HERO
‘Maverick’ who sacrificed for this country
John McCain 1936 - 2018
John McCain — the Vietnam war hero and maverick Republican who rose through the Senate’s ranks over the course of four decades, becoming a two-time presidential candidate and chairman of the powerful Armed Services committee — succumbed to an aggressive brain tumor on Saturday. He was 81. The senator battled brain cancer for more than a year, and on Friday announced he was discontinuing medical treatment.
Since then, his family and closest friends had stayed close by him and his wife, Cindy, at their 15-acre ranch near Sedona, Ariz.
McCain had acknowledged back in July 2017 when his cancer was diagnosed that his doctors gave him a “very poor prognosis.”
He said at the time that in addition to undergoing cancer treatment, he planned to “celebrate, with gratitude, a life well-lived.”
Still, McCain, who remained chairman of the Armed Services Committee until his death, continued to work, soldiering on for much of the following year as an influential GOP leader and counterpoint to President Trump.
Given his Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and knowing he would not run for re-election, “I can speak my mind without fearing the consequences much,” McCain explained in his memoir, “The Restless Wave,’’ which was published in May. “And I can vote my conscience without worry.”
McCain was born the son and grandson of Navy admirals in 1936.
The Navy would define the first half of his life, and the US Senate the second.
He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1958 — fifth from the bottom of his class and a self-admitted insubordinate wise-cracker.
The Vietnam War would prove his mettle.
In 1967, his Skyhawk was shot out of the sky over Hanoi by the North Vietnamese.
Ejected from the aircraft, he landed in a lake — both arms and his right knee broken.
He would be held and tortured for some 5½ years, including some two years in solitary confinement.
Despite the excruciating pain of the beatings that came with brutal interrogations, McCain refused his captors’ offer to release him.
The North Vietnamese had learned he was the son of a Navy admiral and were eager for the publicity boost that springing McCain would give them.
“They could have said to the [other prisoners], ‘Look, you poor devils, the son of the man who is running the war has gone home and left you here. No one cares for you ordinary fellows,’ ” McCain later recalled.
He returned to the United States in March 1973 only after his fellow captives had also been released.
Due to his brutal treatment at the hands of the North Vietnamese, he was permanently unable to raise his arms above his head despite extensive physical therapy.
But his love of America had grown even stronger, and would propel him to pursue public service at the highest levels.
“I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s,” he would say in his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, as he accepted his party’s presidential nomination.
“I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for,” he said.
“I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore; I was my country’s.”
McCain was back behind the controls of fighter planes by late 1974, this time as an instructor and inspiration to younger pilots.
He began serving as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate two years later.
He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and served two terms. In 1986 he was elected to the Senate, where he’d easily win re-election five times, including in 2016.
His political career would suffer a blow in 1989 when he was implicated in a campaign-finance corruption scandal as one of the Keating Five.
Cleared of wrongdoing but reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee, he became an outspoken advocate of
campaign-finance reform.
His first run for the presidency, in 2000, ended early, in a lost primary battle with George W. Bush.
But he had become something of a darling of the press, regaling reporters for hours as they rode together on his campaign bus, which he called “The Straight Talk Express.”
In his 2008 run for the presidency, in which he won the GOP nomination, McCain picked a telegenic but little-known running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
Palin would deliver a riveting convention speech. But she would damage his campaign in a series of embarrassing gaffes — including her parody-inspiring lack of preparation for TV interviews and news that she had spent $150,000 in campaign contributions on her clothes, hair and makeup.
In “The Restless Wave,” McCain pulled his punches and did not criticize Palin, but said he wished he had ignored his advisers’ advice and instead chosen Sen. Joe Lieberman, a close pal, as his running-mate.
As chair of Armed Services, he would be one of President Barack Obama’s strongest critics, calling him soft on ISIS and blaming him for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s gassing of his own people. He’d be a strong critic of Trump as well. Trump and McCain first and most famously locked horns in 2015 when the then-GOP candidate mocked McCain for being captured in Vietnam.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump taunted in a Q&A interview. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Despite their acrimony, McCain last Dec. 12 issued a statement praising the president’s authorization of some $700 billion in defense spending.
“It is the result of an open and bipartisan legislative process,” McCain said of the authorization — an apparent dig at the behind-closed-doors Republican tax-overhaul efforts.
At first, McCain’s cancer diagnosis hardly seemed to slow him down.
In July 2017, less than two weeks after the diagnosis and a craniotomy to remove a blood clot above his left eye, he was back in Washington, casting a deciding vote to allow the Senate to begin deliberations on replacing ObamaCare.
On July 27, he cast another deciding vote, infamously scuttling the so-called “skinny repeal” of Obama’s signature health-care legislation. His colleagues had “rammed” it through without public comment, he complained.
“We have seen the world’s greatest delib- erative body succumb to partisan rancor and gridlock,” he chided his Senate colleagues.
McCain left Washington in December 2017, but remained a formidable political force from his Arizona ranch.
He spoke by phone with political friends and former foes, including Bush, his 2000 primary rival who became president, and Obama, the Democrat who defeated him in 2008.
This past May, McCain led an unsuccessful Senate effort to oppose Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, due to her role in the Bush-era waterboarding interrogations of suspected terrorists.
In July, he blasted Trump for the president’s chummy summit in Helsinki, Finland, with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” McCain tweeted.
Throughout his time in DC, McCain kept a special bond with the military.
“Adventure, comradeship, education, rich experience — these things are all part of the fabric of military life, and they all matter,” he said in one of his last speeches, at an October memorial service at the Pentagon honoring 10 sailors whose lives were lost aboard the USS John S. McCain.
“But there is a unique dignity that comes from stepping forward, as a volunteer, and placing one’s life in harm’s way in commitment to a greater cause,” he said.
“There is no greater cause than the freedoms enshrined in the US Constitution.”
The warship was named after his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr., and father, John S. McCain Jr.
In a July 11 rededication ceremony, the senator officially became the ship’s third namesake.
On Friday, his family announced that his end was near.
“Last summer, Senator John McCain shared with Americans the news our family already knew: he had been diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma, and the prognosis was serious,” his family said in a statement.
“In the year since, John has surpassed expectations for his survival. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict. With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment.”
McCain is survived by his wife, Cindy — who chairs the $300 million-a-year Hensley & Co., one of the largest AnheuserBusch beer distributors in the US.
He is also survived by seven children from his two marriages. Meghan McCain, his daughter with Cindy, is a co-host of TV’s “The View.”