When McCain, Clinton saved Memorial Day

Twenty-five years ago, Americans and some of their politicians tried to ruin Memorial Day, to cheapen it, to politicize it, to forget what the holiday stands for and whom it is meant to honor.

Sen. John McCain kept that from happening.

In those days, 1993, Bill Clinton was president, relatively new on the job and already the target of an unrelenting and strident political opposition.

Yes. Some things never change. As we approached Memorial Day, Clinton’s office announced that the president planned to make a speech on the holiday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. During the presidential campaign, a lot was made of Clinton’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to avoid the military draft.

The announcement of the speech led Clinton’s critics to organize a vocal national campaign against his planned appearance.

Within a short time, it was the controversy, and not Memorial Day, that got all the attention.

Until McCain stepped in.

The origins of Memorial Day go back to a few years after the Civil War. The head of a Union veterans organization, Maj. Gen. John A Logan, urged citizens to decorate the graves of war dead on May 30. Some say he picked the date because it wasn’t the anniversary of any big battle. Others because he believed flowers would be in bloom throughout the country.

It was called Decoration Day back then, and it stayed that way for a long time. It didn’t become an official federal holiday until 1971.

McCain was a prisoner of war in Hanoi at the time. Clinton was a student at Yale Law School.

By 1993, Clinton, a Democrat, was

president and McCain, a Republican, was a senator.

Many of McCain’s friends and supporters were fully behind the protests of Clinton’s planned speech at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

McCain wasn’t having it. The day is supposed to be honoring the dead, not scoring political points.

He said both privately and publicly that he supported Clinton’s decision to make the speech, even writing the president a letter saying, in part, “I hope you will not be discouraged from doing so by the ill-conceived and unjustified opposition of a few.”

McCain later appeared with Clinton at the Memorial Day ceremony.

Also there was David Ifshin, who as a young antiwar activist traveled to Hanoi and made speeches against the war at a time when McCain and others were being held prisoner.

McCain reconciled with Ifshin as well, appearing with him and Clinton at the memorial in 1993, defending him on the floor of Congress and, after Ifshin died of cancer, speaking at his funeral, where McCain said, “David taught me a lot about the meaning of courage.”

I was on the job during those days, and, like other news writers, I had a prickly relationship with McCain.

(By 1995, the senator and his office staff hadn’t responded to my questions for several years. It would stretch on for a total of 12. Really.)

But that May in 1993, Americans were on the verge of ruining Memorial Day, trading those we’re meant to honor for petty politics, and McCain stopped it.

Clinton now says of McCain, “In my lifetime, he’s one of the most remarkable patriots our country’s ever produced.”

The senator took a stand for what’s right, for what should matter. And for that, back in 1993, I called him a name that, coming from me, probably did him more harm than good:

A statesman.