A FINAL FLIGHT
Biden, others remember ‘a brother,’ a friend before senator’s casket heads to Washington
The sun rose over Arizona, and there was John McCain one last time. His flag-covered casket still sat underneath the Capitol’s copper dome, where an honor guard stood watch, waiting to carry the senator to his state’s final goodbye.
They carried him out of the rotunda just after 9 a.m. Thursday, marching past the saluting state troopers and the flags at half-staff. McCain’s family stood at the end of the sidewalk. Together they held hands and watched as the casket disappeared into the back of a hearse, headed toward the church McCain knew so well.
Thousands of people had already filled the sanctuary of North Phoenix Baptist Church, which McCain attended for 25 years before his death Saturday. He was 81 years old.
Thursday morning’s service, which was not McCain’s official funeral, was the second public event in almost a week of memorials that will continue this weekend in Washington, D.C. McCain will be buried Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy.
The memorial featured a list of guests and speakers as sprawling and diverse as the senator’s life. Among the more than 3,000 mourners were two dozen senators and former Vice President Joe Biden, superstar athletes and McCain’s closest friends, all brought together for Arizona’s final moments with its senior senator.
The 90-minute service was as much a tribute to McCain’s adopted home state as it was to the senator himself. Guests flipped through programs covered with a photo of Sedona’s red rocks. The same photo filled two projection screens behind the stage. A Navajo flutist played. Arizona police officers, firefighters and Border Patrol agents showed people to their seats. And a choir from Brophy College Preparatory, where two of McCain’s sons attended high school, sang a song called, simply, “Arizona.”
“He loved this place,” former state Attorney General Grant Woods, a former chief of staff to McCain, said in the first of four tributes. “And if John McCain fell in love with Arizona, Arizona fell in love with John McCain.”
Looking over McCain’s casket, which sat a few feet in front the wooden lectern, Woods called his time with the senator “the greatest honor of my life.” He laughed about McCain’s driving, which sometimes threatened to send the car careening onto sidewalks, and emphasized his lifelong dedication to America’s founding ideals, in all of his life’s countless experiences.
“It’s a long and winding road that took him from that dirt room in Hanoi to the dirt road in Hidden Valley,” Woods said, referencing the two places McCain lived the longest: in a Vietnamese prison and at the bottom of a desert valley in Cornville, Arizona.
Larry Fitzgerald, the Cardinals’ star receiver and a friend of McCain’s, had visited both places. Towering over the lectern, Fitzgerald recalled a trip he made to Vietnam after their short friendship began. He visited the lake where Vietnamese soldiers pulled McCain from the wreckage of his Navy plane and sat in the cell where McCain endured years of torture.
“I wanted to see the places where the will of John McCain was tested and forged,” Fitzgerald said. “And the ordeal that my friend survived became all the more real.”
Fitzgerald was one of three Arizona sports legends included in McCain’s memorial. Former Coyotes captain Shane Doan and former Diamondback Luis Gonzalez served as pallbearers. All three built improbable friendships: McCain was decades older, a political stalwart palling around stadiums and locker rooms, but who, like them, adopted Arizona as his home.
“I’m black. He was white. I’m young. He wasn’t so young. He lived with physical limitations brought on by war. I’m a professional athlete. He was the epitome of toughness. I do everything I can do avoid contact,” Fitzgerald said. “How does this unlikely pair become friends? I’ve asked myself this same question. You know what the answer is? That’s just who he is.”
One after another, the memorial’s speakers praised McCain as a man who worked through differences. Tommy Espinoza, president and CEO of the Raza Development Fund, remembered being asked to co-chair McCain’s presidential committee, even though he was a vocal Democrat. McCain, he said, didn’t care.
“To me, John really did reflect our country in its true form,” Espinoza said. “He understood all of us.”
Then Biden stood to speak. Within a minute, he was reaching for a tissue in his pocket, dabbing the corners of his eyes as he eulogized the man he called “a brother.”
He leaned forward to look straight into the first row, where McCain’s family sat. The energy that once carried him through four decades of politics fell away. In its place was a voice soft and slow, filled with a familiar pain: His son, the late Beau Biden, died in 2015 of the same cancer that ended McCain’s life.
“I know right now, the pain you’re all feeling is so sharp and so hollowing. And John’s absence is all-consuming for you right now,” he said. “But I pray you take some comfort, knowing that because you shared John with all of us your whole life, the world now shares with you the ache of John’s death.”
Suddenly, Biden snapped straight up. His voice rose to a near-yell. His tribute to McCain shifted into a statement to the 24 senators in the room. He lamented the country’s rising extremism, scoffing at the memory of an award he and McCain once received in honor of their civility. That decency, Biden said, shouldn’t have earned an award. It was the kind of politics that people like McCain once made common practice. Biden called it the “McCain Code.” “Things have changed so much in America, they look at him as if John came from another age because he lived by a different code — an ancient, antiquated code where honor, courage, character, integrity, duty mattered,” Biden said.
“The truth is, John’s code was ageless. Is ageless. It wasn’t about politics with John. You could disagree on substance,” he continued. “It was about the underlying values that animated everything John did.”
Biden’s voice softened again. It seemed as if he was trying to speak to the entire country, those in the room and those watching from home.
“I’ve been thinking this week about why John’s death has hit the country so hard,” Biden said. “I think it’s because they knew John believed so deeply and so passionately in the soul of America. That made it easier for them to have confidence and faith in America.”
He finished with a rough paraphrase of Shakespeare: “We shall not see his like again.”
A few minutes later — after McCain’s grandson, Andy, read another Bible verse, the choir sang “Arizona” and a bagpiper trilled through a hymn called “Going Home” — the familiar first chimes of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” started to play.
Three thousand people stood as an honor guard wheeled McCain’s casket out of the sanctuary. The three men loaded his body into the hearse. His family took their now-familiar places in the SUVs that filled the driveway.
The motorcade made its way to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where a Boeing C-32A awaited. Onto the plane went McCain’s casket. His family followed close behind. Then the plane taxied down the runway, and at 12:46 p.m., John McCain left Arizona for the final time.