USA TODAY International Edition
MCCAIN DIES AT AGE 81
SENATOR, FORMER POW BECAME A POWERFUL FIGURE IN WASHINGTON
John McCain, who endured more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before becoming the 2008 GOP presidential nominee and serving Arizona for more than 30 years on Capitol Hill, died Saturday at age 81. ❚ Destined to be remembered among the political giants of Arizona history, the six-term U.S. senator disclosed in July 2017 that he had been diagnosed with a deadly form of brain cancer called glioblastoma.
McCain was a two-time presidential candidate, losing the GOP nomination in 2000 to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush and the general election in 2008 to then-Sen. Barack Obama.
The unsuccessful White House bids were spotlight moments in a long political career that began with his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982. After two terms, McCain ascended to the Senate in 1987, replacing legendary Republican Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was the only other Arizonan to top the national ticket of a major U.S. political party. McCain was re-elected to the Senate in 1992, 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016. He became Arizona’s senior senator in 1995 and chairman of the influential Armed Services Committee in 2015.
Often called a maverick, McCain was a complicated personality and will be remembered as the most important political figure to emerge from Arizona in the past 50 years.
He was ensnared by the Keating Five scandal of the late 1980s and deemed by the Senate Ethics Committee to have demonstrated poor judgment by joining four Senate colleagues in meeting with federal thrift regulators on behalf of political benefactor Charles H. Keating Jr., a savings-and-loan tycoon.
It was in the wake of that scandal, in the 1990s and early- to mid-2000s, that McCain’s “maverick” reputation began to take shape, as he led fights for campaign-finance reform and comprehensive immigration reform and against Big Tobacco. During his 2000 presidential run, McCain famously decried leaders of the Religious Right as “agents of intolerance,” a gutsy fight to pick for a Republican.
The ‘maverick’
In 2015, his own presidential ambitions in the past, McCain clashed with Republican Donald Trump in a public feud that extended into Trump’s time in the White House.
On July 28, 2017, McCain sided with two other GOP senators and all Democrats and cast a crucial vote – a literal thumbs-down on the Senate floor – that stalled Republican efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act, a top Trump priority.
Unlike many of Trump’s GOP punching bags, McCain had the stature to go nose-to-nose with the president.
At one point in the early 2000s, Democrats encouraged McCain to consider switching parties, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry approached him about serving as his running mate. But later, McCain veered to the right, a source of frequent frustration for his previous admirers on the other side of the aisle.
McCain also had a love-hate relationship with his media-promoted reputation as a maverick, relying on it or distancing himself from it as the political circumstances warranted.
“That was a label that was given to me a long time ago,” McCain told the Arizona Republic in 2010. “I don’t decide on the labels that I am given. I said I have always acted in what I think is in the best interests of the state and the country, and that’s the way that I will always behave.”
Two presidential runs
McCain proved himself a thorn in the side of his GOP rival, Bush, at least early in the first term of Bush’s presidency.
However, he and Bush reconciled as McCain geared up for his second presidential run. A classic Senate hawk, McCain was a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and strongly supported Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
During the 2008 presidential race, McCain had to overcome the lingering distrust of many conservatives who resented his maverick record, which included votes against key Bush tax cuts as well as McCain’s successful push for bipartisan campaign-finance reform legislation.
His decision to gamble on the untested Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate was cheered by the conservative wing of the Republican Party but may have hurt the GOP ticket among independent voters.
However, McCain never had much of a chance of defeating Obama, given the political atmosphere of the time. Voters were widely dissatisfied with Bush, and war fatigue had set in. If that weren’t bad enough, the U.S. economy melted down in September 2008, making it unlikely another Republican would succeed Bush.
“You can’t win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party,” Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said after the election.
Looking back at the race in an August 2017 interview with the Republic, McCain largely concurred, though he stressed that Obama deserves the credit for his victory.
“One, Barack Obama was a very, very strong candidate, and that’s the most important thing,” McCain said. “Second, when the stock market collapsed, it really sent us into a real drop. Third of all, I guess, Americans were ready for a change, too.”
A POW in North Vietnam
John Sidney McCain III was born Aug. 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone. His father, John S. McCain Jr., and grandfather, John S. “Slew” McCain Sr., would become the only father-son team of four-star Navy admirals in U.S. history. The youngest McCain followed in his namesakes’ footsteps, attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to become a naval aviator.
In July 1967, during the Vietnam War, McCain survived a fiery maritime disaster on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal that killed 134 people and nearly sank the ship in the Gulf of Tonkin.
On Oct. 26, 1967, McCain was piloting an A-4 Skyhawk attack bomber when a missile blew off one of its wings. Seriously wounded, he was captured and would spend more than five brutal years as a POW.
He refused early release, offered to him because he was the son of a Navy admiral and would have served North Vietnamese propaganda purposes.
McCain finally was released, along with other POWs, in 1973.
In 1977, McCain became the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, setting into motion his future career path as a politician.
After returning the United States, McCain’s first marriage to the former Carol Shepp fell apart, and the couple eventually divorced in 1980. He later married Cindy Hensley, daughter of a wealthy Arizona beer distributor.
McCain had seven children, including television commentator and author Meghan McCain. His family lived in the central Phoenix area for years.