He did great things even on small scale
One of them was helping a Polish family start new life in America
So much has been written about John McCain on a grand scale – the hero, statesman, and maverick – and deservedly so.
But lost in the accolades and tributes is the fact that from very early on in his political career, he had the ability to make a difference in the lives of individual people and families.
As a young reporter in my first job, I covered one of those stories.
The year was 1983. I was in the first year of my first newspaper job, and McCain was in the first year of his first term as a member of Congress.
The case involved a 47-year-old blue-collar worker named Tadeusz
"It wasn’t about politics with John. You could disagree on substance. It was about the underlying values that animated everything John did."
Joe Biden, former vice president
Fronczak, a shipbuilder who had been a member of the outlawed Solidarity labor union in his native Poland.
As government crackdowns on the union escalated, he worried that he would be arrested. He petitioned the government to leave the country, and his request was granted, but with a cruel stipulation.
He, his wife and daughter would be able to leave Poland, but they would have to leave his 6-year-old son behind.
The family decided that Fronczak would go, while his wife, Zofia, an economist who worked at a bank, would stay behind with the children until they could persuade the government to allow all of them to leave together.
With the help of church groups and refugee resettlement agencies, Fronczak arrived in Mesa, where a local businessman named John Hogue, who ran a commercial printing business, agreed to sponsor him and give him a job.
Fronczak actually worked three jobs: as a printer and a janitor for Hogue and as a janitor at a beauty shop. He spent two years trying to learn English while Hogue worked through Catholic relief agencies and the U.S. State Department to try to get Fronczak’s family to the U.S.
Sometime in the summer of 1983, Hogue asked McCain, the brand-new congressman, to help. Several weeks later, Fronczak received a telegram saying his wife and children would arrive in January.
Dates had been set before, only to be inexplicably pushed back. This time would be different. On Sept. 21, a Wednesday, Fronczak received a second telegram, this one in Polish, saying simply that his wife and children would arrive on Sunday.
I interviewed Fronczak in McCain’s Mesa office the day after that second telegram arrived. I remember how flustered and overwhelmed he was. Earlier in the day he’d locked his keys in his car and drained the battery, forcing Hogue to come to the rescue. He was clearly nervous in the presence of McCain.
Grant Woods, who went on to become Arizona’s attorney general, was McCain’s administrative aide at the time. I asked him Monday if he remembered the case of the Polish refugee family.
He did, but the details had grown hazy after 35 years. Nevertheless, he said, the episode was vintage McCain.
“That’s the sort of situation John would jump into personally, especially if it involved bureaucratic red tape,” Woods said. “He was more than willing to jump in and get things done. He took his responsibility (to his constituents) very seriously.”
Woods wasn’t sure whose cage McCain rattled on the Fronczak family’s behalf, someone in the State Department probably. But if the call had come from any other freshman congressman than John McCain, it’s doubtful anything would have happened.
“The thing about John McCain was he knew exactly who to contact and what to do from his experience as a Navy liaison,” Woods said.
Several years after he came home from Vietnam, McCain became the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, where he represented the Navy’s interests on Capitol Hill.
There, he developed close friendships with powerful Senate leaders like John Tower, R-Texas, and William Cohen, a Maine Republican who would go on to become secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton.
That, Woods said, helped give McCain the ability to get things done.
Fronczak, of course, knew none of that.
Nearly two decades after that meeting, I was an editor overseeing The Arizona Republic’s Washington Bureau, and I paid a courtesy on McCain in his office on Capitol Hill.
The senator was not happy with my paper’s coverage at the time, and the reception I got was pretty chilly. But then I asked him if he’d heard anything from Tad Fronczak and his family, the Polish refugees he’d helped reunite.
The ice broke, and he said he had not kept up with them but wondered how they were doing. He suggested I should do a story about where they were now. I told him I would. Somehow I never got around to it until now.
I spoke with Zofia Fronczak on Monday. She said she’d heard the news about McCain’s death while at dinner with her children, and it made her sad.
She told me that her husband, who died several years ago, remained John McCain’s biggest fan for his entire life and loved his adopted country more than anything.
She remembered how McCain had sent the family a letter welcoming them to their new country offering to do anything they needed to help get settled. They never took him up on it. “He had done enough for us already. How could we ask for more?” Zofia said. Besides, they were accustomed to working for what they needed and didn’t like to ask for help, even if it wasn’t easy.
And it wasn’t.
While her husband reveled in his new country, learning English was difficult for Zofia. She had been an economist in Poland, and while she eventually found a good job in manufacturing, she was never able to find a job with the same kind of prestige she’d had in Poland. And while there was an abundance of material things in this country, her family and her friends were still in her old one.
Still, she is grateful. She has everything she needs. Her children, now grown, are far more American than they are Polish, and they are successful and happy.
And they are thankful for the freshman congressman who knew how to get things done.