McCain, Larson forged a lifelong bond
Now the Naval Academy rebel and its enforcer of standards will rest side by side
Chuck Larson and John McCain had agreed they’d be buried side by side someday. In 1998, it was time to pick out the burial site.
Larson looked around the Naval Academy Cemetery and found a lush green spot on a hill, overlooking the Severn River.
As Larson, aide Mark Donohue and Larson’s wife drove back to the Buchanan House from the cemetery, Larson called McCain.
“I found you a spot right next to me, and we have a water view,” Donohue recalled Larson saying.
On Sunday, McCain will be buried alongside his friend and academy classmate. The burial site selection was emblem- atic of the warm relationship between two Class of 1958 buddies who on paper were such opposites.
Larson, who would go on to become an admiral and two-time academy superintendent, was known for not only playing by the rules, but enforcing and mastering them.
McCain … well, that history’s been told
over and over. His days at the Naval Academy, he once said, were akin to the scene of a crime. He didn’t seem bound for glory. But McCain “became an informal leader of his class, the rebellious yin to his best friend and class president Chuck Larson’s more squared-away yang,” says a family biography.
No one can explain with any precision why the two men were not only attracted to one another, but remained friends for life.
They roomed together in flight school after graduation, but their lives would take predictably different paths.
Larson became just the second person to serve two different times as academy superintendent. He tried politics, running in 2002 as a Democrat for lieutenant governor of Maryland, a losing campaign.
McCain found his niche in Republican politics, winning six terms as a U.S. senator from Arizona as well as the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
Yet theirs was a seamless bond, and when they had adventures together, their reputations were embellished.
James Cheevers, former Naval Academy Museum director, tells of how the time had come in spring 1958 to pick the lead brigade commander for what was then called June Week. There were two candidates, Larson and John Poindexter, who decades later would become President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser.
The commandant had heard that Larson had joined McCain in going “over the wall” at the academy one night, a clear rules violation. McCain had a habit of escaping the academy in search of a good time.
William Smedberg, the academy superintendent, asked if the commandant had caught Larson going over the wall. “No,” the commandant said. Then “he’s our man,” Smedberg said, according to Cheevers.
Larson, McCain said in a class biography of his friend, “was a ‘squared away’ brigade commander and class president who received his diploma and personal congratulations from the graduation speaker, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, while I graduated some distance behind.”
But McCain, Larson and the other 899 class members were often bound by a special tie that links academy graduates.
Midshipmen come from all over the country and from different stations in life, “people who would not ordinarily come together” at that age, said John Schofield, a former academy spokesman and retired naval officer. They then go through four years of rigorous training, imbued with a sense of duty, honor and mission, Schofield said.
Larson would become one of the Navy’s most respected officers. He served as an aide to President Richard Nixon, became an admiral at an unusually young age and was named academy superintendent in 1983. He became commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command in 1991.
In 1994, he was called to serve a second Sen. John McCain, left, and then-Naval Academy superintendent Adm. Charles Larson share a laugh onstage in 1998. McCain, who died Aug. 25, will be buried Sunday alongside Larson, his longtime friend. tour as superintendent after the Navy had been rocked by the biggest cheating scandal in its history.
Dozens of students were found to have cheated on a 1992 electrical engineering exam. Twenty-four were expelled and dozens of others were disciplined. Larson was brought in to not only restore morale, but restore a sense of ethical behavior and tighter discipline.
Larson would later come to be criticized, though, for being slow to adjust to an era when discipline was not as automatic as he had known.
In 1995, two dozen midshipmen were linked to a drug ring; 15 were expelled. A year later, current and former students were involved in sexual abuse and car theft schemes.
Midshipmen were too often being accused of criminal activity. James Barry, a teacher at the academy, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post saying the academy was plagued by “a serious moral problem caused by a culture of hypocrisy.”
But Larson’s reputation was intact. He would be known for “his strong emphasis on providing character and honor instruction to the brigade,” which “was instrumental in leading the academy back from a challenging time in its history, both restoring public confidence and repairing the academy’s reputation and credibility,” an academy statement said.
He retired from the Navy in 1998 and, four years later, was the surprise choice of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, as her lieutenant governor running mate. They became the first Democratic ticket to lose the governorship in 36 years.
“No one blamed Larson for the 2002 outcome,” said Todd Eberly, associate professor of political science at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “He was competent and distinguished.”
Townsend was criticized for her choice of Larson, since he changed his party registration to Democratic just before he ran on the ticket. There was also a feeling Townsend was ignoring some of the strongest Democratic constituencies, “ignoring African-American voters and instead making a choice intended to win over more moderate and conservative voters.” Eberly recalled.
The election, said Eberly, “is barely mentioned in recounts of Larson’s life.”
Larson died at age 77 in 2014 of leukemia. The next year, the academy administration building was renamed Larson Hall.
Today, said Schofield, he remains “part of the fabric of what the Naval Academy stands for. The name Chuck Larson is synonymous with what is good at the Naval Academy.”