The maverick mother who raised John McCain

Roberta McCain 1912–2020

Traveling in Europe with her twin sister in 1999, Roberta McCain ran into a snag: no car agency would rent to an 88-year-old woman. Undeterred, she bought a used Mercedes and drove it to Uzbekistan. In 2006, she had another touring car shipped from France to the East Coast, then drove it across the country to gift it to her great-nephew in San Francisco—picking up a speeding ticket en route for hitting 112 mph in northern Arizona. Irreverent and indomitable, she was credited by her son, Sen. John McCain, for endowing him with the will to survive five and a half years in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. As the wife of a four-star Navy admiral, she charmed Washington, D.C., making friends that ran from tycoon J. Paul Getty to Madame Chiang Kai-shek. At age 96 she joined her son’s presidential campaign, where her shoot-fromthe-hip style endeared her to reporters and the public. “Do you want me to sit around and play bridge every day?” she said in 2008. “Well, that isn’t my choice of a way to live.”

She was born Roberta Wright in Muskogee, Okla., said The Washington Post. Her father was a hugely successful oil wildcatter who retired at 40 and moved the family to

Los Angeles. He “took his brood on automobile journeys for weeks on end,” sparking Roberta’s love of travel. As a student at the University of Southern California, she began dating John Sidney McCain, known as Jack, “a young Navy ensign” from a storied military family, said The Times (U.K.). Faced with her mother’s disapproval, the headstrong 20-year-old eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, “where she and

Jack were married above a bar called Caesar’s.” “As her husband rose to global military prominence,” said The New York Times, “she lived in capitals and naval bases in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.” She raised three children largely alone while her husband was at sea; during World War II he commanded a submarine on “months-long patrols in the Pacific.” Roberta kept her pain hidden from the public when her Navy pilot son, John, was shot down over Hanoi in 1967; he came home a hero and she encouraged him to pursue a career in politics. After Jack died in 1981, she traveled extensively with her sister, Rowena, who lived to be 99. Asked about her own longevity, McCain offered few tips. “I don’t do anything I’m supposed to do,” she said in 2008. “Honey, I’ve had a dream life, and it was all luck.”