The photo shows a youngish John McCain, wearing the three-day growth of beard that so many guys flash these days. The caption reads: “The Last Republican, 1936-2018.”
If McCain wasn’t the last Republican, he may have been the last of what we traditional-minded people think of as a Republican. Cautious, practical, steadfast, cooperative. My kind of Republican, as a strongly liberal Democrat once told me.
McCain’s contradictions abound until you tie them into the package of one American. Internet trolls were quick to bash the contradictions. Born to privilege. Broke rules at the Naval Academy because Daddy was a four-star admiral. Confessed to war crimes while a prisoner in North Vietnam. Left his wife after a car crash disabled her.
True, he took longer than many to fit his rebellious self into his family legacy, but his 5.5 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, two of them in solitary confinement, left him partly disabled. When you comb your hair this morning, remember that his POW injuries kept John McCain from combing his hair for the last 45 years of his life.
He apologized to his fellow POWs (and us) for signing the phony confession. He filled the “confession” with dog-signal words and phrases to clarify that it was coerced. Fellow POWs seem not to have begrudged him that act of weakness at the Hanoi Hilton.
McCain also apologized for his behavior when he dated another woman while still married to his first wife. He later divorced Carol Shepp and married Cindy Lou Hensley. He has said that ending his first marriage was “my greatest moral failure.”
And he wasn’t slow to point out silliness in others. He criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton for introducing a bill to send 1 million federal dollars to the Woodstock concert museum in upstate New York, which she represented in the Senate. “My friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.”
In 1958, John McCain graduated 894th of 899 ensigns at the Naval Academy. Despite his low grades and record of demerits, brought about by prankstering and just-plain disobedience to dress and other codes, he honored the academy in the highest way. With his service to the nation. He will be buried on the grounds at Annapolis.
It is telling that his favorite school subjects were history and literature. Neither is a strength of the Naval Academy curriculum, where, of necessity, faculty stress engineering and leadership. But McCain was more interested in how we got here (history) and in how we can understand where we are (literature).
The announcement on Friday that McCain had ended treatment for brain cancer pulled me back 18 months to when my wife, Marilyn, ended her nine-years-and-counting battle against ovarian cancer. I hoped for McCain and his family that his post-treatment days would not drag on. McCain lived a day and a half more and died late Saturday. Marilyn lived 50 days and died on June 3, 2017. When the decision comes to stop treatment, the merciful end may be the quick end. Marilyn’s last 50 days were difficult. For everyone
Now, hear this. Kelli Ward, running to succeed U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, said on Friday that McCain’s people had timed the end of his treatments to detract from her launch that night of a statewide campaign tour across Arizona. The trolls aren’t only on the left.
The election of 2008 excited millions of us. Barack Obama’s story enthralled me, but my cautious side kept looking closely at McCain. His analysis of foreign and defense issues was almost always dead-on. But his solutions were often too muscular. He seemed too willing to take up arms in places that most of us couldn’t justify defending.
Still, my head wanted to vote for McCain. My heart hoped that voting for Obama might help America continue healing racially. In the end, my head won out, but not as you might imagine. When powerful banks led us to the brink of financial ruin, Obama pounced on Republican leaders. McCain, never strong in economics, said the economy was “fundamentally sound.” Events even before the election proved him wrong, and turned me closer to Obama.
And there was the disaster named Sarah Palin. McCain was not one to kowtow, but he bowed to party leaders, who wanted a woman vice-president. A McCain-Joe Lieberman ticket would have impressed me. The Republican Party woefully lacks female leaders, and the bosses picked Palin, who brought two things to the effort: enhancing the career of Tina Fey who mocked her for months on Saturday Night Live, and a really good jump shot. Obama had a good jump shot, too. McCain said picking Palin was a mistake.
But for those two facts, I could have broken my string of never voting for a Republican for president. (I also have never voted for a Democrat for governor of Maine.)
This quotation tells a lot about McCain. “Here’s what I’ve also always known about my friend and occasional sparring partner. He is a good and decent man, God-fearing and kind, a devoted father and husband and a genuine patriot who puts our country before himself. I know, too, that it has been a great privilege to call him my friend.”
That’s not someone else talking about McCain. That’s McCain, in 2016, talking about former vice president and Sen. Joe Biden, who lost a son to brain cancer in 2015. The grace and warmth of that statement about a political opponent shows me what kind of man McCain was.
Here’s Biden, in another forum, talking about McCain. “I know if I picked up the phone tonight and called John McCain and said, ‘John, I’m at 2nd and Vine in Oshkosh and I need your help. Come,’ he would get on a plane and come. And I would for him, too.”
Bob Neal is sad that we can no longer pick up the phone and call John McCain to come help. He hopes that, like McCain, he doesn’t gundeck the tough issues.
John McCain
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