Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Recalling the John McCain We Knew

Reporters and editors at The New York Times had a backstage view of Mr. McCain’s decades in public life. Here are their reflections.

Image
Senator John McCain and his wife, Cindy, during a stop for his presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C., in January 2008.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

I covered three of Senator McCain’s political races — his 2008 White House race, and his 2010 and 2016 Senate re-election campaigns — and each time two Mr. McCains would show up.

The first Mr. McCain was the one the public saw a lot on television: irreverent, cheerful, reverential — of veterans, senior voters, Gold Star mothers, small-business owners — and thoughtful about policy.

That man dominated his successful attempt to capture the 2008 South Carolina primary, a candidate of boundless energy soaking up a blur of V.F.W. halls, vinegar barbecue joints and endless rounds of TV golf watched with Senator Lindsey Graham in the back of a bus. Reporters dragging themselves to a 6 a.m. van call would find Mr. McCain fully caffeinated, probably from a breakfast with a donor an hour earlier. “Come on, jerks!” Mr. McCain would bellow, his grinning, pink face poking out from under a hat.

The other Mr. McCain, brooding, impatient and sometimes dismissive, seemed to surface when he was uncomfortable with the bend that politics had put in his road. In 2010, when confronted by voters who questioned Barack Obama’s birthplace, that Mr. McCain stared at the floor uncomfortably, unlike the one in 2008 who had steadfastly defended his opponent. As I observed him under the relentless sun of southern Arizona trying to defend his multiple immigration positions, he shot me the occasional stony glare.

[Read the obituary for John McCain, who endured five years of captivity in Vietnam and rose to the heights of power in Washington]

The two Mr. McCains surfaced on Capitol Hill over the seven years I covered him there, too. In 2015, I went to his office to discuss a large defense bill, which he would only do after I spent a good 30 minutes sitting on his couch looking at photos of Native Americans taken by his idol, Barry Goldwater.

Months later, relentlessly questioned about Mr. Trump, whose fortunes had entangled his own, he would no longer talk to me about much of anything. He scowled and loped away in that specific Mr. McCain way, one arm — the one injured by torture — slightly behind the velocity of the rest of him.

In South Carolina once, he sat quietly in a chair waiting to do a remote television interview with a reporter back in Washington. Spying me spying him from a corner of the room, he said, eyes fixed on the monitor before him, “Will you come back and see me again, Jennifer?” When I assured him that I certainly would, he asked quietly, “Will you come back even if I fail?”

— Jennifer Steinhauer


Image
Mr. McCain during an Armed Services Committee hearing last November.Credit...Zach Gibson for The New York Times

In January 2015, when Mr. McCain had just taken over the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee — “the only job in Washington, other than being president, that he ever wanted,” I wrote then — I ran into him practically skipping along in a Senate corridor. We hadn't seen one another in some time. “Come see me!" he said playfully. So I did. When I showed up at his office some days later for our interview, I found the senator in a contemplative mood.

Mr. McCain, then 78, was never given to introspection, and on that day, he was combative — he said he would have “of course” made a better commander in chief than then-President Barack Obama — yet also unusually reflective. He told me that one by one, his fellow prisoners from the Vietnam War had been dying, and that he was acutely aware that one day, his time would come.

“Every single day,” he said then, “is a day less that I am going to be able to serve in the Senate.”

I asked him what he wanted written on his tombstone. He didn’t skip a beat: “He served his country.”

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg


Video
Video player loading
Senator John McCain addressed the Class of 1993.CreditCredit...United States Naval Academy

All these things and more, I have seen. And so will you. I will go to my grave in gratitude to my creator for allowing me to stand witness to such courage and honor. And so will you. My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know. God bless you. Semper Fi. Fair winds and following seas.

I was 16 years old. My older brother Dave was graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy with the Class of 1993. Before the ceremony I asked him who the speaker would be, hoping it would be somebody “big” like the young new president, Bill Clinton.

He replied, “I don’t know. Some senator from Arizona, I think.” I was disappointed, but that changed when Senator McCain took the podium. I sat spellbound, and by the end of his speech I was ready to drop out of high school and enlist. Two years later, I entered the Naval Academy as a midshipman myself.

Looking back, I thought it was strange that Senator McCain said, “My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching.” It sounded like he was ready to retire then, but 15 years later he ran for president. Had he won he would have given another commencement speech at the academy as commander in chief, just as Dwight D. Eisenhower had spoken at his own in 1958.

— John Ismay


Image
Mr. McCain and his son Jack in a cell at Hoa Lo Prison in April 2000.Credit...David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

I was on an Easter-week trip to Vietnam in April 2000 with my wife, Angela, and my 18-month-old daughter, Caroline, when an editor on the foreign desk of The Times reached me at my hotel in Hanoi.

Would I rush over to the Hoa Lo prison, a French colonial-era fortress known in the United States as the Hanoi Hilton, where a young aviator and future senator, John McCain, had been an inmate? Mr. McCain was visiting the prison, with his wife and 13-year-old son, Jack.

Interrupted vacations are an occupational hazard for foreign correspondents. But it was hard to complain about this assignment. Mr. McCain had withdrawn from the Republican primary only a month earlier, after losing to George W. Bush, and he was still a bona fide political star.

I got to the jail minutes before the senator, who was trailed by a small retinue of journalists from Washington. He welcomed me to the scrum. Mr. McCain had visited the Hanoi Hilton on one of his earlier trips to Vietnam since his release in 1973, so the story was really his son.

“It’s always interesting for me to be back here and show my son the place where I lived for a long time,” Mr. McCain said, pausing before a faded picture of himself as a grim-faced, defiant prisoner.

The tour was over in less than an hour. That evening, I wrote the story on a flight back to my base in Hong Kong. The image that stayed with me was Mr. McCain showing his son around as if the prison were his alma mater.

“Except,” I wrote, “the landmarks on this tour were dank cells like the one where Mr. McCain spent two years in solitary confinement, and leg irons, which he once wore as a punishment for insulting the guards.”

— Mark Landler


Image
Mr. McCain announced the temporary suspension of his presidential campaign in September 2008.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

John McCain was doing debate prep. That’s what the handful of reporters traveling with the senator were told on the morning of Sept. 24, 2008. But as we gathered at the Morgan Library in New York City that morning, it was clear something was off.

Mark Salter, the senator’s top adviser and speechwriter, was pacing faster than normal, two cellphones pressed to his head as he went in and out of the room where Mr. McCain and his campaign staff were holed up. In fact, what we didn’t know at the time was that the senator was planning what would become one of the most significant moments of his presidential campaign.

At 1:55 p.m., we were hustled out of the library and arrived at the New York Hilton 15 minutes later, to be ushered into a small room where a podium and teleprompter were set up. That was a red flag; Mr. McCain was famous for speaking from the gut and rarely delivering prepared remarks.

It was a grim-faced McCain who entered a few minutes later to begin delivering what the campaign described as a statement about the economy, which days earlier had begun collapsing. “Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington.” (I emailed my colleagues at 2:46 p.m.: “McCain suspending campaign. Asking for delay in debate.” The responses I got: “???,” wrote Anne Kornblut; “Seriously?” said Jonathan Weisman; and “what???” asked Steven Ginsberg.)

Mr. McCain had bet that a return to Washington to help pass an economic recovery bill in Congress might help his struggling campaign against Barack Obama. The look on his face that day suggested that he knew it might not. And his plans to shake up the race began unraveling almost immediately, when Mr. Obama shrewdly refused Mr. McCain’s request to “delay Friday night’s debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.”

I’ve always believed that Sept. 24 was the day that cemented his loss. In the face of the economic crisis, Mr. McCain’s campaign seemed off-balance and uncertain. Mr. McCain returned to Washington, but it was unclear what he was supposed to do when he got there. He had called for a meeting with President George W. Bush and Mr. Obama, but when details of the meeting were quickly leaked out, they revealed that Mr. Obama had taken charge while Mr. McCain was largely silent.

— Michael D. Shear


Image
Mr. McCain was released from captivity in 1973.Credit...Associated Press

Mr. McCain rarely spoke in detail of his torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors between 1967 and 1973, but his experience informed his dogged public battle to keep the United States from embracing similar interrogation methods, even when others in his party went in a different direction. When national security hawks without his experience protested that Al Qaeda was unrestrained in their brutality, Mr. McCain would reply: “It’s not about who they are. It’s about who we are.”

In 2005, Mr. McCain spoke at the funeral of William P. Lawrence, a retired vice admiral who, like the senator, had been held by the North Vietnamese for six years. At the pulpit of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, he gathered 23 other men who had been prisoners of war in Vietnam and declared: “All of us share the bond that was formed many years ago and far away. We had the immense privilege of serving in the company of heroes.”

When Mr. McCain ejected from his disabled jet, was injured on landing and then beaten, he was dragged to a small cell already occupied by another American, George E. Day, who thought Mr. McCain might not survive a day. “He was horribly injured,” Mr. Day recounted in 2005. “He had a fractured right arm, his left arm was out of the socket, his right knee was fractured, and they’d bayoneted his left leg. The Vietnamese were trying to get him to make some antiwar statements, and he’d refused.”

Mr. McCain resisted his captors’ threats and bribes, including an offer of early release, sometimes with grim wit; once, when they demanded the names of members of his squadron, he listed the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line. After days of torture, Mr. McCain finally signed a confession to being a “black criminal” and “air pirate,” deliberately lacing his statement with grammatical errors and communist jargon to show it was coerced. His cellmate for the last two years, Jack Fellowes, explained that such minimal accommodations were necessary for survival. “John McCain bent a little — we all bent a little — but he never broke,” he said.

The experience led to Mr. McCain’s fight for passage, in late 2005, of what was called the McCain Amendment, banning the inhumane treatment of prisoners. It was his response to the revelation that the C.I.A., with the approval of President George W. Bush, had used on Al Qaeda prisoners a range of brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding, that the United States had long considered torture.

“He saw the blood lust that those who tortured him displayed,” Robert Timberg, a Naval Academy graduate, Vietnam veteran and McCain biographer, said at the time. “The idea that a torturer could have an American face is difficult for him to handle.”

— Scott Shane

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT