From PEOPLE Magazine
Click to enlarge
"What part of the military needs reforming?" comes a voice from the street. It becomes apparent that another audience has gathered, uninvited, outside the gates.
"A lot of it," shoots back McCain, observing that the families of 11,000 enlisted men are on food stamps, while he has found "$4.5 billion of pork" in a defense bill.
"Are you supporting Bradley's plan to reform campaign financing?"
"Bill Bradley is supporting my plan," says McCain with a laugh.
"What about education?"
"I'm going to create choice and competition," he says. "But come in and join us. That's it, open the gates."
McCain, 63, is in his element. Not combat, exactly, but friendly fire. People are turning out to hear him in mounting numbers as he makes the rounds in New Hampshire, because, as Paul Chevalier, past commander of the state's VFW will tell you, "he never shirks a question."
The Wall Street Journal has called McCain "refreshing," and in a moment of enthusiasm Mike Wallace said he would consider leaving 60 Minutes to be McCain's press secretary. "There's something authentic about this man," he explained.
McCain is seen as a hero in a time when such people don't exactly festoon the trees. Perhaps because of this, he can get away with being his often impolitic self. He can call Leonardo DiCaprio "an androgynous wimp" (while objecting to the actor's smoking cigarettes throughout Titanic). And he can crack tasteless jokes (suggesting, for example, a biological link between Janet Reno and Chelsea Clinton), because, well, he paid for the privilege. Because he spent 5½ years in a North Vietnamese POW camp where he was brutally beaten. Because when he was offered early release, he refused it—saying there were others who had been there longer than he had—and was beaten some more.
McCain is clearly ambivalent about the hero stuff. "May I remind you," he tells people in Ossipee, N.H., "that it doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down? I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane." Yet even as he says this, a placard bearing his likeness as a young, hunky Navy pilot beams down on the crowd.
"It's one of those things that he can't get away from—like having freckles," says ex-POW pal Bud Day, 74, now a Florida attorney. "John has a past, a very heroic one. It's always going to be there."
McCain grew up with a family history, he writes in Faith of My Fathers, his engaging new memoir, that "often intimidated me." His grandfather Adm. John Sidney McCain fought the Japanese at Guadalcanal; his father, Jack, would become an admiral in charge of U.S. forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War (and would order the bombing of Hanoi while John was in captivity there). The second of three children—McCain's mother, Roberta, 87, is the daughter of a successful oilman—young Johnny was a handful. "I was a wild kid," he says. "Maybe it was all the moving around, the insecurity of changing schools. I was always small and always getting into fights."
McCain also always knew he was headed for the Naval Academy, but he hated the place when he arrived there in 1954, bristling at what he considered Mickey Mouse rules. He headed an unruly group of midshipmen called the Bad Bunch, leading them in carousing and partying, pushing the demerit envelope.
"We called him John "Wayne McCain," says Ron Fisher, 64, an Annapolis classmate. "There has never been anything artificial about John. I had a girlfriend and we broke up, and John fixed her up with someone else; he snuck down after taps [lights out] and apologized. John is the most decent, loyal guy I know. He was a hero back then."
And he was aching to prove it. "I had Hemingway's characters as models," says McCain. "Robert Jordan [in For Whom the Bell Tolls] was ready to go out and die for a cause in a foreign country. It was my heritage too." In 1958 he became a naval aviator. And in 1965 he married Carol Shepp, an ex-model from Philadelphia and divorced mother of two: Doug, now 39, and Andy, 37, whom McCain adopted. (The couple also have a daughter, Sidney, 33.)
McCain was gone on the romance of flying—and seemed to have lives to spare. While he was training in Corpus Christi, Texas, his engine quit and the plane plunged into the bay. McCain regained consciousness underwater. A few years later he had a flameout and ejected just before he hit the trees. Then, in July 1967, he was in his A-4E Skyhawk on the carrier Forrestal when, in a freak accident, a deckful of aircraft blew up, killing 134 men. Says McCain, who rolled through the flames to safety: "I'm the luckiest guy you'll ever meet."
His luck appeared to run out that Oct. 26 while he was bombing a power plant in Hanoi and a missile took off his right wing. McCain ejected, breaking both arms and a knee on the way out and landing in a lake. Soldiers pulled him to shore, where he was pummeled by an angry mob and bayoneted in the groin. The North Vietnamese soon realized that he was the son of Adm. Jack McCain and gloated at having caught the crown prince.
"I was astonished to see him," says Bud Day, recalling the December day McCain was dumped in his cell at the prison nicknamed the Plantation. "He weighed about 80 to 100 pounds. His eyes were burning with fever. His hair had turned white. I was amazed to discover he was a young man."
In Faith of My Fathers, McCain writes of living in solitary for two years, of refusing to give information to the enemy and being subjected to abuse that left him unable to raise his arms above shoulder level. (Today, an aide combs his hair for him before each campaign stop.) He also writes of the men in adjoining cells with whom he communicated by a tap code. I "Someone would go for interrogation," says McCain. "We'd tap on the wall: 'What happened? Did you resist?' It was important to me to have the approval of these men. They were my inspiration."
Thus he was devastated to discover, a year into his captivity, that he was merely human. After four days of steady torture, he broke. He signed a "confession" stating, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate...." It is a foolish document, but to this day McCain is shamed by it.
"I wish I'd done better," he says. "I just believe my ability was in excess of what I displayed." He is quiet for a moment. "I think, unintentionally, it taught me that we are all beset by human frailty."
McCain is not big on being called a hero, because he knows where he has come up short. He not only could have done better in Vietnam, but at home too, where he returned in 1973. He came back to a wife who had been crippled in a car accident—and he began chasing other women. He refuses to blame Vietnam for his behavior. "My wife was faithful and true," he says. "She didn't deserve my treatment of her."
McCain was divorced in 1980 and that year married Cindy Hensley, now 45, the daughter of a Phoenix beer distributor. He retired from the Navy and moved with Cindy to Arizona. Having worked for four years as a Navy Senate liaison, he decided to run for Congress himself. In typical full-bore style, he went door to door, introducing himself to voters morning till night from January to September. He had no sooner gotten into the House than he began positioning himself to succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate, which he did in 1986.
John and Cindy decided to raise their brood (Meghan, 14; Jack, 13; Jimmy, 11; and Bridget, 8) in Phoenix rather than Washington. McCain concedes it would be a "tough adjustment" for Cindy were he to become President. "I know she wants badly for me to win," he says with a smile. "But I don't think she will go into mourning if I don't."
Nor, one suspects, will McCain.
As fellow war hero John Kerry, his friend and Democratic rival in the Senate, observes, there is a sense in which McCain has been "liberated" by Vietnam, so that nothing is going to deter him from being who he is. This is both his signal virtue and potential bane. He is going to inveigh against smoking and pork-barrel spending. He is going to march into Iowa and oppose subsidies for ethanol (the corn-based fuel that is a hot tamale in the Corn Belt) and push for campaign finance reform, even if it costs him the support of major Republican moneybags. "This is going to be the most pragmatic race Republicans have run in a long time," says conservative columnist Cal Thomas. "They need to build a coalition. They need a more conciliatory person than McCain."
Columnist Michael Lewis of The New York Times thinks that "some little part of McCain likes losing," that "he would rather fight the good fight and lose than fight the bad one and win." Indeed, McCain tells the crowd at the North Conway (N.H.) Legion hall, "I'm not afraid of losing. If I lose, I have had a happy life. I get to be a U.S. senator. My children get to grow up in Arizona."
McCain uses a nautical term to describe his approach to the Republican primaries, which, in the minds of many, have already been won by George W. Bush. At sea, when ships come together to refuel, sailors are careful not to pull the lines so tight the ships would crash or leave them so loose they would stray. "You try to keep a steady strain," says McCain.
"I remember in Vietnam we'd hear peace talks were going on in Paris. Then we'd hear they broke off. You had to believe you were going home. But you would try not to get too depressed or too optimistic. You had to maintain tight control of your emotion, but always believe. Keep a steady strain."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
