{"id":4284,"date":"2018-08-25T23:05:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-26T06:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=4284"},"modified":"2018-08-25T23:05:35","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T06:05:35","slug":"john-mccain-war-hero-senator-presidential-contender-dies-at-81-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=4284","title":{"rendered":"“John McCain, War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender, Dies at 81”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Robert D. McFadden, Obituaries, Aug. 25, 2018<\/p>\n

John S. McCain, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.<\/p>\n

According to a statement from his office, Mr. McCain died at 4:28 p.m. local time. He had suffered from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017.<\/p>\n

Despite his grave condition, he soon made a dramatic appearance in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party\u2019s drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But while he was unable to be in the Senate for a vote on the Republican tax bill in December, his endorsement was crucial, though not decisive, in the Trump administration\u2019s lone legislative triumph of the year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr. McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century. It was an odyssey driven by raw ambition, the conservative instincts of a shrewd military man, a rebelliousness evident since childhood and a temper that sometimes bordered on explosiveness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Nowhere were those traits more manifest than in Vietnam, where he was stripped of all but his character. He boiled over in foul curses at his captors. Because his father was the commander of all American forces in the Pacific during most of his five and a half years of captivity, Mr. McCain, a Navy lieutenant commander, became the most famous prisoner of the war, a victim of horrendous torture and a tool of enemy propagandists.<\/p>\n

Shot down over Hanoi, suffering broken arms and a shattered leg, he was subjected to solitary confinement for two years and beaten frequently. Often he was suspended by ropes lashing his arms behind him. He attempted suicide twice. His weight fell to 105 pounds. He rejected early release to keep his honor and to avoid an enemy propaganda coup or risk demoralizing his fellow prisoners.<\/p>\n

He finally cracked under torture and signed a \u201cconfession.\u201d No one believed it, although he felt the burden of betraying his country. To millions of Americans, Mr. McCain was the embodiment of courage: a war hero who came home on crutches, psychologically scarred and broken in body, but not in spirit. He underwent long medical treatments and rehabilitation, but was left permanently disabled, unable to raise his arms over his head. Someone had to comb his hair.<\/p>\n

His mother, Roberta McCain, Navy all the way, inspired his political career. After retiring from the Navy and settling in Arizona, he won two terms in the House of Representatives, from 1983 to 1987, and six in the Senate. He was a Reagan Republican to start with, but later moved right or left, a maverick who defied his party\u2019s leaders and compromised with Democrats.<\/p>\n

He lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, who won the White House.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2008, against the backdrop of a growing financial crisis, Mr. McCain made the most daring move of his political career, seeking the presidency against the first major-party African-American nominee, Barack Obama. With national name recognition, a record for campaign finance reform and a reputation for candor \u2014 his campaign bus was called the Straight Talk Express \u2014 Mr. McCain won a series of primary elections and captured the Republican nomination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin<\/a> of Alaska as his running mate, although meant to be seen as a bold, unconventional move in keeping with his maverick\u2019s reputation, proved a severe handicap. She was the second female major-party nominee for vice president (and the first Republican), but voters worried about her qualifications to serve as president, and about Mr. McCain\u2019s age \u2014 he would be 72, the oldest person ever to take the White House. In a 2018 memoir, \u201cThe Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations,\u201d<\/a> he defended Ms. Palin\u2019s campaign performance, but expressed regret that he had not instead chosen Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent.<\/p>\n

At some McCain rallies, vitriolic crowds disparaged black people and Muslims, and when a woman said she did not trust Mr. Obama because \u201che\u2019s an Arab,\u201d Mr. McCain, in one of the most lauded moments of his campaign, replied: \u201cNo, ma\u2019am. He\u2019s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysts later said that Mr. Obama had engineered a nearly perfect campaign. And Mr. McCain confronted a hostile political environment for Republicans, who were dragged down by President George W. Bush\u2019s dismal approval ratings amid the economic crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq.<\/p>\n

On Election Day, Mr. McCain lost most of the battleground states and some that were traditionally Republican. Mr. Obama won <\/a>with 53 percent of the popular vote to Mr. McCain\u2019s 46 percent, and 365 Electoral College votes to Mr. McCain\u2019s 173.<\/p>\n

\u201cFew of us have been tested the way John once was, or required to show the kind of courage that he did,\u201d Mr. Obama said Saturday. \u201cBut all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At John\u2019s best, he showed us what that means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning to his Senate duties, the resilient Mr. McCain moved to the right politically to fend off a Tea Party challenge to his 2010 re-election. He voted against the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama\u2019s signature health care plan, which became law in 2010. He endorsed Mitt Romney\u2019s losing Republican bid for the presidency in 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But while he was a persistent and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, Mr. McCain had by 2013 become a pivotal figure in the Senate, meeting with Mr. Obama and occasionally fashioning deals with him. He joined a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Mr. McCain is with the president \u2014 on immigration and in brokering the recent deal to secure Senate approval of stalled Obama nominees \u2014 they can usually trump the political right,\u201d The New York Times said in a 2013 news analysis. \u201cWhen he is against him \u2014 sabotaging Mr. Obama\u2019s plan last year to nominate Susan E. Rice as secretary of state \u2014 the White House rarely prevails.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Congress reconvened in January 2015 with Republicans in control of the Senate, Mr. McCain achieved his longtime goal to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with the power to advance his national security and fiscal objectives under a $600 billion military policy bill. He considered the post second only to occupying the White House as commander in chief.<\/p>\n

With the rise of Donald J. Trump, the Republican flame thrower who steered American politics sharply to the right after his election in 2016 as the nation\u2019s 45th president, Mr. McCain was one of the few powerful Republican voices in Congress to push back against Mr. Trump\u2019s often harsh, provocative statements and Twitter posts and his tide of changes.<\/p>\n

In his end-of-life memoir, Mr. McCain scorned Mr. Trump\u2019s seeming admiration for autocrats and disdain for refugees. \u201cHe seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,\u201d he wrote of the president. \u201cThe appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Long before Mr. Trump was criticized as setting new lows for public discourse, Mr. McCain himself had used coarse language and blunt insults, although they were far less assertive, and he often used them in jest. He called Secretary of State John Kerry, a Democrat, \u201ca human wrecking ball,\u201d and the right-wing Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky \u201cwacko birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Personal animus between Mr. McCain and Mr. Trump arose in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. After months of boasts by Trump about his wealth, celebrity and deal-making as qualifications for the White House, and his dismissive capsule characterizations of climate change as \u201ca hoax\u201d and the Iraq war as \u201ca mistake,\u201d Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, with standing as the previous two Republican presidential nominees, denounced Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency.<\/p>\n

Saying Mr. Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment for the White House, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney called him ignorant on foreign policy and said he had made \u201cdangerous\u201d statements on national security. They warned that his election might imperil the United States and its democratic systems.<\/p>\n

In a venomous response, Mr. Trump denigrated Mr. Romney as a \u201cfailed candidate\u201d and \u201ca loser\u201d beaten by Mr. Obama. He had little to say about Mr. McCain. But months earlier, Mr. Trump, who had never served in the military (or held public office) had derided Mr. McCain as a bogus war hero<\/a> and made light of his years of captivity and torture.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a war hero because he was captured,\u201d Mr. Trump said. \u201cI like people who weren\u2019t captured.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr. McCain held his fire. But the nation was shocked. An avalanche of denunciations tumbled from editorial boards and political leaders, but the outrage faded into the tapestry of Mr. Trump\u2019s provocations against Mexicans, Muslims, women and black and Hispanic people. Trump supporters, who were mostly white, said his biases showed a refreshing willingness to disregard political correctness.<\/p>\n

On Saturday night, Mr. Trump expressed his sympathies and respect for Mr. McCain\u2019s family, but refrained from commenting on the senator himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A No-Show in Cleveland<\/h2>\n

As the Trump juggernaut rolled on, Mr. McCain, campaigning for re-election to his sixth six-year term, did not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but said he would support his party\u2019s nominee. (Mr. McCain withdrew that support months later after a recording surfaced exposing lewd comments about women by Mr. Trump, who bragged that his celebrity allowed him to grope them.)<\/p>\n

Days after the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton as the first major-party female candidate for the presidency, Mr. McCain rebuked Mr. Trump for his comments about the family of a Muslim Army captain killed by a suicide bomber as he tried to save fellow American troops in Iraq in 2004. Given the podium at the Democratic convention, Khizr Khan, the father of the captain, Humayun Khan, had denounced Mr. Trump<\/a> for suggesting that Muslims harbored terrorist sympathies.<\/p>\n

With his wife, Ghazala, at his side, the father held up a pocket-size copy of the Constitution and asked if Mr. Trump had read it.<\/p>\n

In response, Mr. Trump belittled the parents, saying the soldier\u2019s father had delivered the speech because his wife had not been \u201callowed\u201d to speak. His implication, that Mrs. Khan had not spoken because of female subservience in some strains of Islam, drew widespread condemnation, led on Capitol Hill by Senator McCain.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,\u201d Mr. McCain said. \u201cI challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after Mr. McCain\u2019s statement, other Republican senators offered their own condemnations. In ensuing days, as outrage over the Trump remarks spread, Mr. Trump told his Twitter followers that Mr. Khan had \u201cno right\u201d to \u201cviciously\u201d attack him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Seemingly impervious to criticism of any kind, Mr. Trump, who had easily won nomination, turned his guns on Mrs. Clinton. After a bruising campaign laden with Trump falsehoods and scurrilous innuendo, he defeated her in the general election, losing the popular vote by nearly three million but winning in the Electoral College.<\/p>\n

After the election, Mr. McCain, determined to let the new administration take shape, said he would temporarily not discuss Mr. Trump publicly.<\/p>\n

But weeks after President Trump moved into the White House and began blindsiding the public and sometimes the government with executive orders and mixed messages on immigration, foreign policy and other issues, Mr. McCain, himself newly re-elected, let loose.<\/p>\n

At a security conference in Munich, he delivered a forceful critique<\/a> of Mr. Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d program before a receptive audience of allied officials and foreign policy experts dismayed at the administration\u2019s drift from seven decades of Western alliances.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake, my friends, these are dangerous times,\u201d Mr. McCain said. \u201cBut you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Mr. Trump\u2019s claim that his White House was operating like a \u201cfine-tuned machine,\u201d Mr. McCain said, \u201cIn many respects, this administration is in disarray.\u201d<\/p>\n

Appearing on the NBC News program \u201cMeet the Press\u201d a day later, Mr. McCain punctured Mr. Trump\u2019s contention that the news media was \u201cthe enemy of the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,\u201d Mr. McCain, a strong defender of the First Amendment, told his national television audience. While not expressly calling the president a dictator, he said, \u201cWe need to learn the lessons of history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[<\/em>John McCain to lie in state at capitols in Washington and Arizona.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

For a senator who had long backed free trade, NATO and assertive foreign policies, and who had harbored suspicions about Russian intentions, Mr. McCain\u2019s differences with Mr. Trump ran deep. He denounced Russia for \u201cinterfering\u201d in the presidential election and called for a select Senate committee to investigate the Kremlin\u2019s cyberactivities.<\/p>\n

His disapproval of Mr. Trump perhaps peaked in July, after the president and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met privately in Helsinki, Finland, and then participated in an extraordinary joint news conference there. Responding to Mr. Trump\u2019s performance, in which the president spoke favorably of his Russian counterpart and questioned American intelligence findings that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. McCain declared, \u201cNo prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weeks later, in signing a $716 billion military spending bill named in Mr. McCain\u2019s honor, Mr. Trump did not mention the senator <\/a>by name in what was widely interpreted as a deliberate snub.<\/p>\n

Although Mr. McCain was sharply critical of Mr. Trump, especially when he thought the new president had threatened to overstep domestic or national interests, he remained broadly supportive of the administration\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

After an acrimonious yearlong fight over replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain joined the Senate\u2019s 54-to-45 majority to confirm Mr. Trump\u2019s selection of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice. Justice Gorsuch\u2019s installation tipped the court\u2019s balance in favor of a conservative majority that seemed destined to last for years.<\/p>\n

Mr. McCain voted for all but two of Mr. Trump\u2019s 15 cabinet selections and eight other administration posts requiring Senate confirmation. But he also chastised Mr. Trump for comments equating Russian and American interests. \u201cThat moral equivalency is a contradiction of everything the United States has ever stood for in the 20th and 21st centuries,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing taking testimony from James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump, Mr. McCain posed confusing questions, seeming to conflate the 2016 investigation of Mrs. Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server as secretary of state with the 2017 investigation of Russian interference in the American election. He later issued a clarification.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the president rise to the level of obstruction of justice,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the case of Secretary Clinton\u2019s emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what \u2018no reasonable prosecutor\u2019 would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump \u2014 whether or not the president\u2019s conduct constitutes obstruction of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since he had opposed the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama\u2019s signature health care law, Mr. McCain became a critical vote on the Republican bill to repeal and replace it. Written in secret, the Republicans\u2019 bill was opposed by health care and patient advocacy groups. Mr. McCain, fearing his constituents might be harmed, was noncommittal. After struggling to write a passable bill and with no votes to spare, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, put off a showdown when Mr. McCain was sidelined by surgery for a cranial blood clot over his left eye in July.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Senator McCain\u2019s office disclosed that, behind the clot, his doctors had found a glioblastoma, an aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Medical experts said that such cancers may be treated with radiation and chemotherapy but almost always grow back, and that the median length of survival with a glioblastoma is about 16 months.<\/p>\n

Days after surgery for the brain cancer, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate and provided a crucial vote for the Republicans to open debate on their efforts to repeal the health law. But when a last-ditch repeal vote was taken later, Mr. McCain made a stirring televised reappearance in the well of the Senate and shocked his colleagues and the nation by turning his thumb down, casting the decisive vote against it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The seven-year Republican drive to derail the Affordable Care Act had collapsed. Some pundits called the McCain vote cold revenge for Mr. Trump\u2019s mockery of his ordeal as a prisoner of war. But the senator told colleagues that he felt compelled only to \u201cdo the right thing.\u201d And in a later statement, he gave a fuller explanation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[<\/em>Read John McCain: The last lion in the Senate.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe vote last night presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh,\u201d he said. \u201cI encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to trust each other, stop the political gamesmanship and put the health care needs of the American people first. We can do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In December, Mr. McCain had been expected to be a pivotal vote in the Republican drive to rewrite the nation\u2019s tax code and cut taxes for individuals and businesses by adding up to $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit. Critics of the measure had identified him as a potential holdout against his party\u2019s legislation. Days before the vote, however, Mr. McCain returned home to Arizona for medical treatment, and he did not cast a ballot in the Senate proceedings. But he endorsed the bill, and his support was important, though not decisive, in the Senate\u2019s 51-48 adoption of the tax package.<\/p>\n

To the Navy Born<\/h2>\n

John Sidney McCain III was born on Aug. 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, one of many posts where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., served in a long, distinguished Navy career. He was the middle sibling of three children. His mother, born Roberta Wright, was a California oil heiress. His parents eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, to marry in 1933.<\/p>\n

With his older sister, Jean Alexandra (who was known as Sandy), and brother, Joseph Pinckney McCain II, John grew up with frequent moves, an often-absent father, a rock-solid mother and family lore that traced ancestral lineages to combatants in every American war and to Scottish clans. There were also highly dubious family claims of having descended from Robert the Bruce, the 14th-century king of the Scots.<\/p>\n

The patriarch of the 20th-century military family was John\u2019s grandfather, Adm. John Sidney McCain Sr. A pioneer of aircraft carriers, he led many naval and air operations in the Western Pacific in World War II, covering Gen. Douglas MacArthur\u2019s invasion of the Philippines and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy in the war\u2019s final stages. He was in the front row of officers aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the documents of surrender in 1945.<\/p>\n

John\u2019s father was a decorated submarine commander in World War II. In Washington, the elder Mr. McCain was influential in political affairs as the postwar Navy\u2019s chief information officer and liaison with Congress. Senators, representatives and military brass were often guests at his home. Raised to full admiral, he was the commander of American naval forces in Europe and, from 1968 to 1972, of all American forces in the Pacific, including those in the Vietnam War theater.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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(Two Navy destroyers were named McCain, for the senator\u2019s father and grandfather, the first father-and-son full admirals in American naval history.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whipsawed by family relocations, young John attended some 20 schools before finally settling into Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school in Alexandria, Va., in the fall of 1951 for his last three years of secondary education. The school, with an all-male faculty and enrollments drawn mostly from upper-crust families of the Old South, required jackets and ties for classes.<\/p>\n

But the scion of one of the Navy\u2019s most illustrious families was defiant and unruly. He mocked the dress code by wearing dirty bluejeans. His shoes were held together with tape, and his coat looked like a reject from the Salvation Army. He was cocky and combative, easily provoked and ready to fight anyone. Classmates called him McNasty. Most gave him a wide berth.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe cultivated the image,\u201d Robert Timberg wrote in a biography, \u201cJohn McCain: An American Odyssey\u201d (1995). \u201cThe Episcopal yearbook pictures him in a trench coat, collar up, cigarette dangling Bogey-style from his lips. That pose, if hardly the impression Episcopal sought to project, at least had a fashionable world-weary style to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

John and a few friends often sneaked off campus at night to patronize bars and burlesque houses in Washington. He joined the wrestling team \u2014 a 127-pound dynamo, he once pinned an opponent in 37 seconds, a school record \u2014 and the junior varsity football team, as a linebacker and offensive guard. His grades were abysmal, except in literature and history, his favorite subjects.<\/a> He graduated in 1954.<\/p>\n

That summer, he followed his father and grandfather into the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He resisted the discipline. His grades were poor. He stood up to upperclassmen, broke rules and piled up demerits, though never enough to warrant expulsion. But he became a ferocious boxer, a magnet for attractive young women and one of the most popular midshipmen in his class.<\/p>\n

In the Cockpit<\/h2>\n

Mr. McCain possessed the rugged independence of a natural leader. It came out at parties and in carousing with friends. Caught by the Shore Patrol at an off-limits bar, he led a carload of drinking buddies in a daring escape. \u201cBeing on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck,\u201d one recalled. In 1958, he graduated 894th in his class, fifth from the bottom.<\/p>\n

Accepted for flight training, the newly commissioned Ensign McCain learned to fly attack jets at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. He also had flings with a succession of young women, from schoolteachers to strippers, and once with a tobacco heiress, \u201coften returning to base just in time to change clothes and drag himself out to the flight line,\u201d Mr. Timberg said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He liked flying, but his performance was subpar, sometimes careless or even reckless. In the 1960s he crashed in Corpus Christi Bay in Texas and Tidewater, Va., but escaped with minor injuries \u2014 and his flying skills improved over time. Early assignments were aboard aircraft carriers: the Intrepid in the Caribbean during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the Enterprise in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

In 1965, Mr. McCain married Carol Shepp, a model. He adopted her two children, Douglas and Andrew, and they had a daughter, Sidney. After a long separation, the couple were divorced in 1980. He then married Cindy Lou Hensley, a Phoenix teacher whose father owned a beer distributorship. They had two sons, John IV and James, and a daughter, Meghan, and adopted a girl, Bridget, from a Bangladeshi orphanage.<\/p>\n

A complete list of survivors was not immediately provided.<\/p>\n

Promoted to lieutenant commander in early 1967, Mr. McCain requested combat duty and was assigned to the carrier Forrestal, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its A-4E Skyhawk warplanes were bombing North Vietnam in the campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. He flew five missions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Then, on July 29, 1967, he had just strapped himself into his cockpit on a deck crowded with planes when a missile fired accidentally from another jet struck his 200-gallon exterior fuel tank, and it exploded in flames. He scrambled out, crawled onto the plane\u2019s nose, dived onto a deck seething with burning fuel and rolled away until he cleared the flames.<\/p>\n

As he stood up, other aircraft and bomb loads exploded on deck. He was hit in the legs and chest by burning shrapnel. At one point, the Forrestal skipper considered abandoning ship. When the fire was finally brought under control, 134 men had been killed in the worst noncombat incident in American naval history.<\/p>\n

Despite his misgivings, Mr. McCain volunteered for more missions and was transferred to the carrier Oriskany. On Oct. 26 he took off on his 23rd mission of the war, part of a 20-plane attack on a heavily defended power plant in central Hanoi. Moments after releasing his bombs on target, as he pulled out of his dive, a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile sheared off his right wing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He ejected as the plane plunged, but hit something as he exited. Both arms were broken and his right knee was shattered. He fell into a lake and, with 50 pounds of gear, sank 15 feet to the bottom, then pulled the inflating pins of his Mae West life jacket with his teeth and rose to the surface, gasping for air. Swimmers dragged him ashore, where he was set upon by a mob.<\/p>\n

Mr. McCain was stripped to his skivvies, kicked and spat upon, then bayoneted in the left ankle and groin. A North Vietnamese soldier struck him with his rifle butt, breaking a shoulder. A woman tried to give him a cup of tea as a photographer snapped pictures. Carried to a truck, Mr. McCain was driven to Hoa Lo, the prison compound its American inmates had labeled the Hanoi Hilton.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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There he was denied medical care. His knee swelled to the size and color of a football. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. When he awoke in a cell infested with roaches and rats, he was interrogated and beaten. The beatings continued for days. He gave his name, rank and serial number and defied his tormentors with curses.<\/p>\n

After two weeks, a doctor, without anesthesia, tried to set his right arm, broken in three places, but gave up in frustration and encased it in a plaster cast. He was moved to another site and tended by two American prisoners of war, who brought him back from near death.<\/p>\n

Commander McCain\u2019s prisoner-of-war status was widely reported around the world. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given a modicum of medical treatment. Other prisoners said he spoke, incongruously, of someday being president of the United States.<\/p>\n

Once he was visited by a group of North Vietnamese dignitaries. A prisoner, Jack Van Loan, said Mr. McCain shrieked at them. \u201cHere\u2019s a guy that\u2019s all crippled up, all busted up, and he doesn\u2019t know if he\u2019s going to live to the next day, and he literally blew them out of there with a verbal assault,\u201d Mr. Van Loan told Mr. Timberg. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine the example John set for the rest of the camp by doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Two Years in Solitary<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In March 1968, Mr. McCain was put in solitary confinement, fed only watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. It lasted two years. When Admiral McCain became the Pacific Theater commander in July, his son was offered early repatriation repeatedly. Commander McCain refused, following a military code that prisoners were to be released in the order taken. He was beaten frequently and tortured with ropes.<\/p>\n

Years after his confession to \u201cwar crimes\u201d and \u201cair piracy,\u201d Mr. McCain wrote: \u201cI had learned what we all learned over there: that every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

His ordeal finally ended on March 14, 1973, two months after the Paris Peace Accords had ended American involvement in the war. The place he had lived longest in his nomadic life was Hanoi. At 36, his hair had gone white. He went home a celebrity, cheered in parades, showered with medals, embraced by President Richard M. Nixon and Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.<\/p>\n

For a Navy man who had always tried to live up to his father\u2019s accomplishments, the Silver and Bronze Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross and other decorations he received were not enough. But a psychiatrist\u2019s report seemed to capture his happiest moment. \u201cFelt fulfillment,\u201d it said, \u201cwhen his dad was introduced at a dinner as \u2018Commander McCain\u2019s father.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

After months of rehabilitation and recovery, he returned to duty and became the Navy\u2019s Senate liaison, as his father had once been. But he knew that his Navy future would be limited by his physical disabilities, and that he would never be an admiral like his forebears. With his mother\u2019s encouragement, he was already thinking about a political career when he retired as a captain in 1981.<\/p>\n

Setting his sights on a congressional seat, he settled in Phoenix and became a public relations executive for his father-in-law\u2019s beer distributorship. He developed contacts in the news media and business community, and got to know real estate developers and bankers like Charles Keating Jr.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Representative John Rhodes of Arizona retired after 30 years in Congress in 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won the seat in a Republican district. He embraced President Reagan\u2019s agenda of tax and budget cuts and a strong national defense, but voted to override Mr. Reagan\u2019s veto of sanctions against South Africa for its racist policies. He was re-elected in 1984.<\/p>\n

After Senator Barry M. Goldwater decided not to seek re-election as Arizona\u2019s conservative stalwart in 1986, Mr. McCain crushed Richard Kimball, a former Democratic state legislator, for the seat. He won appointments to the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee, and soon gained national attention.<\/p>\n

A longtime gambler with ties to the gaming industry, Mr. McCain helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, codifying regulations for Native American gambling enterprises. He backed legislation, sponsored by Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, for automatic spending cuts in deficit budgets. He was shortlisted as a vice-presidential running mate by the 1988 Republican nominee, George Bush, who won the White House (with Senator Dan Quayle on the ticket).<\/p>\n

But Mr. McCain\u2019s rising political career was almost upended by scandal. He was one of five senators who took favors from Charles Keating to intercede with federal regulators on behalf of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed with catastrophic losses. The scandal cost the government and investors billions, and Mr. Keating went to prison for fraud; the so-called Keating Five, cleared of wrongdoing by Senate investigators, were only rebuked for ethical lapses.<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, Mr. McCain reinvented himself as a scourge of special interests, crusading for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.<\/p>\n

The Persian Gulf War in 1991 also helped restore Mr. McCain\u2019s tarnished image. As a television commentator, he showcased his military savvy and impressed Americans as an authoritative voice on foreign policy. While Mr. Bush lost the White House to Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. McCain easily won re-election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After years of voting along party lines, Mr. McCain, in the 1990s, emphasized his independence. With the presidency in his distant sights, he challenged Republican leaders and Democrats and was harder to peg politically. He became a self-appointed Republican spokesman on national security \u2014 challenging the Clinton administration\u2019s intervention in Somalia, counseling against deploying American troops to the Balkans and sounding an early warning on North Korea\u2019s nuclear ambitions.<\/p>\n

Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, a Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran, were chairmen of the Select Committee on P.O.W.\/M.I.A. Affairs, which found \u201cno compelling evidence\u201d that Americans were still alive in captivity in Southeast Asia. Veterans groups and families of long-missing troops rejected the report. He also pressed for full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which were achieved in 1995.<\/p>\n

In the 1996 election, Mr. McCain appeared to be a favorite for the Republican vice-presidential slot, but former Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, chose Jack Kemp, the former congressman and National Football League star. They would lose to Mr. Clinton and Al Gore.<\/p>\n

Mr. McCain won re-election to a third term by a landslide in 1998, and a year later he published a memoir, \u201cFaith of My Fathers,\u201d which became a best seller in time for the 2000 election campaign and was later made into a television movie, starring Shawn Hatosy as Mr. McCain.<\/p>\n

Smears and Defeat<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Seeking the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain pledged \u201ca fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests.\u201d Gov. George W. Bush of Texas was favored, but Mr. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, 49 to 30 percent. South Carolina\u2019s primary then loomed as crucial.<\/p>\n

It was one of the era\u2019s dirtiest campaigns. Anonymous smears falsely claimed that Mr. McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict and that he was a homosexual, a traitor and mentally unstable. McCain ads portrayed Mr. Bush as a liar and called his religious supporters, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the televangelist Pat Robertson, \u201cagents of intolerance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr. McCain later said he regretted calling a Confederate flag on the State Capitol in Columbia a \u201csymbol of heritage.\u201d Civil rights groups had denounced it as a symbol of slavery and oppression of African-Americans. \u201cI feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,\u201d Mr. McCain admitted.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bush won the primary and the nomination, and narrowly defeated the Democrat, Vice President Gore, in the general election.<\/p>\n

[<\/em>Reflections of John McCain\u2019s decades in public life by reporters and editors at The Times.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

Always wary of an adventurousness that might blind Mr. McCain to potential embarrassments, his advisers grew anxious during the 2000 campaign when a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, began turning up with him at fund-raisers and at his office. It came to nothing. But a long report in The Times<\/a> in 2008 said that aides, fearing a romantic involvement, had cautioned Mr. McCain and warned Ms. Iseman off.<\/p>\n

The article raised a flap of angry denials, and Ms. Iseman sued the newspaper for libel. The Times did not retract its article but published a note to readers<\/a> saying it had not intended to suggest a romantic affair, and the suit was dropped<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. McCain supported the Bush administration\u2019s war on terrorism; its invasion of Afghanistan to suppress a fanatic Taliban regime and hunt for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks; and later the invasion of Iraq to depose President Saddam Hussein, the tyrant who was wrongly believed to have weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

Rewarded for years of pushing campaign-finance reforms, Mr. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, finally saw passage in 2002 of the McCain-Feingold Act. It banned a key source of financing for both parties, so-called soft money donated in unlimited amounts to build party strengths, and it limited donations for national candidates to \u201chard money,\u201d subject to annual limits and other rules. The law\u2019s effects became tangled in lawsuits, court rulings and financing schemes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As a torture victim, Mr. McCain was sensitive to the detention and interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism. In 2005 the Senate passed his bill to bar inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, by limiting military practices to those permitted by the United States Army Field Manual on Interrogation. His 2008 bill to ban waterboarding as torture was adopted, but vetoed by President Bush.<\/p>\n

Mr. McCain wrote six books with his aide, Mark Salter, all with themes of courage. Besides his 2018 memoir, they were \u201cWorth the Fighting For\u201d (2002), \u201cWhy Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life\u201d (2004), \u201cCharacter Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember\u201d (2005), \u201cHard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them\u201d (2007) and \u201cThirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War\u201d (2014).<\/p>\n

In 1993, Mr. McCain gave the commencement address at Annapolis: the sorcerer\u2019s apprentice, class of 1954, home to inspire the midshipmen. He spoke of Navy aviators hurled from the decks of pitching aircraft carriers, of Navy gunners blazing into the silhouettes of onrushing kamikazes, of trapped Marines battling overwhelming Chinese hordes in a breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have spent time in the company of heroes,\u201d he said. \u201cI have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling cruelty until further resistance is impossible, break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Robert D. McFadden, Obituaries, Aug. 25, 2018 John S. McCain, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4285,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284\/revisions\/4285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}