McCain,
who has died at the age of 81, was a naval bomber pilot, prisoner of
war, conservative maverick, giant of the Senate, twice-defeated
presidential candidate and an abrasive American hero with a twinkle in
his eye.
The Arizonan
warrior politician, who survived plane crashes, several bouts of skin
cancer and brushes with political oblivion, often seemed to be
perpetually waging a race against time and his own mortality while
striving to ensure that his five-and-a-half years as a Vietnam prisoner
of war did not stand as the defining experience of his life.
He
spent his last few months out of the public eye in his adopted home
state of Arizona, reflecting on the meaning of his life and accepting
visits from a stream of friends and old political combatants.
In a memoir published in May, McCain wrote that he hated to leave the world, but had no complaints.
"It's
been quite a ride. I've known great passions, seen amazing wonders,
fought in a war, and helped make peace," McCain wrote. "I've lived very
well and I've been deprived of all comforts. I've been as lonely as a
person can be and I've enjoyed the company of heroes. I've suffered the
deepest despair and experienced the highest exultation.
"I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times."
McCain
had not been in Washington since December, leaving a vacuum in the
corridors of the Senate and the television news studios he roamed for
decades.
In recent months, he was
not completely quiet, however, blasting President Donald Trump in a
series of tweets and statements that showed that while he was ailing he
had lost none of his appetite for the political fight.
The
Arizona Senator repeatedly made clear that he saw Trump and his America
First ideology as a departure from the values and traditions of global
leadership that he saw epitomized in the United States.
McCain
had been planning his funeral services over the last year and his
family made clear that Trump is not invited, a position that has not
changed, two family friends said Saturday. Former rivals and Presidents
Barack Obama and George W. Bush were asked to give eulogies, people
close to both former presidents and a source close to the senator told
CNN earlier this year.
McCain's two
losing presidential campaigns meant he fell short of the ultimate
political prize, one his story once seemed to promise after he came home
from Vietnam and caught the political bug. In the end, he became a
scourge of presidents rather than President himself.
At
the time of his death, he was largely an anomaly in his own party -- as
one of the few Republicans willing to criticize Trump and a believer in
the idealized "shining city on a hill" brand of conservatism
exemplified by his hero Ronald Reagan that has been dislodged by the
nativist and polarizing instincts of the current President. He was also a
throwback to an earlier era when political leaders, without betraying
their own ideology, were willing on occasion to cross partisan lines.
In
a Washington career that spanned 40 years, first as a Navy Senate
liaison, then as a member of the House and finally as the occupant of
the Senate seat he took over from Barry Goldwater, McCain was a
conservative and a foreign policy hawk. But he was not always a reliable
Republican vote, and sometimes in a career that stretched into a sixth
Senate term, he confounded party leaders with his maverick stands. He
defied party orthodoxy to embrace campaign finance reform, and
excoriated President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, for not taking enough troops to Iraq.
After
Obama ended McCain's second White House race in 2008, the senator
blasted the new President's troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan,
causing critics to carp that he had not yet reconciled the bitterness
he felt in defeat. McCain had supported the invasion of Iraq carried out
by the Bush administration in 2003, but admitted in his memoir "The
Restless Wave" that the rationale, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction was wrong.
"The
war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can't be judged
as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to
accept my share of the blame for it," he wrote.
More
recently, as death approached, he became a strident critic of Trump,
who had once said he didn't consider the Arizona senator a war hero
because he had been captured.
McCain questioned why Trump was solicitous of Vladimir Putin, whom he regarded as an unreformed KGB apparatchik.
In
one of his final public acts, he blasted Trump's cozy summit with the
Russian President in July, blasting it as "one of the most disgraceful
performances by an American president in memory."
"The
damage inflicted by President Trump's naiveté, egotism, false
equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But
it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake," he said
in a statement.
In July 2017,
McCain returned from brain surgery to the Senate floor to lambaste
"bombastic loudmouths" on the television, radio and internet and plead
for a return to a more civilized political age, when compromise and
regular order forged bipartisan solutions.
Then,
in September, in a poignant speech that seemed designed to echo down
the ages after he was gone, McCain reminded his colleagues they were a
check on executive power: "We are not the President's subordinates," he
said. "We are his equals."
In a
final act of defiant independence, McCain, with a dramatic thumbs-down
gesture on the Senate floor in September, cast the vote that scuttled
the GOP's effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, causing fury within
his party -- a move that prompted Trump, to the fury of McCain's family
to repeatedly single him out in campaign rallies.
When
the President signed McCain's last legislative triumph in August, the
John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act, he did not even
mention the Arizona senator.
'I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my country's'
John
Sidney McCain III, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, entered the
world on August 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, a birthplace that
years later would cause a brief campaign kerfuffle over whether he was a
natural born citizen and thus eligible to be elected president.
His
habit of insubordination despite his military pedigree emerged at the
Naval Academy, where he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.
"My
superiors didn't hold me in very high esteem in those days. Their
disapproval was measured in the hundreds of miles of extra duty I
marched in my time here," McCain told graduates at Annapolis in October
of last year.
By 1967, McCain was
in the Pacific and escaped death in a massive fire aboard the USS
Forrestal aircraft
carrier. Months later, he was shot down in his
Skyhawk jet over North Vietnam and parachuted into a lake near Hanoi,
breaking both arms and a leg, and was captured by communist soldiers. In
captivity, McCain was tortured and beaten, an experience that left him
with lifelong injuries, including severely restricted movement of his
arms. He kept himself sane by tapping on a wall to communicate with a
fellow prisoner in a neighboring cell. Later, he refused the offer of a
preferential release, made because his father was an admiral, until his
comrades could also come home, eventually returning in 1973 to a nation
politically torn by the war.
His period in captivity set the course of his life.
"I
fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's,"
McCain said in his 2008 Republican National Convention speech.
"I
loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth
fighting for. I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I
was my country's."
After turning
to politics, McCain served in the House from 1983, won an Arizona US
Senate seat in 1986 and established himself as a down-the-line
conservative in the age of Ronald Reagan. But his political career
almost fizzled before it began when he was among the Keating Five group
of senators accused of interfering with regulators in a campaign finance
case. He was cleared of wrongdoing, but the Senate Ethics Committee
reprimanded him for poor judgment, an experience that led to him
becoming a pioneer of campaign finance reform.
He didn't forget his time in Vietnam.
In
an act of reconciliation, McCain joined Democratic Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts, a fellow decorated Vietnam War veteran, to help end the
US trade embargo on its former southeast Asian enemy in a process that
led to the eventual reopening of diplomatic relations.
By
2000, McCain set his sights on the White House and ran as a maverick
Republican, holding court for hours in candid back-and-forth sessions
with reporters on his campaign bus, dubbed the "Straight Talk Express."
In years to come, he would joke that his adoring press pack was his
"base."
After skipping Iowa over
his long opposition to ethanol subsidies, McCain forged a victory over
establishment favorite and then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in New
Hampshire after a string of town hall meetings with voters.
But
his effort hit a brick wall in South Carolina, where the campaign
turned negative and McCain's independent streak hurt him in a state with
more core conservatives and fewer independents. Bush got back on track
with a primary win that set him on the road to the nomination.
The maverick of the Senate
Back
in the Senate, McCain heard the call of war again, as American foreign
policy was transformed after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, and
he became a forceful proponent of the US use of force overseas. He
backed US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Americans tired of
war, McCain warned that more troops were needed, demanding a surge in
forces that Bush later adopted.
When
it appeared that his hawkish views were at odds with the electorate and
could damage his nascent 2008 presidential bid, McCain answered: "I
would rather lose a campaign than a war."
But,
influenced by his experience of torture in Vietnam, McCain was a
forceful critic of the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA
on terror suspects, believing they were contrary to American values and
damaged the US image abroad.
It
was a typical example of the Arizona senator adopting a position that
appeared antithetical to his political interests or ran counter to the
perceived wisdom of his party.
After
the Keating Five scandal, he joined a crusade with Democratic Sen. Russ
Feingold of Wisconsin to introduce new restrictions on "soft" and
corporate money in political campaigns.
Later,
McCain teamed up with his great friend, late Massachusetts Democratic
Sen. Edward Kennedy on a bill that would provide a path to citizenship
for undocumented immigrants. The measure failed, however, over building
grassroots antipathy to such a move in the GOP, which would later play a
major role in the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
McCain
set his sights on the White House again during Bush's second term. By
2007, his campaign was all but broke. But he fired up the Straight Talk
Express again and pulled off another famous comeback, barnstorming to
victory once more in the New Hampshire primary.
This
time, he also won South Carolina, and beat a fading Mitt Romney and
Rudy Giuliani in Florida before effectively clinching the nomination
with a clutch of wins on Super Tuesday.
That
November, McCain came up against the historic appeal of a much younger
and more eloquent rival, Obama. Mocking the Illinois senator in ads as
"the biggest celebrity in the world," McCain questioned whether his
popular foe was ready to lead.
Seeking
to rebrand himself in a change election, McCain stunned the political
world by picking little-known Sarah Palin as his running mate. The
Alaska governor delivered a spellbinding convention speech, and for
several weeks it seemed as if McCain's gamble worked.
But
a series of gaffes turned Palin into a figure of ridicule and undercut
McCain's contention that his ticket, and not Obama's, was best qualified
to lead in a dangerous world. McCain, however, would not say that he
regretted picking Palin.
But in his
new memoir, "The Restless Wave," and in a separate documentary, McCain
said he wished he had ignored the advice of his advisers and listened to
his gut and chosen Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a
Democrat-turned-independent, calling it "another mistake that I made."
But
McCain also rose above the ugliness of the campaign. On one occasion,
he cut off a supporter at a town hall event who said she could not trust
Obama because she thought he was an Arab, amid conspiracy theories
suggesting that the Democrat had not been not born in America.
"No
ma'am, he's a decent family man, citizen, who I just happen to have
disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign
is all about," McCain said.
He
dealt with his defeat by throwing himself back into life in the Senate.
In later years he described how it felt to lose, telling anyone who
asked, "After I lost ... I slept like a baby — sleep two hours, wake up
and cry."
But his relationship with
Obama was tense, with the President snubbing his former foe in a health
care summit in 2010 by telling him "the election's over."
The
Arizona senator emerged as a fierce critic of Obama's worldview,
prompting Democrats to complain that McCain was the embodiment of a
Republican reflex to respond to every global problem with military
force, which had led America into misadventures like the war in Iraq.
McCain's
robust foreign policy views were reflected on the walls of his Senate
conference room, which featured letters and photos from the likes of
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders who didn't suffer critics gladly.
Still,
McCain was also a throwback, enjoying friendships with rivals across
the political aisle, and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie of the
Senate, where he invariably held court to a crowd between votes.
Sometimes
things got testy with his Democratic pals, including when he confronted
Hillary Clinton and fellow Vietnam War veteran Kerry during hearings of
the Senate Armed Services Committee whkile they served as secretaries
of state under Obama.
'He served his country ... and, I hope we could add, honorably'
The
Republicans' recapture of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections gave
McCain a chance to rewrite the final chapter of his career.
He
at last took the gavel of the Armed Services Committee, an assignment
he had long coveted. His prominent position was seen as one reason he
ran for re-election in 2016.
But he knew his time was limited.
"Every single day," McCain told The New York Times in 2015, "is a day less that I am going to be able to serve in the Senate."
Still,
despite saying he was "older than dirt," McCain made few concessions to
his age. Even after turning 80, he maintained a punishing schedule of
world travel, conferring with top leaders and heading to war zones in
trips that left his younger congressional colleagues exhausted.
He
would blitz Sunday talk shows, direct from Arizona in the dawn hours.
When Trump was elected, McCain took it upon himself to reassure world
leaders, visiting multiple countries in the first six months of 2017
before his diagnosis.
His sidekick, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told CNN the hectic pace had taken a toll.
"You know he just wore himself out traveling all around the world," Graham said.
McCain,
who was divorced from his first wife, Carol, in 1980, is survived by
his wife, Cindy, and seven children, including three sons who continued
the family tradition of serving in the armed forces and a daughter,
Meghan, who is a presenter on ABC's "The View." His mother, Roberta,
aged 106, is also still living.
For
his military service, he was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star,
the Legion of Merit, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He
faced his final diagnosis with characteristic courage, telling CNN's
Jake Tapper that "every life has to end one way or another."
Asked
how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said: "He served his country,
and not always right -- made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of errors --
but served his country, and, I hope we could add, honorably."
McCain,
who will be remembered as much for his combative nature as his
political achievements, summed up the meaning of a life forged in the
example of his political hero Theodore Roosevelt when McCain stood
before the flag-draped coffin of his friend and foe, Sen. Kennedy, in
2009.
His late colleague from
Massachusetts died from the same form of brain cancer that eventually
killed McCain. Both men died on August 25.
"Ted and I shared the sentiment that a fight not joined was a fight not enjoyed."
CNN's Dana Bash and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.