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The War Hero Wins the Heart of Voters
Twenty-five years ago, John McCain was a retired U.S. Navy captain living in Arizona and running for an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He had a consultant's dream resume: Not only was he the scion of well-known admirals, he was a war hero himself.
A fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, McCain was shot down by a North Vietnamese missile in 1967 and locked away in the grim prison that POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. For five and a half years, he was tortured and starved. Several times, the North Vietnamese attempted to use him for propaganda purposes by offering to release the admiral's son ahead of other Americans who'd been imprisoned longer. McCain kept refusing to accept his own freedom, which engendered more beatings and more torture.
By the time he returned to America a free man, his hair had turned white and he was suffering from severe wounds that persist to this day. Another casualty of war was the collapse of his marriage to Carol Shepp, mother of McCain's first daughter, Sydney.
Yet less than a decade later, there he was campaigning in Phoenix and winning over voters with his upbeat manner and infectious humor. A nagging issue dogged his campaign, though: Why was McCain running in this district at all? He'd lived in Phoenix less than a year and had almost no connection with Arizona. He put the matter to rest during a candidates' debate when a rival leveled the carpetbagger charge yet again. "Listen, pal," McCain said, "I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."
The audience sat for a few seconds in stunned silence, then erupted in deafening applause. McCain won the election, served two terms in the House, and then ran for the Senate from Arizona in 1986, winning by increasingly absurd margins every six years.
This ability to make the best of a bad situation is John McCain's hallmark as a public figure. From the moment he set foot again on American soil in 1973, he made it a point not to quarrel with the antiwar protesters of the Vietnam era, even the draft dodgers. In 1994, McCain and future Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry were invited to the Oval Office by President Clinton to discuss the political fallout of normalizing relations with Vietnam. "McCain spoke for less than a minute," recalled McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter. "He basically said, 'It doesn't matter who was for the war, who was against the war. Let's move on.' Clinton just looked at McCain and said, 'You're an amazing man.'"
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