Taste of Senate set Capt. McCain on a new path

Rough waters
Mr. McCain, for his part, was turning 40 and unsure of his path. A shoulder injury still limited his reach, complicating his prospects as a pilot. His marriage to Carol McCain, a former model who was nearly crippled in a car accident while he was imprisoned, was coming apart. He was engaged in a series of extramarital “dalliances,” he later told his biographer, Robert Timberg.

Mr. McCain, in a recent e-mail message, said he was excited about the liaison job. After his release from prison, he wrote, “almost every duty seemed enjoyable.” But some former Senate aides who knew him then say that, at first, he seemed discouraged, stuck at one of several desks in a spartan office. “He looked down and depressed,” recalled William Bader, a former aide to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But Mr. McCain, promoted to captain, threw himself into courting the lawmakers who shaped Navy policy. He formed especially close friendships with two relative liberals about his age: Senator William S. Cohen, a Maine Republican who represented a major shipbuilding state and later became defense secretary, and Senator Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat who had managed the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota in 1972.

A trip to Asia in late 1978 cemented their bond. Mr. McCain and the two senators stole away from official briefings to stroll in the Ginza district of nightclubs and restaurants in Tokyo, visit the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok and take a memorable midnight tour of what Mr. Hart remembered as that city’s “light and dark sides.” In a memoir, Mr. Cohen recalled drinking beer with Mr. McCain at the Hyatt Regency bar overlooking Seoul, watching beautiful Korean women seduce a tipsy traveler.

“He was a salesman par excellence,” Mr. Cohen recalled in an interview, crediting Mr. McCain with redirecting his career by persuading him to join the Armed Services Committee.

The three became regulars together at the Monocle, a watering hole near the Senate. “We would laugh and tell stories about our colleagues,” Mr. Hart recalled. “ ‘So-and-so said something in a caucus meeting.’ He found it fascinating.”

A model for POW-politicians
In turn, Mr. McCain helped Mr. Hart become an officer in the Navy Reserves. For Mr. Cohen, Mr. McCain became a model for the P.O.W.-politician heroes of two novels the Maine senator later wrote. After Mr. McCain met Cindy Lou Hensley at a Honolulu bar on another trip in 1979, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Hart were groomsmen at the couple’s wedding the following year.

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Mr. McCain later said that he was inspired to seek public office in part by the example of Senator Henry M. Jackson, Democrat of Washington, the staunch cold warrior who led the defection to the right of the foreign policy thinkers now known as neoconservatives.

“Thank God for Scoop Jackson,” Mr. McCain wrote in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.” “Without his courage, I doubt we would have recovered from Vietnam as quickly as we did, which would have left those who sacrificed there all the more haunted by the futility of the experience.”

The strait-laced “soda-pop Jackson” sometimes brought his school-age children along on official trips, and Mr. McCain played baby sitter. But Mr. Jackson never went in for the kind of camaraderie Mr. McCain enjoyed with Mr. Hart and Mr. Cohen.

In Mr. Tower, however, Mr. McCain found both a social companion and a political mentor. “Tower treated him like a son,” recalled I. N. Kiland, one of Mr. McCain’s colleagues in the liaison office. “And John idolized John Tower.” (Mr. McCain, in his memoir, acknowledged the “familial” comparisons.)

Budding comeraderie
Mr. Tower was a high-living political powerhouse. But he was also a former Navy man who had served under Mr. McCain’s grandfather in World War II and was so sentimental about his service that he stayed in the reserves through his Senate career and packed his uniform for every trip abroad, his aides said.

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One of Mr. McCain’s first jobs as liaison was accompanying a delegation Mr. Tower led to the Wehrkunde conference, an annual security meeting in Munich during the Bavarian equivalent of Mardi Gras. The conference became known as kind of senatorial spring break.

The event has grown “a lot tamer” since the late ’70s, recalled Mr. Cohen, who described the heyday of the conference vividly in his novel, “Dragon Fire”: “Beer and passions flowed. All restrictions were off. Grounds for divorce were suspended. Members of Congress, particularly the unmarried ones, would look at the German women, who were ready and willing for the taking, and think they had slipped the surly bonds of moral conformity.”

In Washington, Mr. Tower began summoning Mr. McCain for a drink at the end of the day. And when they traveled, Mr. McCain took charge of supplying Mr. Tower’s hotel rooms with Johnnie Walker Black. One night at a hotel in Saudi Arabia, one of many Middle Eastern countries where alcohol is banned, Mr. McCain amused his patron by leaving empty bottles for the authorities to find outside the room of a group of Frenchmen — a prank Mr. Tower later delighted at recounting.

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