Taste of Senate set Capt. McCain on a new path

‘A rapt student’
The Texan also influenced Mr. McCain’s approach to politics. Mr. Tower, who as a graduate student in London had studied the prewar British Conservative Party, saw in President Carter shades of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, his former aides recalled. As the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Tower hammered Mr. Carter over the hostages in Iran, support for Taiwan, SALT II and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan — debates Mr. Tower and other hawks saw as skirmishes in a larger battle over whether America would shrink from confrontation or return to the offensive after Vietnam.

“McCain was a rapt student,” said Mr. Dawson, the former Tower aide. “He followed the debates, and he would take part in them in ways that went way beyond his position as bag-carrier or representative of the Navy.”

Mr. Tower was so close to his protégé that he sometimes raised eyebrows by including Mr. McCain in committee staff meetings that were closed to other military liaisons, Mr. Kiland said. His close ties with Mr. Tower, in turn, helped Mr. McCain earn high marks from his Navy bosses, although with some reservations about his grasp for details.

“Sometimes you had to really explain things to him and put him in a context that he really appreciated,” said former Adm. George Kinnear, Captain McCain’s Pentagon superior. “But he was a hard worker once he bought off on an issue.”

Mr. McCain, with his fame and family, would circumvent the Navy’s chain of command for senators with issues like fighting a base closure, pushing for a new Navy hospital or helping a local contractor, aides said. “McCain had a big Rolodex, we used to say,” recalled Michael Hastings, a former Cohen aide. “He could really deliver for senators on both sides of the aisle.”

Working from the inside out
Over time, Captain McCain also became a minor political player in his own right, sometimes working against the Navy’s official position under the Carter administration. To agitate for laws boosting military pay, former aides said, Mr. McCain steered senators on a trip to Norfolk, Va., toward Navy seamen collecting food stamps. And when the secretary of the Navy declined to replace a giant aircraft carrier, Mr. McCain collected information inside the Navy for lobbyists pushing to build a new one, eventually helping to override a presidential veto.

In his e-mail message, Mr. McCain said he had only been exercising his responsibility to provide senators “the latest and most accurate information.” But former Adm. Clarence A. Hill Jr., then a lobbyist for a new carrier working with Mr. McCain, said: “He was going behind the back of the secretary of the Navy. It is as simple as that.”

A shift into politics
Mr. McCain said in his e-mail message that he had found his Navy job “rewarding and fascinating until my last day of service,” but his former colleagues say that by 1980 they knew he was wrestling with his future.

“There was always this question, ‘Didn’t he want to be an admiral like his father and grandfather?’ ’ Mr. Hastings recalled. “He would say, ‘I don’t think that is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ ”

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Navy psychiatrists offered another explanation. Mr. McCain had long struggled to escape “the shadow of his father,” Dr. P. F. O’Connell wrote in Mr. McCain’s Navy file after his return from Vietnam. But his hero’s homecoming had liberated him, bringing a “smile of fulfillment and relief” when he first heard Admiral McCain introduced as “Commander McCain’s father.” Dr. O’Connell wrote: “He had arrived.”

Finally, in the spring of 1981, Mr. McCain told his father that he was leaving the Navy.

His Senate friends were already moving to jump-start Mr. McCain’s new career. Mr. Cohen connected Mr. McCain with an experienced political consultant, J. Brian Smith, who had initially dismissed working for such a neophyte. And, Mr. Cohen said, he also encouraged Mr. McCain to look away from his previous home in Florida and toward Arizona. His new wife came from a prominent family there, a safe Republican House seat was expected to open up, and Senator Barry Goldwater was expected to retire soon.

Tears for a ‘damn fine sailor’
Mr. Tower did more than anyone else to help. He lent Mr. McCain his fund-raising consultant, raised money for him and enlisted one of Arizona’s most popular Republicans to endorse Mr. McCain over two more experienced primary candidates. “Whatever I asked him for, he gave without hesitation,” Mr. McCain recalled.

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He won his House seat in 1982, a year after he left the Navy, and his Senate seat four years later. Mr. Tower retired in 1985, but their paths crossed again when the Texan was nominated to be secretary of defense by President George Bush. The influential Christian conservative organizer Paul M. Weyrich accused Mr. Tower of public drunkenness and philandering, imperiling his confirmation. A chorus of others echoed the charges.

Mr. McCain was stunned at the Senate’s outrage. “There were too many hearty drinkers around the place who might not always have been the most exemplary of devoted spouses to begrudge John his vices,” he wrote in a chapter of his memoirs. “The sins Tower was accused of were hardly Washington novelties.”

Leaping to his mentor’s defense, Mr. McCain denounced Mr. Weyrich as a holier-than-thou hypocrite, scrambled to discredit the charges and exploded in fits of rage at colleagues. At Mr. Tower’s defeat, Mr. McCain choked back tears.

“God bless you, John Tower,” he said from the Senate floor. “You’re a damn fine sailor.”

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