McCain: Rabble-rouser and standard-bearer

Surviving captivity
Tucked away in a corner of McCain's Senate office, there is a yellowed, three-page telegram hanging in a simple black frame.

The once-secret cable recounts a conversation at the Paris Peace Talks between the top negotiators for the United States and North Vietnam.

In it, Averell Harriman, the U.S. negotiator, reports: "At tea break Le Duc Tho mentioned that DRV had intended to release Admiral McCain's son as one of the three pilots freed recently, but he had refused."

The cable was written in September 1968. It would be four and half more years before "Admiral McCain's son" came home.

His captors had hoped to use early release of McCain — whose father was soon to become commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific — as a propaganda ploy.

When McCain refused to play along, they told him: "Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane." And they were true to their word.

McCain returned home from his five and half years as a POW on crutches and unable to lift his arms. He still can't raise them above his head.

He says he's "never known a prisoner of war who felt he could fully explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it."

He seems more at ease joking about his incarceration than analyzing it.

More than once he's quipped after a distasteful chore: "That's the most fun I've had since my last interrogation."

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When a Senate aide's child got into hot water at school, McCain once advised, "Tell him to confess. Say, 'I am a black air pirate and I have committed crimes against the peace-loving people at my school.' It always worked for me."'

From iron to steel
The advice evoked his darkest hour in Vietnam, when McCain's will was broken and he signed a confession that said, "I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate."

For all of that, though, McCain defied his guards. To his captors, just as to his superiors back at Annapolis, he was exasperating.

"He had to carry a different burden than most of us and he handled it beautifully," says Orson Swindle, a former POW cellmate who remains a close friend. "He didn't need any coping mechanism; that's just built into him."

Even in prison, McCain played to the bleachers, shouting obscenities at his captors loudly enough to bolster the spirits of fellow captives. Appointed by the POWs to act as camp "entertainment officer," a "room chaplain" and a "communications officer," McCain imparted comic relief, literary tutorials, news of the day, even religious sustenance.

Video   McCain spars with Leno over houses Aug. 26: Republican presidential hopeful John McCain answers a question from Jay Leno about how many houses he has by talking about his experience as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. Morning Joe

It started with "Saturday night at the movies," Swindle says. That is, McCain rendering play-by-play action and line-by-line dialogue from famous films.

Soon enough, Swindle recalls, "Hells bells, we were having Monday night at the movies, Tuesday night at the movies, Wednesday night at the movies, featuring John McCain."

McCain expounded on the history of the American novel, too. "We only had the facts half right, but John said nobody knew the difference," Swindle says.

He also led Sunday church services, sounding "as good as any preacher that ever stood at a pulpit," remembers another former cellmate, Medal of Honor winner Bud Day.

McCain's POW experience, says Day, "took some great iron and turned him into steel."

McCain tells AP that Vietnam "wasn't a turning point in me as to what type of person I am, but it was a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest."

It taught him, he says, "that if you put your country first, that everything will be OK."

'My greatest moral failing'
The choices in life, the friends and the enemies, would rarely be as black-and-white again as they had been for McCain in prison.

Video   McCain addresses leadership Aug. 16: John McCain answers questions from Pastor Rick Warren on leadership, moral failures and energy policy at the Saddleback Civil Forum. Video courtesy Saddleback Church. MSNBC

McCain's experience there gave him new confidence in himself and his judgment. But it did not tame his wild side, and his marriage was a casualty. McCain blames the failure of the marriage on "my own selfishness and immaturity" and has called it "my greatest moral failing."

One month after divorcing his first wife, Carol, McCain married Cindy Hensley, 17 years his junior.

(He'd lied about his age, telling her he was four years younger. She did too, telling him she was four years older.)

"He was everything I was looking for," Cindy McCain recalls of their first meeting, "and I wasn't looking."

McCain was lucky: Carol McCain, who had been in a crippling car accident while her husband was imprisoned in Vietnam, let him out of the marriage without theatrics or recriminations.

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