John McCain: driven to serve, and to succeed

The Self Critic
Few politicians have apologized as profusely or as fortuitously as Mr. McCain. He may be the only candidate-author whose editor cut back on the self-criticism in the first draft of his campaign memoirs. “He was quite happy to lacerate himself,” recalled the editor, Jonathan Karp.

Joe McCain attributes his brother’s habit of public penitence to the example of their father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr. “He would whack us on the rear end with these leather slippers that he had,” Joe McCain recalled. “Then he would come back out rubbing his hands together, and I could tell he felt so bad that I almost felt sorry for the guy.”

Their father expected them to live up to a military code of honor and atone for any lapses, teaching them that it was the only way to retain the respect of those around them.

“I think one of John’s deepest needs is to be believed and trusted,” Joe McCain said. After submitting to a forced “confession” statement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, John McCain has said, he found relief from his shame by provoking his guards to beat him.

John McCain’s aspirations were always grand. As a boy, he dreamed of an admiralty like his father’s. As the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, he set his sights on becoming a member. In Vietnam he had mused aloud to cellmates about becoming president, and as soon as he won his first Senate race in 1986 he “felt an emotional need to envision some future goal,” as he recalled in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.”

But he exasperated himself with his own self-defeating behavior — letting his barfly antics as a young pilot undercut his credibility as a Navy officer, or later jeopardizing his friendship with his patrons, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, by leaving his first wife for a glamorous beer heiress 20 years younger, Cindy McCain. “He has always felt very guilty about it,” his Navy colleague James McGovern recalled in an interview eight years ago. “I have never talked with him for more than 40 minutes when he didn’t bring it up.”

For most of his political career, Mr. McCain was a straight-ahead partisan. He voted along party lines, crushed his opponents by outspending them, and sought to run the Senate Republican Campaign Committee. His preferred public image — the straight-talking maverick — did not emerge until well after 1989, when he became one of five senators caught up in a scandal over meetings with savings and loan regulators on behalf of Mr. Keating, a wealthy donor. In a marathon news conference and nonstop media interviews, Mr. McCain became the foremost critic of his own poor judgment (any other accusations he called defamation).

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“The national media was saying, ‘John McCain is the only one who is talking about this, and sometimes it seems like he won’t shut up,’ ” recalled Jay Smith, a political consultant who advised Mr. McCain at the time. As the senator kept talking, “the scandal seemed to improve markedly for him.” Seeing that his openness was effective, Mr. McCain later wrote, he adopted it as a permanent “public relations strategy.”

Repentance became a theme of his career. He wove his regret over decades of smoking Marlboros into his drive for a tobacco tax overhaul. Then he said he felt ashamed of his own party for neglecting children’s health by blocking the bill. He even organized his best-selling 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers,” as a confession. Written with Mr. Salter, his longtime aide, as a springboard to the 2000 presidential race, it catalogs his decades of misbehavior leading to the realization in a Vietnamese prison of the deeper satisfaction of “a cause greater than myself.” Soon he was turning the Keating episode into a similar parable of short-sighted self-interest.

In the 2000 Republican primary, Mr. McCain sometimes seemed to be battling his own impulses as much as he was his rival, Mr. Bush. He opened the year with a speech in New Hampshire denouncing contemporary politics as “little more than a spectacle of selfish ambition” and pledging to take the high ground. At the same event, however, his campaign passed out a news release falsely asserting that Mr. Bush’s “political” tax plan would “put Social Security in danger.” Mr. McCain was apologizing by the end of the day.

Operatives on both sides say Mr. McCain gave as well as he got for most of the race. “It was McCain on the stump fighting the ‘Death Star,’ ” — his epithet for the Bush juggernaut, Mr. Salter recalled.

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