John McCain — flexible aggression

ELECTION SPECIAL ISSUE

By David D. Kirkpatrick

updated 12:54 p.m. ET Oct. 26, 2008

Senator John McCain races through the final days of the presidential race reciting a familiar admonition. It is the same mantra he has called upon to steel himself for moments of conflict as a collegiate boxer at the Naval Academy, a prisoner of war bracing for interrogation, a legislator twisting arms for votes, or as a Republican primary candidate rallying crowds against an all-but-certain defeat.

“Game face on!” he murmurs to himself, borrowing the advice of so many athletic coaches.

Some friends say the expression is a metaphor for an essential tension that runs through Mr. McCain’s life. He is often deliberative, self-critical and flexible, his advisers and fellow senators say, and has frequently corrected course during his 36 years in public life. “He is a much more supple mind than he is usually portrayed,” said Philip Bobbitt, an international relations scholar and Democrat the senator consulted this summer.

But when he confronts an adversary, a starkly different John McCain can emerge, fired up with certainty for an all-or-nothing battle. “I am going to win this thing and you are going to have to run me over to defeat me,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat close to Mr. McCain, explaining his friend’s attitude. “It is a face that makes his opponent think, ‘I don’t know if I want to get my nose bloodied by this guy.’ ”

Conflicting impulses
The conflicting impulses toward deliberation and aggression have been the alternating currents of his singular career and, if Mr. McCain wins the White House, could shape his presidency. As a Navy pilot, Mr. McCain has written, he let his “cockiness” deafen him to the risk of a buzzer warning of enemy fire. But as a returning prisoner of war he drew nuanced conclusions about political leadership and public opinion that have left him at some times a dove (Lebanon, Somalia ) and others a hawk (the Balkans, Iraq).

In the Senate, he is almost as well known for his handwritten apology notes as for his outbursts. (“I think I learned a few things in prison but possibly one of the most important things was the value of friendship,” Mr. McCain wrote in one note provided to The Times. “Chalk it up to the ‘McCain temper.’ ”) He fires advisers who disappoint or embarrass him, but then keeps seeking their advice. He frets publicly that his ambition might tempt him to compromise his principles, but he also races headlong into battles in pursuit of political power.

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If elected, Mr. McCain would arrive well-scarred at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: 72 years old, the oldest president to enter office, the first Vietnam veteran, a survivor of five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp who could also have a son at war. Jimmy McCain, a Marine, recently returned from Iraq, while his brother John Sidney McCain IV, a Naval Academy midshipman, could be on the way.

Driven as much by his notion of honor as by ideology, Mr. McCain could make an unpredictable — his critics say “erratic” — chief executive. By default he is a limited-government conservative, but he readily bends those convictions if a cause seems worthy. He has regularly picked fights with both parties over everything from the tax policy to the war on Iraq, but also knows how to force through bipartisan deals.

Mr. McCain has called his decision-making style “instinctive, often impulsive,” as he put it in “Worth the Fighting For,” a 2002 memoir written with his aide Mark Salter. “I don’t torture myself over decisions. I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow if I can.”

But he also says he has also learned to cultivate what Navy pilots called “situational awareness” — gathering as much information as possible about the context of any decision, including an inventory of his weaknesses and his enemy’s strengths. He got a lesson in its importance 41 years ago over Hanoi.

Convinced of his invulnerability, “I placed too much faith on what was beyond my knowledge or control: luck,” Mr. McCain wrote with Mr. Salter in a recent book, “Hard Call.” “I had five and a half very long years to regret my decision and the lapse in self-awareness.”

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