Senator offers inspiring tales for young and old

Viewed by many as an inspirational figure in his own right, John McCain presents the stories of celebrated historical figures and lesser-known heroes in “Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember,” along with co-author Mark Salter. Some of the portraits include Pat Tillman, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Winston Churchill and George Washington, all of whose values, the authors believe, exemplify the best of the human spirit. McCain visited “Today” to discuss his new book. Here's an excerpt:

Introduction
I don’t believe in destiny. We are not born to become one thing or another, left to follow helplessly a course that was charted for us by some unseen hand, a mysterious alignment of the stars that pulls us in a certain direction, bestowing happiness on some and misfortune on others. The only fate we cannot escape is our mortality. Even a long life is a brief experience, hard as that is to believe when we are young. God has given us that life, shown us how to use it, but left it to us to dispose of as we choose. Our character will determine how well or how poorly we choose.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy. That is all that really passes for destiny. And you choose it. No one else can give it to you or deny it to you. No rival can steal it from you. And no friend can give it to you. Others can encourage you to make the right choices or discourage you. But you choose.

Your happiness is at stake in every difficult decision you must make about what kind of person you will be: honest or deceitful; responsible or unreliable; brave or cowardly; kind or cruel. Your talents have little to do with it. Your looks don’t matter at all. You don’t need to be good at sports. You don’t need to be popular with other kids. You need not be smarter than others. Those things are nice and useful and pleasing. But they won’t by themselves make you happy. Looks change. People for no good reason can sometimes treat us unfairly, and friends come and go as our lives take us to new schools, different jobs, and faraway places. Our strength and speed and agility grow for a few years, and then, for most of our lives, we get weaker, slower, and clumsier. However smart we are, there are always other people who know more than us.

The stories in this book, those that are well known and those that are not, are the stories of remarkable people who chose well. Most are people of exceptionally good character. All, no doubt, had flaws. Everyone does. But they all exemplify one or more essential attributes of good character.

I would be proud to be among their number. But were I to use my own character as an example of how to build yours, I would lack one of the most important qualities of good character — honesty. My own children, who have suffered, as they often remind me, considerable embarrassment already from their father’s public and unconvincing attempts at proving himself a role model for the young, have taught me just enough humility to avoid that conceit. Rather than cause them any further discomfort, I have relied instead on the example of people who have no need to prove themselves worthy of admiration. They have earned much more than public acclaim.

Random House

The best I can claim for my own character is that it is still, even at this late date, a work in progress. The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book, is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have chosen a course that has risked it for some selfish reason. As I am blessed with a naturally optimistic disposition, I’m still working on my character, although I am sixty-eight years old as we write this.

Thus, I can profit as much as any reader from the examples of character we celebrate in the following pages. We have intended this work to be of interest not only to young readers but to parents and readers of any age. However numerous our achievements and experiences, most of us can still stand a little improvement. Even the most crowded, accomplished life can still suffer a sense of incompleteness. Our character is a lifelong project, and perhaps the older we are, and the more fixed our shortcomings are, the more we can use inspiration to encourage our escape from the restraints of our deficiencies.

The greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare, wrote plays and poems that taught such important lessons about human nature and the qualities of good and bad people, few things written before or after have explained them better. His plays, written more than four hundred years ago, were a little hard for me to understand when I was young. But I had a teacher who loved them, and he taught me to love them. Thanks to him, those plays are for me more moving than anything we have for entertainment today.

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