John McCain Was a Flawed Politician I Never Stopped Admiring

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

26 August 18

For the loyalty he inspired among people, for his unquestioned physical courage, and for his instinctive response to the call of the better angels.

nce upon a time, John McCain called me a great American. I was flattered, but not fooled. This was the kind of thing that got him a political lifetime of glorious press coverage. In my life among the political fauna, I have been schmoozed by experts. (In Massachusetts, there always is a knife somewhere in the folds of the flummery.) I had come to a TV studio outside of Boston to interview McCain for a profile I was doing of Senator Ted Kennedy on the occasion of the latter's 30th anniversary in the Senate. I met him and he called me a great American. But that wasn't the thing I remember best. What I remember best is that, when he called me a great American, he was talking to my son. That made all the difference.

And now he has passed at 81, nine years to the day that Kennedy passed, and a victim of the same vicious form of a vicious disease. This is history rhyming in deep, mournful harmony. Two flawed men, sons of difficult fathers, each badly broken in different ways, who came to be friends, and who believed in serving their country, albeit from different angles and with different English on the way they came through its life. But two politicians, most of all.

For John McCain was as much a politician as any Kennedy ever was. It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the "maverick" thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan's adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party's slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.

Take him all in all, he was a politician and, as such, a fairly run of the mill one. He has nothing like Ted Kennedy's legislative record. He did not dominate the chamber like a Johnson, or a Taft, or a Vandenberg. He did not stake out a single issue—except, perhaps, American interventionism everywhere. Where he differed from his party—on immigration, on torture, and most laudably, on climate change—he did so without noticeable effect. The party got worse on immigration and climate change, and it elected a president* who was positively giddy on the stump about torturing people.

When he agreed with his party, which was almost all the time, he did so wholeheartedly and with enthusiasm. And his party got more extreme until it was downright mad and there was nothing John McCain could do to stop it. In 2008, Mitt Romney embarrassed himself by arguing with John McCain about the efficacy of torture. In 2016, Donald Trump mocked McCain's imprisonment in North Vietnam and, except for McCain's loyal constituency in the media, it was little more than a speed bump. By the time a Republican president he could really oppose came along, nobody was listening to John McCain any more and then he got sick. But I remember one day in February of 2000 when John McCain actually was everything John McCain was supposed to be.

He had just been good and horribly ratfcked in the South Carolina primary, a loss that pretty much handed the Republican nomination to George W. Bush, and which sent history spinning off in a terrible direction that looks like a merry-go-round compared to what we're living through now. There were whisper campaigns about the daughter his family had adopted from Bangladesh—the oldest and most poisonous card in the deck, especially in the home office of American sedition. There were whisper campaigns over the telephone conversations from some of America's most famous TV preachers—especially the odious Pat Robertson. There were dozens of loaded "push polls." The entire Atwater-Rove arsenal was turned on him. Rumors were spread about McCain's captivity, his mental stability, and his wife, but it kept coming back to his daughter, Bridget, who was dark enough for the bigots. Then, McCain made a critical gaffe. He remarked that the Confederate flag, which still flew near the state capitol in Columbia, was "a symbol of racism and slavery." And he lost.

Nine days later, in Virginia Beach, McCain gave one of the finest speeches I've ever heard a politician give, even though I didn't agree with a great deal of it. Crafted by Mark Salter, McCain's longtime amanuensis and a supremely gifted writer, the speech gave McCain a chance to define the religious crazies and the dark forces of ratfckery right out of his party. (One of the things that is eternally to McCain's credit is that he commanded the loyalty of some good and decent people like Salter, and the political operative John Weaver.) He did it as well as any politician could have.

I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public—but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

Yes, I see the rather preposterous false equivalence there; Louis Farrakhan had nothing to do with "the Left" in the context of that election whereas Pat Robertson had just shown enough influence on "the Right" to help torpedo McCain's campaign. Nevertheless, it took all kinds of gumption at that point for a Republican to lump Farrakhan and Robertson and Falwell together. That was a maverick move. At that moment, I thought he might be the guy who wrenches his political party back toward something resembling sanity and then, he didn't.

He was a loyal foot soldier for President George W. Bush, the man on whose behalf his child had been slandered. (That's the first thing I thought of in 2016, when Ted Cruz climbed on the Trump train despite the fact that the engineer had slimed his wife and his father.) Once the attacks of 9/11 happened, McCain was all in for adventurism in the Middle East, occasionally opining that we weren't making the rubble bounce high enough. (He got an anti-torture amendment passed that Bush then emasculated with an infamous signing statement.) He was gearing up for another presidential run and here's where John McCain the politician is most clearly defined. More than anything else, by 2006, John McCain wanted to be president more than anyone else I've ever seen.

South Carolina was forgotten, as were those agents of intolerance. He gave a commencement speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. He gave an embarrassing interview to the late Tim Russert where he walked back all those brave words Salter had written for him in 2000. Worse than that, it took him far too long to reject the endorsement of John Hagee, a know-nothing crazoid from Texas. He opined that, perhaps, we should teach intelligent design in the schools as well as evolution. By the time the Republican convention of 2008 rolled around, there was little left of the 2000 John McCain except the ambition that had always burned in him.

Then he picked Sarah Palin to run with him and that was the ballgame, at least for me. I had come to like him during the time we'd spent together when I was doing a profile in 1999 as he was warming up for his first presidential run. He was destined, always, to disappoint me politically but that was only because we didn't agree on anything. The choice of Palin was where I climbed completely off the tire swing. Only someone dangerously blinded by ambition would consider putting her that close to the national command authority. He had lost his way entirely. Anybody who wants to be president badly enough that he'd pick a half-bright human parka as his running mate never should be elected to that office.

I never stopped liking the man, though. I make no apologies for that. I never stopped admiring him for the good things about him—the loyalty he inspired among people, his unquestioned physical courage, his instinctive response to the call of the better angels to which, tragically, he never found the will fully to surrender himself or his ambition.

The last day I was with him in Arizona, we went to the Superstition Mountains. He was taping an A&E special on the Lost Dutchman mine. He was standing on a flat rock, looking up into the shattered peaks, his arms at that awkward angle that you get if your captors hang you up by them from the wall of your cell, and they're never quite right again. I stood on my own flat rock and watched him, and that is how I will remember John McCain in this time of his passing. I liked the way he looked at the mountains.