McCain ‘Heard the Music’ of a Political Life Heady Senate Job Led to End of Naval Career ELECTIONS 2008
By David D. Kirkpatrick
At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman told Captain John McCain that he was about to attain his life ambition: selection for admiral.
But McCain, the son and grandson of revered admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe – sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s Scotch into Saudi Arabia.
He had found a sense of purpose in an apprenticeship to some of the Senate’s fiercest cold warriors. And in Senator John Tower, a hawkish Texas Republican, he had found a new mentor, beginning a relationship that many compared to the bond between father and son.
With Tower’s encouragement, McCain declined his first admiral’s star to make a run for Congress, saying that he could “do more good there,” Lehman recalled. But Lehman knew duty to country was only part of the reason.
“He just loved it up there,” Lehman recalled. “Like very few military people, John heard the music up there, and he really wanted to do it.”
From Vietnam prisoner of war to politician in a hurry – it was the turning point that put McCain on the trajectory toward the Republican presidential nomination this year.
After five and a half years of listening to senators’ antiwar speeches over prison camp loudspeakers in Hanoi, McCain came home in 1973 contemptuous of America’s elected officials and convinced that Congress had betrayed the country’s fighting men by hamstringing the war effort. But in the halls of the Senate, McCain discovered a new calling, at once high-minded and glamorous.
One of several military liaisons assigned to the Senate as advocates for their services and escorts for official travel, McCain quickly emerged as the senators’ favorite. He had a thick head of hair as white as his dress uniform and he showed a natural politician’s gift for winning over an audience. He excelled at leavening official business with a spirit of fun – telling deadpan stories about his years “in the cooler,” playing marathon poker games on flights overseas or surprising senators at a refueling stop in Ireland with a side trip to Durty Nelly’s, a 17th-century pub. He was the epitome of cool, one senator’s son recalled, with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and Theodore White’s memoir, “In Search of History,” in the other.
He relished the push-and-pull of legislative battles, eventually even plunging into defense budget fights with a personal agenda that was sometimes at odds with the Carter administration’s secretary of the navy. He built personal friendships and professional collaborations across ideological divides, a hallmark of his later Senate career. And he applauded the Senate’s leading hawks as they waged what they considered an epic struggle with the Carter administration over America’s place in the post-Vietnam world.
Under Tower’s tutelage, McCain turned his anger over the management of the Vietnam war into an all-or-nothing view of international conflict that became one of the few guiding principles in his otherwise unpredictable political career – from his opposition to sending U.S. Marine peacekeepers into Lebanon in 1983 to his staunch support for the Iraq war today. And when prominent conservative Christians later protested Tower’s nomination as defense secretary because of allegations about drinking and womanizing, McCain’s furious counterattack opened the hostilities with that wing of his party that now dog his presidential campaign.
McCain has often said that he decided to run for office because he felt that his war injuries would make attaining the same rank as his father and grandfather “impossible.” But Lehman, now an adviser to the McCain campaign, and two other top navy officers familiar with McCain’s file insist that was not the case.
Instead, many who knew him say, McCain seemed bored by navy life. “Sitting down with Anwar Sadat or Deng Xiaoping and being treated as an equal – that is pretty heady stuff,” said Rhett Dawson, a former aide to Tower who is now president of an electronics trade group. “It had opened his eyes to a much broader world.”
It is unclear how long McCain has dreamed of the White House. Languishing in a North Vietnamese prison camp in 1970, McCain once mused aloud about the presidency, his cellmate, Richard Stratton, told a reporter eight years ago.
But when he returned from Vietnam on March 18, 1973, McCain was so determined to continue his Navy career that he defied his doctors and underwent a year of excruciating physical therapy to force an injured knee back to the range of motion required of a Navy pilot.
A few other former POWs were running for office, and McCain’s well-publicized valor as a captive had made him a minor celebrity. But he rebuffed invitations to enter politics, focusing instead on his job commanding a fighter squadron near Jacksonville, Florida.
But Admiral James Holloway, the chief of naval operations, saw other uses for McCain. Holloway knew that McCain’s father had once excelled as liaison to the Senate. And though the son had earned a reputation as a playboy at the U.S. Naval Academy, Holloway thought then-Commander McCain might have inherited the skills and judgment needed to deal with senators.
“He could smoke a cigar and play a little poker,” Holloway recalled in an interview. “But he didn’t let the situation get out of hand.”
McCain was turning 40 and unsure of his path. A shoulder injury still limited his reach, complicating his prospects as a pilot. His marriage to Carol McCain, a former model who had been nearly crippled in a car accident while he was imprisoned, was unraveling. He was involved in a series of “dalliances” outside his marriage, he later acknowledged to his biographer, Robert Timberg.
McCain, in a recent e-mail message, said he was excited about the liaison job. After his release from prison, “almost every duty seemed enjoyable,” McCain wrote. But some former Senate aides who knew him then say that, at first, McCain seemed discouraged, stuck at one of several desks in a spartan office. “He looked down and depressed,” recalled William Bader, a former aide to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But McCain, promoted to captain, threw himself into courting the lawmakers who shaped navy policy. He formed especially close friendships with two relative liberals who were about his age: Senator William Cohen, the Maine Republican who represented a major shipbuilding state and later became defense secretary, and Senator Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat who had managed the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota in 1972.
McCain later said that he was inspired to seek public office in part by the example of Senator Henry Jackson, Democrat of Washington, the staunch cold warrior who led the defection to the right of foreign policy thinkers now known as neoconservatives.
In Tower, McCain found both a social companion and a political mentor. “Tower treated him like a son,” recalled I.N. Kiland, one of McCain’s colleagues in the liaison office. “And John idolized John Tower.” Tower was a high-living political powerhouse. But he was also a former navy man who had served under McCain’s grandfather in World War II and was so sentimental about his service that he stayed in the reserves through his Senate career and packed his uniform for every trip abroad, aides said.
The Texan also influenced McCain’s approach to politics. Tower, who as a graduate student in London had studied the prewar British Conservative Party, saw in President Jimmy Carter shades of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, his former aides recalled. As the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Tower hammered Carter over the hostages in Iran, support for Taiwan, the SALT II treaty and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan – debates that Tower and other hawks saw as skirmishes in a larger battle over whether America would shrink from confrontation or return to the offensive after Vietnam.
“McCain was a rapt student,” recalled Dawson, the former Tower aide. “He followed the debates, and he would take part in them in ways that went way beyond his position as bag-carrier or representative of the navy.”
McCain, with his fame and family, would circumvent the navy’s chain of command to help senators with issues like fighting a base closing, pushing for a new navy hospital or aiding a local contractor, aides who knew him say. “McCain had a big Rolodex, we used to say,” recalled Michael Hastings, a former Cohen aide. “He could really deliver for senators on both sides of the aisle.”
Over time, Captain McCain also became a minor political player in his own right, sometimes working against the navy’s official position under the Carter administration. To agitate for laws increasing military pay, former aides said, McCain steered senators on a trip to Norfolk, Virginia, toward navy seamen collecting food stamps. And when the secretary of the navy declined to replace a giant aircraft carrier, McCain collected information inside the navy for lobbyists pushing to build a new one, eventually helping to override a presidential veto.
In his e-mail message, McCain said he was only exercising his responsibility to provide senators “the latest and most accurate information.” But a former admiral, Clarence Hill Jr., then a lobbyist for a new aircraft carrier working with McCain, said: “He was going behind the back of the secretary of the navy. It is as simple as that.”
McCain said in his e-mail message that he had found his navy job “rewarding and fascinating until my last day of service,” but his former colleagues say that by 1980 they knew he was wrestling with his future. “There was always this question, ‘Didn’t he want to be an admiral like his father and grandfather?’” Hastings recalled. “He would say, ‘I don’t think that is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’”
Navy psychiatrists offered another explanation. McCain had long struggled to escape “the shadow of his father,” P.F. O’Connell wrote in McCain’s navy file after his return from Vietnam. But his hero’s homecoming had liberated him, bringing a “smile of fulfillment and relief” when he first heard Admiral McCain introduced as “Commander McCain’s father.” O’Connell wrote: “He had arrived.”
Finally, in the spring of 1981, McCain told his father that he was leaving the navy.
His Senate friends were already moving to assist McCain’s new career. Cohen encouraged him to look away from his previous home in Florida and toward Arizona. His new wife came from a prominent family there, a safe Republican House seat was expected to open up, and Senator Barry Goldwater was expected to retire soon.
Tower did more than anyone else to help. He lent McCain his fund- raising consultant, raised money for him and enlisted one of Arizona’s most popular Republicans to endorse McCain over two more experienced primary candidates. “Whatever I asked him for, he gave without hesitation,” McCain recalled.
He won his House seat in 1982, a year after he left the navy, and his Senate seat four years later. Tower retired in 1985, but their paths crossed again when the Texan was nominated to be secretary of defense by President George H.W. Bush. The influential Christian conservative organizer Paul Weyrich accused Tower of public drunkenness and philandering, imperiling his confirmation. A chorus of others echoed the charges.
McCain was stunned at the Senate’s outrage. Leaping to his mentor’s defense, McCain denounced Weyrich as a holier-than-thou hypocrite, scrambled to discredit the charges and exploded in fits of rage at colleagues. At Tower’s defeat, McCain choked back tears.
“God bless you, John Tower,” he said from the Senate floor. “You’re a damn fine sailor.”
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.