Allan Drury, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Advise and Consent, said that life in politics, specifically the United States Senate, was a life capable of honor.
Those are the words I thought of when I learned that John McCain had died. I only interviewed him once, in 2002, two years after he had lost his Republican primary battle with George W. Bush. He seemed simultaneously intense and weary, and the physical effects of his torture were more visible in person than they were on television.
I remember asking him if he thought he’d run six years later, after George W. Bush’s two terms, and he said, a bit wistfully, that he thought he’d be too old. He wasn’t, of course, and he did finally win that nomination, but ran into a force of nature called Barack Obama.
The economy was tumbling into recession, and probably no Republican could have won that year. But he gave it his best shot. He had to have known he would lose, and he gave the best concession speech I have ever heard.
Then he went back to his job in the U.S. Senate. The day after his first surgery for the brain cancer he knew would kill him, he returned to address his fellow senators and tell them bluntly what they were doing wasn’t working, wasn’t serving the people.
“We are getting nothing done,” he repeated.
He could have easily have been some magnificent senator from ancient Rome warning that the Republic was in danger. Perhaps the thing I admired most about John McCain was his ability to admit that he wasn’t perfect, and was sometimes wrong.
After he lost the South Carolina primary to Bush, McCain admitted he hadn’t been honest when asked what he thought about the Confederate battle flag flying over that state’s Capitol. He said he knew it was a symbol of racist oppression, but was afraid he would have lost if he answered honestly. He avoided answering and lost anyway.
But he admitted it. McCain was a fighter jock, with a daredevil’s strengths and weaknesses. That led to perhaps the worst mistake of his life, when he picked the totally unqualified Sarah Palin to be his running mate ten years ago.
It was a fighter jock move, a Hail Mary pass, and it cast great doubt upon his judgment. He later tacitly admitted he had been wrong, but in a circumspect manner, probably because he didn’t want to hurt his running mate’s feelings.
For me, the Republican Party lost my respect forever when it nominated for president a man who had said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.” Donald Trump was himself a draft dodger who couldn’t even remember what foot he had claimed had bone spurs. When he said that, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said “I unequivocally denounce him.” Yet Walker is a fawning supporter of Trump’s today.
“There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,” a spokesman for the National Republican Party said. But that man, Sean Spicer, went on to become Trump’s press secretary.
John McCain deserves all the tributes he is getting this week. But we are also honoring him because he was nothing like someone else.
And his memory reminds us of a now-vanished world in which we could never have imagined such a creature as President of the United States.
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