To Current Biography

John S. McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona

In 1982, only one year after he settled in Arizona, John S. McCain rose from relative obscurity to win the first of two terms as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 1986 he was elected to the Senate to succeed the retiring senator Barry M. Goldwater. McCain's popularity stemmed in large part from his heroism during the Vietnam War, for McCain holds the unenviable distinction of being the most severely injured pilot ever to withstand the rigors of a North Vietnamese prison camp. The strength of character that he displayed in surviving over five years as a prisoner of war, often tortured and most of the time in solitary confinement, and his ability to put the remnants of his life back together so quickly after that ordeal, won the admiration of Arizonans. Although proud of his service in Vietnam and grateful for the impetus it has given his political career, McCain prefers not to dwell on it. “I don't want to be the POW senator,” he told Susan F. Rasky for the New York Times (August 9, 1988). “What I've tried to do is position myself so that if opportunities come along, I'm qualified and ready.”

Now in his fourth term in the U.S. Senate, McCain sees his mission, according to the Web site for his 2004 reelection campaign, as being to “make government smaller and reduce federal spending, so American families have the freedom to chart their own course and small business can create new opportunities.” Despite such traditionally Republican goals, he has ruffled the feathers of the more conservative elements in his party with his refusal to toe the line on a number of issues and with his insistence on pushing through campaign-finance reform. Indeed, McCain is, according to the Economist (June 18, 2005), “every American liberal’s favourite Republican”so much so that Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, courted McCain as a potential running mate. McCain, who lost to George W. Bush in his 2000 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, has remained noncommittal regarding his plans for the 2008 race. Many observers, however, view his recent triumph in passing anti-torture legislation, despite resistance from the White House, as an indication that he may have the cachet with moderates in both major parties to pull off a victory in the next presidential election.

John Sidney McCain 3d was born on August 29, 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone to John S. McCain Jr. and Roberta (Wright) McCain. He comes from a long line of military commanders dating back to Captain William Young, an ancestor who served on the staff of General George Washington during the American Revolution. His paternal grandfather, Admiral John S. McCain, was commander of all the aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II. His father, also an admiral, was commander in chief of all United States armed forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. The two were the first father and son in navy history to become full admirals. McCain has a sister, Jean (McCain) Flather, and a younger brother, Joseph Pinckney McCain.

McCain grew up at various naval bases in the United States and abroad with the assumption that he would follow in the family's military tradition. On graduating from Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1954, he entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Although his grades as an electrical-engineering student there were satisfactory, he drew so many demerits for breaking curfew and other infractions that he graduated fifth from the bottom of the class of 1958. He was commissioned an ensign and, despite his low class standing, was granted his request for a training slot as a navy pilot.

During the Vietnam War, McCain flew carrier-based attack planes on dangerously low-altitude bombing runs against North Vietnamese positions. On July 29, 1967 he was sitting in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk awaiting takeoff from the deck of the carrier Forrestal when his fuel tank was struck by an errant rocket from one of the other bombers. The resulting chain of explosions and fire killed 130 crewmen and disabled the ship. McCain, who somehow escaped without serious injury, promptly requested transfer to the carrier Oriskany while the Forrestal underwent repairs.

Less than three months later, on October 26, McCain, by then a lieutenant commander, took off from the Oriskany on his 23d air mission, his first against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Directly over the city, the aircraft's right wing was sheared off by a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile, and McCain was forced to eject. He plunged into a lake, breaking both arms and his right leg. Fished out by Vietnamese onlookers, he was dragged ashore before an angry crowd of thousands that had by then gathered at the crash site. There, he was beaten and stabbed twice before being taken into custody. For five days he was denied medical attention, but when authorities learned that his father was a high-ranking naval officer, he was taken to a hospital and assigned a cellmate to nurse him back to health.

Five months later McCain, though weak, was able to get about on crutches. His cellmate was removed, and McCain spent the next three and a half years in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese, who tried to exploit the status of McCain (whom they called the “crown prince”) and his father for propaganda purposes, offered to release him ahead of the other prisoners in a grand ceremony meant to influence world opinion. When McCain refused to cooperate, he was severely beaten, an incident that he has described as the low point of his captivity. He was similarly mistreated for trying to communicate with other prisoners through an improvised wall-tapping code. Extremely malnourished, given just a single daily ration of noodles, some of which was eaten by his guards, he lost more than a third of his weight in prison. Throughout his confinement he was denied all mail and was permitted only once to write a brief postcard home.

In 1971 McCain was transferred from solitary confinement to a cell with 50 other prisoners, but though he was grateful for the company, conditions remained all but unbearable. Months later the men staged a riot, for which some of them, including McCain, were punished at a harsher facility outside Hanoi. The most difficult part of captivity, McCain has said, was not the physical abuse but the psychological strain and the uncertainty of his fate. Because he was deprived of news from the outside, he rode a roller coaster of emotions with each unfounded rumor of imminent release.

On March 17, 1973, two months after the cessation of hostilities, McCain and the other prisoners were turned over to U.S. authorities. When he underwent medical treatment at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and, later, in Jacksonville, Florida, it was obvious to observers that the years of captivity had taken their toll. Although he was only 36 years old, his hair had turned white. Once a robust 160 pounds, he then weighed about 100. Racked by arthritis and deformed joints, he could no longer bend his right knee, raise his right arm above a 45-degree angle, or elevate his left shoulder. Yet despite the permanent disabilities and the long years of torture and solitary confinement, McCain emerged from the war remarkably sound of mind. “Perhaps it has made me more sensitive to the underdog than I otherwise would have been,” he said in an interview with Susan F. Rasky of the New York Times (August 9, 1988). “I know what it is like to be humiliated and degraded. But I don't think it made any change in my basic character.” For his wartime service, he was awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and other decorations.

After spending four months in recuperation, McCain enrolled at the National War College in Washington, D.C., but he longed to fly again. Through sheer determination he passed the rigorous flight physical and returned to the skies for two years as commander of a training squadron. In 1977 he was promoted to captain and reassigned to the Department of the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs, where he served as director of the Navy Senate Liaison Office. Over the next four years, he made extensive legislative contacts and struck up lasting friendships with such politically diverse senators as the Republicans John G. Tower of Texas and William S. Cohen of Maine and the Democrat Gary Hart of Colorado. By 1981 it had become obvious that his ultimate goal of commanding an aircraft carrier was now out of his reach. No longer able to pass the flight physical, he retired from the United States Navy.

Upon his discharge McCain accepted a job offer from his father-in-law, Jim Hensley, a beer distributor in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1982 a vacancy in Arizona's First Congressional District, a solidly Republican region comprising the greater Phoenix area, was created with the retirement of Congressman John J. Rhodes. Although McCain had been living in Arizona for less than a year, he entered the Republican primary against three seasoned contenders. Since early polls revealed that 97 percent of the people in the district had never heard of him, McCain devoted as many as 30 hours a week to knocking on some 16,000 doors in the Phoenix area. His opponents denounced him as a carpetbagger, a new resident unfamiliar with the state. Although that charge has been effective from time to time in states where many voters are life residents, it counts for considerably less in Arizona, which since World War II has attracted millions of Americans from out-of-state. Quickly silencing his critics, McCain pointed out that having been born into a navy family and having been a career naval officer himself, he never really had a home state. “The longest place I ever lived was Hanoi,” he said, pointedly reminding voters of his war record. With fund-raising assistance from his friend Senator John Tower and the dedication of a hustling corps of volunteers, McCain topped the four-man field with a third of the vote and went on to defeat the Democrat William E. Hegarty by a two-to-one margin in the general election. In 1984 he ran for reelection unopposed in the primary and buried his Democratic opponent, Harry W. Braun 3d, taking 78 percent of the vote to Braun's 22 percent.

During his four years in the House, McCain consistently won high marks from conservative groups, earning a perfect 100 rating from the National Security Index of the American Security Council in 1984. He joined Newt Gingrich of Georgia and other young “new Right” Republicans in clashing with Thomas P. (“Tip”) O'Neill, the Speaker of the House. On the House floor he voted in support of prayer in public schools, the 1985 Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction package, the 1986 tax-reform act, continued tobacco subsidies, a resumption of certain handgun sales, and the continued use of the polygraph as a condition for employment under certain circumstances. He opposed the Equal Rights Amendment for women, increased funding to implement the Clean Air Act, trade protection for the textile and apparel industries, the 1983 domestic content bill restricting the use of foreign parts in American automobiles, and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. In foreign affairs, he opposed the 1983 nuclear-freeze resolution and approved funding for the research and development of the MX missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative, increased aid to El Salvador, and arms for the Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua and the pro-Western guerrillas in Angola.

Although on those and most other issues, McCain fell in line with the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan, he did not hesitate to oppose the administration on certain critical matters. In a major floor speech in 1983, for example, McCain called for the withdrawal of all United States Marines from Lebanon. In 1986 he joined the two-thirds majority in voting to override President Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa, whose black majority then suffered under a brutal system of racial segregation. Although he supported the Contra rebels, he urged the administration to abandon its effort to overthrow the Marxist-led Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and instead focus its resources on encouraging the democratic process there. In 1987 McCain exposed and thwarted an administration attempt to remove $28 million from an antipoverty food program to pay for a salary increase for Agriculture Department employees. He criticized the administration's handling of the Iran-Contra affair (in which officials had illegally diverted to the Contras money from the sale of arms to Iran), though he blamed both Congress and the White House for failing to work more closely on a coordinated foreign policy, and he empathized with his fellow Vietnam veteran Oliver North, a central figure in the scandal. “Some of these people like Ollie North,” he explained to Michael Killian for the Chicago Tribune (July 29, 1987), “who saw their comrades and friends spill blood and die on the battlefields in a war that they believe the politicians wouldn't let them win--I think that leads to a mind-set which could rationalize deviating from the established rules and regulations.”

Because of his own wartime experience, McCain was active in pressing the Hanoi government to provide more information about those American servicemen still reported as missing in action (or MIAs) from the Vietnam War era. While condemning the Vietnamese government for cynically using MIA information as a bargaining chip to win United States diplomatic recognition and aid in rebuilding the country, he privately urged the Reagan administration to restore low-level relations between the two nations. After his election to the Senate, in 1986, however, McCain became more outspoken in his criticism of the Reagan administration’s approach to Vietnam, and in the early 1990s, while serving on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, McCain worked closely with Democratic senator and fellow veteran John Kerry to investigate claims that Vietnam still detained American prisoners of war. After years of lobbying on McCain’s part, the U.S. normalized relations with Vietnam on July 11, 1995.

In 1985 McCain accompanied the CBS news broadcaster Walter Cronkite to Vietnam for a special program marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. While there, he warned authorities in Hanoi that resolution of the MIA issue was a precondition to resumption of diplomatic ties. He came away convinced that the dire state of the Vietnamese economy and the people's longstanding fear of the Chinese were prompting Hanoi to seek improved relations with the West. In one poignant episode, McCain and Cronkite returned to the Hanoi lake where the veteran had crashed 18 years earlier. To his surprise, the Vietnamese had erected a monument bearing the likeness of a kneeling American soldier with his arms held up in surrender and an inscription marking the spot where “the famous air pirate” John McCain was shot down. Recognizing him instantly, a gathering crowd began chanting his name as though he were a celebrity. Only in Hanoi, McCain joked, was he more famous than Walter Cronkite.

By 1986 McCain had become so popular among Arizona Republicans that he ran unopposed in the Senate primary for the seat long held by Barry Goldwater, who had announced plans to retire. Early polls gave McCain a comfortable lead over his Democratic opponent, Richard Kimball, but the race tightened somewhat after McCain upset the state's large elderly population with an offhand remark referring to the retirement community of Leisure World as “Seizure World.” Moreover, McCain became unnerved by Kimball's charge that his votes on national-security matters were influenced by campaign contributions from the political action committees of defense-related industries. But McCain, outspending Kimball by three to one, recovered to win handily, by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent. Senator McCain was assigned to the Senate Armed Services Committee and its subcommittees on manpower, projection forces, and readiness; the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and its subcommittees on aviation, communications, and consumer affairs; and the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs.

McCain was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1988, and was reportedly among those considered as a possible running mate with George Herbert Walker Bush. Although McCain was not enthusiastic about the eventual vice-presidential nominee, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, he defended Quayle's Vietnam Warera service in the National Guard. “I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to foster an atmosphere of reconciliation in this country and to get people to move beyond the hurts and the scars of that time,” he told R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times (October 25, 1986). “Now we're threatened, because of the Quayle episode, with another round of finger-pointing, veiled accusations, biography-checking. . . . There's nothing to be gained by going back over that ground.” McCain was a part of the Republican “truth squad” that kept a close critical watch on the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, early in the campaign. Meanwhile, he criticized his own party for not reaching out more effectively to African-Americans or to the poor.

In 1989 McCain was accused, along with four other senators, of trying to shield a campaign donor from a federal investigation into one of the largest-ever savings-and-loan scandals. Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan, was under investigation for illicit financial dealings, which had ruined his institution and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion in a federally funded bailout. McCain had received nine free trips to the Bahamas and $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating, and shortly after the 1986 election, the senator attended two meetings with savings-and-loan regulators on behalf of the embroiled financier, who was later convicted and served jail time. Investigations and hearings into the scandal lasted for four years; the other senators involvedJohn Glenn, Donald W. Riegle Jr., Dennis DeConcini, and Alan Cranstonwere all Democrats, and while McCain was the least culpable of what became known as the “Keating Five,” the Democrats on the Senate Ethics Committee did not want to exonerate him unless their party members were cleared as well. Eventually the committee chastised McCain for displaying poor judgment but stopped short of actually accusing him of any wrongdoing. He was the only senator of the five to be absolved.

McCain has said that his embarrassment over that scandal was more trying than what he endured during his imprisonment in Hanoi. Connie Bruck, writing for the New Yorker (May 30, 2005), theorized that the savings-and-loan episode marked a turning point in McCain’s career, in which he “learned how to use the press” and “developed an intense aversion to partisanship.” “He believed that he had been held hostage by the Democrats, and that his own party had not demanded his release,” she continued. “After that, he determined that he would take on fights over issues without regard to whether his opponents were Democrats or Republicans. And he decided that he would not merely apologize for his error in having sought to wield his influence on behalf of a generous contributor; he would also try to remake the system that encouraged such transgressions.” McCain came to believe that private funding of political campaigns was having a deleterious effect on public life. He held a particular disdain for porklegislation that yields rich benefits for campaign supporters and is usually attached to an unrelated bill shortly before the bill's passageand in 1991 he began agitating for campaign-finance reform. After the 1994 congressional elections, in which Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in four decades, he joined forces with the Democrat Russell Feingold of Wisconsin to begin drafting a bill for campaign-finance reform. The bill that the two senators introduced in 1997, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold bill, was treated by their colleagues at first as something of a joke. “We were like the guys who introduced the bill to convert to the metric system,” McCain told Michael Lewis for the New York Times Magazine (May 25, 1997). Most notably, the bill called for the elimination of “soft money,” donations that are made to the national party ostensibly for general purposes but are later redirected to specific campaigns, and a ban on “issue ads,” supposedly nonpartisan ads that actually advocate for or against a particular candidate.

In August 1999, apparently in preparation for his bid for the Republican presidential nominationwhich he formally announced in the following monththe senator published his first book, Faith of My Fathers. Co-written with his longtime aide, Mark Salter, the book relates the senator’s time in Vietnam to the wartime experiences of his father and grandfather. Writing for the National Review (September 27, 1999), Norman Geoffrey noted that McCain’s book was clearly intended as a campaign tool, but asked rhetorically, “Does this mean that it is necessarily a bad book? A self-serving book? A suspect book? Actually, none of the above. It is, as they say, a good read, which even registered Democrats and just about anyone on the political spectrum right of Jane Fonda would find engaging, sometimes funny, and often profoundly moving.” Assessing the book's usefulness for the senator's campaign, Evan Thomas wrote for Newsweek (September 13 1999), “The book amply demonstrates that McCain was a brave warrior and an honorable man. Whether it shows that McCain would make a good president is a more complicated question. . . . Many Americans would welcome a politician with the integrity to stand up to the hacks. As president, McCain would undoubtedly try to shake up the system, particularly campaign finance. But presidents, like senators, have to know when to compromise, and McCain has never been known as a dealmaker. . . . Still, McCain's character has withstood tests the average politician can only imagine.” (Faith of My Fathers was later made into a television miniseries, which aired on Memorial Day in 2005 on the cable network A&E and received four Emmy Award nominations.)

ThenTexas governor George W. Bush was favored to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, but McCainwhose platform included responsible tax cuts, a plan to use the budget surplus to pay down the deficit, and campaign-finance reformmade a strong showing in the upper Midwest during the primaries. After McCain pulled off an upset victory in the New Hampshire primary, cutting significantly into Bush’s lead in the polls, the governor’s team reportedly began to worry that he could not win without introducing a negative tone into the campaign. Gathering in South Carolina for the primaries in February 2000, they “decided to take the gloves off,” as Nancy Gibbs wrote for Time (February 14, 2000), quoting “a participant.” Voters in South Carolina received E-mail messages and found fliers on their windshieldsplanted by unidentified sourcesalleging that McCain was the father of an illegitimate, racially mixed child. (McCain’s wife, Cindy, had adopted a girl she met while on a relief mission in Bangladesh in 1991.) Other rumors circulated: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife a venereal disease; the senator was a “Manchurian candidate,” brainwashed during his detention in Hanoi to destroy the Republican Party; Cindy McCain was a drug addict (she did admit to pilfering prescription drugs from a relief agency for which she worked in 1994). Rumors were also spread through “push polling,” a practice in which people posing as pollsters call voters in order to spread false, damning information. “What happened in South Carolina is as bad as you’ve been told and worse,” the Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Connie Bruck. “Most of it was about campaign-finance reform and special-interest groupsthey were going to kill him before he got any stronger. It was sheer rumor demagoguery.”

Bush won the South Carolina primary by an 11-point margin, and McCain dropped out of the race shortly thereafter. Though he lost the nomination, McCain had gained nationwide exposure, and his candor earned him support from both registered Republicans and Democrats. According to Joshua Micah Marshall, writing for the American Prospect (December 18, 2000), McCain had “as solid a claim as any to credit” for the “Republicans’ unexpectedly strong showing” in elections for the House of Representatives in 2000, having traveled to make appearances in support of 50 Republican congressional candidates: “Even a cursory look at this year’s election map shows why McCain was a key factor. Republicans retained their majority in the House largely because of wins in a string of supercompetitive races stretching the broad arc from Michigan down into Pennsylvania and up into Connecticut. . . . Each of these candidates ran on McCain-like agendas, each ran in parts of the country where McCain was particularly popular, each got generous campaign assistance from the senator (often with widely publicized joint appearances in the campaign’s final days), and each pulled through by an exceedingly small margin.”

After the election, McCain decided to use his newfound political leverage in order to advocate for positions that were not popular with the Republican leadership. With the Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, he co-sponsored legislation to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. He also voted against Bush’s tax cuts, sponsored the Patients’ Bill of Rights, called for the president to ease restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, proposed legislation that would close a loophole in the law that allows people to purchase guns at gun shows without being subjected to background checks, refused to support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and criticized the administration’s handling of the postwar reconstruction in Iraq (though he had voted in support of the 2003 invasion). Nevertheless, he has consistently received high ratings for his legislative record from the American Conservative Union. “McCain really is a Republican,” Anthony Cordesman, who worked for McCain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, told Connie Bruck, explaining why McCain appeals to many registered Democrats. “One of the difficulties you have with someone that active who starts out on the right and often ends up in the middle is that people assumebecause of his pragmatic approachthat he agrees with them politically. But he does not.”

Though his allegiance may have lain with the GOP, McCain continued to frustrate his own party with his determination to pursue campaign-finance reform. “On most issues, Republican legislators have presented a solid phalanx to give the Bush administration whatever it wants,” Robert Kuttner wrote for the American Prospect (April 23, 2001). “The exception is campaign finance reformand the chink in the Republican armor is Arizona Senator John McCain.” In 2002, after years of stonewalling from the Republican leadership, McCain finally mustered enough supportmostly from Democratsto pass the McCain-Feingold bill: the House voted 240189 for the bill on February 14, and on March 20 the Senate approved the House’s version of the bill by a vote of 6040. President Bush signed the bill into law on March 27, 2002. Libertarians opposed the new regulations because, as they saw it, the restrictions limited not only private financing for campaigns but, in effect, free speech as well. The last attempt to reform campaign finance had been hobbled by just such an argument; the 1974 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley v. Valeo had virtually defined the right to contribute to campaigns as being part of free speech. After the bill’s passage, Senate majority whip Mitch McConnell challenged its legality in court, and in December 2003 the Supreme Court ruled on McConnell v. FEC, allowing most of the bill’s original provisions to stand.

In 2002 McCain also published his second book, Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir, another collaboration with Salter, in which the senator combined autobiographical sketches with musings on figures that he admiresincluding Ernest Hemingway, whose novel For Whom the Bell Tolls contains the passage that supplied the book’s title. In her review for the New York Times (October 3, 2002), Janet Maslin wrote that though McCain had collaborated with an “auxiliary author,” the book does not read as if he did, since it presents the “emphatic, familiar voice of a strongly outspoken public figure eager to announce his guiding ideals.” Russell Baker, writing for the New York Review of Books (October 24, 2002), characterized the memoir as being less a political move than a book about self-discovery: “McCain has clearly advanced to a new stage of his career. Now he no longer feels compelled to be discreet about his discontent with conservative domination of his party. Personal dislikes and policy disagreements with party leaders are voiced in remarkably plain speech. . . . It is the work of someone who has found out, rather late in life, who he is and what he truly believes. Self-discovery seems to give him the nerve to speak with a candor rare among politicians. The result is a book packed with extraordinary indiscretions for a still-practicing politician.” In one passage in the book, McCain, who was suffering from skin cancer at the time, admitted to wondering whether it was time for him to withdraw from public life, fueling speculation that he planned to retire. Nevertheless, McCain sought reelection to the Senate in 2004 and won with more than 76 percent of the vote.

Despite his uneasy relationship with the president, McCain supported Bush's reelection campaign, in 2004. In an election season that was considered to be particularly divisive, McCain’s influence with moderate and undecided voters was highly valued by both parties; both Bush and Kerry used his image in their television ads. Kerry even asked McCain to join his ticket as the vice-presidential candidate; a CBS News poll released in June 2004 showed that while Kerry held a slight lead over Bush, a Kerry-McCain ticket would enjoy a lead of 14 percentage points over the Bush-Cheney ticket. Nonetheless, the senator remained loyal to his party, appearing at more than 20 events to stump for the president.

In Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life (2004), also co-written with Mark Salter, McCain suggested that “the definition of courage has been stretched thin in contemporary parlance, where it can be applied to acts as insignificant as cutting or not cutting one's hair,” according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly (February 9, 2004), who noted that with this slim meditation, the senator hoped “to return to the word's fundamental meaning not just of ‘the capacity for action despite our fears’ but self-sacrifice for the benefit of others as well as for oneself.” McCain cited as an example of that quality the valor exhibited by American soldiers on the battlefield, and also related tales of the Navajo leaders Manuelito and Barboncito, the Jewish freedom fighter and writer Hannah Senesh, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, and the congressman John Lewis, who was involved in the civil rights movement. “These compelling life stories stand up against the best passages of McCain's previous works,” the reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote. “Alas, his writing becomes more vague and less interesting when he shifts to a more abstract discussion of the need for courage in the postSeptember 11 era. One of McCain's greatest strengths as a writer has been that he doesn't sound like just another politician, and while the drop-off in quality here isn't significant, it is noticeable.”

McCain and Salter’s most recent collaboration, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember (2005), discusses 34 notable individuals, including George Washington, Sojourner Truth, Queen Elizabeth I, and Mother Teresa, each representing a particular quality that McCain admires. E. J. Dionne Jr. described the book for the Washington Post (December 11, 2005, on-line) as “a series of morality tales pitched at America's youth,” in which the primary moral is that “everything depends on the capacity of human beings to will themselves to transcend their egos.”

In 2005 McCain proposed what would become known as the McCain amendment, which sought to bar any Americanwhether a civilian or a member of the militaryfrom treating detainees in a cruel, inhumane, and degrading manner. The proposal came in the aftermath of reports of mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. troops in Iraq and elsewhere and the more recent revelation that the U.S. was running secret prisons in Europe and Asia, where CIA agents were authorized to practice torture. McCain's measure was backed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate, but the White House fought against the measure for months, despite increasing pressure both at home and abroad. Vice President Richard B. Cheney was the most vocal opponent of the measure, meeting with McCain to try to persuade him to accept an exemption for CIA operatives. Though McCain refused to make such concessions, the administration signed the bill on December 15, 2005, after the senator offered a provision that would allow those accused of torturing detainees to defend themselves against charges by arguing that a “reasonable person” could have thought that his or her actions were legal. (The White House later released a “signing statement” indicating that the executive branch would interpret the new law as it saw fit.) According to editors of the Economist (December 16, 2005), McCain’s position as a potential presidential candidate in 2008 was strengthened by that victory: “Mr. McCain is often called a Republican Maverick who cannot win the conservative base necessary to get the Republican nomination. But the big majorities he won in Congress for his amendment show that Mr. Bush and his administration no longer have the lock on the party they once did.”

John McCain 3d stands five feet nine inches tall and is somewhat overweight. He was first diagnosed with skin cancer in 1993 and had two tumors removed in 2000, which left a scar on his neck, where skin was removed for a graft on his left temple; he currently visits his dermatologist every three months. The senator has been described as affable and unassuming, quick to laugh, and possessed of an irreverent sense of humor; he likes to do impressions of his fellow politicians. He also grows impatient easily and struggles to check his temper. In 1965 he married his first wife, Carol, and adopted her two sons, Douglas and Andrew. The couple had a daughter, Sidney Ann, before their divorce, in 1980. Later in the same year McCain married Cindy Hensley, with whom he has four children, Meghan, Jack, Jimmy, and Bridget. The senator has four grandchildren.