The Good Soldier

Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain certainly is a man of honor. But is he a man of principle?

Michael W. Lynch from the January 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Out of Annapolis, McCain became an aviator, a life for which the charismatic rebel seemed well suited. "I enjoyed shooting rockets and dropping bombs and shooting off guns," he told Esquire's Charles P. Pierce for a May 1998 article. "You're a young, single guy, and you go out and you fly for a couple of weeks, then you come in for a week and carouse like hell. Nobody deserves to get paid for that."

But McCain's life wasn't all bombs, booze, and babes. There were flying duties, which seemed rather hazardous for the young aviator. At advanced flight school, McCain's engine died one afternoon and he found him-self at the bottom of Corpus Christi Bay. He flew into power lines over Spain and, returning to Mississippi from an Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, was forced to eject from his plane when its engine failed. He made the front page of The New York Times on July 31, 1967, when a renegade rocket ignited his Skyhawk's fuel tank while he was preparing to take off from the carrier Forrestal. The fire engulfed the Forrestal, killing 134 sailors--the worst disaster at sea since World War II. The accident was caused, military officials believe, by an electrical malfunction in a nearby plane, which launched a rocket on the ship's deck. McCain seemed to have bad luck around planes, but good luck escaping his bad luck. That was about to end.

On October 26, 1967, McCain was shot down over North Vietnam. Fished out of Trucbach Lake by North Vietnamese soldiers, he was escorted to Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, commonly referred to as the "Hanoi Hilton," the most famous institution in the North Vietnamese prison system, in which he would spend the next five and a half years. He refused early release, which would have violated the military's Code of Conduct for American Fighting Men. The code requires soldiers to accept release only on a first-in-first-out basis. With legs and arms broken beyond the ability of North Vietnamese doctors to repair, McCain could have justified an early exit based on medical necessity, and he considered it. But knowing this would have been a huge propaganda coup for the North Vietnamese--his father at the time was commander-in-chief of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe and in less than a year would be put in charge of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific--he decided to stay.

And like other American POWs housed at the Hanoi Hilton, he paid his rent with brutal beatings. Writes Timberg: "He was moved to another cell where his arms, battered, broken, and bruised in one way or another since the day he was shot down, were lashed behind his back, then cinched tightly together to intensify the pain. He was left on a stool. Throughout the night, guards came in, asked him if he was ready to confess, then smashed their fists into him when he told them no.

"The next several days fell into a harrowing routine. The ropes came off in the morning. Beatings were administered throughout the day, usually by one guard, sometimes two. On occasion two guards would hold him up while a third hammered him senseless. At night, the ropes were reapplied."

McCain may have been a lifelong petty-rebel playboy, but when his moment came--five and a half years of moments--he acquitted himself with honor. McCain was broken once and signed a confession, an act which plunged him into despair. But in this McCain was no different from other POWs.

His record naturally impresses people, and it distinguishes McCain from political figures with less dramatic pasts. "People can talk real tough. They can say the right things," says Marshall Wittmann, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition and a McCain enthusiast. "But when the test came in his life, he not only passed it, but he passed it with incredible valor that very few people can match." Says Swindle, "When it came time to measure up, he measured up."

The question for an aspiring president, or an influential senator, is whether personal honor and physical courage are an adequate substitute for political principle. The United States is not an aristocracy but a modern republic. Its political officials do not lead personally loyal troops into battle. They create the impersonal rules that, if lawmakers do their work well, allow a free society to flourish.

McCain, by contrast, seems primarily interested in making government conform to his ideals of personal virtue. The appearance of corruption offends his sense of honor, making him above all a proponent of "good government." He led the charge for the 1996 Senate gift ban, which restricted the freebies senators and their staff could accept from individuals and organizations. He employed a person, dubbed "the ferret," who combed through bills looking for pork-barrel projects. The ferret has moved on, but McCain staffers still analyze each appropriation bill for pork, posting the results on his Web page. "He's a pork buster," says Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, which scores McCain's lifetime voting record at 87 percent. "He's even protested pork in his own state."

Most recently, McCain voted against the 1999 budget bill, denouncing it on the Senate floor as
a "betrayal of our responsibility to spend taxpayers' dollars wisely." Earlier in 1998, he voted against the monstrous highway bill, which was loaded up with more than 2,000 special projects--more than four for each congressional district. He labored for a decade on the line-item veto, a good-government tool that the Supreme Court just returned to the shed. He's quick to point out--right after saying, "I'm not a conventional politician" and just before adding, "not a popular position in Iowa"--that he opposes ethanol subsidies.

Like other good-government types, McCain hates special interests. He voted against the 1996 telecommunications act--the only Republican to do so--because special interests "driving that train" had made it too regulatory. Hating special interests, however, does not necessarily mean hating regulation.

Cut to Big Tobacco. It's in the tobacco legislation that McCain's sense of "principle" shines through. He was assigned the task, so he did his duty in crafting legislation that could make it to the Senate floor. The anti-tobacco bill was about good government: McCain appears genuine in his belief that tobacco use foists a $50-billion-a-year tab on taxpayers. It was about honesty: Says McCain, "They lied to Congress and the American people." It was about children: "Three thousand kids start smoking every day, 1,000 will die early," McCain would chant anytime a television camera was near. It was about what the experts say is best: "It wasn't my views I was articulating; they were the views of every expert in America," McCain told a National Health Council audience in July. Add McCain's work ethic to this mix--the ethic that put him in the Senate less than six years after he first moved to Arizona--and you get a committed anti-tobacco warrior.

McCain's focus on campaign finance reform is also easy to understand. Ask people what's the first thing that comes to mind when they hear McCain's name, and they are likely to say "maverick," "POW," "independent," or "war hero." They aren't likely to say what McCain fears the most: "Keating Five."

McCain was close to Charles H. Keating Jr., the savings and loan swindler who gave generously to politicians and then sought their help. From 1982 to 1988, McCain collected more than $100,000 of Keating's cash for his campaign funds and vacationed with Keating several times, flying on Keating's jet to the Bahamas. McCain's second wife and father-in-law invested $359,000 with Keating in a shopping center.

McCain attended the two infamous April 1987 meetings in the office of then-Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) where Keating's business dealings were discussed with banking regulators. Although McCain didn't seek any favors for his former friend, he was still implicated in the scandal: all that money, the vacations, and the meetings. He was the only Republican involved, and there was no way the Democrat-controlled Senate would absolve him early, thereby losing the veneer of bipartisan scandal.