Reason Writers Around Town: Matt Welch on Why McCain Really is a Hero

October 20, 2008

Write a critical book about John McCain, and you will soon become a repository of many colorful rumors. These come in three general flavors: 1) Did you hear about his terrible temper? (The subject did come up, yes.) 2) Did you know he likes the ladies? (Fred Thompson invoked "Marie, the Flame of Florida" at the Republican National Convention, so, yes.) And, most popularly, 3) He wasn't really a hero in Vietnam at all; also, I think they did something funny to his brain there.

The answer to that last rumor, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is that that dog won't hunt.

Rolling Stone magazine this month came up with one of the best-sourced versions of the he's-no-hero argument, and by best-sourced I mean the article quoted one fellow ex-POW on the record as saying that "he wasn't exceptional one way or another." From there, the author went on to conclude that, for McCain in Hanoi, the military Code of Conduct, by which prisoners of war were supposed to abide, "went out the window."

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Times.