McCain’s Course Hasn’t Been Straight or Narrow

Maybe it was the late hour or the way the swarm of people had waited patiently, fervently, in the cool night air as he made his way to the rally at the town firehouse. John McCain could only give in to the wonder of it all.

“This is the noblest experience in the world. . . . It’s marvelous and I can’t tell you how uplifting it is,” McCain softly told the crowd at yet another rally, speaking of his roller-coaster presidential effort.

“I seize every moment, every moment I can, to be in this campaign. . . . In my darkest days, long ago and far away, I never, ever believed that I would have this golden opportunity.”

It was a fleeting reminder of the time he spent, long ago and far away, as a Navy pilot held prisoner in North Vietnam. As he said it, past and present merged, the glory of the presidential campaign he now wages suffused with the indignities he once suffered. It was fitting, for more than any other presidential candidate in memory, that McCain’s past has defined his present and will go a long way toward determining his future.

McCain bridles at the notion that his time as a prisoner somehow characterizes him; ask him what has most influenced his life and his response could be anyone’s: school, his parents, his various jobs. Indeed, although his Vietnam years built the platform for his presidential campaign, they are but the best-known period in a life that foreshadows the arc of his candidacy--epic highs, thundering lows and an effusive McCain soundtrack every step of the way.

In his 63 years, the Arizona senator has survived three airplane crashes, a randy reputation even by fighter pilot standards, more than five years in a POW camp, a divorce of his own making, a career-threatening Senate scandal, a legislative record marked more by loss than victory and the outright animosity of many of his colleagues. And today he is running for president with that astonishingly fallible biography as his weapon.

In some ways, his maverick flamboyance is skin deep. While he revels in its imagery as much as anyone, he is at heart a man who has always known which line he would not cross. He may have rebelled to the brink of banishment from the Naval Academy, but he graduated nonetheless. He may have dated “Marie, the Flame of Florida,” an exotic dancer, but he settled down to a conventional life of marriage and children. He may be running as a Pied Piper of reform, but his politics are firmly conservative.

But risk is still his occasional companion. In a few short months, with charm and insults, candor and raffishness, he has managed to set the rarefied world of presidential politics on its ear by manhandling the Republican front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Once again, he is pushing the envelope.

John McCain defines himself: “One who doesn’t mind getting up on the high wire and doesn’t mind fighting.”

Drafted on Day He Was Born

He was drafted on the day he was born, in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was serving in the Navy. John Sidney McCain III, the namesake son and grandson of acclaimed admirals, heir to a military lineage that dates to 17th century Britain, never considered any other calling.

From his mother, he got prematurely white hair, the gift of charm and a manic embrace of life; at 88, Roberta McCain keeps a fire-engine red BMW in Europe to use during her regular jaunts there with her twin sister, Rowena. From his father, now dead, he got a rigid code of honor, a hellacious temper and a heroic image to measure himself against.

With his older sister and younger brother, he was firmly rooted in the rootless culture of the military, separate from the other kids in their many schools. It groomed an outsider.

When he got to his teens, McCain’s parents sought some stability for their oldest son by enrolling him at Episcopal High School, a boarding school in Alexandria, Va. If McCain was used to feeling apart, Episcopal hardened the sentiment.

“It was a very different culture, an Episcopal high school, all very prominent sons and members of very prominent Southern families,” McCain recalled. “I was the son of a naval officer. There was a certain culture shock.”

“I would fight at the drop of a hat. I was very defensive of my individuality, much too much so, no doubt about that.”

He perfected a James Dean insouciance. He won the nickname “Punk.” He defied the dress code. His yearbook printed a remembrance that would echo accurately 40 years later: “His magnetic personalty has won for him many lifelong friends. But as magnets must also repel, some have found him hard to get along with.”

After graduation, he set off for Annapolis.

From a civilian perspective, McCain’s transgressions there amount to little more than sloppy dress, an inability to properly make his bed and a penchant for searching out a good time. By the stiff standards of the Naval Academy, he was a hell-raiser.

He made his name early as a boxer. Among boys intimidated by demanding teachers and the hazing of upperclassmen, he retained a sense of himself.

“He just wouldn’t back down,” said his roommate, Jack Dittrick, now the vice dean of undergraduate programs for USC’s Business School. “He was very mature. He had been around the world. . . . He seemed to understand everything about the U.S. Navy.”

Ever the magnet, he commanded a varied batch of midshipmen who styled themselves “the Bad Bunch” and racked up demerits at a breathtaking pace. But Dittrick characterizes McCain’s behavior as simple rebelliousness.

“It is a very structured environment,” he explained. “Many people go in, accept the structure, abide by it and graduate. Others want a little bit of independence and, striving for that, push the boundaries so they don’t lose their identity. John fell into that . . . but he did know where the boundaries were.”

McCain’s mouth--and the extent to which he used it--set him apart from his fellow midshipmen. His roommates recall when McCain, barely out of his plebe year, witnessed a senior berating one of the academy’s dining stewards. While his colleagues were frozen in fear of taking on an upperclassman, McCain snapped at him: “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

The senior demanded McCain’s name. He got it, and, thinking the better of conflict, backed down. McCain shrugs off the anecdote as “just an obvious situation.”

“It wasn’t a profile in courage,” he said.

Ultimately, McCain both thrived at and barely tolerated Annapolis. He graduated fifth from the bottom of the class of 1958--but he had survived. Thirty-five years later, he was the guest speaker for the Class of 1993 graduation.

“America is a land of opportunity where anything is possible,” he drolly told the graduates. “And my being given this honor proves it.”

If Episcopal and Annapolis entrapped McCain, freedom came in the form of pilot training. Loosed from the moorings of the academy, he “drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties, and generally misused my good health and youth,” he recalled in his 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.”

At one point, he reminisced, he took up with a local girl who danced at a legendary Pensacola, Fla., bar. “Marie, the Flame of Florida,” as she was known, once accompanied McCain to a party given by a Navy pal.

“After a while, she must have become a little bored,” he wrote. “So, quietly, she reached into her purse, withdrew a switchblade, popped open the blade and, with a look of complete indifference, began to clean her fingernails.”

The frivolity ended soon enough.

Even in 1967, a year before Vietnam protests would plague a presidential campaign, the country debated its war. But for McCain, Vietnam was destiny.

“I didn’t go to war to prove myself,” he said. “I was affirming the profession that my entire family for generations was all about: serving my country’s cause.”

For a fighter pilot, there was no better place than Vietnam. But on his 23rd bombing run, he flew in over Hanoi. As he sighted his target, an alarm sounded in the cockpit, warning him that a surface-to-air missile was bearing down. He dropped his bombs. An instant later, his right wing exploded.

Broken Knee, 2 Broken Arms

For days, he languished in and out of consciousness. In ejecting from his plane, he had broken his right knee, his left arm and, in three places, his right arm. He was pulled from the lake where he landed by North Vietnamese civilians and carted off to prison. He was left to die, until his jailers discovered his lineage.

“Your father is a big admiral,” they said. “Now we take you to the hospital.”

Thus began his years of imprisonment, of beatings and deprivation and near starvation. Nearly half of his time would be spent in solitary confinement.

Nine months into his captivity, McCain was offered a chance to go home--a ploy by the North Vietnamese to embarrass McCain’s father, who was taking command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. He refused, insisting that the prisoners be released in the order of capture. In retaliation, McCain was beaten for four days until he confessed to being an “air pirate”--a capitulation he still sees as a sign of weakness.

Orson Swindle, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, was an imprisoned Marine pilot when he met McCain. McCain’s refusal of early release and his constant defiance of his captors were inspirational, Swindle said.

“It was a crucible,” he said of prison. “You come out a better person or you come out broken. . . . He is a man who is comfortable standing alone.”

Ultimately, in the spring of 1973, McCain and the others were released. Friends and family say the experience matured McCain, freeing him from the need to compete with his father and grandfather. “It condensed him and distilled him,” his younger brother, Joe, said.

In public, McCain offers only vague glimpses of his Vietnam years, never delving into details, usually dispensing of the subject with a self-deprecating line about how little talent it takes to intercept a missile. To others goes the glory: “I was privileged to serve in the company of heroes,” he always says.

‘Vietnam Changed Me in Significant Ways’

In his best-selling book, he was slightly more expansive. “Vietnam changed me, in significant ways, for the better,” he wrote. “I had made more than my share of mistakes in my life. In the years ahead, I would make many more. But I would no longer err out of self-doubt or to alter a fate I felt had been imposed upon me.”

Yet it is one of McCain’s failures that his code of honor, honed in Vietnam, shattered in his personal life. He had married Carol Shepp before he went overseas; he adopted her two sons, and together they had a daughter.

She waited for him loyally, a stalwart presence by his own reckoning. During his imprisonment, she survived a crippling car accident but refused to inform him, lest it add to his burden.

They were reunited in 1973 but by 1980 were divorced, after admitted affairs on his part. Neither will discuss the divorce. In Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song,” a harrowing yet uplifting look at McCain and four other Annapolis graduates, Carol McCain attributes the split to a midlife crisis; friends of McCain’s blame, in part, the dislocation he felt after Vietnam.

Shortly after the divorce, McCain married Cindy Hensley. He moved to her hometown of Phoenix, where they now live with their four children. And where, it turned out, politics beckoned.

A Biography and Wife’s Connections

He was armed with two sobering weapons: his biography and his new wife’s connections. (Her father owns the local Anheuser-Busch franchise.) In quick succession, he won two terms in the U.S. House. In 1986, he replaced Barry Goldwater in the Senate. But barely a year after he arrived, he blundered into his biggest crisis.

Charles H. Keating Jr., a powerful Arizona developer and donor to McCain, was tussling with federal regulators over his thrift, Lincoln Savings & Loan. McCain attended two meetings with four other senators and the regulators, who eventually seized the operation in one of the largest savings and loan failures of the 1980s. McCain took no action on behalf of Keating once he learned that regulators were investigating his political benefactor for wrongdoing. But the damage was done.

McCain and the others--the Keating Five--were probed by a special counsel, who recommended that McCain and then-Sen. John Glenn of Ohio be dropped from the investigation. They were not--largely for political reasons--and McCain ultimately was declared guilty only of “poor judgment.” It is a verdict he sanctions.

Of all his life’s mistakes, he said recently, he is most embarrassed about Keating.

“It will be on my tombstone, something that will always be with me, something that will always be in my biography,” he said. “And deservedly so.”

His brother said the experience visibly affected McCain, as much as his time in Vietnam. “There had been something shaken in him,” Joe McCain said. “He was used to trusting people. [In Vietnam,] close friends had to trust each other. And here was a guy [Keating] who had gotten in under that radar.”

The experience did, however, fuel his desire to reform the political finance system and thus led to the signal issue of McCain’s presidential campaign. It is not a subject that has endeared him to his colleagues.

Of his Senate peers, the overwhelming majority supports his opponent Bush. Some differ with his conservative politics. Some are put off by his temper. Some blanch when McCain battles the genteel formalities of the Senate as he once did the strictures of Annapolis.

One former Senate aide recalled McCain loudly cursing his boss after a routine vote. Curiously, he said, McCain’s outbursts seemed to come not when the pressure was on but when it was not. “My sense is, under pressure he’s the guy you’d want, actually,” he said.

McCain blames passion for his outbursts. And he has his defenders. Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat, said McCain uses anger for effect.

“I haven’t ever seen him do eggs over easy,” said Kerrey, a Vietnam veteran who was awarded the Medal of Honor. “He’s an omelet-breaker. . . . It’s not like you say, ‘Hi, John,’ and he blows up. It’s not like he’s getting signals coming from space. . . . I see it as a means to an end.”

Former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas Republican, believes much of McCain’s difficulty stems from his embrace of campaign reform and his embarrassing blasts about colleagues’ pork-barrel projects.

“He does what he thinks is right and to heck with who may or may not be with him,” said Kassebaum Baker, who encouraged McCain to make a presidential bid. “While that works well in some areas, in others it doesn’t. . . . I think he still has that fighter pilot attitude. To be a successful president, that has to be something he will mute a bit.”

Muted his campaign has not been. Bracing, perhaps. The magnet still repels and attracts.

In Los Angeles last year, he put off members of one audience when he defended his opposition to gun control--this at a Jewish gathering held just days after a gunman fired into a Jewish day care center. A few days ago in Michigan, he grew irritated when someone questioned his support for Native American rights. “First of all, you’re wrong,” he told his questioner.

114 Town Meetings in New Hampshire

But in New Hampshire, where he held 114 town meetings en route to an 18-percentage-point blasting of Bush on primary day, people flocked to him. In every state in which he has competed, voters have turned out in near-record numbers, a phenomenon that analysts credit at least in part to McCain’s appeal.

It is a campaign forever captive to his biography and personality. At many of his events, the stage is dominated by a larger-than-life picture of the young McCain in his flight suit, posed before his fighter. His face is confident, the travails of the future unimaginable.

In front of the picture, nearly four decades older, is the other John McCain. Stooped from his injuries, he exudes the same shoot-from-the-lip, tenacious panache of the fighter pilot. He blasts, he cajoles, he confesses, he crows. It is hard to imagine many other politicians admitting so willingly to their failures, enjoying so profoundly their victories or riding the roller coaster with so much flair.

“Every time I say some of these things they sound so Pollyannaish,” he good-naturedly complained the other day. “It’s been the greatest experience of my life. I’ve treasured every moment of it.”

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Profile:

John Sidney McCain

* Born: Aug. 29, 1936, in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, to Roberta and Navy Adm. John McCain

* Residence: Phoenix and Washington

* Education: U.S. Naval Academy, 1958. Naval War College, 1973-74

* Career highlights: U.S. Navy, 1958-81; prisoner of war in Vietnam, 1967-73. U.S. representative from Arizona, 1983-86. U.S. senator from Arizona, 1987 to present

* Family: Married since 1980 to former Cindy Hensley; seven children, three of them from first marriage