MCCAIN'S PARTY
CONNIE
BRUCK. The
New Yorker. New York: May
30, 2005.
Watched closely by a North Vietnamese guard, a dirty, feeble-looking young
man on crutches, carrying a slop bucket, inched forward in slow, painful steps,
and then, with a huge effort, hoisted the bucket, emptying it into an open,
fetid trough. As cameras whirred, the white-haired John McCain, standing a few
feet away, regarded this portrayal of his younger self intently. The Arizona
senator had come to New Orleans to visit the set of a movie based on his 1999
book, "Faith of My Fathers"--an account of growing up with a father
and grandfather who were both famous four-star admirals, and also of his
experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. It will be shown on the A&E
network on Memorial Day, with Shawn Hatosy starring. McCain remarked that the
set, based that day in a dilapidated former brewery, looked a lot like the
"Hanoi Hilton," where he spent most of his captivity: the
interrogation room with long ropes hanging from the ceiling; the wretched
infirmary cubicle; and the model hospital space, which the North Vietnamese
displayed to visitors. "I spent about one and a half hours there,"
McCain, who was a prisoner for five and a half years, commented dryly.
As he made his way around the set, members of the cast and the crew
surrounded him, asking him to sign copies of his book. A young Vietnamese actor
wearing a North Vietnamese military uniform told McCain that he was one of
twelve children and that his family had come to America when the war ended. At
first, they lived in a three-bedroom apartment with a single bathroom, but they
had saved money, and bought one house and then another, and today his family owns
seventeen houses. "What a story!" McCain exclaimed; moments later, he
was repeating it, word for word, to his longtime chief of staff, Mark Salter,
who wrote "Faith of My Fathers" with him. A young woman asked McCain
to sign a book for her father. "He said to tell you that he really hopes
you're going to be the next President," she said. "Tell him I said
thank you," McCain replied warmly, and wrote a lengthy inscription.
Accompanying McCain on this visit was Colonel George (Bud) Day, a leader of
the P.O.W.s at the Hanoi Hilton and one of the men whom McCain credits with
having saved his life. Day and a cellmate took care of McCain after he was put
in their cell. Day was also prominently featured in ads prepared by the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked Senator John Kerry's Vietnam service
last year. In one commercial, Day addressed himself to Kerry, asking, "How
can you expect our sons and daughters to follow you when you condemned their
fathers and grandfathers?" When McCain defended Kerry and denounced the
ads, Day was upset with his old comrade. "Something that made Bud such an
ideal leader in prison was his tunnel vision," McCain told me later.
"That makes him behave on the outside--well . . . " He trailed off,
chuckling. "But in prison there were guys who would listen to the
Vietnamese propaganda, they'd begin doubting their country. Not Bud! He's
straight tunnel vision, screw 'em! He didn't join in philosophical discussions
about whether the war, you know, was justified--and that's what you want in a
leader in that environment. Whereas the other guys, we used to call them the
political scientists, would sit around and discuss, 'Well, the Geneva
agreements, you know--' But the time to debate and discuss all that was before
you got shot down. Once you're in prison, then you're expected to adhere to the
Code of Conduct." It stipulated that prisoners were not to disclose any
significant information to their captors, and were to agree to be released only
in order of capture. Day refused to listen to the North Vietnamese propaganda
radio show featuring Hanoi Hannah, but McCain enjoyed it. As though reminiscing
about some picaresque adventure, McCain continued, "I used to love to
listen to Hanoi Hannah. Every once in a while, they'd play a decent song.
Somebody left a bunch of old Louis Armstrong records in Hanoi for some reason,
and if they played those it was great."
While visiting the set, McCain filmed an interview, to be used to publicize
the movie. The makeup that is applied for his TV appearances softens the long
scar that runs down one side of his face, from surgery he underwent nearly five
years ago for melanoma, a virulent form of skin cancer. Dressed in jeans,
boots, and a brown leather jacket, McCain, who is sixty-eight, looked like a
much older but still jaunty version of the dashing aviator he once was. As a
young man, he said, he had thought that all glory was self-glory, and that he
was so strong he could achieve whatever he wanted; but he learned in prison
that he was dependent on others. There he was the recipient of a thousand acts
of courage and compassion and love, even as other prisoners--including Bud
Day--"had it far, far worse than I ever did." And, yes, because his
father was commander-in-chief of the Pacific, the Vietnamese saw him as a
valuable propaganda asset (referring to him as "the crown prince")
and offered him early release--something that he turned down repeatedly.
The A&E
interviewer asked what relevance his story had to the present moment.
"We're in a war on terror," McCain responded readily. "We have
young Americans who are fighting and dying as we speak, and I would hope that,
by seeing the film, maybe they might be a little bit encouraged, and recognize
that what they are involved in is a very noble cause."
I asked McCain later whether he feels that he is especially well suited to
lead in these times. "I do believe that I have the qualifications to
address what is now the transcendent issue of our time," he said. He
pointed out that his highest priorities have always been national security,
armed forces, preparedness--"all of those issues that in earlier times may
not have been so important, particularly all through the nineties, when we
basically thought that, since the Cold War was over, we were just at
peace." His qualities and experience would be most pertinent, he said,
"as long as we face the threat that we do, which I think is going to be
for quite a long time."
Whenever McCain is asked if he is running for President, he responds that it
is too early to decide. But it appears to be the organizing principle of his
life these days, evident in his assertion of his leadership capabilities, his
positioning of himself, his relationship to President Bush, even his casual
asides. Many of McCain's friends comment that he is far more serious and
focussed than he has ever been, and that they rarely see the McCain they
knew--irrepressible, occasionally outrageous, impolitic.
But that character is not altogether obsolete. The moment the car stopped at
McCain's hotel in downtown New Orleans, he set out at his usual fast clip for
Harrah's, across the street. McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a close
friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they used to play craps in
Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing at the tables from 10 a.m. to
midnight. "Craps is addictive," McCain remarked, and he headed for
the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet tables. At the most obvious level, the game is
incredibly simple--players rotate turns throwing the dice, and you either win
or lose depending on what number comes up. But McCain's betting formula makes
it much more complicated. "Uh-oh!" he cried, as a player accidentally
threw the dice off the table. "This is a very, very superstitious
game," he said. When his turn came to throw the dice, he picked them up and
blew on them first. He had placed chips on the number 5, so (envisioning a
combination of 2 and 3) he called, "Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan!"
A few minutes before, McCain had tried to move closer to the table and another
player refused to make room. Now, suddenly, the man swung around, peered at
McCain, and exclaimed, "I just realized who you are! Here, take my
place." When McCain demurred, the man went on, "No, you've gotta take
it! I admire you so much! I wish you all the luck next time!" As he walked
off into the crowd, he muttered, "I just wish you'd run the last time,
instead of that other guy."
McCain's near-win in his contest with "that other guy" in the 2000
Republican Presidential primaries was the bright dividing line of his life. He
entered the field as someone who "had six-per-cent name I.D. and was No.
11 out of eleven guys," his former campaign manager, Rick Davis, said--and
he emerged a commanding political figure. Today, he appears to be the most
popular politician in the country. It was not the first time that McCain had
transformed a painful loss into something that augmented his stature and
influence. One of his favorite maxims is "When you go through it, either
it kills you or you come out stronger."
McCain's resilience was particularly conspicuous when he returned from
captivity in Vietnam, in 1973. Admiral Chuck Larson, who met McCain when they
were freshmen at the Naval Academy, in 1954, recalled that McCain then was the
rebel, with grades that placed him at the bottom of his class, and Larson the
high-achieving brigade commander and student-body president. "John used to
introduce me and say, 'The two of us together are in the middle of the class,'
" Larson said. "John was independent. He got tired of people
reminding him of his father and grandfather, and saying, You're not measuring
up." In flight school, in Pensacola, Florida, they roomed together.
"Like his mother, he was prematurely gray," Larson said. "So at
twenty-two he had salt-and-pepper hair--he could attract women from age
eighteen to fifty." Larson spent many weekends and summers at the McCain
home, in Washington, D.C. "John's mother was just a live wire, very
social, and his father was a more private, introspective person," he told
me. "He talked very directly to sailors, who loved him, but when he was at
home he was quiet." Larson smiled. "He always called me 'Godammit
Chuck Boy.' "
In 1969, more than a year after John was shot down, in a bombing mission
over Hanoi in October, 1967, Larson met with Admiral McCain at cincpac
headquarters, in Honolulu. He was there as a naval aide to President Richard
Nixon, who was to receive a briefing from McCain, and the Admiral summoned
Larson. "He sent everyone out of the room, and sat down and told me what
they knew about John, from all the intelligence reports they had. Tears welled
over the edges of his eyes--he was such a tough old guy. When he was done
telling me everything, he bit on a cigar. Didn't light it, just bit down. Then
he buzzed, and when the officer came in he said, 'This is Lieutenant Commander
Larson, give him whatever he needs, or there will be hell to pay.' And after
the officer left he said, 'Godammit Chuck Boy, that's why I like this job--you
buzz, they jump!' "
Larson saw McCain shortly after he was released, in March, 1973, at a party
that Ross Perot threw for the P.O.W.s in a hotel in San Francisco. "He was
much like his old self. When we first got together, he'd tell random stories,
but they were all the funny ones. John did not want to be a professional P.O.W.
That night, at the party, everybody started telling stories about their
incarceration. Not John. One guy had been shot down six weeks before their
release--when the Vietnamese were cleaning and fattening them up. Then he saw
John, and he said, 'I shouldn't be going on this way, I was there for six weeks
and you were there for five and a half years.' And John said, 'Oh, no--go right
ahead. The first six weeks were the toughest!' "
After divorcing his first wife, Carol, who had waited for him through the
years of his captivity, in 1980, McCain married Cindy Hensley, eighteen years
his junior, and the only daughter of a wealthy beer distributor. He eventually
moved to Arizona, where Cindy's parents lived, and became involved in
Republican politics. In 1982, he won a House seat and, four years later, Barry
Goldwater's Senate seat. It was a rapid, sure-footed climb, but a few months
after entering the Senate McCain stumbled. He attended two meetings with
savings-and-loan regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, Jr., a tycoon who was
a major supporter (and who came to personify the collapse of the S. & L.
industry, and went to prison). These meetings triggered Senate investigations,
hearings, and deliberations that dragged on for nearly four years. Of five
senators investigated, McCain was the only Republican; although it was clear
that he was less culpable than most of the others, Democrats on the ethics
committee refused to exonerate him unless the Democrats were exonerated as
well. In the end, McCain and Senator John Glenn received the lightest censures.
McCain has often remarked that the "public humiliation" of the
Keating Five investigation was harder to endure than his incarceration. From
the ordeal, though, he took lessons that came to define him as a very different
kind of politician.
He learned to use the press, in a way that was mutually beneficial. Gullett
said, "John's theory was 'I'm going to talk it to death. I don't have
anything to hide--I might have made a mistake, but this is what I thought. So
I'll answer every question.' That's him: Straight Talk Express! Let the press
on the bus!" McCain 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. 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. He
began to agitate for campaign-finance reform and to attack the appropriations
process and its weakness for "pork," or pet projects for legislators'
home districts. Some viewed this as a cynical attempt to trade in a soiled suit
of clothing for a knight's armor. Whatever his initial motivation, McCain has
been fighting for campaign-finance and pork reform for more than a decade.
Most Presidential contenders are drained by the demands of national
campaigning, but during the 2000 race McCain flourished. Ordinary life never
seems to afford him sufficient action or stimuli. To his staff people, his
favorite opener is "What's goin' on?" "I pick up the phone on
Christmas Eve--'What's goin' on?' " McCain's political adviser, John
Weaver, said, mimicking his boss. " 'Nothing, John. People are with their
friends and family. What's wrong with you?' " There was also a lighter
side, though less publicly visible. "He is really superstitious, so each
time something good happened we'd acquire these lucky things," Weaver
said. "A lucky rabbit's foot. A lucky pen. A lucky feather. Two lucky
rocks. A lucky football. We always had to have them around--I spent a lot of
time looking for them, once we got them. At night, when he unloaded his
pockets, he looked like a twelve-year-old Eagle Scout--all these rocks and
feathers." McCain seems most comfortable when he is doing many things at
once, and he found the perpetual motion of the campaign--and being the center
of attention--uniquely satisfying. He appeared at a hundred and fourteen
town-hall meetings during his campaign, sometimes four or five in a day.
("I love doing it--there's nothing I'd rather do," he told me, and
seemed to mean it.) He refused Secret Service protection, plunging happily into
the crowds.
McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire, in a nineteen-point upset, but
the storybook campaign ended when the Bush machine retaliated, in the infamous
South Carolina primary. McCain had hoped that South Carolina's large veteran
population would help him win there; but the Christian Coalition, deeply
entrenched in the state, became the decisive constituency. Somewhat
surprisingly, McCain had the support of Gary Bauer, the social conservative,
who had dropped out of the race by that time. "I wanted a commitment from
either George Bush or John McCain that if elected he would appoint pro-life
judges to the Supreme Court," Bauer told me. "Bush said he had no
litmus test, and his judges would be strict constructionists. But McCain, in
private, assured me he would appoint pro-life judges." Bauer's support,
however, was no match for the efforts of Pat Robertson--a fiery opponent of
McCain's efforts on behalf of campaign-finance reform, who, along with Ralph
Reed, rallied the Christian right to Bush. E-mails, flyers, faxes, postcards,
and phone calls inundated voters with information; many of the calls were made
through push-polls, where the caller's aim is not to collect information so
much as to spread it, and where the financial backing is difficult to uncover.
There were allegations that McCain had fathered a black child (he and Cindy
have an adopted daughter, Bridget, who is Bangladeshi); that McCain had
committed treason in Hanoi, or was crazed from his captivity. This subterranean
campaign was supplemented separately by attack ads and direct mail paid for by
the National Right to Life Committee, the National Rifle Association, Americans
for Tax Reform, and others. "What happened in South Carolina is as bad as
you've been told and worse," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina
Republican, who supported McCain in 2000 and witnessed the smear campaign, told
me. "Most of it was about campaign-finance reform and special-interest
groups--they were going to kill him before he got any stronger. It was sheer
rumor demagoguery."
It was in South Carolina, too, that McCain made the biggest mistake of his
campaign. In January, 2000, while he and Bush were fighting for New Hampshire's
primary voters, South Carolinians had become enmeshed in a debate about whether
the Confederate flag should be flown from the state capitol. Bush avoided
taking a position by saying that it should be decided by the people of South
Carolina. Two days later, on CBS's "Face the Nation," McCain was
asked what the Confederate flag meant to him. He said that the flag was
offensive "in many, many ways," and added, "As we all know, it's
a symbol of racism and slavery." Chuck Larson, who was campaigning for his
old friend, told me that when McCain stopped in Washington after that interview
he met him in the private area of the airport; John Weaver was there, too, and
McCain asked Weaver how he thought the interview had gone. Larson recalled,
"Weaver said, 'Terrible! You said the rebel flag is a symbol of racism and
slavery!' John said, 'It is!' 'Well, it's your race to lose!' Weaver said, and
stormed off. John let him go, and then he said, 'It's really hard, not to say
what you feel.' "
The next day, when McCain was asked by a reporter about the flag, he pulled
a piece of paper from his pocket and read, "As to how I view the flag, I
understand both sides. Some view it as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a
symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage."
Weaver, who had helped draft the statement, said that McCain "read it as
though he were in the Hanoi Hilton, being given something to read by his
captors. It was the only time we consultants got in the way of John's
instincts--and it was the wrong thing to do."
McCain went on to win primaries in Michigan and Arizona, but after South
Carolina he lost the momentum he needed to raise enough money to compete, and
the day after Super Tuesday he withdrew. (A few weeks later, he returned to
South Carolina, and apologized for having sacrificed principle to his ambition
by retracting his initial remarks about the flag.) It was the first electoral
contest McCain had ever lost. And, for someone so competitive that he didn't
speak to his best friend in prison for days after losing to him in a bridge
game, this defeat was particularly hard. But one of his political heroes,
Theodore Roosevelt, who was defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, offered a
cautionary lesson. "Roosevelt was very bitter at the end of his
life," McCain told me. "And I took a lesson from that--that I would
not be bitter.
"Americans don't like sore losers!" McCain added with some heat.
"They want you to move on. And that's what I did. I didn't complain,
didn't express outrage. I moved on."
Not being a sore loser, in this instance, seems to have meant agreeing to
support Bush in the 2000 campaign. They met in Pittsburgh--alone in a hotel
room for ninety minutes--and emerged with a show of considerable civility. But
it was mainly show. Sharon and Oliver Harper are close friends of the McCains;
the two couples own many acres of adjacent property in Oak Creek, Arizona, and
their children have grown up together. The Harpers travelled with the McCains
on the campaign. Sharon Harper recalled that she and her husband were vacationing
on Arizona's Lake Powell in August, when they received an urgent call. George
and Laura Bush were to visit the McCains at Oak Creek, in an attempt to improve
relations. "John and Cindy said, 'Can you come back? We don't want to be
left alone with them, this is going to be really difficult.' So we came
back." Harper has a photograph of the three couples at Oak Creek, smiling
gamely at the camera. McCain did campaign for Bush in the 2000 election,
"but through gritted teeth," Harper says.
At the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Weaver recalled, he received a
call from a member of Bush's staff, who said, "Would you guys please leave
the Convention? You're getting too much attention."
" 'Fine,' I said. Rick Davis and I went to New York to go to Le Cirque
and get drunk. But John decided to go to Bethesda, to get this thing on his
face checked--only because he had the time. The next week, he called--it was
malignant. If he had waited another month or two--and he would have, if he'd
been running--it would have been lights out." McCain was given a diagnosis
of melanoma, for which he had first been treated in 1993.
"The cancer put him in a hurry, and made his zest for life even more
robust," Weaver said. McCain realized, too, that he could leverage the
power of the national constituency he had established to expand his influence
in the Senate, where Democrats would be more willing to work with him, and he
would probably be able to get more legislation passed than he ever had before.
And the more he was able to use the Senate as a bully pulpit the larger his
national constituency would grow.
After 2000, McCain's distaste for intense partisanship increased even more.
In many of the town-hall meetings during the campaign, when McCain had been
asked about global warming, he had said that he didn't know enough to take a
position but promised that he would look into it. As chairman of the Senate
Commerce Committee, he held numerous hearings on global warming; he became an
impassioned believer, and has co-sponsored legislation with Senator Joseph
Lieberman to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. In the town-hall meetings, he also
heard many stories about people who had been denied health care by their
H.M.O.s and had suffered terribly as a result. In 2001, with Senators Edward
Kennedy and John Edwards, McCain sponsored the Patients' Bill of Rights, which
was intended to regulate the managed-care industry.
McCain's greatest challenge to his own party was his determination to pass
campaign-finance-reform legislation. After an ultimately successful effort to
get the bill passed in the Senate, McCain infuriated the Republican leadership
in the bitterly partisan House by pushing it aggressively there. He even made
calls to House members from an office off the House floor--an act viewed as
treason by many Republicans. McCain broke ranks with the Bush Administration on
other major issues--repeatedly voting against Bush's tax cuts and against the
proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, calling on Bush to ease restrictions
on embryonic stem-cell research, and criticizing Bush for his handling of
postwar Iraq. What might have been tolerated, and even respected, as
independent-mindedness by previous generations of Republicans has come to seem
heretical in today's ideological and highly disciplined congressional ranks.
But McCain has never confused his colleagues with his constituents; it is
his constituents whose approval he most prizes, and he defines them broadly, as
a group that extends far beyond the confines of Arizona. It had always been a
truism that politicians who lose in Presidential primaries return to Congress
as losers, but McCain, as he noted, "came out enhanced, rather than
diminished."
The McCain alchemy derives, in large measure, from a widespread popular
perception that he says what he believes. "Ten times today, I've had
people come up, saying, 'I don't agree with you sometimes, but I really support
you because I think you stand up for what you believe,' " McCain often
remarks. "I cherish that reputation." In 2004, however, the
reputation came into question when McCain, after rejecting John Kerry's offer
of an expanded Vice-Presidency, transformed himself almost overnight from the
President's most severe Republican critic to his most valuable defender.
Kerry's offer to McCain was a reflection, among other things, of how much
McCain was thought to despise Bush for what had been done to him in South
Carolina. Kerry was betting that even if McCain did not accept his offer he
would not campaign aggressively for Bush. "It was a high-risk
strategy," Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator, said. "I think it
ended up hurting Kerry--because the Republicans were able to say, Here's the
person you wanted as your Vice-President, and he is embracing the President."
But he didn't fault Kerry for trying, he added, because the upside was so
great. "I don't think there's any way the President could have beaten
them." (A CBS News poll released last June found that a Kerry-McCain
ticket had a fourteen-percentage-point lead over Bush-Cheney, whereas most
head-to-head polls showed Kerry leading only slightly.)
Kerry had apparently been thinking of McCain as a possible running mate for
some time; in August, 2003, he met with him to propose the idea and to suggest
that they announce their pact before the Iowa caucus, according to a McCain
aide. Then, in the spring of 2004, in a series of phone conversations with
McCain, Kerry offered to augment the power of the Vice-Presidency with the
defense portfolio--in effect, a combined Vice-President and Secretary of
Defense, according to John Weaver and Mark Salter. "Kerry was saying, 'You
can still call yourself a Republican,' and John was saying, 'No! I can't just
call myself a Republican,' " Salter recalled. " 'We don't have the
same philosophy. I'm a hawk, I'm for nation-building, I'm pro-life, I'm a free
trader, I believe in small government. If you're hit by a lightning bolt and I
become President, the people who voted for you will feel betrayed.' "
Kerry asked Warren Beatty, who is a good friend of McCain's, to call him.
Beatty is a diehard Democrat who disagrees with McCain on a number of issues
but likes him, and he admires his efforts to reduce the influence of money in
politics. "I thought he might do it," Beatty told me. "Of
course, I'm a fantasist by trade." Even as Vice-President, he went on,
"With John's personality, he would be able to say what he wanted to say,
and to do quite a bit." He paused. "Whether that would be good for
John Kerry was less clear."
McCain's crossover appeal is a curious phenomenon. His maverick image as
"the real deal" (in Beatty's words) excites people, much more than
his positions on issues. In matters of style, McCain seems like a
Democrat--cultivator of the press, defender of the underdog, scathing critic of
some leaders of the Christian right, anti-establishment rebel. Hated as he is
by the leaders of the N.R.A.
and the National Right to Life Committee, he even has the requisite enemies.
"Those pro-life guys always suspected him," a former aide who worked
for McCain for many years said. "He got the benefit of the pro-life label
but would never go out and make speeches for them. . . . I think he feels that
government should not be involved, but it is, and he took a fairly expedient
position." Several other friends of McCain's also told me that he chose to
be pro-life when he first ran for Congress because it would have been more
difficult to win as a Republican in Arizona otherwise. In any case, he has been
unwaveringly pro-life for the last twenty-four years.
"McCain really is a Republican," Anthony Cordesman, who is at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, and who worked for McCain in
the late eighties and early nineties, said emphatically. "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 assume--because of his pragmatic
approach--that he agrees with them politically. But he does not." And
during the Kerry overtures, he continued, "John was confronted with a lot
of people trying to push him into a role he was very uncomfortable with--as a
crossover into the Democratic Party, with agendas that he does not share."
The Kerry offer carried other risks, too. Chuck Larson recounted to me a
conversation that McCain and he had over breakfast one day, when the
speculation about a Kerry-McCain ticket was most feverish. "I said, 'Let's
just say you accept it, John. Today the press is salivating about this dream
team. But it would quickly shift from stories about this bipartisan dream team
to people saying you're an opportunist, you're a traitor, you're doing this because
you've hated Bush ever since what he did to you in 2000--instead of focussing
on the issues, and who the two of you are.' "
Moreover, if McCain and Kerry won, McCain's paramount ambition would be
defeated. As Rick Davis told me, "It would mean he would end his political
career as Vice-President." Still, McCain is always exhorting Americans to
sacrifice for the greater good. I asked McCain whether a Kerry-McCain team
wouldn't have been the best way to heal the divisiveness that he deplores.
"I would have been a man without a country!" McCain protested.
"The Democrats never would have really accepted me, the Republicans would
never trust me again. And, as I told John, not only would my having the defense
portfolio probably have been unconstitutional--it wouldn't have worked! Say
there's something like the Cuban missile crisis--it's got to be the President
who makes those decisions."
He also brought up an issue that dogged Kerry throughout the
campaign--Kerry's having voted for the war but against the
eighty-seven-billion-dollar measure to fund it. "On the fundamental
question of going to war, he agreed, but then because at the time he had to
beat Howard Dean he voted against the money. Americans do not understand why
you would say, 'Send them, but don't pay for them, O.K.?' And, look, that's
when you gotta stand up," McCain said, his voice rising. "He's a
friend of mine! But you gotta stand up for what you believe in! He knew you had
to fund those troops! But he voted against it for political expediency."
Several people close to McCain told me that he believed that Kerry was too
indecisive to be President. I asked if that was true. "Well, everybody
knows John is indecisive," McCain began. But then he got back on message.
"Really, I just believed that at this time Bush would make the better
commander-in-chief. Not that one was bad, but the other was better."
After it became clear that McCain would not accept an offer to be the
Vice-Presidential nominee on the Kerry ticket, the Bush White House made its
overture. Weaver recalled, "One of Bush's strategists called me, and said
they wanted to have coffee. I didn't even tell John. Afterward, I went over to
see him. 'John, I just had coffee with Karl Rove.' " He imitated McCain:
" 'The end of the world is near! Armageddon! Armageddon!' "
It was the first time that Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, and
Weaver had spoken since 1989. They had been working together on campaigns in
Texas, but after a severe falling out had been estranged ever since. After the
2000 campaign, moreover, the Bush Administration punished those who had worked
for McCain. "Rove put it out strongly that they didn't want McCain people
doing any campaign work," Davis said. "People couldn't make a living.
I don't know any McCain operative who could get a job in the party
structure." (Rove says this is "absolutely not true.") Unable to
find work with a Republican candidate, Weaver briefly switched parties. When I
asked him whether, in their meeting, Rove had apologized for what happened in
South Carolina, he hesitated. "Not really an apology," he said.
"There was an acknowledgment of things that had happened. I said it was
water under the bridge. I don't think it's fair to say more than that."
Mainly, Rove was asking for McCain's help. Was it an easy decision for
McCain? Weaver paused. "John made the decision. People forget--he's a
Republican. He's a conservative Republican. And he always supported the
President's foreign policy, notwithstanding his legitimate criticism of Bush's handling
of the war. So it was easy at the intellectual level--lots of things are easy
at that level--but," he said, tapping his chest, "they don't feel
right."
Whatever ambivalence McCain may have felt was not in evidence as he set out
on the campaign trail with Bush. McCain declared that the war in Iraq was a
conflict between good and evil which threatened the security of the United
States. Even without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
he asserted, the decision to go to war, which he had strongly advocated, was
the right one--"I would do it again today."
"John's was the strongest credible voice in Congress supporting the
President's actions against Saddam Hussein," Lindsey Graham said.
"His support was critical." Some of those closest to McCain thought
he was going overboard. His daughter Meghan, a student at Columbia, who voted
for Kerry, called McCain and chastised him when she saw him on television
making statements she considered baseless. "Once, when John was talking on
TV about what a great wartime leader Bush had been, my wife had to leave the
room," Chuck Larson, whose son-in-law has been flying F-18s over Iraq,
told me. But many friends point out that once McCain agreed to join the Bush
campaign team he would not hold back. "In for a dime, in for a
dollar," he commented to aides, who ribbed him about his role change.
Kerry apparently took McCain's conversion hard. According to a key Democratic
strategist, it was not McCain's rejection that angered him--he had always
understood the odds were long. But Kerry had believed that they were bound by a
special friendship, first forged in the nineteen-nineties, when they worked
together to normalize U.S. relations with Vietnam. And when McCain moved into
his political mode--praising President Bush so extravagantly that Kerry seemed
diminished by the comparison--Kerry felt betrayed.
McCain's evident pragmatism was at odds with his image as someone whose
fast-boiling anger ("McCain moments," as his staff labels his
eruptions) often leads to enduring emnity. But McCain has a history of fighting
hard and eventually getting over it. Having suffered years of abuse as a P.O.W.
in Vietnam, he nonetheless worked to restore U.S. relations with Vietnam. For
years, he refused to deal with Fred Wertheimer, then the head of Common Cause,
who filed the complaint that led to the Keating Five investigation; then, in
the late nineties, he and Wertheimer began working with each other on
campaign-finance reform, and today they are close allies. Senator Trent Lott is
said to have told reporters during the 2000 campaign that McCain was unstable,
as a result of his captivity; they did not speak for several years, but are now
quite friendly. "People mistake the ferocity of the fight for its
longevity--it's that he comes at you like a Mack truck," Salter said.
"But I have seen his enemies become his friends all the time." In
this instance, of course, the reconciliation had distinct implications for
2008.
When I asked McCain about being something of an outsider in his own party,
he said, "When people are in close races, I am the first Republican who is
asked to come and appear for that person. I am the most sought-after of all
Republicans. In this last campaign, I was the one asked by the President to
travel and campaign with him." He continued, "When you look at the
rank and file of ordinary Republicans, I'm extremely popular--it's some of the
party apparatchiks who still harbor bad feelings toward me. But it is a little
hard for them to do that now, because of my strong support for Bush." He
concluded, "Particularly since the 2004 campaign, there has been a great
softening of this dislike for me."
"I think he's running for President. Don't you, Joe?" Roberta
McCain, John McCain's mother, asked, fixing her azure-eyed gaze upon Joe
Donoghue, who has been her son's assistant for the past eighteen years.
Donoghue nodded vigorously. In 2000, Roberta said, "I never expected him
to get elected, and didn't care if he was. I didn't think he had enough money,
enough expertise, enough anything! I was surprised he did as well as he
did." But now, she said, "I've changed my attitude, because I think
he would make a very good President."
She went further. "I think the one chance we have of getting a party of
integrity is John McCain, and I don't know anybody else who's trying to do
it." Regarding his motivation, she volunteered, "I think his only
mission in life--and I raise my right hand--is to serve God and his country.
We're a religious family. Not to mention"--she broke off, laughing--"that
I never go to church and my church is right across the street!"
When McCain's supporters are asked about the issue of his age--he will be
seventy-two in 2008--they often point to his mother. It is easy to see why.
When I arrived at her apartment in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, she
threw open the door: a beautiful white-haired woman, in a Chanel-style
jacket, pleated skirt, and high-heeled shoes. She was standing in a foyer with
red silk billowing slightly from the ceiling, the walls painted with a gorgeous
mural. She told me with a laugh that she had just redone the apartment, even
though she is ninety-three. She was leaving shortly for a three-month trip
through Europe, travelling some of the time with her identical twin sister, to
France and England, then going on to India; she rents a car on these
excursions, and enjoys driving everywhere she goes. (She did not mention that
not long ago she was stopped for speeding, going over 100 m.p.h., near
Flagstaff, Arizona.) Paris would be her first stop; she planned to go to
Maxim's for Christmas dinner, and the Lido on New Year's Eve.
She said that she had been surprised to read in her son's book that he did
not really want to go to the Naval Academy. "I will say this: when that
baby was born, I assumed he was going to go to the Naval Academy," she
went on. "It sounds so corny when I think about it now, but if someone's
son went to Yale I would say, 'Isn't that strange, why would he go to Yale and
not to the Naval Academy?' It was a tradition, and I think it was a wonderful
tradition. I think the Navy has more know-how, more sophistication, more
integrity, more honesty than any other facet of the world. There are people who
are made for the Navy, and I was one. I liked everything about it--even the
lousy pay!" She went to look for something in her study and returned with
a small piece of paper. "My husband went into the Navy in 1927 and retired
in 1972--four years in the Academy, forty-one years on active duty, and he had
the top job." Reading from the paper, she said, "When he retired, he
got two thousand three hundred and forty-six dollars in monthly pay. And paid
taxes on it!" Admiral McCain died in 1981.
There was something in "Faith of My Fathers" that I was curious
about. When McCain's parents were informed that he had been shot down, he
wrote, they were in London and were about to leave for a dinner party at the
Iranian Ambassador's residence. They had attended the dinner and not said
anything to the other guests about the news. Roberta recalled now that there
was a dessert that she'd never seen before, something with spun filaments of
sugar and ice cream, and when tapped with a spoon the outer surface shattered.
When I asked whether the evening wasn't unspeakably difficult for her, she
replied, "It didn't occur to me not to go. You know, I'm a pretty stoic
person. I take things as they come and I don't fly off the handle. It just
never crossed my mind." She paused, and added, "You can't just not
show up at an Embassy dinner party like that--it was a sit-down dinner."
I asked whether she was surprised that her son had run as a pro-life
candidate. Without answering the question, she gave her own view. "I think
it's nobody's business, except the woman's. And I also don't think it's a
political thing--I think it's a spiritual thing, and I don't think it has any
place in politics at all. If a woman wants to have an abortion, I think it's
O.K."
As for his having campaigned so aggressively for President Bush: "All
I've got to say is, Bush is sure a lucky man! I don't know whether he will
acknowledge it or cares or anything else, but he's the luckiest President we've
ever had."
In the aftermath of the election, she said, she was not at all sanguine
about the fact that "the same people are still running the show." She
went on, "So I'm not going to get up and cheer or start being Pollyanna
about things. Somebody's got to straighten this country out, because people are
just losing all respect for the whole government. It made me so mad, the minute
Colin Powell resigned they started sniping, making cracks." She looked at
me. "Now, what else do you want me to shoot my mouth off about?" she
asked, with a dazzling smile.
McCain's friends and staff people may be geared up for 2008, but his wife
insists that the two of them have not yet reached a decision. "People
don't believe me," Cindy McCain said. "They say, 'Oh, c'mon'--but
it's true." There are health considerations; since his surgery for
melanoma in 2000, McCain is checked by a dermatologist every three months. And
about a year ago Cindy suffered a stroke, which caused speech difficulty at
first, and memory loss. I interviewed her in the lovely, sprawling house in
Phoenix where she grew up, and which she recently redesigned in a more
distinctly Southwestern, adobe style. A pretty woman, with long, well-coiffed
blond hair and large violet-colored eyes, she was dressed in jeans, a cashmere
sweater, and red sandals. She is very thin, slightly fragile-looking, and this
day seemed somewhat on edge. During the 2000 campaign, she said, she had been
afraid of making some mistake that would hurt her husband; the experience was
trying, but the good part was that she got to see so much of him. Afterward,
she needed hand surgery, from having shaken so many hands; she showed me the
scars, extending from her right hand up her arm, and said, "It's been
fused. So there won't be any problem now--it's bionic!" Not long before we
met, she had appeared on the Larry King show with other people who had suffered
strokes at a relatively young age (she was forty-nine). And when King asked,
"Has the Senator been very sympathetic?" she responded, "Yes. .
. . Let me explain that. He was very confused in the beginning. 'How could it
happen to my wife, I'm eighteen years older than she is!'. . . So, on his
behalf, I think he's trying to understand all this. It's a lot for him to take
in." They celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on May 17th.
The celebrity that McCain has enjoyed since the 2000 campaign is
qualitatively different from what it was before. He used to come home most
weekends, but now he is away a great deal of the time. And, when they go out
together, strangers clamor for his attention. "We went to the Super Bowl a
few weeks ago--I'd been jostled before, but nothing like this," she said.
"He has reached rock-star status. But he is always nice, generous, always
takes time with people. I get frustrated sometimes, but not John. His attitude
is 'Enjoy it--it won't last forever.' "
Early in the morning on the last Sunday in February, I met McCain near his
house in Oak Creek. A month before, he had attended the World Economic Forum,
in Davos; two weekends later, he had co-led the U.S. delegation to the Munich
Conference on Security Policy, stopping in Ukraine to meet with President
Yushchenko; and days after his return from Munich he had led a congressional
trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Pakistan. (Lindsey Graham, who
accompanied him on these travels, commented, "Anybody who questions his
vigor and ability should travel with him. I love going on a trip with John, but
I'm happy to get home.")
Now, at a motel used by TV networks to film interviews with him when he is
at his retreat, McCain was to be interviewed from Washington by Chris Wallace,
on Fox News. President Hosni Mubarak had just asked Egypt's parliament to amend
the constitution to allow for freer elections, and McCain was telling Wallace,
before they went on the air, how important he believed U.S. pressure on Egypt
was. "I hammered the Egyptian Foreign Minister in Munich," he was
saying. Then, in the interview, he made the kinds of tough statements that have
long been his hallmark in the area of foreign policy. He said he was
"proud of Condi Rice," for having abruptly cancelled a planned trip
to Egypt, because of the arrest of a leading opposition politician. He attacked
the signing of an agreement whereby Russia would supply Iran with fuel for its
first nuclear power plant. "Putin seems to me to be acting somewhat like a
spoiled child," McCain declared. "The United States, and our European
allies, I think, should start out by saying, Vladimir, you're not welcome at
the next G-8 conference!"--a reference to the countries making up the
Group of Eight. But when Wallace asked him whether he thought that President
Bush should have been tougher in his press conference with Putin at a meeting
in Slovakia a few days earlier, McCain suddenly became judicious. "It's
hard for me to second-guess the President," he said repeatedly.
At the end of the interview, Wallace commented that Republicans tend to be
orderly people, always choosing the next one up--Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush
in 2000. Who will be the next one up in 2008?
"Jeb Bush!" McCain said, and then laughed. "If you're looking
at dynasties. . . ." Then he added that he believes it will be a wide-open
situation. "Republican voters will have a great luxury, because they'll
have a lot to choose from," he concluded, smiling.
McCain set out for the local Starbucks
to pick up coffee and newspapers to bring back to the house. He was in high
spirits about his rejoinder to Wallace. "I shook him up! I said, 'Jeb
Bush!' Hah!" he chortled happily. "I said, 'Republicans will have the
luxury of a lot of choices!' " With the women behind the coffee counter,
he engaged in his usual banter: "How ya doin'? Where's Patty? Tell her I
was here, looking for her. Tell her I was disappointed." After driving for
a few miles, he turned off the highway onto a dirt path, which twisted down a
steep incline, finally coming out into a clearing. Hidden Valley is the one
place where McCain does, in a manner of speaking, relax. He bounded out of the
car and led me on the mandatory tour. The McCains' house is built near the
banks of the creek, which was roaring past, swollen from recent heavy rains,
and gleaming in the sunlight. He showed off dozens of fruit trees, about to
blossom. "This is the thing I'm most proud of," McCain said, pointing
to the large nest of a common black hawk, and describing how he had watched the
mother teach the fledgling to fly. Last year, he told me, Cindy looked toward a
nearby hilltop and saw a mountain lion, surrounded by her cubs, gazing down at
her. There are also foxes, bobcats, javelinas, and coyotes. He pointed out the
spacious guesthouse, which he refers to as "the cabin." He has
scandalized some Republicans in Arizona by inviting Democratic politicians
here, including former Senator Tom Daschle. McCain loves to mix things up. As
Lindsey Graham put it, "He'll have Warren Beatty and a right-wing
reactionary like me."
We went to the Harpers' house, a short walk away, for breakfast. Sharon and
Oliver Harper were there, and Lorene and Aaron Lueck, who manage the property,
and live there as well. Before preparing breakfast, McCain, who likes to cook,
summoned the group to the TV room to watch the Fox News interview. We all sat
quietly, focussed on his image as though we were in church--no one more so than
McCain. At the end, he laughed again, loudly, about the Jeb Bush line. He said
that Mark Salter would be mad at him for that one. "I sort of am,
too," Sharon Harper said. McCain returned to the kitchen and, while
cooking bacon and sausage, amused himself, as he often does, by ribbing one of
his companions. "Aaron's a member of the N.R.A.,"
McCain told me. "He wore his N.R.A.
cap when he went to see 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' in the local movie theatre."
Aaron commented that the only issue on which he differs with the N.R.A.
is its support for assault rifles--"because I don't think they're good for
much." "They're good in schools," McCain said, winking at me.
After breakfast, I asked McCain about the speech he had delivered in Munich
two weeks earlier. McCain always enjoys setting off fireworks at the annual
conference, but his speech this year was especially incendiary. In the
Republican foreign-policy divide between idealists and realists, McCain
unequivocally identifies himself as an idealist. He appeared on the podium with
the Russian Minister of Defense, the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and
the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for International and Legal Affairs--and he
did not spare any of them. First, he established his premise: September 11th
made plain that the security of Europe and North America is dependent upon the
promotion of democracy in the Middle East--and, ultimately, in the world.
"The security of New York or Madrid or Munich depends in part on the
degree of freedom in Riyadh or Baghdad or Cairo," he declared. And,
therefore, we can no longer afford the view that "a despotic ally [is]
preferable to an unfriendly democracy," he said. "Russia is actually
moving backward. Mr. Putin . . . is reasserting the Kremlin's old-style central
control." He also attacked Saudi Arabia, where "repression remains
the norm." In Egypt, President Mubarak "has reigned as a dictator for
almost twenty-four years, and he seeks yet another term, while grooming his son
for what one newspaper described as a 'pharaonic succession.' " If these
and other governments continued in their anti-democratic ways, he said,
"we should reassess our relationships--including the billions of dollars
in bilateral aid that flows to them."
U.S. aid to Egypt, of course, has long been a buttress to the
Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace accords. Did he not worry that a cutoff of
aid might be destabilizing? I asked. "Well, there wouldn't be a war,"
McCain said. "You could make that argument fifteen or twenty years ago.
But it's no longer viable to prop up despotic regimes, instead of democracies
that may not be particularly on our side." He added, "I'm not just
picking on Egypt. I said it about Egypt and I said it about Iran and I said it
about Saudi Arabia. The Egyptian Foreign Minister said to me, You're exactly
right on everything except Egypt."
I noted that his language is even more militant than President Bush's.
McCain agreed, but he added, "In all appreciation of my oratory and
positions, it's tougher when you're the President. You gotta be more careful to
maintain the balance."
McCain cannot be termed a neo-conservative, since he has no apostasy in his
past, but neoconservatives are happy to call him theirs. As William Kristol,
the editor of The Weekly Standard, told me, "Maybe you'd say he was more
neo-Reaganite. But his views on foreign policy are neoconservative: American
strength, but also American principles; for nation-building, as well as for
removing dictators. If you go back to the mid-nineties, you see he was more
that way than people realize." McCain was one of the few Republicans who
supported intervening in Bosnia in 1995. He also supported the now famous 1998
letter to President Bill Clinton from members of the Project for the New
American Century, which called for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power
in Iraq--and to be prepared to do so militarily, without being "crippled
by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council." Some
of McCain's advisers like to point out that President Bush has only recently
arrived at the pro-democracy, interventionist foreign policy that McCain has
long championed. His hawkish friends admire his muscularity. As Lindsey Graham
said, "If North Korea and Iran tried to expand their nuclear capabilities,
they would feel the wrath of a John McCain Presidency." In Munich, where a
full-scale clash between idealistic Wilsonian principles and European
Realpolitik occurred, he enthusiastically led the Wilsonian charge.
"Our European friends don't have a strong military, so they always
believe that diplomacy is the answer," McCain told me.
Wolfgang Ischinger, the German Ambassador to the United States, who attended
the conference in Munich and listened with interest to McCain's speech, tried
to explain the view from the other side. "As older societies, we tend to
think of ourselves as more experienced in the way societies evolve, and we tend
to be skeptical of Americans who seem to think that if you believe hard enough,
and you muster enough resources, you can change the world," he told me.
"In the last year or so, as we've engaged in discussions about the
transformation of the Middle East and democracy, I have told my American
friends that the region in this world that has seen the most transformation and
change is Central and Eastern Europe--without shedding a drop of blood. So
don't preach to us. And don't think transformative change will work according
to mechanistic rules. This is very complicated. Changing the way people think
often has to do with religious and cultural issues--we tend to think of them as
long-term, and Americans think, Let's solve the problem in the next four
years!"
The morning after McCain delivered his speech, he attended a breakfast for
the U.S. delegation, hosted by the Germans. The U.S. delegates sat on one side
of the long table, and the German officials on the other. "I was very
tough on 'em," McCain told me. On Iraq, he said that they "should try
to help, and I don't mean militarily, because I know they won't do that, but
there's a thousand things they could do to help Iraq." On the subject of
Iran and European efforts to negotiate over its nuclear program, the
conversation became particularly heated. "One of the German guys said,
'Well, the Iranians have now frozen their procedures toward nuclear.' And I
said, 'That's not what I hear.' And he said, 'My intelligence is as good as
yours.' I said, 'I don't think so.' "
Mark Udall, a Democratic representative from Colorado, and the son of
McCain's friend and mentor Mo Udall, the longtime congressman from Arizona, was
a member of the congressional delegation in Munich. "John likes to
challenge friend and foe," Udall said. But the breakfast was surprising
even by McCain standards. "I hadn't seen him quite as fierce as he was at
that breakfast," Udall, who has attended the conference for the last
several years, said. The German official who was involved in the negotiations
with the Iranians was describing the process, Udall recalled, "and John
interrupted him on two or three occasions, saying, Why are you doing this, why
are you doing that, and it was borderline rude. He even pushed the diplomatic
protocol there. But I think he was trying to make a point that this was very
serious, and that just talking to the Iranians was not going to get the job
done."
One of the Germans who was present recalled, "John McCain spoke more
than any other participant at the breakfast. He was the leader. He said, 'Why
don't you guys help us out in Iraq?' And one of our guys said, 'But we have, we
have trained police.' McCain said, 'That's laughable!' He crushed them. But it
was a battle of people who were not equals--a U.S. senator and Presidential
candidate, full of self-confidence, and a bureaucrat, extremely restricted,
with instructions about what he can say. It was not a fair match.
"Was it helpful?" the German participant asked. "Surely not.
I don't think he was interested in listening to why we believe this is the best
way forward. John McCain is like a charging bull. He loves to fight," the
official added. "That morning, it didn't win him new friends."
McCain has suggested that as President he would be more measured and
diplomatic, at least in his choice of words. The best evidence of his ability
to do that is the way he has conducted himself, in recent months, with his
colleagues and with the President.
McCain is famous for his verbal attacks against appropriators on the Senate
floor. When I asked Weaver about this, he replied, "You haven't read about
his gratuitously taking on other members on the floor in the last six months,
have you?" I said I had not. "Good," he replied.
McCain is chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which since last
year has been investigating the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his
business partner Michael Scanlon, and their dealings with Indian tribes.
Abramoff is also the central figure in corruption and influence-peddling
investigations by the Justice Department and the Interior Department. All of
these have turned up potentially damaging disclosures about trips taken and
gifts received by lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Many of
McCain's colleagues were fearful that now, in the Abramoff investigation, he
would find it irresistible to cast a wide net, as he had in an earlier
investigation into a Boeing
tanker deal. In that deal, which was supported by the White House, the
Pentagon, and key members of Congress, McCain exposed grievous flaws in
oversight. Two Air Force officials resigned, two Boeing
officials have gone to jail, the deal was scrapped, and McCain's reputation as
a giant killer was burnished. McCain decided to address members of his caucus
in order to calm their apprehensions about the Indian Affairs Committee
investigation. "There's a lot of nervousness among a lot of people in
Congress about trips they went on," McCain told me, "and that's why I
talked to the caucus and explained that this is not a witch hunt. I have a
narrow mandate at the Indian Affairs Committee. We'll be tracing the trail of
the Indians' money, seeing who defrauded them--not looking at records of
members' trips."
His team-player posture is nowhere more marked than in his relationship with
President Bush. As Wes Gullett commented, "If you're going to run for
President, you don't want to gratuitously fight with someone the
Republican-primary voters love." McCain hasn't changed long-held positions
to do the President's bidding, however. In March, he voted against Bush's plan
to allow oil drilling in the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge (the bill passed without his vote). He has said that he would vote
against the filibuster-rule change known as the "nuclear option," and
last week he helped lead the protracted negotiations between moderates of both
parties to find a compromise.
Even so, McCain's language about the areas in which he and Bush disagree has
become reasoned and moderate. And when the President really needs his help he
gives it. In December, McCain told me, "I'm not playing on Social
Security." When I asked why not, he said, "It's just not my
issue." Weaver was more explicit. "It's not clear where Social
Security is going to go. There's no reason for him to be out front." But
in late March--by which time the Social Security reform campaign had gone very
badly for the President--McCain accompanied Bush on a three-state swing to
pitch his reform plan. He supported Bush's insistence on the urgency of the crisis
("The longer we wait," McCain warned, "the more Draconian the
changes will have to be"), and he castigated the A.A.R.P.
for recklessness in opposing Bush's plan.
McCain gave a speech on the Senate floor, supporting the President's
nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,
after that nomination engendered doubts even among some Republicans on the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If a temper and an unorthodox
management style were disqualifiers from government service, I would bet a
large number of people in Washington would be out of a job," McCain
declared. ("Bolton called to thank him before John could even get back to
his office," Weaver said.)
Immigration reform is something about which McCain is passionate; he
strongly opposed Arizona's Proposition 200, which calls for the denial of state
welfare benefits to illegal aliens, and which passed in last year's election.
And he repeatedly emphasizes that he has found a philosophical soul mate in
President Bush, who is the former governor of a border state. In the first week
after the election, McCain went to the White House to meet with the President
and Karl Rove, and they discussed immigration reform. "The President and I
share exactly the same views on the issue," McCain told me. "He
believes there are willing workers and willing employers and we ought to match
them up. He recognizes that our borders are broken and we need to protect them,
but we can only do it in a dual approach." McCain and Bush are not as
close on this issue as McCain says. McCain and Senator Edward Kennedy recently
introduced comprehensive legislation that would strengthen border enforcement
but also provide for a guest-worker program, as well as a path to residency for
the illegal immigrants (between eight million and thirteen million) who are
already here, something that many of his Republican colleagues deride as
"amnesty" and that the President has not indicated he supports.
McCain acknowledges that passing such comprehensive legislation will be
extremely difficult, since it is an enormously divisive issue for Republicans.
But he believes that the political consequences will be historic. "By
enacting meaningful immigration reform, the Republican Party will have the
majority of the Hispanic vote for the next generation," McCain said.
In a footnote that seems to capture the new spirit of amity between the
White House and the once renegade Senator, Weaver--blacklisted no longer--is
McCain's liaison to the White House. McCain aides even talk enthusiastically
about Karl Rove helping McCain in 2008. And his supporters have been observing
this rapprochement with delight. In the months since the campaign, Ken
Duberstein, a Republican lobbyist who supported McCain in 2000, told me,
"John has continued to be one of Bush's strongest supporters. I think he
has been quite careful. He's making all the right moves."
McCain's current cultivation of his relationship with Bush may also be
reflected in what he does not do. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, last
spring, McCain was at his best. It was not an unfamiliar sight--the Senator,
red-faced, neck veins bulging, repeatedly interrupting an evasive witness whom
it seemed he might like to throttle. But his rage, for once, seemed altogether
appropriate, as he demanded, "Secretary Rumsfeld, in all due respect,
you've got to answer this question!" At the time, McCain made it plain that
he was going to push the Bush Administration to divulge everything, and
quickly. "The facts have got to come out now," he said to the Times.
A year has passed, and there have been at least ten major investigations,
but, as Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, recently pointed out, there
has been "no assessment of accountability of any senior officials, either
within or outside of the Department of Defense, for policies that may have
contributed to abuses of prisoners." Levin and McCain are longtime members
of the Armed Services Committee; Levin is a former chairman, and McCain is
slated to become chairman in 2007, if the Republicans keep control of the
Senate. Levin told me that he has been urging the current chairman, Senator
John Warner, to hold further hearings, in order to pursue an investigation that
would extend to the top of the chain of command, the Secretary of Defense.
Levin also advocates the formation of an independent commission, similar to the
9/11 Commission, to investigate detainee abuse.
This might seem a natural issue for McCain, and he did support an amendment
to a defense-authorization bill that affirmed the policy of the United States
not to engage in torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. But, since
the furor over Abu Ghraib subsided, he has not grabbed the megaphone, in the
way that he so often does when something makes him angry and he wants to set it
right. When I raised the subject of detainee abuse with him, McCain said he
believes that it is important to pass legislation that will clarify U.S.
interrogation policies. "We can't be saying, 'Get some information from
this guy, soften him up, but not too much.' " And he thinks that such
clarity is particularly important, because there are two different categories
of prisoners: "those who are eligible for the Geneva Conventions on the
treatment of prisoners of war, and others who are outright terrorists, who have
none of these protections but still have protections by international treaties,
such as the torture treaty and others." McCain emphasized that he agrees
with the Bush Administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions be applied
in this selective way. And he made it plain that he was unwilling to constrain
interrogators, in certain situations: "Look--you're from New York. If we
apprehend a terrorist and he has information about a plan that is going to kill
thousands of people, what would you do?"
I reminded him that he has always held that torture doesn't work, because
eventually the victim will do or say whatever his torturers want, as McCain did
when he signed a confession in Vietnam. "Yes," he said, "but in
that kind of situation, thousands of lives at risk, you have to do something,
try whatever you can."
When I asked him if he would join Levin to demand that the Armed Services
Committee conduct a thorough investigation, he replied that there had already
been a number of investigations. And he would not support the formation of a
9/11-type commission. "9/11 was different--it was a unique event in our history,"
he said. Besides, he added, "it would never pass in the Senate.
Never."
It is of course something that the Bush Administration would oppose--and
McCain appears unlikely to jeopardize his new standing, on this or any other
issue. In several interviews, it was striking how forcefully he defended the
President. When I asked McCain what, in his view, made Bush such a strong
wartime leader, he pointed to his having gone to the ruins of the World Trade
Center on September 14th and rallied the nation. (This was the speech in which
Bush said simply that the terrorists "will hear from all of us
soon.")
McCain explained, "There are moments--all John F. Kennedy said was 'I'm
a Berliner.' All Ronald Reagan said was 'Tear down this wall.' Usually, it's
one day that's defining."
McCain frequently comments that we have paid a "heavy price"
because we did not have enough troops in Iraq. He has also expressed concern
that the Army Reserve and the National Guard are overextended, and have fallen
short of recruiting goals. I asked whether the price in American lives and the
damage to the Army were inconsistent with his assertion that Bush has been an
exemplary wartime leader. McCain paused, then said, with some feeling,
"Everything that happens, the President is responsible, O.K.? I think if
you would say that the President deserves the blame, then he deserves the
credit for the election that just took place in Iraq. And, if you see the
Middle East now changing, as many of us believe that it is, then history will
judge him incredibly well." And, he added, with a slight smile, "The
Europeans will have been on the wrong side of history. Again."
Despite some Republican strategists who believe that his moment has passed,
McCain plainly feels that his moment has arrived--because, in this dangerous
world, he is the leader to whom most Americans will turn. A run in 2008,
moreover, would be far different from the quixotic crusade of 2000; not only
does McCain have a broad national constituency and high approval ratings but,
an aide points out, he has a finance committee poised to raise the hundred
million or two hundred million dollars necessary to mount a powerful campaign,
and an organization in every state in the country. In open primaries and the
general election, moreover, he might well win Democratic voters. As Bob Kerrey
told me, "He's got to be the one person the Democrats least want as the
Republican candidate. I'm a Democrat, of course--but he causes people like me
to think twice." Early polls show him beating both John Kerry and Hillary
Clinton.
Still, the Republican primaries remain perhaps his highest hurdle. In 2000,
shortly after the smear campaign led to his defeat in the South Carolina
primary, McCain went to Virginia Beach, not far from where Pat Robertson lived,
and hit back. "I am a pro-life, pro-family fiscal conservative and
advocate of a strong defense," he told the crowd. "And yet Pat
Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement
call me an unacceptable Presidential candidate. . . . Why? Because I don't
pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money
is our message." Gary Bauer told me he thought at the time that that
speech was "self-destructive," and that, if McCain were going to run
in 2008, "he has major repair work to do, reaching out to some of those
individuals." In addition, he would advise McCain "to pick a battle
on one of the social issues--like a pro-life justice on the Supreme Court.
Don't just vote in favor but lead the charge. When Hillary and Ted Kennedy go
to the floor to savage the nominee, McCain should go, and not leave it to Rick
Santorum"--the outspoken Republican senator from Pennsylvania.
McCain faces an extraordinarily difficult test. The problem with his public
image--as someone who says what he thinks to those in power; who is more at
home in the heartland than in Washington, despite his tenure there of more than
twenty years; who is essentially an anti-politician--is that he must live up to
it. At the most basic level, he can't appear to be doing the kinds of things
that he has attacked others for doing. The Reform Institute is a nonprofit
organization in Washington that deals with campaign-finance reform and global
warming. In early March, an article appeared in the Times pointing out that
Rick Davis was its president and McCain was its chairman, and McCain was often
featured in its news releases and fund-raising letters; last year, it raised
about $1.3 million. For the avatar of campaign-finance reform to have this sort
of close, unregulated relationship with a nonprofit (and one whose work can
benefit him politically) seems unwise, at best. He has since resigned. "I
should have realized how it would look. I have to be Caesar's wife,"
McCain said.
And, at a much more difficult level, he will have to make many of the same
kinds of political calculations that his colleagues do--vis-a-vis the Bush
White House, the Christian right, the N.R.A.,
and others--without appearing to be doing so. McCain may well be equal to this
sleight of hand, because, contrary to his cultivated image, he is in many ways
a born politician. Aides say that he knows instinctively what the right
political move is. During last year's Presidential campaign, he advised John
Kerry to stop talking so much about himself in Vietnam (the focus, also, of the
Kerry introduction at the Democratic Convention which proved, in retrospect,
ineffectual). No one is more masterly than McCain at exploiting his P.O.W.
experience. Similarly, his talent for showmanship has enabled him to build the
platform he has with the media, and to use it to his advantage whenever he
pleases without appearing to be a showman. He is intuitive about which issues
the public will respond to, like pork-barrel legislation, campaign-finance
reform, and global warming. One aide recalled that during the 2000 town-hall
meetings McCain was so attuned to what people most cared about that he was
"like a one-man polling station."
McCain's political dexterity would certainly serve him well as President.
But he is not nearly as "alien" in Congress as his aides insist that
he is. He shares with many of his colleagues a long-term fixation on the
Presidency--in his case, since at least 1997, when he confided to Chuck Larson
that he wanted to run. But in McCain's continuing self-dramatization it is duty
that drives him, not the self-serving ambition that impels most politicians.
This is how his ardent supporters see him, too. Lindsey Graham told me,
"If you spend thirty minutes with John, you understand that his goal in
life is not to achieve power for the sake of achieving power. He's never been
driven by becoming something." Part of the McCain mystique derives from
the fact that he so frequently invokes his past--and his father's and his
grandfather's--as a naval officer, as though he were still, somehow, more
military man than politician. On October 9, 2001, two days after the bombing of
Afghanistan began, McCain addressed the young men and women at the U.S. Naval
Academy, saying, "Soon you will be the shield behind which marches the
enduring message of our revolution. There is no greater duty, no greater honor.
. . . Hold that honor as dearly as your country holds you. Hold it as dearly as
do those who have already been called to the battle. Hold it as if it were your
greatest treasure. Because it is. It is. Whatever sacrifices you must bear, you
will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure." He continued,
"My warrior days were long ago, but not so long ago that I have forgotten
their purpose and their reward."