We hear repeatedly that mcCain did not suffer any substantive sanctions from the Senate Ethics Committee in 1989-90 from his actions as a member of the "Keating Five," a term retroactively applied to five U.S. Senators who received significant campaign contributions from the Phoenix-based American Continental Corporation chair Charles Keating - in Keating's words - to persuade them to aid him in avoiding federal oversight in his stewardship of depositor money at Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine, CA.
This is true as far as it goes. However, the implication is that McCain was no different from the other Senators - John Glenn, Dennis DeConcini, Alan Cranston and Don Reigle. This really wasn't the case.
At the time, it was clear that the others took campaign contributions and listened politely to the contributor. In Glenn's case, Keating had been a constituent when he lived in Ohio. In Cranston's case, the two shared an interest in the nuclear freeze movement. (Charlie's Catholicism didn't begin and end with opposition to abortion and pornography; he had apparently been against the arms race for years.) In DeConcini's case, as he really stupidly put it and yes I unfairly paraphrase the twit, "there's jobs for Arizonans in wrecking the U.S. economy."
McCain, though, built a relationship with Keating quite similar to the one he had with Duke Tully. He flew on ACC jets and didn't reimburst the real estate company. He thoguht that the LBJ ploy of simply having his wife do the investing would allow his family to prosper from Keating's aggressive development of NE Phoenix.
What is not being circulated today is an important piece of his "exoneration" from the ethics inquiry. It involved jurisdiction, not substance. McCain's attorney successfully lobbied Robert Bennett, the counsel for the inquiry, to agree that since mcCain's activity was as a House member prior to his 1986 election to the Senate, it wasn't as clearly Senate business as the activity of the others. Please re-read the above sentence before moving on.
I don't doubt McCain's sincerity when he says and writes that the experience really changed his consciousness about politics and money. I don't think we as humans totally change simply because of such recognitions. But tue truth of the matter is that in 1984-86, as he set himself up to replace an icon in the U.S. Senate, John McCain ws very much a junior officer on the make. He traded in a wife in a wheelchair for a wife with a trust fund. He attacked reporters who questioned the contradictions in his stories about his POW years. He honed his position on national issues, and hs courted individuals such as Keating and Tully.
(Duke Tully is a sideshow in all of this, but basically: He was publisher of the Arizona Republic, charged in the early 80s with modernizing the paper while remaining true to the Pulliam family's paleo-conservatism. He had been at one of the family's AZ papers and had built something of a larger than life persona among other things by fabricating a 20-year career as an Air Force pilot in Korea and Vietnam from a two-week medical leave while an ad salesman earlier in his career. The holes in Tully's story should have been clear to a real Vietnam pilot. However, McCain nurtured a friendship with Tully that included each standing as godfather for one of the other's children. )