"I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else."
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
In 1948, a 12-year-old boy discovered two four-leaf clovers in his yard in Arlington, Virginia. Astounded by the doubly potent signs of good fortune, he immediately decided to preserve the twin omens between the pages of a book. He raced to his father’s study, pulled a volume from the shelf at random, let it fall open, became enraptured with the bloody, glorious world he found in the text, and plunged headfirst into his first love affair with a hero outside of his own family.
The hero: Robert Jordan, from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The overarching theme: Beautiful Fatalism.
The boy: John Sidney McCain III.
Of such small accidents is world history made: four-leaf clovers, a Hemingway book, a young boy born into a family with a largely absent father and the stoic blood of generations of military men coursing through his veins. This man who now wants to lead the most powerful country on earth was in no small part shaped by Hemingway's fictional tale of violence, death, doomed love, guerilla battle – and, perhaps most importantly, the story of a man fighting with the demons of his father and grandfather against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The novel contained, as McCain notes, "portents of tragic heroism"—a fascination that he carried over in toto into his adult life. "For a long time," McCain says, "Robert Jordan was the man I admired above almost all others in life and fiction ... a hero for the twentieth century, my century...."
In his own 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For, the then-65-year-old senator still remains entranced with the heroics of pointless and sacrificial bloodshed, personal honor and the beauty of doomed glory: "Their heroism was a beautiful fatalism. They stayed loyal to a doomed cause. But their salvation was found in the ultimate discovery that they had not sacrificed vainly, that they had died for something else, something greater."
These elements – gallantry, sacrifice, violence, fatalism and honor – run like an orchestrated score in a minor key through nearly all of McCain’s writings and speeches in public life. From these themes he takes his cues in a startlingly simplistic fashion into adulthood and into the political sphere, and – as we draw near the election that could make him president – it’s worth examining in depth the heroes he has chosen, the scenarios that captivate him, and the merit he attributes to various human characteristics.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
- Macaulay, Horatius at the Gate
While Robert Jordan may have been the young McCain’s first chosen hero, it’s important to note that he was born into a family replete with pre-packaged legends – some living, some dead – of its own. Every war in which America ever engaged has an ancestor of McCain on its military rolls, stretching all the way back to the American Revolution, and his grandfather and father are the only pair of father-son four-star naval admirals in this country’s history.
Born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone, McCain experienced a childhood marked by the transience familiar to most military families: continuous adjustment to new schools and friends, a mother who holds the family together while the father serves, and reliance on the insular institutional structure of the military to make absence and relocation less traumatic. Looming over all is the necessity to subjugate individual needs to the career requirements of the officer; this was particularly true in McCain’s case as his father, John Sidney McCain Jr. ("Jack"), began his own career rise during the years of the future senator’s childhood. Jack's ascension to power began in the shadow of his famous father, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr. ("Slew"), who eventually took charge of all land-based aircraft operations in the South Pacific early in World War II, helping to coordinate the Guadalcanal invasion.
Living up to the previous generation of military heroes was in itself a McCain family tradition, both a challenge and a burden that forever called the sons to be looking over their shoulders at the legends of the past, assessing whether they were measuring up, even as they struggled to attend to their own current lives and future careers. Nowhere is this more clear than in the way Senator McCain himself chose to tell his own life story in his first best-selling memoir, Faith of My Fathers. Throughout, he weaves the stories of his forebears and his own life, moving back and forth in time, telling anecdotes from his grandfather’s days at Annapolis, then of his own childhood memories of him, then discussing his father’s adventures as a submarine commander during World War II, until it’s often unclear when he’s reminiscing whether he’s discussing the impact on himself, on his father, on his grandfather, or on all of them at once.
But our fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long absences, can be a huge presence in our lives. You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other relatives, and the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance. When your father is away, the tradition remains, and embellishes a paternal image that is powerfully attractive to a small boy, even long after the boy becomes a man.
-John McCain, Faith of My Fathers
Powerful, indeed. At the age of 68, McCain himself proved unable to resist the temptation to embellish his father's image in his book of essays, Why Courage Matters: "My father was the most honest man I’ve ever known. He wouldn’t tell a lie, ever." In Character is Destiny, he reiterates: "I don’t believe he ever told a lie." Similarly impossible, absolutist declarations of his father’s inviolate honesty abound throughout McCain’s memoirs, essays and articles. As biographer Robert Timberg writes:
John spoke of pride, honor, and integrity when discussing his father, but rarely love, as if their relationship was one of respect, but not real affection, at least from John’s standpoint. There also seems to have been some resentment, hints of which occasionally peek out from between the hundred-dollar words. "I didn’t spend as much time with him as maybe I would have if he’d been more committed to being around me," he said on one occasion.
Tantalizingly close, yet concretely distant. Patriotic memorabilia filling a household, treated with reverence, honoring immediate family members who spend little time with you, yet whose careers all family life centers around. A grandfather who stood upon the deck of the Missouri with MacArthur, Halsey and Nimitz as the Japanese officially surrendered, a father who lived out Hollywood-style adventures as a submarine commander who stalked the Japanese fleet. These currents run deep underneath the childhood of John McCain, and it is consequently little wonder he filled in the paternal void of his household with heroes and legends and fascination with sacrifice and war. Learning, as he phrased it, to accept a father’s absence not as a deprivation but as an honor, would seem to require a Spartan attitude unusual in a young boy. Perhaps the only way to train one’s self to accept the inevitable in such circumstances is to begin from a very early age to place sacrifice in the name of the nation above all else; after all, if these causes are not inherently noble, glorious or worth the fighting and sacrificing for – by all family members – then the absence would be psychologically devastating. It would be, in short, rejection. It is this sanctifying of patriotic sacrifice, more than any other ideal, that would prove to be John McCain's lodestar from his adolescence, through his adulthood, and into his years as senior statesman and presidential hopeful.
War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good; for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
- Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
In the several books that McCain has written extolling great men – almost all of his subjects are, in fact, male – a remarkable number of those profiled are primarily notable due to their sacrifice, even death, in the name of their countries. Foremost among them is the man perhaps most closely associated with McCain as a hero in the public eye, the one he has praised the most often over the years: Theodore Roosevelt. Many Americans admire the 26th president, but McCain even has something of a minor personal connection with him through his family: his famed grandfather was aboard a ship of the Great White Fleet, the "new" Navy that TR had built up and sent around the world to show off the military might of America at the beginning of the 20th century.
Many of the traits of Roosevelt that McCain most admires are those the two men appear to hold in common: energy, enthusiasm, a reputation for courting the press and speaking their minds, a reformist label and a passion to extend America’s reach and values to the world at large.
Confessing that the "fantastic, frantic pace is what really drew me to Teddy Roosevelt," McCain attempts to explain his attraction throughout all of his books. Some of the appeal can be attributed to the late president’s investment in the U.S. Navy, which over the years could be viewed as the McCain family business. Yet no other subject unrelated to him elicits as many words from the senator as TR on so many matters; the sheer number of words author McCain expends on him signals a sense of worship that goes beyond mere high esteem and borders on idolatry. While he admits an occasional lapse on Roosevelt’s part – conceding a touch of racism, or the fact "that the war [Spanish-American] our hero gloried in and which glorified him might have been as much his creation as it was the enemy’s, perhaps even more so" – McCain’s relish for TR and what he saw as his "intense and fervid Americanism" sweeps any minor objections under the rug in the senator’s writings. Just a very small sampling of descriptions from McCain’s various books captures this flavor – and begins to sound a theme of Americanism which McCain clearly has adopted as his own:
... in his heart and public speeches he was ever the moral absolutist, who loved a good fight, seeing in every struggle a clear contest between good and evil.
His conduct of American foreign and military policy was even more energetic and forward-looking. He built up the navy and threatened Germany and other European powers, which had designs on colonies in the Western Hemisphere. He fomented a rebellion in Colombia that gave birth to the Republic of Panama, from which he secured the rights to dig his big ditch.
[Theodore Roosevelt] invented the modern presidency by liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches that had tilted decisively toward Congress in the half century since the Civil War.
Base materialism, Roosevelt believed, tempted people to indolence and greed and tempted nations to "shrink like cowards" from the duty of playing "a great part in the world" and seek shelter in "the cloistered life which saps the hard virtues of a nation, as it saps them in the individual."
He was a fighting man. It was his nature to find as much virtue in the battle itself as in the prize. For Roosevelt, fighting determined character.
And so on. And on.
It is hard not to conclude that Roosevelt’s vision of the rightness of American domination, moral absolutism and vigorous militarism helped McCain – who has so willingly responded to TR’s call, continuing to articulate the sense of this nation’s natural superiority – accept his family legacy of paternal absence in service of a higher cause.
Examining the other heroes of McCain, one finds many of the illustrious personages a reader would expect from a lifelong supporter of the military and expansionism: Lord Nelson, Dwight Eisenhower, Ferdinand Magellan, Elizabeth I. But even among some of the more predictable choices, McCain places unusual emphasis on their stubbornness, bloody-mindedness, and other emotional, rather than analytical, attributes. For example, Lincoln is lauded for his willingness to conduct total and annihilating war; Churchill for his "strategically brilliant" masterminding of the disaster at Gallipoli during World War I (in which 140,000 allied troops were either killed or wounded); George Washington for controlling an unseemly temper.
Indeed, the George Washington example highlights a further strange tendency in McCain’s versions of heroics: to perpetuate fictions or to conveniently leave out pertinent information in order to stick to a storyline that points out the moral goodness of his subject (and usually, America). In Why Courage Matters, for example, he urges Americans to tell their children the story of the first president, the cherry tree and the "I can’t tell a lie" myth long attached to Washington’s reputation (and actually created, as most informed Americans now know, from whole cloth by his first biographer, Parson Weems). How one contributes to the cultivation of honesty in America’s children by asking them to swallow as truth a total fabrication about the value of truth is a puzzle. Similarly, in Character is Destiny, he holds up Pat Tillman, the professional football player who volunteered for the U.S. Army and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, as a model of patriotism – which he certainly is – but neglects to point out that the American government for which he sacrificed his life initially lied to his family about the circumstances of his death and tried to cover it up. McCain also neglected to mention that Tillman’s family said the soldier did not support the war, and that he’d told a fellow soldier the entire enterprise was "fucking illegal."
This preference for a clean and simplistic story line with moral purpose is underscored in one of the oddest passages in McCain’s work. In Worth the Fighting For, the author discusses his admiration for Mexican Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, an interest that was sparked when McCain as a high school student first saw Marlon Brando portray him in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! in 1952. Entranced by the "glorious futility" of the rebel’s attempt to wrest control of land from the wealthy hacienda owners of the day, McCain in great detail recounts two scenes from the movie that fixated him. The most inspiring scene was, he admits, based on a total fiction (that Zapata was left in de facto control of Mexico for a time), yet the lessons McCain focuses on are drawn straight from the fictional scenes – in a sense, a reckless disregard for real history in order to reaffirm a romanticized "truth" that lives in a realm far more universal than mere reality. From these fictionalized portrayals, McCain builds an intense mythos about manhood, causes and country and their intertwined nature:
I loved so much the idea of one man on a white horse, fighting for justice, of course, but fighting because he had the courage to, fighting to prove himself better than his enemies, fighting because that was the essential truth of his life: He was a man who fought.
The extent to which he internalized and personalized this image is exhibited when he relates:
And the experience enlivened my dreams of fighting for justice as fearlessly as Zapata had. But even more important to me was my hope that by doing so I would provoke the right sort of enemy. But what was the point of being good if it didn’t gain the attention of the bad? To do that, I reasoned, the good man has to know how to be a little bad sometimes, as long as his misbehavior is for the right cause..
I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination.
- John McCain, Speech to the Republican National Convention, September 4, 2008
More than 50 years later, McCain – with a helping hand from the press – still seems committed to perpetuating a mythology of him as the man on the white horse, fighting for justice. And why not? It’s a good story line, easy to grasp and one that has inspired humankind throughout the ages. The problem is, the world is more complex than "man on the white horse" legends make it. To this day, it’s difficult to tell if McCain truly understands that. Suggestions that he does not lie in a few of the profiles from Character Is Destiny that simply fall outside his paradigm of the warrior individualist. His portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. is lifeless and rote, especially when laid alongside his accounts of TR, Churchill and Nelson, all of which are rich with personality and vividness. One can’t help suspecting a publisher asked him to include at least some portraits outside of the violent actors of history, and King came readily to mind as an obvious one. Some of the other choices, like UCLA hoops coach John Wooden, seem utterly random, and are depicted with tepid accounts of a relatively uneventful life.
But three of the choices in particular stand out as simply unfathomably misunderstood by McCain, and it’s telling that all of them are heroes that embody philosophies of non-violent resistance.
In discussing Gandhi, McCain states:
I can’t offer you an informed explanation of Gandhian philosophy; it is too rooted in his religious devotion, derived mostly from Hindu beliefs, for me to fully comprehend, much less explain, even though his beliefs were influenced by the traditions of all major religions, including mine. I cannot even claim to share all of his convictions, even those I do understand.
Aside from the mystifying decision to analyze in a published essay someone you admit up front you don’t understand, there’s the problem of "not getting" Gandhi. If McCain is serious – and it appears he is – in pleading incomprehension of Gandhi’s straightforward motives, methods, and his role in the anti-colonialist movement, what does this say about McCain and his likely inability to engage diplomatically with any non-hegemonic society?
Moving on from Gandhi, McCain attempts to examine Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and "prisoner of conscience" who has led the non-violent pro-democracy movement for years in Myanmar. In her case, McCain does seem to be making a good faith effort to understand her, and he clearly admires her. He’s met with her in person, and she’s mentioned in two of his books, Why Courage Matters and Character is Destiny. Yet there is an alarming, seemingly almost willful, determination to simply not accept the real underpinnings of her philosophical and political attitudes toward conflict, no matter how clearly she explains them.
In Why Courage Matters, McCain quotes from Aung San Suu Kyi’s 1991 essay, "Freedom From Fear," which was issued when she won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize but was unable to accept the honor in person because the Myanmar government had her under house arrest. In this incredible essay, the devout Buddhist says, "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." McCain admits, "Aung San Suu Kyi might disagree with me that outrage over the suffering inflicted on her people was the source of her extraordinary courage ....I can’t imagine how anyone with such a conscience and sense of duty could fail to experience a towering outrage over the crimes against humanity that her enemies have committed."
Another person profiled in Character Is Destiny is John Lewis, the civil rights-era legend and current Congressman who put into practice his training and philosophy of non-violent resistance. McCain quotes Lewis: "You lose your sense of fear. Because as long as you’re afraid, the opposition has something over you."
Clearly, the inner battle -- as these two activists define it -- is to move far beyond personal fear, in effect taking it off the table as a consideration when contemplating resistant strategies. Yet after relating the stories of these two heroes, McCain manages to discount their message entirely. In a closing summation in Character Is Destiny, even after relating their stories, he stubbornly asserts, "There is only one thing that we can claim with complete confidence is indispensable to courage, that must always be present for courage to exist: fear. You must be afraid to have courage." This may seem a subtle distinction, but it is one vitally important to understanding McCain’s inability to comprehend any person or philosophy outside his realm of personal experience: Both Lewis and Aung San Suu Kyi emphasize the importance of moving past a place of fear to effect change in the world. That, they both believe, is the secret to overcoming institutionalized and sanctioned state violence. Yet by McCain’s definition, fear must always be present for true courage to exist. This contradiction means that Lewis and Aung San Suu Kyi – as well as Gandhi – should not be included on the rolls of McCain’s heroes.
If McCain is so baldly flummoxed by foreign philosophies, it’s difficult to see how he expects to operate successfully on the world stage to find solutions – beyond strong-arm military tactics – to the complexities created by differences in international cultures and religions. His "I can’t imagine ..." confession in regards to Aung San Suu Kyi is disturbing when one realizes this lack of imagination is admitted by someone who aspires to be elected to the position as the greatest power broker on the planet.
This leads us back to examining the only philosophy that McCain seems to "get" –the bloody, glorious theater of war, where individual sacrifice to the doomed cause is the greatest possible good.
The senator’s early infatuation with Jordan foretold a lifelong romance with doomed causes, lost life, "honor" and battlefield heroics. All four of the books he’s authored with Salter glorify warriors, spilled blood, pointless sacrifice and, as he and Hemingway called it, "beautiful fatalism." This fascination with the beauty of fatalism – which other observers of the events recounted could label "waste and carnage" – is reflected in a passage typical of McCain’s near-ecstatic attraction to the splendor of death from Why Courage Matters. In this book, he glorifies a U.S. Marine defeat at the little-known Battle of Peleliu Island during World War II, "where prodigious blood was shed in a possibly unnecessary battle" and where he proclaims that "the pointlessness of the sacrifice on Peleliu certainly doesn’t diminish the heroism with which it was made."
Courage on the scale manifested in Peleliu—hard held, impossibly enduring, selfless, true in all its blood-stained, filthy, aching grandeur, summoned every day for months—will almost surely never be known or needed by us personally.
McCain’s reverence for the "aching grandeur" manifested in such a strategically pointless military blunder speaks volumes about how he might deploy American troops entrusted to his care; it would appear that bloody, unnecessary waste of lives would be viewed as a privilege bestowed upon those who serve. This harkens back to his father’s great love of the British Empire, with its fatalism, stoicism and lyrical glorification of carnage.
Half a league, half a league
Half a league onward
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
- Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade
While running for president in the 21st century (and anachronistically proclaiming the past century as his own), John McCain's attitude toward valor, sacrifice and honor is far more reminiscent of the 19th century. The willingness to casually accept death amongst both Americans and foreign populations in the name of democracy and capitalism bears fearful similarities to the British Empire’s "white man’s burden." Like the imperialists of old, assumptions of cultural superiority and absolutism are at the heart of McCain’s gospel.
McCain’s fetishization of doomed, bloody glory has gone largely unnoted by the national press that is responsible for helping McCain foster a maverick, bipartisan, straight-talking image. One of the few exceptions is Matt Welch, who in a biting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times published in November 2006, caught a whiff of the blood lust when he noted:
He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon's failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of "rogue state rollback." He's a fan of Roosevelt's Monroe-Doctrine-on-steroids stick-wielding in Latin America. And — like Bush — he thinks too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.
In other words, the man who aims to lead the United States of America has only one arrow in his quiver when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world: militarism. And a failed, bloody, doomed militarism at that – which bodes ill for the 21st century, should it be molded in McCain’s image.