The Media’s Favorite Republican

“Sure, I’m disappointed,” he said, “but I’m not distraught. The thing you have to understand is, this thing was thrust upon me. I didn’t ask for this job. The leadership came to me and said, McCain, get a bill through committee, and do it with bipartisan support. And I said, ‘Aye-aye, sir.’ And we got it through on a 19 to 1 vote. Kept the process moving forward.

“I feel strongly that this bill was the best way to stop kids from smoking. And I believe in the cause. But this has never been on my agenda. Now, campaign-finance reform — I’m passionate about that. And national-security issues. But tobacco legislation — I never would have considered it otherwise.”

Even so, I said, you spent three months on it. Your name was wrapped around the bill and it just went down in flames. And you act like you just got back from the beach.

He shrugged, still smiling. “I told my guys” — the staffers who had worked on the legislation — “what would we have done differently? We did everything we could. You see what I mean? We fought hard. We lost. Now let’s move on.”

I reminded him — not that I needed to — of the $ 40 million in ads the tobacco companies had bought to denounce the bill, and to denounce McCain, too, by name: Tax-and-spend McCain, they called him.

“Yeah,” he said, “when I was in Arizona, I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing, ‘What’s happened to John McCain? How come he’s supporting a big tax increase?'” He shrugged again.

Right, right, I said. So why do you seem so happy?

“Look,” he said, impatiently, “let’s go off the record for a second.”

And then, off the record, John McCain told me why he’s a happy man.

Here’s one reason he should be happy, though he himself didn’t mention it: John McCain gets the best press coverage of any politician in the country. It is widely acknowledged that he wants to run for president in 2000, and already national political reporters are lost in love. Reading through the press clippings, you come across a man who’s part Jimmy Stewart, part St. Sebastian. The McCain Swoon is now so conspicuous that NBC News, the Washington Post, and other news outlets have assigned reporters to do favorable stories explaining why the stories about John McCain are so favorable. You see it straight off in the headlines of the many McCain profiles written over the past 18 months: “A Question of Honor” (the New York Times Magazine), “Combat Ready: A Day in the Life of Tobacco Warrior McCain” (CQ Weekly), and, continuing right over the top, “John McCain Walks on Water” (Esquire).

Much of the prose is comically overheated. “Bloody but unbowed, the brash McCain returned to the fray,” wrote the left-wing columnist David Nyhan in the Boston Globe, apropos of something or other. “His spunk and determination win accolades across the political spectrum.” And: “He is the brightest light in the shadowy Senate cave.” And: “one of those rare political gems. . . . For a lot of people, the Senate is 99 bozos and this guy.”

The prose isn’t always so crude. Sometimes it is rich, gorgeous. “In the wider world,” Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire, “he’s come to stand for something completely different — an effective politics of public conscience. The people who come to him do so because they think they can find something they’ve lost. It is a perilous thing, this act of faith in a faithless time — perilous for McCain, . . . and perilous for the people who have come to him, who must realize the constant risk that, sometimes, God turns out to be just a thunderstorm, and the gold just stones agleam in the sun.” (“Jeesh,” McCain said to me one night, when I mentioned these lines, “I don’t think I’m that deep. Do you?”)

The McCain Swoon is one of the curiosities of American politics these days, and it’s worth exploring for what it tells us about political opinion-making, and about McCain. The “mainstream” press, after all, generally swoons elsewhere than at the feet of conservative Republicans. McCain himself offers a straightforward explanation for why reporters treat him so well. “Candor and accessibility,” he says. “Candor, in that they know I’ll tell them what I think. Accessibility — I’m going to return your phone calls. A lot of senators, if they don’t want to talk about an issue, they won’t return the calls. Even if I don’t want to talk about your issue, I’ll return your call, and I’ll tell you I don’t want to talk about it.” It is impossible to underestimate the gratitude this generates in the hearts of reporters, who spend most of their professional lives on the phone making fruitless requests for interviews with important strangers who would rather attend an autopsy than talk to the press. “Reporters are so used to being spun,” he says. “If you just talk to them, and tell them what you really think, they appreciate it.”

So they like him. Most people do. McCain is a charming man, genuinely friendly, witty, and self-deprecating, showing neither the false bonhomie nor the Olympian vanity that politicians generally, and United States senators especially, employ in dealing with the press. With McCain there is no sense of manipulation; he gives the impression, calculated or not, of not being calculating. It would require a kind of perversity not to like him or enjoy his company. He is as close to a normal human being as a reporter has a right to expect any politician to be.

The McCain Swoon is not merely personal, of course; an ideological element enters in, as well. McCain’s standing as an orthodox Republican is secure — conservative organizations that measure such things, and are ever alert to signs of deviationism, routinely score his voting record in the eighties and nineties, and he receives correspondingly low rankings from liberal groups. But over the course of his political career he has gained a reputation for being ideologically complicated. Though a former Navy pilot, for example, he has pushed relentlessly for the closing of obsolete military bases and fought to scuttle both the B-2 bomber and the Sea Wolf submarine. He has been skeptical of the actual deployment of American power, from the disastrous Lebanon adventure in 1983 to Desert Storm. (This strikes many reporters as anomalous, since they mistakenly believe that military men like warfare, just as they mistakenly believe that businessmen like the free market.)

McCain calls himself a “deregulator,” and his tenure as chairman of the Commerce Committee largely bears him out. In the late ’80s, he led the repeal of President Reagan’s catastrophic-health-insurance bill — a position that foreshadowed his early opposition to President Clinton’s proposal to nationalize health care. More recently, though, and much more famously, he has identified himself with two pieces of legislation that together would rival ClintonCare in their expansion of federal authority over previously unregulated areas of American life. The tobacco legislation fashioned by McCain’s committee was a classic bill of attainder. It would have targeted, and maybe bankrupted, a single legal industry with a boatload of fees, advertising restrictions, and unspecified federal regulations. The weirdest provision would have penalized the industry unless consumption of its products declined over the next decade.

The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill is based on a similar faith in the blunderbuss application of federal power. In its various versions, for instance, it would have forced television stations to give free air-time to political candidates; made it illegal for issue-advocacy groups like the ACLU and the National Right to Life Committee to publish commentary on the voting records of federal office-seekers; severely restricted an individual’s right to contribute to out-of-state politicians; and much, much else, all in the cause of “cleaning up politics.”

This kind of ideological complication is catnip to Washington reporters, none of whom smokes and most of whom believe that financial contributions are the great corrupting influence in American politics. As a consequence, McCain has become the conservative that liberals love to love — a “maverick,” it is said, who invariably stands on “principle.” In fact, it is impossible to discern a coherent set of principles that might explain the contradictory positions McCain has taken. He seems, even more than most practical politicians, to move on instinct. “You have to do what you think is right,” he often tells reporters. “You may not agree with me, but you can be assured that I will always do what I think is right.” And if the entire Washington press corps collapses in praise and admiration, well, then, so be it.

Washington’s professional conservatives, of course, have been rather less pleased with McCain. They speak darkly of a man in the grip of “Potomac fever,” an ambitious pol turning his back on his allies as he cravenly seeks the approval of, gulp, the Washington Post editorial page. People who know McCain well find this scenario absurd — or, as his old friend Orson Swindle, now a member of the Federal Trade Commission, puts it: “Utter bulls –.” But the suspicion seems by now ineradicable. When I mentioned McCain to a fellow who works in a think tank in Washington, a highly principled, deeply committed, thoroughly incorruptible conservative, he scoffed. “John McCain is a squish,” he said.

A squish.

“Do you want to go home?”

“No.” . . .

“Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you.”

For the next few days, he lived in terror, trembling at each sound in the corridor, knowing beyond question that his refusal to accept a release meant the good times were over. But nothing happened. A sense of relief began to take hold. He didn’t trust it.

He was right. A week later he was braced in a stark room before Slopehead, the camp commander. Ten guards were standing by, including [the guard nicknamed] the Prick.

“Why are you so disrespectful of guards?” asked Slopehead.

“Because the guards treat me like an animal,” snapped McCain.

The Prick gleefully led the charge as the guards, at Slopehead’s command, drove fists and knees and boots into McCain. Amid laughter and muttered oaths, he was slammed from one guard to another, bounced from wall to wall, knocked down, kicked, dragged to his feet, knocked back down, punched again and again in the face. When the beating was over, he lay on the floor, bloody, arms and legs throbbing, ribs cracked, several teeth broken off at the gumline.

“Are you ready to confess your crimes?” asked Slopehead.

“No.”

The ropes came next . . .

And so on, and so on — it gets worse. This passage is from The Nightingale’s Song, Robert Timberg’s account of five Vietnam-era Annapolis graduates, including McCain, and it helps, as you read it, if you know one thing. When Navy pilot McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and made a prisoner of war, his father was commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and the North Vietnamese offered to send the younger McCain home immediately — as a gesture of good will on their part, they said, and in reality a ploy to demoralize his fellow prisoners. The Navy Code of Conduct required that prisoners be released in the order of their capture. So McCain said no. So they beat him, starved him, hung him by his broken arms — because he wouldn’t let them let him go.

McCain was in prison for five and a half years, two of them in solitary confinement. He had narrowly escaped death already, as Timberg writes, on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal in the South China Sea, when a misfired Zuni rocket tore into the fuel tank of his A-4E Skyhawk. The ensuing firestorm burned for 36 hours and killed 134 men. When the Forrestal made it back to port, McCain immediately volunteered for duty on the carrier Oriskany, also in the South China Sea, and four months later he was in the Hanoi Hilton.

There he met Orson Swindle, who today sees in McCain an exemplar of the POW experience — my words, not his. These are his: “I don’t know if he had these qualities before prison, the irreverence, the sense of humor. I suspect he did. But those qualities are magnified in prison. There’s this sense among all of us that, you know, we’ve seen the worst. I mean, what are you going to do to us — throw us in jail? You learn to laugh at death — you’ve just got to defy death and pain and all the rest of it. You end up with a combination of tenacity and independence and arrogance.

“Most of us started off pretty cocky anyway. Then you spend five or six years not yielding, trying to keep to your principles and beliefs against this enormous pressure, and you build up an intensity that probably never leaves you. I’m sure John gets pressured every day to do one thing or another. But he doesn’t yield.”

McCain spent several months in the hospital after his release from prison in 1973, and then became a squadron commander in Jacksonville, Florida, training pilots.

“All of us are in a hurry, especially then,” says Swindle. “You just hit the ground like a sponge, wanting to absorb everything. You want to live life. You’re making up for lost time.” Before long, McCain’s marriage collapsed. “There’s a pretty high divorce rate in our group,” says Swindle. “The changes in the country, and in us, were so dramatic. Our wives and families went through hell. It was an incredible chasm to try to cross. And a lot of couples didn’t make it.”

In 1980, McCain married Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor from Phoenix. By then the Navy had transferred him to Washington, where he worked as naval liaison in the Senate. He became friendly with several senators — Bill Cohen, the current secretary of defense, served as best man at his wedding, Gary Hart as an usher — and McCain liked what he saw. “It gave me a certain desire for political pursuit,” he says now. Timberg phrases it less gracefully in The Nightingale’s Song: “His time in the Senate had whipped his ambition into a lather.”

He and Cindy moved to Phoenix the next year. “I don’t think he’d been here a week before I started hearing from political people, ‘Gee, I just got a call from this guy McCain — what’s he up to?'” recalls John Kolbe, a columnist for the Arizona Republic. “He was very smart and he moved very quickly. I remember wondering, Why doesn’t he run for the state legislature? Well, there’s a three-year residency requirement for state legislators. But he could run for Congress right away.” A congressional seat opened up months after McCain arrived in Phoenix. Within 24 hours he and Cindy had bought a house in the district.

McCain’s quick moves betrayed an ambition that seems extraordinary even by the generous standards of American politics. As it happened, though, the charge of carpetbagging was made only once, by a Republican rival in McCain’s first political debate.

McCain explained to his opponent, and to voters, that with a father in the Navy he had always moved around a lot. “We lived all over the place,” he said. “When I think about it, I guess the place I’ve lived the longest was Hanoi.”

“That was the end of it,” John Kolbe recalls. “It was the most powerful response I’ve ever heard to a political charge.”

It was also, so far as I can tell, one of the few occasions when McCain has made explicit use of his POW experience for political advantage. But of course he doesn’t need to. He knows the power of his personal story, and he knows, too, that its power is intensified when he leaves it unspoken. Whether this is cynicism, I don’t know — I tend to doubt it — but it sure works, on reporters and on everyone else, too. His heroism is the thing that people know about him, when they know anything about him at all.

The other morning at National Airport, waiting to board a plane for a trip to New Orleans, McCain was approached by a scruffy young man with a shoulder bag.

“Senator McCain, I can’t imagine you want to get on a plane after what you’ve been through,” the man said.

“Friend,” McCain answered, “if I was going to die in a plane it would have happened before now. You’re safe with me.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, with an awkward bow. “It’s an honor. You have a lot of guts, sir.”

I think this happens to John McCain a lot.

McCain was traveling to Louisiana for a political trip — a fund-raising lunch in New Orleans for his Senate reelection campaign, and then a fund-raising dinner in Baton Rouge for the state Republican party. In between were several hours of meetings with various Louisiana political operatives, at which McCain could take soundings for his possible presidential campaign.

No one around McCain doubts he wants to run for president, but opinions vary widely as to whether he’ll do it. “He has a very serious issue with his family,” says Jay Smith, a political consultant who has worked with McCain since 1982. “You can’t run with your family opposed to it, and it’s not at all clear that they’ll want to do it.” In 1994, Mrs. McCain disclosed her past addiction to prescription painkillers — an addiction that she had fed by stealing pills from a medical charity she had founded. She is a reserved and dignified woman, uncomfortable in the public eye. And the rules of the modern presidential campaign would probably require her to undergo any number of grotesque rituals of self-disclosure — an atonement interview with a soulful Barbara Walters, just for starters.

When I mentioned this possibility to McCain on the plane to Louisiana, he visibly shuddered.

“This is of great concern to her,” he said. “She’s not a political person. She lives in Phoenix with the kids” — the McCains have four, ranging in age from 13 to 6 — “and she’s busy with their schools and her volunteer work. She did something wrong. She’s paid for it and gotten on with her life.”

So why, given the possible strain on his family, would he want to run for president? He drew himself up in his seat, and spoke slowly so I would catch his every word.

“To give us, and our children, a more peaceful world,” he said. “To create a more efficient and responsive government, a government that adheres to principle.”

This, too, is typical McCain, as typical as the candor and barbed comments he’s celebrated for. John McCain is not really allergic to political cant. He can sling it with the best of them. Here’s the real complication in McCain’s public persona, and it is more often than not obscured in the press’s obsession with his status as a maverick and a hero. The New York Times may call him a subversive. His staff may call him a populist. But the truth is, in most matters, he’s a thoroughly conventional politician — vague, hesitant, risk-averse. He is given to statements like this one to Chris Matthews, when he was asked on CNBC’s Hardball about Trent Lott’s assertion that homosexuality was a sin.

“My view is that in the case of the military, the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was appropriate. And I also believe that gays should not be in the military, and I know that’s a problem that a lot of people would have. At the same time, I don’t believe that we should discriminate against anyone, and that includes because of their sexual orientation. That may get me in trouble, but I don’t believe that should be the case.”

It’s hard to see how such a statement would “get him in trouble,” since no one, I’ll bet, would be able to figure it out. As long ago as 1986, when McCain was first elected to the Senate after two terms in the House, R. W. Apple wrote in the New York Times that McCain was “now poised to emerge as a significant figure in national politics.” That has always been the expectation of political observers, but it has largely gone unfulfilled. After twelve years in the Senate, few major pieces of legislation have borne McCain’s name, and those that have, like the tobacco and campaign-finance bills, have been conspicuous failures.

As we drove around Louisiana, I asked him what three or four accomplishments he was proudest of during his years on Capital Hill.

“Line-item veto,” he said immediately, and then lapsed into silence. For many years, McCain was the prime sponsor of legislation giving the president a line-item veto. A few days after we spoke, it was overturned by the Supreme Court.

In the car there was a long pause. Then McCain added, “The repeal of catastrophic care,” which was in 1989.

More silence.

“And then, in the third category,” he continued, “I’d have to say involvement in foreign policy and national-security issues, ranging from the Persian Gulf resolution to all the other stuff I’ve been involved in terms of national security. Remember, up until recently, that was my main area of expertise.”

McCain says he is critical of the president’s waffling foreign policy, particularly in China, but it is difficult to get him to say what, precisely, he’d do differently as president.

“The first thing I’d do,” he told me, “is convene the best minds I know of in the field of foreign policy, and that would include members of previous Democratic and Republican administrations. I’d have Brzezinski, Jim Baker, Scowcroft, Tom Pickering, Kissinger, Warren Christopher — and I’m sure others. I’d say, ‘Look, let’s figure out where we are, where we need to go, what our conceptual framework is. Let’s work out a cohesive foreign policy.’ I’m sure that those people, with their collective brilliance and a lot of experience, could come up with a very cohesive foreign policy. See what I mean?”

And China, specifically — would he do anything different?

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I’d send my best people over there first thing to talk privately. And they’d say, ‘Look guys, this damn foolishness of transferring technology to people like Pakistan has got to stop and it’s got to stop now. You’ve got to figure out where your priorities are, guys.'”

Or else?

“Or else, I’d tell them, there’s going to be no choice but that the American people will demand that our relations with you will worsen. See? Of course, if they have some cogent argument why they can’t do what we expect of them, then we’ll listen to their views. After all, they are an emerging world power.”

I asked him about a McCain defense budget. “Oh, there’s a lot of things we could do,” he said. “Modernization. Base-closings. Privatizing all the depot work.”

Would he increase defense spending anywhere? “Yeah,” he said. “But there’s a lot of places where I’d decrease it. Trident submarines, the B-2 bomber. Some of the heavy equipment we’re acquiring now.”

And increases?

He thought for a moment. “Readiness,” he said at last. “A more maneuverable Army and Marine Corps. Modernization. There are a lot of weapons we could have to modernize our force, but nobody knows how to pay for them.”

As the car neared Baton Rouge, where McCain was to give a speech to Louisiana Republicans, I asked him about his domestic initiatives.

“It’s a reform agenda,” he said. “Medicare reform. Reform of the tax code, i.e., a flat tax.”

I asked about his preferences among the various flat-tax proposals. “No preferences, really,” he said. “We’d have to sort them out through a process of examination, discussion, and debate. If the American people thought we were serious about cleaning up the tax code, then we’d get a lot of expert advice. There are a lot of experts out there, you know. A lot of smart people. We could get the best and listen to them.

“I don’t have the expertise really to be very knowledgeable about it. I read a lot about it, but it depends on who you read, because the assumptions are so different. See what I mean?”

McCain often frames his discussions of policy with an appeal to the authority of experts. When I asked him about the possibility of women’s fighting in ground combat, he replied, “I just have to defer to Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, the Joint Chiefs. The experts are unanimous that that’s not the way to go.”

One afternoon, during the tobacco floor fight, I pressed him on some of the bill’s dubious assumptions.

“Every living surgeon general, Dr. Koop, Dr. Kessler, every public-health organization, with hundreds of thousands of members — the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society — every expert who’s looked at this says this is the way to stop kids smoking.”

But those groups will get billions of dollars under this legislation, I said. Of course they’re for it.

He stared at me. “Every living surgeon general,” he repeated coldly, “Koop, Kessler, the AMA . . .”

It is a trope we’ve heard before in politics, and as we pulled into Baton Rouge I suddenly remembered whom I’d heard it from. “What we do is, we get the best minds,” Ross Perot used to say, “we lift up the hood and we go to work and fix it.”

And I remembered a line from the Esquire article about McCain: “He has gathered almost by accident a national constituency to whom politics seems almost beside the point, injurious, and nearly an affront.” That was Perot’s appeal, too. Independent, nonideological, with a limitless faith in expertise and a personal background that not only transcends politics but makes it look puny and mean by comparison: McCain is a thinking man’s Perot, if such a thing is possible. A Perot without the weirdness. A charming, likable, heroic Perot.

McCain got a standing ovation from the Republicans in Baton Rouge. This was the first delivery of what will become his campaign stump speech if he runs for president, and it was beautifully written and almost meticulously unspecific — thematic, in speech-writer terminology. McCain didn’t mention his war experience, of course. But it was there, as it always is, in the way he approached the podium, with his arms slightly akimbo from where they were broken 31 years ago. And it was there, indirectly, in the speech’s peroration — an account of the battle for the Mayaguez, the last engagement in Indochina in 1975.

Of the men who died there, McCain said: “Where they rest is unknown, but their honor is eternal, and lives in our country for so long as she deserves the love of such brave men.” When the lady in front of me rose at the end, she was crying. So was her husband.

Back at the hotel I had a final few minutes with McCain. In the several hours I’d spent with him over two weeks, he’d asked me to go off the record only once — and that was when he’d explained why he was so cheerful even though the tobacco bill had just been defeated. Now I asked him why he’d gone off the record.

“Because I know how it sounds,” he said. “It sounds self-serving. I can’t tell you how intense the pressure is to use all that stuff. Just the other day they brought me a fund-raising letter they’d written for me and the opening was something like, ‘I remember the nightmare of Vietnam . . .’

“I said, ‘Sweet Jesus, you can’t use this.’ I will never do this.

“Look, it’s something that happened in my life. I didn’t like it. I don’t think about it. And I hate to talk about it. But I can’t tell you how badly I want to be remembered as a good senator — the guy who got the line-item veto — and not as a guy who was in prison.”

Finally, though, and maybe reluctantly, he said I could put the quotes on the record. So we’ll end where we began, with John McCain explaining his good cheer.

“Off the record?” he’d said that evening in his office, after the tobacco defeat. “Okay: You read Timberg’s book. About prison, and the Forrestal and all that. By any rational measure, I shouldn’t be alive right now. After that, everything’s like a bonus. I’ve got a great job. I’ve got a wonderful wife and beautiful kids. Here –” he grabbed a piece of colored notepaper from his desk. It was a letter from his daughter at Spanish camp. “Hola Papa Mia!” it began.

“This is what’s important. I’ve learned what’s important. And the rest?” He shrugged, hands in the air.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.