He is 80 years old now. He was 31 when his A-4 was hit by a missile over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. You wonder if it occurred to John McCain, on the anniversary of that date, how improbable his life has been since then. How fortunate, in fact, he is to have had a life at all. He could have drowned in the lake where he landed after ejecting from his ruined airplane. Both arms and one leg were broken. He managed to inflate the life preserver that aviators called a “Mae West” with his teeth.
Surviving ejection was, as everyone knows, just the beginning. After he was pulled from the lake, he was given special treatment by his captors who saw him, correctly, as prime propaganda material. His father was a four-star admiral. In medieval days, John McCain would have been a captured prince worth an extravagant ransom.
So he was, in the eyes of the North Vietnamese, pure gold for propaganda purposes. He was offered early release. He refused and was tortured, again and again, for his resistance. James Stockdale, who was awarded a Medal of Honor for his own astonishing resistance, later called McCain “solid as a rock.”
McCain was what the POWs would call a “good resister,” a role that seemed to fit him when he returned to civilian life and one he may have been born to play.
Fortune and fate are, as the poets have always known, improbable things, and sometimes wonderfully so. It is hard to imagine that McCain would have ever been a political figure and, indeed, become a candidate for president had he not been shot down that day. He was an aviator. This was, supremely, his identity.
He would not have been in that plane, on that mission, had he not embraced that identity so tightly. He could have been ashore, in a cushy job. He had one of those, in Saigon, where he was friendly with R. W. “Johnny” Apple of the New York Times, who was famous both as a “dogged reporter” and a bon vivant. McCain shared with him the second of those two qualities.
McCain was in Saigon only because the carrier from which he had flown five combat missions, the USS Forrestal, had been crippled and forced to return to the yards for extensive repairs. The ship had been damaged by a series of flight deck explosions that began when stray voltage launched a “Zuni” rocket that was shackled to a plane waiting for takeoff. The rocket hit the external fuel tank on another plane and started fires on the flight deck. McCain was in the cockpit of a nearby plane, preparing to fly the strike against North Vietnam that day.
Some nine bombs exploded in the fires that followed. One hundred thirty-four men were killed and 161 injured. McCain survived with minor injuries, and went to Saigon.
He requested a transfer back to flight duty—this time on the USS Oriskany as a member of a squadron designated VA 163 and known as the “Saints.” It was commanded by Bryan Compton, legendary among his peers for both competence and aggressiveness.
The Oriskany was an old carrier of World War II vintage. It had been modernized but was still an old ship and had been through an ordeal much like the one suffered by the Forrestal. That had been the year before, and the fires had killed 44 men, many of them aviators.
Now, in 1967, the Oriskany was back on Yankee Station, launching strikes daily against North Vietnam as part of Operation Rolling Thunder. In a deployment that would last about four months, the ship lost half of its airplanes and a third of its pilots—20 killed or missing in action and 7 who were captured and became prisoners of war, among them John McCain.
He came home with the others, intending to resume his career in the Navy. As part of the plan, he wanted to fly again. But this seemed unlikely, if not impossible, given his injuries. And even if he could pass a flight physical, he had not been in a cockpit for more than five years.
Still, he went through a long and demanding rehab. It was successful, and, before he retired from the Navy in 1981, he was both flying again and in command of his own squadron.
The rest, as they say, is history.
His political career began with a successful run for the House in 1982 and the Senate four years later. He survived a scandal that had him included among the Keating Five (senators who had intervened in the investigation of a troubled savings and loan association). McCain confessed his sins, more or less, and threw himself on the mercy of the voters. They forgave his having become too close to Charles Keating, who spread his campaign contributions around lavishly and wasn’t shy about asking for favors from those he had helped. Including McCain. The experience made McCain a fierce advocate of campaign finance reform.
The campaign to keep his Senate seat this year, his fifth such reelection race, will probably be his last. One wants to say “certainly,” but he looks no less fit at 80 than he did at 60. The abuse inflicted on him during those years of captivity make it difficult for him to raise his arms, among other things, but otherwise, he seems in robust health.
And feisty as ever. McCain has a famously volatile temper. Senate colleagues called him “Yosemite Sam” for his angry, intemperate outbursts, and one of those colleagues, Connie Mack III, had T-shirts printed up with McCain’s face imposed on the body of the cartoon character.
“In our caucus,” Mack says, “I was sort of deputized to be the one to talk John down off the ledge when he went off.”
But Mack, whose temperament is as serene as McCain’s is volcanic, says, “John McCain is a great friend. I love him dearly and I admire him enormously.” Not all his Senate colleagues, past or present, Republican or Democrat, feel the same way.
But evidently, the voters in Arizona still like him. McCain is expected to win the election that falls 12 days after the anniversary of his shoot-down. Donald Trump, who declined to recognize McCain as a war hero because he was “captured,” will probably lose his race to be president, and his disparagement of McCain may have contributed to his loss. Among some people that was a deal breaker. And one does wonder where, exactly, Trump was and what he was doing on October 26, 1967. He was not, certainly, flying an A-4 off the Oriskany.
With a Democrat in the White House, McCain may or may not be a member of the minority party in the Senate. Either way, he and his party will be playing defense. It seems almost certain that a President Clinton will, at some point, be sending the names of people she intends to appoint to the Supreme Court to the Senate for approval. Certain, also, that there will be fights—perhaps even epic fights—over these nominations.
Republican senators may find themselves in the same place that Democratic senators found themselves when Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork. That is, unable to reject the nominee as unqualified on the merits but with confirmation unthinkable on the politics. If they fight, they will need to be prepared for punishment. But McCain doesn’t sound especially frightened by that prospect. He seems, almost and typically, to relish it.
“I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton—if she were president—would put up,” he said recently in a radio interview.
When such a fight comes, it won’t be prosecuted by Donald Trump, who will, almost certainly, be off somewhere, sulking. John McCain, on the other hand, will be in there and still fighting. As he proved after he was shot down almost a half-century ago, he is, above all, a “good resister.”
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and author of Bouncing Back: How a Heroic Band of POWs Survived Vietnam (1990).
