John McCain’s son Jack left active-duty Navy service last month and moved his family to a townhouse in a wooded neighborhood near Washington, D.C. as he considers what comes next.
The 33-year-old Navy helicopter pilot, who trained Afghans to fly Black Hawks in Afghanistan during his father’s battle with brain cancer and after his death, said he had been unaware of how toxic the political climate had become. “I didn’t even have a TV,” Jack McCain told the Washington Post.
Last week, to mark the first anniversary of the senator’s death at age 81, the McCain family launched the #ActsOfCivility campaign in an effort to combat divisiveness in politics. “Incremental change can aggregate to huge change over time,” Jack McCain said of the social media campaign.
In a YouTube video, he said he planned to talk to several childhood friends that he has always clashed with politically — and report back on his experience via social media.
He said he tries to ignore vitriol on social media about his interracial marriage. “Anger is not the right word … disappointment,” he said of people who have attacked his marriage to Renee Swift McCain, 36, who is black. The couple, who met at a Halloween party in 2011 while they were stationed in Guam, have a three-year-old son, John S. McCain V., nicknamed “Mac.”
Jack McCain said leaving active-duty service to join the Navy Reserve after four deployments was one of the hardest decisions he has made. “I’ve been doing this since I was 18 years old, and there is always going to be a little piece of me that asks: Was this the right decision?” he said.
Renee McCain, a major in the Air Force Reserve, said it had been an adjustment for her husband.
“I think just being gone for so long, it’s difficult getting back. A lot did happen while he was gone. I got a doctorate, and our son is now walking and talking and has entered preschool, and we moved. It’s almost like a completely different life that he’s stepping back into,” she said.
John McCain had seven children. Doug, 59, who served in the Navy and is now an American Airlines pilot, and Andy, 57, chief operating officer at Cindy McCain’s family brewing company, were his ex-wife Carol’s sons from her first marriage and were adopted by the future senator. Sidney, 52, who worked in the music business, was a daughter from his marraige to Carol.
After John and Carol divorced in 1980, he married Cindy McCain and they had three children, Meghan, 34, a host of ABC’s The View, Jack and Jimmy, 31, who was an enlisted U.S. Marine who served in Iraq. The couple adopted Bridget, 28, from Bangladesh.
