Night of the (Character) Assassins

In an October 16 cover story entitled “Make-Believe Maverick”, contributing editor (and Mother Jones alumnus) Tim Dickinson attempts the demolition of McCain, hook, line and sinker–faux war hero, faux “maverick,” corrupt politician, pampered child of privilege using his connections to get ahead. It’s powerful stuff–if you could spread it on your tomato plants, you’d have a bumper crop.

It’s a masterpiece of what a friend of mine calls “insinuendo”–half-truths, misdirections, hearsay, gossip and outright lies written by somebody who either has no ability to evaluate the information he was given, or more likely) just doesn’t give a damn. Dickinson relies heavily on the stories of another POW, former LTC John Dramesi, not only for unsubstantiated statements about McCain, but as a contrasting personality, the “real thing,” as opposed to McCain’s “make-believe” hero. And, make no doubt, John Dramesi is a real hero. Shot down in 1967, he attempted to escape not once, but twice. Not content merely with passively resisting North Vietnamese torture and intimidation, he took a defiantly “in your face” approach to his dealings with them. According to his 1975 memoir Code of Honor, he was one of the few POWs who never violated the military’s official Code of Conduct for prisoners of war, never gave any information at all to the enemy–in contrast to John McCain (and most of the others), who were “broken” by torture and gave information to the enemy beyond “name, rank and serial number,” thereby technically violating the Code.

Dramesi, however, is a very controversial figure within the POW community, as indicated in an “A Question of Honor”, a book review published in Air University Review in 1977. As the author of the review, himself a Vietnam POW, writes:

Dickinson does not mention, in his breathless recounting of Dramesi’s two escape attempts that, as a result of his actions, all the POWs in Dramesi’s camp were subjected to harsh punishments, causing the senior POWs there to place strict conditions (including the possibility of outside assistance) on all future escape attempts. Dramesi apparently opposed this ruling, because it was a technical violation of the Code of Conduct (a prisoner shall always endeavor to escape and return to duty), but the camp leadership made a pragmatic decision based upon the probability of success and the costs of failure.

Dickinson also does not relate that after the Vietnam War, the Code of Conduct was itself revised in light of the POW experience. Rather than insisting on Dramesi-like literal adherence, it recognized that every man has a breaking point, beyond which he cannot be pushed. Prisoners are now instructed to try to stay alive and give out as little useful information as possible, dissembling as necessary, but to avoid outright collaboration. This essentially codifies that which was common behavior among the POW community in Vietnam, yet Dickinson takes McCain to task for being no worse than the majority of his peers.

From this promising beginning, Dickinson examines McCain’s Navy career, unearthing no new facts, but casting each fact in the worst possible light. John McCain came from a Navy family, son and grandson of admirals, seemingly destined for the same, but reluctant to follow the family tradition. A mediocre student at Annapolis, McCain is castigated for drinking and partying too much–an ironic accusation, when you consider that Rolling Stone is a publication dedicated to sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. The young John McCain, in fact, closely resembles Rolling Stone‘s target audience. Later, he paints a picture of young Naval Aviator McCain in his own words, “I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties.” Shades of Tom Wolfe, who described the “sacred coordinates” of the fighter pilot as “flying and drinking, drinking and driving, driving and f——” in The Right Stuff. McCain is condemned for being what he was–a typical junior Naval Aviator.

Dickinson accuses McCain of using his family connections to get plum assignments and to get out of trouble when he screwed up. At the time, nepotism was an integral part of Navy life, and McCain used (or abused) the system no more than anyone else of his generation. What Dickinson attempts to do, however, is undermine John McCain’s reputation as a competent naval officer.

To do this, he puts forward a flurry of misleading anecdotes and false statements. For instance: After an incident in which McCain deviates from his flight path and collides with power lines over Italy, Dickinson quotes Phil Butler, another POW who lived in McCain’s dorm in Annapolis:

Butler, whose reputation among other POWs is not sterling (Dickinson omits that Butler has been an Obama partisan since before McCain even won the Republican nomination), is telling an outright lie here, especially for the time at which McCain was flying. Naval aviation was and remains a dangerous profession, and back then there were very few of the safety regulations now in place to prevent accidents (whether this makes for better combat pilots or not is open to debate). A lot of guys did precisely what McCain did on a regular basis. And when one augered in, it was not considered a career-ending move (today is a different story, but today’s pilots are wussier because of it). Self-deprecation was and remains an integral part of naval aviation culture, so McCain describing his accident as “daredevil clowning” would be understood very differently in the naval aviation community.

Dickinson–who as far as I can tell has no flying experience whatsoever–goes so far as to call McCain “a bad pilot,” beginning with primary flight training, when he stalled on a practice carrier approach and crashed his trainer into Corpus Christi Bay. Of course, carrier landings have been described both as “controlled crashes” and the most difficult and dangerous task in military flying. If every aviation cadet who crashed during training were to be condemned as a “bad pilot,” the ranks of Naval Aviation would be much thinner–and lacking several of its great aces.

As for McCain’s other accidents–try looking at the accident rate for the Navy as a whole back then. The planes were, as compared to today’s computerized wonders, highly unreliable and lacking in the kind of automated flight control systems that make it possible for your grandmother to take off and land an FA-18 on a rolling carrier deck. There’s a great passage in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (essential reading if you want to get a better picture of naval aviation when McCain was flying), in which an instructor tells a room full of new aviation cadets to look to their right and to their left. He then says, “If you remain in naval aviation for twenty years, the guys on either side of you are going be dead.” Think on that.

Dickinson is very big on invidious comparisons, in which McCain’s behavior is compared with that of some other naval officer doing something extraordinary. He tells the story of the 1967 fire on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Forrestal, in which an aerial rocket accidentally fired from one plane parked on deck hit an external fuel tank on McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk, a huge conflagration in which 134 sailors were killed and 161 others injured. McCain got out of his burning airplane moments before the two 1000-lb bombs it was carrying “cooked off” in a huge explosion.

McCain then went to the squadron ready room, which is precisely what he was supposed to do–get out of the way and let the damage control crews do their job. Aviators are an expensive commodity–it’s stupid for them to get killed doing something for which they are not trained. But Dickinson prefers to compare McCain’s behavior with that of Lieutenant Commander Herb Hope, who got out of his plane and then placed himself at the head of a fire-fighting team. Hope was undoubtedly heroic, but not particularly smart. There is no reason to believe that his efforts leading a firefighting team made one whit of difference to the survival of the Forrestal, since there were qualified damage control officers doing the same thing. On the other hand, as a senior squadron officer, Hope was worth more to the Navy as an aviator than a fire fighter. But hey, the author of this hit piece doesn’t have a clue.

The author then changes tack 180 degrees, and criticizes McCain for going “fangs out, hair on fire” during the bomb run on which he was shot down, rather than taking evasive action to avoid the SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM) tracking his Skyhawk. Quoting McCain’s own words,

Dickinson makes it all sound so simple, but he’s really talking about a series of complex calculations and decisions made in the space of a few seconds. He also makes it sound like evading an SA-2 is a piece of cake, rather than the gut-wrenching, sphincter-loosening maneuver that it is. McCain still had his bombs on board, so his maneuverability was impaired, making it unlikely that he could evade the SAM unless he jettisoned the bombs–but that would have meant missing the target, possibly killing the very innocent civilians about whom the author was crying crocodile tears just a few minutes before, and requiring a return trip to the target at a later date. McCain had a choice to make–he chose to stay on the target. It’s a valid decision, a coin toss. He lost that one. Other guys got away with it; some got medals for it, others didn’t. I don’t know any aviator who would criticize McCain for the circumstances of his downing.

But then, they don’t have the tactical and technical acumen of this Chairborne Ranger from Rolling Stone, who has the temerity to describe McCain’s performance as a combat pilot as “adequate.”

Not content to leave it there, he then goes back to McCain’s conduct as a prisoner of war, and his alleged violations of the Code of Conduct. I know people who were in prison with John McCain, I know what they endured, and as I have written I stand in awe of all of them. I’ll just mention again that the Code of Conduct was substantially revised and military survival training modified on the basis of their experience. John McCain may not have been John Dramesi, but few were, and the alternative isn’t cowardice, it’s just a different brand of heroism. Not only do I doubt that Dickinson could endure a fraction of what McCain did before singing like a canary, I doubt he would have the humility to admit, in public, that he did, indeed, break under torture. There is real heroism in that, too.

On the matter of McCain’s offer of early release, the author is equally disingenuous. Having just wasted five pages telling us how McCain always talked his way out of difficulties and used his father’s position to cover for his inadequacies, he now tells us that the only reason McCain refused to go home was fear of court martial? Come on!

The rest of the article continues in the same vein–McCain before Vietnam is criticized for being a slacker. Afterwards, he’s criticized for being too driven. McCain is criticized for going behind the back of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of the Navy to get a new Nimitz class carrier authorized to replace the 50-year old Midway, a ship which, in the event, soldiered on until Desert Storm, but which was widely regarded as marginal at best for modern carrier aircraft (keeping the Midway in service until 1993 actually cost more than building a new carrier). So McCain is being criticized here for making the right decision by going around an administration that was obstinately wrong. I call that using good judgment and political skills.

Overall, this is a cheap hit piece, written by someone who is “determined to prove a villain,” no matter what the facts. It’s a scurrilous piece of work. If an equivalent piece were written about Obama, I am sure we would be hearing the “Swiftboating!” refrain from the high heavens. Of course, there is a difference: the Swiftboat veterans were there, they actually saw John Kerry in action. This piece, in contrast, relies exclusively on innuendo, insinuation, half-truths and hearsay.

To spit one of the Left’s favorite quotes back at it, “Have you no shame, sir?”

Stuart Koehl is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Online.