*Editor’s note: This article has been updated since publication to reflect the final copy that ran in the September 10, 2018 issue of our print magazine.*
When I heard last week that the end was near for a man I’d admired for my entire adult life, and had had the privilege of knowing fairly well for the last couple of decades, a speech from an earlier epoch of American history came unbidden to my mind.
That speech is connected to John McCain in two ways. Its subject was another great senator, Henry Clay, who also famously fell short of attaining the crowning achievement for which he yearned, and which he may be said surely to have deserved, the presidency of the United States. And its theme is as applicable to McCain as it was to Clay.
Here’s a passage from Abraham Lincoln’s July 6, 1852, eulogy of Clay:
As much as Clay, and as much as anyone else who has held high office in the United States, John McCain’s “predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty.” That devotion was accompanied by an appreciation of what must be done, both at home and abroad, to defend, preserve, and foster liberty. From his years as a prisoner of war to his years in elected office, McCain understood the price and the value of liberty. Now, at a time when the case for an elevated patriotism that cherishes liberty needs urgently to be made anew, the deeds and speeches of John McCain provide a needed education for a free people.
McCain’s farewell letter to his fellow Americans was a fitting coda to his efforts to educate his fellow Americans. He wrote:
“Fellow Americans”—that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.
Like Clay, McCain understood and taught that power was needed to support the great cause of human liberty—and that power emancipated from the cause of liberty would be nothing much of which to be proud.
Lincoln ended his eulogy:
“Such a man the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us.” Such a man in our time was John McCain. And now he is gone.
