For a war hero, Sen. John McCain is surprisingly easy to criticize. First, I cannot think of a recent military intervention that McCain has opposed — other than to lament that it wasn’t even stronger.
Yet, McCain’s critics do not merely allege that he has a misguided view of the efficacy of American hard power. No, they call him a “warmonger.” That’s what former President Jimmy Carter said. Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, suggested that McCain wants “perpetual war.”
It is also undeniable that McCain, while an advocate of stricter border enforcement, has long supported comprehensive immigration reform. As far back as 2007, he supported plans that included a path to citizenship for the then-estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America.
Yet it is not enough to criticize McCain for underestimating the impacts of these policies on low-income American citizens. No, instead he is “soft” or, as Breitbart put it in a screaming headline, he is “The Poster Boy for Establishment Illegal Immigration Dishonesty.” As an Establishment Man, we are to recognize McCain as a sellout and a traitor.
The New York Times labeled McCain “Critic in Chief of the Trump Administration” so it is not for nothing that he and the president have clashed. Consequently, President Trump says that McCain has been “losing so long he doesn’t know how to win anymore.” According to Trump, McCain is “not a war hero.” Trump supporters now condemn McCain as a media lapdog, turning on his party and president for a few positive headlines in fashionable papers.
What is the one message common to all of these, the message that all of McCain’s critics want to drill into our skulls? It’s that McCain is unprincipled.
But what if that isn’t true? What if McCain is different from all the other politicians? What would that mean? The great David Foster Wallace posed exactly that question after covering McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000. Wallace is worth quoting at great length; you’ve heard this story before, but this time it may strike you differently.
“In October of ’67 McCain…was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, and the ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb […] Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men all swim out toward you […] McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90 degrees to the side, with the bone sticking out. This is all public record. Try to imagine it. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken only about five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a the Hanoi Hilton, of much movie fame – where for a week they made him beg for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let the other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) go untreated. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this […] After he’d hung on like that for several months and his bones had mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up, the prison people came and brought him to the commandant’s office and closed the door and out of nowhere offered to let him go […] And John S. McCain III, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused the offer. The US military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a much longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The prison commandant, not at all pleased, right there in his office had guards break McCain’s ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Forget how many movies stuff like this happens in and try to imagine it as real: a man without teeth refusing release.”
Would you refuse release in that situation? It is impossible to know. But we know what McCain did. Unwilling to betray his code or his country, McCain spent four more hellish years in a special “punishment cell” in Hoa Lo.
So what should one make of John McCain, the man of Hoa Lo and the Straight Talk Express? Of course, he isn’t blind to political imperatives and ramifications; he’s been a senator since 1987. But is McCain merely the unprincipled warmonger, soft, eager to please the same Establishment he took on in 2000? Or is he that rare politician who means what he says and says what he believes?
The answer is locked inside McCain’s mind, and no summary of his wartime trials or presidential campaigns will decide that question or the one beneath it all: Do Heroes Exist?
David Foster Wallace concludes, however, with the much starker, resulting truth: “Whether [McCain is] truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.”
Elliot Kaufman is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a junior at Stanford University and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and more.
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