If we are what we read, then John McCain is clearly a veteran, a history buff, and a bit of an autodidact. The Arizona Republican just released his summer reading list and it’s exactly what one would expect from the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
McCain’s great books reflect the foreign policy realism that has come to define the Arizona senator’s career. Naturally all ten titles focus on conflict, 20th century martial and industrial clashes captured in literature and recounted in non-fiction.
First a quick warning: All the books are worth reading. Not all are beach appropriate. Unless the reader enjoys working on their tan while getting inside the head of a shell-shocked German infantryman coming to grips with bludgeoning enemies with entrenching shovels during World War I. Otherwise All Quiet on the Western Front is best saved for later.
But if the reading isn’t light, it’s certainly essential. Every student of history should resolve to read all 909 pages of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. And anyone serious about American literature must read Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls at least once. The senator certainly has.
The classics cataloged by McCain are the ones that have already shaped his thoughts. These titles, he says, are the “books I have read and reread over the years.” McCain’s list, therefore, opens up the neoconservative mind, allowing us to peek inside the psyche of the senator who might have been president but for Barack Obama.
The list reveals that practical is most important to McCain. He showcases Adm. William McRaven’s Make Your Bed and Barbara Tuckman’s Guns of August. The first teaches how to save 20 minutes in the morning, the second, how to avoid a geopolitical crisis.
Literary hipsters and political cynics will mock the list as a public relations stunt, nothing more than a clever ploy by flacks. Maybe they’re not wrong. That doesn’t matter though.
What’s important is that a congressional leader has demonstrated that he’s a serious reader. And more senators should follow McCain’s example, if only for vanity’s sake. Wouldn’t we all like to get a better idea of what both sides of the aisle are reading in the world’s greatest deliberative body?
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
