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THE LIFE STORY OF ARIZONA'S MAVERICK SENATOR; MCCAIN By BILL MULLER, The Arizona Republic THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC; SPECIAL SECTION; Pg. M3 THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC October 3, 1999 GREENWOOD, S.C.
CHAPTER I: WHAT IS HONOR?
There is a grim determination to Sen. John McCain as he rises to address the Republican faithful. He moves stiffly through the heavy air of the gymnasium, his war injuries still evident.
There is his sore right knee, broken years ago when he ejected from a bomber over North Vietnam. There is his aching right shoulder, shattered by his captors. There is his hair, turned prematurely white by mistreatment and malnutrition.
Then there are his political wounds.
There is the edge McCain carries that led to angry outbursts with reporters during the Keating Five scandal. The defiant tone in his attacks on pork-barrel spending and calls for campaign-finance reform.
He had dug up old newspaper clips that showed Jim Hensley had been an underling to well-known power broker Kemper Marley Sr., a rich rancher and wholesale liquor baron with ties to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.But for McCain, it's not about falling down. It's about getting up again.
Moments before he rose to speak, the lights had dimmed, and patriotic images had flashed on a screen: an American flag, a pilot in a flight suit, a senator shaking hands with President Reagan.
"At a time when America is searching for heroes to lead us," a narrator intoned, "it has the genuine article in John McCain."
Those are the scripted themes of McCain, 63, as he sets out on his carefully calculated campaign for the GOP nomination for president - genuine hero, proven leader, man of integrity in a wayward time.
But McCain is no comic-book hero, drawn in two dimensions.
He's sometimes driven by courage and duty, sometimes by anger and pride.
"I think life is a series of contradictions," said Jay Smith, who worked on McCain's first four campaigns. "Life is complex. Who among us is so simplistic that you can just pigeonhole?"
Certainly not McCain.
In recent years, he's become a champion of campaign-finance reform. More than a decade ago, he took free trips to the Bahamas with savings and loan tycoon Charles Keating. He continues to take big money from interests before his committees.
He's amassed a rogues' gallery of troublemaking former pals - Keating, Gary Hart, John Tower, Fife Symington, Duke Tully - who hardly square with his ambitions as a reformer.
As a senator, he's pilloried tobacco companies, though his wife owes her personal millions to beer sales.
He has romanced the national press while warring with Arizona reporters.
He prides himself on his personal integrity yet admits he wasn't faithful to his first wife, Carol, who was injured in a horrific car accident while McCain was in Vietnam.
He courts the veteran vote yet is despised among veterans who believe there are still POWs alive in southeast Asia.
He was hawkish on Kosovo, yet as a freshman congressman, he opposed Reagan's sending of Marines to Lebanon.
Some say McCain's seemingly principled positions - as on tobacco and campaign-finance reform - are all for show, helping him build his maverick image with a windmill tilt or two.
"In both instances (tobacco and campaign-finance reform), he took positions that were doomed to failure and stuck to them," said Grant Woods, former Arizona attorney general and an early McCain protege.
"In terms of federal legislation, we're in the same position today that we were in five years ago. I wonder what the point of that is. If you truly want to accomplish something on the issue, you've got several ways to go, and this one has produced nothing - and by nothing, I mean nothing."
INTENSE, LIKABLE
Spend any time around McCain and you quickly find that he is well-read, intense, likable. He can talk Robinson Crusoe or Saturday Night Live. He can lead the bull session or just listen. One minute he is chatting about a Sports Illustrated story he read about Bobby Allison ("One of the greatest NASCAR drivers ever, and he's living on the charity of others") and the next he is shaking his head over World War I and the Battle of the Somme ("That's the argument for media coverage. They never would have put up with it").
While at the Naval Academy, McCain let some subjects slide, spending his time reading history and literature and, of course, howling at the moon. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.
McCain's sense of humor, sometimes indelicate, gets him in trouble. Back when he entered politics, he once referred to the Arizona retirement community of Leisure World as "Seizure World." More recently, it was a crude joke about Chelsea Clinton that raised eyebrows.
Still, McCain can be funny.
On a recent trip to South Carolina, state director Trey Walker was stumbling his way along the aisle of the moving campaign bus.
"Trey," McCain said, "is on a work-release program."
During an appearance at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, McCain appeared at the podium, wearing a jacket ridiculously covered with fake ribbons and medals, and cracked:
"The question I ask myself every morning while shaving in front of the mirror is: OK, John, you're an incredible war hero, an inspiration to all Americans. But what qualifies you to be president of the United States?"
From staffers, McCain inspires a loyalty not often found in Washington. He treats them like extended family, always remembering a child's name or a sick relative. Some have been with McCain for more than a decade.
"It's fun to be around him," longtime aide Deb Gullett says. "He cuts up all the time. If you screw up, you feel worse about it than he does."
Some have snickered about aides combing McCain's hair and dusting off his suit jacket before television appearances. What they do not realize is that McCain cannot do it himself - his shoulders are too damaged.
For exercise, McCain walks. He's hiked nearly every trail in Arizona, from the well-known to the obscure. He often drags along his family and staff.
As with everything else, McCain is a relentless hiker. On a recent trip to Lake Powell, he led his party through a slot canyon where the water was almost over their heads.
Gullett jokingly dubbed it "The McCain Death March" and vowed not to return.
In all this hubbub, McCain's family, including wife Cindy, stays in the background. Cindy has no interest in politics. She has agreed to travel with McCain once or twice a month, but she'd clearly rather be at home raising her four children, ages 14, 13, 11 and 8.
"My job is at home," she says simply.
After a well-publicized bout with an addiction to painkillers in the early 1990s, Cindy no longer reads the newspaper. She keeps up with news by listening to the radio.
These days, Cindy and John go weeks without seeing each other. It's a sacrifice they've made to raise their children in Phoenix.
"There are times I wish he were there on that particular evening," Cindy said. "But I wouldn't change our life in any way."
A LITTLE FREELANCING
On the campaign trail, McCain frustrates his handlers. He doesn't repeat the message often enough, frequently choosing to freelance. And if McCain wants to stand and answer questions, to hell with the carefully prepared schedule.
"We used to try," said John Weaver, McCain's national political director.
"We'd say, 'Senator, we have to go,' and he would just look at us."
The man who earned the nickname "White Tornado" in Congress belies his years by working a schedule that would bury men half his age. While campaigning, his days often last from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
"I think I can outwork any other candidate," McCain says.
And there is much work to do, he says.
The presidency is broken, and the White House is stained by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. McCain plans to fix it.
"I'm not running for president to be someone," McCain said recently. "I'm running to do something. This is your country, my friends. And I'm running for president to give it back to you."
McCain says his background makes him qualified to be president. He is the son and grandson of admirals. He flew Navy attack bombers in Vietnam. He spent close to six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. He served two terms in the House of Representatives and was elected to his third Senate term last year.
He's not in awe of the top job.
"I'm obviously aware of the enormous responsibilities," he said. "But I don't find it intimidating."
Most Americans have yet to meet John McCain. With Texas Gov. George W. Bush leading the polls, the national press has been content to sketch McCain as a caricature:
Former prisoner of war. Crusader for reform and breath of fresh air in Washington. One of the Keating Five, but the media tone on that seems to be, who cares, really?
"Since McCain is not yet a threat, nobody is talking much about his negatives," Woods said. "Because of the Bush phenomenon, (McCain's) avoided scrutiny. He'll stay under the radar just because we really don't have a race."
THE POW FACTOR
Tilton, N.H. - At Oliver's Diner, a woman shyly walks up to McCain, her eyes moist.
"I've been waiting 30 years to meet you," she says, and thrusts out her hand.
McCain looks down. The woman is holding a stainless steel POW bracelet, embossed with the lettering LCDR JOHN McCAIN III 10-26-67.
"I'm very touched," McCain says. "Very touched."
Judy Tilton says she started wearing McCain's bracelet when she was 7 years old. It was given to her by her father, a retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard.
Tilton said she first noticed McCain when he was elected to the Senate.
"I thought, 'Wait a minute, I know him,' " she said. "Every time he came to New Hampshire, I thought, 'Maybe I'll meet him.' "
When she saw a notice for the breakfast, Tilton decided it was time.
"It was terrific," she said. "I've been waiting a long time."
McCain knows that being a war hero is not enough to be elected president. But it doesn't hurt.
His military experience gives him a trump card over a generation of draft dodgers and National Guardsmen, those who avoided the war that stole much of McCain's youth.
After all, it was McCain who turned down an early release offered because his father was an admiral. McCain knew it was a propaganda ploy.
It was McCain who rotted in prison and was beaten to a pulp while Bill Clinton studied at Oxford and George W. Bush flew National Guard jets in Texas.
This gives McCain instant credibility on two key campaign issues, foreign policy and national defense, that make Bush and other non-combatant candidates a little queasy.
To tell his story, McCain doesn't need to drag out his medals, which include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross and a fistful of others. His experiences were chronicled in a book, The Nightingale's Song, by Robert Timberg, as well as an A&E special that might have been titled John McCain: Hero or God? McCain just released his own book about his family and his Vietnam experience, Faith of My Fathers.
That book conveniently ends with his release from North Vietnam, skipping the less ennobling things that happened later.
His war story, and the bluntness of his personality that goes along with it, appeal to people.
Among them is his New Hampshire driver, Frank Cartier, a 28-year-old Manchester firefighter and Gulf War veteran whose unit led the 1st Marines into Kuwait City.
Cartier had always admired McCain and became his first volunteer in New Hampshire when he saw a blurb in the local paper. Cartier said McCain impressed him right off the bat.
Cartier said most candidates would just shake your hand and look to the next person. Not McCain.
"I was wearing my Marine tie clip," Cartier recalled. "And he looked me right in the eye and said, 'Thank you for serving.'
"As a Marine, you get a sense of who you would want to lead you into battle. I would gladly take the hill for John McCain."
This is the kind of impact McCain hopes to have, to bring younger voters back into the fold. As he campaigns, McCain often notes that the last election had the lowest voter turnout among 18- to 26-year-olds of any election in history.
"It is a shameful thing, my friends," McCain said, "when young people say we are corrupt. But to a certain extent, they are correct."
McCain also is attracting others into the fray, people who have never participated before. One is Rick Kamp, a 50-year-old marketing executive who hosted a meet-and-greet for McCain at his home in Concord, N.H.
Kamp rented a tent for the back yard and brought in a bartender and mountains of sandwiches for the guests, who would be tapped for donations before the end of the evening.
By the time things got started, it was raining in Concord. The crowd squeezed into Kamp's living room. As McCain spoke with a C-Span camera crew looking on, Kamp and his wife beamed.
"This is my maiden voyage in political activism," Kamp said.
Kamp, who sought out the McCain campaign on his own, said he wanted to support a candidate who is willing to take tough stands and fight for what he believes in.
"He's not the type who needs an overnight poll to tell him what to think or what to say on any given day," Kamp said. "I like that."
Despite the adulation, McCain says there is one thing he might change about his public persona: He doesn't want to be the "POW Candidate."
That may be strategy disguised as humility.
"I'm sure he doesn't want to be the POW candidate, but it's an integral part of his resume," said Jay Smith, who runs a public relations firm in Washington. "It's something people respond to for positive reasons.
"You use what you can use."
At every McCain rally, there are large posters of McCain as a young pilot, standing next to his bomber. In South Carolina, when McCain was introduced in stifling meeting halls, the speaker would note that "John McCain spent five and a half years in a place much smaller and hotter than this."
In his speeches, McCain spins stories about being a POW, though usually about other brave prisoners. He often notes that he was not a hero but served in the company of heroes.
"It doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down," McCain is fond of saying. "I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane."
When he talks of the war, or about another soldier's courage, it reminds people he is no phony.
In a speech before the state Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in New Hampshire, McCain recalled the tale of Mike Christian, a fellow POW who used red and white cloth to sew an American flag inside his prison uniform. Every night, the POWs hung up Christian's shirt and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
One day, the North Vietnamese guards found the flag. They took Christian from the cell and beat him severely. When he was returned, his ribs were broken and his face badly bruised. The other POWs cleaned up Christian the best they could.
Later that night, as McCain struggled to sleep on the concrete slab that was his bed, he looked over into the corner of the room.
"There, beneath that dim light bulb, with a piece of white cloth and a piece of red cloth and his bamboo needle, his eyes almost shut from the beating that he had received, was my dear friend Mike Christian, making another American flag."
CHAPTER II: JOHN WAYNE McCAIN
Annapolis, Md., 1955 - Midshipman John McCain and his roommate, Frank Gamboa, are eating lunch at the mess hall at the U.S. Naval Academy when a first classman, a "firstie" in Naval parlance, begins dressing down a Filipino steward.
"He was just being nasty to him," Gamboa recalls. "(The firstie) was obviously not in a happy mood."
Gamboa hardly notices this exchange, but young John McCain is paying close attention. Since the steward is an enlisted man, he cannot fight back. The firstie is being a bully, a no-no at the Naval Academy.
The man outranks everyone at the table. McCain and Gamboa are barely past being plebes, the school's lowest rank. Fearing trouble, other underclassmen eat quickly and leave. The browbeating continues.
Finally, McCain can take no more.
"Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size?" McCain blurts out.
There is a moment of silent shock at the table.
"What did you say?" replies the firstie.
"Why don't you stop picking on him?" McCain says. "He's doing the best he can."
"What is your name, mister?" snaps the firstie, an open threat to put McCain on report.
"Midshipman John McCain the Third," McCain says, looking straight at the upperclassman. "What's yours?"
The firstie saw the look in McCain's eyes. And fled.
"The guy got so flustered he just got up and left the table," Gamboa recalls.
A FAMILY IN SERVICE
John McCain had plenty to live up to at the Naval Academy.
There was his grandfather, Admiral John "Slew" McCain, Class of 1906, a grizzled old sea dog who commanded aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II.
Slew McCain's peers at the Naval Academy were Chester Nimitz and William "Bull" Halsey, who would become major commanders during World War II. One of Slew McCain's first assignments was as executive officer on a gunboat in the Philippines commanded by Nimitz.
"They would hunt and fish, and every now and then they would stop in for their mail," the younger McCain said recently in a TV interview. "Can you imagine?"
In the 1930s, the military passed a regulation that aircraft carriers could be commanded only by aviators. Already in his 50s, McCain's grandfather went to flight school.
He crashed five airplanes but got his wings and went on to command a carrier. He eventually would rise to command all U.S. carriers in the Pacific, under Halsey. Planes under Slew McCain's command participated in a number of battles, including Leyte Gulf, and once sank 49 Japanese ships in a day.
According to his grandson, McCain was the quintessential combat officer - a throwback, a gregarious, beloved commander who didn't worry whether his uniform was pressed. But the war, and his lifestyle, taxed his health.
"He had a very hard life to start with," the younger McCain recalled recently. "He smoked and he drank and he didn't take care of himself. Also, the strain of operations in World War II was immense."
When the Japanese surrendered aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, Slew McCain was there. He can been seen in the famous picture, standing in the front row of U.S. officers. He was 61 years old, but he looked 80.
In fact, he had been sick for two weeks, at least since a cease-fire was called on Aug. 15, 1945. Around that time, the elder McCain talked with John Thach, who recalled the conversation in the book Carrier Warfare in the Pacific.
McCain had been staying in his sea cabin, popping his head out only occasionally.
"Admiral, you don't feel very well, do you?" Thach asked.
"Well," McCain responded, "this surrender has come as kind of a shock to all of us. I feel lost. I don't know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don't know whether I know how to relax or not. I am in an awful letdown. I do feel bad."
On the day of the surrender, the old man would see his son, John S. McCain Jr., a submarine commander. The younger McCain had been given the job of escorting Japanese submarines into Tokyo Bay. Father and son posed for a picture aboard the Proteus, a submarine tender.
It was the last time John McCain Jr. would see his father alive.
Four days after the surrender aboard the Missouri, the elder McCain flew back to Coronado, Calif. Thach went to visit him and noted that he looked even worse. A few minutes into the visit, McCain said he wanted to lie down.
Thach went to San Diego to visit his father-in-law. A short time later, he got a phone call.
John "Slew" McCain had died of a heart attack.
He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to his brother, William Alexander McCain, a cavalry officer known as "Wild Bill."
Bill McCain, who graduated from West Point, chased Pancho Villa with Gen. Blackjack Pershing, served as an artillery officer during World War I and attained the rank of brigadier general.
In his new book, Faith of My Fathers, McCain details his Scotch-Irish roots, noting that his great-aunt was a descendant of Robert the Bruce, an early Scottish king.
On this continent, McCain's roots date to the American Revolution. An early ancestor, John Young, served on Gen. George Washington's staff. After the family moved to Mississippi, a number of McCain's ancestors fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.
McCain's grandfather grew up on the family plantation in Carroll County, Miss. He attended the University of Mississippi, then entered the Naval Academy.
'HE WAS A TOUGH GUY'
Like his grandfather, John McCain was no scrubbed angel when he reached the Naval Academy in 1954. At Episcopal High, a private boarding school in Alexandria, Va., McCain was a rebel, earning the nickname "McNasty" from classmates who didn't dare cross him.
At 5-9, McCain was an excellent lightweight wrestler in high school. One of McCain's school friends, Malcolm Matheson, said McCain was no bully but took no guff.
"I always got along with him, but he was a tough guy," Matheson said. "He was small but feisty. He's always been that way. . . . If you messed with him, you probably would end up on the wrong side of it."
Despite his rebellious nature, McCain was destined to attend the Naval Academy, like his grandfather and his father (Class of '31) before him.
Ron Thunman, who commanded McCain's plebe, or first-year, class, said he had no idea that McCain came from an old Navy family but said the young man immediately impressed him. The plebe battalions competed in sports, McCain as a boxer.
What he lacked in skill, he made up for in ferocity, Thunman said.
"I got a real kick out of him," Thunman said. "It was clear that nobody was going to take him down without a hell of an effort."
Thunman said he noticed McCain had a quick mind and a good sense of humor. He quickly emerged as a leader in his group.
"He stood out because he was just one of those people that you liked and you got a chuckle out of," Thunman said. "He was somebody who was always moving at top speed in one direction or another. He was never one to hang back."
A free spirit, McCain chafed under the strict rules of the academy. Each year, he was always in the "Century Club," students with more than 100 demerits.
It was mostly small stuff - messy quarters, unshined shoes, reporting late to formation, things like that, recalls Gamboa, who roomed with McCain for three years.
"He and I, we got a lot of demerits," Gamboa said. "It was almost impossible not to."
McCain's grades were good in the subjects he enjoyed, such as literature and history. Gamboa said McCain would rather read a history book than do his math homework. He did just enough to pass the classes he didn't find stimulating.
"He stood low in his class," Gamboa said. "But that was by choice, not design."
On weekends, everyone wanted to hang out with McCain, who grew up around Washington and knew all the best parties. And with his good looks, McCain attracted plenty of women.
"We used to call him John Wayne McCain," Gamboa said. "He was graying at the temples, and it made him more dashing. . . . It was a real adventure living with John."
McCain's bio in the academy yearbook said it all:
"Sturdy conversationalist and party man. John's quick wit and clever sarcasm made him a welcome man at any gathering. His bouts with the academic and executive departments contributed much to the stockpiles of legends within the hall."
One such bout almost ended in disaster.
The further cadets rose in the academy, the fewer demerits they were allowed. Naturally, McCain was pushing the limit as his senior year neared an end.
McCain already had been skirting the rules. He and some friends had bought a television, which was prohibited. They would gather in their rooms on weekends, watching boxing on Friday nights and a Western, Maverick, on Sundays. The men kept the TV hidden in a "pipe locker," a space between the dormitory rooms that housed plumbing, heating and ventilation.
"One day, the company officer got to crawling around in there, and he found the TV," Gamboa said.
Normally, all the men involved would play a game similar to "paper, rock, scissors" to determine who would get the demerits. But Gamboa and the others wouldn't let McCain take the chance - the 30 demerits from the TV would get him kicked out.
"He wanted to, but we just insisted," Gamboa said. "The guy who took the demerits (a model midshipman named Henry Vargo) had none."
McCain also offered advice to the lovelorn. More than one midshipman made his way to McCain's room to ask for advice on a romantic relationship.
One evening, Gamboa was writing a thank-you letter to a date (a custom in those days), when McCain came up and snatched the letter away.
"This is a terrible letter," McCain said. "Did you have fun with her? Do you want to see her again? Here, I'll tell you what to say."
Gamboa and McCain remain close to this day. The friendship says something about McCain, notes Gamboa, a first-generation Mexican-American.
When the two met at the Naval Academy, they had nothing in common. Gamboa was the son of immigrant parents from a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. McCain was the son and grandson of naval officers and attended private schools in Virginia.
But to McCain, race and status meant nothing, Gamboa said.
"I don't think John McCain had even been associated with Hispanics or any minorities, given where he lived and the school he went to, but yet he picked me, a Mexican-American, to be his roommate," Gamboa said.
"I've heard the comment that he has always done well with minorities. He's the most colorblind person I've ever met in my life.
"He treats me like a brother."
CHOOSING A CAREER
As the men graduated from the Naval Academy, they had to make a choice as to what branch of service they would enter, the Navy or the Marines.
Gamboa said he always knew what McCain would pick.
"There was never any question in our minds that he was going to be flier," Gamboa said. "He was an adventurous spirit, and that's what he would do."
For McCain's roommates - Gamboa, Keith Bunting and Jack Dittrick - it was still an open question. Until they met Jack McCain, John's father.
During World War II, the elder McCain won the Silver Star while commanding two submarines: the USS Gunnel, which sunk freighters and battled Japanese destroyers in the Pacific; and the USS Dentuda, which was on hand at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.
While his son attended the Naval Academy, Jack McCain was living in nearby Washington, working as the Navy's senior liaison officer to Congress.
On weekends, John McCain and his roommates would go to his father's house, where the elder McCain would chomp cigars and tell them about the Navy.
"Every time we went to John's house, we would get a blue and gold pep talk from Jack McCain," Gamboa said.
Jack McCain was not subtle. To his friends, he was known as "Good Goddamn McCain."
Speaking to the Annapolis Class of 1970, Jack McCain made light of the antiwar slogan "make love, not war," by noting that naval officers "were men enough to do both," according to Faith of My Fathers.
"He was the best naval officer I ever met in my life," Gamboa said. "I think that's where John got his love of history, from his father. His father's den was filled ceiling to floor with books, and the majority were on history."
Jack McCain made a big impression on the midshipmen. McCain and his roommates joined the Navy, and all reached the rank of captain - Bunting as a submariner, Dittrick as an aviator and Gamboa on surface ships. John McCain went to flight school.
During training, McCain had several close calls, including a crash in Corpus Christi Bay and a collision with power lines in Spain. In both cases, he emerged virtually unscathed.
In 1964, while stationed in Pensacola, Fla., McCain started a relationship with Carol Shepp, a tall Philadelphia model he met while at Annapolis.
The next year, the two were married in Philadelphia. John soon adopted Carol's two sons from a previous marriage. In 1966, they had a daughter, Sydney.
A year later, McCain was sent to Vietnam as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier. Carol would not see her husband again for almost six years.
CHAPTER III: THE CROWN PRINCE
"THE PLANTATION," HANOI, AUGUST 1968 - John McCain sat on a stool, his teeth broken, his body battered from a savage beating, his arms tied behind him in torture ropes.
A guard entered the room.
"Are you ready to confess your crimes?" he asked.
"No," McCain replied.
Every two hours, one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days.
Finally, McCain lay on the floor, a bloody mess, unable to move. His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.
"I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam," McCain would write later. "I was at the point of suicide."
What happened next is chronicled in The Nightingale's Song, by Robert Timberg:
"(McCain) looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers."
A guard burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch.
McCain's will had finally wilted under the beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.
McCain slowly wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."
He would never forgive himself.
"I had learned what we all learned over there," he would write later. "Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine."
BRUSH WITH DEATH
Lt. Cmdr. John McCain was not thinking about a cell in the Hanoi Hilton when he took off in his A-4E Skyhawk from the USS Oriskany on the morning of Oct. 26, 1967.
As a pilot, McCain had led a charmed life, surviving a bad accident on the USS Forrestal about two months before.
The Forrestal was stationed in the Tonkin Gulf, preparing for a mission. McCain was strapped into his jet, warming up the engine. Suddenly, a missile on another plane misfired, shooting across the deck and slamming into McCain's fuel tank. The missile didn't detonate, but the impact spilled hundreds of gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel on the deck. McCain's plane was engulfed in smoke.
As a fire blazed beneath him, McCain scrambled out of the cockpit, then dropped and rolled through the burning aviation fuel. Slapping out the fire on his flight suit, McCain started back to assist another pilot.
Then the first bomb exploded.
Flaming shrapnel whizzed across the flight deck. One man was decapitated; others were burned beyond recognition. McCain was knocked backward, and small pieces of metal peppered his chest. As the crew frantically fought the fire, more bombs and planes exploded.
In the end, 134 men lost their lives, and the Forrestal was almost abandoned. McCain's injuries were minor.
After the accident, McCain transferred from the Forrestal to the Oriskany, another aircraft carrier.
On Oct. 26, McCain would fly his 23rd sortie over Vietnam, joining a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, which had been off-limits to U.S. attacks.
An officer warned McCain to be careful, that some of the pilots might not return.
"Don't worry about me," McCain said.
Hanoi was well-defended against air attack. As McCain approached his target, surface-to-air missiles the size of telephone poles filled the sky. Suddenly, his instrument panel lit up. A missile had locked on to his plane.
McCain dropped his bombs and began to pull up. Suddenly, a missile sheared off his right wing, sending his plane spinning toward earth, out of control. McCain ejected, breaking his right leg and both arms. He regained consciousness as he settled into a small lake in the center of Hanoi.
McCain's battered body sank 15 feet to the bottom of the muddy lake. He managed to kick his way to the surface with his one good leg, but his equipment dragged him back down. Finally, as he went down for a third time, McCain used his teeth to inflate his life preserver and bobbed to the surface.
North Vietnamese pulled McCain from the lake, stripping off his clothes. McCain felt a twinge in his right knee and was horrified to see his leg bent at a 90-degree angle.
"My God, my leg," McCain said.
A man slammed a rifle butt down on McCain's right shoulder, shattering it. Others bayoneted him in the foot and groin.
Eventually, he was thrown onto a truck and taken to Hanoi's main prison. He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious.
On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain's cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain's injured knee.
"It was about the size, shape and color of a football," McCain recalled.
Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.
"They brought in this doctor we called Zorba, and he examined me, took my pulse and turned to this other guy we called The Bug and said something in Vietnamese, and The Bug said, 'It's too late, it's too late,' " McCain said.
"I said, 'If you take me to the hospital, I'll get well.' Zorba took my pulse again and shook his head, and The Bug said, 'It's too late.' And they took me back to my cell."
About two hours later, McCain's cell door burst open, and The Bug rushed in, saying, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital."
It had taken some time, but the North Vietnamese figured out that McCain's father, Jack, was a major Naval commander for the United States. They started calling McCain "The Crown Prince."
MAINTAINING SILENCE
McCain was moved to a filthy hospital, where blood and plasma were administered. He recovered a little but was still in sorry shape.
Soon, McCain was told that a Frenchman wanted to talk to him and would take a message back to McCain's family.
Before the meeting, the North Vietnamese tried to set McCain's shattered right arm, which was broken in three places. Without anesthetic, a doctor using a fluoroscope worked on the arm for 90 minutes, with McCain screaming in pain. The arm had two floating bones, and the doctor could not set it properly.
Finally, the doctor gave up and wrapped a cast around McCain from his neck to his waist and down his right arm to his wrist.
They moved McCain to a new room with clean white sheets. Soon afterward, a North Vietnamese known as The Cat arrived. He was the commander of all prison camps in Hanoi.
Through an interpreter, The Cat told McCain that "the French television man is coming."
It was at that point that McCain realized his visitor was a journalist.
"I don't think I want to be filmed," McCain said.
The Cat wouldn't be dissuaded. He told McCain that he needed two operations and that he would not get them if he didn't say he was grateful to the Vietnamese people and sorry for his crimes.
The French TV crew arrived, led by a reporter named Francois Chalais. On the film, which was shown later on CBS television, McCain looks drugged. He wasn't. He was in agony from the abortive attempt to set the bones in his right arm.
McCain told Chalais that his treatment was satisfactory. This upset The Cat, who stood behind McCain and told him to say he was grateful for humane and lenient treatment. McCain refused. When The Cat pressed it, Chalais broke in.
"I think what he told me is sufficient," he said.
On the film, McCain told his wife, Carol, and his children that he was getting well and that he loved them. When the North Vietnamese insisted that McCain call for a quick end to the war, Chalais waved them off.
"How is the food?" Chalais asked.
"Well, it's not Paris, but I eat it," McCain replied.
The interview ended, and McCain was taken to his dirty room. The North Vietnamese operated on his knee, accidentally cutting the ligaments on one side. Throughout his stay as a POW, McCain could never walk right. Among his fellow POWs, he earned the nickname "Crip."
BLAME THE AMERICANS
After six weeks in the hospital, McCain was taken to a prison camp known as The Plantation and placed in a cell with George "Bud" Day and Norris Overly, both Air Force majors.
Taking one look at McCain, Day was convinced that the North Vietnamese had brought McCain to their cell to die and planned on blaming the Americans.
"He was extremely skinny, and he was just about filthy," said Day, a lawyer in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. "He had food and drink and liquids run all over his face. He had a pretty good beard . . . he probably weighed less than 100 pounds.
"He was in this great big white cast, and his hair was snow white. He just looked like he was absolutely on the verge of death."
Day said McCain's injured right arm jutted from his body cast like a stick "sticking out of a snowman."
But more than anything else, Day remembers McCain's eyes.
"His eyes were extremely bright, they had that real fever luster," Day said. "I just took one look at him and had no qualms that he was going to die, and soon."
Despite his poor condition, McCain still was happy to see fellow Americans. The men spent the night whispering among themselves.
By 6 a.m., Day was convinced that McCain had a decent chance to live, providing the fever did not get him. Slowly, McCain began to recover.
"He was just a very determined guy with a lot of spirit," Day said. "It's kind of like when you see a horse, a young colt, and you just know this is a strong-spirited animal. You could see all that in him."
McCain, it seemed, was too tough to die.
"John was not going to help the Lord take him out," Day said. "If the Lord was involved in taking him out, John was resisting all the way. If the Lord was helping him, John was giving Him 100 percent of his effort."
In the first days, McCain could not wash or feed himself without help. The task of nursing McCain fell to Overly, since Day had been tortured in ropes and had little use of his hands.
"I've got to give Norris a lot of credit," Day said. "Norris took care of John like a baby, like it was his own child. There was no question that he loved John. He did things for John that only a parent would do for their children."
Occasionally, North Vietnamese dignitaries would stroll by to gawk at the prize prisoner. Since McCain's father was an admiral, the North Vietnamese thought McCain's family was very wealthy. They would ask how many corporations his father owned. McCain just laughed.
Slowly, he was nursed back to health. McCain's infections were healing, now that he could wash regularly. Soon, he could hobble around in his cell for a few minutes at a time.
After a time, Overly was removed from the cell and placed with two other prisoners who were going to be released early.
Early release was forbidden by the military's Code of Conduct. To prevent the enemy from subverting prisoners or using them as propaganda tools, officers were to accept release in the order they were captured. That meant that the first man to be released should have been Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez, who had been shot down on Aug. 5, 1964.
Nevertheless, Overly and two others accepted early release. The other POWs soon dubbed the practice the "Fink Release Program."
McCain has spoken with Overly only once since the war, during a short phone conversation after McCain was released in 1973. But Day, who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, has made his peace with Overly.
"If I had been in (Overly's) shoes, maybe I would have done things differently than I did," said Day, who retired from the Air Force in 1976 as a full colonel.
"I came back from Vietnam all crippled up and all screwed up, and a lot of that could have been avoided if I had given the gooks a lot of the stuff they were really pushing me for.
"I didn't think it was the right thing, so I didn't do it."
Once McCain was able to walk on his own, Day was moved out. For two years, McCain would be alone in his cell, which he described in U.S. News & World Report after his release:
"My room was fairly decent-sized - I'd say about 10 by 10. The door was solid. There were no windows. The only ventilation came from two small holes at the top in the ceiling, about 6 inches by 4 inches. The roof was tin, and it got hot as hell in there.
"The room was kind of dim - night and day - but they always kept on a small light bulb so they could observe me."
CODE TALKERS
In October 1968, McCain heard some noise in the cell behind him at The Plantation and began tapping on the cell wall, a common way for POWs to communicate. The call-up sign was the five-tap "shave and a haircut," and the other prisoner would answer with two taps.
For two weeks he got no answer, but finally two taps came back. Using a cup to the wall, McCain could hear the other prisoner and managed to give him the tap code. He finally gave McCain his name - Ernie Brace. For awhile, all Brace could do was tap out "I'm Ernie Brace" and then collapse into sobs.
Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown more than 100 combat missions in Korea. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, was court-martialed and received a dishonorable discharge.
But that didn't keep Brace out of the war. As a civilian pilot, he flew for a CIA-backed airline and was shot down over Laos.
Brace had spent 3 1/2 years in a bamboo cage with his feet in stocks and an iron collar around his neck. During the ordeal, he almost lost the use of his legs. He escaped three times, and when he was captured the third time, he was buried in the ground up to his neck.
After a year had passed, McCain and Brace were communicating with other prisoners in the camp, shuttling messages back and forth with the tap code.
On Dec. 9, 1969, a guard jerked open Brace's cell door. The incident is recounted in Brace's book, A Code to Keep.
"You are in bad trouble for communicating," the guard said. "You are being taken to a harsher place."
Blindfolded, Brace was put into a truck with soldiers and other prisoners. As the vehicle rolled through Hanoi, Brace felt someone tapping a message on his thigh.
"Hi," said the message. "I John McCain. Who U?"
Brace said tears began forming in his eyes as he grabbed his friend's hand, squeezing out the answer.
"EB here."
Offered early release, Brace turned it down, citing the military code. He was the longest-held civilian POW in Vietnam.
AN OFFER TO GO HOME
In June 1968, McCain was taken to an interrogation room where The Cat awaited him. He was joined by another man, "The Rabbit," who spoke very good English.
The Cat spent two hours in seemingly aimless conversation, telling McCain about how he had run French prison camps in the early 1950s. He said that he had released some prisoners early and that they had thanked him later. He also mentioned that Norris Overly had gone home "with honor."
All of sudden, The Cat blurted out: "Do you want to go home?"
McCain told him he'd have to think about it. He'd been hit by a bout of dysentery and was in poor shape. He was losing weight.
But McCain knew the real reason the North Vietnamese wanted to release him. He was the son and grandson of admirals (his father, Adm. Jack McCain, had been made commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific in July 1968.) McCain's release would help the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.
McCain realized that the Code of Conduct gave him no choice. Alvarez, who was being held elsewhere, was supposed to be the first man released. McCain couldn't let down his father and grandfather.
"I just knew it wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "I knew that they wouldn't have offered it to me if I hadn't been the son of an admiral.
"I just didn't think it was the honorable thing to do."
Three days later, McCain met with The Cat again. The North Vietnamese turned the screws. The Cat told McCain that President Johnson had ordered McCain home. McCain asked to see the orders. The Cat didn't have any.
Then the North Vietnamese commander produced a letter from McCain's wife, Carol, saying, "I wished that you had been one of those three who got to come home."
McCain calmly told The Cat that the prisoners must be released in the order they were captured, starting with Alvarez.
On the Fourth of July, McCain had a final sit-down with The Cat and The Rabbit.
"Our senior officer wants to know your final answer," The Rabbit said.
"My final answer is the same," McCain said. "It's no."
"That is your final answer?"
"That is my final answer."
The Cat, who had been seated behind a pile of papers, grabbed a pen and snapped it in half. Ink spurted all over the desk. He rose and kicked the chair over behind him.
"They taught you too well," he said, then left, slamming the door.
Before long, McCain would find himself tied to a stool, and the guards would literally beat the "black air pirate" confession out of him.
McCain's account was confirmed in a cable from Averell Harriman, who was President Johnson's envoy to the Paris peace talks. Harriman had tea with a Vietnamese official, who mentioned that McCain had refused early release.
A CHRISTMAS SERVICE
On Christmas Eve 1968, about 50 POWs, including McCain, were herded into a room decorated with flowers for a makeshift church service.
The North Vietnamese were intent on milking the ceremony for every bit of PR value. Cameramen moved around the room, filming the ceremony. Flash bulbs popped in the background.
Meanwhile, McCain and other prisoners were busy exchanging information. One of the guards, conscious that he was being filmed, smiled while he told McCain to stop talking.
McCain cursed the guard and kept briefing another prisoner.
"I refused to go home," McCain said. "I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm."
McCain pressed on, and the guards kept trying to quiet him.
"Our senior ranking officer is Colonel Larson," McCain said.
"No talking!"
McCain cursed them again and flashed his middle finger toward the camera.
He was taken back to his cell, where he waited for his beating. It didn't come until the day after Christmas.
In May 1969, the North Vietnamese asked McCain to write a letter to U.S. pilots asking them not to fly over North Vietnam. When he refused, they made him stand for hours and hours.
When McCain tired and sat down, a guard jumped on his injured leg. McCain was back on crutches for the next 18 months.
In late 1969, things began to look up for the POWs for the first time. President Nixon had taken office in January. During the Johnson administration, released POWs weren't allowed to talk about bad conditions in the prison camps for fear that such complaints would make things even worse for the men still being held.
That changed under Nixon.
In August 1969, under pressure, the North Vietnamese began releasing sick and injured prisoners. Among them were Navy Lt. Robert Frishman, who had a badly injured arm, Air Force Capt. Wes Rumble, who was in a body cast with a broken back, and Navy Seaman Doug Hegdahl, who had lost 75 pounds.
The men held press conferences, telling the horrifying details of torture and mistreatment. After that, treatment of POWs began to improve.
By fall, the torture had almost stopped. The food improved. The guards seemed almost friendly.
McCain's barred cell door had been covered with wood to keep him from looking out and from getting any ventilation. But in fall 1969, the board was removed at night to cool McCain's cell. And prisoners were allowed to bathe more often.
"It was all very amazing," McCain would write later.
In December 1969, McCain was moved to the Hanoi Hilton. There he met with a Cuban journalist who asked McCain general questions about the war. After the interview, a photographer came in and started snapping pictures, though McCain had said he didn't want his picture taken. After that, he refused to meet with visitors.
In June 1970, McCain was moved into a room called "Calcutta," which had no ventilation. There, McCain suffered from heat prostration and another bout of dysentery and was cut to half rations.
In December 1970, McCain was moved to a room that housed 45 to 50 prisoners. In February 1971, the prisoners defied their captors and held a church service. When the men presiding over the service were taken away by guards, the men started singing The Star Spangled Banner very loudly.
Fearing a riot, the guards rushed in with ropes and subdued the men. A few days later, McCain and others were moved to a punishment camp the prisoners called Skid Row. Though the conditions were filthy, McCain said, the prison was a piece of cake compared with conditions in 1969.
In 1971 and 1972, conditions gradually improved. McCain, whose weight had dropped to 105 during his first years in Hanoi, began to regain some of his health. He was allowed to exercise, which eased the boredom and made it easier to sleep.
"He was crippled but mentally fierce," recalled Orson Swindle, who roomed with McCain for the last two years of their incarceration. "He was stiff-legged and had awkward movement of both arms. He did the funniest push-ups I've even seen.
"One of his arms was sort of crooked . . . he did push-ups with a tilt to it."
The men were in a big room with a large concrete slab in the center and a 3-foot-wide, horseshoe-shape path around the slab. They would exercise by walking along the path.
"When John would run in place, it was sort of humorous to watch him," Swindle said. "One leg would bend, and the other wouldn't. It was a sight to behold."
To entertain themselves and the other men, McCain and Swindle organized "Sunday Night at the Movies" - retelling, and in some cases performing, scenes from Hollywood films they had seen.
One of their favorites was One-Eyed Jacks, a Marlon Brando movie in which Brando is beaten by a worthless sheriff played by Slim Pickens. McCain and Swindle especially loved the part where Brando calls Pickens a "scum-sucking pig."
In December 1972, McCain had a front-row seat to a full-scale bombing attack on Hanoi.
"It was the most spectacular show I'll ever see," McCain later wrote in U.S. News and World Report. ". . . The bombs were dropping so close that the building would shake. The SAMs were flying all over, and the sirens were whining - it was really a wild scene."
Though the bombing had been conceived by Nixon, the actual orders had been given by McCain's father, Jack.
McCain's father never wrote him during the war because of the propaganda value of such a letter. He did, however, try to pass McCain a secret message once, according to a passage in Faith of My Fathers.
In letters to his wife, McCain was using a fairly obvious code to send messages back to the States. Naval intelligence, fearing that McCain would be caught, apprised the admiral.
Adm. John McCain Jr. sent a hidden message in a letter Carol wrote to McCain: "JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS."
The younger McCain never saw it, because the North Vietnamese withheld Carol's letters.
By January 1973, McCain had been moved back to The Plantation. The prisoners sensed that the war was nearing its end. The guards hardly bothered them.
Around that time, McCain was playing bridge with Swindle and two others when he was dealt a perfect hand. But McCain made a rookie mistake and lost his advantage. The other men teased him unmercifully.
Finally, McCain stopped talking to Swindle, who slept right next to him on the floor. This went on for several days.
"We would be walking on the path, and I would say, 'Hi, John,' and John wouldn't respond," Swindle said.
Then one day, the guards came in and ordered Swindle to pack his gear. As one of the first pilots captured, Swindle was in line to be released.
As Swindle was being ushered out, a frantic McCain rushed up to his side.
"John comes running up and says, 'Orson, Orson, I've really been a jerk the last few days.' I said, 'I don't even want to talk to you,' and I turned away.
"Then I looked back at him and winked, and I had a big grin on my face, and I said, 'I'll see you at home.' "
In March, McCain joined a group of prisoners who were put onto trucks and driven to Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. McCain said he didn't believe he was leaving until he actually spoke with an American in uniform.
It was the best day of his life.
"At the time, it wasn't that overwhelming. It was one of those things that you had anticipated for so long, nothing could have lived up to my expectations," McCain said. "It's like when a kid waits for Christmas, and then it arrives, and it can't quite live up to what he expected."
One by one, The Rabbit read off their names, and they boarded the plane.
McCain's long ordeal was over.
CHAPTER IV: ARIZONA, THE EARLY YEARS
In 1979, John McCain came face to face with his future.
He was in Hawaii, attending a military reception. While there, he met a young, blond, former cheerleader named Cindy Hensley.
It was an incredible stroke of luck for McCain.
How fortunate could one man be? Here was McCain, who had his eye on Congress, meeting a young, attractive beer heiress from Arizona, which was adding a congressional district in 1982.
McCain recalls that both he and Cindy fudged their ages at first. McCain made himself a little younger and Cindy made herself a little older. They found out their real ages when the local paper published them. McCain was 43, Cindy 25.
"So our marriage," McCain cracks, "is really based on a tissue of lies."
While they were dating, McCain called Cindy from Beijing, where he was traveling with a contingent from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while she was in the hospital recuperating from minor knee surgery. She thanked him for the lovely flowers in her room, sent from "John."
What McCain didn't tell Cindy was that he hadn't sent the flowers. They were from another John, who lived in Tucson.
"I never thanked him," Cindy notes with a grin.
After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.
McCain needed a divorce from his wife of 14 years, Carol, who had been badly injured in a car accident while McCain languished in Hanoi.
The marriage had been strained by his years of absence, along with McCain's admitted affairs after returning from Vietnam.
In February 1980, less than a year after he met Cindy, McCain petitioned a Florida court to dissolve his marriage to Carol, calling the union "irretrievably broken." Bud Day, a lawyer and fellow POW, handled the case.
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"I thought things were going fairly well, and then it just came apart," Day recalls. "That happened to quite a few. . . . I don't fault (Carol), and I don't really fault John, either."
In the divorce settlement, McCain was generous with Carol, the mother of their daughter Sydney and two other children, whom McCain had adopted. Among other things, McCain gave Carol the rights to houses in Florida and Virginia, and agreed to pay her medical bills for life.
Except for signing the property settlement, Carol did not participate in the divorce. A court summons and other paperwork sent to her during the proceeding went unanswered.
In April, the judge entered a default judgment and declared the marriage dissolved.
A month later, McCain married Cindy in Phoenix, and they moved there.
McCain was immediately plugged into Arizona's power elite. Cindy's father, Jim Hensley, owned a Phoenix Anheuser-Busch distributorship that had made him a millionaire many times over.
It was no secret that McCain was interested in a political career. In the six years after he returned from Vietnam, he had been in rehab and then was assigned to a political post, working in the Navy's Senate liaison office in Washington.
While there, McCain made friends with such political movers as Sen. Gary Hart and Sen. John Tower, who was the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. He also met Sen. Bill Cohen, now the secretary of Defense, who ended up being the best man at John and Cindy's wedding.
In 1981, McCain retired from the Navy, mostly because of his badly injured knees and shoulder, compliments of his North Vietnamese captors. Hensley gave his new son-in-law a job as vice president of public relations, but McCain was soon bored.
"Jim Hensley didn't care about PR," said Bill Shover, a former executive with Phoenix Newspapers Inc. who met McCain in 1981. "When you have the Budweiser franchise, you have a license to steal. You don't need PR."
It didn't take long for McCain to meet wealthy power brokers such as developer Charles Keating Jr. and Fife Symington III, who would later be elected governor. Local pols suggested McCain start slowly by running for the state Legislature, but McCain would have none of it.
Eager to make up for time lost as a POW, McCain wanted Arizona's new congressional seat.
But he had a problem. The new district was in Tucson. For McCain to move from Phoenix to Tucson would open him up to criticism as a carpetbagger.
Fate lent a hand. In January 1982, Rep. John Rhodes retired from the 1st District seat, which includes the East Valley.
On the day Rhodes announced his retirement, Shover got a call from McCain. He could hear noise in the background.
"Where are you?" Shover asked.
"I'm on the freeway," said McCain, who had stopped at a service station to call Shover. "I'm on the way to Mesa to buy a house."
Many have told the tale of John McCain winning the 1st Congressional District by wearing out three pairs of shoes. McCain's footwear definitely took a beating during the race, but it was more greenbacks than soles that swept McCain into the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982.
McCain's first campaign benefited from his wife's personal wealth, some of which had been tied up in a trust set up in 1971 by her parents, Jim and Marguerite "Smitty" Hensley.
In 1981, the trust expired and was dissolved, giving Cindy McCain a half interest in Western Leasing Co., a truck-leasing business controlled by her father, said Trevor Potter, general counsel to the McCain 2000 campaign and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
In 1982, Cindy McCain received $639,000 from Western Leasing, according to a financial disclosure report filed by McCain. Potter said that figure reflects Cindy's income on paper, not the actual cash she received, which was about $250,000.
In any case, that same year, the McCains lent $169,000 of their own money to the campaign. Western Leasing, in part, made those loans possible, Potter said.
"Her financial assets played a part in allowing them to loan money to the campaign," Potter said. "And her financial assets included the income from Western Leasing."
Western Leasing was not the only income the McCains had in 1982. They earned a combined $130,000 in salary and bonuses from Hensley and Co., the beer distributorship controlled by Cindy's father. John also had his Navy pension, which paid $31,000 a year.
"No one pretends that Cindy had no money at all," Potter said. "It was hers. And it wasn't something Jim (Hensley) had given her for the campaign."
Under 1982 election rules, it was legal for McCain to tap his wife's assets, as well as his own, when making personal loans to the campaign. In 1983, the rules were rewritten, with tighter guidelines on the use of family money.
In the end, including the personal loans, McCain would raise more than $550,000 to win the seat.
AN ALLY IN THE PRESS
McCain had money, and he also had another staunch ally in Phoenix: Darrow "Duke" Tully, publisher of the state's largest newspaper, The Republic.
Upon meeting McCain, Tully regaled him with stories of his own military service as an Air Force pilot in Korea and Vietnam. The two men quickly hit it off and soon were spending a lot of time together. Cindy McCain and Tully's second wife, Pat, also got along well. Both were far younger than their husbands.
Tully had logged many hours in Air Force simulators learning how to fly F-16s. He bragged about a simulated dogfight between him and McCain on the Goldwater gunnery range in southwest Arizona.
"Duke said he had gotten John in his sights and shot him down," Shover recalls. "John couldn't maneuver very well, because of his (formerly) broken arm."
Tully immediately started grooming McCain for public office.
Shover said Tully was practically McCain's PR man, hosting dinners to introduce him to the Valley's movers and shakers. He set up guest columns for McCain in PNI's flagship newspaper, The Republic. In one of them, McCain gave a tear-jerking account of Christmas in Hanoi. Tully became godfather to one of McCain's children.
With his connections and war record, McCain was taken seriously by the Republican establishment. Plus, McCain had charm. Women were drawn to him, and men respected him as a man's man.
"John was a very engaging guy," Shover recalls. "You could not help but like John."
McCain was vulnerable on one count. He was not from Arizona and looked like he was shopping for a congressional seat.
In 1982, at a candidates forum, McCain settled the carpetbagger issue for good. After noting that he had been a military brat and moved around his whole life, McCain played his ace in the hole.
"The place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi," McCain said.
Although it was clear McCain had the tools to reach political office on his own, Tully helped open the door. Armed with a war chest provided by such people as Keating and Symington, McCain conducted a tireless door-to-door campaign and beat his primary opponents. He easily rolled over his Democratic challenger in the general election.
Tully and McCain would only get closer, and McCain would influence the paper.
In the pages of The Republic and The Phoenix Gazette, McCain could do no wrong. Political columnists adopted him like a lost puppy. Late Gazette columnist John Kolbe blasted McCain's Republican primary opponent in 1982, Jim Mack, for calling McCain's first wife to dig up dirt.
In 1984, McCain won a second term in the House, facing only token opposition. He was already hunting bigger game. McCain wanted to succeed Barry Goldwater, who was retiring from the Senate.
McCain's main stumbling block was Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a popular Democrat with deep family ties in the state. McCain's people decided early on that the race would be half won if they could persuade Babbitt to stay out.
"It wasn't so much a strategy as it was a reality," recalls Torie Clarke, McCain's press secretary from 1983 until 1989. "The theory was, if we worked really hard . . . if John really could get his roots deep in Arizona, it became less and less likely that Babbitt would want to run against him."
Babbitt also was toying with a run for president in 1988, two years after he would have been elected to the Senate. McCain's people kept the pressure on, making it clear that McCain planned an all-or-nothing assault on the seat.
In March 1985, Babbitt made it official: He wasn't running for the Senate. In May, five-term Congressman Bob Stump also took a pass, giving McCain an open field for the Republican nomination.
To face McCain, the Democrats fielded Richard Kimball, a tall, good-looking 37-year-old with an offbeat personality. Urged on by Tully, The Republic and Gazette editorial pages tore into Kimball, a former member of the Arizona Corporation Commission.
Republic columnist Pat Murphy blasted a Kimball position paper because it contained grammatical and spelling errors. Kolbe, now firmly in McCain's corner, also lampooned Kimball, saying he suffered from "terminal weirdness."
Of course, everyone knew that McCain was Tully's favorite.
"(Tully) was really pushing John," Shover said. "He liked him. (McCain) was probably the guy Duke wanted to be. Duke was this Walter Mitty type."
Walter Mitty to be sure. All of Tully's war stories were pure fiction. McCain, like everyone else, had been fooled.
Tully invented his military history to live up to the expectations of his father, whose other son had been killed in a military training accident.
In late 1985, the pressure of living the lie was building up inside Tully, causing him to drink and alienate his wife, Pat. After she filed for divorce, Tully, in his own words, "was beginning to crack up."
He began to drop not-so-subtle hints to people that he had never served in the military. Then, on Oct. 25, a concerned secretary summoned Shover to Tully's office.
Shover found Tully stepping on his plaques and certificates and throwing them into a trash can.
Determined to protect his boss, Shover told him to quietly get rid of his uniforms and to stop telling his fake war stories.
Tully refused to be quiet about it.
"It's almost like he was trying to get caught," Shover said.
Eventually, word leaked out to Tully's enemies, one of whom was Maricopa County Attorney Tom Collins, who had been smacked by The Republic for taking a trip with his family at taxpayer expense.
Collins, along with freelance aviation writer Dick Rose, began to investigate Tully's background. The day after Christmas, Tully told Shover that Collins would have a press conference to expose him.
Shover drafted Tully's letter of resignation and called Indianapolis, the headquarters of The Republic's parent company, Central Newspapers Inc.
Tully's reign was over.
One of the early press calls was to McCain.
"His response was kind of like, 'Yeah, I have heard of Duke Tully. I'm sorry about what happened to him. Any other questions?' " Shover said.
Shover said McCain was a political opportunist who moved quickly to distance himself from Tully.
"In other words, he walked," Shover said. "He used Duke Tully to gain what he got in his life and he left him just when Duke needed him most."
'SEIZURE WORLD'
The fall of Tully threw Kimball off balance, since he had sought to paint McCain as a tool of the newspaper and its publisher. For the next few months, Kimball darted and dashed around McCain, throwing a lot of punches and landing none.
McCain took Kimball seriously, though.
"We worried, we sweated, we were concerned every single day," Clarke said. "From the first to the last, until Election Day . . . that's probably the reason John is so successful. That's the way he is."
In June 1986, McCain gave Kimball an opening, jokingly referring to Leisure World, a retirement community, as "Seizure World."
Kimball launched another series of attacks, calling McCain "bought and paid for" by special interests, since much of McCain's campaign contributions came from political action committees in four industries: defense, real estate, petroleum and utilities.
Kimball also noted that McCain was a millionaire because of his wife's interests in the beer distributorship owned by her father. Kimball wasn't shy about airing the Hensley family laundry.
He had dug up old newspaper clips that showed Jim Hensley had been an underling to well-known power broker Kemper Marley Sr., a rich rancher and wholesale liquor baron with ties to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.
After World War II (Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17 that was shot down over the English Channel), Hensley and his brother Eugene went to work at Marley-owned liquor distributorships in Phoenix and Tucson.
In 1948, the Hensley brothers were convicted of falsifying records to conceal, government lawyers contended, the illegal distribution of hundreds of cases of liquor. The sales occurred from 1945 to 1947, postwar years when liquor was rationed and in short supply.
Eugene Hensley was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Jim Hensley got six months, but his sentence was suspended. He received probation.
In 1953, Jim Hensley was again charged with falsifying records at Marley's liquor firms. The companies were defended by William Rehnquist, who would go on to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Hensley was found not guilty.
'STANDING ON A SOAPBOX'
In late 1986, as Kimball gained ground on McCain in the Senate race, the candidates agreed to debate on television.
Since McCain was a good deal shorter than the lanky Kimball, he stood on a riser behind the podium. At one point, Kimball called him on it, saying McCain was "standing on a soapbox" to make himself look taller.
McCain was angry but kept his cool. The next day, he got mad all over again when he saw himself standing on the riser on the front page of The Republic.
While the debate was mostly a draw, McCain enjoyed a huge fund-raising lead, outspending Kimball nearly 4 to 1. On Election Day, McCain steamrolled Kimball, 60 percent to 40 percent.
McCain went to a downtown hotel for his acceptance speech, an event chronicled in The Nightingale's Song by Robert Timberg.
Jay Smith, McCain's political consultant, was told to make sure McCain stood on a riser as he delivered his acceptance speech.
"Arriving at the hotel shortly after McCain, Smith saw reporters and well-wishers huddle together on the stage," Timberg wrote. "From the midst of the throng, he heard a familiar voice floating upward, thanking the voters for sending him to the Senate. Familiar but disembodied. McCain had seen the riser and kicked it aside. The White Tornado had become the Invisible Man."
By 1988, McCain was a hot property and was rumored to be George Bush's choice for vice president.
"Before Dan Quayle came popping out on the dock in New Orleans, the last name eliminated for consideration by the AP wire was John McCain," said Scott Celley, a McCain aide at the time.
But in October 1989, everything came crashing down around McCain.
CHAPTER V: THE KEATING FIVE
As a war hero and U.S. senator, John McCain's life has been chronicled in pictures.
There are grainy mug shots of a young McCain, printed in U.S. newspapers after his jet was shot down over North Vietnam. There are black-and-white images of his return, grinning and waving, his hair turned prematurely gray by 5 1/2 years of malnutrition and torture in a Hanoi prison camp.
In happier times, there is McCain holding his newborn daughter while his wife, Cindy, smiles from her hospital bed.
But it is an innocent vacation picture that symbolizes McCain's Achilles heel and carries the reminder of the scandal that threatened his political career.
In the picture, which was taken in the Bahamas, McCain is seated on a bandstand while wearing an outrageous, straw party hat. Next to him on the dais, a bottle tipped to his lips, sits Charles Keating III, son of developer Charles H Keating Jr.
McCain calls the Keating scandal "my asterisk." Over the years, his opponents have failed to turn it into a period.
It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.
As federal auditors crawled all over Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He'd spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.
One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini. The Arizona lawmaker was one of Keating's most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini's campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.
Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with the regulators. The message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting between five senators and the regulators. One of them was John McCain.
McCain knew Keating well. His ties to the home builder dated to 1981, when the two men met at a Navy League dinner where McCain was the speaker.
After the speech, Keating walked up to McCain and told him that he, too, was a Navy flier, and that he greatly respected McCain's war record. He met McCain's wife and family. The two men became friends.
Charlie Keating always took care of his friends, especially those in politics. John McCain was no exception.
In 1982, during McCain's first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting more than $11,000 from 40 employees of American Continental Corp. McCain would spend more than $550,000 to win the primary and the general election.
In 1983, during McCain's second House race, Keating hosted a $1,000-a-plate dinner for McCain, though he had no serious competition and coasted into his second term. When McCain pushed for the Senate in 1986, Keating was there with more than $50,000.
By 1987, McCain had received about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.
McCain had also carried a little water for Keating in Washington. While in the House, McCain, along with a majority of representatives, co-sponsored a resolution to delay new regulations designed to curb risky investments by thrifts like Lincoln.
HESITANT PARTICIPANT
Despite his history with Keating, McCain was hesitant about intervening. At that point, he had been in the Senate only three months. DeConcini wanted McCain to fly to San Francisco with him and talk to the regulators. McCain refused.
Keating would not be dissuaded.
On March 24 at 9:30 a.m., Keating went to DeConcini's office and asked him if the meeting with the regulators was on. DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous.
"McCain's a wimp," Keating replied, according to the book Trust Me, by Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden. "We'll go talk to him."
Keating had other business on the Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer had already told McCain about the wimp comment.
When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.
McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly, but that was all.
"Keating gave me the clear impression that he expected me to do more," McCain said later. "He had several specific requests."
When Keating questioned his courage, McCain invoked his POW experience. He told Keating that he didn't spend 5 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton to be called a coward.
The two argued, then Keating stormed out.
Despite the dust-up, McCain attended not one but two meetings with the regulators. McCain later explained that he thought it was the right thing to do, because Keating was a constituent.
McCain would live to regret it.
The first meeting, on April 2 in DeConcini's office, included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as well as four senators: DeConcini, McCain, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and John Glenn, D-Ohio.
The meeting had a clandestine air. Gray came alone. None of the senators brought their aides. DeConcini asked Gray to withdraw a regulation in order to help Lincoln. Gray shook his head.
For Keating, the meeting was a bust. Gray told the senators that as head of the loan board, he worried about the big picture. He didn't have any specific information about Lincoln. Bank regulators in San Francisco would be versed in that, not him. Gray offered to set up a meeting between the senators and the San Francisco regulators.
The second meeting was on April 9. The same four senators attended, along with Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich. Also at the meeting were William Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC.
In a recent interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures.
"The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle."
Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.' "
'ALWAYS HAMLET'
The five senators, including McCain, seemed like a united front to Black.
"They presented themselves as a group," Black said, "and DeConcini is the dad, who's going to take the primary speaking role. Both meetings are in his office, and in both cases it's 'we' want this, with no one going, 'What do you mean we, kemo sabe?' "
According to nearly verbatim notes taken by Black, McCain started the second meeting with a careful comment.
"One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion," McCain said. "ACC (American Continental Corp.) is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them. . . .
"I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper."
Black said the comment had the opposite effect for the regulators. It made them nervous about what might really be going on.
"McCain was the weirdest," Black said. "They were all different in their own way. McCain was always Hamlet . . . wringing his hands about what to do."
Glenn, a former astronaut and the first American to orbit the Earth, was not as tactful.
"To be blunt, you should charge them or get off their backs," he told the regulators. "If things are bad there, get to them. Their view is that they took a failing business and put it back on its feet. It's now viable and profitable. They took it off the endangered species list. Why has the exam dragged on and on and on?"
Added DeConcini, "What's wrong with this if they're willing to clean up their act?"
Cirona, the banking official, told the senators that it was "very unusual" to hold a meeting to discuss a particular company.
DeConcini shot back: "It's very unusual for us to have a company that could be put out of business by its regulators."
The meeting went on. McCain was quiet, while DeConcini carried the ball. The regulators told the senators that Lincoln was in trouble. The thrift, Cirona said, was a "ticking time bomb."
Then Patriarca made a stunning comment, according to transcripts released later.
"We're sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice," he said. "Not maybe, we're sending one. This is an extraordinarily serious matter. It involves a whole range of imprudent actions. I can't tell you strongly enough how serious this is. This is not a profitable institution."
The statement made DeConcini back off a little.
"The criminality surprises me," he said. "We're not interested in discussing those issues. Our premise was that we had a viable institution concerned that it was being overregulated."
"What can we say to Lincoln?" Glenn asked.
"Nothing," Black responded, "with regard to the criminal referral. They haven't, and won't be told by us that we're making one."
"You haven't told them?" Glenn asked.
"No," said Black. "Justice would skin us alive if we did. Those referrals are very confidential. We can't prosecute anyone ourselves. All we can do is refer it to Justice."
After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.
"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."
Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?
Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.
"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."
McCain's reservations aside, Keating accomplished his goal. He had bought some time, though the price was very high.
SHORT-LIVED REPRIEVE
A month later, the San Francisco regulators finished a yearlong audit and recommended that Lincoln be seized. But the report was virtually ignored because of politics on the bank board.
Gray was being replaced as chairman by Danny Wall, who was more sympathetic to Keating.
The audit, which described Lincoln as a thrift reeling out of control, sat on a shelf.
In September 1987, the investigation was taken away from the San Francisco office, away from Black and Patriarca. In May 1988, it was transferred to Washington, where Lincoln would get a new audit.
It was a win for Keating. A battle, not the war.
In Phoenix, the move sparked a triumphant party at the posh headquarters of American Continental.
Someone hurled a computer from the second floor, shattering a window. Keating, all 6-feet-5 of him, struck a Superman pose and ripped open his shirt to display a hand-drawn skull and crossbones over the letters FHLBB - the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.
A secretary climbed onto a desk to take photos, and American Continental executive Robert Kielty joined her. Keating grabbed a roll of tape and lashed their legs together.
Potted plants were knocked over. Beer and champagne were spilled on the carved wood desks. Kielty took a bottle of champagne and poured it down another secretary's blouse.
"Get this champagne colder," Keating yelled.
Back in San Francisco, Black was fuming.
"Clearly, we were shot in the back," he would say later.
Despite the reprieve, Keating's businesses continued to spiral downward, taking the five senators with him. News of the meeting leaked out, and now all five men were answering some very embarrassing questions.
"Did you lean on regulators for Charlie Keating?"
"Did you get campaign contributions in exchange for your cooperation?"
"Why did you protect Keating?"
Together, the five senators had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon:
Keating Five.
As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The Keating Five became shorthand for the kind of political influence that money can buy. The five senators were linked as the gang who went to bat for an S&L bandit.
S&L "trading cards" came out. The Keating Five card showed Charles Keating holding up his hand, with a senator's head adorning each finger. McCain was on Keating's pinkie.
As the Keating investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the body blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides.But McCain made a critical error.
In spinning his side of the Keating story, McCain adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.
Keating was far more than a constituent to McCain, however.
On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.
The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.
McCain also did not pay Keating for the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.
When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself. When reporters first called him, he was furious. Caught out in the open, the former fighter pilot let go with a barrage of cover fire. Sen. Hothead came out in all his glory.
"You're a liar,"' McCain snapped Sept. 29 when a Republic reporter asked him about business ties between his wife and Keating.
"That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?"
He also belittled the reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating.
"It's up to you to find that out, kids."
And then he played the POW card.
"Even the Vietnamese didn't question my ethics," McCain said.
The paper ran the story a few days later. At a news conference, McCain was a changed man. He stood calmly for 90 minutes and answered every question.
On the shopping center, his defense was simple. The deal did not involve him. The shares in the shopping center had been purchased by a partnership set up between McCain's wife and her father.
But McCain also had to explain his trips with Keating and why he didn't pay Keating back right away.
On that score, McCain admitted he had fouled up. He said he should have reimbursed Keating immediately, not waited several years. His staff said it was an oversight, but it looked bad, McCain jetting around with Keating, then going to bat for him with the federal regulators.
Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to founder.
In April 1989, two years after the Keating Five meetings, the government seized Lincoln, which declared bankruptcy. In September 1990, Keating was booked into Los Angeles County Jail, charged with 42 counts of fraud. His bond was set at $5 million.
During Keating's eventual trial, the prosecution produced a parade of elderly investors who had lost their life's savings by investing in American Continental junk bonds.
'THE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR'
In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee convened to decide what punishment, if any, should be doled out to the Keating Five.
Robert Bennett, who would later represent President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was the special counsel for the committee. In his opening remarks, he slammed DeConcini but went lightly on McCain, the lone Republican ensnared with four Democrats.
"In the case of Senator McCain, there is very substantial evidence that he thought he had an understanding with Senator DeConcini's office that certain matters would not be gone into at the meeting with (bank board) Chairman (Ed) Gray," Bennett said.
"Moreover, there is substantial evidence that, as a result of Senator McCain's refusal to do certain things, he had a fallout with Mr. Keating."
McCain, the ultimate survivor, had dodged another missile.
Among the Keating Five, McCain received the most direct contributions from Keating. But the investigation found that he was the least culpable, along with Glenn. McCain attended the meetings but did nothing afterward to stop Lincoln's death spiral.
Lincoln's losses eventually were set at $3.4 billion, the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal.
McCain also looked good in contrast to DeConcini, who continued to defend Keating until fall 1989, when federal regulators filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and into political campaigns.
In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.
"The appearance of it was wrong," McCain said recently. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."
McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.
"For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel," McCain said. "I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was the only Republican of the five and the Democrats were in the majority (in the Senate)."
But McCain owns up to his mistake:
"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."
CHAPTER VI: ARIZONA, THE LATER YEARS
For many politicians, the Keating scandal would have been too much to overcome. But McCain refused to go down easily.
He employed a dual strategy. He would make himself accessible to any reporter anywhere who wanted to talk about the Keating Five, and he wouldn't let the controversy detract from his work as a senator.
McCain grimly marched about the country, struggling to clear his name.
"I have to say, it was not an easy time," said Torie Clarke, McCain's former press secretary. "But because of the strategy he decided to pursue . . . nobody had time to sit around and feel sorry for themselves."
McCain's hobnobbing with the press had an unexpected side effect. Reporters started to like him.
McCain always returned phone calls. He showed up for his television appearances. He was willing to go off the record to help reporters unearth certain stories. He answered questions bluntly, without much political tap dancing.
For Beltway reporters bored with bureaucrats, McCain was fresh, new and different.
"Everybody in town," Clarke said, "from the makeup artist at the local news station to the producers and directors, every reporter and every editor, loves working with John McCain because he does not stand on ceremony, he has no airs."
Going into the 1992 election, some thought McCain was in trouble. President Bush was flagging in the polls, and McCain was coming off the Keating scandal. His Democratic opponent was Claire Sargent, a Phoenix community activist. Former Gov. Evan Mecham was running as an independent despite having been impeached and removed from office in 1988.
But McCain's image improved in 1991. Soon after the Persian Gulf War broke out, McCain was in demand. The phone began ringing off the hook the day POWs were taken.
"The Today Show called, and we started on The Today Show at four-something in the morning," said Scott Celley, a former aide. "The last thing I remember him being on was Australian Nightline, which was done here at Channel 10, a few blocks away, at close to 11 p.m. He was on television or the radio every minute of that day."
McCain became a regular on public affairs shows, using his expertise as a former Navy pilot and POW. McCain quickly became a national authority on foreign affairs.
The din of the Keating Five began to lessen. McCain stayed on message and began to distance himself from the scandal.
In 1992, McCain received 58 percent of the vote in the three-way election, easily winning a second Senate term.
Things did not go as well for Charlie Keating. In January 1993, a federal jury convicted him of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud in the collapse of American Continental and Lincoln.
Keating was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison but served just 50 months before the conviction was overturned on a technicality. In 1999, at age 75, he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud for siphoning some $975,000 from American Continental before he had declared bankruptcy in 1989. He was sentenced to time served.
In 1995, McCain was lionized in The Nightingale's Song, a book that examined the military and political careers of McCain and four other Annapolis graduates, James Webb, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter and Oliver North.
Robert Timberg devotes two of his 475 pages to the Keating scandal and says this about it:
"Stripped of the veneer of sleaze that coated the affair, McCain's defense of his actions was solid and credible. It didn't matter. The Keating Five label endured, shabby journalistic shorthand that made up in simplemindedness what it lacked in precision."
By 1996, McCain was considered a front-runner to be Bob Dole's running mate in the race against Clinton and Al Gore, before Dole picked Jack Kemp.
Today, the Keating Five scandal is barely mentioned. In most national profiles of McCain, it has been reduced to one paragraph.
McCain knows it will never disappear altogether.
"It'll be on my tombstone," McCain told 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace. "One of the Keating Five."
McCAIN ERUPTIONS
In the early 1990s, despite McCain's battering over Keating, he didn't stop throwing his weight around Arizona.
Some public officials are still stinging from McCain's volcanic temper.
One is Democrat Paul Johnson, the former mayor of Phoenix and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. During Johnson's stint as mayor, he saw McCain's temper up close, and it makes him think twice about McCain becoming president.
"His volatility borders in the area of being unstable," Johnson said. "Before I let this guy put his finger on the button, I would have to give considerable pause."
Johnson said he got a full dose of McCain's anger when he was in Washington in 1992, dealing with a federal land swap that involved the Phoenix Indian School. He and McCain, who disagreed over the issue, were in a hearing room with other mayors when hostilities broke out.
"He says, 'Start a tape recorder. It's best when you get a liar on tape,' " Johnson recalled. "Then I said something back to him, and before you knew it, we were nose to nose and chin to chin. No blows were exchanged, but we were as close to being 14-year-old boys as we possibly could be. . . . Testosterone was flowing all over place."
Johnson, who also fought McCain's plan for a regional airport, marvels at his wrath.
"Oh, gosh, you never dealt with a more brutal individual," Johnson said.
"He was very tough."
McCain's penchant for bullying state officials essentially destroyed his relationship with Grant Woods, who served as state attorney general from 1990 until 1998.
Woods, son of powerful Mesa contractor Joe E. Woods, was an early McCain staffer. He provided key help in McCain's first run for Congress, mainly by persuading his influential father to support McCain in Mesa over several local candidates.
"The support of Joe Woods in the district was about 100 times more important than the support of Grant Woods," the younger Woods said. "When he went with McCain, it made it OK for the old guard to support McCain rather than one of the locals."
The Woods-McCain relationship began to chill in 1994 when Woods started investigating bid-rigging allegations surrounding Gov. Fife Symington's government cost-cutting program, Project SLIM. Despite pressure from other Republicans, including McCain, Woods pursued the probe.
Over the years, McCain had become very close to Symington. Even their staffs were tied together. Symington's former chief of staff, Wes Gullett, is McCain's deputy campaign director and is married to McCain aide Deb Gullett.
Others note that McCain called for the scalp of Gov. Evan Mecham, who was impeached and removed from office, but let Symington slide when he was under indictment for bank fraud. Symington later was convicted and resigned, but his conviction was overturned earlier this year.
McCain said the state was operating smoothly under Symington, which was not the case with Mecham. He bristled when it was suggested that he was protecting a friend.
"I really won't answer that kind of insinuation," McCain said. "I do what's best for the state. I do what's best for the country."
McCain added, "Of course (Symington) was a friend of mine. I had a friendly relationship with Gov. Mecham before he got into the difficulties."
Woods said McCain didn't like it when he investigated Symington.
"I think he probably liked to be in the loop," Woods said.
"Consequently, when he wasn't, and then I kept investigating Republicans or criticizing Republicans . . . he never could get over that.
"It appeared clear to me that the only way I could return to his good graces was to be a good boy, and I wasn't willing to be a good boy."
Eventually, McCain and Woods had it out over Symington.
"He just did not approve of me constantly making life difficult for Republicans, and I made it clear that it wasn't going to change, and we weren't going to have any more of these conversations. We haven't talked in a long time."
Woods ultimately obtained a $725,000 civil settlement in the SLIM case.
Woods said he finds it ironic that McCain, Mr. Maverick in the Senate, didn't want Woods to assume the same role in the Arizona Republican Party.
"I guess it's OK to be the maverick but not tolerate mavericks around you," Woods said.
WIFE'S DRUG SCANDAL
By the early 1990s, his political rehabilitation was complete. Nobody on the national stage seemed to care about McCain's foibles.
What McCain didn't know was that the Keating scandal had already claimed another victim, one from McCain's own family.
In August 1994, a group of Valley journalists received a strange phone call from Jay Smith, McCain's political strategist.
They were offered an exclusive in exchange for agreeing to certain terms. They would attend individual interview sessions Aug. 19 and sit on the story until Aug. 22. The five journalists - three print reporters, a television reporter and a radio reporter - agreed.
One by one, they went to the McCain home, where they were told an incredible story.
Cindy McCain told them that she had been a drug addict for three years. From 1989 to 1992, she was addicted to Percocet and Vicodin. Worse, she had stolen pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a relief organization that she founded to aid Third World countries.
"More than anything, I wanted to be able to face my children," she said at the time, "for them to know I wasn't lying to them. They're too young to fully understand right now, but someday they will."
Cindy blamed two back surgeries and the Keating Five scandal - a mix of physical and emotional pain - for driving her to drugs.
Things started to unravel when a Drug Enforcement Administration audit found irregularities in AVMT's records, prompting an investigation, Cindy told the reporters.
In 1992, as the Keating affair surfaced again during McCain's run for a second Senate term, Cindy's parents confronted her about her drug use.
What had been so clear to Cindy's parents was lost on McCain, who said he hadn't noticed his wife's addiction.
"I was stunned," McCain said at the time. "Naturally, I felt enormous sadness for Cindy and a certain sense of guilt that I hadn't detected it. I feel very sorry for what she went through, but I'm very proud she was able to come out of it. For her, it was like the Keating affair had been for me - a searing experience, and we both came out stronger. I think it has strengthened our marriage and our overall relationship."
To avoid prosecution on drug charges, she would enter a federal diversion program.
In telling her story, Cindy got choked up when she told of federal drug agents knocking on her door, asking about missing pills.
The reporters were sympathetic.
Cindy had always been physically fragile. She suffered two miscarriages early in her marriage to McCain until doctors determined she was a "DES baby." Cindy's mother had been given the drug diethylstilbestrol during her pregnancy.
During the 1940s and '50s, DES was thought to prevent miscarriages. Instead, it caused numerous birth defects, including deformed uteruses in female offspring. Doctors finally detected the problem and took special precautions during Cindy's third pregnancy.
Even so, there were long separations, because Cindy couldn't travel while pregnant. Besides, she preferred Arizona to Washington.
Cindy told the reporters that she finally entered The Meadows, a drug-treatment center in Wickenburg, and went to anti-dependency meetings twice a week.
In 1993, she said, a hysterectomy ended the nagging back pain that had driven her to the painkillers.
So why go public a year later?
"If what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile," she said. "They should know it's OK to be scared. It's OK to talk about it. And there's nothing wrong with staying home, carpooling and potty-training a 3-year-old."
Given Cindy's heartfelt confession, the handpicked journalists did what Smith expected. They painted Cindy as the victim, a courageous soldier beating back the devil of drug addiction.
But there was far more to the story. The reporters had been the victims of a spin job. It became apparent the next week, as more details came out.
John McCain had organized the interviews to head off a far more negative story, one that centered on a former AVMT employee who accused Cindy McCain in a lawsuit of ordering him to conceal "improper acts" and "misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding."
The accuser was Tom Gosinski, who had been fired from AVMT in 1993. It was he who had tipped the DEA to check out Cindy's organization. His lawsuit had been filed as a warning shot - his real allegation was that Cindy McCain had fired him because he "knew too much" about her drug use.
The details were in a 212-page report from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office that was about to become public when McCain arranged the interviews.
Ironically, County Attorney Rick Romley entered the fray at the request of McCain lawyer John Dowd, who charged that Gosinski was extorting the McCains by offering to settle the case for $250,000.
By asking Romley to investigate, Dowd helped create a public record that otherwise wouldn't have existed. When the report was released, McCain lost control of the story. Reporters who had been cut out of Cindy's private interview sessions, including those from The Republic, pursued it with new vigor.
Infuriated that his spin had failed to take, McCain refused to talk to reporters who weren't invited to Cindy's private interviews.
Dowd, who would later defend Gov. Fife Symington, put it plainly to a Republic reporter who called him for comment:
"You're not going to talk to Cindy. You're not going to talk to me. You're not going to talk to anybody associated with us. Have you got the message?"
Then he hung up.
Meanwhile, new allegations were surfacing, feeding the press frenzy for fresh angles, especially in light of McCain's silence.
Gosinski alleged that Cindy had asked him to lie to make it easier for her to adopt a baby from Bangladesh.
Backed up by court documents, the McCains denied there was anything improper in the adoption. They noted that the adoption probably saved the girl's life, as her cleft palate would not have allowed her to survive in Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, Gosinski's credibility started to slip. In Romley's report, several AVMT staffers said Gosinski had privately threatened to blackmail Cindy if she ever fired him.
Ultimately, Gosinski's lawsuit was dropped and he was never prosecuted.
The issue hasn't quite died. During a recent campaign swing through South Carolina, a New York Daily News reporter asked Cindy about her addiction.
She replied that she has been drug-free for eight years, but she acknowledged that she will always be in recovery.
"I had a real problem," she said, "and I dealt with my addiction head-on."
CHAPTER VII: INSIDE THE BELTWAY
None of McCain's battles have caused so much uproar - especially in his own party - as campaign-finance reform.
He surprised everyone by teaming with Democrat Russell Feingold and drafting a bill that would cut the legs out from under the major parties.
McCain's target was "soft money" - unlimited contributions given to political parties by corporations. He sees this as the ultimate evil in government, greasing the wheels for special interests.
Detractors say this is a bit high-handed, especially coming from a man who accepted $112,000 in campaign contributions from Charlie Keating and his pals.
They also note that McCain's stand on campaign-finance reform has not prevented him from working Washington, D.C., for campaign cash or accepting tens of thousands of dollars from corporations who are under the thumb of the Commerce Committee, which McCain heads.
The committee holds sway over a number of key industries, overseeing issues ranging from cable and satellite television rules to airline deregulation to access to telephone long-distance markets.
Armed with this seeming contradiction, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fired a salvo at McCain after he tried to re-energize his campaign-finance bill in July.
"I just think, when you're out there raising money right and left," Lott told The New York Times, "and then you're talking about how you need to reform the system, it rings a little hollow."
McCain says he will persist because he believes the public wants reform.
"Most Americans care very much that it is now legal for a subsidiary of a corporation owned by the Chinese Army to give unlimited amounts of money to American political campaigns," McCain says. "Most Americans care very much that the Lincoln bedroom has become a Motel 6 where the president of the United States serves as the bellhop."
Though outspoken in Congress, McCain has resisted criticizing other Republicans during the presidential race. Instead, he's decided that Clinton makes a good whipping boy.
When the Kosovo conflict broke out, public affairs shows went running to McCain, and he didn't disappoint them. He became the first major political figure to question Clinton's tactics.
Though Kosovo worked out in Clinton's favor, McCain didn't really take a hit, said Dennis Goldford, chairman of the department of politics and international relations at Drake University.
"Nothing backfired," Goldford said. "McCain didn't propose something, some use of force, that backfired and had tremendous casualties and was a disaster."
Since it was ultimately Clinton's call, "McCain could take a principled position and not worry about whether it actually worked or not," Goldford said.
Even apart from Kosovo, McCain says, Clinton has pursued a "feckless, photo-op foreign policy."
McCain blames the president for gutting the military, which has seen its numbers reduced in recent years. He points to 11,000 military personnel on food stamps and pilots leaving the Navy and Air Force in record numbers to fly for commercial airlines, where they can make more money.
McCain also wants the armed forces rebuilt to better deal with modern threats.
"We have a military that is structured to fight a tank battle on the plains of Europe," McCain says. "What we need is a force that can be moved around the world on short notice."
He says that base closings are a must and that the government must provide proper health care for World War II veterans. He says it's an "absolute disgrace" that veterans are being ignored.
How does one rebuild the military and cut taxes at the same time? For McCain, that means targeting pork-barrel projects and weapons systems that he deems unnecessary, such as the Sea Wolf submarine, which will cost $4 billion apiece.
He also promises to repair Medicare and Social Security.
"More young Americans believe that Elvis is alive then believe they'll ever see a Social Security check," McCain says, adding that many in Congress don't see the need to repair Social Security. "They figure, 'Since I'll be gone by then, I'll let you figure it out yourselves. And you don't vote, so hell."
'A VERY EFFECTIVE VOICE'
Some have criticized McCain for failing to pass a piece of major legislation during his 17 years in Congress. McCain-Feingold died, as did his anti-tobacco bill. His line-item veto did pass, but it was later tossed out by the courts.
Congressman Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., said McCain shouldn't be judged on the number of bills he has passed.
"You should look at a person's success by how many bills they stopped," Salmon said. "He's been a very effective voice at cutting wasteful spending. I don't judge a person based on how many bills they get through. . . . I think that's a bogus way of appraising somebody's strengths."
McCain was first elected to the House in 1982 and served two terms. As a freshman congressman, he broke from the pack in criticizing President Reagan's decision to station troops in Lebanon.
In a House floor speech in September 1983, McCain called for the withdrawal of all U.S. Marines from Lebanon. He was one of 27 Republicans to defy Reagan openly.
"The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave," he said.
A month later, McCain was tragically proved right when the Marine barracks were bombed, killing 241 U.S. servicemen.
That speech drew national press for McCain, who was lauded in Rolling Stone magazine and was listed as a "Republican on the rise" by U.S. News & World Report.
Much of his second House term was dominated by talk of him running for the Senate, though in 1985, he drew more national attention when he returned to Vietnam with CBS news legend Walter Cronkite.
In 1986, McCain was elected to the Senate, replacing legendary Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater. In 1998, McCain was elected to his third term.
Over the years, McCain has earned his maverick status. He's not afraid to make a controversial floor speech, though some argue they have had little effect.
His defiant nature plays well in Arizona, a conservative state with a sagebrush-rebellion mentality. GOP voters like McCain's politics.
For the most part, he's been a good Republican, in some ways more conservative than Goldwater. During most of his years in Congress, he has been in the minority party.
Last year, McCain voted with his party 81 percent of the time. He voted to convict Clinton during the president's impeachment and supported the Contract With America.
During the Reagan years, McCain followed the party line, voting for prayer in public schools, the 1986 tax reform act, continued subsidies for tobacco companies and the reintroduction of some handgun sales.
He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, funding for the Clean Air Act and opposed the 1983 nuclear freeze resolution.
At times, though, he would go against the tide.
In 1986, McCain voted with a two-thirds majority to override Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa. The next year, he outfoxed the administration and stopped an attempt to funnel $28 million from a poverty food program into a raise for Department of Agriculture employees.
Today, as chairman of the Commerce Committee, McCain is shepherding the deregulation of the telephone industry as well as dealing with burgeoning issues involving transportation, cable television and the Internet.
McCain also has made a name for himself by fighting wasteful government spending, which often takes the form of pet federal projects in congressmen's or senators' districts.
As part of his campaign rhetoric, McCain notes that Congress looks at appropriations bills "the way Willie Sutton looked at banks."
To root out the pork, McCain has stationed a staffer at Appropriations Committee meetings. He also pushed the line-item veto, which would allow the president to remove certain elements of a bill while allowing the legislation to become law.
Although it passed, the courts struck down the line-item veto in 1997.
McCain recently started his "It's Your Country" Web site (www.itsyourcountry.com), to monitor pork and corporate welfare. It includes "the daily outrage," naming companies that get huge federal subsidies in exchange for contributions to political parties.
McCain also targeted Big Tobacco, seeking to raise taxes on cigarettes to help states pay their smoking-related health care costs, finance an anti-smoking advertising campaign and pay for health research.
The tobacco industry mounted a $40 million national advertising campaign to defeat McCain's anti-tobacco bill, and it ultimately prevailed.
"The losers are the children of America," McCain said after the bill went down.
WATCHING HIS TEMPER
These days, John McCain is on his best behavior. He is focused on becoming president, and he's not going to let his temper get in the way. When reporters chase him on the street and ask for just one more question, McCain is accommodating.
"Anything," he says. "Anything."
It has not always been this way. More than one reporter has picked up his phone in the morning to hear McCain shrieking on the other end, furious over some injustice.
When The Republic ran an editorial cartoon about his wife Cindy's drug addiction, the senator didn't speak to his hometown paper for more than a year.
The cartoon, by Steve Benson, The Republic's Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, showed Cindy McCain holding an emaciated child upside down by the ankle and shaking him over a field of starving children.
"Quit your crying and give me the drugs," read the caption.
McCain also has yelled at bureaucrats, dressed down fellow members of Congress and earned the name Sen. Hothead from Washingtonian magazine.
Some Arizona elected officials have been scarred by run-ins with McCain, who brooks no disloyalty - you are either with him or against him.
But McCain is a shrewd campaigner. He knows he can't show that side if he's going to reach the Oval Office.
His flaws remain below the surface, and they aren't drawing a lot of press.
"It has to have some new twist to it or new information, something like, hey, did you know . . ." McCain says.
"There will always be people who will attack me. I've heard some of the damnedest things said about me. I was on a radio show in Charleston (S.C.), and someone calls up and says, 'Did you ever commit adultery with prostitutes in Subic Bay?' " McCain recalls, laughing.
"And I said the last time I was in Subic Bay was 1966, but no.
"Once every couple weeks, some hand grenade is lobbed into the headquarters with some stupid statement or charge."
McCain has one advantage: Much of his dirty laundry already has been aired.
BEDFORD, N.H. - McCain's campaign van is rocketing down the road to another event, another 100 people who want to shake his hand, hear his words, hope against hope that he'll be president.
He's leaning way back in the seat, answering questions about Vietnam, about Charlie Keating, about anything.
Just for a moment, his eyes close and he slumps a little, the weight of the campaign on his shoulders.
Then he's asked to define his message. McCain's eyes flutter open. The van is pulling to a stop in front of someone's home.
"Reform," McCain says as the door slides open.
There is faint smattering of applause from the lawn.
"Principle," he says. "And freedom."
And then he is gone.
Charts (2)
Photos (2)
Photos (5) by Associated Press
Color photo by Associated Press
Photos (2) by The Arizona Republic
Photos (2) by Dennis Cook/Associated Press
Photos (2) by Mark Henle/The Arizona Republic
Color photos (3) by Mark Henle/The Arizona Republic(1) BIOGRAPHY
John Sidney McCain III
* Born: Aug. 29, 1936, in Panama Canal Zone.
* Parents: Adm. John Sidney McCain Jr. (deceased) and Roberta (Wright) McCain.
* Siblings: Joe McCain, Mrs. Sandy Morgan.
* Spouse: Married Cindy Hensley McCain in 1980. A previous marriage to Carol Shepp McCain (married 1965, divorced 1980).
* Children: Doug, Andrew, Sydney Ann, Meghan, Jack, Jimmy and Bridget. Four grandchildren.
* Military career: Graduated from U.S. Naval Academy, 1958. Became naval aviator. Prisoner of war in Vietnam, 1967-73. Attended National War College, 1973-74. Promoted to captain, 1977. Senate Navy liaison, 1979-81. Retired 1981.
* Decorations: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Political career: U.S. representative from Arizona's 1st Congressional District, 1982-86. U.S. senator from Arizona, 1986 to present. Chairman of Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee. Member of Armed Services and Indian Affairs committees.
* Net worth: Most of the family wealth belongs to Cindy McCain. John McCain's direct income consists mainly of his $136,700-a-year Senate salary and a $49,668-a-year Navy pension. His other assets are listed at less than $100,000. McCain's personal finance report showed that Cindy McCain earned more than $1 million in dividends from her family's business, Hensley & Co. The Phoenix beer distributorship's assets include more than $1 million in Anheuser-Busch stock, a stake of more than $1 million in the Arizona Diamondbacks and property in Mesa and Yuma worth several million dollars.
(2) CHRONOLOGY
Aug. 29, 1936: Born in Panama Canal Zone.
1954-58: Attends Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
July 3, 1965: Marries Carol Shepp of Philadelphia. Adopts her two sons, Doug and Andrew.
Sept. 6, 1966: Daughter Sydney Ann McCain is born.
Jan. 1, 1967: Promoted to lieutenant commander, U.S. Navy.
July 29, 1967: Survives a fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal that starts when a missile misfires and strikes McCain's plane. The explosions and fire kill 134 crewmen and disable the ship. McCain transfers to the USS Oriskany.
Oct. 26, 1967: Shot down while flying a bombing mission over Hanoi. Spends nearly 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.
March 14, 1973: Released from prison in Hanoi. Returns to United States three days later.
July 1, 1973: Promoted to commander.
1973-74: Attends National War College.
1974-77: Serves as executive officer and eventually commanding officer of an attack squadron based in Florida.
1977-81: Serves as Navy liaison officer to the U.S. Senate.
April 1, 1980: Divorces Carol Shepp.
May 17, 1980: Marries Cindy Hensley.
March 1981: Retires from Navy as a captain.
Nov. 2, 1982: Elected to U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona's 1st Congressional District.
Oct. 23, 1984: Daughter Meghan McCain is born.
Nov. 6, 1984: Re-elected to the House.
Nov. 4, 1986: Elected to U.S. Senate from Arizona, defeating Democrat Richard Kimball.
May 2, 1986: Son Jack McCain is born.
April 1987: McCain meets with federal bank regulators twice on behalf of Phoenix developer Charles Keating Jr., who is under investigation. The meetings are kept secret.
February 1988: The Detroit News reports that McCain and Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona are among five senators who took large campaign contributions from Keating and associates and then met with federal bank examiners on Keating's behalf.
May 21, 1988: Son Jimmy McCain is born.
Oct. 8, 1989: The Arizona Republic reports that Cindy McCain and her father, Phoenix beer baron Jim Hensley, had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.
February 1991: McCain receives a mild rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee.
October 1991: Cindy McCain travels to Bangladesh with her medical relief group, the American Voluntary Medical Team, and brings back Bridget, a baby born with a cleft lip and palate. After reaching the United States, Bridget undergoes plastic surgery and the McCains ultimately adopt the child. Nov. 3, 1992: Re-elected to U.S. Senate, defeating Democrat Claire Sargent.
August 1994: Cindy McCain admits that she had become addicted to painkillers. She said she used the drugs from 1989-92 and stole pills from the medical relief charity that she founded.
January 1995: Becomes chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Aug. 14, 1996: Makes speech nominating Bob Dole as the Republican candidate for president.
Nov. 3, 1998: Re-elected to U.S. Senate, defeating Democrat Ed Ranger. Sept. 27, 1999: Formally announces candidacy for president.1) McCain parties with Charles Keating III, son of developer Charles H Keating Jr., in the Bahamas. 2) McCain parties with Charles Keating III, son of developer Charles H Keating Jr., in the Bahamas.
1) John McCain followed his father (right) and grandfather into the Naval Academy. Young McCain quickly emerged as a leader at the academy. 2) McCain is administered to in a Hanoi hospital soon after being shot down over North Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967. Vietnamese care was either incompetent or non-existent, resulting in lifelong injuries. 3) McCain's marriage to Carol Shepp, a former model, collapsed after his return from Vietnam, owing to both his 5 1/2-year absence and affairs he had after returning. 4) Charles H Keating Jr. and his associates gave about $112,000 to McCain. 5) Charles H Keating Jr. and his associates gave about $112,000 to McCain.
The McCains and their children, (from left) Meghan, Bridget, Jimmy and Jack.
1) Soon after his divorce, McCain married Cindy Hensley, whose money helped him win a House seat. They are shown here with daughter Meghan in 1985. 2) Grant Woods (right) had a falling out with McCain over sensitive investigations.
1) McCain dodged a bullet before the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five case. He got a mild rebuke for using "poor judgment" in intervening with federal regulators. 2) McCain dodged a bullet before the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five case. He got a mild rebuke for using "poor judgment" in intervening with federal regulators.
1) McCain looks over memorabilia with Frank Cartier, his first New Hampshire volunteer, in Dixville Notch, the precinct that will report that state's first primary results. 2) On the campaign trail in July, McCain listens to Tim Bennett at American Legion Post 120 in Seneca, S.C. Bennett was angry over a raise the Senate had given itself. McCain has never voted for a raise.
1) "I'm not running for president to be someone," John McCain says. "I'm running to do something. This is your country, my friends. And I'm running for president to give it back to you." 2) In August 1994, McCain tried to defuse an ugly situation over his wife's drug addiction by having her speak with reporters he had handpicked for interviews about her problems. The ploy to circumvent bad publicity backfired. 3) McCain addresses the supporters and the curious in June at the home of McCain 2000 Vice Chairwoman Kathy Flora in Bedford, N.H.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Thanks for the post. An interesting read, even understanding the bent of the author.
Fascinating stuff. Some good and some bad; all I know is that I won't be voting for him.
Great article, although it skipped the bit where Keating and McCain had their falling out.
If John Mc"Caine" and the enabling liberal media is successful in slaying the "able" G.W. Bush, the consequences for all mankind may not be as terrible as the original slaying of Abel by Caine, but the consequences for America may well be worse.
The only difference I see between Klynton and McCaine is that one is a war hero and one is a cowardly draft dodger. Of course no human could possibly be as morally bankrupt as what we now have-but that is true of whom ever the replacement may be.
A misguided hero can be just as destructive to our Constitution as a weasely draft dodger.
It should be obvious to all, that the liberal's love affair with McCaine is not because of their respect for his hero status in a war in which they themselves rooted for the enemy. It is likely their belief that their man can beat McCaine more easily than Bush, or if he does beat their man, his political objectives for America are not too different from their own, that motivates them.
I believe in honoring and respecting our heroes, but not to the point of enabling them to take America to hell!
You are right. Personally, I see "campaign Finance reform" as not only unconstitutional and detrimental to groups like the Right to Life organization snd all others who wish to be heard, but also as unilateral disarmament on the part of the Republican party. Bush is a decent guy. I'm sticking with him.
Great in-depth post.
Hackworth mentions a Newsweek article of 14 May 1973 wherein
the interviewed McCain admits saying to the North Vietnamese:
"I'll give you info if you will take me to the hospital."
Hey guy.
Bttt.
WELL STATED
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