What These Eyes Have Seen

There is a telling line in "Faith of My Fathers": "I was on leave from the Navy when I attended high school." At Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., then a school for the sons of Southern gentry, McCain daydreamed of going to Princeton. He had been entranced by Princeton's lazy beauty and wanted to join an eating club with the other young gentlemen. But from birth, he had been marked for the U.S. Naval Academy. He responded by rebelling. According to Robert Timberg's "The Nightingale's Song," McCain's nicknames at EHS were "Punk," "Nasty" and "McNasty." A classmate described him as a "tough, mean little f–––er." Episcopal had borrowed from state military schools the sobriquet "rat" to describe first-year students at the mercy of upperclassmen hazing. McCain writes: "My resentment, along with my affected disregard for rules and school authorities, soon earned me the distinction of 'worst rat'." At Annapolis, he was, he writes, "a slob." He looked for authorities to subvert, settling on a bullying, second-year midshipman he and his friends dubbed "Sh–––y Witty the Middy," and making life miserable for a by-the-book captain who was supposed to discipline him. "I acted like a jerk," McCain writes. McCain came close to "bilging"—getting kicked out—but seemed to know exactly how far he could go. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

Choosing naval aviation, he was at best an average pilot, a daredevil, "kick-the-tires and light-the-fire" type who sacrificed careful preparation for more time at the O Club bar. He wanted combat in Vietnam and got it. On his 23rd mission over North Vietnam, on Oct. 26, 1967, he was flying through heavy flak over Hanoi, dodging SAM missiles that looked "like flying telephone poles," when he heard a "beep" signaling that a SAM had locked on to his plane. McCain was just about to drop his bomb on target. He writes that he should have jinked to evade the missile, but out of stubbornness, or a mad kind of bravery, he flew straight on and toggled the bomb switch—just as the missile blew off the right wing of his plane. The force of the ejection from the spinning plane broke his right leg and both arms.

After he parachuted into a lake in the middle of Hanoi, a North Vietnamese guard shattered his shoulder with a rifle butt and plunged a bayonet into his ankle and groin. Near death, McCain survived in prison camp by sheer cussedness. The same belligerence that got him into trouble in school worked to maintain his spirits as he cursed and taunted his guards in solitary confinement. Yet he discovered that he could not make it alone. He began to drift off in terrible, dangerous reveries. "On several occasions, I became terribly annoyed when a guard entered my cell to take me to the bath or to bring me my food and disrupted some flight of fantasy," he writes. With regular beatings, the guards tried to break him and make him confess his sins as an "air pirate." Despairing, "fearing the close approach of my moment of dishonor," he climbed on his waste bucket and tried to hang himself by tying his shirt to a window shutter and wrapping it around his neck. Before he could kick the bucket, the guards stopped him. (He tried a second time, in a more halfhearted way; "I doubt I really intended to kill myself," he writes.) What saved McCain were his fellow prisoners. They communicated by tapping on the walls and pipes, and over time, as the brutality of the guards slowly let up, held religious services and plays (McCain was both chaplain and entertainment officer; he would act out movies he made up in his head). "To hold on to love and honor, I needed to be part of a fraternity," McCain writes. "I was not as strong a man as I had once believed myself to be."

McCain did make a meaningless confession of his "air piracy," and it haunted him to think his father would find out. Unbeknownst to McCain, his father had been elevated to become CINCPAC, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, making McCain into what his jailers called a "Crown Prince." As a propaganda stunt, McCain was offered early release after about a year of captivity. He refused to leave before his comrades—and remained in prison for four more years. McCain sensed that he was getting "extra attention" from his guards (i.e., more beatings), but also that they did not want him to die or to return home gravely scarred. Always, the fear of disgracing his forebears hung over him. "He has been preoccupied with escaping the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others," reads a psychiatric evaluation in McCain's medical files. "He feels his experiences and performance as a POW have finally permitted this to happen." Released after the 1973 Peace Accords, McCain returned to the United States a hero. "Felt fulfillment when his Dad was introduced at a dinner as 'Commander McCain's father.' He had arrived," noted the psychiatric report in 1974.

Like his father and grandfather, McCain wanted to be an admiral, but, too disabled to fly, he knew he would never command a carrier group, a prerequisite for winning four stars like the two older McCains. While working as a naval liaison officer with Congress in the late '70s, McCain discovered a flair for politics. He decided to run for the House. Remarried (his first marriage did not survive the strangeness and strain of repatriation) to a beer heiress, he used his new wife's family ties to win a safe seat in Arizona, and then essentially inherited Barry Goldwater's Senate seat in 1987.

In the military, there are two kinds of leaders, McCain mused in his interview with NEWSWEEK—the "organizer of victory" type, like Gen. George Marshall and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the more "inspirational" type, like his father and grandfather, who may not be terribly organized but are gifted at leading men into battle. Likewise, said McCain, there are different types of senators. "One is the person who is involved in the detail and the appropriation for the road or the bypass," he said—the type of lawmaker who gets involved in the "minutiae" that helps "people get re-elected." McCain said, unenthusiastically: "I respect that kind of senator." Then there is the "policymaking" senator, clearly McCain's model. He mentioned that on his way to work every day he passed the statue of the late Richard Russell, senator from Georgia, wise man confidant of Lyndon Johnson and all-powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.