What These Eyes Have Seen

McCain has many admirers among his colleagues. "I consider him a leader," says Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a fellow member of the Armed Services Committee. "He has forged bipartisan coalitions on a lot of different issues, including global warming and campaign finance and the patient bill of rights and greenhouse-gas emissions. He's a real player in the Senate. He has tremendous impact, even when we're not on the same side. He is usually early on an issue and right on an issue." McCain does have a refreshing knack for reaching across the aisle. In 2004, he had a vodka-drinking contest with Hillary Clinton on a Senate junket to Estonia. Former Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle has written that he engaged in serious talks with McCain in 2001 to bring him over to the Democratic Party. "I was never going to leave my party, you ask anybody, I was one of the biggest campaigners for Republicans out there," McCain insists now. McCain is not a loner, but he is independent-minded. His staff is devoted; they call themselves "McCainiacs."

But a number of senators and former lawmakers are still licking their wounds from run-ins with McCain. "It's sad, really," says former senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire. "John McCain can tell a good joke and we can laugh, and I've had my share of good times with him." That is the side of McCain, says Smith, that the press sees. But behind the scenes lurks a less amiable McCain. "You can disagree without being disagreeable," says Smith. "And I don't think John is able to do that. If he disagrees with you, he does it in a way that is disagreeable."

The lore of "Senator Hothead," as McCain has been dubbed over the years, is considerable. McCain is widely reported to have yelled profanities at senators and even shoved one or two (including the late Strom Thurmond, a feisty nonagenarian at the time of the alleged incident). After McCain used an obscenity to describe Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa to his face in 1992, Grassley did not speak to McCain for more than a year. ("That's all water over the dam," Grassley says.) McCain has reportedly learned to control his temper; still, there are moments when he cannot or does not. Last spring, at a closed-door meeting of senators and staff, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tried to amend the immigration bill to make ineligible convicted felons, known terrorists and gang members. Agitated that any attempt to amend the bill would jeopardize its slim chance of passage (ultimately, the bill failed), McCain snapped, "This is chickens–––." Cornyn shot back that McCain shouldn't come parachuting in off the presidential-campaign trail at the last minute and start making demands. "F––– you," said McCain, in front of about 30 witnesses. (A Cornyn aide says that the Texas senator was unbothered by the incident. "I think he just thought, 'Here's John being a jerk'," says the aide, who declined to be identified speaking for Cornyn.)

Sen. Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, has had his share of dust-ups with McCain, usually over some appropriation that McCain regards as pork-barrel spending. "He gets very volatile," Cochran tells NEWSWEEK. "He gets red in the face. He talks loud." Cochran, who says he is still a friend of McCain's ("at least on my part"), says the Senate dining room has lately been buzzing with Senator Hothead stories, mostly stirred by a recent wave of press interest. "I was surprised to find so many senators who'd had a personal experience when he'd lost his temper," says Cochran. Did he find McCain's temper to be somehow disabling or disqualifying in a potential president? "I don't know how to assess that," says Cochran. "I certainly know no other president since I've been here who's had a temperament like that. There's some who were capable of getting angry, of course. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both. But this …" His voice trailed away. "You like to think your president would be cool, calm and collected. He's commander in chief." (Cochran has endorsed Romney, who has sought to make McCain's temper a campaign issue.)

McCain acknowledged that he has had "strong disagreement with appropriators from time to time … of course I have." But he rattled off a list of senior Republicans who respect him, including Sen. John Warner of Virginia and former senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. "You don't get the support of these people if they don't respect you," he said. "That's really what the Senate is about, not friendship." As for his anger, he asks, steam rising, "Was I angry when I saw the abuse [convicted-felon lobbyist Jack] Abramoff committed and his friends and members of Congress? Of course I was." McCain has long had chilly relations with conservative activists in Washington, D.C., including Grover Norquist, an advocate of tax cutting who is close to many right-of-center lobbyists. "McCain reacts poorly when criticized," says Norquist. "When the NRA and the right-to-life and right-to-work groups criticized him, he reacted like they were personal attacks, and then he supported some gun-control legislation to get back at the NRA." Norquist denies that he has ever personally tangled with McCain, though Norquist was subpoenaed to testify when McCain's Indian Affairs Committee looked into charges that Abramoff (a friend and sometime business partner of Norquist's) was fleecing Native American groups applying for gambling licenses. "Some of his staff guys took a whack at me," says Norquist. "No harm, no foul."

If McCain does not suffer fools lightly, that is because they are doing foolish things to the national interest, says Collins of Maine. "I have never seen him lose control of himself," she says. "What I have seen is him being justifiably angry, even very angry, at behavior that was corrupt or spending that was absurd." Sen. Joe Lieberman tells NEWSWEEK: "John is a remarkably disciplined person, including emotionally. Have I seen him passionate about things? Sure. But this is not a kind of anger that loses control; this is a passion about stuff." Sen. Richard Shelby recalled a typical McCain blow-up when Shelby, an Alabama Republican, tried to slip $1.5 million in the 2001 Interior Department Appropriation Bill to help pay for the restoration of Birmingham's 56-foot-tall cast-iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forge.