Hidden Depths

It was the day he buried his father. Early on the morning of Friday, march 27, 1981, Capt. John Sidney McCain III (USN) had risen, put on his dress blue uniform and, by 10 o'clock, was standing in the white sanctuary of the Colonial brick Old Post Chapel at Fort Myer, next to Arlington National Cemetery. Adm. John S. McCain Jr. had died the previous Sunday, on a transatlantic flight. His funeral was full: First Lady Nancy Reagan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, three chiefs of Naval Operations and so many officers that some had to stand in the side aisles during the service. One of McCain's chief memories of the morning was of Rear Adm. Ike Kidd "sobbing loudly and struggling to regain his composure."

In a eulogy, John's brother, Joe, quoted their father: "Life is run by poker players, not the systems analysts," the admiral would say, and "It's one of the most forgotten, then relearned foreign-policy axioms in history. If you keep backing away because you're afraid of what might happen to you—and you keep backing away and backing away—what you were afraid of in the first place is going to happen to you."

The admiral, Joe recalled, would chomp on his cigar as he recited poetry (Lewis Carroll was a favorite, as was Oscar Wilde's "Ave Imperatrix"). Every night he prayed the daily office, carrying "an old worn Episcopal prayer book into whatever served as his study"; the family sometimes found him "down on his knees reciting a prayer from that old book."

Then it was John III's turn to speak. Standing with his back to the altar, flanked by stained-glass windows, McCain recited some lines from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem":

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Gladly did I live and gladly die …
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Afterward, the McCains went to the grave site. As a riderless horse led the caisson from the chapel, the Navy Band played the same Handel march the Royal Navy had used for Nelson's funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

The service over, taps played, the admiral in his grave—John had, he recalled, kept his "eyes fixed straight ahead" during the burial—the mourners adjourned to the elder McCains' grand apartment on Connecticut Avenue, in the Kalorama section of Washington, near Embassy Row. The neighborhood had been home at various times to William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Amid drinks and old stories beneath a large oil portrait of her father-in-law, the first Adm. John S. McCain, Roberta McCain was a perfect hostess—she "whirled around the apartment," John recalled in a memoir, "seeming to take part in every conversation."