Hidden Depths

The images of that Washington funeral—the Old Post Chapel, the gathering of admirals and statesmen, the stained glass, the sound of taps, the sloping hills and white headstones of Arlington, the party afterward in Kalorama, high on Connecticut Avenue—seem to belong to another, vanished world. The capital that McCain's grandfather and father knew was the city as evoked by Allen Drury or by Herman Wouk, one of McCain's favorite writers (McCain recently reread Wouk's "The Winds of War," the saga of Victor [Pug] Henry, a taciturn but devoted and passionate World War II naval officer).

At the reception, though, John McCain was thinking not about the past, but about breaking with it. Tired and distracted, McCain recalls having a hard time making small talk. He had business on the other side of the river. An hour after arriving, McCain left, drove back across the Potomac to a Navy office in Crystal City, Va., and signed his discharge papers. He had begun the day by donning the uniform of his fathers. He now ended it by boarding a plane and leaving for Phoenix. He has not stopped moving since.

McCain's admirers, and they are legion, think of him as a man of valor, a kind of honorary member of the Greatest Generation whose evident obsession with the virtues of honor, courage, faith and duty make him an ideal soldier of freedom to keep the watches of the night against terrorist enemies, and to stand fast in Iraq. His foes, and they, too, are legion, would like to cast him as a relic of a long-ago era whose service was noble but whose time has passed. In this view he is a black-and-white movie in a YouTube era, a doddering old hawk competing against a lithe young multilateralist. McCain can seem an unreflective warrior whose wealth and isolation from ordinary life—first as the scion of a high-ranking naval family, then as the husband of a very rich woman and finally as a longtime senator—have rendered him a foreign figure to many Americans.

Neither caricature, however, has the man who will accept the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States this week exactly right. It is easy to mistake McCain for a rich septuagenarian with houses beyond number, who does not use e-mail or what George W. Bush once called "the Internets," and who hums "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of a Beach Boys cover of a song written the year Barack Obama was born.

But McCain is not a neo-Victorian, or a neo-Eisenhower. In ways difficult to discern but central to understanding him, he is a very modern figure who is at once heroic and ironic, stoic and sometimes short-tempered, ambitious and rebellious. John McCain is no sun-belt Cincinnatus. He is an eager, cold-eyed politician who has sought the White House for a decade, compromised and reversed himself and believes he is an actor in a grand, unfolding saga. He is also more comfortable with shades of gray than he appears—a sense of nuance rooted, it seems, in an early life in which he at once revered his father and felt sorry for him. McCain has long lived with complexity, and Democrats who try to dismiss him as stubborn or Republicans who venerate him as unflinching miss a crucial truth about the man: he is an adept political juggler, as he has always been an adept emotional one.

Early on, he had to be. It was the only way to make sense of a great and glaring contradiction at the center of his universe: his father—strong, honorable, noble—was also an alcoholic, a binge drinker who, under the influence, became what McCain calls "a totally different person." Adm. Jack McCain was not to be mindlessly celebrated or mindlessly condemned. He was a man of parts, of strengths and weaknesses, and his son learned to take the occasional bad with the usual good.

Presidents tend to come from one of two kinds of families. There is either no father at all (Andrew Jackson, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton) or a dominant one (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes). Barack Obama belongs to the first category, the son of a man he met only once. McCain embodies the second. He was clearly driven to live up to the example of his grandfather and his father, heroes and leaders of men, but McCain's dad was not what he seemed.