Hidden Depths

When he came back from Vietnam, he destroyed his marriage, found love with a second wife and created a political career. On the domestic front, when he left his first wife, Carol (with whom he is still friendly), he refused to blame the war for his failures as a married man. "I got over Vietnam the moment we landed at Clark," McCain has said. "I wanted newspapers, magazines—I wanted to know what was going on in the world right then." Of his divorce, he has written: "Sound marriages can be hard to recover after great time and distance have separated a husband and wife. We are different people when we reunite. But my marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine."

After a stint at the War College, where he studied the lessons of Vietnam, McCain was assigned to Capitol Hill, where he served as the Navy's liaison to the Senate. He soon began to think of politics for himself. He had started giving speeches for the Navy, and liked the attention of the public and the power of the politicians. He would watch Scoop Jackson or John Tower just scribble something on a scrap of paper in the markup for a DoD bill, and it would become law. "McCain was fascinated by that kind of power, where you could have such a direct impact," says Salter.

Washington was a familiar milieu for him. When his own father was working for the Navy on Capitol Hill, his mother had made breakfasts in the morning for Carl Vinson, the chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, who would drop by on his way to the office. Later, in his own days as liaison, McCain would often have an afternoon drink with John Tower, the Republican senator from Texas and a powerful member (later chairman) of the Armed Services Committee. When he was thinking of running for office himself, McCain was tutored by Tower, Gary Hart and William Cohen. After he married Cindy and was thinking of where to settle, Arizona seemed a good place; it was her beloved home, and the state was growing, which meant more congressional districts were likely to be drawn up. "I was in my 40s and in a hurry, ambitious for the kind of influence I had seen wielded by the country's most accomplished politicians and worried that my chances were diminishing by the day," McCain recalled of his move west. He told his father that he was retiring, and the old man understood: it was unlikely, not least because of his five years in Hanoi, that there would be a third McCain admiral in the 20th century. "I have craved distinction in my life," McCain recalled, and now it was politics, not the Navy, that offered him the best chance to satisfy his appetite. "I have wanted renown and influence for their own sake. That is, of course, the great temptation of public life. Few are immune to its appeal. The desire to be somebody has driven many a political career much further than the intention to do something. I have never been able to conquer it permanently, but I have tried."

Politicians face a perennial tension between principle and pragmatism—without the latter, one does not often get the chance to put the former into action. And there are the inescapable elements of ego, of ambition and pride. McCain is aware of this, and of his own vulnerability to it. "Political leadership is not so great a stretch for the military officer with a career change in mind," McCain wrote. "Those who manage it do so, I suppose, because they can't imagine a life without wanting a prominent place in the nation's affairs, a place of honor in a great nation's history … Perhaps some of us come to believe that the country cannot part with us. That, of course, is a delusion, but it can be a beautiful delusion as long as it doesn't reverse the order of our allegiances."

His father had a temper and streaks of self-righteousness. One day, the admiral was testifying before Congress, Admiral Vasey recalled, when a lawmaker asked Admiral McCain a "question [that] kind of implied that the admiral was not telling the truth. Maybe exaggerating, and the admiral just exploded … and he really told them off and said, 'I'm an honorable man and I'm not gonna take that'." McCain was incensed. "He got red in the face," Vasey said. Admiral McCain "was very concerned in those days about the strength, the growing strength, of the Soviet Union, and so that was probably the area that this senator may have asked him about or questioned him on … But Admiral McCain felt very strongly then, as we all did, about this threat from the Soviet Union, and we were certainly right. He got angry, red in the face, pointed his finger. I was sitting behind him, so I just reached up and grabbed him by the back of the coat, bottom of the coat, and pulled down. He settled down."

The son is subject to similar moments. Early on, his temper flared on the campaign trail, especially when his opponents pressed the charge that he was a carpetbagger in his 1982 congressional campaign: "In truth, if you will pardon the vulgarity, I was becoming pissed off by the carpetbagger label, and my temper was getting the better of my judgment (as it often has). I felt that my family's service in the Navy and my own, which had deprived me of the comforts of a hometown, entitled me to choose any place in the country to live, and no one had good cause to question my decision."

Asked in a debate about the carpetbagger issue, McCain said: "Listen, pal … I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi." In another debate, after an opponent had reached out to Carol McCain for dirt about the divorce, McCain confronted the man and said: "If you ever try to hurt anyone in my family again, I will personally beat the s––t out of you."