Hidden Depths

His political and personal adaptability can be traced to how he viewed his father, but it is also rooted in his experience as the subject of scandal two decades ago. McCain and four other senators faced allegations that they had improperly lobbied for Charles Keating, the Arizona developer at the center of a savings and loan disaster. McCain was cleared, but believed his honor was under attack. "I never saw anybody work as hard as John McCain did to try and restore his reputation," says Bruce Merrill, an Arizona State professor who was a McCain pollster in the early 1980s. "He worked 20-hour days. John has always understood the media. He would drive an hour to Kingman, Arizona, for 10 minutes of radio time [to clear his name]. He was working so hard to overcome this." And, in the long run—for McCain, there is no other kind of run—he did.

He accomplished this partly by drawing on the examples of tenacity and courage from his imagination, the realms of warriors who won through. In 2001, Jonathan Karp, then an editor at Random House, reached out to Salter with a book idea for McCain. Karp had published "Faith of My Fathers," McCain's 1999 memoir, and it had been a critical and commercial success. Thinking of a second book, Karp asked whether the senator might be interested in answering the question: who are your heroes, and why? Salter mentioned the proposal to McCain one day. Heroes, McCain thought, who are my heroes? "And the first guy out of his mouth was Robert Jordan," Salter recalls—the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's novel of the Spanish Civil War, "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

"He's fictional," Salter replied.

"Yeah, I know," McCain said, "but he was everything a man would want to be."

Hemingway's Jordan is a college professor from Montana who goes to Spain as a freedom fighter in the war against the Fascists in 1937. He does his duty, falls in love and, at the climax of the novel, suffers a seemingly fatal wound from a shell. Left alone with his machine gun on a hill to die, waiting to kill a pursuing enemy before he himself succumbs, he muses on love and fate and duty and death. "You have had much luck," he thinks. "There are many worse things than this. Every one has to do this, one day or another. You are not afraid of it once you know you have to do it, are you? No, he said, truly … He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have." Then comes the line McCain remembers best: "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

In talking about the book—which he does often—McCain seems to thrill to Jordan's fatalism, the stoic acceptance of sacrifice in a larger cause, the image of a good man playing his part in the battles of his time, dying nobly in the knowledge that nothing on earth will ever be precisely the way we want it to be, but that we must fight on, for such is the lot of man. A careful reading of the conclusion of Hemingway's novel, though, does not quite fit so neatly with the fatalist interpretation McCain—like many other readers—favors. The final image in the book is not of a death but of a man on a mission, still fighting. His target, Lieutenant Berrendo, unaware that Jordan is lying in wait, is riding into range. "Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady," Hemingway writes. "He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow." Jordan prepares to take his shot—and the novel ends with these words: "He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest." Robert Jordan may be dying, but he does not die. A tragic ending, then, is in fact a romantic one, for Hemingway leaves his hero alive, at least for another moment, on the forest floor, preparing to do one last noble thing. McCain's hero may hate to leave the world, but we do not see him do it: what we see, instead, is a good man hanging on, clinging to life, always fighting. Closing the book, which McCain first did as a boy in his father's study in Washington, the reader is left with a sense of life, not death, of light, not darkness. The conclusion is ambivalent, and holds out a bit of hope. Little wonder McCain loves it so.

With Suzanne Smalley, Holly Bailey, Eve Conant and Pat Wingert

© 2008