The Books of John

He appreciates rabble-rousers who take the long view against popular opinion. In "Worth the Fighting For," McCain describes his admiration for Army officer Billy Mitchell, who conducted a lonely and self-destructive crusade for the creation of an Air Force separate from the Army and the Navy, a campaign for which he was arrested and court-martialed. In "Hard Call," he and Salter write admiringly of young Winston Churchill's risky, expensive and controversial decision to convert the royal fleet from coal to oil. Churchill was in his 30s at the time, "challenging the weight of generations of experience and knowledge possessed by his opponents." McCain does not compare his accomplishments with those of his heroes; he identifies with their attitude (though critics now contend that McCain has shed his rebellious persona, aligning himself with the wing of the GOP that, they say, he once stood apart from). In "Worth the Fighting For," McCain assumes detractors view him as a "self-styled, self-righteous, maverick pain in the ass."

He ' s not as fatalistic as he says he is. When facing a bleak political scenario, McCain often humorously invokes a saying he attributes to Mao: "It's always darkest just before it's totally black." The detached wit underscores McCain's acceptance of whatever twist life delivers, a kind of fatalism he links to his family's assumption, dating back to the American Revolution, that all McCain men would serve in the military. "Our strong sense of predestination made us prematurely fatalistic," he says in "Faith of My Fathers." But perhaps realizing that fatalism is not an effective leadership strategy, McCain and Salter revised their definition in "Why Courage Matters": "Fatalism can be a technique to summon or hold our courage, or more accurately, to keep our nerve … When I've experienced difficult times or been in situations that portend uncertain or intimidating consequences, I usually find a little false bravado, a little affected fatalism, helpful."

He doesn ' t consider himself a fierce partisan. His books invoke Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt ("You must do the thing you think you cannot do") as well as Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan. When McCain was elected to Congress in 1982, one of his role models was Arizona legislator Morris Udall, whom McCain praises for "genuine bipartisanship." In "Worth the Fighting For," McCain declined to align himself with the "scorched-earth tactics" of the Young Turks in Congress, among them Newt Gingrich, Connie Mack and Vin Weber. Instead he formed a friendship with Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Later in the book, McCain describes his growing disgust with partisan politics, especially in the personal assault on Sen. John Tower during his failed nomination for secretary of defense: "I learned that partisanship taken to extremes is dishonorable and lethal to one's character."

Obama is to McCain what McCain was to Goldwater.We don't often think of presidential candidates as being profiles in humility (anyone who thinks he can run the free world has to have an ego). But McCain seems to place a premium on that quality. In "Hard Call," humility is one of his six factors in decision making. In "Character Is Destiny," McCain and Salter include a chapter on humility, personified by Dwight Eisenhower. McCain's campaign has repeatedly attacked Barack Obama for grandiosity, though McCain himself once played Obama's role as the upstart when he sought Barry Goldwater's Senate seat in 1985. "I really don't think he liked me very much," McCain writes in "Worth the Fighting For," adding, "Maybe he thought I was too junior, too little accomplished, too new to Arizona … to presume to succeed him."

He comes from a privately religious tradition, and he's not a literalist. In "Faith of My Fathers," McCain alludes to why he doesn't talk more often and openly about his own faith by describing his devout father: "He didn't proselytize. But he always kept with him a tattered, dog-eared prayer book, from which he would pray aloud for an hour, on his knees, twice every day." McCain does not proselytize either. But in "Character Is Destiny," published at a time when some social conservatives were mounting an attack on the theory of evolution, McCain and Salter included a chapter on Charles Darwin, including this polite rebuttal: "The only undeniable challenge the theory of evolution poses to Christian beliefs is its obvious contradiction of the idea that God created the world as it is in less than a week. But our faith is certainly not so weak that it can be shaken to learn that a biblical metaphor is not literal history. Nature doesn't threaten our faith."

"Hard Call" offers clues as to why the Sarah Palin pick makes sense to him. The most recent McCain-Salter book is subtitled "The Art of Great Decisions." I asked them to write it on the assumption that voters might be curious about the process by which a potential president makes up his mind. The authors begin the book by discussing the importance of "situational awareness," a tactic McCain learned as a naval aviator. (McCain's critics, of course, would argue that the selection of the vice president should not be reduced to a situational tactic.) An additional clue can be found in their analysis of another key quality in decision making—foresight. They quote Wayne Gretzky: "I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it's been." Although it's too soon to know whether picking Palin will turn out to be the right call, anyone reading "Hard Call" will quickly realize it's exactly the kind of decision McCain values—one unconcerned with conventional wisdom. In a passage written almost two years before anyone knew McCain would be running for president against Barack Obama, or that 2008 would be deemed a "change" election year, the authors stated, "Profound change doesn't always require consensus. Sometimes it is achieved when just a few people see the way ahead and decide to set in motion events that will overtake resistance, change the unsatisfactory status quo, and leave something better in its place."

Karp is publisher and editor in chief of Twelve (twelvebooks.com), an imprint within the Hachette Book Group.

© 2008