Worlds Apart

Books have been written about 1968—"The Year That Made Us Who We Are," as NEWSWEEK proclaimed in a cover story 40 years later. The nation was gripped by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Tet Offensive, Nixon's election. Far from the headlines, it was also a year that helped make John McCain and Barack Obama who they are. Both future senators had arrived in Southeast Asia around that time. Obama was a happy-go-lucky kid in Jakarta, thrilling to his exotic new surroundings—which included a pet crocodile—yet also savoring visits to the place he came to see as a symbol of hope and opportunity, the U.S. Embassy's American Club. McCain wasn't that far away from Obama geographically—Hanoi lies about 1,800 miles north of Jakarta—but as a 31-year-old naval aviator who had recently been shot down, he was beginning the five years of brutal imprisonment that would come to define his life and public persona.

Despite the 25-year gap in McCain's and Obama's ages, their Asian sojourns began to awaken parallel passions in each man: a love for his distant country, a keen appreciation of the unique values America stands for and a strong sense that it is America's destiny to keep the world an orderly place. Yet they also mark the beginning of journeys that would lead them to very different judgments about how the United States should fulfill that mission.

How McCain and Obama see the world—and hence how they might deal as president with an unexpected crisis—may seem obvious by now. "John Wayne" McCain, as he was known at Annapolis, is the tough-talking ex-flyboy who envisions the United States locked in battle with formidable foes, yet steeled to confront them. Obama is the more cerebral cosmopolitan, at ease with other cultures and calculating America's interests in broad, strategic terms. Each stereotype has elements of truth in it, but to understand truly the candidates' world views, one needs to look more closely at the places, people and ideas that have shaped each of them since 1968. Five such factors have been critical in both men's lives:

Two Trips
For McCain, the lessons of Vietnam did not end with his release in 1973. The next year, with the help of the then Navy Secretary John Warner, a future colleague in the U.S. Senate, McCain studied for a year at the National War College, where he devoured files and paperwork in hopes of finding out what had gone so wrong with the war.

As a part of that effort, McCain and Col. Bud Day, a POW cellmate of his and a close friend, returned to visit a teetering Saigon in late 1974. The pair dashed around town, scrounging up old buddies, trying to get the inside scoop so they could "make an assessment of what was happening with the South Vietnamese government now that [American] money had been cut off," Day says. Over drinks with an old friend of Day's from Sioux City, Iowa, Richard Baughn—who was then serving in the embassy as the American deputy defense attaché—they learned to their "astonishment that North Vietnam had a pipeline built to within 80 miles of Saigon … They were really ready for this invasion," says Day. A South Vietnamese general told the Americans his men were down to 10 rounds of ammo a day. Later they listened, aghast, to the U.S. ambassador telling them "not to worry about how the [South] Vietnamese would fight, rah, rah, rah!" says Day. "He didn't have the faintest clue what was going on."

McCain was furious: the cause for which he had endured five years of torture was being betrayed, in his eyes, by his own government. Most to blame were congressional Democrats, who controlled the purse strings—"McGovern, Javits, all those old antiwar hippies trying to sell Vietnam out," says Day. "We were both just really bent out of shape."

Friends say that for McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, Vietnam became the great cautionary example of squandering American blood. "Vietnam [taught] us that war is a terrible thing and you don't go in unless you're prepared to win and get it over with," says McCain's younger brother, Joe. "Here my father was commander in chief of the Pacific, he had the most powerful [military] force in the history of the world, and he was unable to use that force." Former senator Gary Hart says his old friend McCain, "like other veterans, believes that we could have 'won the Vietnam War' but the politicians panicked."