Worlds Apart

That view turned McCain into an early advocate of what would come to be called the Powell doctrine, named after fellow vet and later Secretary of State Colin Powell: do not commit U.S. troops unless the mission and exit strategy are clear and overwhelming force is applied. Then give the military, and your allies, full and unstinting support. McCain applied this lesson in late 2003 as he began to realize the U.S. military was undermanned in Iraq. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said in a speech then.

Barack Obama's trip back to Asia was equally mind-opening. With a Pakistani college roommate, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, he went vagabonding around South Asia in 1981. He found himself overwhelmed by Karachi—a vast and chaotic metropolis clogged with the poor, and then, as now, rife with sectarian tensions. "Part of the most memorable portion of the trip," Obama told NEWSWEEK earlier this year, "was traveling to … a more provincial area outside of Karachi, seeing what was essentially a feudal life"—peasants who were eking out a subsistence living in the middle of a modern democracy. Obama was relearning as a young man, in other words, what he had only dimly understood as a child in Indonesia: most people around the world are looking to fulfill basic needs like shelter, jobs and education for their kids. Their primary concern is development, not democracy. Later, these experiences contributed to Obama's concept of "dignity promotion"—working to ease conditions of misery rather than focusing only on elections and other trappings of democracy. "He's very much committed to the challenges of strengthening the capacity of weak states to deal with poverty and good governance," says his top foreign-policy adviser, Susan Rice.

On the trip, Obama also became more acutely aware of the diversity of and tensions within the Muslim world. "Both as a consequence of living in Indonesia and traveling in Pakistan … I was very clear about the history of Shia-Sunni antagonism," he said. Obama's confidence in his knowledge of the Muslim world is so great that he has proposed holding a global summit of Muslim leaders early in his presidency. "I think that I can speak credibly to them about the fact that I respect their culture, that I understand their religion, that I have lived in a Muslim country, and as a consequence I know it is possible to reconcile Islam with modernity and respect for human rights and a rejection of violence. I think I can speak with added credibility."

Maverick Mentors
First as a naval liaison and then as a congressman and senator, McCain admired many of his colleagues on the Hill—most of all, perhaps, John Tower, the GOP Texas senator whose nomination as defense secretary went down to defeat despite McCain's fierce support. (Choking back tears, McCain declared from the Senate floor: "God bless you, John Tower. You're a damn fine sailor.") But for McCain, the hawkish Democratic Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson, one of the leading lights of the neoconservative movement, "remains the model of what an American statesman should be," as the GOP candidate said in a speech in June.

McCain's admiration is revealing: Jackson was a maverick who bucked his own party on the biggest issue of the day— how to confront the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s he opposed a Democratic president over détente and SALT II, and he refused to accept the view that Moscow could safely be contained. "Some people saw the principal cold-war issue as managing the relationship with the Soviet Union," says Richard Perle, another acolyte. "[Jackson] challenged the fundamental legitimacy of the Soviet Union. And he was right." This sense that evil must be confronted by strength appealed to McCain, who had not questioned the cause in Vietnam, only its prosecution. And Jackson, McCain later said, was a symbol of stalwart courage in the pursuit of a great cause—a model he wanted to emulate as a politician.

Obama's senatorial role model is also a man of principle from the opposing party. But Richard Lugar cuts quite a different figure than Scoop Jackson. The 76-year-old Indiana Republican is as deficient in charisma as Obama is blessed with it. (Lugar's 1996 presidential bid failed in large part because he put audiences to sleep.) Nevertheless, when Obama arrived on Capitol Hill in January 2005, he worked hard to impress Lugar, sitting through gavel-to-gavel hearings of his Foreign Relations Committee.

What Obama most admired was that Lugar, a pragmatist and internationalist with far-reaching vision, was focused on core national-security issues like nuclear nonproliferation. To achieve his long-term goals, Lugar set aside politics to work across many different administrations as well as party lines. "Not ending all our problems in four years or eight years, but putting in place, like Harry Truman, structures that are sustainable," says Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes. "A guy like Lugar has spent his life doing that."