Worlds Apart

Mandela was released three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Obama believed the two historic events converged in some ways, representing what could be achieved when ordinary people united to take action and were supported by international pressure. Obama's view is that the United States should support such "people power" movements wherever possible as the best hope for securing U.S. interests. But aides say he is also realistic about the limitations of both grass-roots movements and international will. In Obama's view, the lessons from South Africa and Germany are tempered by two historic failures that also took place around the same time—the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and the Rwandan civil war in the mid-1990s.

The Predecessors
John McCain's hero worship of Teddy Roosevelt dates back to McCain's days as a boy talking about historical figures at the breakfast table, says McCain's brother, Joe: "He's probably his most important historical role model, a sickly asthmatic kid who became a robust type." Both Bud Day and John Raidt, a former Commerce Committee staff director for McCain, say he mused about TR deep into the night with them too, whether in the Hanoi Hilton or the halls of the U.S. Senate.

Roosevelt is the patron saint of what's come to be called national-greatness conservatism, of which McCain is a proponent. At the turn of the 20th century, a time when the United States was seen as a secondary power, TR built up the country's might, preaching both intensive diplomacy ("speak softly …") and military investment ("… carry a big stick"). McCain admired his sheer grit—Roosevelt once delivered a speech after being shot in the chest—and he appreciated that Roosevelt believed "the U.S. was the greatest force for good in the world," says the senator's brother. The Great White Fleet that Roosevelt sent around the world in 1907 was the greatest armada in history at the time, and a potent warning to America's enemies. (Standing on the fleet's flagship, McCain later wrote, was "a skinny young ensign" named John Sidney McCain, his grandfather, who went on to become a famed admiral in World War II.) "He sought to preserve peace and order by confronting potential adversaries with America's resolve and readiness to fight," McCain later wrote.

McCain is friends with TR's great-grandson Theodore Roosevelt IV. Obama, too, has a direct personal connection to his own presidential hero, John F. Kennedy. Caroline Kennedy has praised Obama as a man who can inspire people "in the way my father made them hope." Ex-New Frontiersmen like speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Newton Minow, a senior Kennedy administration official, have also joined the cause. "In the summer of '06, by chance I saw him speaking at a big event," says Minow. "I watched him dealing with the crowd and said, 'My God, that's JFK all over again'."

While he hasn't made Kennedy his role model as forthrightly as McCain has TR— Obama also likes to invoke Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lincoln—he has sought to identify himself with JFK's foreign policy (at least after the disastrous Bay of Pigs). "Kennedy had a vision for America's leadership role in the world that is very much like his," says Susan Rice. The candidate likes to compare his proposal to talk to Iran without preconditions about its nuclear program to JFK's bold bid to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear-test ban with the Soviets at the height of the cold war. "It was cheeky of Kennedy to do it at a time when we were so polarized," notes one adviser. Obama's "No. 1 quote," this adviser says, comes from JFK: "We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate."

Obama himself, in private meetings, has cited Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis as a model, especially how JFK consulted widely and negotiated directly with the Soviets to defuse an intense situation effectively. Obama admires Kennedy's steady, cool leadership and his ability to bring many people into the process: Ben Rhodes says that Obama also often cites the successful resolution of the crisis as an example of what can come from negotiations, even if there is no immediate resolution. Only five months before, JFK held a summit in Vienna with Nikita Khrushchev. "JFK had begun to acquire some knowledge of Khrushchev, which not only enabled him to be in touch with the Kremlin during the crisis, but to have a little bit of insight into the guy," says Rhodes. "There are benefits to direct contact with adversaries, even if you don't reach agreement. You get to know your adversary."

Everything Changed
McCain was crossing the 14th street bridge in Washington, D.C., near the Pentagon, when he heard news of the first plane crash at the World Trade Center. Upon arriving at his office on Capitol Hill, he immediately went into the office of his then chief of staff, Mark Salter, where he, Salter and other aides watched on television as a second plane hit the South Tower. "I immediately thought, 'This is war'," McCain recalled. A few minutes later, an aide rushed in and announced that the Pentagon had been hit.