Worlds Apart

Bud Day, his old friend, says McCain's first reaction that day was to suspect Iran. "It was such a shattering day," he says. "They had been attacking us all over: Hizbullah … had blown up the Khobar Towers [in Saudi Arabia], bombed the Marines in Beirut … Who the hell else would it be?"

Salter claims that McCain "knew, like everybody else, that Al Qaeda was almost certainly responsible." And U.S. intelligence did quickly identify Al Qaeda, which was not linked to Hizbullah or Iran, as the culprit. Regardless, for McCain, the event signaled the start of another grand struggle, like the one that his grandfather undertook after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The morning after 9/11, McCain did an interview with his closest Senate friend, Joe Lieberman, on CBS's "The Early Show." Lieberman targeted by name Iran, Iraq and Syria, saying the United States needed to focus on countries that gave terrorists a safe haven. Asked if he agreed, McCain said yes. "These [terrorist] networks are well embedded in some of these countries," he said. Just over a month later, after a deadly strain of anthrax had been mailed to offices on Capitol Hill and to various news organizations, McCain brought up Iraq again, this time on the "Late Show With David Letterman": "Some of this anthrax may—and I emphasize may —have come from Iraq," he told Letterman.

Salter says McCain was responding to the climate of those days, when Washington was looking to pre-empt further attacks. "After 9/11, it became clear that the central security challenge was that terrorists, Islamic extremists, would acquire weapons of mass destruction," Salter says. "You looked around the world, and who was a threat?" McCain, though, continues to group the various strains of Islamic extremism together, calling them collectively the "transcendental challenge" that faces the country and the next president. "You could trace [the threat] back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut" by Hizbullah, McCain told NEWSWEEK earlier this year.

Obama had a very different reaction to 9/11. He was a state senator heading to a committee hearing in downtown Chicago that morning, driving along Lake Shore Drive. When he heard the initial news reports, he, like many, thought a small propeller plane had mistakenly crashed into the Trade Center. By the time he arrived at his meeting, the second plane had struck, and Obama's building was evacuated. People gathered in the streets, looking up at the sky and at the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the United States, 10 blocks away. Obama went to his law office, where he worked part time, and watched the television footage of the planes, people jumping from windows, the towers collapsing. Then, after the retaliatory attack on Afghanistan—which he supported to the point of wanting to "take up arms myself," Obama later wrote—"I waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enunciation of a U.S. foreign policy for the 21st century … This new blueprint never arrived."

For Obama, say aides, 9/11 presented not just a tactical problem—finding Osama bin Laden and punishing the Taliban—but also a golden strategic opportunity. Obama wanted to put in place a framework to tackle a host of 21st-century transnational threats, like nuclear nonproliferation and endemic poverty. Instead, he found the Bush doctrine to be all too similar to the way that Teddy Roosevelt had interpreted the Monroe doctrine—as an excuse to remove unfriendly foreign governments. A year later, Obama was delivering the speech in Chicago's Federal Plaza that first brought him to national attention, vehemently opposing the impending invasion of Iraq as "dumb" and "rash."

For Obama, 9/11 brought into focus all that he had learned abroad—in Indonesia, Pakistan and elsewhere—about how raising people's living standards is key to U.S. national security. He saw the challenge of the post-9/11 era as similar to the one taken up by JFK and, before him, Truman: to introduce long-lasting strategic structures in concert with U.S. allies to tackle the world's worst problems. In a larger sense, 9/11 was a chance to reaffirm America's wisdom and promise as global leader. "Instead, what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together and with new labels affixed," Obama wrote.

How They ' d Lead
Obama and McCain are complicated men, and the pieces of their lives don't exactly fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. But in the four decades since their time in Southeast Asia, a picture of how each might lead begins to emerge. McCain has spent much of his life and career trying to guide America through a complete recovery from Vietnam, championing a Rooseveltian buildup of U.S. might and prestige. Obama is keen on reaching across vast divides like JFK; he seems more preoccupied with restoring U.S. legitimacy and securing America's safety through patient work like Lugar's and summits of understanding, and with rebuilding America's strength from the "bottom up"—through its economy.