John McCain, veteran US politician and Republican nominee in the 2008 presidential election – obituary

During Bush’s presidency, McCain was the leader of a band of Republican dissidents who exploited the weaknesses of an administration they saw as steadily losing control. His constant criticism of the handling of the Iraq war hit home and his calm questioning of Donald Rumsfeld (whom he later described as “one of the worst secretaries of defence in history”) over the Guantanamo prisoner abuse scandal forced a change of policy.

His attacks on the spiralling Bush budget deficits struck a chord across America. And his support for illegal aliens becoming citizens, for limiting corporate donations to political campaigns, and for taking steps to address global warming all heightened the mistrust felt by conservative Republicans.

But none of this did McCain little harm with Americans disillusioned with Bush’s brand of folksy zealotry, and his bluff take-me-as-you-find-me approach disarmed even the most hostile journalist who crossed his path, as did his easy familiarity with world affairs.

He was witty enough to be a regular guest on liberal America’s favourite Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, to host Saturday Night Live and make cameo appearances in television series. He had a good line in self-deprecating jokes. When he lost the Republican nomination to Bush in 2000, he said: “I slept like a baby … I slept for two hours, woke up and cried. Then slept for two hours, woke up and cried.”

In the 2008 presidential primaries he joked about being “older than dirt” with “more scars than Frankenstein,” while reminding listeners that his mother was a hale and hearty 96.

Admirers described him as “the Republican who speaks like a Democrat”, yet in reality McCain was considerably more Right-wing than most people assumed. On Iraq, he was resolute that there should be no timetable for withdrawal; on social security, he promised more – not less – radical reform; he backed moves to ban abortion, favoured teaching creationist Intelligent Design theory alongside evolution in schools and also lent enthusiastic support to Bush’s conservative nominees for the Supreme Court.

The bluff exterior also hid some character flaws. He had a notoriously bad temper, regularly topping annual in-house lists of the Senate’s most difficult member, and he could be monumentally insensitive. He had to apologise after saying of the Clintons’ daughter: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno” (Bill Clinton’s lesbian Attorney General, who was rumoured to have had an affair with Hillary).

Questioned in 2007 about possible military action against Iran, McCain responded by singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys song Barbara Ann. But he had a knack of playing up his failings in order to anticipate and undercut the attacks. “Hang around a while and I’ll throw you a temper tantrum,” he would tell his audiences. 

On the campaign trail he would greet his staff every morning with the refrain: “Where’s the coffee? You’re all fired.” In fact McCain inspired a level of personal loyalty that is rare in Washington. Many of his staffers had been with him for a decade or more.

McCain’s appeal was rooted in the experience that many regarded as the most important entry on his CV – his five years as a PoW in Vietnam. It was never forgotten that while Bush managed to skip Vietnam after his father arranged for him to jump a waiting list of 100,000 and secure a cushy number with the Texas National Guard, “defending Texas against Oklahoma”, as one wag put it, McCain had served as an aviator in the US Navy, had been repeatedly subjected to torture during his captivity by the North Vietnamese, and had earned a number of decorations including the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Amid the endless corruption scandals of the Bush era and frustration over the war in Iraq, McCain preserved an image of bravery and integrity that appealed to blue-state and red-state voters alike.

Despite his unpopularity with grass-roots Republicans, when he set out on the campaign trail in 2008, McCain was the front-runner. In the event, however, the nomination was barely worth having. The unpopularity of Bush, the Wall Street collapse and the political talent of Barack Obama ensured that the election was never really close. McCain did not help himself either when, in the midst of the financial panic, he declared that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

His choice of Sarah Palin, then the governor of Alaska, as his vice-presidential running mate in an effort to reinvigorate a flagging campaign with a woman on the ticket, also turned out to be a mixed blessing.

On November 4 2008 Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173 and with 52.9 per cent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.7 per cent.

“I remind all my colleagues: We had an election,” McCain said when he returned to the Senate in January 2009. “I think the message the American people are sending us now is they want us to work together, and get to work.” He went on to cement his role as a hawkish voice on foreign policy, a fierce defender of the military as leader of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as someone who, though popular with colleagues on both sides, still enjoyed throwing the occasional spanner into the works of his own party.

There was little love lost between him and President Donald Trump, who, in one of his many controversial sallies during the presidential campaign, denigrated McCain’s military record, claiming in 2015 that he was considered a war hero only because he had been captured. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump went on.

For his part McCain repeatedly criticised Trump, calling for a probe into the firing of former FBI director James Comey and pressing for a full investigation into any interference into the presidential campaign by Russia. During that campaign, he was particularly vocal in his condemnation of Trump for remarks about the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, a US Muslim soldier killed in Iraq.

After Khan’s father criticised Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric in a speech, Trump went after Ghazala Khan, who had stood beside her husband during his speech but did not speak, implying that she may not have been allowed to speak because of her religion, prompting McCain to observe that Trump did not have an “unfettered licence to defame those who are the best among us”.

When in July 2017 it was announced that McCain had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a common but highly malignant brain tumour, peace seemed to have been restored somewhat, with Trump issuing a statement hoping that McCain would get better very soon “because we miss him. He’s a crusty voice in Washington. Plus we need his vote [on healthcare reforms]. And he’ll be back.”

It was left to McCain’s old adversary Barack Obama to deliver the more heartfelt tribute. Describing McCain as “a hero and one of the bravest fighters I’ve ever known,” he added: “Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell, John.”

Internecine warfare was restored, however, when McCain returned to the Senate with a fresh scar from brain surgery, to cast the decisive vote to defeat Republican plans to repeal parts of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, derailing Trump’s campaign to dismantle “Obamacare”.

“Democrats are laughingly saying that McCain had a ‘moment of courage’,” Trump observed. “Tell that to the people of Arizona.”

John Sidney McCain was born at Coco Sola, Panama, on August 29 1936 into a distinguished naval family. His grandfather, Admiral John “Slew” McCain, would fight the Japanese at Guadalcanal, and his father, Admiral Jack McCain, would be put in charge of American forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War, when he unsentimentally ordered the bombing of Hanoi while his son was in captivity there.

Young John was an obstreperous child, a “rebel without a cause” as he later admitted, whose parents would regularly dunk him in a cold bath to calm his rages. At prep school near Washington, he was nicknamed “Punk” and remembered by a contemporary as “a feisty little rat throwing water bombs around the dormitory”.

At the Naval Academy he continued to break the rules, leading a hard-drinking group of midshipmen called the Bad Bunch and earning a new nickname: John Wayne McCain. “I didn’t get the most demerits of anyone who ever went there,” McCain admitted, “but I was in the top 10.” At flight school, it was much the same – endless partying and an exotic dancer called Marie, The Flame of Florida, for a girlfriend.

His misspent youth never did him any harm politically, however. When asked during the 2008 presidential campaign if he drank too much as a young man, he launched into a parody of the weasel-like evasions typical of younger politicians and killed the issue stone dead.

McCain qualified as a naval aviator but proved remarkably accident prone. On training over the coast of Texas, engine failure caused his aircraft to crash and he recovered consciousness under water. After another plane caught fire he ejected just before he hit the trees. In July 1967, he was in his A-4E Skyhawk on the carrier Forrestal when a deckful of aircraft exploded in a freak accident, killing 134 men. McCain rolled through the flames to safety.

By this time he had married Carol Shepp, a divorced former model with two children, but three months after the Forrestal incident his luck ran out. On his 23rd sortie, a bombing mission over Hanoi, a missile took off his starboard wing, and he ejected, breaking both arms and a knee. After landing in a lake, he was beaten up by a North Vietnamese mob, bayoneted in the groin and taken prisoner.

The Vietnamese initially refused to treat his injuries and would probably have left him to die, but they discovered McCain’s family background and decided to try and turn his capture into a propaganda coup. When his father was appointed commander-in-chief of the Pacific command, the North Vietnamese sought to embarrass him by offering his son freedom – even though the American military code required PoWs to be released in order of their capture.

McCain refused and was beaten for days; his left arm was refractured, his teeth were broken and his ribs were cracked. He tried to commit suicide by hanging, but was caught and beaten again.

The brutal efforts to extract a confession for war crimes included two years in solitary confinement during which McCain communicated with comrades in adjoining cells by tapping out code with a drinking cup. He later wrote a stilted two-sentence confession for his “deeds of an air pirate” – a “moment of dishonour”, as he put it, for which he never forgave himself, though when ordered to give the names of his squadron members, he supplied the names of the Green Bay Packers American football team. Released in 1973, McCain was a changed man.

His hair had gone prematurely white, he had acquired a permanent limp and his arms were so badly injured that he was never again able to raise them above shoulder height. The war transformed his personality too, taking some of the aggressive edge and bringing out a rather touching awareness of his own frailties.

In the 2000 presidential run-off with Bush he responded to suggestions of mental instability by releasing a 1,500-page psychiatric report drafted after his release in which his doctors noted his “mildly hysterical traits”, his temper, attention-seeking and tendency to aim too high, matched by self-flagellation over failure, but concluded: “Patient is a very intelligent, ambitious, competitive, intellectually curious, caring person.”

It has to be said that there was nothing very caring about McCain’s treatment of his wife, who had remained faithful throughout his six-year captivity but had, in the meantime, been severely injured in a car accident and needed crutches to walk.

He repaid her with a series of affairs and eventual divorce in favour of his second wife Cindy Hensley – the glamorous blonde daughter of an Arizona beer magnate, whom he married in 1980. In typically self-flagellatory fashion, he blamed himself for the breakdown of his first marriage. “My wife was faithful and true,” he said later. “She didn’t deserve my treatment of her.”

McCain became commanding officer of a training squadron and the US Navy’s liaison to the Senate before retiring in 1981 with a chestful of medals, in order to work for his father-in-law’s beer distributorship in Phoenix. The next year he announced a bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, responding to accusations of being a carpetbagger by playing the Vietnam card.

“Listen, pal,” he told his accuser, “I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and spending my entire life in a place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” The contest was a walkover; four years later he inherited Goldwater’s mantle and entered the Senate.

McCain’s gregariousness and lack of pomposity played well on Capitol Hill, but his political career suffered a potentially serious blow when he was investigated as one of the so-called “Keating Five”, a group of mainly Democratic lawmakers accused of trying to influence the regulators in favour of a failed local banker, who was also a big political contributor. McCain was the only one to be absolved and the only one to remain in politics. Indeed he turned the matter to his advantage, becoming an avid crusader for campaign finance reform.

By the 1990s he had established a reputation as brave, tough and maverick. In 1997 Time magazine named him as one of the “25 most influential people in America”. His family memoir Faith of My Fathers (1996) became a bestseller.

After the bitterly fought 2000 presidential campaign, McCain was touted as a possible running mate in 2004 for Bush’s Democratic challenger John Kerry. But McCain was never a Democrat and campaigned for Bush in the elections.

He formally announced he was seeking the presidency on April 25 2007, and although he experienced early fundraising problems due to his support for the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which was unpopular with the Republican grass roots, he went on to win the Republican nomination on March 4 2008.

Despite his no-nonsense image, McCain was deeply superstitious. He carried around a string of lucky charms including a lucky compass, pen, feather, shoes, penny and rock. When, during the 2000 campaign, he temporarily mislaid the feather, his campaign team went into panic mode. Before the 2008 New Hampshire primary, he made sure he slept on the same side of the bed in the same hotel room he had stayed in before he won there in 2000. It worked. He was elected to a sixth Senate term in November 2016.

McCain and his wife Cindy had two sons and two daughters, one of them adopted. He also had a daughter by his first marriage to Carol Shepp and adopted her two sons by an earlier marriage.

John McCain, born August 29 1936, died August 25 2018