John McCain "Make-Believe Maverick"

This article dispels a lot of illusions and myths, both those created
by McCain and those created by others about him. Whatever you might
have thought of McCain before this race, his long-term history cannot
and should not be ignored. This is a long article but if you're
voting, it's worth reading. JVB

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a
disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

TIM DICKINSON

Posted Oct 16, 2008 7:00 PM

VIDEO: Five Myths About John McCain

The Double-Talk Express

Mad Dog Palin: The Full Story
Karl Rove's A-Team

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the
nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two
former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney
McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that,
according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth
into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the
grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force
lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate
program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get
into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College
of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared
experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American
POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to
his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two
daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with
daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the
escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But
Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded
two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions.
McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever
met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between
the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to
their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young
officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant
corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait,
Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi
says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces
in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was
not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam,
and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still
the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding
in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his
own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything
to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief,
ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank
his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of
the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and
George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American
dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which
they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social
intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental
exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each
step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed
upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the
Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-
inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical
churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the
current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

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This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few
politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth
of greatness. In McCain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son
who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put
"country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly
wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer"
and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even
tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."

It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in
Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask
has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army
colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin
Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't
bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."

We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he
positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics
of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring
voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we
conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics."
After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking with the
president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting
with joining the Democratic Party.

In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of
politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once
denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and
deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture.
Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the
very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years
ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose
only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base.
And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even
Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in
McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."

The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who
has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third,
never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in
2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and
Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate
sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with
whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in
2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush
again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a
second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts
between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain
changed." (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests
for comment from Rolling Stone.)

Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his
recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a
maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says
Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that
ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his
seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is
consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for
himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special
interest.

"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former
GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's
readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the
only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms
in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And
they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's
worst judges from the federal bench.

"On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee
says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds.
"McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in
blinking neon lights."

THE NAVY BRAT

John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the
shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney "Slew" McCain
earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II.
His deeply ambitious father, Adm. "Junior" McCain, reached the same
rank, commanding America's forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.

The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a
toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper
was on display. "At the smallest provocation," he would hold his
breath until he passed out: "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then,
suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." His parents cured him of
this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by
dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post,
McCain didn't play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty
physique inspired a Napoleon complex: "My small stature motivated me
to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me."

McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His
father — himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex — had secured a
political post as the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate, a job his
son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was
a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing
up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys
boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today
tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his
privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even
his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean
little fucker."

McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for
drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore
year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a
pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so
vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.

McCain's admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But
martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his
character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student;
he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram
for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before
meeting a girlfriend's parents for the first time, McCain got so
shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he
showed up in his white midshipman's uniform.

His grandfather's name and his father's forbearance brought McCain a
charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea — to Rio de
Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt — the captain was a former student of his
father. While McCain's classmates learned the ins and outs of the
boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back.
In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.

Back on campus, McCain's short fuse was legend. "We'd hear this
thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate — doors
slamming — and one of them would go running down the hall," recalls
Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. "It
was a regular occurrence."

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he
grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his
commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have
gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his
classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though
his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because
of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the
academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face,
he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain
dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to
take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

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"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on
probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and
his grandfather — they couldn't exactly get rid of him."

McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended
with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of
899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

BOTTOM GUN

In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He
took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the
actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent
all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of
tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He
picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.

In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his
planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he
crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine
practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on
impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim
to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death
experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap,
and then went out carousing that night.

Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of
Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the "addictive"
game of craps. McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job.
Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his
flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane
sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning"
plunged much of the area into a blackout.

That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy,
if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your
wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and
taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark "a small international
incident" like McCain had? Any other pilot would have "found
themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry,"
says Butler.

"But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO —
you know?"

McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the
academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in
Vietnam. His motivation wasn't to contain communism or put his country
first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of
the man he calls his "distant, inscrutable patriarch." He needed to
secure a command post in the Navy — and to do that, his career needed
the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.

As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get
ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the
undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his
abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to
McCain Field — an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his
grandfather — to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.

With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain
formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for
hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down
from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual
knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore"
of the club.

In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with
Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his
classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent
most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates.
They married the following summer.

That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia,
where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game,
McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk,
Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his
parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.

By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable
— and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground
control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once
again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over
his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"

TRIAL BY FIRE

Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.

It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin
atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal.
Perched in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain
ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.

Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father's
expectations, to finally be known as something other than the fuck-up
grandson of one of the Navy's greatest admirals. That morning,
preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying
pilot's dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his
reach.

Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-
foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across
the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft.
Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze.
Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly
of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.

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McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled
aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from
the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the
flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his
bombs "cooked off," blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the
sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers.
McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but
the wounds weren't serious; his father would later report to friends
that Johnny "came through without a scratch."

The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set
off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that
would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and
threaten to sink the ship.

These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born.
Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes
down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier,
Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and
clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading.
According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then
"gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help
contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale
The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men
who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in
dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping
sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator
to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready
room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash
and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on
the room's closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the
valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship,
pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his
combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me
considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my
ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed
the Forrestal."

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while
oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower
decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The
New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest
Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty
surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and
McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple
and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger
turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal
mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the
Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he
recalls as "some welcome R&R."

VIOLATING THE CODE

Ensconced in Apple's villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter
forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious
pilot's career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the
charter member of McCain's media "base," an elite corps of admiring
reporters who helped create his reputation for "straight talk."

Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain
sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from
Hanoi. "Now that I've seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people
on our ship," he told Apple, "I'm not so sure that I want to drop any
more of that stuff on North Vietnam." Here, it seemed, was a frank-
talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military
establishment in the name of truth.

But McCain's misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly
took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his
combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier
USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire — following a
holiday on the French Riviera — McCain reported for duty in the Gulf
of Tonkin.

McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he
bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His
record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American
planes destroyed by McCain: two.

The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing
raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way
onto the strike force — there were medals up for grabs. The plant had
recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two
of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force's top honors.

It was a dangerous mission — taking the planes into the teeth of North
Vietnam's fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi
airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and
surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day's kills,
McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the
target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded:
A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive
maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that
"can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."

But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his
bombs — just as the SAM blew his wing off.

To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred
Thompson's account of John McCain's internment in Vietnam, you would
think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name,
rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay
Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we're to understand,
steeled the man — transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself
first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public
good.
There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam.
His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his
arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin,
and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged
McCain's broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire
from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he
was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain's mistreatment — and the
transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply
flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid;
few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they "give no
information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades." Under the
code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and
service number — and to make no "statements disloyal to my country."

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the
window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the
hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now
insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving
him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after
the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral.
What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out:
McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who
remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his
behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he
insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he
believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic — "he
wasn't exceptional one way or the other" — has a corrosive effect on
military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?"
Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If
it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking
around without one or two arms or legs — or he'd be dead."

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the
"crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His
value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than
any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It
was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured
an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity
was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his
medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military
information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese
press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which
McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage
of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He
also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown,
his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

THE CONFESSION

In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain
slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after
three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release.
In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of
mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow
POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have
required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the
military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked
court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of
us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who
was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country
and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that
the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.'
So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

"He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished,"
says Dramesi. "A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was
not the case." In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain's
experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the
only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his
days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese
captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968,
when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed
"Cat" got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was
holding, splattering ink across the room.

"They taught you too well, Mac Kane," Cat snarled, kicking over a
chair. "They taught you too well."

The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August
1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a
confession that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate."

"John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he
knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals," says
Butler. "John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual.
He was just another POW."

McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted
for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention,
Fred Thompson said of McCain's torture, "For five and a half years
this went on." In fact, McCain's torture ended after two years, when
the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to
change the way they treated POWs. "They decided it would be better to
treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real
estate," Butler recalls.

By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all:
His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of
all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half
years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his
strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time
he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris
Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on
his own feet.

Even those in the military who celebrate McCain's patriotism and
sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top
qualification to be commander in chief. "It took guts to go through
that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces
of your life and move on," says Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief
of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. "It is unquestionably
a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don't think that it
is a special qualification for being president of the United States.
In some respects, I'm not sure that's the kind of character I want
sitting in the Oval Office. I'm not sure that much time in a prisoner-
of-war status doesn't do something to you. Doesn't do something to you
psychologically, doesn't do something to you that might make you a
little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little
more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament."

"A BELLICOSE HAWK"

The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for
advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless,
womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real
difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that
the latter's ambition was now on overdrive. He wanted to study at the
National War College — but military brass turned him down as
underqualified. So McCain appealed the decision to the top: John
Warner, the Secretary of the Navy and a friend of his father. Warner,
who now serves in the Senate alongside McCain, overruled the brass and
gave the POW a slot. McCain also got his wings back, even though his
injuries prevented him from raising his hands above shoulder height to
comb his own hair.
McCain was eager to make up for lost time — and the times were
favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of
the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon
administration's illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all
the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related
his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News &
World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic
defense of Nixon's discredited foreign policy. "I admire President
Nixon's courage," he wrote. "It is difficult for me to
understand . . . why people are still criticizing his foreign policy —
for example, the bombing in Cambodia."

In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his
father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for
chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the "goddamn gooks" and
pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally
gung-ho. "John has always been a very bellicose hawk," says John H.
Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War
College. "When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media
of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we
had the national will."

It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in
far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who
had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with
the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan
invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual "prayer
breakfast" in Sacramento.

Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been
working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer
of the largest air squadron in the Navy — the Replacement Air Group
based in Jacksonville, Florida — training carrier pilots. It was a
post for which McCain flatly admits, "I was not qualified." By now,
however, he was unembarrassed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony
commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking
on with pride, McCain wept openly.

BOOZE AND PORK

If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit
her ex-husband's equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she
skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She
would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The
former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his
"long tall Sally" was now five inches shorter and walked with
crutches.

By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams
of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post
in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain
seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though
adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be
romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy's liaison
to the Senate — the same politically connected post once occupied by
his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young
senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also
taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower,
the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor.
Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a
diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some
tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the
room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.

As the Navy's top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the
bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the
reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting
costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging
carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration's
decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace
the carrier — at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today's dollars — was
pork-barrel politics.

Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain
had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would
pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. "He did a lot of stuff behind the
back of the secretary of the Navy," one lobbyist told Timberg. Working
his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for
the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing
firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an
attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his
lobbyist friends didn't give up the fight. The following year,
Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time,
Carter — his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison —
signed the bill.

In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the
Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a
willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to
each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-
year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a
cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court
documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they
"cohabitated as husband and wife" for the first nine months of the
affair.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three
months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his
first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the
state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980.
McCain's second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary
Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May
17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose
father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix
area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

McCain's friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans — with
whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New
Year's holidays — never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-
proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution" two years later, he
and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took
Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating
McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last
March when she endorsed his candidacy. "Ronnie and I always waited
until everything was decided and then we endorsed," she said. "Well,
obviously, this is the nominee of the party."

THE CARPETBAGGER

As his marriage unraveled, McCain's naval career was also stalling
out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command
on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-
star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final
plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of
his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a
1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one
arm in a sling.

So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP
congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside
edge to good use. Within minutes of the incumbent's official
retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house
that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to
the way he now markets himself, McCain's campaign ads billed him as an
insider — a man "who knows how Washington works." Though the Reagans
no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling
with them.

"Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience," McCain writes, "I had, as
they say in politics, a good story to sell." And sell it he did.
"Listen, pal," he told an opponent who challenged him during a
candidate forum. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of
growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like
the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a
matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the
longest in my life was Hanoi."
To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family
fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who
tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed
boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and
corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings
with major donors and lobbyists over the years.

Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would
ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his
role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much
like today's subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten
banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab
of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for
McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of
political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his
family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and
vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas.
There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending
extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie
Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her
father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26
percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.

McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating's
"great respect for military people" and the duo's "political and
personal affinity." But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the
purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he
made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf,
Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I
certainly hope so."

THE KEATING FIVE

In congress, Rep. John McCain quickly positioned himself as a GOP hard-
liner. He voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a
national holiday in 1983 — a stance he held through 1989. He backed
Reagan on tax cuts for the wealthy, abortion and support for the
Nicaraguan contras. He sought to slash federal spending on social
programs, and he voted twice against campaign-finance reform. He cites
as his "biggest" legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that
abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still
cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.

McCain voted to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme
Court. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a group
that sponsored an anti-gay-rights ballot initiative in Oregon. His
anti-government fervor was renewed in the Gingrich revolution of 1994,
when he called for abolishing the departments of Education and Energy.
The following year, he championed a sweeping measure that would have
imposed a blanket moratorium on any increase of government oversight.

In this context, McCain's recent record — opposing the new GI Bill,
voting to repeal the federal minimum wage, seeking to deprive 3.8
million kids of government health care — looks entirely consistent.
"When jackasses like Rush Limbaugh say he's not conservative, that's
just total nonsense," says former Sen. Gary Hart, who still counts
McCain as a friend.

Although a hawkish Cold Warrior, McCain did show an independent streak
when it came to the use of American military power. Because of his
experience in Vietnam, he said, he didn't favor the deployment of U.S.
forces unless there was a clear and attainable military objective. In
1983, McCain broke with Reagan to vote against the deployment of
Marine peacekeepers to Lebanon. The unorthodox stance caught the
attention of the media — including this very magazine, which praised
McCain's "enormous courage." It was the beginning of a beautiful
friendship. McCain recognized early on how the game was played: The
Washington press corps "tend to notice acts of political independence
from unexpected quarters," he later noted. "Now I was debating Lebanon
on programs like MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of The New
York Times and The Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention
and eager for more."

When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring
Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a
true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in
Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor,
Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse.
Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally
insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them
to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted
his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.

In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation
that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans.
Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign.
Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board
with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through.
In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain
also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal
regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort
would come to be known as the Keating Five.

"Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history
that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a
regulator on behalf of one institution," says Bill Black, then deputy
director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who
attended the second meeting. "And it hasn't happened since."

Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the
regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the
time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for
$3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank
failure — until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000
investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were
federally insured, had their savings wiped out.

"McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators," recalls Black.
"He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But
he did absolutely nothing."

McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics
Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised "poor judgment."
The committee never investigated Cindy's investment with Keating.

The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In
1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the
Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She
directed a doctor employed by her charity — which provided medical
care to patients in developing countries — to supply the narcotics,
which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and
El Salvador.

Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while
working as director of government affairs for the charity. "I am
working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to
a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with
drugs," he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski,
he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration,
sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to
a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her
husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who
was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the
McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former
employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors
dropped the investigation in 1994 — but not before publishing a report
that included details of Cindy's drug use.

Notified that the report was being released, Sen. McCain leapt into
action. He dispatched his top political consultant to round up a group
of friendly reporters, for whom Cindy staged a seemingly selfless,
Oprah-style confession of her past addiction. Her drug use became part
of the couple's narrative of straight talk and bravery in the face of
adversity. "If what I say can help just one person to face the
problem," Cindy declared, "it's worthwhile."

FAVORS FOR DONORS

In the aftermath of the Keating Five, McCain realized that his career
was in a "hell of a mess." He had made George H.W. Bush's shortlist
for vice president in 1988, but the Keating scandal made him a
political untouchable. McCain needed a high horse — so his long-
standing opposition to campaign-finance reform went out the window.
Working with Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, McCain authored
a measure to ban unlimited "soft money" donations from politics.

The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling
the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on
reporters who questioned his wife's financial ties to Keating —
calling them "liars" and "idiots." Predictably, the press coverage was
merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. "I
talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for
information from me was completely satisfied," he later wrote. "It is
a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day." Mr.
Straight Talk was born.

Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal
didn't affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance
industry. "He continues to follow policies that create the same kind
of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and
epidemics of fraud led by CEOs," says Black, the former S&L regulator.
Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil
Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking
Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in — with McCain's fervent
support — a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and
brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now
being felt in Wall Street's catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has
admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood
as well as I should," relies on Gramm to guide him.

McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In
1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce
Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications
industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now
denounces as "fat cats." The special interests with business before
the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and
fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain
when he served as the chairman or ranking member.

The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth
contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the
favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give "serious
consideration" to the company's request to become a long-distance
carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier
EchoStar cleared McCain's committee, the company's founder celebrated
by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain's presidential bid.

Whatever McCain's romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki
Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly
$85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a
meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC's delay of his
proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had
treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of
his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in
campaign donations.

"You're the head of the commerce committee," Paxson told McCain,
according to The Washington Post. "The FCC is not doing its job. I
would love for you to write a letter."

Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several
weeks later — the day after McCain used Paxson's jet to fly to Florida
for a fundraiser — McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William
Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator's meddling
"highly unusual." Nonetheless, within a week of McCain's second
letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson's deal.

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle
to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set
up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from
explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute
with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising
chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster
McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself
took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with
interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground
floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of
Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the
Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were
testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the
cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former
chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time:
"Appearance of corruption, anyone?"

"HE IS HOTHEADED"

Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so
nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. "If
I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up
on me and ridicule me in print," says Dan Schnur, who served as
McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an
"immature and unprofessional reaction to slights" that is "little
changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy."

McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his
height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest
party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected
senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage
setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his
head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped
from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had
set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming
that he was an "incompetent little shit." Jon Hinz, the director of
the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising
to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife,
Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was
"getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top,
cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him
hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the
makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was
witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took
place.

In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain
has "very few friends" — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to
explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In
1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over
the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling
me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!"
yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared
McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his
nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to
blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen
missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to
McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case.
According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to
strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party
to the right, a "pompous self-serving son of a bitch" who "possesses
the attributes of a Dickensian villain." In 1999, he told Sen. Pete
Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that
"only an asshole would put together a budget like this."

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration
legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out
by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn
said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you
just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain
exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room."
The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September,
when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into
the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as
congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan
agreement.

At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say
that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in
chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that
McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international
affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should
disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want
this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of
Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends
a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."

McCain's frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question
his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President
Clinton's teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. "Why is Chelsea
Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked. "Because her father is Janet Reno!"

More recently, McCain's jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The
senator once cautioned that "the world's only superpower . . . should
never make idle threats" — but that didn't stop him from rewriting the
lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a
town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain
responded by singing, "bomb bomb bomb" Iran. The loose talk was meant
to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran,
whose foreign minister condemned McCain's "jokes about genocide" as a
testament to his "disturbed state of mind" and "warmongering approach
to foreign policy."

"NEXT UP, BAGHDAD!"
The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations — from pampered
flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible
reformer — that simply never happened. But there is one serious
conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a
cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of
neoconservatism.
"He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier
general who has known McCain since their days at the National War
College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military
at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George
Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting
the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it
through the barrel of a gun."

McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military
power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton's involvement in Somalia,
sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following
year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti,
taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even
started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the
war in the Balkans.

But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to
run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with
William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who
became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann — a hard-right
lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi — came aboard as
McCain's top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once
cautioned against "trading American blood for Iraqi blood" had been
reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using
American military might to spread American ideals — a belief he
describes as a "sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to
protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity."
By 1999, McCain was championing what he called "rogue state rollback."
First on the hit list: Iraq.

Privately, McCain brags that he was the "original neocon." And after
9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even
Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the
threat posed by Saddam Hussein. "There's other organizations besides
Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States,"
he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. "It isn't
just Afghanistan. We're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North
Korea, Libya and others." A few days later, he told Jay Leno's
audience that "some other countries" — possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria —
had aided bin Laden.

A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the
anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that "we'll do fine" in
Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, "The second phase is Iraq. Some
of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq."

Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick
Cheney's favorite lie: "The Czech government has revealed meetings,
contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is
very clear. . . . So we will have to act." On Nightline, he again
flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that "there
is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of mass
destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his
relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the
administration will be making as we move step by step down this road."

That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin
Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter
to the White House. "In the interest of our own national security,
Saddam Hussein must be removed from power," they insisted, claiming
that there was "no doubt" that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass
destruction "against the United States and its allies."
In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle
East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in
the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore
Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through
over President Carter's veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq
a "clear and present danger to the security of the United States of
America." Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes
roared off, en route to Afghanistan — where Osama bin Laden had
already slipped away. "Next up, Baghdad!" McCain whooped.

Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued
to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group
called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close
concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was
established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on
the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain
III.

In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be
"fairly easy" with an "overwhelming victory in a very short period of
time." On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked
McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the
postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a
large number of them, will treat us as liberators?"

McCain was emphatic: "Absolutely. Absolutely."

Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle
from the outset. "The American people were led to believe this could
be some kind of day at the beach," he said in August 2006, "which many
of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very
difficult undertaking." McCain also claims he urged Bush to dump
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "I'm the only one that said that
Rumsfeld had to go," he said in a January primary debate. Except that
he didn't. Not once. As late as May 2004, in fact, McCain praised
Rumsfeld for doing "a fine job."
Indeed, McCain's neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican
generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse
their party's nominee. "The fact of the matter is his judgment about
what to do in Iraq was wrong," says Richard Clarke, who served as
Bush's counterterrorism czar until 2003. "He hung out with people like
Ahmad Chalabi. He said Iraq was going to be easy, and he said we were
going to war because of terrorism. We should have been fighting in
Afghanistan with more troops to go after Al Qaeda. Instead we're at
risk because of the mistaken judgment of people like John McCain."

MR. FLIP-FLOP

In the end, the essential facts of John McCain's life and career — the
pivotal experiences in which he demonstrated his true character — are
important because of what they tell us about how he would govern as
president. Far from the portrayal he presents of himself as an
unflinching maverick with a consistent and reliable record, McCain has
demonstrated an unwavering commitment to taking whatever position will
advance his own career. He "is the classic opportunist," according to
Ross Perot, who worked closely with McCain on POW issues. "He's always
reaching for attention and glory."

McCain has worked hard to deny such charges. "They're drinking the
Kool-Aid that somehow I have changed positions on the issues," he said
of his critics at the end of August. The following month, when
challenged on The View, McCain again defied those who accuse him of
flip-flopping. "What specific area have I quote 'changed'?" he
demanded. "Nobody can name it."

In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a
host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax,
waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out
of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing
nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully
funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration
policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.

In March, McCain insisted to The Wall Street Journal that he is
"always for less regulation." In September, with the government forced
to bail out the nation's largest insurance companies and brokerage
houses, McCain declared that he would regulate the financial industry
and end the "casino culture on Wall Street." He did a similar about-
face on Bush's tax cuts, opposing them when he planned to run against
Bush in 2001, then declaring that he wants to make them larger — and
permanent — when he needed to win the support of anti-tax
conservatives this year. "It's a big flip-flop," conceded tax
abolitionist Grover Norquist. "But I'm happy he's flopped."

In June of this year, McCain reversed his decades-long opposition to
coastal drilling — shortly before cashing $28,500 from 13 donors
linked to Hess Oil. And the senator, who only a decade ago tried to
ban registered lobbyists from working on political campaigns, now
deploys 170 lobbyists in key positions as fundraisers and advisers.
Then there's torture — the issue most related to McCain's own
experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled
the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a
victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field
Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he
prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with
the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison
detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions'
prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling
was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting
the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had
been working to ban torture. According to Wilkerson, Colin Powell's
former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he
too had had the rug pulled out from under him. "We all knew the
opposite was the truth," recalls Wilkerson. "That's when I began to
lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a
straight shooter."

But perhaps the most revealing of McCain's flip-flops was his promise,
made at the beginning of the year, that he would "raise the level of
political dialogue in America." McCain pledged he would "treat my
opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect."
Instead, with Rove protégé Steve Schmidt at the helm, McCain has
turned the campaign into a torrent of debasing negativity,
misrepresenting Barack Obama's positions on everything from sex
education for kindergarteners to middle-class taxes. In September, in
one of his most blatant embraces of Rove-like tactics, McCain hired
Tucker Eskew — one of Rove's campaign operatives who smeared the
senator and his family during the 2000 campaign in South Carolina.

Throughout the campaign this year, McCain has tried to make the
contest about honor and character. His own writing gives us the
standard by which he should be judged. "Always telling the truth in a
political campaign," he writes in Worth the Fighting For, "is a great
test of character." He adds: "Patriotism that only serves and never
risks one's self-interest isn't patriotism at all. It's selfishness.
That's a lesson worth relearning from time to time." It's a lesson, it
would appear, that the candidate himself could stand to relearn.

"I'm sure John McCain loves his country," says Richard Clarke, the
former counterterrorism czar under Bush. "But loving your country and
lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his
view."

[From Issue 1063 — October 16, 2008]
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