JACKSON — The possibility now of a John McCain presidency causes me to recall that three generations of John S. McCains, starting with the grandfather back in World War II, have in different ways crossed my personal life track.
The oldest, Vice Admiral John S. McCain, was commander of Task Force 38 that my destroyer was part of during the Pacific war. Memorably, in January 1945 we provided the wizened little admiral “taxi service” at sea from his flagship to meet with Admiral Bull Halsey, the Third Fleet commander, on his flagship.
That meant hauling the admiral aboard by a canvas bag breeches buoy as the two ships rolled and pitched in the angry seas. I recall that when McCain arrived on our forecastle deck, he was swathed in a bulky kapok life jacket that he refused to remove. “Not while I’m on board a destroyer,” he growled, remembering that three of our fellow tin cans a month earlier went down in a massive typhoon.
To us 20-somethings on the Potter, he seemed a tired old man not long for this world. Actually, two days after Japan surrendered, McCain died of a heart attack. Only years later did I learn he was a native of Carrollton, Miss.
The next John S. McCain — John S. II, father of Senator McCain — also had become an admiral, rising to commander of Pacific forces (CINCPac) during the Vietnam War. At the time, his son, Navy Lt. John S. McCain III, was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam after being captured when his fighter plane was shot down over Hanoi. Refusing release without his comrades, after 5-1/2 years McCain was freed in late 1973.
In the latter 1970s, Admiral McCain II had an occasion to visit Mississippi and called on Gov. Cliff Finch. Eagerly, Finch called in the Capitol press corps, giving me a chance to have a pleasant chat with the admiral and share my recollections of having his dad on board the Potter.
Of the three McCains, I had far more personal contact with the current John S. McCain, U.S. senator from Arizona, now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. I’ve closely followed his political career and, for the most part, admired it.
Though I’d briefly met McCain back in the 1980s when he was a member of the U.S. House, it was 1999 at a small private luncheon in Jackson here honoring the Arizona Republican that I had a good opportunity to talk and interact with him. Mind you, the luncheon host was Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the Mississippi super trial lawyer now under indictment for judicial bribery involving legal fees in a Katrina insurance case settlement.
Scruggs and McCain had become close the previous year when Scruggs and Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore spent weeks on Capitol Hill trying to persuade Congress to approve a national settlement with tobacco companies over health care damages. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee considering the bill, turned over his office facilities to the two Mississippians to wage their campaign. (In the end, the bill failed under the 60-vote cloture rule.)
Some heavy-hitter guests at the luncheon (certainly, excluding me) raised a pot of money for McCain’s planned bid for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination. As history records, his “Straight Talk Express” campaign fell short, chiefly after George W. Bush’s forces used a smear campaign in South Carolina to stop McCain’s surge.
These were days when John McCain was a maverick in full bloom. Still unable to raise his right arm over his head from his crippling torture in Vietnam, he regularly kicked the Bush administration and the GOP establishment in the shins and joined with Democrats to push legislation, notably the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. McCain especially angered the GOP right wing by voting against Bush’s income tax cuts.
Meantime he often tangled with some fellow Republicans over “pork barrel” spending in appropriations. One major foe was Mississippi’s GOP Sen. Thad Cochran, who headed the Senate Appropriations Committee. McCain recently described Cochran as a “pork king” in an interview with NBC’s Tim Russert. In turn, Cochran blasted McCain’s well-known hot-headedness, adding: “I certainly know no other president since I’ve been here who’s had a temperament like that.” (Cochran backed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney until Romney dropped out, then later endorsed McCain.)
Once considered by Democratic Sen. John Kerry as his 2004 running mate, McCain in his 2008 presidential bid has veered far from his maverick days. Now pandering to the GOP right wing on social issues, he has become such a hawk on the war in Iraq that he’s talking an unending American military presence there and “winning.” What is there to win in Iraq? most Americans ask. For two years they have said they want out and soon.
Friend Claire King Sargent, a former Jacksonian (her husband had headed the holding company that owned Mississippi Power & Light Co.), ran against McCain as Arizona’s Senate Democratic nominee in 1992. Sargent got trounced but recalls, “I think he took a page from my book about the need for change in Washington.” Deja vu?
