Campaign 2000: The Power and The Story

By the time he came out of his Hanoi prison, John McCain had learned the power of stories. He had been raised on them. The son and grandson of admirals forever at sea, he had spent more time with their legends than with the men themselves. Among the POWs, he was the prison storyteller, the one who helped pass the days by retelling, scene by scene, his favorite Marlon Brando movies, who offered a course he called A History of the World from the Beginning, the one who was allowed 10 minutes with a Bible one Christmas so he could refresh his memory of Bethlehem and lead a service in their cell. But it was not until he was home, a famous, crippled war hero, that he met Ronald Reagan and learned from the master that he now had the ultimate political weapon.

Reagan was Governor of California in 1974, when he invited McCain to a prayer breakfast in Sacramento. McCain has never been a particularly reverent guy; but that morning he found himself telling the silent crowd about a discovery he made when he was thrown into solitary confinement in a 6-ft. by 9-ft. hole in the ground. On the wall was etched a testimony, scratched into the stone by a previous occupant: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty," read the jagged writing. The words sustained him, McCain told the crowd, through his 2 1/2-year solitude. When he finished, the audience, including the Governor, was sobbing. "I realized," he says now, "it wasn't really me that moved them. It was the Story that did it."

The Story. You could argue that the story of McCain's remarkable rise, to the point where he now has a chance of snatching the G.O.P. nomination away from the $65 Million Man, is the Story of a story. It is not just that the commentariat has concluded that this presidential race is all about character and biography and that McCain's, at the moment, is a best seller. It is not just that McCain's story defines the man: You cannot scare me, I've been scared by professionals, and I have nothing to lose because every day is a gift I once thought I'd never have.

The story is his running mate, and has been from the day he decided to leave the Navy for politics. It has served as both weapon and shield, a kind of deterrent that makes him easy to fear, hard to attack, hard sometimes even to live with. Throughout his rise to power, it was the story that could both win people over and shut people down. Who among his adversaries wanted to answer the question, "So just what were you doing from 1967 till 1973, while he was being maimed and tortured in service to his country?"