The Power and The Story

(3 of 9)
The funny thing about McCain's story is that it has always worked better on other people than it has worked on him. The whole hero mantle, he claims, makes his skin crawl. That may be carefully calculated modesty, but it may also reflect a nagging problem. "It doesn't take a lot of talent," he says, every chance he gets, "to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane." And yet that failure as a pilot meant that he joined the truly tiny group of men who returned home from a reviled war and were welcomed with parades and medals and a handshake from the President.

That he survived at all gave the country reason to consecrate him. But McCain, a rascal midshipman who graduated near the bottom of his class, had found his faith in a different standard, where glory is measured by commitment to causes larger than oneself. And if everyone around him was saying he had brought honor to his family name, he didn't yet have reason to believe it. "They are treating us like heroes," he told his Naval Academy roommate Chuck Larson when he got back to the States, "and all I did was get shot down and try to survive the best I could. I really want to put that behind me. What's important to me is what I do from now on. I don't want to live and be nothing but a POW." It's not that the story was a lie; it's just that no one understood it the way he did.

And so all the parades and the praise just made McCain more impatient to live up to the expectations that had been set for him practically at birth. He didn't have time to lash out at the political system that had abandoned him or the counterculture that called his comrades baby killers. His cause was more immediate and personal. "The years he was in prison were like cutting out the fillet of a T-bone steak," says Nancy Reynolds, a longtime Reagan aide who befriended McCain during those years. "After that, John was always playing catch-up."

The one place where McCain could not make up lost time, the one arena where his story in a strange way carried the least weight, was in the military. When he came back from Vietnam, he toyed briefly with "alternative plans in civilian life in politics," according to doctors who debriefed him. But McCain only toyed with the idea, choosing instead to study at the War College, become a Navy flight instructor in 1974, and then, in 1977, to take a job his father had held 20 years before, as the Navy's liaison to the Senate. In this last role, the road forked. Even as he took that job, it was clear that his Navy career was stalled. His war injuries were still bad enough to rule out a sea command. It had taken years of physical therapy for him to be able to bend his knee again, and to this day he can't raise either arm above his head. Though his father and grandfather had been the only father-and-son four-star admirals in U.S. history, McCain was passed over by a promotions board.

Yet even as one door closed, another was opening. Here he was, a rookie staff member on Capitol Hill, and Senators were asking to have their picture taken with him. They came to his tiny office for a drink at the end of the day and often wound up talking long into the night. "Youthfulness, combat experience...and as unmilitary a manner as possible," is how McCain once explained the requirements of the job.