Senator John McCain has brain cancer.
In a statement released through the Arizona Republican’s office, doctors at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix in found “a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma” when they were removing a blood clot behind his eye last week. This is likely what Sen Lindsey Graham was alluding to when he said the 80-year-old McCain “sounded like the old John McCain” after the surgery.
The mouth of a sailor, or a senator
It has been said that John McCain’s mouth kept the son and grandson of admirals from becoming an admiral himself. I don’t doubt it. In true Navy fashion, his first words to me in private, spoken in an elevator as I was showing him to his hotel room in Meredith, N.H. late at night in the winter of 1999, included profanity. Asking if I worked for his New Hampshire campaign manager (I did) he said, “don’t trust him; he’s a f—–g liar.” For the record, the gentleman in question was not, in fact, a liar, and the senator was just trying to get a reaction out of me.
“Good to know, sir” was all I said in response, but such was my introduction to the world of presidential politics, and life on the “Straight Talk Express.” It was the start of nearly two decades of being alternately exhilarated and infuriated by the “maverick senator.”
I was one of only 244 McCain delegates to the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. (I was in the Massachusetts delegation, but was neither of the two delegates who refused to heed McCain’s request that we all support Gov. George W. Bush). A self-described “McCainiac,” my wife and I named our Golden Retriever, who joined our family in the summer of 2000, Sidney, from McCain’s middle name. we often referred to the pup as “The Senator.”
“Presidential ambition,” McCain would say in his stump speeches (misattributing the Estes Kefauver quote to his Arizona colleague in the House of Representatives, Morris K. “Mo” Udall), “is a disease that can be cured only by embalming fluid.” So it was only natural that McCain would try again. I discussed joining his 2008 campaign with his chief strategist Steve Schmidt, but ultimately chose to remain on my mobilization at the Pentagon.
THE BEST FRIEND A SERVICE MEMBER COULD HAVE IN THE SENATE
It’s also personal because I spent 25 years of my life in uniform. While it is easy to point out all the ways John McCain has sinned against the conservative orthodoxy as laid out by his predecessor, the late Barry Goldwater, when it comes to the men and women of the armed forces, he has been a tireless advocate. That has meant, on occasion, that he tells tough truths about short-term pain for long-term gain. That has made his positions at times unpopular, but that is what makes McCain who he is.
This year, as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation, he symbolically visited with troops at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield on Independence Day. While there, he tweeted about presiding over promotion and reenlistment ceremonies at the base.
Doubtless, many of the young men and women he was reenlisting were still in grade school when I met McCain in that New Hampshire elevator. I hope they can see past the partisan bickering to see McCain as I do, the straight talking sailor’s sailor and friend of everyone in uniform.
I, for one, cannot wait for his “crusty voice,” to borrow the president’s phrase, to return to Capitol Hill for many more years of political combat. Get well soon, shipmate.
