The nation lost a lion Saturday afternoon when 81-year-old Sen. John McCain slipped his mooring and set sail for the afterlife. McCain was perhaps the last great example of a rapidly dying breed: the statesman devoted to public service. I wrote about my fondness for the good senator last summer when the world first learned of his diagnosis of glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain tumor.
John McCain loyally served the republic for 60 years
It’s hard to come up with something that someone else hasn’t already said about McCain, a man who lived most of his adult life in public. From the time he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958, McCain served his country with honor and distinction. There was his naval career, of course, including his five-and-one-half-year stay as a prisoner of war in the North Vietnamese prison known as the Hanoi Hilton. If there was one thing McCain excelled at, it was self-effacing humor. On the campaign trail, I often heard him repeat the joke that his greatest military accomplishment was getting a multi-million dollar aircraft shot out from underneath himself.
Following his retirement in 1981, he moved to Phoenix, AZ. with his new wife, Cindy Hensley, and ran for the House of Representatives in 1982. In 1986, he ran for the seat of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who had held it since 1969 (as well as holding Arizona’s other Senate seat from 1953 until 1965). McCain, who had been the chief of the Navy’s legislative liaison mission in the Senate, held that spot in the Senate until his death.
For those not good at math, that’s 60 years of public service – from Annapolis, to Vietnam, to Washington.
blunt talk in the senate armed services committee
From January 2015 until his death, he held the chairman’s gavel in the Senate Armed Services Committee, a position Goldwater held for his final two years in the Senate. Goldwater used that position to push for the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the most sweeping reform of the Department of Defense since its inception, creating the unified combatant command structure that we are familiar with today. As chairman, McCain followed Goldwater’s lead, publishing a white paper that laid-out his vision for “Restoring American Power” four days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Never one to mince words, McCain’s document was blunt. He took direct aim at the Obama administration’s defense policies, accusing them of being “built on a series of flawed assumptions,” including the belief that we could decrease our presence in the Middle East and still defeat radical Islamic terrorism; that “strategic patience” was the best way to deal with North Korea; and that the Iran nuclear deal “would moderate its regional ambitions and malign behavior.”
Much of the language in McCain’s document found its way into the National Security Strategy, most notably the assertion that the nation faces “at once, a persistent war against terrorist enemies and a new era of great power competition.” His triumph is not just in the influence he had on shaping the nation’s strategy, but on securing the funding for making it happen.
“great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine”
At least since he began his his first presidential run in 1999, McCain has urged America’s youth – if not all of us – to dedicate themselves “to a cause greater than their own self-interest.” He certainly did that himself, and the country is richer because of it. He was, at his core, a man terribly aware of his own faults and shortcomings. His detractors will point those out; I won’t.
I will simply leave you with the closing paragraph to his most recent book, The Restless Wave, published earlier this year.
“What an ingrate I would be to curse the fate that concluded the blessed life I have led. I prefer to give thanks for those blessings, and my love to the people who blessed me with theirs. The bell tolls for me. I knew it would. So I tried, as best I could, to stay a “part of the main.” I hope those who mourn my passing, and even those who don’t, will celebrate as I celebrate a happy life lived in imperfect service to a country mad of ideals, whose continued success is the hope of the world. And I wish all of you great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine.”
Fair winds and following seas, skipper. Bravo Zulu.
