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Watched closely by a North Vietnamese guard, a dirty, feeble-looking young man on crutches, carrying a slop bucket, inched forward in slow, painful steps, and then, with a huge effort, hoisted the bucket, emptying it into an open, fetid trough. As cameras whirred, the white-haired John McCain, standing a few feet away, regarded this portrayal of his younger self intently. The Arizona senator had come to New Orleans to visit the set of a movie based on his 1999 book, "Faith of My Fathers"—an account of growing up with a father and grandfather who were both famous four-star admirals, and also of his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. It will be shown on the A&E network on Memorial Day, with Shawn Hatosy starring. McCain remarked that the set, based that day in a dilapidated former brewery, looked a lot like the "Hanoi Hilton," where he spent most of his captivity: the interrogation room with long ropes hanging from the ceiling; the wretched infirmary cubicle; and the model hospital space, which the North Vietnamese displayed to visitors. "I spent about one and a half hours there," McCain, who was a prisoner for five and a half years, commented dryly.
As he made his way around the set, members of the cast and the crew surrounded him, asking him to sign copies of his book. A young Vietnamese actor wearing a North Vietnamese military uniform told McCain that he was one of twelve children and that his family had come to America when the war ended. At first, they lived in a three-bedroom apartment with a single bathroom, but they had saved money, and bought one house and then another, and today his family owns seventeen houses. "What a story!" McCain exclaimed; moments later, he was repeating it, word for word, to his longtime chief of staff, Mark Salter, who wrote "Faith of My Fathers" with him. A young woman asked McCain to sign a book for her father. "He said to tell you that he really hopes you're going to be the next President," she said. "Tell him I said thank you," McCain replied warmly, and wrote a lengthy inscription.
Accompanying McCain on this visit was Colonel George (Bud) Day, a leader of the P.O.W.s at the Hanoi Hilton and one of the men whom McCain credits with having saved his life. Day and a cellmate took care of McCain after he was put in their cell. Day was also prominently featured in ads prepared by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked Senator John Kerry's Vietnam service last year. In one commercial, Day addressed himself to Kerry, asking, "How can you expect our sons and daughters to follow you when you condemned their fathers and grandfathers?" When McCain defended Kerry and denounced the ads, Day was upset with his old comrade. "Something that made Bud such an ideal leader in prison was his tunnel vision," McCain told me later. "That makes him behave on the outside—well . . . " He trailed off, chuckling. "But in prison there were guys who would listen to the Vietnamese propaganda, they'd begin doubting their country. Not Bud! He's straight tunnel vision, screw 'em! He didn't join in philosophical discussions about whether the war, you know, was justified—and that's what you want in a leader in that environment. Whereas the other guys, we used to call them the political scientists, would sit around and discuss, 'Well, the Geneva agreements, you know—' But the time to debate and discuss all that was before you got shot down. Once you're in prison, then you're expected to adhere to the Code of Conduct." It stipulated that prisoners were not to disclose any significant information to their captors, and were to agree to be released only in order of capture. Day refused to listen to the North Vietnamese propaganda radio show featuring Hanoi Hannah, but McCain enjoyed it. As though reminiscing about some picaresque adventure, McCain continued, "I used to love to listen to Hanoi Hannah. Every once in a while, they'd play a decent song. Somebody left a bunch of old Louis Armstrong records in Hanoi for some reason, and if they played those it was great."
While visiting the set, McCain filmed an interview, to be used to publicize the movie. The makeup that is applied for his TV appearances softens the long scar that runs down one side of his face, from surgery he underwent nearly five years ago for melanoma, a virulent form of skin cancer. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a brown leather jacket, McCain, who is sixty-eight, looked like a much older but still jaunty version of the dashing aviator he once was. As a young man, he said, he had thought that all glory was self-glory, and that he was so strong he could achieve whatever he wanted; but he learned in prison that he was dependent on others. There he was the recipient of a thousand acts of courage and compassion and love, even as other prisoners—including Bud Day—"had it far, far worse than I ever did." And, yes, because his father was commander-in-chief of the Pacific, the Vietnamese saw him as a valuable propaganda asset (referring to him as "the crown prince") and offered him early release—something that he turned down repeatedly.
The A&E interviewer asked what relevance his story had to the present moment. "We're in a war on terror," McCain responded readily. "We have young Americans who are fighting and dying as we speak, and I would hope that, by seeing the film, maybe they might be a little bit encouraged, and recognize that what they are involved in is a very noble cause."
I asked McCain later whether he feels that he is especially well suited to lead in these times. "I do believe that I have the qualifications to address what is now the transcendent issue of our time," he said. He pointed out that his highest priorities have always been national security, armed forces, preparedness—"all of those issues that in earlier times may not have been so important, particularly all through the nineties, when we basically thought that, since the Cold War was over, we were just at peace." His qualities and experience would be most pertinent, he said, "as long as we face the threat that we do, which I think is going to be for quite a long time."
Whenever McCain is asked if he is running for President, he responds that it is too early to decide. But it appears to be the organizing principle of his life these days, evident in his assertion of his leadership capabilities, his positioning of himself, his relationship to President Bush, even his casual asides. Many of McCain's friends comment that he is far more serious and focussed than he has ever been, and that they rarely see the McCain they knew—irrepressible, occasionally outrageous, impolitic.
But that character is not altogether obsolete. The moment the car stopped at McCain's hotel in downtown New Orleans, he set out at his usual fast clip for Harrah's, across the street. McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight. "Craps is addictive," McCain remarked, and he headed for the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet tables. At the most obvious level, the game is incredibly simple—players rotate turns throwing the dice, and you either win or lose depending on what number comes up. But McCain's betting formula makes it much more complicated. "Uh-oh!" he cried, as a player accidentally threw the dice off the table. "This is a very, very superstitious game," he said. When his turn came to throw the dice, he picked them up and blew on them first. He had placed chips on the number 5, so (envisioning a combination of 2 and 3) he called, "Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan!" A few minutes before, McCain had tried to move closer to the table and another player refused to make room. Now, suddenly, the man swung around, peered at McCain, and exclaimed, "I just realized who you are! Here, take my place." When McCain demurred, the man went on, "No, you've gotta take it! I admire you so much! I wish you all the luck next time!" As he walked off into the crowd, he muttered, "I just wish you'd run the last time, instead of that other guy."
McCain's near-win in his contest with "that other guy" in the 2000 Republican Presidential primaries was the bright dividing line of his life. He entered the field as someone who "had six-per-cent name I.D. and was No. 11 out of eleven guys," his former campaign manager, Rick Davis, said—and he emerged a commanding political figure. Today, he appears to be the most popular politician in the country. It was not the first time that McCain had transformed a painful loss into something that augmented his stature and influence. One of his favorite maxims is "When you go through it, either it kills you or you come out stronger."
McCain's resilience was particularly conspicuous when he returned from captivity in Vietnam, in 1973. Admiral Chuck Larson, who met McCain when they were freshmen at the Naval Academy, in 1954, recalled that McCain then was the rebel, with grades that placed him at the bottom of his class, and Larson the high-achieving brigade commander and student-body president. "John used to introduce me and say, 'The two of us together are in the middle of the class,' " Larson said. "John was independent. He got tired of people reminding him of his father and grandfather, and saying, You're not measuring up." In flight school, in Pensacola, Florida, they roomed together. "Like his mother, he was prematurely gray," Larson said. "So at twenty-two he had salt-and-pepper hair—he could attract women from age eighteen to fifty." Larson spent many weekends and summers at the McCain home, in Washington, D.C. "John's mother was just a live wire, very social, and his father was a more private, introspective person," he told me. "He talked very directly to sailors, who loved him, but when he was at home he was quiet." Larson smiled. "He always called me 'Godammit Chuck Boy.' "
In 1969, more than a year after John was shot down, in a bombing mission over Hanoi in October, 1967, Larson met with Admiral McCain at cincpac headquarters, in Honolulu. He was there as a naval aide to President Richard Nixon, who was to receive a briefing from McCain, and the Admiral summoned Larson. "He sent everyone out of the room, and sat down and told me what they knew about John, from all the intelligence reports they had. Tears welled over the edges of his eyes—he was such a tough old guy. When he was done telling me everything, he bit on a cigar. Didn't light it, just bit down. Then he buzzed, and when the officer came in he said, 'This is Lieutenant Commander Larson, give him whatever he needs, or there will be hell to pay.' And after the officer left he said, 'Godammit Chuck Boy, that's why I like this job—you buzz, they jump!' "
Larson saw McCain shortly after he was released, in March, 1973, at a party that Ross Perot threw for the P.O.W.s in a hotel in San Francisco. "He was much like his old self. When we first got together, he'd tell random stories, but they were all the funny ones. John did not want to be a professional P.O.W. That night, at the party, everybody started telling stories about their incarceration. Not John. One guy had been shot down six weeks before their release—when the Vietnamese were cleaning and fattening them up. Then he saw John, and he said, 'I shouldn't be going on this way, I was there for six weeks and you were there for five and a half years.' And John said, 'Oh, no—go right ahead. The first six weeks were the toughest!' "
After divorcing his first wife, Carol, who had waited for him through the years of his captivity, in 1980, McCain married Cindy Hensley, eighteen years his junior, and the only daughter of a wealthy beer distributor. He eventually moved to Arizona, where Cindy's parents lived, and became involved in Republican politics. In 1982, he won a House seat and, four years later, Barry Goldwater's Senate seat. It was a rapid, sure-footed climb, but a few months after entering the Senate McCain stumbled. He attended two meetings with savings-and-loan regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, Jr., a tycoon who was a major supporter (and who came to personify the collapse of the S. & L. industry, and went to prison). These meetings triggered Senate investigations, hearings, and deliberations that dragged on for nearly four years. Of five senators investigated, McCain was the only Republican; although it was clear that he was less culpable than most of the others, Democrats on the ethics committee refused to exonerate him unless the Democrats were exonerated as well. In the end, McCain and Senator John Glenn received the lightest censures. McCain has often remarked that the "public humiliation" of the Keating Five investigation was harder to endure than his incarceration. From the ordeal, though, he took lessons that came to define him as a very different kind of politician.
He learned to use the press, in a way that was mutually beneficial. Gullett said, "John's theory was 'I'm going to talk it to death. I don't have anything to hide—I might have made a mistake, but this is what I thought. So I'll answer every question.' That's him: Straight Talk Express! Let the press on the bus!" McCain developed an intense aversion to partisanship. He believed that he had been held hostage by the Democrats, and that his own party had not demanded his release. After that, he determined that he would take on fights over issues without regard to whether his opponents were Democrats or Republicans. And he decided that he would not merely apologize for his error in having sought to wield his influence on behalf of a generous contributor; he would also try to remake the system that encouraged such transgressions. He began to agitate for campaign-finance reform and to attack the appropriations process and its weakness for "pork," or pet projects for legislators' home districts. Some viewed this as a cynical attempt to trade in a soiled suit of clothing for a knight's armor. Whatever his initial motivation, McCain has been fighting for campaign-finance and pork reform for more than a decade.
Most Presidential contenders are drained by the demands of national campaigning, but during the 2000 race McCain flourished. Ordinary life never seems to afford him sufficient action or stimuli. To his staff people, his favorite opener is "What's goin' on?" "I pick up the phone on Christmas Eve—'What's goin' on?' " McCain's political adviser, John Weaver, said, mimicking his boss. " 'Nothing, John. People are with their friends and family. What's wrong with you?' " There was also a lighter side, though less publicly visible. "He is really superstitious, so each time something good happened we'd acquire these lucky things," Weaver said. "A lucky rabbit's foot. A lucky pen. A lucky feather. Two lucky rocks. A lucky football. We always had to have them around—I spent a lot of time looking for them, once we got them. At night, when he unloaded his pockets, he looked like a twelve-year-old Eagle Scout—all these rocks and feathers." McCain seems most comfortable when he is doing many things at once, and he found the perpetual motion of the campaign—and being the center of attention—uniquely satisfying. He appeared at a hundred and fourteen town-hall meetings during his campaign, sometimes four or five in a day. ("I love doing it—there's nothing I'd rather do," he told me, and seemed to mean it.) He refused Secret Service protection, plunging happily into the crowds.
McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire, in a nineteen-point upset, but the storybook campaign ended when the Bush machine retaliated, in the infamous South Carolina primary. McCain had hoped that South Carolina's large veteran population would help him win there; but the Christian Coalition, deeply entrenched in the state, became the decisive constituency. Somewhat surprisingly, McCain had the support of Gary Bauer, the social conservative, who had dropped out of the race by that time. "I wanted a commitment from either George Bush or John McCain that if elected he would appoint pro-life judges to the Supreme Court," Bauer told me. "Bush said he had no litmus test, and his judges would be strict constructionists. But McCain, in private, assured me he would appoint pro-life judges." Bauer's support, however, was no match for the efforts of Pat Robertson—a fiery opponent of McCain's efforts on behalf of campaign-finance reform, who, along with Ralph Reed, rallied the Christian right to Bush. E-mails, flyers, faxes, postcards, and phone calls inundated voters with information; many of the calls were made through push-polls, where the caller's aim is not to collect information so much as to spread it, and where the financial backing is difficult to uncover. There were allegations that McCain had fathered a black child (he and Cindy have an adopted daughter, Bridget, who is Bangladeshi); that McCain had committed treason in Hanoi, or was crazed from his captivity. This subterranean campaign was supplemented separately by attack ads and direct mail paid for by the National Right to Life Committee, the National Rifle Association, Americans for Tax Reform, and others. "What happened in South Carolina is as bad as you've been told and worse," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, who supported McCain in 2000 and witnessed the smear campaign, told me. "Most of it was about campaign-finance reform and special-interest groups—they were going to kill him before he got any stronger. It was sheer rumor demagoguery."
It was in South Carolina, too, that McCain made the biggest mistake of his campaign. In January, 2000, while he and Bush were fighting for New Hampshire's primary voters, South Carolinians had become enmeshed in a debate about whether the Confederate flag should be flown from the state capitol. Bush avoided taking a position by saying that it should be decided by the people of South Carolina. Two days later, on CBS's "Face the Nation," McCain was asked what the Confederate flag meant to him. He said that the flag was offensive "in many, many ways," and added, "As we all know, it's a symbol of racism and slavery." Chuck Larson, who was campaigning for his old friend, told me that when McCain stopped in Washington after that interview he met him in the private area of the airport; John Weaver was there, too, and McCain asked Weaver how he thought the interview had gone. Larson recalled, "Weaver said, 'Terrible! You said the rebel flag is a symbol of racism and slavery!' John said, 'It is!' 'Well, it's your race to lose!' Weaver said, and stormed off. John let him go, and then he said, 'It's really hard, not to say what you feel.' "
The next day, when McCain was asked by a reporter about the flag, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read, "As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides. Some view it as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage." Weaver, who had helped draft the statement, said that McCain "read it as though he were in the Hanoi Hilton, being given something to read by his captors. It was the only time we consultants got in the way of John's instincts—and it was the wrong thing to do."
McCain went on to win primaries in Michigan and Arizona, but after South Carolina he lost the momentum he needed to raise enough money to compete, and the day after Super Tuesday he withdrew. (A few weeks later, he returned to South Carolina, and apologized for having sacrificed principle to his ambition by retracting his initial remarks about the flag.) It was the first electoral contest McCain had ever lost. And, for someone so competitive that he didn't speak to his best friend in prison for days after losing to him in a bridge game, this defeat was particularly hard. But one of his political heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, who was defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, offered a cautionary lesson. "Roosevelt was very bitter at the end of his life," McCain told me. "And I took a lesson from that—that I would not be bitter.
"Americans don't like sore losers!" McCain added with some heat. "They want you to move on. And that's what I did. I didn't complain, didn't express outrage. I moved on."
Not being a sore loser, in this instance, seems to have meant agreeing to support Bush in the 2000 campaign. They met in Pittsburgh—alone in a hotel room for ninety minutes—and emerged with a show of considerable civility. But it was mainly show. Sharon and Oliver Harper are close friends of the McCains; the two couples own many acres of adjacent property in Oak Creek, Arizona, and their children have grown up together. The Harpers travelled with the McCains on the campaign. Sharon Harper recalled that she and her husband were vacationing on Arizona's Lake Powell in August, when they received an urgent call. George and Laura Bush were to visit the McCains at Oak Creek, in an attempt to improve relations. "John and Cindy said, 'Can you come back? We don't want to be left alone with them, this is going to be really difficult.' So we came back." Harper has a photograph of the three couples at Oak Creek, smiling gamely at the camera. McCain did campaign for Bush in the 2000 election, "but through gritted teeth," Harper says.
At the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Weaver recalled, he received a call from a member of Bush's staff, who said, "Would you guys please leave the Convention? You're getting too much attention."
" 'Fine,' I said. Rick Davis and I went to New York to go to Le Cirque and get drunk. But John decided to go to Bethesda, to get this thing on his face checked—only because he had the time. The next week, he called—it was malignant. If he had waited another month or two—and he would have, if he'd been running—it would have been lights out." McCain was given a diagnosis of melanoma, for which he had first been treated in 1993.
"The cancer put him in a hurry, and made his zest for life even more robust," Weaver said. McCain realized, too, that he could leverage the power of the national constituency he had established to expand his influence in the Senate, where Democrats would be more willing to work with him, and he would probably be able to get more legislation passed than he ever had before. And the more he was able to use the Senate as a bully pulpit the larger his national constituency would grow.
After 2000, McCain's distaste for intense partisanship increased even more. In many of the town-hall meetings during the campaign, when McCain had been asked about global warming, he had said that he didn't know enough to take a position but promised that he would look into it. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he held numerous hearings on global warming; he became an impassioned believer, and has co-sponsored legislation with Senator Joseph Lieberman to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. In the town-hall meetings, he also heard many stories about people who had been denied health care by their H.M.O.s and had suffered terribly as a result. In 2001, with Senators Edward Kennedy and John Edwards, McCain sponsored the Patients' Bill of Rights, which was intended to regulate the managed-care industry.
McCain's greatest challenge to his own party was his determination to pass campaign-finance-reform legislation. After an ultimately successful effort to get the bill passed in the Senate, McCain infuriated the Republican leadership in the bitterly partisan House by pushing it aggressively there. He even made calls to House members from an office off the House floor—an act viewed as treason by many Republicans. McCain broke ranks with the Bush Administration on other major issues—repeatedly voting against Bush's tax cuts and against the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, calling on Bush to ease restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, and criticizing Bush for his handling of postwar Iraq. What might have been tolerated, and even respected, as independent-mindedness by previous generations of Republicans has come to seem heretical in today's ideological and highly disciplined congressional ranks.
But McCain has never confused his colleagues with his constituents; it is his constituents whose approval he most prizes, and he defines them broadly, as a group that extends far beyond the confines of Arizona. It had always been a truism that politicians who lose in Presidential primaries return to Congress as losers, but McCain, as he noted, "came out enhanced, rather than diminished."
The McCain alchemy derives, in large measure, from a widespread popular perception that he says what he believes. "Ten times today, I've had people come up, saying, 'I don't agree with you sometimes, but I really support you because I think you stand up for what you believe,' " McCain often remarks. "I cherish that reputation." In 2004, however, the reputation came into question when McCain, after rejecting John Kerry's offer of an expanded Vice-Presidency, transformed himself almost overnight from the President's most severe Republican critic to his most valuable defender.
Kerry's offer to McCain was a reflection, among other things, of how much McCain was thought to despise Bush for what had been done to him in South Carolina. Kerry was betting that even if McCain did not accept his offer he would not campaign aggressively for Bush. "It was a high-risk strategy," Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator, said. "I think it ended up hurting Kerry—because the Republicans were able to say, Here's the person you wanted as your Vice-President, and he is embracing the President." But he didn't fault Kerry for trying, he added, because the upside was so great. "I don't think there's any way the President could have beaten them." (A CBS News poll released last June found that a Kerry-McCain ticket had a fourteen-percentage-point lead over Bush-Cheney, whereas most head-to-head polls showed Kerry leading only slightly.)
Kerry had apparently been thinking of McCain as a possible running mate for some time; in August, 2003, he met with him to propose the idea and to suggest that they announce their pact before the Iowa caucus, according to a McCain aide. Then, in the spring of 2004, in a series of phone conversations with McCain, Kerry offered to augment the power of the Vice-Presidency with the defense portfolio—in effect, a combined Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, according to John Weaver and Mark Salter. "Kerry was saying, 'You can still call yourself a Republican,' and John was saying, 'No! I can't just call myself a Republican,' " Salter recalled. " 'We don't have the same philosophy. I'm a hawk, I'm for nation-building, I'm pro-life, I'm a free trader, I believe in small government. If you're hit by a lightning bolt and I become President, the people who voted for you will feel betrayed.' "
Kerry asked Warren Beatty, who is a good friend of McCain's, to call him. Beatty is a diehard Democrat who disagrees with McCain on a number of issues but likes him, and he admires his efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics. "I thought he might do it," Beatty told me. "Of course, I'm a fantasist by trade." Even as Vice-President, he went on, "With John's personality, he would be able to say what he wanted to say, and to do quite a bit." He paused. "Whether that would be good for John Kerry was less clear."
McCain's crossover appeal is a curious phenomenon. His maverick image as "the real deal" (in Beatty's words) excites people, much more than his positions on issues. In matters of style, McCain seems like a Democrat—cultivator of the press, defender of the underdog, scathing critic of some leaders of the Christian right, anti-establishment rebel. Hated as he is by the leaders of the N.R.A. and the National Right to Life Committee, he even has the requisite enemies. "Those pro-life guys always suspected him," a former aide who worked for McCain for many years said. "He got the benefit of the pro-life label but would never go out and make speeches for them. . . . I think he feels that government should not be involved, but it is, and he took a fairly expedient position." Several other friends of McCain's also told me that he chose to be pro-life when he first ran for Congress because it would have been more difficult to win as a Republican in Arizona otherwise. In any case, he has been unwaveringly pro-life for the last twenty-four years.
"McCain really is a Republican," Anthony Cordesman, who is at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and who worked for McCain in the late eighties and early nineties, said emphatically. "One of the difficulties you have with someone that active who starts out on the right and often ends up in the middle is that people assume—because of his pragmatic approach—that he agrees with them politically. But he does not." And during the Kerry overtures, he continued, "John was confronted with a lot of people trying to push him into a role he was very uncomfortable with—as a crossover into the Democratic Party, with agendas that he does not share."
The Kerry offer carried other risks, too. Chuck Larson recounted to me a conversation that McCain and he had over breakfast one day, when the speculation about a Kerry-McCain ticket was most feverish. "I said, 'Let's just say you accept it, John. Today the press is salivating about this dream team. But it would quickly shift from stories about this bipartisan dream team to people saying you're an opportunist, you're a traitor, you're doing this because you've hated Bush ever since what he did to you in 2000—instead of focussing on the issues, and who the two of you are.' "
Moreover, if McCain and Kerry won, McCain's paramount ambition would be defeated. As Rick Davis told me, "It would mean he would end his political career as Vice-President." Still, McCain is always exhorting Americans to sacrifice for the greater good. I asked McCain whether a Kerry-McCain team wouldn't have been the best way to heal the divisiveness that he deplores. "I would have been a man without a country!" McCain protested. "The Democrats never would have really accepted me, the Republicans would never trust me again. And, as I told John, not only would my having the defense portfolio probably have been unconstitutional—it wouldn't have worked! Say there's something like the Cuban missile crisis—it's got to be the President who makes those decisions."
He also brought up an issue that dogged Kerry throughout the campaign—Kerry's having voted for the war but against the eighty-seven-billion-dollar measure to fund it. "On the fundamental question of going to war, he agreed, but then because at the time he had to beat Howard Dean he voted against the money. Americans do not understand why you would say, 'Send them, but don't pay for them, O.K.?' And, look, that's when you gotta stand up," McCain said, his voice rising. "He's a friend of mine! But you gotta stand up for what you believe in! He knew you had to fund those troops! But he voted against it for political expediency."
Several people close to McCain told me that he believed that Kerry was too indecisive to be President. I asked if that was true. "Well, everybody knows John is indecisive," McCain began. But then he got back on message. "Really, I just believed that at this time Bush would make the better commander-in-chief. Not that one was bad, but the other was better."
After it became clear that McCain would not accept an offer to be the Vice-Presidential nominee on the Kerry ticket, the Bush White House made its overture. Weaver recalled, "One of Bush's strategists called me, and said they wanted to have coffee. I didn't even tell John. Afterward, I went over to see him. 'John, I just had coffee with Karl Rove.' " He imitated McCain: " 'The end of the world is near! Armageddon! Armageddon!' "
It was the first time that Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, and Weaver had spoken since 1989. They had been working together on campaigns in Texas, but after a severe falling out had been estranged ever since. After the 2000 campaign, moreover, the Bush Administration punished those who had worked for McCain. "Rove put it out strongly that they didn't want McCain people doing any campaign work," Davis said. "People couldn't make a living. I don't know any McCain operative who could get a job in the party structure." (Rove says this is "absolutely not true.") Unable to find work with a Republican candidate, Weaver briefly switched parties. When I asked him whether, in their meeting, Rove had apologized for what happened in South Carolina, he hesitated. "Not really an apology," he said. "There was an acknowledgment of things that had happened. I said it was water under the bridge. I don't think it's fair to say more than that."
Mainly, Rove was asking for McCain's help. Was it an easy decision for McCain? Weaver paused. "John made the decision. People forget—he's a Republican. He's a conservative Republican. And he always supported the President's foreign policy, notwithstanding his legitimate criticism of Bush's handling of the war. So it was easy at the intellectual level—lots of things are easy at that level—but," he said, tapping his chest, "they don't feel right."
Whatever ambivalence McCain may have felt was not in evidence as he set out on the campaign trail with Bush. McCain declared that the war in Iraq was a conflict between good and evil which threatened the security of the United States. Even without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he asserted, the decision to go to war, which he had strongly advocated, was the right one—"I would do it again today."
"John's was the strongest credible voice in Congress supporting the President's actions against Saddam Hussein," Lindsey Graham said. "His support was critical." Some of those closest to McCain thought he was going overboard. His daughter Meghan, a student at Columbia, who voted for Kerry, called McCain and chastised him when she saw him on television making statements she considered baseless. "Once, when John was talking on TV about what a great wartime leader Bush had been, my wife had to leave the room," Chuck Larson, whose son-in-law has been flying F-18s over Iraq, told me. But many friends point out that once McCain agreed to join the Bush campaign team he would not hold back. "In for a dime, in for a dollar," he commented to aides, who ribbed him about his role change. Kerry apparently took McCain's conversion hard. According to a key Democratic strategist, it was not McCain's rejection that angered him—he had always understood the odds were long. But Kerry had believed that they were bound by a special friendship, first forged in the nineteen-nineties, when they worked together to normalize U.S. relations with Vietnam. And when McCain moved into his political mode—praising President Bush so extravagantly that Kerry seemed diminished by the comparison—Kerry felt betrayed.
McCain's evident pragmatism was at odds with his image as someone whose fast-boiling anger ("McCain moments," as his staff labels his eruptions) often leads to enduring emnity. But McCain has a history of fighting hard and eventually getting over it. Having suffered years of abuse as a P.O.W. in Vietnam, he nonetheless worked to restore U.S. relations with Vietnam. For years, he refused to deal with Fred Wertheimer, then the head of Common Cause, who filed the complaint that led to the Keating Five investigation; then, in the late nineties, he and Wertheimer began working with each other on campaign-finance reform, and today they are close allies. Senator Trent Lott is said to have told reporters during the 2000 campaign that McCain was unstable, as a result of his captivity; they did not speak for several years, but are now quite friendly. "People mistake the ferocity of the fight for its longevity—it's that he comes at you like a Mack truck," Salter said. "But I have seen his enemies become his friends all the time." In this instance, of course, the reconciliation had distinct implications for 2008.
When I asked McCain about being something of an outsider in his own party, he said, "When people are in close races, I am the first Republican who is asked to come and appear for that person. I am the most sought-after of all Republicans. In this last campaign, I was the one asked by the President to travel and campaign with him." He continued, "When you look at the rank and file of ordinary Republicans, I'm extremely popular—it's some of the party apparatchiks who still harbor bad feelings toward me. But it is a little hard for them to do that now, because of my strong support for Bush." He concluded, "Particularly since the 2004 campaign, there has been a great softening of this dislike for me."
"I think he's running for President. Don't you, Joe?" Roberta McCain, John McCain's mother, asked, fixing her azure-eyed gaze upon Joe Donoghue, who has been her son's assistant for the past eighteen years. Donoghue nodded vigorously. In 2000, Roberta said, "I never expected him to get elected, and didn't care if he was. I didn't think he had enough money, enough expertise, enough anything! I was surprised he did as well as he did." But now, she said, "I've changed my attitude, because I think he would make a very good President."
She went further. "I think the one chance we have of getting a party of integrity is John McCain, and I don't know anybody else who's trying to do it." Regarding his motivation, she volunteered, "I think his only mission in life—and I raise my right hand—is to serve God and his country. We're a religious family. Not to mention"—she broke off, laughing—"that I never go to church and my church is right across the street!"
When McCain's supporters are asked about the issue of his age—he will be seventy-two in 2008—they often point to his mother. It is easy to see why. When I arrived at her apartment in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, she threw open the door: a beautiful white-haired woman, in a Chanel-style jacket, pleated skirt, and high-heeled shoes. She was standing in a foyer with red silk billowing slightly from the ceiling, the walls painted with a gorgeous mural. She told me with a laugh that she had just redone the apartment, even though she is ninety-three. She was leaving shortly for a three-month trip through Europe, travelling some of the time with her identical twin sister, to France and England, then going on to India; she rents a car on these excursions, and enjoys driving everywhere she goes. (She did not mention that not long ago she was stopped for speeding, going over 100 m.p.h., near Flagstaff, Arizona.) Paris would be her first stop; she planned to go to Maxim's for Christmas dinner, and the Lido on New Year's Eve.
She said that she had been surprised to read in her son's book that he did not really want to go to the Naval Academy. "I will say this: when that baby was born, I assumed he was going to go to the Naval Academy," she went on. "It sounds so corny when I think about it now, but if someone's son went to Yale I would say, 'Isn't that strange, why would he go to Yale and not to the Naval Academy?' It was a tradition, and I think it was a wonderful tradition. I think the Navy has more know-how, more sophistication, more integrity, more honesty than any other facet of the world. There are people who are made for the Navy, and I was one. I liked everything about it—even the lousy pay!" She went to look for something in her study and returned with a small piece of paper. "My husband went into the Navy in 1927 and retired in 1972—four years in the Academy, forty-one years on active duty, and he had the top job." Reading from the paper, she said, "When he retired, he got two thousand three hundred and forty-six dollars in monthly pay. And paid taxes on it!" Admiral McCain died in 1981.
There was something in "Faith of My Fathers" that I was curious about. When McCain's parents were informed that he had been shot down, he wrote, they were in London and were about to leave for a dinner party at the Iranian Ambassador's residence. They had attended the dinner and not said anything to the other guests about the news. Roberta recalled now that there was a dessert that she'd never seen before, something with spun filaments of sugar and ice cream, and when tapped with a spoon the outer surface shattered. When I asked whether the evening wasn't unspeakably difficult for her, she replied, "It didn't occur to me not to go. You know, I'm a pretty stoic person. I take things as they come and I don't fly off the handle. It just never crossed my mind." She paused, and added, "You can't just not show up at an Embassy dinner party like that—it was a sit-down dinner."
I asked whether she was surprised that her son had run as a pro-life candidate. Without answering the question, she gave her own view. "I think it's nobody's business, except the woman's. And I also don't think it's a political thing—I think it's a spiritual thing, and I don't think it has any place in politics at all. If a woman wants to have an abortion, I think it's O.K."
As for his having campaigned so aggressively for President Bush: "All I've got to say is, Bush is sure a lucky man! I don't know whether he will acknowledge it or cares or anything else, but he's the luckiest President we've ever had."
In the aftermath of the election, she said, she was not at all sanguine about the fact that "the same people are still running the show." She went on, "So I'm not going to get up and cheer or start being Pollyanna about things. Somebody's got to straighten this country out, because people are just losing all respect for the whole government. It made me so mad, the minute Colin Powell resigned they started sniping, making cracks." She looked at me. "Now, what else do you want me to shoot my mouth off about?" she asked, with a dazzling smile.
McCain's friends and staff people may be geared up for 2008, but his wife insists that the two of them have not yet reached a decision. "People don't believe me," Cindy McCain said. "They say, 'Oh, c'mon'—but it's true." There are health considerations; since his surgery for melanoma in 2000, McCain is checked by a dermatologist every three months. And about a year ago Cindy suffered a stroke, which caused speech difficulty at first, and memory loss. I interviewed her in the lovely, sprawling house in Phoenix where she grew up, and which she recently redesigned in a more distinctly Southwestern, adobe style. A pretty woman, with long, well-coiffed blond hair and large violet-colored eyes, she was dressed in jeans, a cashmere sweater, and red sandals. She is very thin, slightly fragile-looking, and this day seemed somewhat on edge. During the 2000 campaign, she said, she had been afraid of making some mistake that would hurt her husband; the experience was trying, but the good part was that she got to see so much of him. Afterward, she needed hand surgery, from having shaken so many hands; she showed me the scars, extending from her right hand up her arm, and said, "It's been fused. So there won't be any problem now—it's bionic!" Not long before we met, she had appeared on the Larry King show with other people who had suffered strokes at a relatively young age (she was forty-nine). And when King asked, "Has the Senator been very sympathetic?" she responded, "Yes. . . . Let me explain that. He was very confused in the beginning. 'How could it happen to my wife, I'm eighteen years older than she is!'. . . So, on his behalf, I think he's trying to understand all this. It's a lot for him to take in." They celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on May 17th.
The celebrity that McCain has enjoyed since the 2000 campaign is qualitatively different from what it was before. He used to come home most weekends, but now he is away a great deal of the time. And, when they go out together, strangers clamor for his attention. "We went to the Super Bowl a few weeks ago—I'd been jostled before, but nothing like this," she said. "He has reached rock-star status. But he is always nice, generous, always takes time with people. I get frustrated sometimes, but not John. His attitude is 'Enjoy it—it won't last forever.' "
Early in the morning on the last Sunday in February, I met McCain near his house in Oak Creek. A month before, he had attended the World Economic Forum, in Davos; two weekends later, he had co-led the U.S. delegation to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, stopping in Ukraine to meet with President Yushchenko; and days after his return from Munich he had led a congressional trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Pakistan. (Lindsey Graham, who accompanied him on these travels, commented, "Anybody who questions his vigor and ability should travel with him. I love going on a trip with John, but I'm happy to get home.")
Now, at a motel used by TV networks to film interviews with him when he is at his retreat, McCain was to be interviewed from Washington by Chris Wallace, on Fox News. President Hosni Mubarak had just asked Egypt's parliament to amend the constitution to allow for freer elections, and McCain was telling Wallace, before they went on the air, how important he believed U.S. pressure on Egypt was. "I hammered the Egyptian Foreign Minister in Munich," he was saying. Then, in the interview, he made the kinds of tough statements that have long been his hallmark in the area of foreign policy. He said he was "proud of Condi Rice," for having abruptly cancelled a planned trip to Egypt, because of the arrest of a leading opposition politician. He attacked the signing of an agreement whereby Russia would supply Iran with fuel for its first nuclear power plant. "Putin seems to me to be acting somewhat like a spoiled child," McCain declared. "The United States, and our European allies, I think, should start out by saying, Vladimir, you're not welcome at the next G-8 conference!"—a reference to the countries making up the Group of Eight. But when Wallace asked him whether he thought that President Bush should have been tougher in his press conference with Putin at a meeting in Slovakia a few days earlier, McCain suddenly became judicious. "It's hard for me to second-guess the President," he said repeatedly.
At the end of the interview, Wallace commented that Republicans tend to be orderly people, always choosing the next one up—Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000. Who will be the next one up in 2008?
"Jeb Bush!" McCain said, and then laughed. "If you're looking at dynasties. . . ." Then he added that he believes it will be a wide-open situation. "Republican voters will have a great luxury, because they'll have a lot to choose from," he concluded, smiling.
McCain set out for the local Starbucks to pick up coffee and newspapers to bring back to the house. He was in high spirits about his rejoinder to Wallace. "I shook him up! I said, 'Jeb Bush!' Hah!" he chortled happily. "I said, 'Republicans will have the luxury of a lot of choices!' " With the women behind the coffee counter, he engaged in his usual banter: "How ya doin'? Where's Patty? Tell her I was here, looking for her. Tell her I was disappointed." After driving for a few miles, he turned off the highway onto a dirt path, which twisted down a steep incline, finally coming out into a clearing. Hidden Valley is the one place where McCain does, in a manner of speaking, relax. He bounded out of the car and led me on the mandatory tour. The McCains' house is built near the banks of the creek, which was roaring past, swollen from recent heavy rains, and gleaming in the sunlight. He showed off dozens of fruit trees, about to blossom. "This is the thing I'm most proud of," McCain said, pointing to the large nest of a common black hawk, and describing how he had watched the mother teach the fledgling to fly. Last year, he told me, Cindy looked toward a nearby hilltop and saw a mountain lion, surrounded by her cubs, gazing down at her. There are also foxes, bobcats, javelinas, and coyotes. He pointed out the spacious guesthouse, which he refers to as "the cabin." He has scandalized some Republicans in Arizona by inviting Democratic politicians here, including former Senator Tom Daschle. McCain loves to mix things up. As Lindsey Graham put it, "He'll have Warren Beatty and a right-wing reactionary like me."
We went to the Harpers' house, a short walk away, for breakfast. Sharon and Oliver Harper were there, and Lorene and Aaron Lueck, who manage the property, and live there as well. Before preparing breakfast, McCain, who likes to cook, summoned the group to the TV room to watch the Fox News interview. We all sat quietly, focussed on his image as though we were in church—no one more so than McCain. At the end, he laughed again, loudly, about the Jeb Bush line. He said that Mark Salter would be mad at him for that one. "I sort of am, too," Sharon Harper said. McCain returned to the kitchen and, while cooking bacon and sausage, amused himself, as he often does, by ribbing one of his companions. "Aaron's a member of the N.R.A.," McCain told me. "He wore his N.R.A. cap when he went to see 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' in the local movie theatre." Aaron commented that the only issue on which he differs with the N.R.A. is its support for assault rifles—"because I don't think they're good for much." "They're good in schools," McCain said, winking at me.
After breakfast, I asked McCain about the speech he had delivered in Munich two weeks earlier. McCain always enjoys setting off fireworks at the annual conference, but his speech this year was especially incendiary. In the Republican foreign-policy divide between idealists and realists, McCain unequivocally identifies himself as an idealist. He appeared on the podium with the Russian Minister of Defense, the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for International and Legal Affairs—and he did not spare any of them. First, he established his premise: September 11th made plain that the security of Europe and North America is dependent upon the promotion of democracy in the Middle East—and, ultimately, in the world. "The security of New York or Madrid or Munich depends in part on the degree of freedom in Riyadh or Baghdad or Cairo," he declared. And, therefore, we can no longer afford the view that "a despotic ally [is] preferable to an unfriendly democracy," he said. "Russia is actually moving backward. Mr. Putin . . . is reasserting the Kremlin's old-style central control." He also attacked Saudi Arabia, where "repression remains the norm." In Egypt, President Mubarak "has reigned as a dictator for almost twenty-four years, and he seeks yet another term, while grooming his son for what one newspaper described as a 'pharaonic succession.' " If these and other governments continued in their anti-democratic ways, he said, "we should reassess our relationships—including the billions of dollars in bilateral aid that flows to them."
U.S. aid to Egypt, of course, has long been a buttress to the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace accords. Did he not worry that a cutoff of aid might be destabilizing? I asked. "Well, there wouldn't be a war," McCain said. "You could make that argument fifteen or twenty years ago. But it's no longer viable to prop up despotic regimes, instead of democracies that may not be particularly on our side." He added, "I'm not just picking on Egypt. I said it about Egypt and I said it about Iran and I said it about Saudi Arabia. The Egyptian Foreign Minister said to me, You're exactly right on everything except Egypt."
I noted that his language is even more militant than President Bush's. McCain agreed, but he added, "In all appreciation of my oratory and positions, it's tougher when you're the President. You gotta be more careful to maintain the balance."
McCain cannot be termed a neo-conservative, since he has no apostasy in his past, but neoconservatives are happy to call him theirs. As William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, told me, "Maybe you'd say he was more neo-Reaganite. But his views on foreign policy are neoconservative: American strength, but also American principles; for nation-building, as well as for removing dictators. If you go back to the mid-nineties, you see he was more that way than people realize." McCain was one of the few Republicans who supported intervening in Bosnia in 1995. He also supported the now famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton from members of the Project for the New American Century, which called for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—and to be prepared to do so militarily, without being "crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council." Some of McCain's advisers like to point out that President Bush has only recently arrived at the pro-democracy, interventionist foreign policy that McCain has long championed. His hawkish friends admire his muscularity. As Lindsey Graham said, "If North Korea and Iran tried to expand their nuclear capabilities, they would feel the wrath of a John McCain Presidency." In Munich, where a full-scale clash between idealistic Wilsonian principles and European Realpolitik occurred, he enthusiastically led the Wilsonian charge.
"Our European friends don't have a strong military, so they always believe that diplomacy is the answer," McCain told me.
Wolfgang Ischinger, the German Ambassador to the United States, who attended the conference in Munich and listened with interest to McCain's speech, tried to explain the view from the other side. "As older societies, we tend to think of ourselves as more experienced in the way societies evolve, and we tend to be skeptical of Americans who seem to think that if you believe hard enough, and you muster enough resources, you can change the world," he told me. "In the last year or so, as we've engaged in discussions about the transformation of the Middle East and democracy, I have told my American friends that the region in this world that has seen the most transformation and change is Central and Eastern Europe—without shedding a drop of blood. So don't preach to us. And don't think transformative change will work according to mechanistic rules. This is very complicated. Changing the way people think often has to do with religious and cultural issues—we tend to think of them as long-term, and Americans think, Let's solve the problem in the next four years!"
The morning after McCain delivered his speech, he attended a breakfast for the U.S. delegation, hosted by the Germans. The U.S. delegates sat on one side of the long table, and the German officials on the other. "I was very tough on 'em," McCain told me. On Iraq, he said that they "should try to help, and I don't mean militarily, because I know they won't do that, but there's a thousand things they could do to help Iraq." On the subject of Iran and European efforts to negotiate over its nuclear program, the conversation became particularly heated. "One of the German guys said, 'Well, the Iranians have now frozen their procedures toward nuclear.' And I said, 'That's not what I hear.' And he said, 'My intelligence is as good as yours.' I said, 'I don't think so.' "
Mark Udall, a Democratic representative from Colorado, and the son of McCain's friend and mentor Mo Udall, the longtime congressman from Arizona, was a member of the congressional delegation in Munich. "John likes to challenge friend and foe," Udall said. But the breakfast was surprising even by McCain standards. "I hadn't seen him quite as fierce as he was at that breakfast," Udall, who has attended the conference for the last several years, said. The German official who was involved in the negotiations with the Iranians was describing the process, Udall recalled, "and John interrupted him on two or three occasions, saying, Why are you doing this, why are you doing that, and it was borderline rude. He even pushed the diplomatic protocol there. But I think he was trying to make a point that this was very serious, and that just talking to the Iranians was not going to get the job done."
One of the Germans who was present recalled, "John McCain spoke more than any other participant at the breakfast. He was the leader. He said, 'Why don't you guys help us out in Iraq?' And one of our guys said, 'But we have, we have trained police.' McCain said, 'That's laughable!' He crushed them. But it was a battle of people who were not equals—a U.S. senator and Presidential candidate, full of self-confidence, and a bureaucrat, extremely restricted, with instructions about what he can say. It was not a fair match.
"Was it helpful?" the German participant asked. "Surely not. I don't think he was interested in listening to why we believe this is the best way forward. John McCain is like a charging bull. He loves to fight," the official added. "That morning, it didn't win him new friends."
McCain has suggested that as President he would be more measured and diplomatic, at least in his choice of words. The best evidence of his ability to do that is the way he has conducted himself, in recent months, with his colleagues and with the President.
McCain is famous for his verbal attacks against appropriators on the Senate floor. When I asked Weaver about this, he replied, "You haven't read about his gratuitously taking on other members on the floor in the last six months, have you?" I said I had not. "Good," he replied.
McCain is chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which since last year has been investigating the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his business partner Michael Scanlon, and their dealings with Indian tribes. Abramoff is also the central figure in corruption and influence-peddling investigations by the Justice Department and the Interior Department. All of these have turned up potentially damaging disclosures about trips taken and gifts received by lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Many of McCain's colleagues were fearful that now, in the Abramoff investigation, he would find it irresistible to cast a wide net, as he had in an earlier investigation into a Boeing tanker deal. In that deal, which was supported by the White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress, McCain exposed grievous flaws in oversight. Two Air Force officials resigned, two Boeing officials have gone to jail, the deal was scrapped, and McCain's reputation as a giant killer was burnished. McCain decided to address members of his caucus in order to calm their apprehensions about the Indian Affairs Committee investigation. "There's a lot of nervousness among a lot of people in Congress about trips they went on," McCain told me, "and that's why I talked to the caucus and explained that this is not a witch hunt. I have a narrow mandate at the Indian Affairs Committee. We'll be tracing the trail of the Indians' money, seeing who defrauded them—not looking at records of members' trips."
His team-player posture is nowhere more marked than in his relationship with President Bush. As Wes Gullett commented, "If you're going to run for President, you don't want to gratuitously fight with someone the Republican-primary voters love." McCain hasn't changed long-held positions to do the President's bidding, however. In March, he voted against Bush's plan to allow oil drilling in the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (the bill passed without his vote). He has said that he would vote against the filibuster-rule change known as the "nuclear option," and last week he helped lead the protracted negotiations between moderates of both parties to find a compromise.
Even so, McCain's language about the areas in which he and Bush disagree has become reasoned and moderate. And when the President really needs his help he gives it. In December, McCain told me, "I'm not playing on Social Security." When I asked why not, he said, "It's just not my issue." Weaver was more explicit. "It's not clear where Social Security is going to go. There's no reason for him to be out front." But in late March—by which time the Social Security reform campaign had gone very badly for the President—McCain accompanied Bush on a three-state swing to pitch his reform plan. He supported Bush's insistence on the urgency of the crisis ("The longer we wait," McCain warned, "the more Draconian the changes will have to be"), and he castigated the A.A.R.P. for recklessness in opposing Bush's plan.
McCain gave a speech on the Senate floor, supporting the President's nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, after that nomination engendered doubts even among some Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If a temper and an unorthodox management style were disqualifiers from government service, I would bet a large number of people in Washington would be out of a job," McCain declared. ("Bolton called to thank him before John could even get back to his office," Weaver said.)
Immigration reform is something about which McCain is passionate; he strongly opposed Arizona's Proposition 200, which calls for the denial of state welfare benefits to illegal aliens, and which passed in last year's election. And he repeatedly emphasizes that he has found a philosophical soul mate in President Bush, who is the former governor of a border state. In the first week after the election, McCain went to the White House to meet with the President and Karl Rove, and they discussed immigration reform. "The President and I share exactly the same views on the issue," McCain told me. "He believes there are willing workers and willing employers and we ought to match them up. He recognizes that our borders are broken and we need to protect them, but we can only do it in a dual approach." McCain and Bush are not as close on this issue as McCain says. McCain and Senator Edward Kennedy recently introduced comprehensive legislation that would strengthen border enforcement but also provide for a guest-worker program, as well as a path to residency for the illegal immigrants (between eight million and thirteen million) who are already here, something that many of his Republican colleagues deride as "amnesty" and that the President has not indicated he supports. McCain acknowledges that passing such comprehensive legislation will be extremely difficult, since it is an enormously divisive issue for Republicans. But he believes that the political consequences will be historic. "By enacting meaningful immigration reform, the Republican Party will have the majority of the Hispanic vote for the next generation," McCain said.
In a footnote that seems to capture the new spirit of amity between the White House and the once renegade Senator, Weaver—blacklisted no longer—is McCain's liaison to the White House. McCain aides even talk enthusiastically about Karl Rove helping McCain in 2008. And his supporters have been observing this rapprochement with delight. In the months since the campaign, Ken Duberstein, a Republican lobbyist who supported McCain in 2000, told me, "John has continued to be one of Bush's strongest supporters. I think he has been quite careful. He's making all the right moves."
McCain's current cultivation of his relationship with Bush may also be reflected in what he does not do. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, last spring, McCain was at his best. It was not an unfamiliar sight—the Senator, red-faced, neck veins bulging, repeatedly interrupting an evasive witness whom it seemed he might like to throttle. But his rage, for once, seemed altogether appropriate, as he demanded, "Secretary Rumsfeld, in all due respect, you've got to answer this question!" At the time, McCain made it plain that he was going to push the Bush Administration to divulge everything, and quickly. "The facts have got to come out now," he said to the Times.
A year has passed, and there have been at least ten major investigations, but, as Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, recently pointed out, there has been "no assessment of accountability of any senior officials, either within or outside of the Department of Defense, for policies that may have contributed to abuses of prisoners." Levin and McCain are longtime members of the Armed Services Committee; Levin is a former chairman, and McCain is slated to become chairman in 2007, if the Republicans keep control of the Senate. Levin told me that he has been urging the current chairman, Senator John Warner, to hold further hearings, in order to pursue an investigation that would extend to the top of the chain of command, the Secretary of Defense. Levin also advocates the formation of an independent commission, similar to the 9/11 Commission, to investigate detainee abuse.
This might seem a natural issue for McCain, and he did support an amendment to a defense-authorization bill that affirmed the policy of the United States not to engage in torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. But, since the furor over Abu Ghraib subsided, he has not grabbed the megaphone, in the way that he so often does when something makes him angry and he wants to set it right. When I raised the subject of detainee abuse with him, McCain said he believes that it is important to pass legislation that will clarify U.S. interrogation policies. "We can't be saying, 'Get some information from this guy, soften him up, but not too much.' " And he thinks that such clarity is particularly important, because there are two different categories of prisoners: "those who are eligible for the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, and others who are outright terrorists, who have none of these protections but still have protections by international treaties, such as the torture treaty and others." McCain emphasized that he agrees with the Bush Administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions be applied in this selective way. And he made it plain that he was unwilling to constrain interrogators, in certain situations: "Look—you're from New York. If we apprehend a terrorist and he has information about a plan that is going to kill thousands of people, what would you do?"
I reminded him that he has always held that torture doesn't work, because eventually the victim will do or say whatever his torturers want, as McCain did when he signed a confession in Vietnam. "Yes," he said, "but in that kind of situation, thousands of lives at risk, you have to do something, try whatever you can."
When I asked him if he would join Levin to demand that the Armed Services Committee conduct a thorough investigation, he replied that there had already been a number of investigations. And he would not support the formation of a 9/11-type commission. "9/11 was different—it was a unique event in our history," he said. Besides, he added, "it would never pass in the Senate. Never."
It is of course something that the Bush Administration would oppose—and McCain appears unlikely to jeopardize his new standing, on this or any other issue. In several interviews, it was striking how forcefully he defended the President. When I asked McCain what, in his view, made Bush such a strong wartime leader, he pointed to his having gone to the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 14th and rallied the nation. (This was the speech in which Bush said simply that the terrorists "will hear from all of us soon.")
McCain explained, "There are moments—all John F. Kennedy said was 'I'm a Berliner.' All Ronald Reagan said was 'Tear down this wall.' Usually, it's one day that's defining."
McCain frequently comments that we have paid a "heavy price" because we did not have enough troops in Iraq. He has also expressed concern that the Army Reserve and the National Guard are overextended, and have fallen short of recruiting goals. I asked whether the price in American lives and the damage to the Army were inconsistent with his assertion that Bush has been an exemplary wartime leader. McCain paused, then said, with some feeling, "Everything that happens, the President is responsible, O.K.? I think if you would say that the President deserves the blame, then he deserves the credit for the election that just took place in Iraq. And, if you see the Middle East now changing, as many of us believe that it is, then history will judge him incredibly well." And, he added, with a slight smile, "The Europeans will have been on the wrong side of history. Again."
Despite some Republican strategists who believe that his moment has passed, McCain plainly feels that his moment has arrived—because, in this dangerous world, he is the leader to whom most Americans will turn. A run in 2008, moreover, would be far different from the quixotic crusade of 2000; not only does McCain have a broad national constituency and high approval ratings but, an aide points out, he has a finance committee poised to raise the hundred million or two hundred million dollars necessary to mount a powerful campaign, and an organization in every state in the country. In open primaries and the general election, moreover, he might well win Democratic voters. As Bob Kerrey told me, "He's got to be the one person the Democrats least want as the Republican candidate. I'm a Democrat, of course—but he causes people like me to think twice." Early polls show him beating both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
Still, the Republican primaries remain perhaps his highest hurdle. In 2000, shortly after the smear campaign led to his defeat in the South Carolina primary, McCain went to Virginia Beach, not far from where Pat Robertson lived, and hit back. "I am a pro-life, pro-family fiscal conservative and advocate of a strong defense," he told the crowd. "And yet Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement call me an unacceptable Presidential candidate. . . . Why? Because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message." Gary Bauer told me he thought at the time that that speech was "self-destructive," and that, if McCain were going to run in 2008, "he has major repair work to do, reaching out to some of those individuals." In addition, he would advise McCain "to pick a battle on one of the social issues—like a pro-life justice on the Supreme Court. Don't just vote in favor but lead the charge. When Hillary and Ted Kennedy go to the floor to savage the nominee, McCain should go, and not leave it to Rick Santorum"—the outspoken Republican senator from Pennsylvania.
McCain faces an extraordinarily difficult test. The problem with his public image—as someone who says what he thinks to those in power; who is more at home in the heartland than in Washington, despite his tenure there of more than twenty years; who is essentially an anti-politician—is that he must live up to it. At the most basic level, he can't appear to be doing the kinds of things that he has attacked others for doing. The Reform Institute is a nonprofit organization in Washington that deals with campaign-finance reform and global warming. In early March, an article appeared in the Times pointing out that Rick Davis was its president and McCain was its chairman, and McCain was often featured in its news releases and fund-raising letters; last year, it raised about $1.3 million. For the avatar of campaign-finance reform to have this sort of close, unregulated relationship with a nonprofit (and one whose work can benefit him politically) seems unwise, at best. He has since resigned. "I should have realized how it would look. I have to be Caesar's wife," McCain said.
And, at a much more difficult level, he will have to make many of the same kinds of political calculations that his colleagues do—vis-à-vis the Bush White House, the Christian right, the N.R.A., and others—without appearing to be doing so. McCain may well be equal to this sleight of hand, because, contrary to his cultivated image, he is in many ways a born politician. Aides say that he knows instinctively what the right political move is. During last year's Presidential campaign, he advised John Kerry to stop talking so much about himself in Vietnam (the focus, also, of the Kerry introduction at the Democratic Convention which proved, in retrospect, ineffectual). No one is more masterly than McCain at exploiting his P.O.W. experience. Similarly, his talent for showmanship has enabled him to build the platform he has with the media, and to use it to his advantage whenever he pleases without appearing to be a showman. He is intuitive about which issues the public will respond to, like pork-barrel legislation, campaign-finance reform, and global warming. One aide recalled that during the 2000 town-hall meetings McCain was so attuned to what people most cared about that he was "like a one-man polling station."
McCain's political dexterity would certainly serve him well as President. But he is not nearly as "alien" in Congress as his aides insist that he is. He shares with many of his colleagues a long-term fixation on the Presidency—in his case, since at least 1997, when he confided to Chuck Larson that he wanted to run. But in McCain's continuing self-dramatization it is duty that drives him, not the self-serving ambition that impels most politicians. This is how his ardent supporters see him, too. Lindsey Graham told me, "If you spend thirty minutes with John, you understand that his goal in life is not to achieve power for the sake of achieving power. He's never been driven by becoming something." Part of the McCain mystique derives from the fact that he so frequently invokes his past—and his father's and his grandfather's—as a naval officer, as though he were still, somehow, more military man than politician. On October 9, 2001, two days after the bombing of Afghanistan began, McCain addressed the young men and women at the U.S. Naval Academy, saying, "Soon you will be the shield behind which marches the enduring message of our revolution. There is no greater duty, no greater honor. . . . Hold that honor as dearly as your country holds you. Hold it as dearly as do those who have already been called to the battle. Hold it as if it were your greatest treasure. Because it is. It is. Whatever sacrifices you must bear, you will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure." He continued, "My warrior days were long ago, but not so long ago that I have forgotten their purpose and their reward." ♦


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Two years ago Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij took a late premiere slot for their film Sound of My Voice and seemingly took over the Sundance Film Festival overnight. Their low-budget, tightly scripted and mysterious movie was the rare Sundance film that seemed to immediately demand a sequel (though there's no plan for one yet), and the film was bought by Fox Searchlight, which quickly agreed to finance and distribute the pair's next effort, The East.
That film easily could have bypassed a festival debut in favor of a more traditional release, but Marling and Batmanglij have returned to Sundance with The East not just out of nostalgia, but to prove that they're only getting better. A bigger and more conventional film than Sound of My Voice, with genre elements that wouldn't be out of place in a Bourne film, The East is also spectacular, the kind of gripping thriller that precious few mainstream Hollywood directors even attempt these days. Taking the time to dig deep into its characters and constantly blurring the line between right and wrong, The East is provocative and thoughtful-- but also far more entertaining that you'd ever think it had a right to be.
Marling, who played the ethereal cult leader of Sound of My Voice, is this time the audience surrogate, a corporate spy who infiltrates herself into The East, an environmental terror group intent on attacking many of the fat cat clients who keep her employed. Marling's Jane has experience in the CIA and has clearly impressed her hard-nosed boss (Patricia Clarkson), but she's soft and canny enough to fit right in with the kind of anarchist freegans you see hanging around public parks, and then eventually The East. The group is camped out in a crumbling mansion, planning their next attack (or "jam" as they call it) and engaging in all kinds of rituals familiar from cult stories, from group baths in the lake to a touchy-feely game of spin the bottle. Alexander Skarsgard's Benji, with his sharp good looks and enormous frame, is the classic charismatic leader, but he's matched in passion and chilly intensity by Ellen Page's Izzy, who is the hardest on Jane upon her arrival and seems most committed to the cause.
In the beginning we see some impressive details of Jane's double-agent prowess, from her willingness to gash open her own arm to a cannily hidden Blackberry, but that fades away to an almost illogical degree later on-- how, exactly, does she report back to the office so frequently with no one suspecting her? But what Marling and Batmanglij's script lacks in specifics, Batmanglij makes up in the intensity of his direction, assembling fantastically intense scenes for the "jams" and probing delicately into the constantly shifting relationships in the group. We all know the story of these kinds of collectives, how united passion turns into infighting and dissolution, but the characters within The East are so well-drawn that it feels meaningful here, especially with Jane finding herself trapped between her loyalties to her job and the family she's pretended to join.
There's no spy story more familiar than that of one who starts to identify with her double life, but in the hands of a marvelously expressive actress like Marling, who's matched perfectly by the towering Skarsgard, Jane's conflict feels alive and fresh. The East wheezes its way a bit toward a conclusion, as if Batmanglij and Marling are still too hooked on the cliffhanger from Sound of My Voice to give this one an honest finale, but that's truly a small complaint in a thriller with so much to enjoy. Coming to theaters from Fox Searchlight this year, The East is a small scale, welcome respite from the usual drone of Hollywood genre-- and yet another example of how Sundance breakout stars can get only better as their careers get bigger.

subset: commoncrawl