McCain's oldest son said goodbye with a meaningful series of knocks on his casket

Richard Ruelas
The Republic |
View Comments
Doug McCain, the son of Sen. John McCain, greets people who came pay their respects to their father as they wait in line to enter the Arizona state capitol where Senator John McCain lies in state in Phoenix on Wednesday, August 29, 2018.

Doug McCain approached the flag-draped casket of his father grim-faced, but his gesture was whimsical. He leaned over and, with his right hand, knocked on the casket seven times. Though not evenly.

His knocks tapped out a familiar rhythm, one important to the biography of his father, Sen. John McCain.

What he knocked is known as the “Shave And A Haircut” riff. It ends some popular songs, including the theme of the old “Tonight Show” when it was hosted by Johnny Carson. It’s the knock a wiseacre friend might use on a front door.

Da-di-di-da-da. Then a pause. Da-da.

It is not known why Doug McCain made this gesture.

He did not do so when he approached the casket in Phoenix, as his father lay in state at the Arizona State Capitol. There, he simply touched the casket with his right hand for a few seconds.

Two days later, at the U.S. Capitol on Friday, Doug McCain, the late Senator’s oldest son, a Navy pilot and current American Airlines pilot, walked up to the casket and quickly knocked out the riff.

“Shave and a haircut. Two bits.”

What is known is that the series of knocks was important to Senator McCain when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

In his first memoir, “Faith Of Our Fathers,” McCain wrote about his more than six years as a prisoner after his place was shot down in Vietnam.

RELATED: John McCain's final months: "A man in a hurry all the way to the end"

When he was kept in solitary confinement, what got him through, he wrote, was the ability to communicate with other prisoners. “It was, simply a matter of life and death,” he wrote.

Prisoners used hand signals to each other when being moved about, he wrote. They also would leave notes in drains. In the cells, McCain wrote, prisoners would hold their enamel drinking cups wrapped in their shirts up to the wall and be able to speak to each other.

They also developed a tap system, McCain wrote. The alphabet was broken into five segments and the prisoners would tap between one and five times to signal a segment, and then another few taps to indicate a letter.

“We became so proficient at it that in time we could communicate as efficiently by tapping as we could be speaking through our drinking cups,” McCain wrote.

Prisoners would begin any tap chat with the “shave and a haircut” rhythm, McCain wrote. The two-tap response — “two bits” — would mean the coast was clear.

In October 1968, though, it would be used to say hello to a fellow prisoner in solitary who needed the communication to lift his broken spirit.

RELATED: Ducey names Jon Kyl as McCain's successor

McCain, in his book, wrote that he could hear a new prisoner being moved into the cell next to his.

The man was Ernie Brace. A Marine in the Korean War, Brace had become a civilian pilot in the Vietnam era. He had been captured by North Vietnamese while flying supply missions to Laos.

Brace, according to a 2013 interview he gave for an episode of “Locked Up Abroad” on National Geographic, had been held in a bamboo cage with his neck held in place with a rope tied to a stake and his arms and legs bound. He escaped twice, but his weakened muscles meant he couldn’t get far.

After his first escape, Brace said in the interview, his captors placed his legs in stocks that were bolted shut. Brace used a sliver of barbed wire to undo the bolt for his second escape.

After that escape, Brace said he was thrown in a pit and buried up to his neck. He was left that way for a week, he said. When he was dug out, his muscles had atrophied to the point where he needed to be lifted up.

Brace was taken to Hanoi and placed in the cell next to McCain.

McCain heard the commotion next door and after it died down, he wrote, he tried tapping out to the man next door.

Brace, in his television interview, said that he heard the knocking but was afraid to respond. He could not take more punishment, could not take being locked in another cage.

McCain kept tapping.

Until, for Brace, something clicked.

“I thought about the rhythm and suddenly I recognized it,” Brace said. “Shave and a haircut.”

Brace said the phrase was a ubiquitous part of entertainment growing up. People had heard it on stages or in movies.

“It’s really an American thing,” he said, “so there had to be an American next door.”

Though he still feared punishment, he said, that was overridden by the prospect of being able to communicate with a fellow American for the first time in more than three years.

McCain tapped again. Brace tapped back. “Two bits.”

It started a communication between the two.

Brace said it lifted him out of a deep depression.

McCain said he was also lifted hearing what Brace had been through.

“It made my experience look like a day at the beach,” McCain said in an interview for the National Geographic show.

Brace died in 2014.

The year before, with assistance from Senator McCain’s office, Brace was awarded the Purple Heart.


View Comments