The Luckiest Man: Life with John McCain

Salter’s psychological portrait of McCain is informed and convincing… We too are lucky to have counted him among our leaders and to have this intimate biography that will keep his memory bright. —The Washington Post

The Luckiest Man

Life with John McCain

Mark Salter

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For Diane, Molly, and Elizabeth

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, not falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

REMINISCENCES

In my memory of that warm July day in 1989, there are half a dozen staffers milling around his subterranean office in the Russell Building, including an intern who was shadowing him for the day. It was casual. The men were in shirtsleeves, ties loosened. Everyone called him John, not sir or Senator. Those formalities were reserved for responses when he was angry with you or with a colleague or with himself. There were two or three conversations happening at the same time. He introduced me to the intern, whom I sat next to on the leather sofa. It was a little hard to hear him over the hum of multiple conversations. Many years have passed, and I have an old man’s memory, but I recall his instruction to me going something like this:

Look, Lorne is leaving. I want you to fill in. Most of the job will be Central America and Southeast Asia, but I want you to do a lot of the writing around here. Go talk to Chris about the money.

Lorne was Lorne Craner, his foreign affairs aide, son of air force colonel Bob Craner, who had occupied the cell next to the senator’s when they were held in solitary confinement in Hanoi. Lorne had accepted a job in George H. W. Bush’s State Department. Chris was Chris Koch, McCain’s administrative assistant, which is what head staffers in Senate offices used to call ourselves before we inflated our title to chief of staff.

I hadn’t expected him to offer me a position on his staff, and I asked him for a little time to consider it. I thought I would appear overeager to jump at it, even though I knew instantly I wanted the job. He looked puzzled and a little put out by my response, and he paused for a second before asking, Whaddya need, a couple hours? I mumbled something noncommittal in reply, and he dismissed me with, Yeah, okay, think about it. But not too long. We’ll have fun. Talk to Chris about the money.

I talked to Chris about the money. Then I walked back to my office wondering how long an interval I should let lapse before I accepted. I didn’t want to risk offending him, but having asked for time, I thought it would look silly if I got back to him that day. And I first had to break the news to my employer, former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was vacationing in France at the time. I decided to call Kirkpatrick in the morning and then call Chris to accept the senator’s offer precisely twenty-four hours after he had extended it. The recollection of my overthought, dorky propriety makes me laugh now, which is appropriate. Derisive laughter was the typical response to most examples of formality in the notoriously informal McCain world.

Twenty-eight years to the month later, I found myself in his office—a more spacious one, a floor above his first suite of rooms, with a fine view of the Capitol—searching again for the right reaction to another unexpected and, in this instance, unwanted turn of events. It was just the two of us, a few days after McCain had returned to the Senate, and less than two weeks since he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. We talked about his priorities for the time that remained to him. There was urgency in his attitude, but not a great deal more than the urgency he usually brought to new predicaments. He lightened the conversation with wisecracks and irony, his trademark response to adversity. His response to success, too. His response to everything, to fate, to human folly, to the physical laws of the universe: It’s always darkest before it’s totally black. I tried to behave likewise, kidding that I expected him to outlive me. You’re giving the eulogy at my funeral, I insisted. I’ve already written it for you. It’s very moving.

I suddenly felt myself losing composure. Nothing had seemed to precipitate it. One moment we were joking around, and then, as if I had been startled by something, I asked him, What are we going to do about this? He held up his hand to stop me from going further and said, We’re going to man up, you and me. That’s what we’re going to do about it.

The nearly three decades that had passed between my introduction to the life of John McCain and his declaration of how he intended to face its end were purposeful, exhilarating, and, as he had promised, fun. I was exposed to people and events that shaped the course of history, to national politics at the highest level, to world affairs as conducted in corridors of power, and to the struggles of human beings for security, autonomy, and respect. I went to work for him when I was thirty-four years old. Before then, I had not traveled outside the continental U.S. except for a brief trip to Canada. My exposure to national politics was limited to conversations with friends who worked for politicians. McCain was a man with causes. They were causes I was obligated to serve by my responsibilities to him, for which my previous experiences had not prepared me, and they gave my life greater purpose than I had expected it to have. My life likely would have been a lot less interesting and rewarding had I not worked for him. A lot less fun, too.

In the course of our long association, we became friends, and I am obligated, too, by bonds of friendship to defend his reputation, as I did in one capacity or another while he was alive. I won’t present a false portrait of the man, puffing up his virtues and denying his defects. He was not someone who was particularly guarded about his reputation. I don’t mean his reputation didn’t matter to him. It certainly did. But he didn’t think his reputation—or anyone’s, for that matter—should be so delicate a thing that it couldn’t admit to failings, rough edges, and contradictions. What mattered was that you acted honorably in service of something more important than yourself, and you treated people fairly. He didn’t believe politicians had to adhere to strict rules of decorum that put their personalities in a straitjacket. He believed if you maintained your honor, which could be a demanding commitment, you didn’t have to sweat the sillier stuff of politics, the conventions on how to act and speak in public, the cautious image-making that made you appear as though you had been born middle-aged or the affected folksy modesty of the phony populist. He thought most voters could see through that stuff. You could be yourself, he believed—mostly, anyway.

He was himself most of the time, in private and public, a man, his mother observed, who has no sides, one personality for some people and another for others. He was lousy at posing. It’s not that he didn’t attempt it occasionally. Any of his staffers can attest to witnessing an overdose of fulsome charm accorded someone he was trying to impress, a visiting celebrity he admired or a profile writer. Those occasions were not many, mercifully, and were always comically unconvincing. You could tease him about it afterward, when he had relaxed, and the next time you caught him buttering up a new acquaintance and gave him a look, he’d likely flash a grin to acknowledge it and take it down a notch. But in his public persona, for most people, most of the time, he kept it real to a degree unusual for a politician. And most people seemed to appreciate it.

My responsibilities, as a friend, to defend his honor don’t require me to polish his image any more than he did, to smooth out his rough edges or clean up his language or refuse to acknowledge failings that he acknowledged. His reputation didn’t depend on those pretenses, not the reputation he cared about. Nobody gives a shit, boy, he typically responded when I urged him to tone it down a little, if I don’t act like… The ellipses represent a rotating cast of fellow politicians whom he felt were phonier than the job required. He often gave them an expletive for a middle name.

He was usually willing to cop to his flaws to voters, reporters, colleagues, to perfect strangers sometimes. He’d be embarrassed for himself and for me if I didn’t have the same confidence about what is really important and what isn’t. This account of him, of the public man seen from the private vantage point of an aide and friend, respects his wishes. Although he mentioned in an interview that he wanted me to write his biography, we never discussed the project in any detail. His time was too short by then, and we were racing to finish our last collaboration, his memoir, The Restless Wave. But I approached this book with his standard admonition to me squarely in mind: Cut the crap.

His prideful insistence on permitting as small a gap as possible between the public and the private John McCain was the essence of his charisma with voters, with the press, and with his friends. It was also, as you would expect, a recipe for regular trouble for a public figure with presidential ambitions because the quality most obviously shared by both the private and the public McCain was the habitual wiseass’s delight in getting a laugh. And wiseasses in politics, however entertaining they might be, can make their own lives a lot harder by making their rivals’ lives easier.

It often fell to me to remonstrate with him when his devil-may-care authenticity threatened to cause political problems or harm important relationships. During my tenure as his administrative assistant, I could be blunt with him, to the point of rudeness sometimes, and could even get away with nagging him when he refused to follow my advice. He might argue with me, both our voices raised. He might snap at me to drop it. He might just laugh at my concerns or ignore me. To my astonishment, he might say, You’re right. I’ll fix it. The record of when such concessions were meant sincerely and when they were meant to get me off his back is mixed. But there were enough of the former occasions that I didn’t give up trying.

He loved appearing on the late-night talk shows. He loved doing any shows hosted by comedians. He delighted in guest-hosting Saturday Night Live. He enjoyed trading insults with Jon Stewart. He eagerly agreed to offers of cameo roles in movie and television comedies. He fancied himself an amateur stand-up comedian, beginning every town hall appearance and even more formal public addresses with a litany of jokes he had been collecting, refining, and repeating forever. Before every turn on a comedy talk show, he would come up with a routine, canvassing friends and staff for new jokes to mix with his standards, and cram as many of them as he could into his exchanges with the host even if they had little relevance to the topics being discussed. He insisted on the approach despite protestations from the shows’ professionals that he should improvise his humor within the flow of the conversation.

In 2005 he was beginning to give serious consideration to running for president again. That same year he had appeared in a brief, inoffensive scene in the R-rated movie Wedding Crashers, which Matt Drudge had hyperbolically denounced as a boob raunch fest, after noting the senator’s appearance in it. McCain was scheduled to do The Tonight Show with Jay Leno the next day; anticipating a question about the Drudge thing, he came up with a line, or someone gave him a line, to make a joke of it. In Washington, I work with boobs every day, he told an appreciative Leno, earning loud laughs and applause from the studio audience.

There was at the time resentment among some of his colleagues over the frequency of his media appearances, and not just cable news hits but the Sunday-morning shows and, increasingly, entertainment media. The resentment was compounded by his tendency to get laughs at their expense. A senator with whom he was not on the friendliest of terms was once heard to exclaim to several appreciative colleagues that he had a great Sunday. You know what makes a great Sunday? he asked before answering his own question. A Sunday when McCain isn’t on TV. Someone relayed the comment to McCain, who laughed it off: He wishes he could get five minutes on cable on a Saturday. Still, he knew that not all of his colleagues were as thrilled by his comedic stylings as he was, and McCain Calls Colleagues Boobs on Leno stories weren’t going to help matters.

He had returned to Washington on the red-eye the morning after that show. I walked into his office not long after he arrived, and I shut the doors, which indicated that I was about to gripe about something, and he looked at me expectantly. I told him the next time he decided to make a joke at his colleagues’ expense, he might remember that should he decide to run for president again, he would be asking many for their support. Few Senate Republicans had signed on to his first campaign, in 2000, and he needed to do better to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2008.

"John, you can’t make fun of people on Leno at night and then ask them for their endorsement in the morning, I objected. He graciously conceded the point. You’re right, boy, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll be better."

While we were talking, his telecommunications counsel, Lee Carosi, was waiting outside the office to accompany him to a conference committee meeting, and she tried to hustle him out the door as soon as I opened it. As he left with her, he called over his shoulder to me, Goodbye, Mark, I’m going to meet with a bunch of boobs right now. I could hear him cackling down the corridor as he walked to the elevator.

We agreed I would go with him to New York the first time he hosted Saturday Night Live, in 2002, and stick close by him throughout rehearsals. My charge from his other political advisors was to make sure he didn’t agree to sketches that were so embarrassing he would elicit more ridicule from detractors than laughs from fans. I was to be especially vigilant, we all agreed, about any suggestion that he dress in drag, as Rudy Giuliani had agreed to do in his first appearance on the show.

The writers and cast convened in Lorne Michaels’s office on Monday evening to start tossing around sketch ideas, which the writers would start to flesh out the next day. Most were half-baked concepts and would never make it into the show, but all of them, predictably, made the guest host laugh. Happily, none of them tripped my censor alarms. By Wednesday, all the proposed sketches were written and read aloud in front of the entire cast and crew, and by Friday, the list had been pared down to a few more than could fit in the ninety-minute live show. The final cut would take place just after the live dress rehearsal Saturday evening. I reported to my colleagues that we could relax. While some skits were funnier than others, we didn’t need to worry that any would prove too embarrassing or controversial.

We were reading the newspapers in his dressing room on Friday afternoon between rehearsals. I was a cigarette smoker in those days, and as we had a half hour or so before his next rehearsal, I excused myself to go outside for a smoke. It took about twenty minutes and two elevators to exit the building, smoke a cigarette, pass through security, and get back to the floor where his dressing room was located. When I returned, I discovered the dresser helping him squeeze into a pair of snug fishnet stockings.

What’s going on?

This is his costume for the CD cover, the dresser responded.

What CD cover? I asked.

The CD cover in the Streisand bit.

The bit he was referring to was a pretend TV ad that had him dressed like a hotel lounge singer performing a medley of Barbra Streisand songs in his genuinely awful singing voice to promote a McCain Sings Streisand CD as payback for the outspoken liberal’s criticism of Republicans. In between murders of Streisand classics, the ad cut to the CD cover. For the cover photo, someone had decided to dress him in Streisand’s costume from The Owl and the Pussycat; she’d played a prostitute in the film. The costume in question was a tight-fitting dress with handprint appliques over the breasts and a pair of fishnet stockings. It looked better on Streisand.

We agreed no drag, I protested.

It’s not for the sketch. It’s just for the CD cover, the dresser replied.

Yeah, it’s just the CD cover, the agreeable McCain confirmed with one leg in fishnets and the other still bare.

No drag, no fishnets, no dresses, no women’s attire of any kind. We agreed, I practically shouted.

But— the dresser tried to interject.

But— his confederate implored.

You can’t, John, the killjoy aide persisted.

I guess I can’t, the crestfallen amateur comedian conceded.

In the end, they posed him awkwardly in a long T-shirt with a Superman emblem and a pair of white shorts, a facsimile of the Streisand costume on her Superman album. It wasn’t drag, technically. Everyone agreed the Streisand bit was the funniest sketch in the show.

He was a fascinating character to study at close quarters, capable right until the end of surprising you with qualities you hadn’t thought could fit compatibly in one personality. He was a great bunch of guys, staffers used to joke. He was romantic and cynical, hopeful and fatalistic. Having seen humanity at its best and worst in the same experience, he expected to see good and evil in every conflict, martial and political. He believed there were always, in every fight, good guys fighting bad guys on behalf of little guys. But his romanticism didn’t ignore reality. He saw the gray between the white of his convictions and the black of their antitheses. He was worldly, widely traveled, well informed, pragmatic, and familiar with all kinds of actors in all kinds of conflicts. He assured American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan that they were fighting forces of darkness. In Libya, he pleaded with an Islamic militant militia commander to join the provisional government in the hope that his presence would dissuade other jihadist militia leaders from attacking it.

His romanticism might seem naive at times or an expression of his orneriness because he was so tenacious. That tenacity, like others of his qualities, resided in his extraordinary capacity to hold on to hope in the grimmest situations. He rarely gave up because he rarely lost hope, no matter the setbacks he suffered. For all his chronic impatience, he would persevere for years, decades, in pursuit of a goal he believed was right and just. And he was drawn to people who did likewise, people who refused to accept permanent defeat, who held on to hope when experience taught them hope was for fools. He sponsored three comprehensive immigration bills, introduced over a span of eight years. Two passed the Senate with the support of incumbent presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But they all ultimately failed. They were big, time-consuming, exhausting efforts that McCain had poured his heart and soul into. They made him vulnerable to damaging attacks from rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. He risked a lot and fought as hard as he could to get them to the president’s desk. Their failure was extremely discouraging to the bill’s advocates, especially the defeat of the last effort, which had passed the Senate by a super-majority and died in the House before it could be signed by President Obama because House Republican leaders wouldn’t take it up. And yet, in the months after his brain cancer diagnosis, he was able to attend the last session of Congress and, despite a reluctant Republican congressional leadership and a hostile Republican president, discuss with staff and colleagues how to get negotiations started on a fourth immigration bill. He wanted to make one more attempt at putting together a coalition to solve a problem that shouldn’t be this damn hard to solve. We can get it started, anyway, he explained, sensing his listeners’ skepticism, even if I’m not around to see it finished.

A key provision of his signature campaign finance legislation, McCain-Feingold, formerly titled the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), was overturned by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The decision disheartened supporters who had toiled for nearly a decade to get the law passed. It upset McCain, too. He chewed out one of the lawyers on the legal team representing Citizens United, Ted Olson, for the hypocrisy of representing the plaintiff after having successfully defended the law before the Court in 2003, when he was solicitor general in the Bush administration. Olson had assured McCain at the time that he believed in the constitutionality and necessity of the law, having been convinced by the evidence that the current campaign finance system was corrupting lawmakers. McCain remained angry with those responsible for weakening the law. Anytime you mentioned the subject to him, he would repeat his disdainful observation about the justices who had ignored or rejected evidence of corruption. Not one of them ever ran for anything, he scoffed. But as was often the case when disappointment infuriated him, it also fueled his determination to find another way to accomplish his goal. Realistically, the political composition of the Court will have to change before real campaign finance limits are again established in law. But that didn’t stop him from seeking other ways to make political campaigns more transparent and politicians less corruptible.

He hated to quit. No matter how steep the climb. You could defeat his attempts to summit, but you couldn’t defeat his drive to keep trying, to explore new routes to get there. I never speculated with him about the psychological reasons for his tenacity. He would’ve laughed at me had I tried. But I suspected his refusal to give up causes that appeared hopeless was connected at least in part to the trauma that had humbled him more than any other experience, the one time when he gave up, when he truly lost hope, the lowest moment of his imprisonment, when he gave his captors a taped confession. Did the memory of the despair he had felt then, and the guilt he always felt for yielding to it, breed his fierce aversion to giving up? I assume so, but he probably would have mocked the suggestion, and undeniably, there were plenty of examples in his life before Vietnam of what might be described as his dogged refusal to face facts and give up.

He could be impatient in the calm and steadfast in adversity. When he decided on a course of action, he wanted to start on it immediately. The tobacco bill he sponsored in 1998 and pushed through committee could have rightly been assigned somewhere other than Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which he happened to chair at the time. But once he began meeting with interested parties and had grasped the dimensions of the problem, he saw how he might move a bill through his committee and just started acting like it was his problem to sort out. He pestered and cajoled Majority Leader Trent Lott to give Commerce the sole responsibility for a bill, while he was already in negotiations with the White House and with committee members, many of whom had conflicting interests on the outlines of a compromise. Before Lott officially acquiesced, John had staff planning a markup of a bill that had yet to be written, and was already starting in on Lott about how much floor time he could have to get it through the full Senate. The bill that the committee would send to the full Senate was mostly written during markup, as John negotiated with one member after another on scores of amendments, accepting some, revising others, and rejecting a few, until he had not only enough votes to report out the bill but a nearly unanimous consensus. Only one committee member voted against it.

To the observer unfamiliar with his methods and personality, the action around McCain could appear chaotic and his conduct impulsive. Both were often true. But the observation missed how well he thrived in those conditions. Bustling with energy and optimism, he might appear impatient and unfocused, but he had a goal, and he launched himself toward it day after day, until he won or lost. He was indefatigable. In all that action and appearances to the contrary, he was, in his peculiar fashion, relaxed. Steady strain, he admonished his overloaded staff when an important project was advancing or floundering and emotions were running high. It was a phrase he borrowed from his navy days that refers to the optimal condition of lines holding two ships together at sea.

He was the most restless person I ever knew, and there was a manic quality to that restlessness. You suspected he was worried he would lose something important if he didn’t cram more into his day than anyone else would cram into theirs. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour workdays were the norm. Crisscrossing the country almost every week, sometimes twice a week. Campaigning all over the country for almost anyone who asked for his help. Overseas trips were referred to as McCain death marches by exhausted colleagues and staffers who traveled with him. I remember one trip to Asia that included stops in five countries in eight days. We once flew to Hanoi for a single day of meetings, just days before his 1992 reelection. His weekends could be as busy as his weekdays. Racing around the state, holding town halls and press events, meeting with local officials, visiting military bases, frequent trips to Native American reservations.

He was an unusually hardy soul. He never seemed as tired as you were when you traveled with him or shared his long workday. He could nap anywhere to restore himself and was an especially sound sleeper on flights notable for heavy turbulence that had other passengers fingering their rosaries and looking at pictures of their kids. His dietary habits were a curious mix of high and low cuisine, at home in a Michelin-starred restaurant or in one of his favorite barbecue joints, coffee shops, or Mexican cafés. When he ate lunch in his office, which was most days, his usual fare would be familiar to an eighth-grader—a hot dog, a bag of potato chips, and for dessert, a package of Chuckles. His weight seldom varied: He was blessed with a metabolism that, like his energy, ran at more RPMs than most people could boast. But occasionally, he would add a couple pounds to his normally slim build and, noticing a tightness at the waistband, would go on a quick health kick, announcing to his personal assistant that he was on a diet. When she asked what he wanted for lunch, he answered, No hot dog. I’ll have a baloney sandwich on white bread. Did he still want chips and Chuckles? Sure.

The one place he reserved for relaxation, if you can call it that, was his and Cindy’s place in northern Arizona, euphemistically referred to as the cabin (when they purchased it, a single cabin was the only habitation on the property, and then they started expanding). He was totally unguarded there, which, since he wasn’t very guarded in public, was evident mostly in his dress: Cindy made sure the public John McCain was nicely attired. But in private, no one could save him from his indifference to the clothes he wore. At the cabin, you found him in ratty jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts, and sweatshirts. I Got My Crabs at Joe’s was a favorite.

There he would begin his mornings, usually earlier than guests who were visiting, with a cup of coffee, seated at his favorite spot on a bend of Oak Creek, waiting for others to wake. He might watch the birds while he sat there, especially the pair of rare black hawks and their offspring if they were in residence. He wouldn’t have the newspapers yet, and if you watched him unobserved from the window of a guesthouse, he appeared lost in thought or, to the untrained eye, idle. He was at peace. Or as much at peace as his restless nature could bear. It wouldn’t last long. Soon the papers would arrive, breakfast would be cooked and consumed, and the day’s activities would commence. They would end in the evening meal that he slowly grilled for hours while nursing one or two vodkas on ice. He’d hike the steep hills surrounding the hidden valley to an Indian cave or a point with a panoramic view. He would swim in his creek, a tributary of the Verde River that carves a spectacular canyon as it descends from Flagstaff; it can be a raging torrent in the spring after the snowmelt. In the drier months, it was a shallow stream that might be waist-deep in spots where rocks formed pools. A reporter once asked McCain how he got exercise, and he ran through his activities at the cabin. I hike and swim a lot there, he bragged. When asked if the creek was deep enough for swimming, he conceded that wasn’t always the case. I wade, he added, I wade. The answer became an inside joke among campaign staff, repeated when an ambitious response to a press query had to be modified following a subsequent disclosure.

Of all the images that come most readily to mind when I think of him, the most frequent is of him hustling down a hallway some minutes behind his crowded schedule, setting a brisk pace with that stiff-legged gait, staffers jogging to keep up as they hurriedly briefed him for whatever meeting or vote he was racing to, bounding down stairways at a controlled lurch, letting gravity do the work that his broken knee made difficult. Famously, he couldn’t elevate his arms above his shoulders for more than a few seconds. If his hair was out of place, he would pause wordlessly and bend at the waist while a staffer patted it down.

What else? What else? His incessant question to staff, to colleagues, to friends, to strangers. To the world. What else do you have to tell me, teach, reveal, entertain, provoke, summon? What else? I got nothing, John was my signal to terminate the conversation, at least my end of it. A quick look of disappointment invariably followed, and then off he went in search of another conversation to keep stimulated a mind that required little rest.

He was sentimental and more easily moved to tears than most people imagined. I once awoke from sleep on an overnight flight to Japan to observe him, seated across the aisle from me, watching the final scene of the movie Ghost, tears rolling down his cheeks as Demi Moore kissed goodbye the apparition of Patrick Swayze. It was easy to plant lines in a speech that would choke him up a little, triggering a memory of loss or sorrow or sacrifice. It might embarrass him, but it made a powerful impression on his audiences. If it got to me when I wrote it, I knew it would get to him. Dammit, you did it again, he would complain after. But we both knew it was affecting.

He was hard-nosed and a soft touch. I knew a couple of navy aviators who had been his students in Meridian, Mississippi, where he was a flight instructor in the early 1960s. You never got over it, one of them told me, flying with him in the back seat, yelling at you the whole time, banging his clipboard on the canopy, on your helmet. Jesus. I never asked him about it. I assumed he was trying to simulate the stress of flying in combat, although at that time he had yet to experience the real thing himself.

If he thought a witness before his committee was being evasive or lying to him, he would barrage the offender with hard-edged questions until he or she was visibly rattled, and, were it a confirmation hearing, while the witness’s family and friends in the audience watched with alarm. But if he thought a witness was being treated unfairly, he would fly to their defense.

He was capable of abusing and sympathizing with someone in the same set of circumstances. He was a leading critic of the Clinton administration’s policy concerning North Korea’s nuclear buildup. On a trip to South Korea, he had a moderately contentious discussion with the general commanding U.S. forces there, urging him to make clear to Congress the reservations he had about the policy: That’s your duty, General, he snapped. But he knew, too, that the general was in a tough spot. He was making his reservations clear to his superiors in the Pentagon and to the National Security Council; were he to be totally open with Congress, it would cost him influence within the administration. Politics would inevitably threaten his position anyway. He came to see McCain months later, in advance of a hearing where he knew he was likely to catch hell from some Republican members who planned to go after him in order to disparage the administration. Don’t worry about them, McCain advised him. They couldn’t carry your mess kit. If it gets out of line, I’ll step in.

McCain derided the Clinton administration’s feckless approach to negotiations with North Korea, complaining that every time the North Koreans crossed a line we had warned them not to cross, talks were suspended only to be resumed by the administration without conditions and with new incentives offered to Pyongyang. In speeches, interviews, and op-eds, he denounced the all carrot, no stick policy as appeasement, and rebuked the administration for reinforcing failure with failure. Chief negotiator Robert Gallucci, an intelligent and seasoned diplomat, occasionally came in for special abuse. Gallucci asked to meet with McCain. I sat in on the meeting, which was manageably tense as Gallucci briefed a skeptical McCain on the progress of negotiations, pausing patiently for questions and criticism. When Gallucci appeared to have finished, he asked if he could have a few minutes alone with John, and I left the meeting.

I was on the phone and didn’t see Gallucci leave a few minutes later. When I hung up, I walked into John’s office to ask what Gallucci had wanted. I found him writing an apology to Gallucci’s adolescent son, praising his father. Gallucci had told him that his son had asked him at the breakfast table the other day to explain why John McCain had called him an appeaser. John had apologized to the father and asked for his mailing address. He explained what he was doing and asked me to help draft it. How apologetic? I asked. Groveling, he replied. He showed me what he had written so far and told me what else he wanted to say. I revised a few lines, but the letter was undeniably his. I spoke with your father the other day, it began,

and he told me you had seen a recent comment I made about your dad and his work. I want you to know that I very much regret that remark. I have apologized to your father, and I apologize to you.

Your father and I disagree about the problem he spends so much time working on—the problem of North Korea. Although we disagree about how to solve that problem, we both love our country, and are trying our best to do our duty as God has given us light to see that duty. Your father is an honorable man, who is trying hard to act in the best interests of the United States.

Your father works hard because North Korea is such a difficult and dangerous problem. I admire his patience and his dedication to his work. He knows that your well-being, my children’s well-being and the well-being of everyone’s children may be seriously affected by how well he does his job. That’s why he works so hard, and feels so strongly about the problem.

I feel strongly about it, too, and sometimes in the heat of debate, people personalize a disagreement. I did that recently in my disagreement with your father. That was a mistake I regret very much, and I hope he and you will accept my apology. I give you my word, should I disagree with your father in the future, I will do so respectfully.

He kept his promise. Thereafter, although he remained a vocal critic of the policy, he kept the invectives to a minimum and avoided calling Mr. Gallucci anything harsher than mistaken.

McCain could be quick to anger and quicker to feel bad about it. Working on landmark legislation to protect the Grand Canyon, he was on the phone one day trying to persuade another western senator, the late Malcolm Wallop, to release his hold on the bill. He tried pleading and cajoling. He tried promises to address Wallop’s reservations in subsequent legislation, all to no avail. Suddenly, his demeanor changed from supplicant to avenging angel, and he erupted, spitting invectives at Wallop for thirty seconds or so. It’s the Grand Canyon, Malcolm! Don’t you get that? The! Grand! Fucking! Canyon! It’s only our greatest national treasure, and you don’t give a shit about it!

He slammed the phone down and, in the next instant, looked across his desk at me and another aide, John Raidt, as we stared at him slack-jawed. Arching his eyebrows to express uncertainty, he asked meekly, Too tough? Before we could answer, he had gotten Wallop back on the phone. Malcolm, I’m sorry, my old friend, I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I apologize. Not a minute had elapsed since he had excoriated Wallop, who, as far as Raidt and I could tell, said nothing in response to this rapid turn of affairs.

That his temper was notorious, a feature of profiles and commentary, had much to do with the fact that its outbursts were usually directed at his peers and other powerful people, many of whom weren’t used to receiving abuse from a colleague. I never observed him lose his temper with a president. But several times I overheard him give the commander in chief a dose of straight talk, criticizing an administration decision or action as stupid, foolish, naive, and other unflattering adjectives, often punctuating the criticism with See what I mean? But he always stood up to take the call and punctiliously addressed his listener as Mr. President throughout the conversation.

He would bark at staff, scold us, and argue with us, sometimes at high volume, but rarely would he really blow up at one of us and deliver a memorable dressing-down. There were a few times. But it wasn’t until the months before his cancer diagnosis when staff started to notice he was getting much shorter with them, harsher in disagreements, and unwilling to drop the matter when the staffer had yielded with a Yes sir, will do. They had started to worry then that there was something wrong with him, and a few staffers mentioned their concerns to Rick Davis and me. But in the almost three and a half decades preceding that trying time, he had been a demanding, blunt, teasing, profane, fair, funny, sometimes difficult, and often inspiring boss. The tenure for McCain staff was years longer than the average tenure for Hill staff. Most of his staff loved him. All of them respected him.

He teased us constantly, introducing us to VIPs as people with checkered backgrounds. He introduced a junior staffer to General David Petraeus as a parolee in a work-release program, and the young man was rewarded with a sincere Good for you, son from the general. Or we might be a recovering [fill in the blank] addict just out of rehab. The eccentric character actor Gary Busey visited the office once, and McCain declared that the aide staffing the meeting was just back from Betty Ford’s. The actor’s face lit up as he announced, Me too! and asked, What were you in for?

McCain was cheap, out of ignorance, partly. He didn’t need to worry about money, and while he understood things like inflation rates and cost-of-living increases in the abstract, he paid less attention to their effects on real prices and wages. Once a year, as his administrative assistant, I met with him to go over proposed fiscal year-end bonuses and salary raises, holding a sheet of paper listing all the staff, their current salaries, and the bumps I thought they had earned. In every one of those meetings, McCain was surprised about the salaries we were paying, which were, I assured him, no more than the average, and modest in a city as expensive as Washington. He donated to charity every salary raise he received, and I don’t think he had any idea how much he was being paid. He would have considered it a fortune, as he did the salaries of his senior staff. How much are we paying him? he’d ask with a look of astonishment and, when I confirmed the amount he was staring at, Good God! Yet not once did he refuse my recommendation.

He regularly encouraged others to adopt his parsimony. An aide was tasked with purchasing a new sound system for the television in John’s condo, which John was having trouble hearing clearly. As the staffer stood in line at the Best Buy register, he noticed a stack of Saving Private Ryan DVDs on sale for $9.99. Thinking the movie’s opening D-Day sequence was ideal to demonstrate the quality of the senator’s new surround sound, he added a copy to the purchase. After installing the system and leaving detailed operating instructions next to the remote, he informed John that it was all set up and ready to go.

"Oh, and they had copies of Saving Private Ryan on sale, so I picked one up for you."

Who told you to do that?

Um, no one, but I know you liked it, and I thought what a great movie to watch with the surround sound.

Take it back.

I can’t, it was on sale.

Don’t do that again.

With that, the exasperated aide reached in his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, explaining, Fine, I’ll buy it, then. John nodded and took the money.

Seated next to him on a flight to California, his friend and longtime fund-raiser Carla Eudy purchased the airline’s Wi-Fi service so she could respond to emails on the flight. A skeptical McCain observed the transaction. How much did you just pay for that? he asked. Eight dollars, she replied. That’s a waste of money, he rebuked her, why don’t you just read a book? Carla shot him a look of irritation and snapped, It’s my money, and I’ll spend it on whatever I want. I’ve got work to do. Among her emails during that flight was one from the Senate office, asking her to tell McCain that Vladimir Putin had included his name on a list of Americans forbidden to travel to Russia, which it delighted him to learn. He immediately began dictating emails he wanted Carla to send, asking for more information. I guess I won’t be spending spring break in Siberia this year, he told her, a line he would repeat again and again to reporters and other audiences, cracking himself up each time.

Yet for all his frugality about expenses, he was one of the more generous people I’ve known. He tipped generously and never failed to pick up the check at dinner, no matter the size of the party. He was an easy touch for panhandlers. He gave liberally to charities. He was bighearted. He never refused his help to a friend or former aide struggling with a serious problem. If a former staffer lost a job or was miserable in one, McCain would make call after call recommending him or her for a new position. If none could be found, he’d call me into his office and instruct me to try to find a place for the person back on staff.

He split evenly with me the royalties from the books we collaborated on, an uncommon arrangement, to say the least. When his presidential campaign went broke in the summer of 2007, senior campaign staff had to stop taking salaries and agree to become volunteers for the remainder of the year. I had two mortgages, two kids in private school, and a spouse who had given up her job to raise them. McCain knew it would be hard for me to work for free for six months. He called his literary agent and instructed her to assign to me all of the remaining advance we were owed for his soon-to-be-published new book. He said nothing to me about it. I found out when I received the check. When I went to thank him, he cut me off with You did the work, and then he changed the subject.

He was an avid sports fan. He often joked that he would stay up late to watch the bed wetters play the thumb suckers if there were no other games available. He was a devoted follower of all Arizona’s teams, college and professional. The Coyotes, the Cardinals, the Diamondbacks, the Suns, the Sun Devils, the Wildcats, the Grand Canyon University Antelopes all claimed him as their number one celebrity fan. He went to their games whenever he could. Games he couldn’t attend in person, he watched on TV or checked the scores on his phone, doing it surreptitiously only when he was chairing a hearing or occupied with some other official duty. He rarely felt it necessary in social settings to disguise the fact that he was more interested in how his guys were doing than he was by the company he was in. He became friends with some of the players and particularly close friends with Larry Fitzgerald of the Cardinals, Luis Gonzalez of the Diamondbacks, and Shane Doan of the Coyotes.

McCain wasn’t a political fan. He was a fan’s fan, intense, loyal, knowledgeable, cheering on his guys with his injured arms thrust straight out in front of him, thumbs up, booing bad calls, expressing without any thought to appearances all the joys and disappointments of a sports nut. When the L.A. Dodgers celebrated clinching their division title in 2013 by jumping in his beloved Diamondbacks’ pool, McCain reacted like any other Diamondback fan with access to social media. He denounced the insult on Twitter, calling it a no-class act by a bunch of overpaid, immature, arrogant, spoiled brats! Adding, for good measure, The Dodgers are idiots. He could walk into a ballpark and not be booed, although probably not in Dodgers Stadium. More often than not, he received an ovation, one of very few politicians regularly accorded that courtesy. Fans knew he was one of them. He took care to make sure he was. He talked to anyone who approached him at a game, took pictures, signed autographs, engaged in brief discussions of the game.

The sport he loved most was boxing. He was a passionate fight fan, as he had once been an amateur fighter at the Naval Academy. He always described himself as a mediocre high school and college athlete, but, as with all things he cared for, in his youth and in his old age, he brought intensity to the pursuit, almost a ferocity that seemed to come naturally to him and partially compensated for limitations in skill. The late journalist Bob Timberg, in his insightful book The Nightingale’s Song, captured McCain’s style in the ring, the style he brought to other contests as well. Unschooled as a boxer, Timberg wrote, McCain’s style was to charge to the center of the ring and throw punches until someone went down.

He had an acute sense of fairness that was actuated by the exploitation of fighters. For years, he and filmmaker Ken Burns pleaded with presidents of both parties to pardon posthumously the legendary fighter Jack Johnson, whose only crimes had been to have a larger-than-life personality and become the heavyweight champion of the world. Fairness drove McCain’s efforts to protect fighters from unethical promoters, especially journeyman fighters, many of whom ended their boxing careers broke and broken, without pension or prospects. His sense of fairness provoked reactions to the fights themselves when he felt the judges had robbed a fighter of a decision.

He was at the classic 1997 welterweight title fight between Pernell Whitaker and Oscar De La Hoya and was beside himself at the decision. Everyone ringside, including De La Hoya promoter Bob Arum, heard him yelling that Whitaker had been robbed. And by the next day, everyone he knew in the sport, and a good many people who had a merely passing interest in it, if any, had heard from him on the subject.

His sense of fairness was alert even to small examples of thoughtlessness. Late in his public life he finally agreed to let an aide drive him. He had always had an aide designated to drive with him. For many years it was his longest-serving staffer, Joe Donoghue. Most of the time Joe rode in the passenger seat, taking the wheel only when John arrived at his destination, couldn’t find a parking spot, and let Joe sort it out. After the 2008 election, aides convinced him he was too distracted to drive, as he was constantly talking on his phone while at the wheel. When you drove him, you had to get him through Washington’s notoriously sluggish traffic to reach his destination more or less on time even though he had put off leaving fifteen minutes longer than he should have. You had to get him through the traffic without, as many drivers did, cutting in front of a line of cars waiting to pass through a bottleneck. You got a lecture if you did, a stern one. See those people, that guy right there giving you the finger? You deserve it. You see all those people behind him? See them? You just screwed them. Don’t. Do it. Again.

He disliked the coddling he and his colleagues received, the routine perks of senatorial life that he thought were intended not just as conveniences or security precautions but to elevate them as a privileged class. In the spring of 1994, McCain exited the old terminal at National Airport after arriving from Phoenix. He walked with an aide to the parking lot reserved, free of charge, for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and foreign diplomats, conveniently located mere steps from the terminal. He noticed a young, very pregnant woman struggling with her luggage shooting him a disdainful look as she cut through the VIP lot on her way to some more distant lot, where she no doubt had been charged a fee to park. Goddammit, he muttered, that’s not right. When he arrived at the office, he instructed staff to prepare an amendment to whatever bill was pending before the Senate, which would open to the public airport parking lots reserved for senators and charge the same fee to everyone who used them, U.S. senator and expectant mother alike. To his chagrin, his amendment was defeated 53 to 44, after causing considerable ill will among colleagues in both parties, a few of whom had the courage to debate it on the Senate floor.

He didn’t like any accommodation reserved for senators only, including the elevators in the Capitol Building off-limits to unaccompanied staffers, custodial workers, lobbyists, journalists, and the throngs of tourists who, in pre-9/11 days, were allowed to wander most of its halls without supervision. He went out of his way to beckon passersby to share an elevator with him. After stepping into an elevator in the Russell Building once, he motioned to two guys in blue shirts with mops and rolling buckets to ride with him. No, thanks, Senator. We’ll get the next one, they declined politely. C’mon, guys, he shot back, whatever you’re doing is more important than what I’m doing, and with a nod of thanks, they joined him. A family of sightseers was welcomed into the paneled sanctuary of a senators-only elevator in the Capitol with the encouragement to act like you own the place. Because you do.

When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in 1997, one of his first instructions to aides was to hang on the hearing room walls the official portraits of as many past committee chairmen as they could locate in the Senate archives. The collection grew to around fifty by the time they were done. He had them all reframed and hung in chronological order. He loved to walk constituents or reporters down the marble hallway from his senate office to the hearing room, where he would point at the portraits, asking, Remember this guy? No, well how about this guy? He would go in that fashion until he had selected ten or so of his forgotten predecessors. You know, these guys thought they were really big deals.

He was generous with his time and stopped to talk with anyone who wished to shake his hand or exchange a few words or take a picture with him in hallways and airports and at sporting events. He was usually running late to catch a flight and talking on his cell phone. But he would almost always pause to take a selfie with anyone who stopped him, answer their questions, and ask them a few in return. This will all be over someday, he routinely reminded himself and aides who were accompanying him, and no one’s gonna give a shit who I used to be. He knew that whatever inconvenience his celebrity might cause him, he would miss all of it when it was gone. Once in a great while he would be irritable when importuned, if he was focused on a game or hurrying somewhere with his family or engaged in conversation with someone else. But that was very rare. He knew who he worked for, and he accepted that they were entitled to his time and attention, no matter how little of it he had available. He was usually willing to accept abuse as well. His town halls in Arizona were attended by detractors and often featured lengthy complaints about a position he had taken and a few loud jeers from the crowd. He didn’t accept opprobrium meekly. He gave as good as he got, but he didn’t resent it, either. He began almost every town hall promising to speak briefly, after which he would open it up for your questions, comments, and insults, and he meant it. Voters were allowed to give him a hard time, he said. And he was obliged to take it.

John Raidt recalls watching a woman tear into McCain for five minutes at the Arizona State Fair on the issue of abortion. He silently nodded throughout her diatribe. She was so aggressive that Raidt made a couple of attempts at intervening, only to be waved off by the senator. Appreciating his forbearance, the woman eventually moderated her tone and they settled into a good, candid discussion. After they had finished and she had walked away, he didn’t make any smart remarks about the encounter. He told Raidt he had appreciated his attempted intercession, but she had a right to express her views as forcefully as she wanted to, and he had a duty to listen. He admired the courage of her convictions, he added.

He hated motorcades. He hated the fuss, the procession of motorcycles and squad cars and black SUVs with tinted windows. He hated the inconvenience imposed on people trying to go about their business in a traffic jam caused by him. He didn’t dwell on his disappointment the night he lost the election for president, but chose to look on the bright side. No more motorcades, he rejoiced moments after being told he could go ahead and deliver his concession speech. After a campaign event in Winston-Salem, while riding in a long line of black SUVs carrying the candidate, campaign staff, and Secret Service to the airport, he noticed all the exits to the airport had been closed until his motorcade passed, with traffic backed up at each one. He was beside himself. How many people are going to miss their flight because of me? How many? he yelled to no one in particular. The head of his Secret Service detail explained that he hadn’t ordered the closings; local law enforcement had taken the unnecessary precaution upon themselves.

Well, dammit, Billy, don’t let them do that.

They don’t always ask, sir. But we’ll make sure they know how you feel about it.

Make sure they know how I feel about it before they do it, okay?

Yes, sir.

Motorcades were part of living in the bubble. And he hated the bubble, hated its constraints, its barriers to normal experiences. He wanted to be in the world, not protected from it. He wanted to go to the ball game or the movies, eat in a restaurant, buy a cup of coffee, shop at the grocery store, browse a bookstore without an intervening force preventing incidental human contact. He put off accepting Secret Service protection as long as he could in 2008, until his pleading family and senior aides wore down his resistance. On election night, he dismissed his detail with genuine gratitude but firmly when the plan had been to continue protection for another week or so. The next morning, surprised Phoenicians encountered him as he happily walked with Cindy to their neighborhood Starbucks to get his morning cappuccino, with no more protection than a little sunscreen, he recalled.¹

He disliked being stuck in someone else’s security bubble as much as he did in one of his