With the Presidential election moving into full swing, I believe it to be appropriate to take a look at the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain.
Who is John McCain? He keeps being described as a war hero. What is the basis for that?
In October of 1967, more than 40 years ago, while on a bombing run over Hanoi, his A-4 Skyhawk was hit by surface-to-air missiles; for five and a half years, he would be a prisoner of war. When his captors realized that he was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., they offered to release him ahead of other POWs as a gesture of goodwill. He refused the offer, resulting in even harsher treatment from his guards.
However, it now appears that a senior officer among the prisoners ordered him to refuse the offer. Thus if McCain had accepted the offer, he would have disobeyed a direct order from a superior and been subject to court marshal. It is hardly heroic to obey an order in the military. Worse, after four days, McCain made an anti-American propaganda "confession." McCain later said, "everyone has their breaking point" and everyone does, but most prisoners of war did not break.
He spent five years in captivity and was tortured, but so were many others who have never claimed to be heroes, and who never used that to build careers for themselves. McCain deserves sympathy for the pain that was inflicted on him by his Vietnamese captors, but it does not make him a hero.
But how did he get where he is now? He was the son and grandson of four-star admirals. Many expected that he would follow in their footsteps. But he graduated fifth from the bottom of the class of 1958. Because of the influence of his family of famous admirals, McCain was leap-frogged ahead of more qualified applicants and granted a coveted slot to be trained as a navy pilot.
On July 3, 1965 McCain married Carol Shepp. In 1980 he divorced her. A month after the divorce, McCain married Cindy Lou Hensley, heiress to Phoenix-based Hensley & Co., the nation's second-largest Anheuser-Busch distributor. McCain followed his young millionaire wife back to Arizona where her father helped catapult McCain into politics. Today, Cindy Hensley McCain is chairwoman of Hensley's board of directors. Hensley and Company financial reports show assets worth a minimum of $28 million for the McCains.
McCain has built a reputation for rectitude, but his record there is more mixed then is generally realized. McCain was one of the Keating five. Charles Keating was convicted of racketeering and fraud in both state and federal court after his Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $3.4 billion. McCain intervened on behalf of Keating after Keating gave McCain at least $112,000 in contributions. In the mid-1980s, McCain made at least nine trips on Keating's airplanes, and three of those were to Keating's luxurious retreat in the Bahamas. McCain's wife and father-in-law also were the largest investors in a Keating shopping center; the Phoenix New Times called it a "sweetheart deal."
In the Senate, McCain created a reputation as a maverick, best known for the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act of 2002. But now that he is running for the Presidency he promises to appoint judges to the Supreme Court like John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, who have emasculated the act with their decisions.
He voted against the Bush tax cut, on the ground that it was a give-away to the rich and would cause huge deficits, but now as a presidential candidate he insists that we must make it permanent.
He tries to disassociate himself from President Bush. But when Bush attacked presidential candidate Barack Obama in an address to the Israeli Knesset equating the willingness to negotiate with enemies with appeasement of Adolf Hitler, McCain joined Bush in the smear. He ignored the fact that all previous presidents negotiated with our adversaries from Richard Nixon and China, to John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev, to Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev. He ignores former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s famous quote, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," which remarks were made at a White House luncheon on June 26, 1954.
In South Carolina, McCain was asked when he thought the military might "send an air mail message to Tehran. McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song, "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," he sang to the tune of "Barbara Ann." He seems to have arrived at a point where he makes Bush sound responsible.
He also tried to disassociate himself from Bush by criticizing him for the way the Katrina disaster was handled by saying that unlike Bush he would not have flown over the area, but rather would have landed. I wonder how many of the people who lost their homes would be reassured by knowing that the difference between Bush’s neglect and McCain’s is that McCain would have visited them and looked upon their misery first hand.
If McCain was ever the maverick that he presented himself to be, which is doubtful, he is not that man any longer.
Emil Scheller
