John McCain Biography

Contents 1 CHAPTER I: WHO IS JOHN McCAIN? 2 CHAPTER II: AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY 3 CHAPTER III: PRISONER OF WAR 4 CHAPTER IV: BACK IN THE U.S.A. 5 CHAPTER V: ARIZONA, THE EARLY YEARS 6 CHAPTER VI: THE SENATE CALLS 7 CHAPTER VII: THE KEATING FIVE 8 CHAPTER VIII: OVERCOMING SCANDAL, MOVING ON 9 CHAPTER IX: McCAIN BECOMES THE 'MAVERICK' 10 CHAPTER X: THE 'MAVERICK' RUNS 11 CHAPTER XI: THE 'MAVERICK' AND PRESIDENT BUSH 12 CHAPTER XII: THE 'MAVERICK' GOES ESTABLISHMENT

CHAPTER I: WHO IS JOHN McCAIN?Edit

Nobody ever called John McCain simple.

And as the four-term Republican senator from Arizona continues in his bid to become the nation's 44th president, it's not likely that anyone will. Especially as they get to know even more about the decorated veteran, former prisoner of war and frequent talk-show guest.

For all the different names applied to him over the years - "maverick" is perhaps the best remembered - McCain is difficult to label.

"Complex" is as good a place to start as any. Some might even say contradictory.

McCain is hawkish on Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and even Iran and North Korea. He is pushing to increase troop levels in Iraq. Yet as a congressman, McCain voted against extending Reagan's Marine mission in Lebanon.

In the 1990s, he crusaded for campaign-finance reform. In the 1980s, he vacationed in the Bahamas with savings-and-loan tycoon Charles Keating.

He ascended to Congress amid President Ronald Reagan's first term and still calls himself a "Reagan Republican." Two decades later, Democrats approached him about changing his party affiliation.

He voted against President George W. Bush's sweeping tax relief package in 2001, but he subsequently voted to extend those tax cuts.

A voracious reader well-versed in history, literature and popular culture, he graduated fifth from the bottom of his 1958 graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

He is cozy with the national press but distant to Arizona reporters.

Running for president in 2000, McCain overtly appealed to independents, Democrats and centrist Republicans, promising to forge a new "McCain Majority." He scorned powerful leaders of the Religious Right, denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance."

Then, in May 2006, McCain turned around and delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Now, his campaign theme is "Common-sense conservatism."

What gives?

"I think life is a series of contradictions," former McCain political consultant Jay Smith once observed. "Life is complex. Who among us is so simplistic that you can just pigeonhole?"

Questions about his sometimes-prickly personality and temperament have dogged him for years. He wrote in a memoir about how as a toddler he would get angry and would hold his breath until he blacked out. Yet his longtime staff members, friends and even his ex-wife remain fiercely loyal to him.

"It's fun to be around him," said Deb Gullett, who cut her political teeth working for McCain before embarking on her own brief political career in the Arizona Legislature. "He cuts up all the time. If you screw up, you feel worse about it than he does."

McCain has described himself as a "wise ass." His edgy and sarcastic sense of humor helped cement his media image as a straight-talking "maverick" and made him a hit with late-night TV hosts such as Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. Other times, his mouth has gotten him in trouble. Back when he entered politics, he once referred to the Arizona retirement community of Leisure World as "Seizure World." During the Clinton administration, it was a joke about presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton's looks that prompted criticism.

McCain isn't easy to figure out.

And rarely predictable.

'I'm older than dirt'

John Sidney McCain III was born Aug. 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, the namesake of his father and grandfather, both distinguished four-star Navy admirals.

In July 1967, McCain, a naval aviator, barely escaped death on the USS Forrestal in a fiery disaster that killed 134 of his shipmates and nearly sunk the aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.

That October, his A-4 Skyhawk attack bomber was blown out of the sky over North Vietnam, landing him in a prisoner of war camp where he endured severe brutality and would spend more than five years.

Those days seem long ago.

If elected in 2008, McCain would take office as America's oldest president. He will turn 72 a couple of months before Election Day.

"I'm older than dirt, and I have more scars than Frankenstein" is McCain's stock response to questions about his age.

Yet he keeps going at a pace he set 25 years ago, when voters first sent him to Washington.

In Congress, McCain earned the nickname "White Tornado" by working a relentless schedule.

During the 2006 congressional midterm campaign season, McCain stumped for GOP hopefuls in every state, appearing at 346 candidate and party events and raising $10.5 million. He flew nearly 138,000 miles.

McCain keeps in shape by walking. He has hiked nearly every trail in Arizona, from the well-known to the obscure. During a 1990s trip to Lake Powell, he led his party through a slot canyon where the water almost covered their heads.

At the time, Gullett jokingly dubbed it "The McCain Death March."

But there are signs that McCain is mortal.

A scar from a serious 2000 skin cancer operation still is visible on the side of his face.

Aides often must comb McCain's hair before he goes on TV - his war-damaged shoulders prevent him from doing it himself.

In fate's hands

Here is a contradiction that probably stumps even McCain.

He used to brag how his insurgent 2000 White House bid disrupted Bush's anticipated GOP coronation and how he spent the early part of Bush's first term as the president's No. 1 Republican rival. He has long criticized Bush's and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war and bucked the White House over the treatment of war on terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

In the irony of ironies, McCain now finds his presidential ambitions anchored to Bush's failing poll numbers.

McCain and Bush's Iraq policy are closely linked, and opponents will seek to saddle him with the war and other assorted liabilities associated with Bush's presidency.

For all of McCain's early organizational maneuvering, which has been substantial, the 2008 election may be decided by forces he can scarcely control.

Timing is everything.

If McCain can win the Republican nomination, he must convince Americans - Republicans, Democrats and independents - that they should replace an unpopular Republican president with another Republican. That, itself, is a challenge.

And then there is Iraq.

McCain was a vocal advocate for toppling the government of Saddam Hussein. In January, Bush took McCain's suggestion to up the ante in Baghdad by announcing he would deploy another 21,500 troops.

That came two months after Democrats swept Republicans out of power on Capitol Hill, largely because of the war question.

Even some Republicans are wary of the escalation.

Will Iraq doom McCain, too? One potential Democratic presidential rival quickly named Bush's escalation "the McCain Doctrine." McCain says he is acting on principle and angling to avoid another humiliating U.S. defeat a la Vietnam.

"Knowing him, he's not going to back down on it for political reasons," said Jay Smith, his former political consultant. "But like it or not, facts are facts, and upwards of 70 percent of the American people today are against our involvement in Iraq.

"If Iraq is the Number 1 issue by the time the primaries roll around, I think John McCain's chances will be diminished. But if there's victory of some kind, or the implementation of a genuine exit-strategy, and people start thinking about other issues, his chances improve."

Beyond politics, the war is personal for McCain.

In 2006, Jimmy McCain, his son, signed up for the Marine Corps and could go to Iraq later this year. His older son, Jack, is attending the Naval Academy, just as his dad, his grandfather and his great-grandfather did.

"I cannot tell you the countless hours we have talked about the many ways of giving back to their country," wife and mom Cindy McCain wrote about the couple's sons in an Aug. 6, 2006, Arizona Republic guest column.

"It is and always will be a common thread running deeply within our family."

As the 2008 presidential race takes shape, McCain is in a complicated spot.

But for McCain, things never were simple.

CHAPTER II: AT THE NAVAL ACADEMYEdit

It's 1955 in Annapolis, Md., and Midshipman John McCain and his roommate, Frank Gamboa, are eating lunch at the mess hall at the U.S. Naval Academy. A first classman, a "firstie" in Navy parlance, begins dressing down a Filipino steward.

Gamboa hardly notices this exchange, but young John McCain is paying close attention. Since the steward is an enlisted man, he cannot fight back. The firstie is being a bully, a no-no at the Naval Academy.

The man outranks everyone at the table. McCain and Gamboa are barely past being plebes, the school's lowest rank. Fearing trouble, other underclassmen eat quickly and leave. The browbeating continues.

Finally, McCain can take no more.

"Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size?" McCain blurts out.

There is a moment of silent shock at the table.

"What did you say?" replies the firstie.

"Why don't you stop picking on him?" McCain says. "He's doing the best he can."

"What is your name, mister?" snaps the firstie, an open threat to put McCain on report.

"Midshipman John McCain the Third," McCain says, looking straight at the upperclassman. "What's yours?"

The firstie saw the look in McCain's eyes. And fled.

A family in service

John McCain had plenty to live up to at the Naval Academy.

There was his grandfather, Adm. John "Slew" McCain, Class of 1906, a grizzled old sea dog who commanded aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II. And his father, Adm. Jack McCain, Class of 1931, won the Silver Star for his command of two submarines during World War II.

It was McCain's grandfather who set the course for the family.

"With his bony frame, hooked nose and sunken cheeks, he looked at least 10 years older than his age," E.B. Potter wrote of Slew McCain in a 1985 biography of Navy legend William "Bull" Halsey. "Junior officers and enlisted men often referred to him as Popeye the Sailor Man, whom he superficially resembled."

Slew McCain's peers at the Naval Academy were Halsey and Chester Nimitz, who would become major commanders during World War II. One of Slew McCain's first assignments was as executive officer on a gunboat in the Philippines commanded by Nimitz.

"They would hunt and fish, and every now and then they would stop in for their mail," grandson John McCain once recalled in a TV interview. "Can you imagine?"

In the 1930s, the military passed a regulation that aircraft carriers could be commanded only by aviators. Already in his 50s, McCain's grandfather went to flight school.

He crashed five airplanes but got his wings and went on to command a carrier. He eventually would rise to command all U.S. carriers in the Pacific, under Halsey. Planes under Slew McCain's command participated in a number of battles, including Leyte Gulf, where he met waves of Japanese kamikaze attacks and once sank 49 Japanese ships in a day.

Slew McCain was the quintessential combat officer - a throwback, a gregarious, beloved commander who didn't worry whether his uniform was pressed, McCain said. But the war, and his lifestyle, taxed his health.

"He had a very hard life to start with," his grandson recalled. "He smoked and he drank and he didn't take care of himself. Also, the strain of operations in World War II was immense."

When the Japanese surrendered aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, Slew McCain was there. He can be seen in the famous picture, standing in the front row of U.S. officers. He was 61 years old, but he looked 80.

In fact, he had been sick for two weeks, at least since a cease-fire was called on Aug. 15, 1945. Around that time, the elder McCain talked with John Thach, who recalled the conversation in the book Carrier Warfare in the Pacific.

McCain had been staying in his sea cabin, popping his head out only occasionally.

"Admiral, you don't feel very well, do you?" Thach asked.

"Well," Slew McCain responded, "this surrender has come as kind of a shock to all of us. I feel lost. I don't know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don't know whether I know how to relax or not. I am in an awful letdown. I do feel bad."

On the day of the surrender, the old man would see his son, John S. McCain Jr., a submarine commander. The younger McCain had been given the job of escorting Japanese submarines into Tokyo Bay. Father and son posed for a picture aboard the Proteus, a submarine tender.

It was the last time John McCain Jr. would see his father alive.

Four days after the surrender aboard the Missouri, Slew McCain flew back to Coronado, Calif. Thach went to visit him and noted that he looked even worse. A few minutes into the visit, McCain said he wanted to lie down.

Thach went to San Diego. A short time later, he got a phone call.

John "Slew" McCain had died of a heart attack. There is speculation that he may have suffered an earlier heart attack at sea but never sought treatment.

"My father could not get home in time for the funeral and burial in Arlington National Cemetery," John McCain wrote in the foreword to Alton Keith Gilbert's 2006 biography of Slew McCain, A Leader Born. "Just as well, he told my mother, because 'it would have killed me.' I don't think my father ever knew a single day, through the many trials and accomplishments of his own life, when he didn't mourn the loss of his father. Their love for one another was complete."

McCain's grandfather and father would become the first father-son team to reach the rank of four-star admiral.

"My father spoke of him to me often, as an example of what kind of man I should aspire to be," John McCain recalled.

Halsey biographer Potter wrote that "there were few wiser or more competent officers in the Navy than Slew McCain."

The Navy honored him in 1953 by naming a new destroyer the USS John S. McCain.

Slew McCain is buried next to his brother, William Alexander McCain, a cavalry officer known as "Wild Bill."

Bill McCain, who graduated from West Point, chased Mexican insurgent Pancho Villa with Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, served as an artillery officer during World War I and attained the rank of brigadier general.

In his 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers, McCain details his Scotch-Irish roots, noting that his great-aunt was a descendant of Robert the Bruce, an early Scottish king.

On this continent, McCain's roots date to the American Revolution. An early ancestor, John Young, served on Gen. George Washington's staff. After the family moved to Mississippi, a number of McCain's ancestors fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.

McCain's grandfather grew up on the family plantation in Carroll County, Miss. Slew McCain attended the University of Mississippi, then entered the Naval Academy.

'He was a tough guy'

Like his grandfather, John McCain was no scrubbed angel when he reached the Naval Academy in 1954. At Episcopal High, a private boarding school in Alexandria, Va., McCain was a rebel, earning the nickname "McNasty" from classmates who didn't dare cross him.

McCain was an excellent lightweight wrestler in high school. One of McCain's school friends, Malcolm Matheson, said McCain was no bully but took no guff.

"I always got along with him, but he was a tough guy," Matheson said. "He was small but feisty. He's always been that way. . . . If you messed with him, you probably would end up on the wrong side of it."

Despite his rebellious nature, McCain was destined to attend the Naval Academy, like his grandfather and his father before him.

Ron Thunman, who commanded McCain's plebe, or first-year, class, had no idea that McCain came from aNavy family but said the young man immediately impressed him. The plebe battalions competed in sports, McCain as a boxer.

What he lacked in skill he made up for in ferocity, Thunman said.

"I got a real kick out of him," Thunman said. "It was clear that nobody was going to take him down without a hell of an effort."

Thunman said he noticed McCain had a quick mind and a good sense of humor. He quickly emerged as a leader in his group.

"He stood out because he was just one of those people that you liked and you got a chuckle out of," Thunman said. "He was somebody who was always moving at top speed in one direction or another. He was never one to hang back."

A free spirit, McCain chafed under the strict rules of the academy. Each year, he was always in the "Century Club," students with more than 100 demerits.

It was mostly small stuff: messy quarters, unshined shoes, reporting late to formation, things like that, recalled Gamboa, who roomed with McCain for three years.

"He and I, we got a lot of demerits," Gamboa said. "It was almost impossible not to."

McCain's grades were good in the subjects he enjoyed, such as literature and history. Gamboa said McCain would rather read a history book than do his math homework. He did just enough to pass the classes he didn't find stimulating.

"He stood low in his class," Gamboa said. "But that was by choice, not design."

On weekends, everyone wanted to hang out with McCain, who grew up around Washington and knew all the best parties. And with his good looks, McCain attracted plenty of women.

"We used to call him 'John Wayne McCain,'" Gamboa said. "He was graying at the temples, and it made him more dashing. . . . It was a real adventure living with John."

McCain's bio in the academy yearbook said it all:

"Sturdy conversationalist and party man. John's quick wit and clever sarcasm made him a welcome man at any gathering. His bouts with the academic and executive departments contributed much to the stockpiles of legends within the hall."

One such bout almost ended in disaster.

The further cadets rose in the academy, the fewer demerits they were allowed. Naturally, McCain was pushing the limit as his senior year neared an end.

McCain already had been skirting the rules. He and some friends had bought a television, which was prohibited. They would gather in their rooms on weekends, watching boxing on Friday nights and a Western, Maverick, on Sundays. The men kept the TV hidden in a "pipe locker," a space between the dormitory rooms that housed plumbing, heating and ventilation.

"One day, the company officer got to crawling around in there, and he found the TV," Gamboa said.

Normally, all the men involved would play a game similar to paper, rock, scissors to determine who would get the demerits. But Gamboa and the others wouldn't let McCain take the chance. The 30 demerits from the TV would get him kicked out.

"He wanted to, but we just insisted," Gamboa said. "The guy who took the demerits (a model midshipman named Henry Vargo) had none."

McCain also offered advice to the lovelorn. More than one midshipman made his way to McCain's room to ask for advice on a romantic relationship.

One evening, Gamboa was writing a thank-you letter to a date (a custom in those days) when McCain came up and snatched the letter away.

"This is a terrible letter," McCain said. "Did you have fun with her? Do you want to see her again? Here, I'll tell you what to say."

Gamboa and McCain remained close. The friendship says something about McCain, notes Gamboa, a first-generation Mexican-American.

When the two met at the Naval Academy, they had nothing in common. Gamboa was the son of immigrant parents from a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. McCain, the son and grandson of naval officers, attended private schools in Virginia.

But to McCain, race and status meant nothing, Gamboa said.

"I don't think John McCain had even been associated with Hispanics or any minorities, given where he lived and the school he went to, but yet he picked me, a Mexican-American, to be his roommate," Gamboa said.

"I've heard the comment that he has always done well with minorities. He's the most colorblind person I've ever met in my life.

"He treats me like a brother."

Choosing a career

As the men graduated from the Naval Academy, they had to make a choice as to what branch of service they would enter, the Navy or the Marines.

Gamboa said he always knew which McCain would pick.

"There was never any question in our minds that he was going to be a flier," Gamboa said. "He was an adventurous spirit, and that's what he would do."

For McCain's roommates - Gamboa, Keith Bunting and Jack Dittrick - it was still an open question. Until they met Jack McCain, John's father.

During World War II, the elder McCain won the Silver Star while commanding two submarines: the USS Gunnel, which sunk freighters and battled Japanese destroyers in the Pacific, and the USS Dentuda, which was on hand at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.

While his son attended the Naval Academy, Jack McCain was living in nearby Washington, working as the Navy's senior liaison officer to Congress.

On weekends, John McCain and his roommates would visit Jack McCain, who would chomp cigars and tell them about the Navy.

"Every time we went to John's house, we would get a blue and gold pep talk from Jack McCain," Gamboa said.

Jack McCain was not subtle. To his friends, he was known as "Good Goddamn McCain."

Speaking to the Annapolis Class of 1970, Jack McCain made light of the anti-war slogan "make love, not war" by noting that naval officers "were men enough to do both," according to Faith of My Fathers.

"He was the best naval officer I ever met in my life," Gamboa said. "I think that's where John got his love of history, from his father. His father's den was filled ceiling to floor with books, and the majority were on history."

Jack McCain made a big impression on the midshipmen. McCain and his roommates joined the Navy, and all reached the rank of captain: Bunting as a submariner, Dittrick as an aviator and Gamboa on surface ships. John McCain went to flight school.

During training, McCain had several close calls, including a crash in Corpus Christi Bay and a collision with power lines in Spain. In both cases, he emerged virtually unscathed.

In 1964, while stationed in Pensacola, Fla., McCain started dating Carol Shepp, a tall Philadelphia model he met while at Annapolis.

The next year, the two were married in Philadelphia. John soon adopted Carol's two sons from a previous marriage. In 1966, they had a daughter, Sidney.

A year later, McCain was sent to Vietnam as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier. Carol would not see her husband again for almost six years.

CHAPTER III: PRISONER OF WAREdit

John McCain sat on a stool in Hanoi, his teeth broken, his body battered from a savage beating, his arms tied behind him in torture ropes.

A guard entered the room.

"Are you ready to confess your crimes?" he asked.

"No," McCain replied.

Every two hours, one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days.

Finally, McCain lay on the floor at "The Plantation," a bloody mess, unable to move. His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.

"I reached the lowest point of my 5½ years in North Vietnam," McCain would write later. "I was at the point of suicide."

What happened next, in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, is chronicled in The Nightingale's Song by Robert Timberg:

"(McCain) looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers."

A guard burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch.

McCain's will had finally wilted under the beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.

McCain slowly wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."

He would never forgive himself.

"I had learned what we all learned over there," he would write later. "Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine."

The Forrestal Disaster

Lt. Cmdr. John McCain survived a major catastrophe on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal a few months before he was shot down over Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967.

On July 29, 1967, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was in the Tonkin Gulf, preparing for a mission.

McCain, 30, already the veteran of five bombing sorties, was strapped into his jet, warming up the engine. He was third in line to take off. Tom Ott, a second-class petty officer and McCain's parachute rigger, was wiping McCain's helmet visor, just as he always did.

Neither noticed the F-4 Phantom also revving up. An electrical surge from the engine combustion is believed to have triggered one of its wing's Zuni missiles. It accidentally fired, blasting across the deck and slamming into the fuel tank of McCain's A-4. The missile didn't detonate, but the impact spilled 200 gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel and knocked two of McCain's bombs to the deck. The fuel caught fire and McCain's plane was engulfed in smoke.

"I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire," McCain wrote in his 1999 book Faith of My Fathers. "I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire."

Slapping out the fire on his flight suit, McCain rushed to assist another A-4 pilot who also was on fire. He followed Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier, who wielded a fire-extinguisher, and other men carrying a hose.

Then the first bomb exploded.

McCain recalls the concussion blowing him back 10 feet. He was lucky. The other pilot, Farrier, and the men with the hose died on the spot. One man was decapitated; others were burned beyond recognition.

Flaming shrapnel whizzed across the flight deck, with small pieces of hot metal peppering McCain's chest and legs. As the crew frantically fought the fire, more bombs and planes exploded.

McCain recounts the carnage in his book: "Body parts, pieces of the ship, and scraps of planes were dropping onto the deck. Pilots strapped in their seats ejected into the firestorm. Men trapped by flames jumped overboard. More Zuni missiles streaked across the deck. Explosions tore craters in the flight deck, and burning fuel fell through the openings into the hangar bay, spreading the fire below."

In the end, 134 men, including McCain's parachute rigger Ott, perished. The blaze damaged the Forrestal so severely that the Navy almost abandoned the ship.

"The crew's heroics kept her afloat," McCain recalled. "They fought the inferno with a tenacity usually reserved for hand-to-hand combat. They fought it all day and well into the next, and they saved the Forrestal."

The November 1967 issue of All Hands, the Bureau of Naval Personnel's magazine, included a series of first-person accounts in an article headlined "A ship full of heroes."

"Seamen and commanders both directed hoses into smoke-filled holes, aware all the time that more bombs were down there and could explode at any time," D. Harvey, a chief radarman, reported. "Men straddled those already dead to train streams of water into fires, backing off when the flames belched out, advancing in the lulls. Crews manned hoses on both sides of the holes punched in the flight deck while water at their feet boiled and the deck steamed."

The article lists McCain as recovering from shrapnel wounds.

After the accident, McCain transferred from the Forrestal to the USS Oriskany, another aircraft carrier.

Shot down

On Oct. 26, McCain would fly his 23rd run over North Vietnam, joining a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in the capital city of Hanoi, which had been off-limits to U.S. attacks.

An officer warned McCain to be careful, that some of the pilots might not return.

"Don't worry about me," McCain said.

Hanoi was well-defended against air attacks. As McCain approached his target, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles the size of telephone poles filled the sky. Suddenly, his instrument panel lit up. A missile had locked on to his plane.

McCain dropped his bombs and began to pull up. Then, a missile sheared off his right wing, sending his plane spinning toward earth, out of control.

"I pulled the ejection handle and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection - the air speed was about 500 knots," McCain would write in 1973 for U.S. News & World Report. "I didn't realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the center of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off."

McCain's battered body sank 15 feet to the bottom of the muddy lake. He managed to kick his way to the surface with his one good leg, but his equipment dragged him back down. Finally, as he went down for a third time, McCain used his teeth to inflate his life preserver and bobbed to the surface.

North Vietnamese pulled McCain from the lake, stripping off his clothes. McCain felt a twinge in his right knee and was horrified to see his leg bent at a 90-degree angle.

"My God, my leg," McCain said.

A man slammed a rifle butt down on McCain's right shoulder, shattering it. Others bayoneted him in the foot and groin.

Eventually, he was thrown onto a truck and taken to Hanoi's main prison. He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious.

On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain's cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain's injured knee.

"It was about the size, shape and color of a football," McCain recalled.

Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.

"They brought in this doctor we called Zorba, and he examined me, took my pulse and turned to this other guy we called The Bug and said something in Vietnamese. And The Bug said, 'It's too late, it's too late,'" McCain said.

"I said, 'If you take me to the hospital, I'll get well.' Zorba took my pulse again and shook his head, and The Bug said, 'It's too late.' And they took me back to my cell."

About two hours later, McCain's cell door burst open, and The Bug rushed in, saying, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital."

It had taken some time, but the North Vietnamese figured out that McCain's father, Jack, was a major U.S. Naval commander.

They started calling McCain "The Crown Prince."

Maintaining silence

McCain was moved to a filthy hospital, where blood and plasma were administered. He recovered a little but was still in sorry shape.

Soon, McCain was told that a Frenchman wanted to talk to him and would take a message back to McCain's family.

Before the meeting, the North Vietnamese tried to set McCain's shattered right arm. Without anesthetic, a doctor using a fluoroscope worked on the arm for 90 minutes, with McCain screaming in pain. The arm had two floating bones, and the doctor could not set it properly.

Finally, the doctor gave up and wrapped a cast around McCain from his neck to his waist and down his right arm to his wrist.

They moved McCain to a new room with clean white sheets. Soon afterward, a North Vietnamese man known as "The Cat" arrived. He was the commander of all prison camps in Hanoi.

Through an interpreter, The Cat told McCain that "the French television man is coming."

It was at that point that McCain realized his visitor was a journalist.

"I don't think I want to be filmed," McCain said.

The Cat wouldn't be dissuaded. He told McCain that he needed two operations and that he would not get them if he didn't say he was grateful to the Vietnamese people and sorry for his crimes.

The French TV crew arrived, led by a reporter named Francois Chalais. On the film, which was shown later on CBS television, McCain looks drugged. He wasn't. He was in agony from the abortive attempt to set the bones in his right arm.

McCain told Chalais that his treatment was satisfactory. This upset The Cat, who stood behind McCain and told him to say he was grateful for humane and lenient treatment. McCain refused. When The Cat pressed it, Chalais broke in.

"I think what he told me is sufficient," he said.

On the film, McCain told his wife, Carol, and his children that he was getting well and that he loved them. When the North Vietnamese insisted that McCain call for a quick end to the war, Chalais waved them off.

"How is the food?" Chalais asked.

"Well, it's not Paris, but I eat it," McCain replied.

The interview ended, and McCain was taken to his dirty room. The North Vietnamese operated on his knee, accidentally cutting the ligaments on one side. Throughout his stay as a POW, McCain could never walk right. Among his fellow POWs, he earned the nickname "Crip."

Jack McCain, his father, and his mother went to CBS to watch the French film footage before its national broadcast, said Herbert Hetu, a naval public affairs officer quoted in Faith of My Fathers.

"I think Admiral McCain and his wife looked at the film twice," Hetu said. "His reaction afterward was very emotional, but he never talked to us about it. Some things are just too painful for words."

Blame the Americans

After six weeks in the hospital, McCain was taken to a prison camp known as The Plantation and placed in a cell with George "Bud" Day and Norris Overly, both Air Force majors.

Taking one look at McCain, Day was convinced that the North Vietnamese had brought McCain to their cell to die and planned on blaming the Americans.

"He was extremely skinny, and he was just about filthy," said Day, who after the war became a longtime Fort Walton Beach, Fla., attorney and veterans-affairs activist. "He had food and drink and liquids run all over his face. He had a pretty good beard. ... He probably weighed less than 100 pounds.

"He was in this great big white cast, and his hair was snow white. He just looked like he was absolutely on the verge of death."

Day said McCain's injured right arm jutted from his body cast like a stick "sticking out of a snowman."

But more than anything else, Day remembers McCain's eyes.

"His eyes were extremely bright; they had that real fever luster," Day said. "I just took one look at him and had no qualms that he was going to die, and soon."

Despite his poor condition, McCain still was happy to see fellow Americans. The men spent the night whispering among themselves.

By 6 a.m., Day was convinced that McCain had a decent chance to live, providing the fever did not get him. Slowly, McCain began to recover.

"He was just a very determined guy with a lot of spirit," Day said. "It's kind of like when you see a horse, a young colt, and you just know this is a strong-spirited animal. You could see all that in him."

McCain, it seemed, refused to die.

"John was not going to help the Lord take him out," Day said. "If the Lord was involved in taking him out, John was resisting all the way. If the Lord was helping him, John was giving him 100 percent of his effort."

In the first days, McCain could not wash or feed himself without help. The task of nursing McCain fell to Overly because Day had been tortured in ropes and had little use of his hands.

"I've got to give Norris a lot of credit," Day said. "Norris took care of John like a baby, like it was his own child. There was no question that he loved John. He did things for John that only a parent would do for their children."

Occasionally, North Vietnamese dignitaries would stroll by to gawk at the prize prisoner. Because McCain's father was an admiral, the North Vietnamese thought McCain's family was very wealthy. They would ask how many corporations his father owned.

McCain just laughed.

Slowly, he was nursed back to health. McCain's infections were healing because he could wash regularly. Soon, he could hobble around in his cell for a few minutes at a time.

Code talkers

After a time, Overly was removed from the cell and placed with two other prisoners who were going to be released early.

Early release was forbidden by the military's Code of Conduct. To prevent the enemy from subverting prisoners or using them as propaganda tools, officers were to accept release in the order they were captured.

The POWs kept tabs on each other via underground communication techniques, which the guards "went to extraordinary lengths to stop," with little success, according to McCain.

"Through flashed hand signals when we were moved about, tap codes on the wall, notes hidden in washroom drains, and holding our enamel drinking cups up to the wall with our shirts wrapped around them and speaking through them, we were able to communicate with each other," McCain wrote in his book. "The whole prison system became a complex information network, POWs busily trafficking in details about each other's circumstances and news from home that would arrive with every new addition to our ranks."

McCain kept track of his 80 or so fellow American prisoners and even silently recited their names as he went to sleep. "Keeping an ever-lengthening account of the men we learned were prisoners was the solemn responsibility of every POW," McCain wrote.

So everybody knew that Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez, who had been shot down on Aug. 5, 1964, should have been the first prisoner released.

Nevertheless, Overly and two others accepted early release under a North Vietnamese "amnesty" program. The other POWs dubbed the practice the "Fink Release Program."

McCain and Day, who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, don't judge Overly too harshly.

"If I had been in (Overly's) shoes, maybe I would have done things differently than I did," said Day, who retired from the Air Force in 1976 as a full colonel.

"I came back from Vietnam all crippled up and all screwed up, and a lot of that could have been avoided if I had given (them) a lot of the stuff they were really pushing me for.

"I didn't think it was the right thing, so I didn't do it."

In Faith of My Fathers, McCain credits Overly with saving his life.

"I thought him a good man then, as I do today," McCain wrote. "I feared he had made a mistake, but I couldn't stand in judgment of him. ... I wished him well as he departed, carrying a letter from me to (McCain's wife) Carol in his pocket."

Once McCain was able to walk on his own, guards moved Day out. For two years, McCain would be alone in his cell, which he described in U.S. News & World Report after his release:

"My room was fairly decent-sized - I'd say about 10 by 10. The door was solid. There were no windows. The only ventilation came from two small holes at the top in the ceiling, about 6 inches by 4 inches. The roof was tin, and it got hot as hell in there.

"The room was kind of dim - night and day - but they always kept on a small light bulb so they could observe me."

In October 1968, McCain heard a clamor in the cell behind him at The Plantation and began tapping on the wall to contact his new neighbor. The call-up sign was the five-tap "shave and a haircut," and the other prisoner would answer with two taps.

For two weeks he got no answer, but finally two taps came back. Using a cup to the wall, McCain could hear the other prisoner and managed to give him the tap code. He finally gave McCain his name: Ernie Brace. For a while, all Brace could do was tap out "I'm Ernie Brace" and then collapse into sobs.

Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown more than 100 combat missions in Korea. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, was court-martialed and received a dishonorable discharge.

But that didn't keep Brace out of the war. As a civilian pilot, he flew for a CIA-backed airline and was shot down over Laos.

Brace had spent 31/2 years in a bamboo cage with his feet in stocks and his neck in an iron collar. During the ordeal, he almost lost the use of his legs. He escaped three times, and when he was captured the third time, he was buried in the ground up to his neck. After a year had passed, McCain and Brace were communicating with other prisoners in the camp, shuttling messages back and forth with the tap code.

On Dec. 9, 1969, a guard jerked open Brace's cell door. The incident is recounted in Brace's book, A Code to Keep.

"You are in bad trouble for communicating," the guard said. "You are being taken to a harsher place."

Blindfolded, Brace was put into a truck with soldiers and other prisoners. As the vehicle rolled through Hanoi, Brace felt someone tapping a message on his thigh.

"Hi," said the message. "I John McCain. Who U?"

Brace said tears began forming in his eyes as he grabbed his friend's hand, squeezing out the answer.

"EB here."

Offered early release, Brace turned it down, citing the military code. He was the longest-held civilian POW in Vietnam.

An offer to go home

In June 1968, McCain was taken to an interrogation room, where "The Cat" awaited him. He was joined by another man, "The Rabbit," who spoke very good English.

The Cat spent two hours in seemingly aimless conversation, telling McCain about how he had run French prison camps in the early 1950s. He said that he had released some prisoners early and that they had thanked him later. He also mentioned that Norris Overly had gone home "with honor."

All of a sudden, The Cat blurted out: "Do you want to go home?"

McCain told him he'd have to think about it. He'd been hit by a bout of dysentery and was in poor shape. He was losing weight.

But McCain knew the real reason the North Vietnamese wanted to release him. Adm. Jack McCain, his father, was an important U.S. military figure. In July he would assume command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain's release would help the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.

McCain realized that the Code of Conduct gave him no choice. Alvarez, who was being held elsewhere, was supposed to be the first man released.

"I just knew it wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "I knew that they wouldn't have offered it to me if I hadn't been the son of an admiral.

"I just didn't think it was the honorable thing to do."

Three days later, McCain met with The Cat again. The North Vietnamese turned the screws. The Cat told McCain that President Johnson had ordered McCain home. McCain asked to see the orders. The Cat didn't have any.

Then the North Vietnamese commander produced a letter from McCain's wife, Carol, saying, "I wished that you had been one of those three who got to come home."

McCain calmly told The Cat that the prisoners must be released in the order they were captured, starting with Alvarez.

On the Fourth of July, McCain had a final sit-down with The Cat and The Rabbit.

"Our senior officer wants to know your final answer," The Rabbit said.

"My final answer is the same," McCain said. "It's no."

"That is your final answer?"

"That is my final answer."

The Cat, who had been seated behind a pile of papers, grabbed a pen and snapped it in half. Ink spurted all over the desk. He rose and kicked the chair over behind him.

"They taught you too well," he said, then left, slamming the door.

Before long, McCain would find himself tied to a stool, and the guards would literally beat him into confessing that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate."

McCain's account was corroborated by a cable from Averell Harriman, who was President Johnson's envoy to the Paris peace talks. Harriman had tea with a Vietnamese official, who mentioned that McCain had refused early release.

A Christmas service

On Christmas Eve 1968, about 50 POWs, including McCain, were herded into a room decorated with flowers for a makeshift church service.

The North Vietnamese were intent on milking the ceremony for every bit of PR value. Cameramen moved around the room, filming the ceremony. Flash bulbs popped in the background.

Meanwhile, McCain and other prisoners were busy exchanging information. One of the guards, conscious that he was being filmed, smiled while he told McCain to stop talking.

McCain cursed the guard and kept briefing another prisoner.

"I refused to go home," McCain said. "I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm."

McCain pressed on, and the guards kept trying to quiet him.

"Our senior ranking officer is Colonel Larson," McCain said.

"No talking!"

McCain cursed them again and flashed his middle finger toward the camera.

He returned to his cell, where he waited for his beating. It didn't come until the day after Christmas.

In May 1969, the North Vietnamese asked McCain to write a letter to U.S. pilots asking them not to fly over North Vietnam. When he refused, they made him stand for hours and hours.

When McCain tired and sat down, a guard stomped on his injured leg. McCain was back on crutches for the next 18 months.

In late 1969, things began to look up for the POWs for the first time.

President Nixon had taken office in January. During the Johnson administration, released POWs weren't allowed to talk about bad conditions in the prison camps for fear that such complaints would make things even worse for the men still being held.

That changed under Nixon.

In August 1969, under pressure, the North Vietnamese began releasing sick and injured prisoners. Among them were Navy Lt. Robert Frishman, who had a badly injured arm, Air Force Capt. Wes Rumble, who was in a body cast with a broken back, and Navy Seaman Doug Hegdahl, who had lost 75 pounds.

The men held press conferences, telling the horrifying details of torture and mistreatment. After that, treatment of POWs began to improve.

By fall, the torture had almost stopped. The food improved. The guards seemed almost friendly.

McCain's barred cell door had been covered with wood to keep him from looking out and from getting any ventilation. But in fall 1969, the board was removed at night to cool McCain's cell. And prisoners were allowed to bathe more often.

"It was all very amazing," McCain would write later.

In December 1969, McCain was moved to the Hanoi Hilton. There, he met with a Cuban journalist who asked McCain general questions about the war. After the interview, a photographer came in and started snapping pictures, though McCain had said he didn't want his picture taken. After that, he refused to meet with visitors.

In June 1970, McCain was moved into a room called Calcutta, which had no ventilation. There, McCain suffered from heat prostration and another bout of dysentery and was cut to half rations.

In December 1970, McCain was moved to a room that housed 45 to 50 prisoners. In February 1971, the prisoners defied their captors and held a church service. When the men presiding over the service were taken away by guards, the men started singing The Star-Spangled Banner very loudly.

Fearing a riot, the guards rushed in with ropes and subdued the men. A few days later, McCain and others were moved to a punishment camp the prisoners called Skid Row. Though the conditions were filthy, McCain said, the prison was a piece of cake compared with conditions in 1969.

In 1971 and 1972, conditions gradually improved. McCain, whose weight had dropped to 105 pounds during his first years in Hanoi, began to regain some of his health. He was allowed to exercise, which eased the boredom and made it easier to sleep.

"He was crippled but mentally fierce," recalled Orson Swindle, who roomed with McCain for the last two years of their incarceration. "He was stiff-legged and had awkward movement of both arms. He did the funniest push-ups I've even seen.

"One of his arms was sort of crooked. . . . He did push-ups with a tilt to it."

The men were in a big room with a large concrete slab in the center and a 3-foot-wide, horseshoe-shaped path around the slab. They would exercise by walking along the path.

"When John would run in place, it was sort of humorous to watch him," Swindle said. "One leg would bend, and the other wouldn't. It was a sight to behold."

To entertain themselves and the other men, McCain and Swindle organized "Sunday Night at the Movies," retelling, and in some cases performing, scenes from Hollywood films they had seen.

One of their favorites was One-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 movie in which Marlon Brando is beaten by a worthless sheriff played by Slim Pickens. McCain and Swindle especially loved the part where Brando calls Pickens a "scum-sucking pig."

In December 1972, McCain had a front-row seat to a full-scale bombing attack on Hanoi.

"It was the most spectacular show I'll ever see," McCain later wrote in U.S. News and World Report. "The bombs were dropping so close that the building would shake. The SAMs were flying all over, and the sirens were whining - it was really a wild scene."

Although the bombing had been conceived by Nixon, the orders had been given by McCain's father, Jack.

McCain's father never wrote to him during the war because of the propaganda value of such a letter. He did, however, try to pass McCain a secret message once, according to a passage in Faith of My Fathers.

In letters to his wife, McCain was using a fairly obvious code to send messages back to the States. Naval intelligence, fearing that McCain would be caught, apprised the admiral.

Adm. Jack McCain sent a hidden message in a letter Carol wrote to McCain: "JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS."

The younger McCain never saw it because the North Vietnamese withheld Carol's letters.

By January 1973, McCain was back at The Plantation. The prisoners sensed that the war was nearing its end. The guards hardly bothered them.

Around that time, McCain was playing bridge with Swindle and two others when he was dealt a perfect hand. But McCain made a rookie mistake and lost his advantage. The other men teased him unmercifully.

Finally, McCain stopped talking to Swindle, who slept right next to him on the floor. This went on for several days.

"We would be walking on the path, and I would say, 'Hi, John,' and John wouldn't respond," Swindle said.

Then one day, the guards came in and ordered Swindle to pack his gear. As one of the first pilots captured, Swindle was in line to be released.

As Swindle was being ushered out, a frantic McCain rushed up to his side.

"John comes running up and says, 'Orson, Orson, I've really been a jerk the last few days.' I said, 'I don't even want to talk to you,' and I turned away.

"Then I looked back at him and winked, and I had a big grin on my face, and I said, 'I'll see you at home.'"

In March, McCain joined a group of prisoners who were put onto trucks and driven to Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. McCain said he didn't believe he was leaving until he actually spoke with an American in uniform.

It was the best day of his life.

"At the time, it wasn't that overwhelming. It was one of those things that you had anticipated for so long, nothing could have lived up to my expectations," McCain said. "It's like when a kid waits for Christmas, and then it arrives, and it can't quite live up to what he expected."

One by one, The Rabbit read off their names, and they boarded the plane.

McCain's long ordeal was over.

CHAPTER IV: BACK IN THE U.S.A.Edit

The day Lt. Cmdr. John McCain limped down the stairs to the runway at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, he stepped into a world that was more than five years ahead of him.

Adm. Noel Gaylor, who had succeeded McCain's father, Jack, as commander of the Pacific fleet, was there to meet the plane carrying McCain and the other former prisoners. McCain's father, Adm. Jack McCain, declined to accompany him because the military did not invite family members of other returning POWs.

The newly free McCain had some adjusting to do.

He had gotten filtered news about America from his North Vietnamese captors only in bits and pieces. President Nixon had replaced President Johnson. The United States had completed a successful moon mission. An anti-war youth counterculture had flowered.

Catching up on the latest twists and turns in politics and pop culture would have been daunting enough.

But first McCain had to digest some shocking news about his family.

Carol, his wife, had been in a disfiguring traffic accident in 1969, a development that McCain first heard about from an officer's offhand remark.

Like her husband, Carol was enduring a painful episode. On an icy Christmas Eve, she lost control of her car and crashed into a telephone pole. Authorities found her thrown from the wreckage, in shock and with serious injuries. Her legs were crunched, her arm and pelvis smashed and internal organs were bleeding. She almost died, and doctors discussed amputating her legs. It took months of operations, physical therapy and convalescence before Carol could walk without crutches.

"You might be upset when you see me," Carol warned him from Jacksonville in their first post-release telephone conversation.

McCain reassured her: "Well, you know, I don't look so good myself. It's fine."

According to McCain's account of Carol's recovery in Faith of My Fathers, she lost 4 inches off her height as a result of the accident and the related medical procedures.

In the book, McCain praised Carol's "determined spirit" and refusal to succumb to "despair and self-pity."

McCain was eager to get home to Carol and the children. His daughter Sidney was just a baby when McCain departed for Vietnam. She didn't remember him.

"To her I had become an object of curiosity, a man in a photograph whom her mother and brothers talked about a lot," McCain wrote.

He had no idea what Sidney or her older brothers now looked like. He had gotten little word on their growth while in the prison camp.

By St. Patrick's Day 1973 he was back in Florida.

"I have often maintained that I left Vietnam behind me when I arrived at Clark," McCain would write in Faith of My Fathers. "That is an exaggeration. But I did not want my experiences in Vietnam to be the leitmotif of the rest of my life."

Only McCain would find that he could never really leave Vietnam behind.

Looking back in Faith of My Fathers, McCain called his POW experience "transforming":

"Surviving my imprisonment strengthened my self-confidence, and my refusal of early release taught me to trust my own judgment. I am grateful to Vietnam for those discoveries, as they have made a great difference in my life. I gained a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect. I had made more than my share of mistakes in my life. In the years ahead, I would make many more. But I would no longer err out of self-doubt or to alter a fate I felt had been imposed on me. I know my life is blessed and always has been."

Celebrity POW

McCain returned to the United States something of a celebrity.

The New York Times put a photo of him disembarking at Clark on its front page.

A White House reception yielded another famous news service image of McCain teetering on crutches and grasping Nixon's hand.

McCain participated in parades, made other personal appearances and sorted through fan mail.

He even headlined one of California Gov. Ronald Reagan's annual prayer breakfasts and became acquainted with the future president and his wife, Nancy.

"Unlike most Vietnam veterans, McCain and the other POWs were welcomed home as heroes," author Robert Timberg wrote in John McCain: An American Odyssey. "To many Americans they were. To others they symbolized the national catharsis that effectively marked the end of the nation's participation in the Vietnam War."

McCain authored a lengthy first-person account of his experience for the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report. The magazine cover featured a picture of McCain and promised the "inside story" of "how POWs fought back."

The U.S. News essay introduced American readers to The Cat, The Rabbit, The Bug and the other cruel characters who ran the North Vietnamese prison camp, as well as to the captive American resisters. More than that, it preserved a fascinating glimpse of McCain at age 36.

The piece finds McCain already sounding a bit like a politician:

• On the United States: "Now that I'm back, I find a lot of hand-wringing about this country. I don't buy that. I think America today is a better country than the one I left nearly six years ago. ... I think America is a better country now because we have been through a sort of purging process, a re-evaluation of ourselves. Now I see more of an appreciation of our way of life. There is more patriotism. The flag is all over the place. I hear new values being stressed - the concern for the environment is a case in point."

• On the public reaction to his release: "This outpouring on behalf of us who were prisoners of war is staggering and a little embarrassing because basically we feel that we are just average American Navy, Marine and Air Force pilots who got shot down. Anybody else in our place would have performed just as well."

• On his future: "My own plans for the future are to remain in the Navy, if I am able to return to flying status. That depends upon whether the corrective surgery on my arms and my leg is successful. If I have to leave the Navy, I hope to serve the government in some capacity, preferably in the Foreign Service for the State Department. I had a lot of time to think over there and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life - along with a man's family - is to make some contribution to his country."

The U.S. News spread included a sidebar headlined "Three generations of a famous Navy family" that included photos of his grandfather and father.

McCain was not destined for a quick return to the ranks of Navy fliers. His recovery was a long struggle. His condition limited his immediate options.

As a former POW, McCain was allowed to pick his next assignment and decided to attend the National War College at Ft. McNair in Washington, D.C. Navy officials protested because McCain was not yet a commander, the minimum rank required for admittance to the college, a training ground for higher officers. McCain actually had earned the rank, but the promotion hadn't taken effect yet. He appealed to Navy Secretary John Warner, a friend of his father's and a future U.S. senator from Virginia. Warner said McCain could go.

By late 1974, McCain had recuperated to the point where he was able to regain ("barely," as he put it) his cherished flight status. He took over as executive officer, and eventually commanding officer, for a group that trained aircraft carrier pilots at Cecil Field in Jacksonville.

Landing on Capitol Hill

In 1977, Admiral James Holloway, then chief of Naval operations, had an idea for a new job for McCain. Hoping to capitalize on McCain's notoriety, Holloway assigned him to the Navy's Senate liaison office on Capitol Hill in Washington. Years earlier, McCain's father had done a similar stint as the Navy's legislative-affairs director.

McCain started in the office's No. 2 spot, but it wasn't long before he was promoted to captain and took charge of the operation, which was based in the Russell Senate Office Building.

The job entailed lobbying and acting as a communication conduit between the Navy and the Senate.

McCain considers the liaison position his "real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant."

While McCain was reestablishing a career, he and his wife separated. His work ethic remained strong.

Congressional meddling in the Vietnam War had rubbed McCain the wrong way, and he did not hold the institution in particularly high esteem when he took his new post. That quickly changed as he observed the Senate Armed Services Committee and defense appropriations subcommittee in action and got to know the lawmakers.

"I watched and admired (Sens.) Barry Goldwater, John Stennis, Henry Jackson, John Tower, Sam Nunn and others wrestle with all manner of issues involved in America's defense with great skill, intelligence, and seriousness," McCain recalled in Worth the Fighting For. "They were statesmen, and although some of them had never served in uniform, I came to appreciate that most were patriots of the first order."

Some of these leaders, most notably Tower, would leave a lasting influence on McCain.

Tower, R-Texas, would serve in the Senate until 1985. Later, he ran the panel that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal. (It became known as the Tower Commission.) After that, President George H.W. Bush nominated Tower for Defense secretary, but the Democrat-controlled Senate blocked him partly over character concerns about his womanizing and drinking. He died in a 1991 plane crash.

Tower held Lyndon Johnson's old Senate seat. He had served in the Navy, been solidly pro-Vietnam War and was the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

McCain and Tower became pals, probably an unprecedented relationship for a senator and a Navy liaison.

James Jones, a Marine who served under McCain during this period, told author Timberg: "He was very much loved by John Tower. I think that John McCain is the son that John Tower never had."

For his part, McCain remembered that Tower "loved good company, and that he thought me such is something I'm proud of."

"Tower knew my father well, and he knew of my grandfather," McCain wrote in his 2002 memoir. "He respected my service in Vietnam. He was also, of course, a loyal Navy man, and whenever he traveled abroad officially, he would request that I serve as his escort. I traveled quite a lot with him, perhaps on as many as twenty trips, all around the world."

McCain was not the typical Navy liaison. His Capitol Hill office became a popular afternoon hangout. His friendship with Tower was deep, and he also developed ties with other key lawmakers and staffers, among them Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and William Cohen, R-Maine. Hart later unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Cohen, though a Republican, later served as Defense secretary under President Bill Clinton.

"I never ran across any people in the military liaison offices that were at all like John," Pete Lakeland, a Foreign Affairs Committee staff member, told Timberg. "In fact, I really didn't even get to know any of the others. They handled baggage, and that was it."

John W. Mashek, a veteran U.S. News & World Report political reporter who at the time covered the Armed Services Committee, remembered watching McCain's political ambitions emerge.

"Over lunch, he once told me that he felt just as smart as many of the senators on the panel," Mashek wrote in a July 13, 2006, blog posting. "He suggested he just might go into politics. The rest, as they say, is history."

CHAPTER V: ARIZONA, THE EARLY YEARSEdit

In 1979, John McCain came face to face with his future.

He was in Hawaii, attending a military reception. While there, he met a young, blond former cheerleader from Phoenix named Cindy Hensley.

McCain was immediately dazzled and spent the event chatting her up.

"She was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident," McCain wrote in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "I monopolized her attention the entire time, taking care to prevent anyone else from intruding on our conversation. When it came time to leave the party, I persuaded her to join me for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By the evening's end, I was in love."

McCain recalls that both he and Cindy initially misled each other about their ages. McCain made himself a little younger, and Cindy made herself a little older. They found out their real ages when the local paper published them. McCain was 43, Cindy 25.

"So our marriage," McCain cracks, "is really based on a tissue of lies."

Early in the courtship, McCain called Cindy from Beijing, where he was traveling with a Senate Foreign Relations Committee contingent. Cindy was in the hospital recuperating from minor knee surgery. She thanked him for the lovely flowers in her room, sent from "John."

What McCain didn't tell Cindy was that he hadn't sent the flowers. They were from another John, who lived in Tucson.

"I never thanked him," Cindy notes with a grin.

After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.

McCain needed a divorce from Carol, his wife of 14 years from whom he was separated. After McCain's dramatic homecoming from Vietnam, the couple grew apart. Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs.

"If there was one couple that deserved to make it, it was John and Carol McCain," author Robert Timberg wrote in John McCain: An American Odyssey. "They endured nearly six years of unspeakable trauma with courage and grace. In the end it was not enough. They won the war but lost the peace."

In February 1980, less than a year after he met Cindy, McCain petitioned a Florida court to dissolve his marriage to Carol, calling the union "irretrievably broken."

Bud Day, a lawyer and fellow POW, handled the divorce proceedings.

"I thought things were going fairly well, and then it just came apart," Day later recalled. "That happened to quite a few. . . . I don't fault (Carol), and I don't really fault John, either."

In his book Worth the Fighting For, McCain offers his own post-mortem on his failed marriage. He "had not shown the same determination to rebuild (his) personal life" as he had to excel in his naval career.

"Sound marriages can be hard to recover after great time and distance have separated a husband and wife. We are different people when we reunite," McCain wrote. "But my marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine."

Carol, who remains on good terms with her former husband, generally has avoided reporters interested in hearing her side of the story.

She did briefly address her divorce to Timberg: "The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don't know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else."

In the divorce settlement, McCain was generous with Carol, the mother of their daughter Sidney and two sons, whom McCain had adopted. Among other things, McCain gave Carol the rights to houses in Florida and Virginia and agreed to provide insurance or pay for additional treatment she was expected to require.

Except for signing the property settlement, Carol did not participate in the divorce. A court summons and other paperwork sent to her during the proceeding went unanswered.

In April 1980, the judge entered a default judgment and declared the marriage dissolved.

A month later, McCain married Cindy in Phoenix, where the couple would move. The wedding party included a couple of McCain's high-profile friends from Washington. Sen. William Cohen was the best man. Sen. Gary Hart was a groomsman.

Carol went her separate way, finding work as a personal aide to Nancy Reagan during the 1980 presidential primary campaign and later running the White House Visitors Office.

McCain for Congress

The move to Arizona was convenient for the budding politico McCain. After the 1980 census, Arizona was sure to get a new, fifth congressional seat.

But was it too convenient?

McCain explains the reaction of some of his new neighbors: "My ambition was plainly obvious, and to some, it was presumptuous and arrogant. If not said, it was thought by many that when I had decided to start a political career, I had looked around the country for a place where I thought the locals were gullible enough to take a chance on a novice. Worse, some critics contended that I had married Cindy because of her Arizona residency and her wealth and connections there. Neither charge is fair, and I am surprised at how angry I still become when some fool hints that such ruthlessness lay behind decisions to marry and relocate."

McCain truly was at a turning point in his life and ready for a new challenge.

He had a new wife. He retired from the Navy in 1981. His father, Adm. Jack McCain, died on March 22, 1981.

Politics occupied his mind.

According to Timberg's book, McCain actually had toyed with the idea of seeking a House seat as far back as 1976, when he was still living in Florida, but determined he probably couldn't win. After his Senate liaison duty, it became an obsession.

Cindy's money came from her family business. Her father, Jim Hensley, owned a Phoenix Anheuser-Busch distributorship that had made him a multimillionaire. He gave his new son-in-law a job as vice president of public relations, but, really, McCain was just biding his time until the right political opportunity came up.

"Jim Hensley didn't care about PR," said Bill Shover, a former executive with The Arizona Republic who met McCain in 1981. "When you have the Budweiser franchise, you . . . don't need PR."

McCain himself acknowledges that he "fit the bill" of the stereotypical "upwardly mobile boss' son-in-law who obviously lacks the experience and training typically required for the job he holds." But he didn't want to let Hensley down, either.

On the political front, McCain reached out to his Capitol Hill mentors and friends for guidance. Cohen put him in touch with veteran political consultant Jay Smith, who advised McCain to discreetly get out and start meeting Arizona VIPs.

His job with Hensley allowed him to do that.

It didn't take long for McCain to meet wealthy power brokers such as developers Charles Keating Jr. and Fife Symington III, who would later be elected governor. Local polls suggested McCain start slowly by running for the state Legislature, but McCain wasn't interested.

Eager to make up for time lost as a POW, McCain wanted Arizona's new congressional seat.

But he had a problem. The new district was in the Tucson area. For McCain to move from Phoenix to Tucson would open him up to criticism as a carpetbagger.

Fate lent a hand. In January 1982, former House Minority Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., a legendary figure in Arizona Republican politics, retired from his seat in the former 1st Congressional District, which included the East Valley. Rhodes had first won the seat in 1952.

On the day Rhodes announced his retirement, Shover got a call from McCain. He could hear noise in the background.

"Where are you?" Shover asked.

"I'm on the freeway," said McCain, who had stopped at a service station to call Shover. "I'm on the way to Mesa to buy a house."

McCain was hardly a shoo-in. Other well-known local Republicans had their eye on Rhodes' job and were not about to step aside for an audacious newcomer.

Two veteran state lawmakers entered the race. State Sen. Jim Mack, R-Tempe, had served in the Legislature since 1971; Rep. Donna Carlson-West, R-Mesa, since 1975. Ray Russell, a third GOP rival, was a personable former veterinarian active in Mesa civic affairs and the Mormon Church.

The Republican establishment took McCain seriously because of his war record and Washington insider ties. Plus, McCain had charm. Women were drawn to him, and men respected him as a man's man.

"John was a very engaging guy," Shover recalls. "You could not help but like John."

But McCain still had a political Achilles' heel. As a recent Valley transplant, he looked like a carpetbagger, and critics instantly seized the issue.

How McCain finally squelched the charge has become part of Arizona political lore.

At a 1982 candidates forum, McCain "snapped," to use his own word, after somebody brought up his residency "for the thousandth time."

Here is what he said:

"Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

The late Phoenix Gazette political columnist John Kolbe is quoted in Timberg's book as calling McCain's brusque answer "the most devastating response to a potentially troublesome political issue I've ever heard."

McCain recalls in Worth the Fighting For: "Looking back, I think the race was effectively over right then. I had stunned the audience and finally put to rest the one nagging vulnerability that was still clouding my prospects. But I didn't know that then. I was just mad and had taken a swing."

And it wasn't the only time that McCain would lash out during the campaign.

Mack contacted McCain's former wife Carol in hopes of digging up dirt on McCain. An offended Carol gave McCain a heads-up about the telephone call. (She also discussed the conversation with Kolbe, who ripped Mack in a Gazette column.)

McCain confronted Mack after a subsequent campaign event.

McCain recounts in his book: "When the debate ended, I walked over to the opponent who had attempted to mine some little nasty opposition research from my failed marriage and told him with as much steel as I'm capable of demonstrating, 'If you ever try to hurt anyone in my family again, I will personally beat the shit out of you.'"

A taste of victory

McCain's strategy for winning the primary focused primarily on Scottsdale. Mack, Carlson-West and Russell's stomping grounds were Mesa and Tempe. Much to McCain's surprise, the popular longtime Scottsdale Mayor Herb Drinkwater immediately embraced his candidacy. The mayor lined up support from the rest of the City Council and other Scottsdale community leaders.

"I can't think of a single Arizonan outside the confines of my own house who was more instrumental to my election to Congress," McCain later recalled of Drinkwater, who died in 1997.

Other Arizonans helped, too. For example, former governor and senator Paul Fannin, R-Ariz., endorsed McCain. He did so at the urging of Sen. John Tower, McCain's buddy from his days in the Navy's Senate liaison office.

According to McCain, Tower helped more than anybody, breaking his own long-standing rule against backing a candidate in a competitive GOP primary to support his friend. He also intervened with Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., after Goldwater's office criticized McCain for trying to take some credit for the then-new Apache attack helicopter that a Mesa defense contractor would build. McCain had supported the Apache as Navy liaison but later acknowledged his attempt to share in the glory of the local contract award was "a bit of a stretch." But Tower quickly issued a counter news release confirming that McCain had indeed recommended the Apache.

Russell recently recalled McCain as a hard worker and a tireless, if inexperienced, campaigner.

"He really wanted that worse than anything," Russell said. "There were several issues that he flip-flopped on. He wanted to win so badly that he'd tell people whatever they wanted to hear."

On Sept. 7, 1982, McCain finished first with 15,363 votes. Russell was second (12,500 votes), Mack third (10,675 votes) and Carlson-West fourth (9,736 votes).

According to Russell, McCain's early and effective use of television advertising helped him clinch victory. Carlson-West's decision to stay in the race also helped McCain, Russell said.

"If she had dropped out, I would have beaten McCain easily because I would have gotten almost all of her votes," Russell said. "But that's politics: timing and money and all that stuff."

The congressional district was so solidly Republican that McCain had Rhodes' seat locked up after the primary. He made short work of his Democratic opponent, Bill Hegarty, thumping him by a more than 2-1 margin in the Nov. 2, 1982, general election.

Money-in-law

Many have told the tale of McCain winning the 1st Congressional District by wearing out three pairs of shoes, with the final pair immortalized in bronze by Cindy. McCain's footwear definitely took a beating during the race, but it was more greenbacks than soles that swept McCain into the House of Representatives.

McCain's first campaign benefited from his wife's personal wealth, some of which had been tied up in a trust set up in 1971 by her parents, Jim and Marguerite "Smitty" Hensley.

In 1981, the trust expired and was dissolved, giving Cindy a half interest in Western Leasing Co., a truck-leasing business controlled by her father, according to Trevor Potter, general counsel to the McCain 2000 presidential campaign and 2008 exploratory campaign. Potter also is a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. Western Leasing was not the only income the McCains had in 1982. They earned a combined $130,000 in salary and bonuses from Hensley, the beer distributorship controlled by Cindy's father. John also had his Navy pension, which paid $31,000 a year.

"No one pretends that Cindy had no money at all," Potter said. "It was hers. And it wasn't something Jim (Hensley) had given her for the campaign."

Under 1982 election rules, it was legal for McCain to tap his wife's assets, as well as his own, when making personal loans to the campaign. In 1983, the rules were rewritten, with tighter guidelines on the use of family money.

In the end, including the personal loans, McCain would raise more than $550,000 to win the seat.

The 'Maverick' cometh

McCain's notoriety followed him back to Washington, D.C.

Although for the most part McCain's House years found him a fairly typical Reagan era conservative, from Day One he clearly was a little different from his peers.

In 1983, he was elected the House GOP freshman class president.

In 1985, after he had breezed to a second term the previous November, McCain returned to Vietnam with veteran CBS newsman Walter Cronkite. He got to go only after some drama. The Vietnamese government initially balked at providing McCain a visa. Once in Hanoi, Cronkite and McCain made a stop by a monument marking the fall of "the famous air pirate" blown out of the sky in 1967. McCain, the man immortalized by the landmark, mingled with Vietnamese onlookers eager to shake his hand. The McCain sequences aired on CBS as part of an hourlong special titled Honor, Duty and a War Called Vietnam.

As a representative, McCain took another vote that is of interest in retrospect.

In fall 1983, he bucked President Reagan by voting against a resolution allowing the White House to keep Marines deployed in Lebanon for another 18 months.

He denounced the policy in a House floor speech.

"I do not foresee obtainable objectives in Lebanon," McCain said. "I believe the longer we stay, the more difficult it will be to leave, and I am prepared to accept the consequences of our withdrawal."

The resolution passed. The next month, a terrorist truck bomb shattered the Marines' barracks in Beirut, killing 241 soldiers.

Reflecting on the resolution in Worth the Fighting For, McCain notes that the approval already was a done deal, "so I can hardly claim my dissenting vote was a singular act of political courage."

But there were other consequences, as McCain explains:

"It caught the attention of the Washington press corps, who tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected quarters. My press secretary, Torie Clarke, began receiving interview requests from national print and broadcast media. Because of my POW experience, I had always enjoyed a little more celebrity than is usually accorded freshmen, but not so much that my views were solicited or even taken seriously by the national media. Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention and eager for more."

U.S. News & World Report listed him a "Republican on the rise." Even Rolling Stone, the left-leaning music and pop culture magazine, praised McCain for the vote.

The 'maverick' was born.

CHAPTER VI: THE SENATE CALLSEdit

John McCain had celebrity and money, and he also had another influential ally in Phoenix: Darrow "Duke" Tully, publisher of the state's largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, and its now-defunct sister paper The Phoenix Gazette.

Upon meeting McCain, Tully regaled him with stories of his own military service as an Air Force pilot in Korea and Vietnam. The two men quickly hit it off and soon were spending a lot of time together. Cindy McCain and Tully's second wife, Pat, also got along well. Both were far younger than their husbands.

Tully had logged many hours in Air Force simulators learning how to fly F-16s. He bragged about a simulated dogfight he had with McCain on the Goldwater gunnery range in southwest Arizona.

"Duke said he had gotten John in his sights and shot him down," recalls Bill Shover, a former Phoenix Newspapers Inc. executive. "John couldn't maneuver very well because of his (formerly) broken arm."

Tully helped McCain in his first bid for congress and groomed him for higher office. Shover characterized Tully as McCain's PR man, hosting dinners to introduce him to the Valley's movers and shakers. McCain wrote guest columns for The Republic. In one of them, McCain gave a sentimental account of Christmas in Hanoi. Tully became godfather to one of McCain's children.

Although it was clear McCain had the ability, ambition and wherewithal to reach Congress on his own, Tully helped open doors. In the pages of The Republic and The Phoenix Gazette, McCain was a star.

In 1984, McCain won a second term in the House, facing only token opposition. The ever-ambitious McCain already wanted to succeed five-term Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., who was retiring from the Senate.

McCain would follow an Arizona heavyweight - Goldwater was the 1964 Republican presidential nominee - and possibly face another.

McCain's main obstacle was Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a popular Democrat with deep family ties in the state. McCain's people decided early on that the race would be half won if they could persuade Babbitt to stay out.

"It wasn't so much a strategy as it was a reality," recalls Torie Clarke, McCain's press secretary from 1983 to 1989 who would later gain a national profile after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's spokeswoman. "The theory was, if we worked really hard . . . if John really could get his roots deep in Arizona, it became less and less likely that Babbitt would want to run against him."

For his part, Babbitt also had grand political plans. He wanted to run for president in 1988, two years after he would have been elected to the Senate. McCain's people kept the pressure on, making it clear that McCain planned an all-or-nothing assault on the seat. A Senate loss in 1986 would have ended Babbitt's longshot White House run before it started.

McCain personally liked Babbitt but fully intended to beat him.

"I worked hard to make a name in Arizona, and if I was not as well-known or as well-liked as the governor, I had come a long way from my beginnings as an alleged carpetbagger," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For, his 2002 memoir. "I also had the state's Republicans leaning in my favor, as well as an experienced campaign team, a proven track record as a competent fund-raiser, and at least as much ambition as my probable opponent. Prominent national reporters were already handicapping the contest. Ours was expected to be one of the marquee races in the country in 1986."

Not so fast.

On March 18, 1985, Babbitt made it official: He wouldn't seek Goldwater's Senate job. McCain hustled home from Washington and publicized his intention to run a day later.

In May, five-term Rep. Bob Stump, R-Ariz., a potential GOP spoiler, also took a pass, giving McCain an open field for the Republican nomination.

To face McCain, the Democrats fielded Richard Kimball, a tall, good-looking 37-year-old with an offbeat personality. The Republic and Gazette editorial pages tore into Kimball, a former state senator from Phoenix who had previous statewide office experience as a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission.

Republic columnist Pat Murphy ridiculed a Kimball position paper because it contained grammatical and spelling errors. Gazette columnist John Kolbe, now firmly in McCain's corner, also lampooned the "hapless" Kimball, saying he suffered from "terminal weirdness."

Everyone knew that Tully wanted McCain to win.

"(Tully) was really pushing John," Shover said. "He liked him. (McCain) was probably the guy Duke wanted to be. Duke was this 'Walter Mitty' type."

Walter Mitty to be sure. All of Tully's war stories were pure fiction. McCain, like everyone else, had been fooled.

Tully invented his military history to live up to the expectations of his father, whose other son had been killed in a military training accident.

In late 1985, the pressure of living the lie was building up inside Tully, causing him to drink and alienate his wife, Pat. After she filed for divorce, Tully, in his own words, "was beginning to crack up."

He began to drop not-so-subtle hints to people that he had never served in the military. Then, on Oct. 25, a concerned secretary summoned Shover to Tully's office.

Shover found Tully stepping on his plaques and certificates and throwing them into a trash can.

Determined to protect his boss, Shover told him to quietly get rid of his uniforms and to stop telling his fake war stories.

Tully refused to be quiet about it.

"It's almost like he was trying to get caught," Shover said.

Eventually, word leaked to Tully's enemies, one of whom was Maricopa County Attorney Tom Collins, who had been smacked by The Republic for taking a trip with his family at taxpayer expense.

Collins, along with freelance aviation writer Dick Rose, began to investigate Tully's background. The day after Christmas, Tully told Shover that Collins would have a press conference to expose him.

Shover drafted Tully's letter of resignation and called Indianapolis, the headquarters of The Republic's then-parent company, Central Newspapers Inc. (Gannett Co., Inc. bought the company in 2000.)

Tully's reign was over.

One of the early press calls was to McCain.

"His response was kind of like, 'Yeah, I have heard of Duke Tully. I'm sorry about what happened to him. Any other questions?'" Shover said.

Shover called McCain a political opportunist who moved quickly to distance himself from Tully.

"In other words, he walked," Shover said. "He used Duke Tully to gain what he got in his life, and he left him just when Duke needed him most."

McCain has a different take.

Part of him resented Tully's deception, but mostly McCain says he felt bad for him. And he criticizes The Republic's own coverage of Tully's "downfall" as excessive and "a little gleeful."

"In one of its numerous takes on the subject, The Republic ran a story that puzzled over my inability to spot Duke's deception, given our close relationship," McCain wrote in his 2002 book. "'Tully's lies rang true to combat flier McCain' ran the headline. Well, they also rang true to the reporters and editors of The Republic, people whose job it is to distinguish truth from falsehood. That story marked the first, but sadly not the last, episode in what can be fairly characterized as my antagonistic relationship with Arizona's leading newspaper."

McCain also thanks Tully for The Republic's editorial endorsement of his candidacy in the competitive primary race that led to his House election. The endorsement was instrumental in helping McCain break out of the GOP pack.

"I owe Duke for that. I think of him often, and not just of his unfortunate last days in Arizona. He was good company, and I miss him."

'Seizure World'

The fall of Tully threw Kimball off balance because he had sought to paint McCain as a tool of the newspaper and its publisher. For the next few months, Kimball darted and dashed around McCain, throwing a lot of punches and landing none.

McCain took Kimball seriously, though.

"We worried, we sweated, we were concerned every single day," Clarke said. "From the first to the last, until Election Day. . . . That's probably the reason John is so successful. That's the way he is."

In June 1986, McCain gave Kimball an opening. Speaking in Tucson, he jokingly referred to Leisure World as "Seizure World," the East Valley retirement community where, in the 1984 election, according to McCain's gag, 97 percent of the people voted and "the other 3 percent were in intensive care."

Kimball's response: "I am offended by his joke. It leaves me humorless." The Democrat also took the opportunity to highlight McCain's "zero rating" from the National Council for Senior Citizens. Senior citizens picketed McCain, a stunt he decried at the time as "a rather cheap political ploy by Mr. Kimball."

The "Seizure World" flap "would have passed a hell of a lot faster if I had listened to my advisers and apologized immediately and fully for my discourtesy," McCain recalls in his book. "Instead I insisted on responding to every accusation of insensitivity by launching into a litany of my steadfast support for any and all interests of concern to the elderly, without actually getting around to saying, 'I'm sorry.'"

McCain attributes the ill-advised quip to his "irremediable" personality trait of being "a wiseass."

"Occasionally my sense of humor is ill-considered or ill-timed, and that can be a problem," he conceded in his 2002 memoir. Kimball launched another series of attacks, calling McCain "bought and paid for" by special interests because much of McCain's campaign contributions came from political action committees in four industries: defense, real estate, petroleum and utilities.

Kimball also noted that McCain was a millionaire because of his wife's interests in the beer distributorship owned by her father. Kimball wasn't shy about airing the Hensley family laundry.

He had dug up old newspaper clips that showed Jim Hensley had been an underling to well-known power broker Kemper Marley Sr., a rich rancher and wholesale liquor baron with suspected links to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

After World War II (Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17 that was shot down over the English Channel), Hensley and his brother Eugene went to work at Marley-owned liquor distributorships in Phoenix and Tucson.

In 1948, the Hensley brothers were convicted of falsifying records to conceal, government lawyers contended, the illegal distribution of hundreds of cases of liquor. The sales occurred from 1945 to 1947, postwar years when liquor was rationed and in short supply.

Eugene Hensley was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Jim Hensley got six months, but his sentence was suspended. He received probation.

In 1953, Jim Hensley was again charged with falsifying records at Marley's liquor firms. The companies were defended by William Rehnquist, who would go on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hensley was found not guilty.

'Standing on a soapbox'

In late 1986, as Kimball gained ground on McCain in the Senate race, the candidates agreed to debate on television.

Because McCain was shorter than the lanky Kimball, he stood on a riser behind the podium. At one point, Kimball called him on it, saying McCain was "standing on a soapbox" to make himself look taller.

McCain was angry but kept his cool. Jay Smith, his political guru, later told a writer that McCain at that moment "wanted to kill" Kimball. The next day, he got mad all over again when he saw himself standing on the riser on the front page of The Republic.

While the debate was mostly a draw, McCain enjoyed a huge fund-raising lead, outspending Kimball nearly 4 to 1. On Election Day, McCain steamrolled Kimball, 60 percent to 40 percent.

"Far from being the marquee race everyone looked forward to when Bruce Babbitt was the presumptive Democratic candidate, my first race for the Senate was pretty close to a foregone conclusion," McCain remembers in Worth the Fighting For. "I led in the polls from start to finish. . . . (Kimball) was not the first-tier candidate that the Democrats had hoped to field."

McCain went to a downtown hotel for his acceptance speech, an event chronicled in Timberg's book.

Smith accommodated McCain with a riser from which to deliver his acceptance speech.

"Arriving at the hotel shortly after McCain, Smith saw reporters and well-wishers huddle together on the stage," Timberg wrote. "From the midst of the throng, he heard a familiar voice floating upward, thanking the voters for sending him to the Senate. Familiar but disembodied. McCain had seen the riser and kicked it aside. (McCain) had become the Invisible Man."

At home in the Senate

McCain, now 50, returned to the Russell Senate Office Building, the same place he wet his feet in the 1970s as the Navy's liaison.

Only this time he was a senator.

He also returned to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Only this time, he was a member, not a lobbyist. (The retiring Goldwater, a longtime Armed Services panelist, pushed to get McCain the spot. "John being on that committee, and I'm making darn sure he's going to get on that committee, will only lend it strength," Goldwater said during the campaign.) McCain also joined the Senate Commerce and Indian Affairs committees.

The Republic reported in February 1987 that "four likely Republican presidential aspirants are sparring to capture Arizona freshman Sen. John McCain as a key adviser and supporter of their 1988 campaigns." The quartet "wooing" McCain consisted of Vice President George H.W. Bush; Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan.; Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y.; and former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, R-Tenn.

By 1988, after Bush had secured the GOP nomination, McCain was among Bush's rumored choices for running mate.

"Before Dan Quayle came popping out on the dock in New Orleans, the last name eliminated for consideration by the AP wire was John McCain," said Scott Celley, a McCain aide at the time.

McCain is not so sure: "I had clearly made the press's short list," but the Bush campaign never contacted him about the running-mate job.

McCain, however, did get to deliver a televised national speech at the Republican convention, although outgoing President Ronald Reagan's famous "shining city on a hill" address of the same night overshadowed his remarks.

Early in the Bush administration, McCain emerged as one of the most passionate defenders of his friend John Tower, the former senator from Texas who was the president's pick for Defense secretary.

Tower came under attack from not only Democrats but from social conservatives who denounced him over alleged excessive drinking and marital infidelity. The episode marked an early chapter in McCain's rocky relationship with the Republican Party's evangelical wing. In his book, McCain slams Paul Weyrich, a religious conservative who emerged as one of Tower's chief detractors and who remains a GOP activist, as "a pompous self-serving son of a bitch."

The Senate rejected the Tower nomination, but McCain's stature continued to swell.

But in October 1989, his world came crashing down.

CHAPTER VII: THE KEATING FIVEEdit

As a war hero and U.S. senator, John McCain has been chronicled in pictures.

There are grainy mug shots of a young McCain, printed in U.S. newspapers after his jet was shot down over North Vietnam. There are black-and-white images of his return, grinning and waving.

In happier times, there is McCain holding his newborn daughter while his wife, Cindy, smiles from her hospital bed.

But it is an innocent vacation picture that carries the reminder of the scandal that threatened his political career.

In the picture, taken in the Bahamas, McCain is seated on a bandstand while wearing an outrageous straw party hat. Next to him on the dais sits Charles Keating III, son of developer Charles H Keating Jr.

McCain calls the Keating scandal "my asterisk." Over the years, his opponents have failed to turn it into a period.

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors examined Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He had spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.

One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

The state's senior senator was one of Keating's most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini's campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.

Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with regulators to deliver a message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting with five senators and the regulators. One of them was McCain.

McCain already knew Keating well. His ties to the home builder dated to 1981, when the two men met at a Navy League dinner where McCain spoke.

After the speech, Keating walked up to McCain and told him that he, too, was a Navy flier and that he greatly respected McCain's war record. He met McCain's wife and family. The two men became friends.

Charlie Keating always took care of his friends, especially those in politics. McCain was no exception.

In 1982, during McCain's first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting more than $11,000 from 40 employees of American Continental Corp. McCain would spend more than $550,000 to win the primary and the general election.

In 1983, as McCain contemplated his House re-election, Keating hosted a $1,000-a-plate dinner for him, even though McCain had no serious competition. When McCain pushed for the Senate in 1986, Keating was there with more than $50,000.

By 1987, McCain had received about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.

McCain also had carried a little water for Keating in Washington. While in the House, McCain, along with a majority of representatives, co-sponsored a resolution to delay new regulations designed to curb risky investments by thrifts such as Lincoln.

Reluctant participant

Despite his history with Keating, McCain was hesitant about intervening. At that point, he had been in the Senate only three months. DeConcini wanted McCain to fly to San Francisco with him and talk to the regulators. McCain refused.

Keating would not be dissuaded.

On March 24 at 9:30 a.m., Keating went to DeConcini's office and asked him if the meeting with the regulators was on. DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous.

"McCain's a wimp," Keating replied, according to the book Trust Me, by Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden. "We'll go talk to him."

Keating had other business on Capitol Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer already had told McCain about the "wimp" insult.

When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.

McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly but that was all.

The first meeting, on April 2, 1987, in DeConcini's office, included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as well as four senators: DeConcini, McCain, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and John Glenn, D-Ohio.

(Years later, McCain recalled that DeConcini started the meeting with a reference to "our friend at Lincoln." McCain characterized it as "an unfortunate choice of words, which Gray would remember and repeat publicly many times.")

For Keating, the meeting was a bust. Gray told the senators that as head of the loan board, he worried about the big picture. He didn't have any specific information about Lincoln. Bank regulators in San Francisco would be versed in that, not him. Gray offered to set up a meeting between the senators and the San Francisco regulators.

The second meeting was April 9. The same four senators attended, along with Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich. Also at the meeting were William Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC.

In an interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures.

"The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle."

Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.'"

McCain previously had refused DeConcini's request to meet with the Lincoln auditors themselves. In Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote that he remained "a little troubled" at the prospect, "but since the chairman of the bank board didn't seem to have a problem with the idea, maybe a discussion with the regulators wouldn't be as problematic as I had earlier thought."

McCain concedes that he failed to sense that Gray and the thrift examiners felt threatened by the senators' meddling.

'Always Hamlet'

The five senators, including McCain, seemed like a united front to Black.

"They presented themselves as a group," Black said, "and DeConcini is the dad, who's going to take the primary speaking role. Both meetings are in his office, and in both cases it's we want this, with no one going, 'What do you mean we, kemo sabe?'"

According to nearly verbatim notes taken by Black, McCain started the second meeting with a careful comment.

"One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion," McCain said. "ACC (American Continental Corp.) is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them. . . .

"I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper."

Black said the comment had the opposite effect for the regulators. It made them nervous about what might really be going on.

"McCain was the weirdest," Black said. "They were all different in their own way. McCain was always Hamlet . . . wringing his hands about what to do."

Glenn, a former astronaut and the first American to orbit the Earth, was not as tactful.

"To be blunt, you should charge them or get off their backs," he told the regulators. "If things are bad there, get to them. Their view is that they took a failing business and put it back on its feet. It's now viable and profitable. They took it off the endangered species list. Why has the exam dragged on and on and on?"

DeConcini added: "What's wrong with this if they're willing to clean up their act?"

Cirona, the banking official, told the senators that it was "very unusual" to hold a meeting to discuss a particular company.

DeConcini shot back: "It's very unusual for us to have a company that could be put out of business by its regulators."

The meeting went on. McCain was quiet. DeConcini carried the ball. The regulators told the senators that Lincoln was in trouble. The thrift, Cirona said, was a "ticking time bomb."

Then Patriarca made a stunning comment, according to transcripts released later.

"We're sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice," he said. "Not maybe, we're sending one. This is an extraordinarily serious matter. It involves a whole range of imprudent actions. I can't tell you strongly enough how serious this is. This is not a profitable institution."

The statement made DeConcini back off a little.

"The criminality surprises me," he said. "We're not interested in discussing those issues. Our premise was that we had a viable institution concerned that it was being overregulated."

"What can we say to Lincoln?" Glenn asked.

"Nothing," Black responded, "with regard to the criminal referral. They haven't and won't be told by us that we're making one."

"You haven't told them?" Glenn asked.

"No," said Black. "Justice would skin us alive if we did. Those referrals are very confidential. We can't prosecute anyone ourselves. All we can do is refer it to Justice."

After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.

"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."

Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?

Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.

"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."

McCain's reservations aside, Keating accomplished his goal. He had bought some time, though the price was very high.

Short-lived reprieve

A month later, the San Francisco regulators finished a yearlong audit and recommended that Lincoln be seized. But the report was virtually ignored because of politics on the bank board.

Gray was being replaced as chairman by Danny Wall, who was more sympathetic to Keating.

The audit, which described Lincoln as a thrift reeling out of control, sat on a shelf.

In September 1987, the investigation was taken away from the San Francisco office, away from Black and Patriarca. In May 1988, it was transferred to Washington, where Lincoln would get a new audit.

It was a win for Keating. A battle, not the war.

Back in San Francisco, Black was fuming.

"Clearly, we were shot in the back," he would say later.

Despite the reprieve, Keating's businesses continued to spiral downward, taking the five senators with him. Together, the five had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon: "The Keating Five."

The Keating Five became synonymous for the kind of political influence that money can buy. As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The five senators were linked as the gang who shilled for an S&L bandit.

S&L "trading cards" came out. The Keating Five card showed Charles Keating holding up his hand, with a senator's head adorning each finger. McCain was on Keating's pinkie.

As the investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the hardest blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides.

But McCain made a critical error.

He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself.

"You're a liar," McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating.

"That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?"

He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating.

"It's up to you to find that out, kids."

The paper ran the story.

In his 2002 book, McCain confesses to "ridiculously immature behavior" during that particular interview and adds that The Republic reporters' "persistence in questioning me about the matter provoked me to rage."

"I don't know how (The Republic journalists) would have reported the story had I been more civil and understanding or just more of a professional during the interview," McCain wrote.

At a news conference after the story ran, McCain was a changed man. He stood calmly for 90 minutes and answered every question.

On the shopping center, his defense was simple. The deal did not involve him. The shares in the shopping center had been bought by a partnership set up between McCain's wife and her father. (The couple also had a prenuptial agreement that separated Cindy McCain's finances and dealings from his.)

But McCain also had to explain his trips with Keating and why he didn't pay Keating back right away.

On that score, McCain admitted he had fouled up. He said he should have reimbursed Keating immediately, not waited several years. His staff said it was an oversight, but it looked bad, McCain jetting around with Keating, then going to bat for him with the federal regulators.

"I was in a hell of a mess," McCain later would write.

Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to founder.

In April 1989, two years after the Keating Five meetings, the government seized Lincoln, which declared bankruptcy. In September 1990, Keating was booked into Los Angeles County Jail, charged with 42 counts of fraud. His bond was set at $5 million.

During Keating's trial, the prosecution produced a parade of elderly investors who had lost their life's savings by investing in American Continental junk bonds.

Verdict: 'Poor judgment'

In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee convened to decide what punishment, if any, should be doled out to the Keating Five.

Robert Bennett, who would later represent President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was the special counsel for the committee. In his opening remarks, he slammed DeConcini but went lightly on McCain, the lone Republican ensnared with four Democrats.

"In the case of Senator McCain, there is very substantial evidence that he thought he had an understanding with Senator DeConcini's office that certain matters would not be gone into at the meeting with (bank board) Chairman (Ed) Gray," Bennett said.

"Moreover, there is substantial evidence that, as a result of Senator McCain's refusal to do certain things, he had a fallout with Mr. Keating."

Among the Keating Five, McCain took the most direct contributions from Keating. But the investigation found that he was the least culpable, along with Glenn. McCain attended the meetings but did nothing afterward to stop Lincoln's death spiral.

Lincoln was the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal. Taxpayers lost more than $2 billion on the bailout. McCain also looked good in contrast to DeConcini, who continued to defend Keating until fall 1989, when federal regulators filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and into political campaigns.

In January 1993, a federal jury convicted him of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud in the collapse of American Continental and Lincoln. Keating was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison but served just 50 months before the conviction was overturned on a technicality. In 1999, at age 75, he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud. He was sentenced to time served.

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

"The appearance of it was wrong," McCain said. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

"For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel," McCain said. For his part, DeConcini is critical of McCain's role in the affair. The two senators never were particularly cozy, and the stress of the public scrutiny worsened their relations.

In his memoir Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle, he praises the decision to keep McCain on the hook.

"It became clear to me, and it was later confirmed by Ethics Committee members, that Bennett was attempting to dismiss the charges against McCain, and in order to appear nonpartisan, he included Glenn in this effort," DeConcini wrote with co-author Jack August. "Thanks to the three Democrats on the committee and perhaps with the help of Senator (Jesse) Helms (R-N.C.), however, the charges remained in place for all the senators under investigation. So all of us had to attend the 23-day public hearing, which was indeed a trial, before the six-member Senate Ethics Committee."

In the book, DeConcini reiterates his allegation that McCain leaked to the media "sensitive information" about certain closed proceedings in order to hurt DeConcini, Riegle and Cranston. It's a fairly serious charge. The Boston Globe revisited the Keating Five leaks in 2000. The story paraphrased a congressional investigator, Clark B. Hall, as personally concluding that "McCain was one of the principal leakers." The newspaper also reported that McCain, under oath, had denied involvement with the leaks.

McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

CHAPTER VIII: OVERCOMING SCANDAL, MOVING ONEdit

For many politicians, the Keating Five scandal would have been too much to overcome.

Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., declined to seek a fourth Senate term in 1994.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., refused to give up.

He employed a dual strategy. He would make himself accessible to any reporter anywhere who wanted to talk about the Keating Five, and he wouldn't let the controversy detract from his work as a senator.

McCain grimly marched about the country, struggling to clear his name.

"I have to say, it was not an easy time," said Torie Clarke, McCain's former press secretary. "But because of the strategy he decided to pursue . . . nobody had time to sit around and feel sorry for themselves."

McCain's hobnobbing with the press had an unexpected side effect. Reporters started to like him.

McCain always returned phone calls. He showed up for his television appearances. He was willing to go off the record to help reporters unearth certain stories. He answered questions bluntly, without much political tap dancing.

For Beltway reporters bored with bureaucrats, McCain was fresh, new and different.

"Everybody in town," Clarke said, "from the makeup artist at the local news station to the producers and directors, every reporter and every editor, loves working with John McCain because he does not stand on ceremony; he has no airs."

Going into the 1992 election, some thought McCain was in trouble and not just because of Keating.

President Bush was dropping in the polls and would lose that year to Democrat Bill Clinton.

McCain's Democratic opponent was Claire Sargent, a Phoenix community activist.

Former Republican Gov. Evan Mecham also was running for the Senate as an independent despite having been impeached and removed from office in 1988.

Mecham, a divisive and controversial figure in Arizona politics, nursed a grudge against McCain, who had joined other Arizona GOP establishment figures, including former Sen. Barry Goldwater, in calling for Mecham's resignation. (And "for which I earned the lasting enmity of some of his supporters," McCain would later note.)

Some conservative voters remained fiercely loyal to Mecham. Certain state lawmakers central to the impeachment proceedings - notably Arizona House Speaker Joe Lane, R-Willcox, and Senate President Carl Kunasek, R-Mesa - lost their seats in the immediate aftermath. (Ed Buck, the well-known activist behind a drive to recall Mecham, considered running against McCain but decided against it.)

Some Republicans worried that Mecham could act as a spoiler and throw the Senate seat to the Democrats. The McCain campaign initially sought to block Mecham from the ballot.

But McCain bounced back in 1991. Soon after the Persian Gulf War broke out, McCain was in demand. The phone began ringing off the hook the day POWs were taken.

"The Today Show called, and we started on The Today Show at four-something in the morning," said Scott Celley, a former aide. "The last thing I remember him being on was Australian Nightline, which was done here at Channel 10, a few blocks away, at close to 11 p.m. He was on television or the radio every minute of that day."

McCain became a regular on public-affairs shows, using his expertise as a former Navy pilot and POW. He quickly became a national authority on foreign affairs.

The din of the Keating Five began to lessen. McCain stayed on message, and the scandal gradually faded from the public consciousness.

The tough re-election fight McCain dreaded never panned out.

Sargent never mounted much of a campaign, though she did briefly draw national attention after making a slightly off-color observation.

"I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts," Sargent joked. "After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough."

A few sparks did fly between McCain and the ever-combative Mecham, who also happened to be a former prisoner of war held by the Germans during World War II. At a news conference, Mecham accused McCain of "selling out his fellow POWs" and participating in a government coverup concerning U.S. servicemen abandoned in Southeast Asia.

McCain called Mecham's allegation "the kind of contemptuous lie which the people of Arizona have sadly come to expect in any of Mecham's political campaigns."

It made for entertaining political theater, but Mecham ultimately had little impact on the ballot-box results. His day in Arizona politics had passed.

Even in a race split three ways, McCain swept up 56 percent of the votes to clinch his second term. Mecham finished behind Sargent.

"The pictures of me cavorting on a Bahamian beach with Charlie that I had anticipated seeing in Arizona newspapers never made an appearance in the campaign," McCain reflects in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For. "(Fellow Keating Five member) John Glenn also was re-elected."

In 1995, The Nightingale's Song lionized McCain. The book examined the military and political careers of McCain and four other Annapolis graduates: Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Oliver North and James Webb, who in 2006 would win a hard-fought race against Sen. George Allen, R-Va.

In anticipation of McCain's 2000 presidential run, author Robert Timberg spun the McCain portion of The Nightingale's Song into its own book. John McCain: An American Odyssey still stands as the most authoritative McCain biography on the shelves.

Timberg penned this coda about the Keating Five:

"Stripped of the veneer of sleaze that coated the affair, McCain's defense of his actions was solid and credible. It didn't matter. The Keating Five label endured, shabby journalistic shorthand that made up in simplemindedness what it lacked in precision."

On Election Night 1992, the triumphant McCain told The Arizona Republic: "I think this puts the issue behind me, yes, politically."

By 1996, McCain's image had recuperated to the point where the vice presidential candidate chatter resumed. This time, McCain was a rumored front-runner to be Bob Dole's running mate before Dole chose Jack Kemp in his race against Clinton and Al Gore. McCain that year had strongly supported the short-lived White House bid by his friend Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. He even served as Gramm's national campaign chairman.

The Keating Five scandal, which never was easy to understand or explain, wasn't even much of a factor in McCain's 2000 presidential bid and barely comes up anymore.

McCain knows it will never disappear altogether.

"Despite my recovery, the Keating Five experience was not one that I have walked away from as easily as I have other bad times," McCain wrote in 2002. "Twelve years after its conclusion, I still wince thinking about it and find that if I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important, something that was sacrificed in the pursuit of gratifying ambitions, my own and others', and that I might never possess again as assuredly as I once had."

'I'm Cindy, and I'm an addict'

By the early 1990s, McCain's political rehabilitation seemed complete, but the Keating Five fallout would continue to overshadow his personal life and affect his relationship with the local media.

In August 1994, a group of Valley journalists received an unusual phone call from Jay Smith, McCain's political strategist.

They were offered an exclusive story in exchange for agreeing to certain terms. They would attend individual interview sessions Aug. 19 and sit on the story until Aug. 22. The five journalists - three print reporters, a television reporter and a radio reporter - agreed.

One by one, they went to the McCain home, where they heard an incredible story.

Cindy McCain, 40, told them that she had been a drug addict for three years. From 1989 to 1992, as the Keating Five made headlines, she was addicted to Percocet and Vicodin. Worse, she had stolen pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a relief organization that she founded to aid Third World countries.

"More than anything, I wanted to be able to face my children, for them to know I wasn't lying to them," she said at the time. "They're too young to fully understand right now, but someday they will."

Cindy blamed two back surgeries and the Keating Five scandal - a blend of physical and emotional pain - for hooking her on drugs.

Things started to unravel when a Drug Enforcement Administration audit found irregularities in the charity's records, prompting an investigation, Cindy told the reporters.

In 1992, as the Keating affair surfaced again during McCain's run for a second Senate term, Cindy's parents confronted her about her drug use.

What had been clear to Cindy's parents was lost on McCain, who said he had not noticed his wife's addiction.

"I was stunned," McCain said at the time. "Naturally, I felt enormous sadness for Cindy and a certain sense of guilt that I hadn't detected it. I feel very sorry for what she went through, but I'm very proud she was able to come out of it. For her, it was like the Keating affair had been for me, a searing experience, and we both came out stronger. I think it has strengthened our marriage and our overall relationship."

The late Phoenix Gazette political columnist John Kolbe helped break the story.

His Aug. 25, 1994, column was headlined and led with a powerful quote:

"I'm Cindy, and I'm an addict."

Kolbe also drew a straight line between Cindy's drug predicament and the Keating Five stress.

"As the family bookkeeper, she was unable to find records of her reimbursement to Keating for three vacation trips to the Bahamas on Keating's corporate plane," Kolbe wrote. "The apparent lack of reimbursement - which wasn't resolved until the records turned up months later - became a key ethical charge against the senator."

Cindy explained to Kolbe: "It wasn't my fault, but at the time, you couldn't convince me. (Senate Ethics Committee Chairman) Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) even told me it was my fault."

To avoid prosecution on drug charges, she would enter a federal diversion program.

In telling her story, Cindy got choked up when she told of federal drug agents knocking on her door, asking about missing pills.

The reporters were sympathetic.

Cindy had always been physically fragile. She suffered two miscarriages early in her marriage to McCain until doctors determined she was a "DES baby." Cindy's mother had been given the drug diethylstilbestrol during her pregnancy.

During the 1940s and 1950s, DES was thought to prevent miscarriages. Instead, it caused numerous birth defects, including deformed uteruses in female offspring. Doctors finally detected the problem and took special precautions during Cindy's third pregnancy.

Even so, there were long separations because Cindy could not travel while pregnant. Besides, she preferred Arizona to Washington.

Cindy told the reporters that she finally entered The Meadows, a drug-treatment center in Wickenburg, and went to anti-dependency meetings twice a week.

In 1993, she said, a hysterectomy ended the nagging back pain that had driven her to the painkillers.

So why go public a year later?

"If what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile," she said. "They should know it's OK to be scared. It's OK to talk about it. And there's nothing wrong with staying home, carpooling and potty-training a 3-year-old."

Given Cindy's heartfelt confession, the handpicked journalists did what Smith expected. They painted Cindy as the victim, a courageous soldier beating back the devil of drug addiction.

"As surely as John McCain was a casualty of Vietnam, Cindy is a casualty of political life," Kolbe quoted an unnamed "friend" as saying. "But now she is fighting to save herself."

But the select group of reporters had not heard the whole story. It became apparent the next week, as more details came out.

The McCain camp had organized the interviews to head off a more negative story that was pending publication in the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times. That piece centered on a former American Voluntary Medical Team employee who accused Cindy McCain in a lawsuit of ordering him to conceal "improper acts" and "misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding."

The accuser was Tom Gosinski, whom the charity had fired in 1993. He had tipped the DEA to check out Cindy's organization. He filed the lawsuit as a warning shot. His real allegation was that Cindy McCain had fired him because he "knew too much" about her drug use.

The details were in a 212-page report from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office that was about to become public when McCain arranged the interviews.

Ironically, County Attorney Rick Romley entered the fray at the request of McCain lawyer John Dowd, who alleged that Gosinski was extorting the McCains by offering to settle the case for $250,000.

By asking Romley to investigate, Dowd helped to create a public record that otherwise would not have existed.

The invitation-only interviews were not exactly a suave PR move. By playing favorites with the disclosure of the news, McCain created hard feelings among the Valley journalists who were not invited. They aggressively chased the story.

McCain refused to talk to reporters who were not invited to Cindy's private interviews.

Dowd, who would later defend Gov. Fife Symington, put it plainly to a Republic reporter who called him for comment:

"You're not going to talk to Cindy. You're not going to talk to me. You're not going to talk to anybody associated with us. Have you got the message?"

Then he hung up.

Meanwhile, new allegations were surfacing, feeding the press frenzy for fresh angles, especially in light of McCain's silence.

Gosinski alleged that Cindy had asked him to lie to make it easier for her to adopt a baby from Bangladesh.

Backed up by court documents, the McCains characterized the adoption (from one of Mother Teresa's orphanages) as "proper in every respect." They noted that the adoption probably saved the abandoned infant's life, as her cleft palate would not have allowed her to survive in Bangladesh.

In an Aug. 26, 1994, response to a Phoenix Gazette news article about the adoption, McCain accused the newspaper of trying to "tarnish a story of kindness with the brush of scandal."

"I will accept a great deal in public life, but I cannot accept this," McCain wrote. "I ask the reporters of The Gazette and every reporter to please take a moment to consider whether it is really in the people's interest to make a family - any family - suffer in public because they chose to live some of their happiness and their sorrow in private."

Gosinski's credibility started to slip. In Romley's report, several charity staffers said Gosinski had privately threatened to blackmail Cindy if she ever fired him.

Ultimately, Gosinski's lawsuit was dropped, and he was never prosecuted.

Cindy maintains she has avoided drugs since the scandal, which she candidly revisited in a 1999 Dateline NBC interview.

"I have done good things, and the best thing I've ever done is go into recovery and stay drug-free," she said on the TV show.

CHAPTER IX: McCAIN BECOMES THE 'MAVERICK'Edit

Sen. John McCain, held up to national scorn and ridicule as a member of the Keating Five just a few years before, reinvented himself in the 1990s as one of the leading critics of money's corrupting influence on U.S. politics.

In doing so, he created rifts with deep-pocketed special interests on the right and the left and helped set the stage for an insurgent 2000 presidential campaign.

Detractors called McCain's newfound passion for reform a bit high-handed, especially coming from a man who accepted $112,000 in campaign contributions from Charlie Keating and his pals.

They also noted that McCain's stand on campaign-finance reform had not prevented him from working Washington, D.C., for campaign cash or accepting tens of thousands of dollars from corporations that are under the oversight of the Senate Commerce Committee, which McCain formerly ran and still sits on.

The panel holds sway over a number of key industries, overseeing issues such as cable and satellite television rules, airline deregulation and access to telephone long-distance markets.

McCain admits that his own involvement in the Keating embarrassment made him take a hard look at the way congressional candidates finance their campaigns. If nothing else, politicians who grovel for special-interest money tend to disgust the public, he says.

"Questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics, and because they incite public distrust, they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption," McCain wrote in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For.

"By the time I became a leading advocate of campaign finance reform, I had come to appreciate that the public's suspicions were not always mistaken. Money does buy access in Washington, and access increases influence that often results in benefiting the few at the expense of the many."

Jousting with the status quo

Even before making campaign-finance reform his signature issue, McCain cocked an eye at some practices viewed as business as usual on Capitol Hill.

He is a longtime foe of pork-barrel spending and government waste.

"Pork" is the name for parochial federally funded projects, defense contracts or tax-code loopholes of dubious national value that are directed to the home districts or states of influential representatives and senators.

To some Washington politicians, this is a time-honored practice that they consider essential to their continued re-election. They resist efforts to curb pork spending, which, thanks to the explosion of budget earmarks, costs taxpayers more today than ever before.

McCain calls the activity, which largely is controlled by House and Senate leaders and powerful appropriators, small-minded, "offensive" and detrimental to true national priorities, such as a strong and responsive military.

"Congress is the national legislature, not a town council, not a state assembly, and not a corporate boardroom," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For. "And we ought to devote ourselves to promoting those things that promote the national interest, allocating resources equitably to serve the progress of the whole society, and not fostering greater social divisions by squabbling among ourselves over who gets the bigger piece of the federal pie to the exclusion of national needs."

To combat the overspending problem, McCain helped push through a presidential line-item veto in 1995, but the courts overturned the law as unconstitutional. The line-item veto would have allowed a president to strike specific spending items in a bill while allowing the rest of the appropriations to become law. It was McCain's first big Senate victory, though ultimately it did not work out.

He continues to wage war on pork to this day, devoting part of his official Senate Web site to the concern.

In April 1994, McCain riled his colleagues with an amendment that would have eliminated free VIP parking at two Washington-area airports. The airports reserved the convenient parking spaces for members of Congress. McCain offered an egalitarian measure to open up the lots to the general public, calling it "a small gesture of respect for popular sovereignty." The Senate rejected it, with some members sneering at McCain for trying to score political points by portraying them in a bad light and fueling public cynicism.

It was not the last time McCain would get under the skin of his fellow senators.

"Honesty obliges me to confess that there is also something in my nature that enjoys throwing bricks at customs that smack of pretension, and sometimes my behavior reveals more vanity on my part than was evident in the practice I denounce," McCain acknowledged in Worth the Fighting For.

There are other examples of McCain going against the flow.

In 1983, as a member of the House, he voted against President Reagan's effort to keep Marines in Lebanon.

In 1986, while still in the House, McCain voted with a two-thirds majority to override Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa.

The next year, his first in the Senate, he helped stop the administration's attempt to funnel $28 million from a poverty food program into a pay raise for Department of Agriculture employees.

A 1993 Washington Post story described McCain as "a conservative with maverick instincts," but it would take his dogged pursuit of campaign-finance reform for his independent streak to fully assert itself.

Meet Russ Feingold

Campaign-finance reform picked up steam in late 1994, after McCain reached out to freshman Sen. Russell Feingold, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin.

McCain and Feingold were as different as night and day. "He is polite, patient, self-effacing, studious, lawyerly and self-controlled, adjectives rarely applied to me," McCain would observe later. But McCain early on had detected in Feingold flashes of independence similar to his own.

Together they worked on reform legislation related to earmarks and lobbyists. They had some quick success in putting restrictions on the gifts lawmakers could accept from lobbyists and figured rewriting campaign-finance laws would not be any more difficult.

They were wrong.

Politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, take their incumbency seriously. The Senate duo's battle to enact the new restrictions on political parties' soft money would take seven years. Feingold would become so identified with their McCain-Feingold bill that he still jokes that people think his first name is "McCain."

"Soft money" was the insider term for the limitless contributions that special interests such as corporations, labor unions or independently wealthy individuals donated to the political parties. Party officials, in turn, often used the money to bankroll attack ads on each other's candidates. Although the candidates had to abide by "hard money" restrictions on contributions, the parties did not. The "soft money" phenomenon evolved over time from a loophole in post-Watergate campaign laws. By the mid-1990s, "soft money" was saturating federal races.

McCain and Feingold had their work cut out for them. Most of the political establishment opposed, either explicitly or quietly, their crusade to clean up elections.

However, they had one big ally: the media.

Whether it was out of sympathy to the cause or simply a fascination with the David-vs.-Goliath-style struggle, McCain and Feingold became national media mainstays. By 1995, references to the "maverick Republican" McCain were ubiquitous. Some conservatives still hold the positive coverage McCain received during this period against him. Some became suspicious of his motives.

Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot eventually derisively dubbed him "John McCain (R., Media)."

McCain answered his critics in Worth the Fighting For:

"Those who criticize my reform efforts as posturing for what they disparage as the liberal East Coast media misunderstand the relationship," McCain wrote. "There is little institutional interest in reforming entrenched traditions, traditions under which most politicians have prospered handsomely. Only public opinion can force change, and the only way to arouse public opinion is through the media."

Conservative antipathy toward the media was directly connected to the Right's resistance to campaign-finance reform, according to McCain. Some GOP activists felt they needed easy access to money to bankroll paid advertising to counter what they perceive as the media's liberal drumbeat.

McCain never let go of McCain-Feingold, even as he geared up for a possible 2000 presidential race. McCain, then Commerce Committee chairman, collected campaign contributions from business interests, an irony not lost on some reform foes.

"When you're out there raising money right and left and then you're talking about how you need to reform the system, it rings a little hollow," then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., told reporters in summer 1999.

During a Dec. 5, 1999, appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, host Tim Russert threw Lott's quote in McCain's face.

"Literally every business in America falls under the Commerce Committee, and that's why the name of it is 'Commerce,'" McCain said on the Sunday morning program. "And I'm very pleased that I get support from many corporations and companies around America. And I restrict those contributions to $1,000. . . .

"It's not, Tim, the $1,000 contribution that has corrupted our work here in Washington. It's the huge, uncontrolled, now multibillion dollars in campaign contributions."

McCain promised to carry on because he believed the public was demanding reform. The backdrop of Clinton-era political scandals helped him make his case.

"Most Americans care very much that it is now legal for a subsidiary of a corporation owned by the Chinese Army to give unlimited amounts of money to American political campaigns," McCain said at one point. "Most Americans care very much that the Lincoln bedroom has become a Motel 6, where the president of the United States serves as the bellhop."

In 1999, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library took some of the sting out of the political beating that campaign-finance-reform opponents had given McCain and Feingold. It honored the duo with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award.

Eye on the White House

Campaign-finance reform was not the only high-profile issue McCain took on in the 1990s.

In 1995, he also targeted Big Tobacco, seeking to raise taxes on cigarettes to finance an anti-smoking advertising campaign, support health research and help states pay their smoking-related health care costs.

Special-interest money flexed its muscle here, too. The tobacco industry mounted a $40 million national advertising campaign to defeat McCain's anti-tobacco bill, and it ultimately prevailed.

"The losers are the children of America," McCain said after the bill went down.

McCain's reform efforts had yet to bear fruit. But he had made a national name for himself, and his increasingly rebellious, anti-establishment demeanor won fans across the political spectrum, particularly among independents fed up with both parties.

If his 1986 and 1992 Senate races proved anti-climactic, his 1998 re-election bid was a snoozer. McCain, then 62, didn't have to break a sweat to clinch his third Senate term. He easily defeated Democrat Ed Ranger, an environmental attorney new to politics, and two minor-party challengers.

"John McCain might have saved my friends and me a lot of time, effort and money," Ranger later would reflect in a 2001 guest column for the Los Angeles Times. "If he had only let me know he was going to be a centrist Democrat in his third U.S. Senate term, I would never have become the Democratic nominee against him in 1998."

McCain swore off "soft money" in the race, but still compiled a war chest worth more than $4.4 million. To some, the large amount of money seemed like overkill against a political unknown such as Ranger and a couple of Libertarian and Reform Party candidates.

McCain explained to The Arizona Republic that he needed the cash just in case one of the special interests he had rattled in Washington decided to take him on at home.

"I'm sure that all citizens of Arizona noticed that tobacco companies spent several millions on direct attacks on me," McCain said. "I don't know when the tobacco companies are going to go back at me again. I have to be able to respond."

Ranger's campaign barely registered with the public. Mostly, he repeatedly warned Arizona voters that McCain was preoccupied with presidential ambitions.

He was right.

CHAPTER X: THE 'MAVERICK' RUNSEdit

"It is a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve."

So Sen. John McCain of Arizona launched his against-the-odds presidential campaign on Sept. 27, 1999.

Modeling himself on President Theodore Roosevelt, his political idol, McCain was aiming his insurgent, anti-establishment road show at the White House. He tailored his message to appeal not only to Republicans but also Democrats and independents, too - a new, even brazen strategy that would bank heavily on states that hosted GOP primaries that were open to other registered voters.

McCain had been taking the preliminary steps for a 2000 run since the previous December.

He formed an exploratory committee to gauge the viability of his candidacy.

He shifted $1.9 million in surplus 1998 Senate race funds to his nascent presidential effort.

And he became a bestselling author.

Random House published Faith of My Fathers, co-written with longtime aide Mark Salter, on Aug. 31, 1999.

The book retold not only McCain's dramatic Vietnam War exploits - the USS Forrestal disaster and his POW camp trauma - but also familiarized readers with his family's military tradition.

A Feb. 10, 1999, episode of the A&E cable TV network's Biography titled John McCain: American Maverick shared some of the same material with its national audience.

"I'm sure there's no perfect time, but this certainly is as close to the right time that I would have" to seek the presidency, McCain told The Arizona Republic a few days after he filed his exploratory committee paperwork.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the former president's son, already was the clear front-runner when McCain entered the race. The same day that McCain announced, former Vice President Dan Quayle of Paradise Valley dropped out. Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., would duke it out for the Democratic nod.

McCain knew that his war record was not enough to win the presidency. But it couldn't hurt. Ever since George Washington, Americans have embraced war heroes as their presidents. His story appealed to many people.

During a 1999 stop at a Tilton, N.H., diner, a woman named Judy Tilton approached candidate McCain.

"I've been waiting 30 years to meet you," she said, thrusting out her hand.

McCain looked down. Tilton had a stainless steel POW bracelet, embossed with the lettering LCDR JOHN McCAIN III 10-26-67. Her father, a retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, had given it to her at age 7.

"I'm very touched," McCain told her. "Very touched."

His military experience did give him an edge over a generation of draft dodgers and National Guardsmen, those who avoided the war that stole much of McCain's youth.

After all, it was McCain who denied the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory by turning down an early release offered because his father was an admiral. It was McCain who rotted in prison and was beaten to a pulp while others managed to avoid Vietnam.

"Although it's ridiculous to conceive of him as a showboat, let's imagine McCain showing up for a debate with Bush wearing military medals - Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross," Sandy Grady, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist, wrote shortly after McCain announced for president. "What would Bush wear - a badge from the Texas National Guard?"

Grady was correct to suggest that McCain never would be so ostentatious, but he did rely on his military record throughout the race.

"I'm sure he doesn't want to be the POW candidate, but it's an integral part of his resume," observed Jay Smith, McCain's former political consultant. "It's something people respond to for positive reasons. You use what you can use."

In his speeches, McCain spun stories about being a POW but usually talked about other brave prisoners. He would say that he was not a hero but served in the company of heroes.

"It doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down," McCain still is fond of saying. "I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane."

In a speech before the state Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in New Hampshire in the late 1990s, McCain recalled the tale of Mike Christian, a fellow POW who used red and white cloth to sew an American flag inside his prison uniform. Every night, the POWs hung up Christian's shirt and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

One day, the North Vietnamese guards found the flag. They took Christian from the cell and beat him severely. When he was returned, his ribs were broken and his face badly bruised. The other POWs cleaned up Christian the best they could.

Later that night, as McCain struggled to sleep on the concrete slab that was his bed, he looked over into the corner of the room.

"There, beneath that dim light bulb, with a piece of white cloth and a piece of red cloth and his bamboo needle, his eyes almost shut from the beating that he had received, was my dear friend Mike Christian, making another American flag."

McCain's recollections of his war experience did not always draw a positive response.

His continued use of the derogatory term "gook" to describe his North Vietnamese captors earned him criticism in the media and in parts of the country with significant Vietnamese populations, such as Orange County, Calif.

Under fire in Arizona

McCain quickly learned that the punches fly a lot faster and harder in presidential politics.

Before McCain had even finished his weeklong national announcement tour, he came under attack in Arizona.

The front-page headline from the Sept. 28, 1999, edition of The Arizona Republic foreshadowed the fierce fight he faced in his home state: "Bush's juggernaut rolling into Arizona."

Just one day after McCain entered the race, Bush dropped by to pick up the endorsement of not only Republican Gov. Jane Hull, at that time one of the state's most popular politicians, but also former Congressman John Rhodes, McCain's House predecessor. The next month, Bush would pick up the support of popular Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Hull's son, Mike, became Bush's Arizona campaign chairman.

The Bush goal clearly was to humiliate McCain in the Feb. 22, 2000, Arizona primary.

Bush even rubbed McCain's nose in the Hull endorsement.

"I've got advice for anyone who's running for president," Bush said in Phoenix. "Make sure you get the governor on your side, particularly if you've got a governor with a record of accomplishment and a governor as beloved by the people as Gov. Hull."

A poll showed Bush leading McCain in Arizona by 9 percentage points.

"I really think this race is going to be one of the most interesting, exciting and maybe bitter in the history of Arizona politics," predicted Bruce Merrill, a veteran political scientist at Arizona State University. "Bush can drive a silver stake into McCain if he wins Arizona."

Rhodes explained that he backed Bush over McCain only because he perceived Bush as destined to win the GOP nomination.

"There is no substitute for victory in politics," Rhodes said. "The number two is also last."

Bush also would pick up the support of former Republican Attorney General Grant Woods, a former McCain aide who later fell out with him. They have reconciled in recent years.

Woods told The Republic that he expected McCain's campaign to fall apart before the Arizona primary.

"(Bush is) really an impressive guy," Woods said. "I think there's a reason why he's winning in Arizona, and there's a reason why he's winning everywhere else: Because he's got the right stuff for the job."

McCain returned to Arizona later in the week for a campaign rally at Hayden Square Amphitheater in downtown Tempe and shrugged off suggestions that Bush was the state's front-runner.

"We will win the state of Arizona," McCain promised the Mill Avenue crowd on Sept. 30. "We will win easily."

But Hull had more trouble in store for McCain.

In a front-page New York Times story published Oct. 25, Hull made McCain's temperament a national issue.

"Pretending to hold a telephone receiver several inches from her ear, Mrs. Hull explained in an interview this week how she reacted to Mr. McCain's occasional eruptions at her," Times reporter Richard Berke wrote.

"You've got to hold it out there for a while and let him calm down," Hull told the newspaper. "We all have our faults, and it's something that John has to keep control of."

Hull also told the Times that McCain once demanded that she fire Rick Collins, her chief of staff.

"Did he actually want me to fire you?" Hull said, looking to Collins. "Or just boil you in oil?"

According to the Times story, Collins joked to Berke and Hull that, "It was, 'Just kill him!'"

Throughout his political career, McCain faced similar questions. The late Phoenix Gazette political columnist John Kolbe cited McCain's "temper" as a potential liability as far back as 1986. By 1999, McCain had amassed a record of run-ins with several Arizona and Capitol Hill politicians eager to tell their stories.

In his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For, McCain acknowledged that "my temper has become one of my most frequently discussed attributes."

"I have one, of course, and its exercise, usually when I am very tired, has caused me to make most of the more serious mistakes of my career," McCain wrote. "It is fair to say that my temper has become legendary. But like most legends, it is exaggerated far beyond reality."

As for Hull's claims in the New York Times story, McCain flatly denied ever trying to retaliate against Collins for any slight or offense.

"I will take a polygraph," said McCain, adding that he had endorsed Hull in her 1998 gubernatorial race.

At a news conference in Phoenix, McCain suggested the Times story was planted by the Bush campaign: "I think it's pretty obvious, as we've closed in the polls - we're up to within 12 points of Gov. Bush in New Hampshire - that the memo came out from the Bush campaign to start attacking John McCain."

Whatever its origins, the Times story prompted widespread media scrutiny of McCain's personality.

The Republic quickly weighed in with a stinging Sunday editorial that concluded there is "reason to seriously question whether McCain has the temperament, and the political approach and skills, we want in the next president of the United States."

"McCain often insults people and flies off the handle," The Republic editorialized. "This newspaper has chronicled just some of these unfortunate exhibitions."

The Republic also defended Hull from McCain's suggestion that she was a Bush stooge. "This is, sadly, not an untypical McCain remark: unfounded, sarcastic and condescending. It demeans Hull as an independent political actor and pretty well validates rather than refutes her description of their relationship and his treatment of her."

The Republic's rebuke of McCain also attracted national attention. The national media scrutinized not only the editorial but also McCain's long-term relationship with the newspaper.

On ABC's Good Morning America, McCain called the editorial part of a Republic "vendetta" dating at least to 1994, when the paper published a controversial cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Benson about McCain's wife's drug addiction and McCain's decision to stop cooperating with the paper's news staff.

McCain supporters lined up to blast the newspaper.

Appearing on CNN's Crossfire, then-Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., called the Benson cartoon "about the most vicious thing I've ever seen about a candidate's wife."

Former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., said on Hardball with Chris Matthews, then on CNBC: "When most people were being sympathetic (to Cindy McCain), this newspaper was cruel beyond belief." Rudman called The Republic's editorial about McCain's temper "really deplorable."

Keven Ann Willey, then The Republic's editorial page editor, found herself in the national spotlight, defending the editorial and the by then 5-year-old Benson cartoon. She eventually wrote a column to correct the "inaccuracies and misinformation" that she believed contaminated the national TV coverage of "what most Arizonans consider to be an old issue."

"Vendetta? Right, and the Grand Canyon is in Utah," she wrote.

Willey noted that The Republic endorsed McCain every time he sought political office and defended the Benson drawing as "hard-hitting but hardly unfair."

Walter Mears, a veteran Associated Press journalist, used the McCain debate to point out that temperament issues are common to presidential hopefuls.

"Political tempers do tend to be short-fused," Mears wrote. "President Clinton's sometimes shows. Richard M. Nixon raged on the White House tapes. Even the affable George McGovern got fed up near the end of the 1972 campaign, when he told a heckling woman to kiss his rear end, although he didn't put it so politely."

The Republic eventually would decline to endorse either candidate in the Arizona primary: "Neither McCain nor Bush has yet persuaded us that he is a clearly superior choice to be the Republican nominee," the newspaper editorial said.

'Straight Talk' success

McCain's tougher-than-expected resistance in Arizona was offset with a better-than-anticipated reception elsewhere.

From the beginning, his presidential effort was an uphill struggle. To seek the Republican nomination while running against the GOP establishment and appealing to centrists, independents and even Democrats is, to say the least, an unusual strategy.

Bush was the guy to beat from Day 1. He had the money and the organization. Millionaire magazine publisher Steve Forbes and former ambassador Alan Keyes also were pursuing the Republican nod.

"No one thought I had much of a chance, including me," McCain wrote in his book Worth the Fighting For. "We took a lot of risks, first, because I like to take risks, and second, because we really didn't have any other choice. We decided or, more accurately, we resigned ourselves to running a campaign that would test many of the conventions of previously successful presidential campaigns."

Besides, McCain felt that as the dark horse, he would have more leeway to speak his mind on the campaign trail without worrying about the political ramifications of every syllable.

The first risk: McCain for the most part ignored Iowa, host of the first caucuses. He wanted to focus on the next week's New Hampshire primary, which was open to independents and Democrats as well as Republicans. As a foe of ethanol subsidies, McCain likely would have met a lot of opposition in Iowa.

Short on cash, McCain knew from experience that free media coverage could help spread his reform message to make up for his lack of paid advertising. He filled his campaign bus with reporters and named it the Straight Talk Express. The bus would symbolize McCain's insurgent bid and become one of the best-known icons of turn-of-the-century politics.

"We gave them more access than they ever dreamed they would have," McCain said of the journalists.

That invitation of unprecedented access often did not extend to The Republic. The McCain camp at one point had barred The Republic's reporter from the Straight Talk Express but relented after the Washington Post asked about the policy.

Although Bush was a governor, he was the son of a former president. That allowed McCain, a nearly 20-year Capitol Hill veteran, to tag Bush as the Washington insider and cast himself as the outsider.

On Feb. 1, 2000, McCain landed his first blow, clobbering Bush in New Hampshire by nearly 20 percentage points.

New Hampshire was do-or-die for McCain. It wasn't even close.

McCain's blunt talk particularly resonated with New Hampshire's independents.

"I expected him to win, and I half expected him to win handily," Clark Hubbard, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told The Republic at the time. "But I never expected him to slaughter Bush."

The Straight Talk Express was on a roll as it headed toward South Carolina, where Bush had been comfortably leading in the approaching Feb. 19 primary. Bush's New Hampshire thrashing immediately tightened the polls.

To many Republicans, McCain's presidential candidacy started as little more than a novelty.

Now it had become a threat. A loss to McCain in South Carolina could have dire ramifications for the Bush campaign.

'The ugly underside of politics'

From the start, South Carolina posed a different set of challenges to the upstart McCain.

Unlike in New Hampshire, where Republicans are known for a feisty, libertarian streak, social conservatives have a lot of clout in South Carolina.

McCain never was particularly chummy with that crowd.

Most Religious Right organizations actively opposed McCain's campaign-finance reform efforts. Americans for Tax Reform, the National Rifle Association, a variety of anti-abortion groups and other special-interest organizations with axes to grind against McCain showed up in South Carolina to help stop his momentum.

And the candidate's support for higher tobacco taxes rankled others in the region. The pro-tobacco National Smokers Alliance also piled on McCain.

Besides that, Bush's New Hampshire shellacking forced his reeling strategists to retool their message. Pinching from McCain's act, the "compassionate conservative" Bush was reborn as the "reformer with results." By mid-February, Bush would be preaching on behalf of campaign-finance reform.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush, George W. Bush's mother, complained to The Republic that the media were treating McCain like "sort of a star figure" and buying his campaign's "baloney" that her son was the establishment candidate.

"That's the silliest thing I ever heard," she said.

Back in South Carolina, the Bush campaign went negative, slamming McCain hard on taxes and veterans issues.

The Bush campaign's use of a marginal veterans rights activist named J. Thomas Burch to personally attack McCain for allegedly "abandon(ing) the veterans" incensed McCain. Five senators who fought in Vietnam led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., even fired off a letter to Bush defending McCain's record and urging Bush to apologize and "disassociate" himself from efforts "to impugn John McCain's character and so maliciously distort his record on these critical issues."

McCain slugged back with particularly pointed TV ads.

The McCain spots accused Bush of lying like President Bill Clinton and asked viewers if they "really want another president in the White House that America can't trust."

Comparing a candidate to Clinton is "about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary," Bush groused.

Things spiraled downhill from there.

Bush's own anti-McCain campaign was overwhelming enough. But the third-party groups also ran TV and radio spots savaging McCain, and other foes deluged voters with anti-McCain messages ranging from the nasty to the outrageous. Political pundits still argue about whether some of those smears were linked to the official Bush campaign.

"In e-mails, faxes, flyers, postcards, telephone calls and talk radio, groups and individuals circulated all kinds of wild rumors about me, from the old Manchurian Candidate allegation to charges of having sired children with prostitutes," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For. "There wasn't a damn thing I could do about the subterranean assaults on my reputation except to act in a way that contradicted their libel. When things got so bad that I became discouraged by my own negative ads, we pulled them. But I spent too much of my time denouncing my opponent's campaign tactics instead of sticking with the message that I believed in and that had worked so well in New Hampshire."

The Manchurian Candidate was a 1962 Cold War thriller starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey as a brainwashed former Korean War POW groomed by the Communists to infiltrate U.S. politics as an assassin. From time to time, fringe critics of McCain have sought to draw parallels between the movie plot and McCain's story.

A South Carolina mother brought to McCain's attention a story about a disturbing telephone call her 14-year-old son took. The youth, a Boy Scout, idolized McCain and became frightened and upset after the anonymous caller denounced his hero as "a cheat and a liar and a fraud."

McCain took the telephone call up with Bush, who denied having anything to do with it. "If I find out it was somebody from my campaign, they're not going to be in my camp anymore," Bush promised.

Another round of calls allegedly disparaged Cindy McCain as a drug user.

Meanwhile, key religious conservatives such as televangelist Pat Robertson came out strongly for Bush and against McCain, who also found critics picking apart his anti-abortion stance. McCain had given them some ammo in New Hampshire by seeming to suggest he would let his 15-year-old daughter make her own decision whether to have an abortion. (McCain quickly clarified that he meant that his family would consider all the options together.)

Although McCain had cast anti-abortion votes in the Senate, national anti-abortion groups made it clear they preferred Bush. The National Right to Life Committee put out a mailer praising Bush as the candidate of choice for conservative Christians.

The unrelenting assault from so many directions took its toll. On Feb. 19, Bush handily won the South Carolina primary by 11 points. He had stalled the Straight Talk Express.

In defeat, McCain denounced his opponent's "negative message of fear" and "empty slogan of reform."

"I'm not going to take the low road to the highest office in the land," McCain said the night of the election. "I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way."

McCain critics say he can't blame his defeat solely on negative campaigning. For example, McCain's explicit overtures to Democrats and independents also likely turned off some faithful Republicans.

Still, the 2000 South Carolina primary has entered national political lore as a low-water mark in presidential campaigns.

Within a few years, the accusations of dirty politics had taken on a life of their own.

Writing in 2004, Byron York of the conservative National Review examined what the magazine dubbed "the McCain Myth" that "only by resorting to underhanded tactics . . . was Bush able to win South Carolina and, later, the GOP nomination."

York concluded that nasty telephone calls such as the one described by the mother of the 14-year-old boy likely were uncommon. Otherwise, somebody would have been able to snag a recording off an answering machine or some other device.

York wrote: "The Bush campaign had hired an out-of-state company to make about 200,000 'advocacy' calls to voters. After McCain's criticism, the campaign released the script of those calls. The script said Bush was 'working hard and stressing his message of reform with results.' It went on to say, 'Unfortunately, the race has turned ugly,' and urged listeners, 'Don't be misled by McCain's negative tactics.' It ended with more positive words about Bush. There was no mention of cheats or liars or frauds."

York also cited a Los Angeles Times story from the South Carolina campaign in which the newspaper could not verify the claims of the 14-year-old's mother.

Additionally, the McCain campaign relied on negative telephone calls in Michigan and Washington, York noted, to try to portray Bush as anti-Catholic for speaking at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina.

In Paul Alexander's 2003 book Man of the People: the Life of John McCain, McCain looked back at some of the more outrageous South Carolina accusations in circulation:

"Let's face it. There were phone calls that said, 'Do you know that Cindy McCain's a drug addict?' Or phone calls that said, 'Do you know the McCains have a Black baby?' Hundreds of thousands of those calls went out. That's really the ugly underside of politics."

The Confederate flag?

One issue intrinsic to South Carolina was the state's controversial tradition of flying the Confederate flag at its Capitol. Civil rights advocates decried it. Others defended it.

When the Stars and Bars question came up in a debate, Bush dodged it by saying the flag controversy was a matter for South Carolina residents to decide.

During a subsequent interview on CBS' Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer asked McCain, "What does the Confederate flag mean to you?"

McCain called the flag "very offensive" to many Americans as "a symbol of racism and slavery," but as a descendent of Confederacy-backing Southerners who didn't own slaves, he said he also understood its historical significance. While the flag matter was a South Carolina issue, others could help persuade residents to reach a proper conclusion about its continued display, he said.

Panicking campaign aides immediately warned McCain that his answer would anger the flag's passionate supporters, many of whom were conservative voters. They urged him to put out a statement that "clarified" his position in a way more sympathetic to the flag's fans.

McCain maintains he really believed that South Carolina should retire the flag. But when confronted with this choice of "lying or losing," McCain later acknowledged he picked "lying."

His revised statement pleaded for "mutual respect" on both sides of the debate and emphasized that, to him, "the battle flag" symbolized "heritage," not "slavery."

To most politicians, this sort of compromise is no big deal. But it apparently weighed heavily on McCain's conscience. Inside, he knew he had undermined the spirit of the Straight Talk Express.

"I had promised to tell the truth no matter what," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For. "When I broke it, I had not been just dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me."

As it turned out, McCain's Southern forebears actually did own slaves. Salon magazine published the revelation. But McCain characterized that misstep as an honest mistake, saying he truly had believed that they had not.

'Agents of intolerance'

McCain left South Carolina demoralized but quickly won two more states: Arizona and Michigan.

Although he had trailed Bush a few months earlier, and despite Gov. Hull's attempt to line up Arizona Republicans for Bush, McCain made good on his promise of an easy home-state win on Feb. 22.

Reading the polls prior to Election Day, Hull tried to spin the outcome by saying McCain had to win Arizona by at least 30 points to truly consider it a victory.

"There is a track record that says you ought to be winning your home state by a huge, huge margin," Hull said. "And I don't think there is anyone who is claiming that that margin is going to be huge in Arizona."

Most political observers rolled their eyes at Hull's audacious suggestion. McCain took the state by 24 percentage points.

The same day, he also won Michigan, a state that Republican Gov. John Engler had promised to deliver to Bush. ("We've never seen a candidate like John McCain who goes out to rent Democrats for a day to win the Republican nomination," Engler moaned after Bush's loss.)

Speaking in Arizona, McCain urged mainstream Republicans to join his makeshift coalition of centrist Republicans, Democrats and independents.

"This is where you belong, in the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan," McCain said at victory party. "We are creating a new majority, my friends: a McCain majority."

If more states held open Republican primaries, perhaps McCain would have had a shot of achieving that vision.

As it was, his presidential hopes for all intents and purposes had perished in South Carolina. The money was drying up. The Arizona and Michigan wins were too little, too late, and McCain realized it.

In an unexpected move, McCain decided to take on some of the Religious Right's best-known leaders.

He lashed out at leading social conservatives during a now-famous Feb. 28, 2000, speech in Virginia Beach, Va.

"I am a pro-life, pro-family fiscal conservative, an advocate of a strong defense, and yet Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement call me an unacceptable presidential candidate," McCain said. "They distort my pro-life positions and smear the reputations of my supporters. Why? Because I don't pander to them. Because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message."

McCain decried their "political tactics of division and slander" and said those "who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country."

And in his most devastating, and most memorable, blow, McCain said: "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

The Associated Press called McCain's remarks "unprecedented language for a serious Republican presidential candidate."

The tough talk rallied McCain's faithful fans but further distanced him from the social conservatives so influential in the GOP nominating process. "It sounds like Senator McCain has taken to name-calling, needless name-calling," Bush said at the time. In the short term, it further motivated certain Republican voters who already were not particularly fond of McCain to hit the polls.

The harsh remarks about Falwell and Robertson would follow McCain years into the future.

"Observers thought the move politically unwise," McCain wrote of the Virginia speech in his book Worth the Fighting For. "But I was proud of it and remain so."

Super Tuesday was March 7. That is the day that the Republican establishment that McCain had so brazenly challenged struck back and curbed the Straight Talk Express for good. Bush won nine of the 13 primaries decided that day; McCain won four.

Speaking in Sedona, McCain announced that he was "suspending" his presidential campaign. Despite speculation about a possible third-party try, he would not attempt to make a comeback.

McCain's madcap dash for the White House was over.

Bush and McCain

The 2000 presidential election between Bush and Gore was a historic squeaker.

Even though McCain's name was not on the ballot, he continued to play a role in the election.

On Aug. 1, 2000, McCain appeared at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia to give a speech supporting Bush, his former adversary.

Predictably, McCain continued to attract exhaustive coverage.

Some reporters continued to rhapsodize about the so-called maverick's unsuccessful campaign. Some speculated that he may mount another presidential campaign, maybe in 2004 if Bush were to lose to Democratic nominee Al Gore or as a third-party independent. Others wondered about what McCain would say about Bush after their bare-knuckle brawling during the race.

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Sandy Grady reflected the media's perspective: "Could St. John survive the Republican convention with his halo - his reputation as the most admired politician in America - undented?"

McCain did not come across as a sore loser.

An Arizona Republic reporter described McCain's primetime convention talk as "a lofty, patriotic speech that earned the heartiest applause when congratulating the man who defeated him, Texas Gov. George W. Bush."

McCain connected his family and Bush's.

"Many years ago, the governor's father served in the Pacific with distinction under the command of my grandfather," McCain said. "Now, it is my turn to serve under the son of my grandfather's brave subordinate."

He said of the victorious Bush: "I support him. I am grateful to him. And I am proud of him."

McCain, then 63, also would overshadow, slightly, the Democratic National Convention later in the month, though not by choice.

The fair-skinned McCain underwent surgery for melanoma, a dangerous form of skin cancer. It was his second time facing the sometimes-fatal disease. Medical records released during his campaign revealed that he had undergone a less-serious bout in 1993. This time, doctors removed cancerous lesions from his arm and temple, resulting in a still-noticeable scar on the side of his face.

The news broke about McCain's cancer on the day of the convention speech by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the Democratic vice presidential nominee and a friend of McCain's. During his remarks, Lieberman mentioned that McCain "is in our thoughts and prayers."

Sufficiently recovered, McCain made campaign stops for Republican candidates and, eventually, stumped with Bush, too, although McCain's enthusiasm also was subjected to scrutiny.

McCain made a couple of appearances with Bush around the time of the Republican convention and caught up with him in New England in late October.

At an Oct. 20 appearance in Bangor, Maine, McCain cited the Oct. 12, 2000, terrorist plot against the USS Cole, which killed 17, in supporting Bush as the better choice for commander in chief "in a dangerous world."

In Florida, McCain again referred to the Cole explosion as an indictment of the Clinton administration's "photo-op foreign policy for which we may pay a very heavy price in American blood.

"We need a commander-in-chief that men and women in the military will look up to and respect and will restore their readiness and their prestige, and that my friends is Gov. George W. Bush, I promise you," McCain was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune in an Oct. 26 piece.

Bush also stressed that his differences with McCain were in the past.

"I didn't particularly like it when he beat me in New Hampshire," Bush said, according to media reports. "But I'm a better candidate for having tough competition in the primary. This good man put me through my paces."

Only Bush was wrong.

His rivalry with McCain had only begun.

CHAPTER XI: THE 'MAVERICK' AND PRESIDENT BUSHEdit

President George W. Bush's inauguration was Jan. 20, 2001.

The weather in Washington was terrible.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the 2000 GOP also-ran, appeared on the stage on the Capitol's east front lawn in a see-through rain frock.

The rainy and cold celebration was about Bush, who became the 43rd president after barely edging out Vice President Al Gore. But McCain could revel in his own political rock-star status.

He returned to Washington a true political heavyweight with national and international stature.

He dominated popularity polls and television news shows.

And he had an ambitious "reform agenda" that included his trademark curbs on campaign spending, an HMO patient bill of rights and even election safeguards. America had just come through a narrow election that perhaps was best defined by Florida's infamous "dimpled chad."

McCain had other advantages, too. The new Senate was split 50-50, with Vice President Dick Cheney set to cast any deciding votes. Such circumstances lent themselves to McCain's goal of building bipartisan support for his crusades.

He transitioned easily into his new role as the No. 1 Republican counterweight to Bush.

On Jan. 22, 2001, McCain and ally Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., reintroduced the latest version of their namesake campaign-finance-reform legislation.

Co-sponsored with Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., a prominent conservative, it aimed to eliminate the unregulated "soft money" contributions to political parties. It also would crack down on corporate and union-financed television ads and other third-party commercials targeting federal candidates.

"After one of the closest elections in our nation's history, there's one thing the American people are unanimous about - they want their government back," McCain said. "We can do that by ridding politics of large, unregulated contributions that give special interests a seat at the table while average Americans are stuck in the back of the room. The Senate needs to act early on campaign-finance reform so we can achieve meaningful reform and restore the public's faith in their government."

Bush, like most of the Republican establishment, opposed the McCain-Feingold bill. McCain challenged the White House and Republicans on other fronts that year, too:

• In February, he teamed with Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and John Edwards, D-S.C., on an HMO reform bill that Bush wanted stopped.

• In early May, he blasted Bush for blocking the Kyoto Protocol climate-control treaty cracking down on greenhouse gas emissions.

• On May 15, McCain joined forces with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., for legislation that would have increased regulation of gun-show sales.

• On May 24, he reacted to the decision of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont to change his affiliation from Republican to Independent, which tipped the Senate's balance of power to the Democrats, by telling fellow Republicans "to grow up." Jeffords, a moderate-to-liberal Republican, cited pressure and threats from party leaders as reasons he quit. "Perhaps those self-appointed enforcers of party loyalty will learn to respect honorable differences among us, learn to disagree without resorting to personal threats and recognize that we are a party large enough to accommodate something short of strict unanimity on the issues of the day," McCain said in a written statement.

• On May 27, McCain made one of his boldest moves: He cast one of only two Republican votes against Bush's $1.35 trillion tax-relief package, saying the cuts benefited the wealthy at the expense of middle-class Americans.

Jeffords' party switch heightened the scrutiny of McCain's activities. After word got out that McCain would host new Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., at his Sedona ranch, the heat turned atomic.

McCain's office rushed out this short statement on June 1: "In a visit that was discussed and planned months ago, Senator Tom Daschle and his wife are spending an evening with Senator McCain in Arizona this weekend. It is a strictly social event. Over the years Senator McCain and his wife, Cindy, have been pleased to invite many friends, Democrats and Republicans, to spend time with them at their weekend home. Bipartisan friendships are not as rare in Washington as some would believe. No one should read anything more into this. Senator McCain and Senator Daschle have known each other since 1983."

The next morning, the Washington Post dropped a front-page bombshell: "McCain is considering leaving GOP; Arizona senator might launch a third-party challenge to Bush in 2004."

Reporters Thomas B. Edsall and Dana Milbank quoted unnamed sources identified as "those close to the senator" to suggest that McCain was weighing a possible 2004 White House run "in the same way the reformist Teddy Roosevelt, McCain's hero, battled a conservative Republican, William Howard Taft, in 1912."

"Whether or not McCain leaves the GOP, he has transformed himself from quirky conservative before the 2000 campaign to spokesman for an embattled progressive wing of the Republican Party today," the Post reporters wrote. "Whatever McCain does, it is clear he will continue to be a thorn in the side of Bush, who is already weakened by the defection from the GOP of moderate Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont."

In the story, McCain revealed that Democrats had approached him about switching, but he was not interested. He also told the Post he did not see himself running for president again, either.

On the same day the story ran, a Saturday, McCain issued a written statement refuting its major points:

"I have not instructed nor encouraged any of my advisors to begin planning for a presidential run in 2004. I have not discussed running for president again with anyone. As I have said repeatedly, I have no intention of running for president, nor do I have any intention of or cause to leave the Republican Party. I hope this will put an end to further speculation on this subject."

It didn't.

"McCain was privately upset about news stories suggesting he was thinking of changing parties and running as an Independent in 2004," author Elizabeth Drew wrote in her 2002 book, Citizen McCain. "He worried about not only breeding suspicions about his every act, and about making the gulf between himself and the White House wider than he wanted it to be (at least at this point), but also about what all this talk was doing to his conservative base, particularly in Arizona. The answer was that it was hurting it."

Conservative critics organized an anti-McCain march in May 2001.

The next month, McCain opponents launched two separate recall drives. It was a bit tricky and probably unconstitutional because federal lawmakers are not subject to the Arizona Constitution's recall provisions. But McCain previously had pledged to abide by a recall election's results and step down if that were the voters' preference.

On June 30, 2001, critics organized "Complain against McCain" rallies in Phoenix, Tempe, Tucson and Yuma.

"I voted for him the last time around because I liked what he stood for," Tempe resident Marion Griffin told The Republic while demonstrating in the parking lot of McCain's office on South Rural Road. "But now I want him removed."

On Sept. 11, 2001, everything changed.

Terrorists piloting hijacked airliners destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and set the Pentagon ablaze. Another hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington, D.C.

"These were not just crimes against the United States; they are acts of war," McCain said. "We will prevail in this war, as we have prevailed in the past. May God bless us in this trial, defend us and make our justice swift and sure."

That day, McCain fielded questions from 17 Arizona and national media outlets, according to the book Citizen McCain.

"I felt shock followed by anger," McCain said in Paul Alexander's book John McCain: Man of the People. "Then, obviously, I connected it with the embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole and other incidents, going all the way back to the bombing of the marines in Beirut."

Suddenly, McCain and his rivalry with Bush seemed very Sept. 10th.

'Reformer with results'

In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, McCain maintained a high profile. His military background made him in demand for comment on developments on Bush's war on global terrorism.

McCain's support of Bush, his wartime commander in chief, was enough to prompt his Arizona critics to drop their attempted recall of him, but he never totally relinquished his role as a White House counterweight.

McCain wrote a widely quoted guest column in the Oct. 26, 2001, edition of the Wall Street Journal that criticized the Bush war strategy against the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan. The campaign needed ground troops, not just air power and military "half-measures," he wrote.

McCain, the former Navy pilot, seldom wants to rely solely on air power. It's a fundamental tenet of how McCain believes America should make war. Most presidents generally resist deploying ground troops because they inevitably mean more U.S. casualties. Time and again, McCain has argued that they are needed.

In 1999, he urged President Clinton to consider ground forces in Kosovo. Later, he would criticize Bush for not sending adequate ground forces to Iraq.

The Pentagon did not take McCain's recommendation of a ground invasion. Within a few months Defense Department strategists had to defend the lack of U.S. infantry at the historic battle of Tora Bora, where intelligence officials believe terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and key Taliban allies escaped a massive aerial bombardment.

While the war temporarily stymied much of McCain's reform agenda, he continued to work with Democrats on key issues.

For instance, McCain and Lieberman pushed through legislation to create the bipartisan and independent 9/11 Commission to investigate the intelligence and security failures that allowed the terrorist strikes to succeed. He also was instrumental in the post-Sept. 11 law that federalized airport security under the new Transportation Security Administration.

His coverage remained positive. The Feb. 4, 2002, issue of The New Yorker featured a lavish profile of him. He appeared regularly on Imus in the Morning, The Tonight Show and similar programs. Later in the year, McCain would become the first sitting senator to host NBC's longtime comedy show Saturday Night Live.

The New Republic and The Washington Monthly published essays speculating that McCain might run against Bush in 2004 as a Democrat and temporarily reignited the chatter about his future political plans.

By February 2002, he and Feingold were ready to jumpstart their campaign-finance-reform bill. The national furor over the unfolding Enron Corp. corruption scandal helped give the legislation new life.

McCain's House allies got campaign-finance reform back on track with a rarely used "discharge petition." The measure passed the Senate but had stopped moving in the House. The discharge petition, which required 218 signatures, forced a vote.

The House voted 240-189 on Feb. 14 to pass its version of McCain-Feingold, known as Shays-Meehan after House sponsors Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass. On March 20, the Senate adopted the House-passed version on a 60-40 vote.

"Something of enormous, historic significance had happened," Drew wrote in Citizen McCain. "After many long years of stalemate and frustration, the Congress had approved legislation to remove the most egregious, corrupting element of the campaign-finance system. It wasn't a perfect bill, as McCain kept saying, and of course people would try to find ways around it, as they always do with any regulatory law. Most of the unintended consequences predicted by critics had been considered by the bill's backers, but they thought the possible tradeoffs worth it. Other problems in the campaign finance system remained to be addressed. But something had taken place in both the Senate and the House that, a little over a year before, few had thought possible."

When Bush signed the bill into law on March 27, there was no Rose Garden ceremony, which some viewed as a snub of McCain. McCain's written statement was terse: "I'm pleased that President Bush has signed campaign finance reform legislation into law."

It was McCain's greatest legislative victory.

Foes immediately challenged the law's constitutionality, which the Supreme Court upheld in a controversial 5-4 decision in 2003. A new challenge is pending.

To borrow the line from Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, McCain, too, was now a "reformer with results."

'A clear and present danger'

As the Bush administration made its case for pre-emptive war against Iraq, which was then suspected of stockpiling chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, McCain became a top national spokesman for "regime change."

Speaking Oct. 10, 2002, on the Senate floor, McCain called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "a megalomaniacal tyrant whose cruelty and offense to the norms of civilization are infamous." Saddam's government, McCain warned, "is a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

McCain demanded Saddam's removal during the debate over the Iraq war resolution:

"He has developed stocks of germs and toxins in sufficient quantities to kill the entire population of the earth multiple times. He has placed weapons laden with these poisons on alert to fire at his neighbors within minutes, not hours, and has devolved authority to fire them to subordinates. He develops nuclear weapons with which he would hold his neighbors and us hostage.

"No, this is not just another self-serving, oil-rich potentate. He is the worst kind of modern-day tyrant - a conscienceless murderer who aspires to omnipotence who has repeatedly committed irrational acts since seizing power. Given this reality, containment and deterrence and international inspections will work no better than the Maginot Line did 62 years ago."

The Senate voted 77-23 to adopt the Iraq resolution. The House already had passed it 296-133.

The United States was headed toward what would become its most controversial military adventure since the Vietnam War.

CHAPTER XII: THE 'MAVERICK' GOES ESTABLISHMENTEdit

"A rebel without a cause is just a punk. Whatever you're called - rebel, unorthodox, nonconformist, radical - it's all self-indulgence without a good cause to give your life meaning."

- Sen. John McCain in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is synonymous with "maverick," but he says he never cared much for the media term even when it was applied as a compliment.

In his book Worth the Fighting For, McCain worried that the act might be getting a little stale. McCain turned 70 in 2006.

"American popular culture admits few senior citizens to its ranks of celebrated nonconformists," he wrote. "We lack the glamorous carelessness of youth and risk becoming parodies of our younger selves. Witnessing the behavior can make people uncomfortable, like watching an aging overweight Elvis mock the memory of the brash young man who had swaggered across cultural color lines.

"I fear many things but only few things more than appearing ridiculous."

That anxiety has never stopped McCain from taking chances.

On Oct. 19, 2002, McCain hosted NBC's comedy show Saturday Night Live, reciting groan-worthy jokes and sharing the bill with musical guest the White Stripes.

"They tell me I'm the first sitting senator ever to host this show," McCain said in his opening monologue. "They asked President Bush to do it, but apparently he doesn't like to work on weekends. Uh ... People have asked me, 'How does spending a week up in New York hosting Saturday Night Live benefit your constituents?' And I always say the same thing, 'Shut up, Daschle, you're just jealous!'"

Ba-dump-bump.

McCain appeared on the program as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in a spoof of the cable TV program Hardball with Chris Matthews.

"As Americans, we will never truly be free until each and every one of us is afraid of being thrown in jail," McCain quipped while wearing an Ashcroft wig.

He also warbled a medley of Barbra Streisand hits in a mock commercial for a fictitious CD titled McCain Sings Streisand. The gag was that the liberal activist entertainer for years had tried to do McCain's job, so now he was going to take a stab at hers.

"Do I know how to sing? About as well as she knows how to govern America," McCain said.

The Streisand bit lives forever on YouTube.com.

Back in Arizona, McCain took some ribbing for missing a vote on a $355 billion defense spending bill while in New York rehearsing for SNL. Some constituents did not think that was so funny.

Still, McCain had crossed a cultural threshold.

He had become as familiar to fans of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart as he was to viewers of Meet the Press.

His 2004 Senate re-election race was his easiest yet.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a pork-fighting conservative in the McCain style, grabbed some headlines by suggesting he may make a primary run against McCain, but even he readily acknowledges that McCain would have stomped him had he gone through with it.

In the general election, McCain captured nearly 80 percent of the vote against unknown Democrat Stuart Starky, who was widely viewed as his party's sacrificial lamb.

Over the next few years, McCain would make cameos in the TV thriller 24 and the raunchy big-screen comedy Wedding Crashers. After McCain drew fire for appearing in the R-rated 2005 film with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, he joked to Leno: "In Washington, I work with boobs every day." (The joke rang a bell with old-timers: His 1992 Senate opponent, Claire Sargent, was widely quoted in her call for "senators with breasts" because "we've been voting for boobs long enough.")

McCain's cameo in Wedding Crashers was so brief and innocuous that it is a little surprising that anybody made a fuss.

Also in 2005, cable's A&E network ran a dramatized version of McCain's 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers, starring actor Shawn Hatosy as McCain, Troy Ruptash as his fellow POW and friend Bud Day and an old Falstaff beer brewery in New Orleans as the Hanoi Hilton.

And at some point, a goal that once seemed out of reach suddenly came back into focus: the White House.

'Are you freaking out on us?'

"I did not get to be president of the United States," McCain wrote in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "And I doubt I shall have reason or opportunity to try again."

But as early as 2004, news stories speculated McCain was well-positioned as a front-runner for the 2008 Republican nomination.

By 2006, McCain was ramping up for another possible campaign.

This time, he would have to mount a different strategy. He would not be the underdog. And one of 2000's big lessons was that a Republican candidate cannot ride the support of independents, Democrats and media to victory in the GOP primary process.

McCain, the media-adored "maverick," would need to redefine himself as an establishment Republican candidate.

"In 2000, he could do the Straight Talk Express and choose to be hip," said McCain biographer Robert Timberg, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and author of The Nightingale's Song and John McCain: An American Odyssey. "When you really have a chance to win, things change."

Winning back the conservatives would not be easy. He had alienated them with his 2000 presidential run, his post-election rivalry with President George W. Bush and with his assorted crusades and bipartisan legislative efforts. The explosion of the partisan blogosphere gave McCain's critics on the right an influential voice.

Many continue to mistrust McCain, who more recently became, with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., one of the big champions of a comprehensive guest worker and immigration reform plan. Although President Bush supports the legislation, many conservatives denounce its pathway to citizenship provisions as "amnesty" for illegal aliens. McCain argues that his proposal is not "amnesty" because it would force illegal immigrants to take steps to fix their situation, including paying fines and back taxes. A version of McCain's plan passed the Senate in 2006 but crashed in the House.

By this point, McCain had made several moves to polish his conservative credentials, but it really took the revelation that he intended to speak at the May 2006 commencement ceremony at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., for the media to really notice.

In February 2000, McCain famously denounced Falwell, the televangelist founder of the 1980s special-interest group Moral Majority, as one of the right's "agents of intolerance."

To many of McCain's admirers, it looked like he was pandering to Falwell by agreeing to speak.

Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show wondered if the Straight Talk Express had "been rerouted through Bull (expletive) Town."

"Are you freaking out on us?" Stewart wanted to know.

"Just a little," McCain responded.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a McCain fan, moaned that the McCain-Falwell summit was "too depressing for words."

"Falwell is rightly a pariah for his outright bigotry on a whole range of issues," he wrote.

Falwell told the Lynchburg News & Advance that his feud with McCain was over.

"We dealt with every difference we have," Falwell said. "There are no deal breakers now. But I told him, 'You have a lot of fence mending to do.'"

On the April 2 airing of NBC's Meet the Press, host Tim Russert worked McCain over:

Russert: "Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?"

McCain: "No, I don't. I think that Jerry Falwell can explain to you his views on this program when you have him on."

Russert: "After September 11th, let me show you what ..."

McCain: "Go ahead. Yeah."

Russert: "... Reverend Falwell had to say: 'What we saw on (Sept. 11, 2001), as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve. ... I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle ... I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

McCain: "You'll have to ..."

Russert: "Are you embracing that?"

McCain: "I am speaking at the graduation of his university. I'm not embracing all of the tenets that are expressed at (The New School) in New York City nor other liberal universities and institutions that I have spoke at. For example, I don't agree with the Ivy League colleges barring recruiters, military recruiters, from their campuses, but I still speak there."

Russert: "Are you concerned that people are going to say, 'I see. John McCain tried Straight Talk Express. Maverick. It didn't work in 2000, so now, in 2008, he's going to become a conventional, typical politician, reaching out to people that he called agents of intolerance, voting for tax cuts he opposed, to make himself more appealing to the hard-core Republican base.'"

McCain: "I think most people will judge my record exactly for what it is, where I take positions that I stand for and I believe in. Whether it be climate change, whether it be torture or whether it be a number of other issues with which I am (working on). Immigration. I don't think that my position on immigration is exactly pleasing to the far right base. I will continue to take positions that I believe in and I stand for. And I recognize that a lot of my credibility is based on that, and I think most Americans will judge me by my entire record."

On April 6, the Christian Science Monitor ran a story headlined "Political risk of John McCain's rightward pitch."

Social conservative Paul Weyrich, who years earlier had helped snuff the chances of McCain's friend John Tower to become Defense secretary, took aim at McCain.

"Everybody understands he hates the Christian right," Weyrich said. "That's a real problem."

(For his part, McCain describes Weyrich in his Worth the Fighting For book as "the embodiment of the caricature often used to malign all religious conservatives.")

The Monitor also quoted a political scientist to provide some insight into McCain's strategy.

"It seems what McCain is doing is the classic move that Richard Nixon patented - run right during the primaries, then run center for the general," Bruce Buchanan of the University of Texas at Austin told the publication. "He's doing what he has to do. To a purist it doesn't smell right, but find me someone who hasn't done that who won."

In the much-anticipated May 13 speech at Liberty, McCain defended his support of the ongoing Iraq war, which had become a political liability. The weapons of mass destruction that McCain, Bush and others believed Saddam had possessed never materialized. The post-Saddam Iraqi government was unable to take over its own security.

"War is an awful business," McCain said, but he "believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it."

McCain urged Americans who disagreed to debate in a civilized manner and remember that he is doing only what his conscience dictates.

Students at other, more politically progressive colleges, took McCain up on his offer to "state their opposition," not just to the war but also to planned McCain speeches on their campuses.

A "John McCain Does Not Speak For Me" protest greeted McCain May 16 at New York's Columbia University, but heavy rain largely spoiled the demonstration.

A rowdy confrontation a few days later at The New School in New York City garnered significant news coverage and blog chatter. Jean Rohe, a 21-year-old graduating student, spoke before McCain came to the microphone, sharply criticized him and for about 15 minutes was a minor hero to anti-war liberals.

Other disruptions marred McCain's New School speech.

Boos. Catcalls. Jeers.

Teachers and students turned their backs to McCain as he talked.

"I've got to say that maybe the students at The New School could learn a lesson in courtesy from the students at Liberty University," McCain later told the Associated Press. "I was saddened that these young people live in such a dull world that they don't want to hear the views of someone who disagrees with them."

War's eerie specter

McCain set up his 2008 presidential exploratory committee on Nov. 15, 2006, eight days after Democrats recaptured the House and Senate in midterm elections heavily influenced by the Iraq war.

In a speech the next day to the conservative group GOPAC, McCain lectured Republicans over "hypocrisy" and for failing to live up to the principles that propelled them to office.

He chided them for rampant pork-barrel spending, which had increased under GOP rule, and swelling the size of government "in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office."

"We lost our principles and our majority," McCain said. "And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first."

The unpopular Iraq war, which McCain championed and still supports, also played a part in the American public's rejection of Capitol Hill Republicans.

It is Iraq, not Vietnam, that is overshadowing McCain's 2008 White House aspirations.

Before the Iraq war, McCain was one of the nation's most vocal hawks. He continues to support its goals. But as the war drags on, McCain does not hesitate to point out what he considers to be problems with the Bush administration's prosecution.

Early on, McCain warned that U.S. troop levels were insufficient.

In December 2004, McCain said he had lost confidence in then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

McCain appeared in Eugene Jarecki's 2005 anti-war documentary Why We Fight, although he later griped that the filmmaker edited his remarks in such a way as to make it look like he was suggesting Vice President Dick Cheney was corrupt. The film theorizes that the Iraq war is the realization of President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex.

On Aug. 22, 2006, McCain blamed the administration for not talking straight to the American people about the sacrifices that war demands and for soft-pedaling the tenacity of the insurgency.

"We had not told the American people how tough and difficult this could be," McCain said during a campaign stop in Ohio for embattled Republican Sen. Mike DeWine. "It has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."

In a recent Washington Post interview, McCain said of the war: "One of the most frustrating things that's ever happened in my political life is watching this train wreck."

And he told the Politico.com Web site that Cheney, along with Rumsfeld, deserves blame for Iraq's "witch's brew."

"Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of Defense," McCain said.

Still, the critical, sometimes harsh remarks are not enough to offset the public perception of McCain as one of the Iraq war's premier cheerleaders, particularly after Bush finally took McCain's advice on U.S. troop levels.

In a nationally televised Jan. 10 speech, Bush announced that he was sending 21,500 more soldiers to violence-torn Baghdad and Anbar province.

"McCain owns Iraq just as much as Bush does now," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

McCain is unbowed in his push for victory in Iraq even at the expense of his presidential bid.

"I'd rather lose a campaign than lose a war," McCain told CNN on Jan. 10.

Abandoning Iraq now could lead to future U.S. involvement in "a wider war in the world's most volatile region," he said in a statement delivered Jan. 12 to the Senate Armed Services Committee. McCain challenged critics of the president's "New Way Forward" plan to "indicate what they would propose to do if we withdraw and Iraq descends into chaos."

In other words, if the United States runs from Iraq now, it inevitably will return later under even more dire conditions.

Still, McCain stresses he cannot guarantee that the extra troops will mean success. He has suggested that the Iraqi government meet "benchmarks" to ensure continued U.S. military support, which could open an exit.

Democrats were quick to saddle McCain with the troop increase, which polled badly with Americans.

The Democratic National Committee dubbed the strategy the "Bush-McCain War Escalation."

"We never should have gone there in the first place. Sen. McCain bears some responsibility for supporting the president when we went," Howard Dean, DNC chairman, said in a CNN interview. "His prescription for getting out is no prescription for getting out. The American people have already rejected the stay-the-course position of Sen. McCain and President Bush. We need new leadership in this country, and that's what the presidential election is going to be about in 2008."

Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a possible Democratic presidential candidate, derisively called the troop increase "the McCain Doctrine."

McCain countered that it is the "the McCain Principle" that lawmakers who vote "to send young American men and women into harm's way" must commit to accomplishing the mission.

"The irony of all this for me is that I am the guy that for three years, more than three years, has said, 'You don't have enough troops there! And you are not running this war right! And you've got to change!'" McCain said in the Politico.com interview. "And now I find myself the object of scorn because I think we can't afford to leave."

Few doubt that the war hero McCain, the author with chief of staff Mark Salter of the books Why Courage Matters and Character Is Destiny, is doing what he believes his right.

McCain's Iraq stance also fits his longtime reputation as a hawk.

"People buy that (from McCain) because it is fundamentally a part of who McCain is," Sabato said. "Also, it makes no sense politically. You have to admire somebody for taking a stand that really doesn't help them, and I don't think this does."

Author Timberg said McCain's decision to take a position on Iraq that could hurt him politically is "perfectly consistent" for the senator who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

Timberg, now editor of Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute's magazine, interviewed McCain dozens of times for The Nightingale's Song and John McCain: An American Odyssey. The books chronicle McCain's life from the U.S. Naval Academy to Capitol Hill.

Timberg recalled a "minor but telling" 1978 incident from McCain's days as the Navy's liaison to the Senate.

The Carter administration objected to a proposed nuclear aircraft carrier, so the Navy, which wanted it, reluctantly backed off. But McCain, the Navy's lobbyist, believed the carrier was needed and, against orders, quietly pushed for it anyway.

President Carter so opposed the $2 billion ship that he vetoed a major defense bill to stop it. Congress, again with McCain's behind-the-scenes support, came back the next year with new legislation that Carter eventually signed.

"When I asked (McCain) why he did that, he said that after the things that had happened to him in his life, he wanted to make sure things were done right," Timberg said. "He essentially was imperiling his Navy career by doing that sort of thing."

Despite Democratic efforts to present McCain as the second coming of Bush, the public likely still sees McCain, with his military record, as having more "credibility and competence" than the beleaguered president, Timberg said.

"While there is a very good chance that George Bush will face a serious backlash by virtue of his decision to send in 21,000 additional troops, I think John McCain could probably send in 50,000 more troops and the public would support him," he said.

Only time will tell if McCain, the presidential hopeful, can outrun the ghosts of war.

The front-runner?

In other respects, McCain is well positioned for the 2008 primaries.

McCain has raided the old Bush campaigns for key staff members and donors. As of January 2007, his exploratory committee had already built a formidable organization.

In December, conservative commentator Robert Novak reported that Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., two "establishment" GOP senators, are pitching McCain to big-time Washington, D.C., corporate executives and lobbyists.

"They were selling him to establishment Republicans as the establishment's candidate," Novak wrote. "Nothing could be further from McCain's guerrilla-style presidential run in 2000 that nearly stopped George W. Bush."

Novak christened the nascent McCain machine "McCain Inc."

Still, McCain, 70, won't waltz to a coronation.

In the Republican race, he could face serious challenges from former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and a host of lesser-knowns. Despite his many recent overtures to segments of the right who have rejected his message in the past, many conservatives continue to oppose him. On the flip side, his rightward shift and war stance have driven away some of the independents and Democrats who cheered his 2000 effort.

Should he capture the nomination, he could face a Democratic heavyweight such as Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., or former North Carolina senator Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee.

And the Iraq war remains the biggest wild card in McCain's deck.

In their 2006 book The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, journalists Mark Halperin of ABC News and John F. Harris of the Washington Post generally give McCain good chances to prevail in what they characterize as the "Freak Show" era of American politics and media.

"Because of his ability to speak to conservatives, centrists, and even some liberals, and because of the unique power of his personal biography as a military hero, he would seem to have more potential than any of the other 2008 contenders to transcend the Freak Show, to break its cycle of political attack and retribution," Halperin and Harris wrote.

"But one should not underestimate his vulnerability to the Freak Show. McCain's opponents will try to wrest control of his public image by painting him as hypocritical, angry, and mentally unbalanced. He has been called these names before, and the consequences were as unattractive as they were effective."

But while the political analysts noted that "there rarely has been a presidential candidate in the Freak Show era who has received such fawning press coverage as McCain enjoyed during the 2000 race and beyond," the mainstream media could not save him from the relentless political bombardment in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

"If the Old Media's favorite politician can suffer such a severe challenge to his public image, there are two lessons," Halperin and Harris wrote. "First, it can happen again to McCain if he runs in 2008. And, second, it can happen to anybody."

McCain, who will turn 71 this year, had better expect the fight of his life.