John McCain's Long Journey In Public Life......
has shown us many sides of this man. His military service, his captivity during the Viet Nam War, his time in the senate, two-time failed presidential candidate, one of the Keating Five; Senator McCain has been in the public eye for a long time in many different roles.
You had to know something was very wrong with him during the questioning of Jim Comey last month. Now the pieces fall into place. Its a sad way for his career to end. He could be infuriating. He could be acerbic. Most of the time he was wrong on the issues. His later years of service in the Senate have not been his finest hours. I really think that his losses, first to Bush in the republican primary, then to Obama in the Presidential election made him bitter and resentful. Obviously his political views don't align with us here at DU. However, there were some very laudable things he has done (beyond his military service) that we can acknowledge from the other side.
Take a few minutes to read the linked article from the New Yorker about his relationship with John Kerry. Look at the YouTube clip below. How many republicans can you name that would exhibit any of the character traits or have the public courage that you can glean from the article or the video clip? I'm hard pressed to think of more than one or two. THAT John McCain from 10 or more years ago was a different person from the guy we've come to know from recent years. Ambition to be president and bitterness can both be terrible things.
I'm not here to lionize or praise him-he's not dead yet and I find very few points of agreement with him on policy. He's done some things that were inexplicably bad. However, people are complicated and there's a few things he's done that are important to remember. His making peace with anti-war protestors, his ability to forge relationships with people he disagreed with, his ability to know where to draw the line in conflict-these are things we can all learn from. Even recently his comments about Trump that “ that's how dictators get started” and his alarm at the “hardening resentment we see toward immigrants, and refugees, and minority groups, especially Muslims” set him apart-even if he didn't go far enough or refuse to toe the party line. We can acknowledge these things upon hearing the news of his condition and respect what is worthy of respect. It's what sets us apart from the republicans.
An excerpt from a rather long article in the New Yorker from 1996:
On Memorial Day in 1993, two United States senators were escorted through a prison in downtown Hanoi. It was a massive building, enclosed in a compound and occupying most of a block in the middle of the crowded city. The windows had bars, and some had louvred shutters. The Vietnamese name for the prison was Hoa Lo. The name given it by Americans was the Hanoi Hilton. During the war, the prison held captured fliers, whom the Vietnamese called "air pirates," and on this day one of them had returned, for the first time since his release: John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona. As a Navy bomber pilot, he had been held prisoner for nearly six years, from October of 1967, when he was shot down, until March of 1973. Most of that time he had spent at Hoa Lo, more than two years of it in solitary confinement. This past summer, a large television audience heard McCain refer to the experience when he placed Bob Dole's name in nomination at the Republican National Convention. "A long time ago, in another walk of life, I was deprived of my liberty," he said, with the understatement of a man who knows that his imprisonment is what distinguishes him.
When McCain returned to Hoa Lo in 1993, he was accompanied by John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts. Kerry, another Navy war veteran, was the chairman of the by then disbanded Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, while McCain was its leading Republican; committee business had brought them back to Vietnam. Recently, Kerry told me about the visit to the prison, describing the walk down a corridor toward McCain's old cell—"at the back end of the right-hand side as we walked in, around the corner. It was just this very small, dark, dank cell, with a little bed area, hardly fit for anybody."
Read the article here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/a-friendship-that-ended-the-war
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