The Pearl - Esquire profiles John McCain

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One of Us, Part 4 By Chris Jones

In August 2006, Esquire published the first installment of Chris Jones's intimate portrait of John McCain's long fight to become president. In January and April of this year, we published Part 2 and Part 3, chronicling the wild fall and startling resurgence of his campaign. Now, as the Republican convention approaches, Jones joins McCain again as the candidate prepares for his final fight.

The snipers look out from the rooftops. Soldiers in camouflage cradle their machine guns along the runway. Secret Service agents press their fingers to their ears. ("There's security here even I don't know about," one of them says.) And a bomb-sniffing dog pokes its nose around Air Force One, this great, beautiful plane shining in the desert heat at the airport in Phoenix. Its pilots stand in their uniforms at the bottom of the metal stairs that lead up to the open front door. Exactly 190 feet away, following rigorous protocol, a flatbed truck has been parked. Its trailer is crowded with cameras and reporters who have been wanded and sniffed. An alert arrives seemingly out of the thin, dry air and a crackle follows: They are on their way.

Within minutes, thirty-two motorcycle troopers, riding in pairs, rumble out toward the runway. They are followed by a string of Suburbans, vans, and sedans, more than twenty in all, as well as an ambulance and two fire trucks, just in case, and twin black limousines miraculously free of dust. The first carries President Bush and one of the two men left with a chance to replace him, along with that man's wife, in a dappled green dress. The other limousine is empty, a decoy but today also a symbol, the void that will soon be filled. Through tinted windows, John and Cindy McCain are getting another glimpse of their possible lives.

They climb out of the car along with the president, who steps toward the reporters and points at their cameras, a strange, trademark gesture; McCain, a few steps behind him and looking not quite sure what to do, repeats the walk-and-point like a shadow. Bush returns to give Cindy a kiss, McCain gives him a pat on the back--as close as these men will come to hugging in public again, after that humiliating photograph of McCain with his face pressed into Bush's armpit made the Internet rounds--and the president waves, salutes, and begins his solo climb to the top of the stairs.

It will be noted by the assembled press that on this late-May afternoon McCain and Bush spent exactly twenty-six seconds on the tarmac together. That hard fact, combined with the moving of the Republican fundraiser they had just attended from the city's convention center to a couple of tents behind a mansion, will be dissected in the continuing debate over campaign optics: No longer will anything in McCain's public life be dismissed as accident. Even the smallest gestures will seem choreographed, which means the genuinely impromptu or unrehearsed will stand out, stains on a blank white field.

Now he stands at the bottom of the metal stairs looking up at the top, watching Bush give one last wave before he disappears inside the plane, and it's clear, even from 190 feet away, that for all his practice and preparation, John McCain still doesn't know what to do with his hands.

Already something had changed in the days before McCain spent twenty-six seconds on a runway in Phoenix and disappeared. What had felt like a slow evolution toward some new understanding of his position in life--that bit by bit, he was being locked away inside the kind of shell that protects very important people, and that's just how it was going to be--now felt like a sharper divide, serious and mean. After shaking up his senior staff in July, giving more authority to former Bush-campaign advisors, McCain seemed to be separating himself ever further from his longtime aides. Even his family and closest staff traveled with him less, because, as one of them said privately, life on the road wasn't much fun anymore.

Whether it was McCain's own defense mechanisms kicking in, whether it was the coaching of the party operatives who now followed him around like valets, whether it was the arrival of the Secret Service that had brought a chill, it was impossible to know. (Earlier in the year, as his resurgent, ebullient campaign began to break the backs of his once-favored opponents, McCain had said that he didn't want Secret Service protection and that even as president he would get by with one or two men in suits with guns on their hips. "It's just not something I need," he'd said. Now there were eight full-time agents assigned to him.)

Whatever the reason behind the shift, two truths were indisputable: While he could still appear to be proximate to everywhere and everyone--Albuquerque yesterday, Denver and Phoenix today, Reno, Nevada, and Los Angeles tomorrow--McCain had cultivated a gap between himself and the eyes that followed him. And on those rare occasions when he appeared in view--the pearl he calls his head poking into the aisle at the front of his plane; his board-straight right arm waving over a crowd of supporters; his tired, disembodied voice echoing over loudspeakers and the hollering of protesters--he seemed to have built a distance between himself and the man he used to be, too. Like the country he hopes to govern, McCain has been changed by this process, by the war and this great wringing out. He is no longer the chastened-but-happy underdog, intimate and accessible, rolling through cornfields in a bus, earning votes handshake by handshake. Now he belongs to the millions, and he needs every one of them to feel as though they could own some part of him, the way he had given so much of himself to win the nomination. But he also needs to survive, and perhaps by necessity as much as by design, he has withdrawn enough to become like the faces on money, omnipresent but two-dimensional.

The weekend before Phoenix had sealed the retreat. At the family compound near Sedona in northern Arizona, McCain had summoned some longtime friends, his wife, and three of his possible candidates for vice-president: former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Florida governor Charlie Crist, and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. The meeting was to have been secret, and McCain was furious when news of it had been leaked days before. Peppered by lead-up questions, he insisted the get-together was purely social. ("It really was," he said after. "I love to grill.") But no one believed him, especially given the guest list. It was like showing up to a party with three hookers and trying to convince everyone that they're just old pals.

The weather matched McCain's mood. In the wind and rain, reporters camped out at the end of the dirt road that leads to the collection of rustic cabins, eating Mexican breakfasts off the trunks of their cars between long squints through their cameras. For McCain, just the idea of the stakeout was bad enough. That, for him, felt like a betrayal--only months before, he had invited reporters to this beautiful spot, where he told jokes and cooked them ribs, and in return, one of the last places in the world where he could be guaranteed sanctuary was now set upon. But then he saw footage of himself leaving a local restaurant where he liked to take his friends, wearing a ratty green sweatshirt and ball cap and stepping carefully down the stairs accompanied by Cindy--he saw himself as thousands of viewers saw him, as that doddering old man--and somewhere inside him a switch was flipped. (pg.1 of 3)
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