Honest John, on the Loose
With McCain, you get the good, the bad, and the angry
John McCain wiggles around in the seat, leans the back of his head against the window of the bus, whips out a pair of dark, happenin' sunglasses that make him look like Sen. Blues Brother, and begins to talk about his old friend Barry Goldwater, the man he followed to the Senate, a man he truly loved. "Goldwater said to me, 'If I had been elected president, if I had defeated Lyndon Johnson in 1964, you never would have been in a Vietnamese prison camp,'" McCain says and waits as the reporters scratch this furiously into their notebooks. "And I said, `You're right, Barry. It would have been a Chinese prison camp!'"
Everyone roars. The bus rocks. And John McCain plunges into another story, this one about how when his plane was shot down and he was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese from 1967 to 1973, he was his cell's "movie teller" and had to tell the plots of movies every day to help everyone survive the crushing boredom. "I must have told a hundred movies," McCain says. "Of course, I didn't know a hundred movies. So I just made them up." But McCain's masterwork was going to be the staging of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Using a sliver of bamboo for a pen and ink made from cigarette ash, McCain laboriously wrote out every part on toilet paper. "And then the goddamn gooks came into the cell and took three of my stars out!" McCain growls.
Strictly speaking, one does not say "gooks" anymore. It is simply not done. But John McCain says "gooks," and who is going to tell him not to? And when he starts another story, talking about how he fell in love with one of the camp cooks and is asked what "his" name was, McCain says, "Please! It was a female! I never got that bad."
Strictly speaking, McCain might want to avoid that joke, considering Barney Frank once called him "a thousand percent antigay." And when McCain enters VFW Post 1670 in Laconia, N.H., one evening and spies a couple of marines in the crowd, he begins his speech by saying, "After the Naval Academy, I tried to get into the Marine Corps. But my parents were married." Strictly speaking . . . .
"It seems to me," says campaign manager Rick Davis, showing a certain flair for understatement, "the rest of the field is not conducting their campaigns the way John McCain is." The rest of the field is not even coming close. Nobody campaigns like this. In an age when "controlling the message" has become a mania and candidates are viewed by their staffs as errant children who must be kept from the press lest they commit news, McCain is unique: He sits down with reporters, talks on the record with reporters, jokes with reporters, and just plain schmoozes with reporters. Is he eventually going to get burned? Sure. Does he care? Not much. "Other campaigns I've been on, you see this kind of almost a class thing, you know what I mean?" McCain told U.S. News. "The reporters are back there and you're up here. One out of 100 may be trying to sandbag you, but that's a risk you take." So far, McCain has gotten terrific press--the praise has been so lavish, it has been dubbed the "McCain Swoon"--and he is so open, it is easy for reporters to start feeling protective of him. On one recent five-day tour of New Hampshire, his 15th Granite State trip since he began running for president, he unexpectedly began the day by volunteering to reporters some of the terrible things he has said in the past. First there was the time he referred to the Leisure World senior citizens home as "Seizure World," and then there was the time he said, "The nice thing about Alzheimer's is you get to hide your own Easter eggs," and then there was the egregious joke that went something like, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is her father, and Hillary is her mother," and pretty soon a reporter just begged McCain to shut up and protect himself. But the guy can't help it. He was a Navy jet jockey, and while regulations required him to follow a careful checklist before each takeoff, McCain often dispensed with it. "Kick the tires and light the fires!" McCain says, recalling his motto back then. "To hell with the checklist. Anybody can be slow." Which is exactly the way he is running his campaign.
No mistletoe. This is the charming and disarming side of McCain. But the campaign is one of conflicts: Though he says he is "embarrassed" by and "bored" with the constant repetition of his Vietnam experience--"I mean, Jesus, it can make your skin crawl," he says--his campaign exploits it at every opportunity. The Picture, a boyish, smiling, handsome McCain standing in front of his A-4 Skyhawk before he went to Vietnam, is dispensed by his campaign in small, medium, large, and eventually, one suspects, billboard sizes. There are also clear conflicts within the man, as those who show up at his speeches find out. McCain is always introduced with a brief recitation of his war record, and he usually begins each speech modestly by smiling and saying: "It doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down. I was able to intercept an enemy missile with my own airplane." He rarely speaks for more than 10 minutes and then takes questions for another 30 to 40 minutes. After 16 years in public office as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona, he has a considerable range of knowledge and likes to demonstrate it, but New Hampshire being New Hampshire, he often gets questioners who disagree with him. And they can end up getting an earful. In Littleton, N.H., Jerome Danin, a textile worker, disagreed with McCain's vehement championing of free trade, saying it was driving his employer out of business. "Sir, I did not know your ambitions were for your children to work in a textile mill," McCain replied scathingly. "I would rather see them work in computers or a high-tech industry." McCain's position is not outrageous, but candidates almost never take on audience members. Candidates kiss the mistletoe of the people who attend their speeches. They are, after all, likely voters.
But McCain is nothing if not unpredictable. Mispronounce his name--as a caller to New Hampshire's National Public Radio station did recently--and McCain will snappishly correct you. But ask him about being a member of the Keating Five, and McCain will beat himself up. On NPR, a caller asked him about his relationship with Charles Keating, the savings and loan crook, who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to McCain and four other powerful senators in return for their intervention with federal regulators. McCain got off with a wrist slap when the Senate Select Ethics Committee found that all he did was exercise "poor judgment." But McCain said on the air, "Thank you, Charlie, for that question. I was judged to have used poor judgment, but I did worse than that. I was wrong." And it affects his behavior. He now likes to admit improprieties before they happen: His wife and three young children took a vote as to whether he should run for president, and it came out 3 to 1. The opposing vote was cast by his 11-year-old son, who agreed to change it if his father, as president, could get him to the head of the line at Disney World. "So I promised him," McCain said with a deadpan expression and a shrug. "It's an abuse of office, but I promised him."
McCain is so well known for his reform positions on tobacco and campaign financing that some who attend his speeches incorrectly assume he is some kind of squishy liberal. They soon find out different as McCain often brags about his high ratings from conservative groups, including a 90 percent approval in 1997-98 from the National Right to Life Committee. "I have two theories, and sometimes they may even appear to conflict," McCain told U.S. News. "One is a conservative view of the role of government--less government, less regulation, lower taxes--but at the same time sometimes there is a role for government. Theodore Roosevelt thought there was a need for national parks; I believe there's a need for campaign-finance reform. There's a need for us to try to do something about kids smoking. So I'm glad to be a conservative, but that doesn't mean that I'm completely passive in my views about the role of government."
Cruel captor. McCain's mood can also quickly turn from sunny to stormy without warning. With his shades on and looking out through the bus window at water-skiers crashing through silver waves under a golden sun over Lake Winnipesaukee near Laconia, McCain begins talking about his captors. They are living in Hanoi, he says, except for the Cuban, the man he called "Fidel," who would beat the American prisoners with an automobile fan belt. "He was particularly cruel," McCain says, his mood darkening almost imperceptibly. McCain says he has the CIA looking for "Fidel," and a reporter innocently asks why. "He was from a foreign country!" McCain says, his voice rising. "He had no business coming to Hanoi and killing my friends! And I'd love to bring him to justice!" And just as quickly, the storm passes. McCain adjusts his glasses a little and says, "It was a long time ago. I almost never talk about it." He looks from one reporter to another. "Really. There was a lot of humor in prison. A lot of funny stories."
At 63, one of the oldest candidates in the race, he is a bundle of energy, powering through as many as eight speeches a day. Except when he sleeps, he is virtually never silent and when you say a lot of things, some strike gold--"There is no reason a good teacher should be paid less than a bad senator"--and some strike out, as when he seemed to be changing his position on repealing Roe v. Wade and got weeks of angry commentary from some conservatives. "I've had foot-in-mouth disease all my life," he says. And he has no intention of changing. It may be a high-risk way to run, but his whole campaign is high risk. "I decided that the planets were aligned and I had a shot at it," he says. "Not a very good shot, but a shot. I'm not going to be driven by a fear of losing. I'm going to have fun and enjoy it because I'll never do this again."
McCain not only has the true politician's ability to call complete strangers "my dear friends" and sound like he means it, but he also has the ability to avoid candor when he chooses, such as when he rails in nearly every speech against the recent Republican tax bill passed by Congress--"It's a disgrace; it's obscene"--without also mentioning that he voted for it. Polling indicates that this year the voters want optimism, and both George W. Bush and Steve Forbes have been careful to position themselves that way, but McCain spends little of his speeches on the upbeat. Though he says he wants to "inspire a generation or more of Americans to be committed to more than their self-interest," he says that because of the "feckless" foreign policy of the Clinton administration, "We may have to pay a very heavy price in blood and treasure in the future." He is not downbeat about America's future, he says in an interview, "but there may be some downbeat aspects of my message because I am worried, I am worried about the future of the political system in America. And I think those concerns are legitimate."
But along with conveying a sense of urgency, McCain conveys a great sense of vigor, a sense that anything can happen on his campaign, it probably will, and if it does, McCain most assuredly will climb onto the press bus and talk about it with reporters. Maybe he really does like doing this or maybe it is therapeutic, but at least it is different. He has a huge task ahead of him, and he is going about it the only way he knows how, which is all out. So kick the tires and light the fires! To hell with the checklist. John McCain is flying once again.
This story appears in the September 27, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.