Death is never simple proposition. It becomes immensely more complicated when the person who has died is a public figure, especially a politician. That would be the late John McCain.
I won’t wax hypocritical about McCain, or default to hagiographic bromides that have begun and are inevitable with the death of someone as universally-known as the senator was. He was not my favorite politician, or a leader I was particularly enamored with. Partly this is due to McCain’s politics—they certainly sat to the right of my own.
But given all of that, I have been paying attention to the past year or so of his life. Once he was diagnosed with glioblastoma last July, a particularly aggressive brain tumor, I knew that this day was inevitable. McCain would succumb to cancer, and the accolades and tributes would begin pouring in.
One of the marks of greatness is dying with dignity and grace. In that regard, I’d say anyone with a shred of humanity would agree that McCain’s final year of his life was worthy of admiration.
McCain’s final run for the presidency, especially his naming someone that makes our current president seem like an intellectual (a feat nearly impossible to pull off), Sarah Palin, really irked me. I don’t know why, other than I thought somehow, Senator McCain was better than that. I now realize that he was, but politics being what it is, decisions get made in order to curry favor with groups that give you a chance to win. To win as a Republican is a particularly nasty process, although the Democrats haven’t done much to differentiate themselves as a group that’s markedly better. That was on grand display during our previous presidential election.
What I’m trying to say is that Mr. McCain’s politics could trigger a particularly visceral reaction in me (and did, much of the time), save for these past 12 months.
Once he was diagnosed, I started to pay more attention to his final acts in the Senate. It was no secret that he despised President Trump. Who could blame him? If you still have any respect at all for the presidency, the current occupant of the White House has made the office a place given to fiasco after fiasco. What’s particularly rich is for someone like Trump who received multiple draft deferments, so he never got to close to battle, danger, or death, to disparage McCain—a hero in all but the most cynical definition of the word—is yet another clear demonstration of what a truly heinous person our 45th president is. Even in death, Trump remains incapable of letting go of his obvious enmity towards McCain. This speaks volumes about the latter’s shortcoming, I think, as do others.
The president having difficulty honoring a hero. (AP photo)
On Monday, I hearkened back to something that one of my favorite writers wrote for Rolling Stone in 2000, about McCain. This was during the senator’s first run for president, and the late David Foster Wallace had been commissioned to be one of the “boys on the bus,” following McCain and the merry band of hopefuls around for a month.
Wallace’s nearly 25,000-word essay on McCain holds up well, 18 years after Wallace wrote it. In revisiting the epic piece of political (and personal) reporting, I’m reminded that McCain is like almost all of us—someone full of contradictions. He was a witty, straight-talking “maverick,” as he was branded back then. He’s worn that moniker well quite often, since. As a senator, he often voted with his party, which drove me crazy about him. Interestingly, those trolling McCain after his death criticize him for not voting as often as Republican leaders and the ideological hacks they pander to thought he should.
I urge you to read Wallace’s essay over the next few days. If you are a cynic like me (and Wallace certainly had his cynical side and it comes through in the piece), you’ll recognize that even the most jaded can’t help but recognize the heroic elements that are part and parcel of McCain’s legend, and Wallace the reporter teases these out in his lengthy treatment of McCain the candidate. This literary journalistic tour-de-force and thinking back upon it was something that frequently tempered my own anger and irritation towards the senator from Arizona framed some of my thoughts about him and his death. Again, human beings have a complexity that often diverges from the surface analysis. And at the end of his journey, I think the guy who held court on the Straight Talk Express and garnered reluctant admiration from writers like Wallace, was always present, even when he was at his most partisan, the side of McCain I deplored.
And as if on cue, Laura Miller derides Wallace and some of the articles that have been written referencing his Rolling Stone take on McCain. It’s always easier being a critic, than actually treading new ground as a writer, like Wallace did across his fiction and nonfiction.
Politics makes us ugly people. It is apt to reveal our worst selves. I’m guilty of that and not particularly proud of that, either.
Because of politics, I forgot that McCain was a man given to books and an appreciation of the written word. By all accounts, he was a voracious reader, counting Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as favorites. Has Mr. Trump ever read a literary work from front to back? I know that he’ll never grant an interview like this one by McCain, centered on books and reading.
He was a reader as well as a writer. He wrote a number of books with longtime collaborator, Mark Salter. Maine’s own William Cohen, a friend of McCain’s, spoke glowingly of McCain’s appreciation for the literary in an interview with Andrea Mitchell during the noon hour on Monday. I thought both Cohen and Salter were especially poignant in their reflections about their friend, so I’m posting it, here. Pay particular attention to Cohen’s words about McCain, and his appreciation of literature. Our local daily, the Portland Press Herald, ran a story with a similar orientation, on Sunday.
John McCain wasn’t a perfect man. But I think history will render kindness towards him and the story he wrote, over time.