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Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years, nearly five of them after his refusal to accept the out-of-sequence repatriation offer. His wartime injuries left him permanently incapable of raising either arm more than 80 degrees.
Regarding the Syrian civil war that had begun in 2011, McCain repeatedly argued for the U.S. intervening militarily in the conflict on the side of the anti-government forces. He staged a visit to rebel forces inside Syria in May 2013, the first senator to do so, and called for arming the Free Syrian Army with heavy weapons and for the ...
Sep 1, 2018 · John McCain’s conduct as a prisoner of war in Vietnam was heroic. But the cause he sacrificed for was indefensible. The American government put McCain in harm’s way — and subjected him to ...
- Features Writer, Intelligencer
- Overview
- Early years and military service
- Political career
John McCain (born August 29, 1936, Panama Canal Zone—died August 25, 2018, Cornville, Arizona, U.S.) U.S. senator who was the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2008 but was defeated by Barack Obama. McCain represented Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives (1983–87) before being elected to the U.S. Senate (1987–2018). Although a sel...
McCain had strong Southern roots–—his great-great-grandfather, William A. McCain, owned a Mississippi plantation with more than 50 slaves and died fighting for the Confederacy in 1863—but he believed that his heritage lay almost entirely inside the country’s military. The son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy near the bottom of his class in 1958, his low class rank attributed to indifference both to disciplinary rules and to academic subjects he did not enjoy. He then served in the navy as a ground-attack pilot. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, McCain was nearly killed in a severe accidental fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, then on active duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Later that year McCain’s plane was shot down over Hanoi, and, badly injured, he was captured by the North Vietnamese. In captivity he endured torture and years of solitary confinement. When his father was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific in 1968, the North Vietnamese, as a propaganda ploy, offered early release to the younger McCain, but he refused unless every American captured before him was also freed. Finally released in 1973, he received a hero’s welcome home as well as numerous service awards, including the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit.
McCain relocated to Arizona, and in 1982 he was elected to the House of Representatives. After serving two terms, he successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1986. Two years later he gained national visibility by delivering a well-received address to the Republican National Convention. But McCain also became embroiled in the most spectacular case to arise out of the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s, as a result of his connections with Charles Keating, Jr., the head of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California, who had engaged in fraud. Although cleared by the Senate in 1991 of illegalities in his dealings on Keating’s behalf, McCain was mildly rebuked for exercising “poor judgment.” Duly embarrassed, McCain became a champion of campaign finance reform; he collaborated with the liberal Democratic senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and, after a seven-year battle, the pair saw the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act signed into law in 2002. The legislation, which restricted the political parties’ use of funds not subject to federal limits, was McCain’s signal achievement on Capitol Hill.
On most issues—including military spending, labour legislation, abortion, and gun regulation—McCain’s record in the Senate was basically conservative. Yet quite apart from campaign reform, McCain took stands on specific issues that distanced him from the conservative Republican mainstream in Washington. Despite his years in captivity in Vietnam, McCain strongly advocated restoring diplomatic relations with that country, finally achieved in 1995. He led unsuccessful efforts to enact a new federal tax on tobacco products that would fund antismoking campaigns and help the states pay for smoking-related health costs. On immigration reform, health care, restriction of so-called greenhouse gas emissions (a primary cause of global warming), reduction of pork-barrel government spending, regressive tax cuts, and the political power of religious conservatives, McCain stood out. His critics claimed that his contrarian stance was calculated and mostly for show and that the favourable impression it made inside the news media far outweighed the political risks. Still, with congressional Republicans increasingly marching in lock step during the 1990s, McCain’s dissent made him look like a genuinely unconventional conservative.
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Aug 27, 2018 · Navy Lieutenant Commander John McCain arrived at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, after his release from Hanoi during the Vietnam War in 1973. Richard Nixon personally welcomed him home after...
- Greg Daugherty
Aug 26, 2018 · After a devastating ordeal as a POW in Vietnam, John McCain launched a political career, winning election to the U.S. Senate from Arizona for the first time in 1986.
His most strenuous objections were to the Obama Administration’s ineffective policy regarding the Syrian civil war, and its tolerance of the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Bashir Assad’s murderous regime and its allies, Iran and Russia.
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