John McCain: An American Odyssey - Couverture souple

Timberg, Robert

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 068486794X ISBN 13 : 9780684867946

Editeur : Pocket Books, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Timberg Robert

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One: The Punk
As a teenager, John McCain didn't talk much about the Navy, but when he did it was evident that he understood he was the inheritor of an uncommon seafaring legacy.
"That's my grandfather, right there," he would tell friends, pointing excitedly to a framed photograph of the historic Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri in 1945.
On such occasions, he abandoned his studied nonchalance toward things military. With good reason. The solemn, somewhat cadaverous figure in the picture had evoked both cheers and howls in his lifetime, but never indifference.
John Sidney McCain defied the image of the senior naval officer. Bony, wizened, with a hooked nose and sunken cheeks, he turned sixty during World War II and looked at least ten years older, according to naval historian E.B. Potter.
Poorly fitting false teeth, which caused his speech to be plagued by whistles, compounded the problem, as did a herky-jerky gait and a high-strung, fidgety nature, characteristics he passed on to his son and grandson.
"There were few wiser or more competent officers in the Navy than Slew McCain, but whenever his name came up, somebody had a ridiculous story to tell about him -- and many of the stories were true," said Potter.
One tale unearthed by Potter goes back to January 1943 when McCain, Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz, South Pacific commander William F. "Bull" Halsey, and Navy secretary Frank Knox were making an inspection tour of Guadalcanal. The island was secured by then, but Japanese aircraft still bombed regularly. That night, as the visiting dignitaries slept in a hut, they launched a vicious bombing attack. Nimitz, exhausted and afraid of mosquitoes, stayed inside, but the others, half-naked, raced from the shelter and dove for the nearest trench. McCain landed in a warm, soupy hole that until a few hours earlier had served as the receptacle under a portable latrine.
True or not, the story was consistent with McCain's performance at the Naval Academy, where he stood a lackluster 79 out of 116. "The skeleton in the family closet of 1906," or so his yearbook described him.
Like his son and grandson, both of whom ranked even lower, Slew McCain would prove that a second-rate record at Annapolis did not foreclose success in the Navy. Over the next two decades he outpaced most of his classmates to fashion a remarkably eventful if occasionally turbulent career. He became a pioneer in the development of naval aviation, notably in the strategy and tactics for employing attack carriers. In the early days of World War II he served as chief of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. Collier's magazine was so taken by his crusty demeanor that it featured him in an admiring cover story entitled "Navy Air Boss." In the final months of the Pacific war, commanding Bull Halsey's fast carrier task force, he rained destruction on the crumbling Japanese fleet.
Aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, as MacArthur, Nimitz, and Halsey stood behind the surrendering Japanese envoys, Vice Admiral McCain took his place in the front rank of senior American officers. The ceremony recorded for posterity, he lunched with his son, Jack, a decorated submarine skipper, then left for his San Diego home. He was dead of a heart attack four days later. The New York Times reported his death on its front page. Congress, citing his war record, promoted him posthumously to the rank of full admiral.
Halsey's chief of staff, Rear Admiral Robert Carney, later insisted that McCain had suffered an earlier heart attack while at sea but had somehow managed to hide it so he wouldn't be forced to relinquish command. "He knew his number was up," said Carney, "but he wouldn't lie down and die until he got home."
Two decades later, in another war and vastly different circumstances, his grandson would find himself facing a similar challenge. Again, the temptation was to lie down and die. But the old man had set the McCain family standard for grit and courage, and John McCain, sometimes clumsily, often grudgingly, always did his best to live up to family standards.

Princeton did not meet those standards. On a prep school athletic trip, he had fallen in love with the campus, been intrigued by the possibilities. He could study things he cared about there, history and literature, might even fool everybody and turn out to be a decent student. There were other attractions. A hot-blooded romantic, he could easily imagine himself pointing out Fitzgerald's old room to some visiting coed from Vassar, then casually guiding her down a shaded gravel path to a secluded trysting spot.
But Princeton was a pipe dream. As far back as he could remember, Johnny McCain knew he was going to Annapolis, knew it with such unshakable finality that he never really thought twice about it, at least not seriously. It was part of the air he breathed, the ether through which he moved, the single immutable element in his life. He also knew that if he said what he thought -- hold it, screw Annapolis, the place sucks -- shock waves would reverberate through countless generations of McCains, shaking a military tradition that could both inspire and bully.
That tradition stretched back to Colonial times. In 1764, Johnny's ancestors, Captain John Young and his brother Thomas, clashed with an Indian force at the Battle of Back Creek in Virginia. John survived, but Thomas was killed and scalped. John pursued the Indians for three days, resumed the fight, and reclaimed Thomas's scalp so it could be buried with him. Johnny's later forebears would go to West Point, among them a distant uncle, Major General Henry Pinckney McCain, who set up the World War I draft and became known as the father of Selective Service.
The Annapolis tradition was more recent, but by the time Johnny arrived on the scene, it was even more compelling. He was the grandson of Admiral Slew McCain, Annapolis '06, the legendary geezer who fought the Japanese from Guadalcanal to Tokyo Bay, watched them surrender, then, as if on cue, dropped dead. He was the oldest son of John Sidney McCain, Jr., '31, a World War II submarine skipper climbing steadily toward flag rank himself. So everyone, including Johnny himself, took it for granted that the Naval Academy alumni register would one day contain another entry: John Sidney McCain III.
And so it does, but it was a close call. Although resigned to Annapolis, Johnny was fully capable of sabotaging his chances, both for admission and graduation. Rebellious by nature, he viewed rules and regulations through a highly personal prism, as challenges to his wit and ingenuity. And as a succession of individuals and institutions would learn to their chagrin -- among them his parents, teachers, Annapolis officialdom, and his jailers in Hanoi -- all bets were off when Johnny McCain thought the rules were unfair, stupid, or, as most were in his estimation, made to be broken.

The U.S. Navy into which John McCain was born in 1936 was a sleepy service. Promotions were slow, the pay a joke, and congressional appropriations meager, befitting the isolationist sentiment that gripped the nation between world wars. The officer corps was small but tightly knit, its code of conduct both uplifting and stultifying. Assumed to be a man of honor, a naval officer could stroll into an officers club anywhere in the world and sign a chit for his food and liquor. But divorce was taboo, a career-ending event, and there were few secrets within the fraternity. Roberta McCain, Johnny's mother, said she knew when an officer was cheating on his wife even if he was an ocean away.
For those willing to play by the rules, the pre-World War II Navy had its compensations, and more than a whiff of romance. In the early 1930s, when Jack and Roberta McCain were stationed in Honolulu, officers in starched whites would join their ladies for afternoon cocktails on the manicured grounds of the elegant Royal Hawaiian Hotel. In the evenings, usually after a bracing game of tennis, the McCains would dress for dinner -- Jack in black tie, Roberta in a long dress. A Japanese maid served the meal by candlelight.
Whatever the realities, naval officers and their wives encouraged the perception that the Navy was the most aristocratic of services. You borrowed the silver for a big dinner party, shortened an old dress for a special occasion, did whatever was needed so that guests recognized you as a person of taste and breeding when they entered your home, as perfection when you entered theirs. Navy families of that era adopted an old southern expression as their credo: Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash. "In other words, we in the Navy never really had anything," said Roberta, "but we never took second best."
Roberta gave birth to Johnny at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone on August 29, 1936. The timing was auspicious. The base commander was his grandfather, who earlier that month, at the advanced age of fifty-two, had earned his wings as a naval aviator. Johnny's father was stationed nearby, at a small submarine facility. Jack McCain was transferred to New London a few months later, but for that brief period Panama became the epicenter of three generations of a family whose distinguished naval service would eventually span the great national upheavals of the twentieth century, from World War I through Vietnam and its still murky aftermath.
Johnny's father and grandfather may have made history, but nobody ignored his mother, the spunky, occasionally ditzy Auntie Mame of Navy wives. Though the family lived on Jack's salary, Roberta Wright McCain was born to wealth. Her father struck oil in the Southwest as a young man, made his fortune, and retired at forty, soon after Roberta and her identical twin, Rowena, were born. "I've accomplished more than most men ever accomplish," he told his wife. "I've just had twin daughters, and I'm going to stay home and enjoy my family." He never worked another day in his life. Instead, as his daughters were growing up, he took them to school, escorted them to the theater, delivered them to dancing class.
Roberta and Rowena had another advantage: They were gorgeous. Years later, when the McCains were stationed in Norfolk, Annapolis midshipmen on summer training there would talk about "getting lucky." That meant catching a glimpse of the admiral's wife on the base tennis court during their daily run. By then Roberta was in her fifties. Over the years, Roberta's and Rowena's spectacular good looks set up Jack McCain's most memorable wisecrack. Asked how he managed to tell his wife and her sister apart, he'd puff on his trademark cigar, flash a devilish grin, then harrumph, "That's their problem."
Her charm and beauty notwithstanding, Roberta's defining quality, as it was to be her son's, was an unquenchable spirit. Along with a religiously grounded fatalism, that spirit carried the family through difficult times. If her husband served as the role model for Johnny, his older sister, Sandy, and younger brother, Joe, Roberta made the family work. She dealt with the illnesses, picked out the cars, bought the houses, selected the schools. Once she went out to buy a dress and came home with a Mercedes. That got a minor rise from Jack, not much more. He did not like to shop and he hated paying bills. "What he really wanted to do was work," said Roberta. She didn't even bother to fake his signature on checks, just signed his name in her own handwriting. "If Jack McCain ever paid a bill, they'd send it back as a forgery," she said.

When John McCain was twelve, his father received orders transferring him from Washington to the West Coast. His mother let the three kids finish their term at school, then piled them in the car and began one of those cross-country migrations so familiar to service families. The first night, after getting the children settled, she sat down to write her husband. "Guess what?" she began. "Guess who was a nuisance today? Johnny." She was mystified. Usually he was everything a mother could hope for -- quiet, dependable, courteous to a fault. She figured it was a momentary mood swing. She was wrong: "From that time on, he was a pain in the neck."
Others had seen the change coming sooner. At Saint Stephen's, an exclusive private school in the Washington, D.C., area, he had begun to display a defiant, unruly streak. But it was not until a few years later when he entered Episcopal High School, a boys' boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, that those qualities emerged with a vengeance.
"Unlike those Northern schools that lured students with glitz and glamour, Episcopal found its identity in the proud but threadbare gentility of the Reconstruction South," wrote Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle of his old school on its 150th anniversary in 1989. "Tuition was low, living conditions Spartan, most of the staff unaccredited. We lived in curtained alcoves like hyperglandular monks; slept in sagging pipe-frame beds; drank milk drawn from some dairy where, it seemed, the cows grazed on nothing but onions, and amused ourselves at meals by covertly flipping butter pats with knives onto the ceiling, where they would later melt free to drop on other, unsuspecting skulls."
When Johnny arrived at Episcopal in the fall of 1951, the school was still drawing nearly all its students from the better families of the Old South. Like most prep schools of the time, Episcopal was lily white (it has long since integrated), its faculty all male, the students required to wear jackets and ties to class. A sampling of McCain's cohorts gives a flavor of the student body: Percival Cabell Gregory III, Greenville, South Carolina; Angus Murdock McBryde, Jr., Durham, North Carolina; Nathaniel Holmes Morison III, Roanoke, Virginia; Joshua Pretlow Darden, Jr., Norfolk, Virginia. If an impressive name meant you belonged, John Sidney McCain III should have been right at home.
To hear him tell it, he was, at least to the extent he was comfortable anywhere during his nomadic childhood. In recent years he has spoken with great affection of Episcopal, often contrasting it with the Naval Academy, which he found tolerable at best. But old friends and acquaintances from Episcopal days think the passage of time has warmed his memories.
Rives Richey, one of his closest friends back then, remembered McCain as rambunctious and combative, at times "just repelling," the type of kid who had a few good pals within a student body that either actively disliked him or gave him a wide berth. "He was considered kind of a punk," said Richey.
In fact, he was known as Punk, alternatively as Nasty, in another variation, McNasty. He cultivated the image. The Episcopal yearbook pictures him in a trench coat, collar up, cigarette dangling Bogey-style from his lips. That pose, if hardly the impression Episcopal sought to project, at least had a fashionable world-weary style to it. Generally, though, he mocked the school's dress code by wearing blue jeans with his coat and tie and otherwise affecting a screw-you raffishness.
"John used to wear his jeans day in, day out, week in, week out to where they would almost stand up in the corner by themselves," said Richey. "And a lot of people thought he maybe should have washed a little more or something. His blue jeans would be just filthy."
The rest of his outfit was not much better. "His coat would be something the Salvation Army would have rejected," said Riley Deeble, an Episcopal master, as teachers were called. "And his shoes would be held together by tape."
As at Annapolis, Episcopal tradition encouraged the hazing of new students, who were forced to endure the indignities of the school's Rat System even if they entered after their freshman year. McCain, who enrolled as a sophomo...

Présentation de l'éditeur

This reissue of the penetrating biography of Senator John McCain, the man who may be the next president of the United States, by celebrated author Robert Timberg now has a new foreword that updates readers on the politician's life since this book's original publication in 1999. In John McCain: An American Odyssey, Timberg provides a riveting account of McCain's remarkable life -- from his rambunctious childhood and his madcap escapades as a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman to his grim experiences as a combat pilot and POW in Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese held him prisoner for five and a half years. Most important, the author illuminates Senator McCain's postwar evolution into one of our country's most distinguished politicians and a formidable presidential candidate. This biography probes deeply into the life of this hugely colorful, straight-talking American original. It is a rich and captivating portrait of one of America's most fascinating and provocative public figures -- a man who has captured the imagination of millions of Americans and who will continue to be a most prominent figure in the American political landscape.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Pocket Books
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 068486794X
• ISBN 13: 9780684867946
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 8