U.S. Senator John McCain, a highly decorated naval aviator, is arguably the most famous American hero of the Vietnam War. His is a ‘Dunkirk’-like saga of triumph through noble survival.
There can be no good time for a diagnosis of aggressive brain cancer. John McCain’s comes at one of the worst possible times.
At the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s presidency, America is in crisis, the White House in the hands of an erratic megalomaniac with pronounced know-nothing, neo-fascist tendencies, the nation’s role in an increasingly chaotic world shaky, unpredictable, destabilizing.
Despite having Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump has done nothing legislatively. The latest version of the GOP health care debacle is just, well, the latest example. He has gotten some right-wing judges confirmed, though, and is doing his stubborn best to administratively gut key regulations, especially on the environment, and our international affairs both by executive order and what can only be described as deliberate mismanagement by vacating key governmental offices.
Trump is a shambolic bust as president, a pathological liar with the attention span of a sugar-crazed child and the intellectual depth of a hormonally-addled adolescent, but he is still holding on to a vast reactionary base which in its turn holds the Republican Party, whose Frankenstein it is, in its thrall.
The reactionary base and once Grand Old Party have even, as predicted, stuck with Trump through a series of painfully embarrassing revelations about Trump’s namesake son, go-to son-in-law, and national campaign chairman meeting in the midst of the presidential race with a Russian government representative bearing anti-Clinton intelligence just one floor beneath The Donald’s Trump Tower lair. That the Russian rep, a very well-known lobbyist for Kremlin concerns, was also a lawyer for the FSB, successor agency to the famed and much feared KGB which forged Trump’s man-crush Vladimir Putin, is only one of many things that would shock any healthy, honorable political party to its core. So much for honor.
This should be John McCain’s moment, the last great mission of a great patriot who, like others of his cohort, the only generation in American history not to produce a President of the United States, mounted very serious but ultimately short-falling candidacies for the White House. For McCain, forged in the crucible of Annapolis and the hellfire of Vietnam, son and grandson of four-star admirals, noble survivor of nearly six years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, does care about honor. Deeply so.
His alarm about devolutionary America has been evident for a long time, especially as the revelations about the Trumps’ strange Russian fixation have tumbled forth with a deeply disconcerting regularity.
While Trump, a jittery figure in the best of times, is acting like the walls are closing in — witness his weekend Twitter-storm about his “unlimited power to pardon” — the fact is that the investigations into the Trump-Russia affair are still relatively new. And the Congressional portion of it is remarkably slow-footed and scattered.
What’s needed is a fearless and focused fellow like, well, not just like John McCain but John McCain himself at the helm of a joint special committee. Alas, it is not to be.
President Donald Trump, who repeatedly evaded military service during the Vietnam War he vociferously supported, with his new communications director, Wall Street hustler and hedge fund operator Anthony Scaramucci. That the new White House comms director was an Obama fundraiser and Clinton booster not all that long ago matters little in the grinning jackal culture of TrumpWorld.
Participating as ex officio during last month’s Senate Intelligence Committee appearance by Trump-fired FBI Director James Comey, the Senate Armed Services Chairman seemed far less focused than usual. Then came cranial surgery for blood clots, followed by the revelation of an aggressive form of brain cancer.
So we will not get what I pointed out in March that we need; i.e., a McCain-led special congressional probe. Other Republicans are far too compromised or lack the sheer forcefulness needed to plunge ahead. Democrats? Well, they are in the minority in both houses. And the track record of Democratic chairs of the Intelligence Committees has been marked for years by a combination of after-the-fact moralizing, banal assertions of benignly secret global strike programs, and a lack of sophistication.
Nonetheless, McCain stands as an example of what can be, especially among Republicans.
Imperfect, of course, though I’m proud to have been a very small part of his 2000 presidential campaign in the Veterans for McCain operation. It seemed at times that McCain was so reflexively interventionist that he might intervene in a snowball fight at the South Pole. But at times it is necessary to pull the trigger. As was the case with the early rise of Isis, which the Obama National Security Council fatefully allowed to flourish for months while pursuing tangential diplomacy in Baghdad.
McCain has balanced his martial advocacy with military reform (he is a great friend of my old friend and boss Gary Hart) and is a great advocate of efforts to rein in big money in politics and deal with climate change. For all his intrepidity as a naval aviator, it is his heroic perseverance which makes McCain such an inspirational figure.
John McCain stands for the updating of enduring American values, as recounted in his great memoir ‘Faith of My Fathers’, co-authored with former chief of staff Mark Salter.
Discussing his time as a tortured prisoner of war, McCain declared: “Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles. No misfortune, no injury, no humiliation can destroy it.”
When Donald Trump, a classic chicken hawk draft dodger, dissed McCain as somehow not a real hero because he had been captured (as if the cosseted New York rich kid had ever put himself on the line), I thought Trump had ruined himself. That he had not, as I quickly realized, told me that Trump was really on to something in devolutionary America, something that made him the coming political thing.
But at some point, perhaps some point approaching sooner than later — if Trump’s renewed Monday morning Twitter fit is any indicator — Republican pols will again find themselves at a crossroads at which principle is again in consideration.
And perhaps the example of John McCain will again be in play.
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