A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

Make-Believe
Maverick [John McCain - and please note the date. ~J]

Posted on June 13, 2013 byJean

A
closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record
of recklessness and dishonesty

At Fort McNair, an army
base located along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, a chance reunion
takes place one day between two former POWs. It’s the spring of 1974, and Navy
commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi
that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth
into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort
McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was
also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the
National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings
with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own
merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

This article appeared
in the October
16, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

There’s a distance
between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call
it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and
offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast,
attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with
daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt.
Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a
disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of
the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the
toughest guys I’ve ever met.”

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On the grounds between
the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals
and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges
sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political
leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I’m going to the Middle
East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the
Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

“It’s a place we’re
probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going
to, John?”

“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you
going to Rio for?”

McCain, a married father
of three, shrugs.

“I got a better chance of
getting laid.”

Dramesi, who went on to
serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a
wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life
changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says
today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went
in.”

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McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the
real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story
of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man
willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become
commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him
to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes,
McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the
White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the
third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege
against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social
intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion.
Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of
their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins
as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as
self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’
evangelical churches.

In one vital respect,
however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W.
Bush was a much better pilot.

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Click
Here to continue reading – at the top of page two.

This, of course, is not
the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or
successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In McCain’s version of his
life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam,
learned to put “country first.” Remade by the Keating Five scandal
that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a
“reformer” and a “maverick,” righteously eschewing anything
that “might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my
office.”

It’s a myth McCain has
cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this
year’s campaign, the mask has slipped. “Let’s face it,” says Larry
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of
State Colin Powell. “John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he
doesn’t bend his principles for politics. That’s just not true.”

We have now watched
McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a
principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of
the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates “by the example
we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice
politics.” After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking
with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting
with joining the Democratic Party.

In his current campaign,
however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He
has embraced those he once denounced as “agents of intolerance,”
promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted
opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has
reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight
years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only
qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove’s base. And he has
engaged in a “practice of politics” so deceptive that even Rove
himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain’s campaign
ads go “too far” and fail the “truth test.”

The missing piece of this
puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over
his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended
to run against Bush in 2004. “McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics,
campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush’s team and
the corporate sector,” says the former friend, a prominent conservative
thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in
2001. “But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush
again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second
life. He saw Bush and Cheney’s ability to draw stark contrasts between black
and white, villains and good guys. And that’s why McCain changed.” (The
McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)

Indeed, many leading
Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the
GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. “John McCain’s ambition overrode
his basic character,” says Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the
matter is that ambition is John McCain’s basic character. Seen in the sweep of
his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent
with the only constant in his life: doing what’s best for himself. To put the
matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.

“John has made a
pact with the devil,” says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has
been appalled at his one-time colleague’s readiness to sacrifice principle for
power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax
cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the “Gang of 14,” which
blocked some of Bush’s worst judges from the federal bench.

“On all three —
sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped,” Chafee says. And forget
all the “Country First” sloganeering, he adds. “McCain is
putting himself first. He’s putting himself first in blinking neon
lights.”

THE NAVY BRAT

John Sidney McCain III has spent
most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather
Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain earned his four stars commanding a
U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm.
“Junior” McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America’s forces
in the Pacific during Vietnam.

The youngest McCain was
not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic
temper was on display. “At the smallest provocation,” he would hold
his breath until he passed out: “I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then,
suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious.” His parents cured him of this
habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their
blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

Trailing his
hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn’t play well
with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon
complex: “My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who
provoked me.”

McCain spent his
formative years among the Washington elite. His father — himself deep in the
throes of a daddy complex — had secured a political post as the Navy’s chief
liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on
Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail
circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white,
all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today
tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege
allowed, earning the nicknames “Punk” and “McNasty.” Even
his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as “a mean
little fucker.”

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