The NPR Politics Podcast - Sen. John McCain, Former Presidential Nominee And Prisoner Of War, Dies At 81

Episode Date: August 26, 2018

Arizona senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain died Saturday at the age of 81. We remember his life and legacy and look at how he shaped the Republican party. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional reporter Kelsey, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, and editor correspondent Ron Elving. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stationsLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It's Saturday night at 9.41 p.m. and we're here because Senator John McCain has died. He was 81 years old and had served the nation for some 60 years. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And we're here with a late-night podcast because John McCain wasn't just any senator. He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a very long serving senator, the Republican nominee for president in 2008. All of us here on this podcast have covered John McCain at one time or another. I covered him when he was in the United States Senate starting in 1987 and thereafter.

But the memory that really sticks in my mind is the summer of 1996 in San Diego at the Republican National Convention. Robert Dole was the nominee that summer. And John McCain, as a surrogate, stood out in the lobby of the media hotel not just once in a while, but almost all day long until the convention session began, holding forth for crowds of reporters, sometimes small, sometimes large crowds, but always standing there in a polo shirt, looking immensely comfortable and casual, and talking about how great Bob Dole was, and talking down the Democratic incumbent president, Bill Clinton, but mostly just being enormously charming. And that was the beginning of John McCain, presidential candidate.

He came back in 2000, of course, and ran as a formal candidate, eventually getting the Republican nomination in 2008. And I had the good fortune to cover that campaign, the 08 campaign, which for most of its duration was a extremely freewheeling, ad-libbing, stream of consciousness kind of campaign from the back of a bus. It got a little bit more buttoned down in the final months when he was gunning for the White House. And then I had the opportunity, of course, to cover the Obama and Trump administrations. And as a senator, John McCain tangled with both those presidents. And I pick up in 2010 when I started covering Congress and covered him until he left.

He was still serving until just today. We haven't seen him in Congress since basically since December. And, you know, I have a million memories from the times that he used to buzz the train buzzers so hard to get from his office to the Capitol for votes that everybody knew he was coming down the line to. There was this time last year when they were dedicating a new bus that was being put into the Capitol somewhere. And he was coming off the floor and a couple of us asked him, you know, what would you like a bust of yourself to be in the Capitol someday? And he said, well, I don't need that. I don't need that because there's already a monument to me in Vietnam and it calls me an air pirate. And how could you get anything better than that? I think that gets us to

John McCain's biography, because why was he an air pirate in Vietnam? Because he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. And he wasn't just any prisoner of war because his father was a big deal. And his grandfather. He was a third generation Navy officer. His father and grandfather were both high-ranking admirals. And so he was quite a prize for the North Vietnamese when he was captured. That's right, and they hoped, actually, to use him as a kind of bargaining chip, but he refused to be returned. This was in his first year out of five and a half years of captivity. They tried to use him in that manner, and he refused to be released ahead of others who had been held for a longer period. Yeah. And in his remembrance, they didn't know at first who he was when he was captured.

And when they became clear, he was all of a sudden up for release. And he put two and two together. And he said that he lived by a code and he knew that he couldn't let other he couldn't let his status be the reason he was let go. So the thing is, he wasn't just held, he was tortured. Yeah, he still, to the day that he died, had physical repercussions from that torture. He was physically marred for the rest of his life. He couldn't comb his own hair. He couldn't raise either arm more than 80 degrees. And he was tortured not only while he was in prison, but he was tortured in

his crash. He broke a shoulder when he was captured. He was bayoneted by the people who captured him. From Vietnam, he is eventually able to come home. And then he worked as a military attache on Capitol Hill. He was sort of a Pentagon representative. And he got to know a lot of lawmakers from both parties when he was still in uniform serving as a military liaison. He would travel with members of Congress overseas as a sort of a military attache. So he was already a familiar face before he actually ran for office himself from his adopted state of Arizona. And he was in the House first for a while and then over to the Senate? Elected in 1982 to the House. When he was in the Senate's liaison

office for the Navy, that was the social center of the office buildings on the Senate side. That's where senators and staff and other people interested in armed services affairs would gather. He was enormously entertaining. He organized parties and organized various and sundry outings. And he was quite the figure long before he was elected in his own right to Congress and then to the Senate. I think we have a theme developing here, which is that he was an entertainer of sorts. He was a funny guy. He was the senator who, covering Congress, we always were glad to find in the hallway. You know, I think it's important to think about him as a complex person as a senator. He was enormously entertaining, enormously warm and always available.

A friend of mine on the Hill pointed out that this man was almost president and there was never a day that he wasn't willing to have a conversation about policy and about politics. He stopped for reporters all of the time, but he was also kind of a grumpy and difficult person to cover. He told us we asked stupid questions all the time. I can't tell you the number of times he told me that it was a dumb question and he asked me why my editors let me ask those questions. But he was still there when I wanted to ask them. Yes, it's sort of a theme with him. So he first wins in 1982, a House seat. Four years later, he's elected to the Senate. But then there was a scandal. The Charles Keating scandal of that era involved an

SNL operator, a savings and loan operator, at a time when the savings and loan industry was essentially melting down. And Charles Keating entertained a number of senators, gave donations, tried to win favor with a number of different people in Congress. And when asked if he gave those donations with a hope that it would give him some kind of support from those political figures, he replied rather candidly, well, I sure hope so. And that just got basically everybody who had ever done any business with Charles Keating in trouble. And John McCain was one of several senators in both parties who were caught up with this Ohio savings and loan figure. It gave John McCain, in a sense, a kind of epiphany. He had this extraordinary conversion on the road to Damascus and at that point became the great, one of the two or three great Senate advocates for campaign finance reform. Let's get all this money out of politics, at least at the congressional level. Let's say we don't need all these donors and their wish lists and

their agendas. It might be worth saying, John McCain was raised in a Navy family. He went to Annapolis. He lived by a certain code of conduct. And I think he always bristled at the idea that anyone would question his ethics. But in the Charles Keating affair, his ethics did come to be questioned, and rightfully so. And that was a searing experience for John McCain. And out of that came his commitment to campaign finance reform, which alienated many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, including the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who's one of the leading opponents of campaign finance reform. And while Senator McConnell was certainly gracious and issuing statements this evening on McCain's death, they were definitely on opposite sides when it came to that issue.

Well, this is a big part of kind of the way McCain's story goes, right, is that there were inflection points. There were these moments where things really went poorly for him or where he was at attention or where he, you know, was at a crossroads. And those were the times that really changed his political trajectory. We can talk about dozens of them, but the ones that come to mind right now are think about the Affordable Care Act and how we talk about him being this loud and big presence in the Senate. But one of the biggest moments for him in the end of his career was a silent one, where after struggling with the Affordable Care Act and where he was going to be and whether or not he was going to support his party on repeal, he walked out silently onto the Senate floor and gave a thumbs down and effectively

ended his party's ability to roll back the signature pledge of their presidential campaign and congressional campaigns and everything they ran against President Obama about. And this was right after getting the diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. Yeah, nine days after. And Donald Trump has never forgiven John McCain for that moment. In fact, while the president did issue a rather perfunctory tweet tonight honoring the memory of John McCain and offering thoughts and prayers to his families, just last week, President Trump signed the Defense Authorization Act, which was named in honor of John McCain, the chairman of

the Senate Armed Services Committee. And President Trump managed to get through the entire signing ceremony without ever mentioning John McCain. Later that evening, he went to another event where he, as he's done many times, excoriated McCain without naming him for that thumbs down moment. I can tell you that Republicans on the Hill were very, very upset about that, that they wanted the president to have a moment where that he was ready to honor McCain or that he was at least ready to let it go. And it just didn't happen. And just to put a button on the McCain Trump relationship, during the 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump, then candidate Trump, criticized McCain and said that, you know,

he didn't think McCain was a hero, a war hero, because, you know, he didn't think McCain was a hero, a war hero, because, you know, he likes people who don't get captured. Another thing in Senator McCain's career that is a recurring theme in the Senate is his sort of strong view on torture being wrong. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and how he moved to outlaw torture. And he had the moral standing, obviously, to make that argument and make it stick. And at times that put him at odds with his party, and he never wavered. John McCain staked out a very strong position as a person who had suffered torture himself as a prisoner of war, a very strong position against the use of torture, even after 9-11, even dealing with terrorist suspects,

John McCain was against the United States using torture. And that applied across the board, whatever agency of the United States might be using it. Another thing that is an absolute hallmark of his career is that he was one of the leading hawks of the entire Congress, really. He was one of the people who really, really favored military intervention and thought that that was a very big part of the way that the United States expressed itself in the world. Yes, you could say that Senator McCain came from Arizona, but he was just as loyal and just as interested in representing

the armed services. Yes, the senator from the Pentagon. He also differed with President Bush when it came to his feelings on Vladimir Putin. Remember, Bush talked about looking in Putin's eyes and seeing someone he could do business with. McCain used to joke about looking in Putin's eyes and seeing three letters KGB. And he was equally critical of Donald Trump on that score. After Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, McCain was even more outspoken than some of his Capitol Hill colleagues when he called it one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. So I think that there's another theme that we're developing here in John McCain's life,

and that is that there were many times where he felt that what was right was not in agreement with his own party, where he numerous times bucked his party or was not as conservative as the conservatives would have wanted him to be. You know, a really great example of that, and I think we can hear a little bit of it, is when he was on the campaign trail in 2008. Actually, Scott, you can probably talk about this more because you were covering that campaign. I was at that town hall, and this is a moment that lots of people will point to as an indication of Senator McCain's integrity, his willingness to even challenge his own supporters. Let's just take a listen. I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's an Arab. He's

not. No? No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about. He's not. Thank you. It should be noted that there are reports that McCain has asked that George W. Bush, former President George W. Bush and former President Barack Obama both deliver eulogies at his funeral. You know, John McCain had this reputation as a maverick, which went back all the way to his youth. And he made something like 20 different changes of schools when he was, before he went

to the U.S. Naval Academy. He was known as a maverick there. He was known as a maverick in politics. He was always giving his own views and always defining what he would call conservatism in his own way. He didn't think he was necessarily less conservative than the rest of his party, but he had a different definition of conservatism. And that maverick image, which I think helped him a lot as a presidential campaigner, was not necessarily the sort of thing that helped him lead the party in the Senate. But that maverick image, and I think, again, Scott, you can probably talk about this more, is the time that we really think about him being defined as a maverick was actually the time when he kind of helped usher in a change in American politics when he picked

Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, right? That was the only moment during his campaign when he really was catching up to Barack Obama. And he had a window of time there where the McCain-Palin ticket was kind of on fire and doing very well. Palin didn't wear very well. And as voters came to learn more about her, the polling numbers for the McCain-Palin ticket dropped back again. But for a brief moment there, the McCain-Palin ticket was really on fire. And I think the McCain staffers who played a role, and the senator himself in choosing Sarah Palin, felt like that had been a real win for them. I think in hindsight, they came to look on that as a problem for their campaign,

but more importantly, a problem for what it sort of spelled for the future of American politics, the sort of celebritization of American politics. They had been so critical of Barack Obama as being more a celebrity than a leader. And then they kind of stepped on that message by choosing someone like Sarah Palin. In some ways, you can draw a straight line from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump. And John McCain and Donald Trump, McCain had sort of a fundamental disagreement with a lot of what Trump represented. Including foreign policy. I mean, John McCain gave a speech last fall in which he just really attacked the kind of America first approach to foreign policy that President Trump has pursued. To go with what he called some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who'd rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past

that Americans consign to the ash heap of history. So, yeah, not at all on the same page as Donald Trump when it came to foreign policy. There've been a lot of reactions pouring in. I'm pretty sure that my inbox is going to notify me that it's full soon. There have been so many reactions pouring in. But what stands out to you guys, aside from the Trump tweet, obviously, in terms of the reactions to this loss? The one that's standing out to me right now is a statement from former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of the same form of cancer that afflicted McCain.

And he put out a statement saying, John was many things, a proud graduate of the Naval Academy, a Senate colleague, a political opponent. But to me, more than anything, John was a friend. America will miss John McCain. The world will miss John McCain. And I will miss him dearly. And it, this is one of those statements that just kind of, it feels like so much of what we're hearing is that people acknowledge that he was an opponent, that they didn't always agree with him, but they deeply respected him. Yeah, and in the category of fellow Democrats,

Senator Chuck Schumer, who's the top Democrat in the Senate, put out a statement saying, as you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them. And he is talking about, and I don't know exactly how it would work, but he's planning to introduce a resolution to rename one of the Senate office buildings after Senator McCain. That is interesting because you have three Senate office buildings, and the one I believe they're proposing to rename would be the original one, Richard Russell building, and that was named for the legendary Georgia senator who is very much a Democrat, a Southern Democrat to be sure, but a Southern Democrat of the old school. So Schumer is offering up one of his own in that

respect. And a statement tonight from Cindy McCain, who says, I'm so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved in the place he loved best, Arizona. Senator Lindsey Graham, and we mentioned Graham because he was the buddy comedy with John McCain in the Senate. They were just like best buddies. And he sent out a couple of tweets tonight. He says, America and freedom have lost one of her greatest champions, and I've lost one of my dearest friends and mentor. I will need some time to absorb this, but I want Cindy and the entire McCain family to know that they are my prayers. Lindsey Graham could be described as, in use of the naval aviation metaphor, John McCain's wingman in the Senate. He certainly aspired to being John McCain's wingman,

to flying support for him, and being his ready-at-hand number two guy to support what John McCain was standing for. The people that he served with in jail will tell you the same thing in prison that I will tell you. He is loyal to his friends. He loves his country. And if he has to stand up to party for his country, so be it. He would die for this country. I love him to death. And those sniffles that you hear are Senator McCain, who was there at that CNN town hall with Graham, and McCain was crying. And there is at least some talk that Cindy McCain is one of the people who could be considered to be named to take Senator McCain's seat through the rest of his term.

His term runs through 2020, and it's up to the governor of Arizona to appoint a replacement to serve during that time. It has to be a Republican. It's statutory. Is it not in Arizona? It's not just political. It's statutory. That's right. But beyond just filling the seat, is there anyone who fills that role of being sort of, you know, a moral voice of the Senate, of being someone who brings people together? Because he did bring people together, as much as he also, you know, a moral voice of the Senate, of being someone who brings people together, because he did bring people together as much as he also, you know, fought with people. Oh, gosh, he was the person that people would call in when they needed somebody to broker

some sort of bipartisanship, some sort of deal. And there isn't really a, you know, a strong person to inherit that legacy. There are some people who are vying for that role. I think that Susan Collins of Maine kind of views herself or people view her that way. And she's potentially a person on that list. But there really aren't that many people who carry that kind of gravitas and they have the depth of relationships and the depth of trust on both sides of the aisle that McCain did. It's funny you mentioned her. There was a government shutdown in 2013 that was very long. And yes, and John McCain thought it was very dumb. And Kelsey, you and I were both covering it. And he, on numerous occasions, would tell us how dumb

that shutdown was and how he wanted it to end and just make it go away. And when the shutdown finally ended, I chased him down in the hallway and was trying to talk to him. And he was kind of like, why are you talking to me? You should be talking to the women senators who made this happen, who made this end, who, you know, started the process of bringing us together to end this dumb shutdown. Yeah. And there are definitely going to be people who float Susan Collins as, you know, as somebody to inherit the bipartisanship. Another might be Lisa Murkowski, another one of the women who was involved in that. The Senate is in a place right now where it is so closely divided and people have retreated to their corners so deeply that it is very rare right now when we see true bipartisanship. And oddly, we're seeing it actually

at this moment on spending bills, which is like the last place people would expect to see bipartisanship right now. Except it's just bipartisan spending, which is kind of the easiest thing you can do. Right, spending money. Spending money. When you want to spend money, it's easy to get people on board. Not John McCain. Not John McCain, that's true. But there are limits to that. And there are a lot of really difficult and controversial things that seem to be on the horizon. And it's really, really unclear who can be the person who stands in the middle and keeps things calm and is credible. appropriate to hear a little bit of tape from a speech that Senator McCain gave on the floor of the Senate July 25th of last year. He had just come back from surgery to remove that blood clot near his eye that turned out to be brain cancer. It was on the eve of his thumbs down on the

Obamacare repeal. And he gave a speech about partisanship, lamented the ugly partisanship in today's Senate. Both sides have let this happen. Let's leave the history of who shot first to the historians. I suspect they'll find we all conspired in our decline either by deliberate actions or neglect. We've all played some role in it. Certainly I have. Sometimes I've let my passion rule my reason. Sometimes I made it harder to find common ground because of something harsh I said to a colleague. Sometimes I wanted to win more for the sake of winning than to achieve a contested policy.

Senator John McCain died at 4.28 p.m. on August 25th, and we're going to leave it there. We will be back in your feed soon. You can keep up with our coverage at npr.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. There are a bunch of really great stories that our colleagues have done about Senator McCain at various points in his life and career. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor-Correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.