A Closer Look at the Legacy of John McCain
Senator John McCain died on August 25, 2018. His passing occurred just a day after the McCain family told the public that the he would stop…
Senator John McCain died on August 25, 2018. His passing occurred just a day after the McCain family told the public that the he would stop receiving medical treatment for a glioblastoma tumor, the aggressive form of brain cancer he was diagnosed with in 2017.
McCain was born in 1936, at a Navy base in the Panama Canal Zone, a literal child of U.S. imperialism whose father and grandfather were both Navy admirals during their lifetimes. He eventually followed in the footsteps of other family members by enrolling at the U.S. Naval Academy, in 1954, and he later volunteered for combat duty in the U.S. Navy, where he was assigned as a pilot.
McCain’s most famous story regarding his time in the military occurred during a time of increasing protests against the United States for its involvement in the Vietnam War. While McCain was fighting in the war, prominent political figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr., were expressing their dissent; in 1967, the same year that MLK gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, McCain’s plane was shot down while he was flying over North Vietnam, and he parachuted into what is now Hanoi. He was held as a prisoner of war for the next five and a half years, and he said he experienced suicidal thoughts as a result of his imprisonment during this time.
“I had learned what we all learned over there,” McCain would later say. “Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine.”
McCain’s military service may have been what led him to be such a pro-military hawk and champion of Pentagon funding during his time in Congress. According to Al-Jazeera, McCain may have opposed torture, given his experience, but he did not oppose the first Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, or the 2003 invasion of Iraq when they took place. McCain famously turned a Beach Boys song into a threat to bomb Iran and is considered “a great friend of Saudi Arabia,” as he’s helped the Middle Eastern kingdom fund its war on Yemen.
In 1977, McCain began his political career as a liaison for the Navy to the U.S. Senate, where he met a young Senator Joe Biden. Five years later, he would run and win as a Republican representative for the state of Arizona. During his decades-long tenure, McCain was at the center of multiple political controversies, including reported connections to a group that supplied aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. (The Contras were a right-wing militant group known for a plethora of human rights violations and for multiple acts of terrorism.)
McCain was a conservative, and his political record reflected that. In 1983, he voted against the creation of a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., and he voted against civil rights legislation in 1990. He was staunchly pro-life and had a history of voting against abortion rights, claiming Roe v Wade was a “flawed decision.”
In 2000 and 2008, McCain ran for president of the United States. In 2008, he earned the status of Republican nominee, but lost to Barack Obama.
McCain’s 2008 presidential run against Obama was an especially troubling one given the 2016 election that would follow. As noted in op-eds dating to that campaign from outlets like The Atlantic, SFGate, and The New York Times, McCain’s campaign seemed to allow vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to create racist narratives around Obama and his candidacy while giving McCain and his team a level of plausible deniability.
The tactic in play was to associate Obama as nearly as possible with terrorism, capitalizing on the conflation of the word with radical Islam in a post–9–11 United States. Surrogates at McCain rallies spoke of the opponent as “Barack Hussein Obama,” and Palin herself railed against Obama for “palling around with terrorists,” asserting that he had once been close to William Ayers, a radical leftist who was part of a group that bombed police stations and other government buildings in the early 1970s, before Obama (who was born in 1961) had even hit his teen years.
McCain, who refused to stop using a racial epithet for Asian people when challenged on it during the 2000 presidential campaign, has been hailed as a hero of American civility, both before and after his death, for his defense of Obama on the campaign trail, which set up Arabs and “decent family” men as a false binary of opposing forces. These lionizations ignore that the GOP helped foster the very racism its candidate had to correct himself.
Which might make it seem ironic that, throughout the 2016 election cycle and beyond, McCain was one of the few Republicans to become an outspoken critic of Donald Trump and his policies. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump insulted McCain, claiming that the former Navy pilot was “not a war hero.” In January 2017, McCain came out against President Trump’s Muslim ban, referring to the policy as an “apocalyptic ideology of hatred” in a joint statement with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. In May 2018, a source close to McCain reported that the senator did not want Trump to attend his funeral; instead, McCain reportedly wanted Vice President Mike Pence to come in the president’s stead.
McCain underwent a series of treatments after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain tumors, in 2017. (He had been diagnosed with cancer three times before.) After rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, he spoke about treatment during a 60 Minutes interview, saying that the initial prognosis was “very, very serious.”
Shortly after his passing, his daughter Meghan McCain released a statement on Twitter confirming his death.
“He loved me and I loved him,” she wrote. “He taught me how to live.”
As his family mourns, much of the country grapples with his long and complicated history among its leaders.
Originally published at www.teenvogue.com.