President Ronald Reagan greets John McCain as First Lady Nancy Reagan looks on, March 1987
Gallery of John McCain
U.S. President George W. Bush with Senator McCain, December 4, 2004
Gallery of John McCain
U.S. President Barack Obama and McCain at a press conference in March 2009
Gallery of John McCain
McCain in his Senate office, November 2010
Gallery of John McCain
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen meets with U.S. Senate delegation led by McCain, June 2016
Gallery of John McCain
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Senators Joni Ernst, Daniel Sullivan, John McCain, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and Cory Gardner attending the 2016 International Institute for Strategic Studies Asia Security Summit in Singapore
Gallery of John McCain
United States
John McCain talks to Rick Davis, during the flight from South Carolina to California, February 4, 2008
Gallery of John McCain
Washington, DC, United States
December 6, 2017
Gallery of John McCain
Senator John McCain - the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Senator Jack Reed - the Committee's Ranking Democratic Member
Gallery of John McCain
McCain in 1983, during his first term in the House of Representatives
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Silver Star
Silver Star
Bronze Star Medal (3) with Combat "V"
Bronze Star Medal (3) with Combat "V"
Purple Heart
Purple Heart
Legion of Merit (2) with Combat "V"
Legion of Merit, Legionnaire order
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Cross
Republic of Vietnam National Order of Vietnam (Commander)
Badge on a ribbon of a knight of the National Order of Vietnam
Prisoner of War Medal
Prisoner of War Medal
Navy Expeditionary Medal
Navy Expeditionary Medal
Vietnam Service Medal with two stars
Vietnam Service Medal with two stars
Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal with 1960- device
Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal with 1960- device
Republic of Vietnam Meritorious Unit Citation (Gallantry Cross) with frame and palm
Republic of Vietnam Meritorious Unit Citation (Gallantry Cross) with frame and palm
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Senators Joni Ernst, Daniel Sullivan, John McCain, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and Cory Gardner attending the 2016 International Institute for Strategic Studies Asia Security Summit in Singapore
John McCain, in full John Sidney McCain III, U.S. senator who was the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2008 but was defeated by Barack Obama. McCain represented Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives (1983–87) before being elected to the U.S. Senate (1987–2018).
Background
Ethnicity:
John’s ancestry was English, Scottish, Scots-Irish/Northern Irish/Irish, and distant Welsh.
John McCain was born on August 29, 1936, at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, to naval officer John S. McCain Jr. and Roberta (Wright) McCain. At the time of his birth, the Panama Canal was an unincorporated territory of the U.S., and John’s father was serving there. John’s paternal grandfather, John Sidney “Slew” McCain, Sr., was also a prominent admiral, and a pioneer of aircraft carrier operations.
Education
John went to a private preparatory boarding school, Episcopal High School, Alexandria, Virginia, graduating in 1954. In order to continue the family tradition, he attended United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, and passed out in 1958.
McCain then served in the navy as a ground-attack pilot. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, McCain was nearly killed in a severe accidental fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, then on active duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Later that year McCain’s plane was shot down over Hanoi, and, badly injured, he was captured by the North Vietnamese. In captivity he endured torture and years of solitary confinement. When his father was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific in 1968, the North Vietnamese, as a propaganda ploy, offered early release to the younger McCain, but he refused unless every American captured before him was also freed. Finally released in 1973, he received a hero’s welcome home as well as numerous service awards, including the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit.
McCain retired from the navy in 1981, after his life had changed course. In 1977 he became the navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, which he later called his “real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant.”
McCain relocated to Arizona, and in 1982 he was elected to the House of Representatives. After serving two terms, he successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1986. Two years later he gained national visibility by delivering a well-received address to the Republican National Convention. But McCain also became embroiled in the most spectacular case to arise out of the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s, as a result of his connections with Charles Keating, Jr., the head of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California, who had engaged in fraud. Although cleared by the Senate in 1991 of illegalities in his dealings on Keating’s behalf, McCain was mildly rebuked for exercising “poor judgment.” Duly embarrassed, McCain became a champion of campaign finance reform; he collaborated with the liberal Democratic senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and, after a seven-year battle, the pair saw the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act signed into law in 2002. The legislation, which restricted the political parties’ use of funds not subject to federal limits, was McCain’s signal achievement on Capitol Hill.
In 2000, promising the country “straight talk” and extensive government reform, McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination, competing against Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Bush prevailed after a strenuous fight, including an especially brutal effort by the Bush campaign in the South Carolina primary. McCain eventually recovered from his devastating defeat, campaigned hard for Bush’s reelection in 2004, gave unswerving support to the Iraq War, and, after initially opposing Bush’s tax cuts, voted against their repeal.
In 2007 McCain announced that he would once again seek the Republican presidential nomination. Despite his rapprochement with the Bush family, his campaign seemed to be in serious trouble as the election year approached, lacking money and a clear political base. But after a decisive victory in New Hampshire and a strong showing on Super Tuesday, McCain took a commanding lead, and he secured the nomination with his victories on March 4, 2008. In late August he chose Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential running mate.
McCain faced a challenging political climate in the general election. After 40 years of conservative dominance, the public seemed eager to start anew. By aligning himself with President Bush, McCain gained powerful political resources, but it remained to be seen how much Bush’s hard-core supporters, especially among religious conservatives, would rally to McCain’s cause, despite his efforts to court them. By sidling up to Bush, McCain also contradicted his reputation for independence, made himself look inconsistent on key issues (including taxes), and identified himself with a president who in his second term earned the longest sustained period of public disapproval ever. McCain remained far more popular with the public than his party did, but, as he took on Democrat Barack Obama, he faced the humbling irony that, having been defeated by George W. Bush in 2000, he might find himself defeated by the legacy of Bush’s presidency in 2008.
Indeed, in the event, McCain lost to Obama. Trailing in the initial opinion polls, McCain appeared to rebound following the Republican national convention in early September. His choice of Palin, a social conservative, as his running mate—the first female ever nominated to a Republican national ticket—initially stirred great excitement, particularly within the party’s social conservative base. But Palin soon received harsh criticism from many commentators, including conservatives, who claimed her lack of experience raised doubts about McCain’s judgment. The outcome became almost inevitable when, later in September, the failure of some major investment houses and banks signaled the start of what became widely described as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. McCain strangely suspended his campaign, just prior to the first scheduled presidential debate, in order to work on a congressional bailout of the financial industry. He then just as suddenly decided to participate in the debate, which made him look erratic—and when House Republicans rejected the proposed bailout bill, he looked ineffectual as well. Obama wound up winning nearly 53 percent of the popular vote—a decisive margin, but no landslide—yet also captured not only all of those states that had gone for John Kerry in 2004 but also a number of historically Republican states won by Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections, including Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Virginia.
Humbled but determined that his political legacy would not be as a failed presidential candidate, McCain returned to the Senate, where he continued to play a prominent role. In 2013, as part of the “gang of eight” group of Republican and Democratic senators, McCain pursued a bipartisan solution to immigration reform that included a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. In August 2013, at the request of President Obama, McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s longtime colleague and friend, traveled to Egypt, where they held separate meetings with that country’s new interim leaders and with the Muslim Brotherhood. After Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 2014 election, McCain became the chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee.
In 2016 McCain faced and ultimately fended off a primary challenge from former state senator Kelli Ward, whose adamant opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants and whose calls to secure the border differed starkly from McCain’s tolerant stance but were in keeping with the strident approach taken by Donald Trump as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and as the party’s standard-bearer in the general election. Initially McCain provided consistent, if tepid, support for Trump’s candidacy, despite Trump’s criticism of what he characterized as McCain’s failure to support veterans and even after Trump controversially maligned McCain’s military record, saying that he liked “people who weren’t captured.” In October 2016 McCain withdrew his endorsement of Trump after a hot-mic video from an infotainment television program in 2005 surfaced in which Trump boasted to a reporter about sexual exploits that were grounded in predatory behaviour.
After Trump won the presidency, McCain was among a small group of Republicans who were critical of the new chief executive’s warm overtures to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, in the face of the consensus within the U.S. intelligence establishment that the Russian government had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. McCain joined Democrats in calling for the creation of a special committee to investigate the Russian intervention in the election and the possible collusion by the Trump campaign in that effort.
In mid-July 2017, following surgery to remove a blood clot over McCain’s left eye, it was announced that McCain was suffering from glioblastoma, a common but extremely malignant brain tumour. Joining other ex-presidents and a chorus of McCain’s Senate colleagues in offering messages of support for McCain, Obama tweeted, “Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell, John.”
McCain coauthored several books, including Faith of My Fathers (1999), Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir (2002), Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life (2004), Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (2007), Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War (2014), and The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (2018).
He referred to himself as an Episcopalian as recently as June 2007 after which date he said he came to identify as a Baptist.
Politics
On most issues—including military spending, labour legislation, abortion, and gun regulation—McCain’s record in the Senate was basically conservative. Yet quite apart from campaign reform, McCain took stands on specific issues that distanced him from the conservative Republican mainstream in Washington. Despite his years in captivity in Vietnam, McCain strongly advocated restoring diplomatic relations with that country, finally achieved in 1995. He led unsuccessful efforts to enact a new federal tax on tobacco products that would fund antismoking campaigns and help the states pay for smoking-related health costs. On immigration reform, health care, restriction of so-called greenhouse gas emissions (a primary cause of global warming), reduction of pork-barrel government spending, regressive tax cuts, and the political power of religious conservatives, McCain stood out. His critics claimed that his contrarian stance was calculated and mostly for show and that the favourable impression it made inside the news media far outweighed the political risks. Still, with congressional Republicans increasingly marching in lock step during the 1990s, McCain’s dissent made him look like a genuinely unconventional conservative.
Views
McCain was against federal funding of birth control and sex education; his opposition included a vote against spending $100 million to reduce teen pregnancy by education and contraceptives.
McCain voted in 2003 and 2005 against legislation requiring insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to also cover birth control.
McCain had indicated that he believed life begins at the moment of conception and believed that embryos should be afforded full human rights. However, McCain did support the use of embryos in stem-cell research. In 2012, speaking about abortion, Senator McCain said that the Republican Party should "leave the issue alone" and that he respected pro-life and pro-choice views.
However, on February 18, 2007, he stated, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned." McCain has said he supports amending the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or risk to the mother's life.
McCain has voted against abortion 115 out of 119 times in the Senate including co-sponsoring the Federal Abortion Ban.
McCain mostly had a 0% rating from the pro-choice group, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and a 75% rating from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC).
Quotations:
"Our shared values define us more than our differences. And acknowledging those shared values can see us through our challenges today if we have the wisdom to trust in them again."
"Every day, people serve their neighbors and our nation in many different ways, from helping a child learn and easing the loneliness of those without a family to defending our freedom overseas. It is in this spirit of dedication to others and to our country that I believe service should be broadly and deeply encouraged."
"I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's."
"In the real world, as lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty is reality."
"But we should be mindful as we argue about our differences that so much more unites than divides us. We should also note that our differences, when compared with those in many, if not most, other countries, are smaller than we sometimes imagine them to be."
"America didn't invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: nations, cultures, and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them."
"Civic participation over a lifetime, working in neighborhoods and communities and service of all kinds - military and civilian, full-time and part-time, national and international - will strengthen America's civic purpose."
"The first role of government is to help people who are in crisis or need. That's why we have government."
"For much of my life, the Navy was the only world I knew. It is still the world I know best and love most."
"Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. That's not how we were meant to govern."
"I don't think anybody is - no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time."
Membership
John McCain III is not a Freemason, but his father and grandfather were and they imparted some of their wisdom and experience from the fraternity to him.
Project Vote Smart
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United States
1990 - 2008
United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs
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United States
1991 - 1993
Personality
Journalist Adam Clymer notes of McCain that, "There is no question that he sometimes loses potential allies by his penchant for telling off other senators." Todd Purdum remarks upon a "temperament that routinely put[s] him atop insiders' lists of the most difficult senators on Capitol Hill." A 2006 Washingtonian survey of Capitol Hill staff ranked McCain as having the second "Hottest Temper" in the Senate. Former Senator Rick Santorum says that, "John was very rough in the sandbox. Everybody has a McCain story. If you work in the Senate for a while, you have a McCain story. ... He hasn't built up a lot of goodwill." Writer Elizabeth Drew quoted a senator who admired McCain as saying, "Dealing with John McCain is kind of like dancing with a cactus."
Physical Characteristics:
His height was 1.75 M.
Quotes from others about the person
"These times require more than a good soldier. They require a wise leader."
Joe Biden, Democratic National Convention
"Though both Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, "fighting for you," let us face the matter squarely. There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you."
Sarah Palin, from RNC Vice-Presidential acceptance speech
"McCain ran an aggressive, hard-hitting campaign against former Congressman J. D. Hayworth. If he had taken this same kind of principled conservative and ‘take no prisoners’ campaign against Barack Obama in 2008, he’d now be in the second year of his presidency."
Richard Viguerie about McCain campaign against J. D. Hayworth. 25 August 2010
"Mr. McCain fought in Vietnam. I think that he has enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands. It must be impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore. Mr. McCain was captured and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years. Anyone would go nuts."
Vladimir Putin, Live Question & Answer session, December 15, 2011
"The problem for John McCain and George Bush is this: they have defined leaving as losing. Therefore, we cannot ever leave."
Chris Hayes, Washington Editor of The Nation, on Countdown; July 21, 2008
Interests
Riding bikes
Politicians
Ronald Reagan
Writers
McCain said his favorite book was Ernest Hemingway's 1940 Spanish civil war novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
Sport & Clubs
Boxing
Music & Bands
John McCain's top 10:
1. ABBA - Dancing Queen 2. Roy Orbison - Blue Bayou 3. ABBA - Take A Chance On Me 4. Merle Haggard - If We Make It Through December 5. Dooley Wilson - As Time Goes By 6. The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations 7. Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World 8. Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin 9. Neil Diamond - Sweet Caroline 10. The Platters - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Connections
In 1965, John McCain married Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia, thus becoming step-father to her two kids, Douglas and Andrew, from her previous marriage. The couple had their first child in 1966: daughter Sidney. However, due to McCain’s extramarital affair with Cindy Lou Hensley, daughter of multimillionaire beer distributor in Phoenix, the couple divorced in 1980.
John married Cindy in 1980, a month after his divorce. The couple had four children: Meghan McCain (1984), John Sidney IV (1986), James Hensley (1988), and Bridget Leela (1991, adopted from a Bangladeshi orphanage).