My country saved me.
My country saved me and I cannot forget it.
And I will fight for her as long as I draw breath so help me God.
The last great active political figure of the 20th century
has lost his battle with cancer at age 81.
John McCain, former prisoner of war and two time presidential candidate
was a man propelled by his interpretation of the honor code
to defy his Vietnamese captors, criticize Republican politicians including Donald Trump,
and ultimately to support some of the most interventionist foreign policies
in modern American history.
The namesake son and grandson of well known navy admirals
McCain initially rebelled against his military destiny,
famously graduating 894th out of an Annapolis class of 899.
He drank and cussed, dated Florida strippers and Brazilian heiresses
and crashed an alarming number of planes before settling down to the family business of war.
McCain was on the deck of the USS Forrestal
when a stray bomb ignited a fire, killing 134 servicemen
the most deadly accident in US Navy history.
And then the first bomb exploded and this knocked me about 10 feet
and everyone who had been near me were all either badly maimed or killed from this explosion.
Yesterday over Hanoi, three American planes were shot down
and at least two of their pilots captured.
One of them was Lieutenant Commander John McCain, Third,
the son of the US naval commander in Europe.
I was on a flight over the city of Hanoi and I was bombing,
I was hit by either a missile or anti-aircraft fire and I ejected
and broke my leg and both arms
and went into a lake.
The aviator's rebellious nature served him well over the next five and a half years
as he inspired cellmates with loud acts of defiance
and quiet organization of internal communication systems
despite enduring torture that permanently damaged his body.
This experience combined with the domestic discord he witnessed upon returning stateside in 1973
damaged his faith in American foreign policy.
Silver Star, Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, eight Air Medals,
national defense and the rest of this garbage it doesn't mean a thing.
As a congressman McCain opposed Ronald Reagan sending marines to Beirut.
As a senator he criticized Bill Clinton's nation building adventures in Somalia and Haiti
and described US military involvement in Yugoslavia as:
The aspect of the future of this nation that bothers me more than anything else.
Yet by 1998 McCain would emerge as the Senate's leading hawk.
So what happened?
The unexpectedly easy military successes in the Gulf War and Yugoslavia
coupled with the vacuum in post Cold War leadership
led McCain to re-embrace a Teddy Roosevelt style belief in American military supremacy
and to waive off Vietnam as some sort of anomaly.
"Our loss in Vietnam afflicted America witha kind of identity crisis"
he wrote in his 1998 memoir 'Faith of my Fathers'
"We should never have let this one mistake, terrible though it was, color our perceptions forever."
And I thought I would tell Senator McCain
he is a man of profound personal courage
and the suffering in service he gave to this country ought to be honored.
For most of McCain's political career, he was the media's favorite Republican.
I admit I, we all rooted for you by the way
and a lot of us in this business like John McCain a lot.
The wonderful thing about McCain always has been that he is a maverick.
Hillary Clinton has said that you are her favorite Republican.
The mutual love affair with what McCain once described as his base in the national media
soured once he won the Republican nomination.
But even in 2008 the press frequently mistook his pragmatism for a lack of ideology.
In fact, it was anything but.
The Arizona Senator has long had an alarmingly martial view of citizenship.
In which individualism must be subsumed to the greater good.
President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
Maybe a hundred, that'd be fine with me as long as Americans-
as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.
His longest war was against what he called corrosive cynicism.
Which meant that anything creating more of the stuff
from steroids in baseball, to political advertising on Facebook was in his cross-hairs.
The same sense of high moral dudgeon would also take him to better places
such as his opposition to torture and annual attacks on Pentagon waste.
Understandably it's McCain's profound sense of honor
that obituarists will be emphasizing in the coming days.
With his health deteriorating in 2017
the Senator led a global tour to reassure nervous American allies,
called out eruptions of conservative bigotry,
and cast the deciding vote against the flawed repeal of Obamacare.
Turning the thumbs down on the repeal-
The open ended interventionism the Senator championed in his final two decades
led to some of the most tragic policy failures of our time.
There is also honor in seeking a more humble conception of America's role in the world.
Farewell John McCain.
You will make sacrifices for your fellow Americans
who won't be asked to make sacrifices for you.
It is a noble cause, it is your cause and it's worth living and dying for.
May your lives be as lucky as mine, godspeed, semper fidelis, fair winds and following seas.
Thank you.
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