On 'Meet the Press,' McCain said Hagel was 'unqualified' for the job. Why McCain turned on Hagel

Well into last week, Sen. John McCain was telling confidantes that he would vote for cloture on the nomination of his one-time pal and fellow Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary.

Then Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) came to McCain’s Senate office late Wednesday afternoon and turned around the Arizona Republican — a switch that proved decisive the next day when Hagel came one short of the 60 votes needed for cloture on the Senate floor. Now, Hagel’s confirmation roll call is delayed until at least after a weeklong Presidents Day recess.


( Also on POLITICO: Hagel reassures Graham on Israel)

For old McCain allies, it was an all-too familiar scenario: Their champion pulled back into the fray by his friend Graham, a likable but impulsive figure caught up in his own political battles with the right in South Carolina. By reversing himself, McCain effectively sacrificed his own credibility to buy Graham more time to continue his campaign against Hagel — an issue that plays to Graham’s advantage as he prepares to run for reelection in 2014.

“This is just a bone thrown to Lindsey Graham, who keeps painting himself into corners and then pleading with friends to crawl in there with him in a vain attempt to save a little face,” one Republican insider told POLITICO. And making it more poignant and personal in this case: The Graham friendship dominated at the expense of McCain’s earlier one with Hagel.

( Also on POLITICO: McCain: Hagel confirmation imminent)

Taking full advantage of his win, Graham continued to push all the hot political buttons Sunday.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, he said that Hagel has shown an “antagonism toward Israel” that is “beyond belief.” “I am glad we have more time to look,” Graham said. “We’re doing our job to scrutinize one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time.”

McCain, while not backing down, was more restrained.

“He is my friend,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said of Hagel on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “He will be confirmed. … I don’t believe he is qualified, but I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further because I think it is a reasonable amount of time to have questions answered.”

As to Wednesday’s meeting between McCain and Graham, both camps were tight-lipped. Neither confirmed nor denied POLITICO’s reporting. “I’m just going to leave it there,” said a Graham spokesman. In response to questions first submitted Friday, McCain’s office came back with a statement Sunday that it also would not comment on his discussions with Graham.

“There was broad agreement in the conference that a brief delay was warranted to address any issues still outstanding,” a McCain spokesman said. “This wasn’t just about one member or one line of inquiry.”

Nonetheless , the turnaround on the cloture vote underscores the tangle of emotions raised by the Hagel nomination for McCain — who can seem one minute aggressive and the next tortured, pulled three ways at once.

At 76, he has reached the point where his career literally spans generations in his party. Forever linked to the Vietnam War, he tangles now with a new tea party breed like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is Ivy League, bright and articulate but born years after McCain’s plane went down in 1967 and seemingly clueless about what Hagel went through a year later in the infantry on the ground.

Indeed, the Hagel fight resurrects a checklist of post-Vietnam McCain battles: the John Tower nomination in 1989, the bitter South Carolina presidential primary in 2000 and the Iraq War debate — many of which also predate his colleagues today.

Tower, a Texas Republican, Navy veteran and powerhouse in the Senate Armed Services Committee, had befriended McCain as a young naval liaison to Congress and later helped him first run for the House in 1982. As a freshman senator, McCain was beside himself when Democrats rejected Tower’s nomination to be defense secretary after a nasty debate colored by leaked FBI reports and allegations of heavy drinking and womanizing.

In the heat of that fight McCain could lash out at a reporter — and then call later to apologize. That anger showed itself again Sunday: “The worst thing I have ever seen in my life was the crucifixion of John Tower where they delayed for three months and destroyed a good and decent man,” he told NBC.

But at this stage, even if the Senate does vote Feb. 25 on Hagel, that would be only two weeks shorter than the Tower deliberations from Jan. 20 to March 9 in 1989.

The South Carolina 2000 primary, an exceptionally brutal contest, was a body blow dealt by George W. Bush to knock McCain out of the 2000 campaign. But it also marked two points in McCain’s development that are relevant to events today.

First, South Carolina sealed his friendship with Graham, then a 44-year-old congressman. Amid rebel yells, Graham campaigned at McCain’s side against the state GOP establishment, vowing to “kick their … .” The young attorney was already laying plans for a Senate run in 2002. Arriving in the House just weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he moved quickly into the McCain sphere even as the senator’s relations with Hagel were cooling.

Second, South Carolina also saw an evolution in McCain: the admiral’s son and Naval aviator who began, as a presidential candidate, to identify more closely with the enlisted rank ground troops who accounted for the vast majority of those killed in the Vietnam War.

Having come home from Hanoi’s prisons in 1973, McCain candidly admitted later that he and his fellow POWs — mostly career officers — received a warmer welcome than ordinary soldiers. “It’s the average soldier who loves that wall,” he said in 1985 of the Vietnam Memorial. “Not the officers. Not the POWs.”

But this changed in 2000, as seen in a small McCain rally held after a January Republican debate with Bush in Columbia, S.C.

“The important thing is to stand up for what you believe in, remember those who have served and sacrificed before you,” McCain said, his voice quavering with emotion. “My lasting ambition is the approval of those whose names are engraved on the wall down at the Mall on the Vietnam monument.”

The great emotional catch now is that Hagel so fits the profile of those names.

Among the more than 58,000 Americans killed in the war, 84 percent were enlisted men and all but a sliver of these were without a college degree. Hagel himself had just a few college semesters to his credit. His teenage brother Tom was fresh out of high school when they enlisted in 1967.

More than race or income, it was this education divide — promoted by draft deferments in the 1960s — that most explains those who were in combat in Vietnam and those who were not. That history, which McCain knows, was what made it so striking last week when Cruz, a sophisticated Princeton and Harvard Law graduate, seemed to question Hagel’s patriotism by his line of questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“I just want to make it clear,” McCain interceded. “Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He served his country. And no one on this committee, at any time, should impugn his character or his integrity.”

“We all agree with that,” added Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “I hope.”