John McCain likes to joke that any senator not under investigation or detoxification sees himself as a candidate for president — in other words, not the type who would normally seek out professional mentorship.

And yet, for many senators — past and present — that’s exactly the word they use to describe their relationship with the 80-year-old McCain, who for years has been working to impart his vision of a more muscular foreign policy on a younger generation of his colleagues.


The Arizona Republican, now undergoing radiation and chemotherapy after being diagnosed last month with brain cancer, remains the GOP’s leading champion of the kind of interventionist foreign policy that supporters of President Donald Trump often dismiss as “globalism.”

And McCain’s mentees say his efforts to groom a younger cadre of defense hawks have ensured that his ideas will live on in the Senate for decades to come, even as Trump seeks to rebrand the Republican Party under his banner of America-first nationalism.

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"There’s a fight in the Republican Party for its heart and soul when it comes to foreign policy,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has long been McCain’s chief acolyte. “I will certainly carry on the tradition of leading from the front, not from behind.”

Other acolytes, according to a half-dozen people who spoke to POLITICO about their relationships with McCain, include Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. There are also some Democrats who’ve formed strong bonds with McCain, like Armed Services members Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana, along with Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

“I consider him a mentor,” said King, who developed a friendship with McCain after the Armed Services chairman noticed King was one of the few senators who stuck around for the entirety of the committee’s hearings. “You can’t be in the same room with John McCain very long and not be influenced by his thinking.”

King, Graham and others said McCain has a talent for drawing people into his worldview. One tool he uses is congressional delegation trips, when fellow lawmakers are a captive audience during long flights overseas.

Every year, he leads trips to defense conferences all over the world, from the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Senators jump at the chance to travel with McCain, several of them said, since, as the best-known U.S. lawmaker on the international stage, he has no trouble lining up meetings with prominent foreign leaders. (It’s like “a forced march with Paul McCartney,” King recently quipped in an Instagram post.)

McCain likes to engage his fellow senators in in-flight debates.

“A lot of people get on a long airplane ride and they’ll put the earphones in and listen to John Grisham or something,” King said. McCain, on the other hand, “was constantly engaged, talking about issues. What are we going to do in the Middle East? What are we going to do with the Palestinians and the Israelis? What should be our role in Syria?”

Graham said these flights with McCain were “kind of like a tutorial.”

“John will gather everybody up and say, ‘What do you think?’” he said. “He makes sure that you’re involved.”

Many current and former senators have vivid memories of the origins of their relationships with McCain.

Sullivan said that when he joined the Armed Services panel as a first-year senator in 2015, McCain asked him to take the lead for the committee on Asia-Pacific and Arctic issues. “He came to me and said, ‘Hey, Dan, there aren’t a lot of senators focused on this part of the world,'” Sullivan said. “Of course, I took that up.”

Sen. Tim Kaine is one of a handful of Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee who've formed strong bonds with McCain. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo.

Former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte said that when she was running for Senate in 2010, McCain agreed to attend a town hall with her in New Hampshire. McCain had a legendary status as a campaigner in New Hampshire because of the hundreds of town halls he held there during his runs for president in 2000 and 2008, when he took questions from all comers and occasionally invited some of the more colorful personalities up on stage to debate him.

“Here I was, a candidate for U.S. Senate, with someone who had done so many town halls across my state,” Ayotte said. After the event, she explained with a laugh, McCain told her she needed to give shorter answers.

“He’s always given me the advice to answer the question and be plain about it and be straight about it,” she said. “When I got elected to the Senate he really, really was a mentor to me.”

Ayotte also forged a close relationship with Graham, often issuing joint statements on defense issues with him and McCain. This led to her being branded as the successor to former Sen. Joe Lieberman in a group of defense hawks dubbed the “three amigos.”

“I’ve learned a tremendous amount from [McCain] in working with him on the Armed Services Committee,” added Ayotte, who lost reelection last year and is now back in New Hampshire serving on several corporate and nonprofit boards. “To me, that is really such an important part of his legacy, his mentorship of leaders in the United States and around the world.”

McCain’s hawkish views were once dominant in the Republican Party but have lost some of their hold with the rise of Trump. Campaigning last year under the mantra of “America First,” Trump blasted U.S. leaders in both parties for wasting so much blood and treasure in Iraq. He questioned U.S. alliances such as NATO and said he wanted to repair relations with Russia.

Trump also took aim at McCain himself, saying he was "not a war hero" despite the 5½ years McCain spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "I like people who weren't captured," Trump said.

But even as McCain’s wing of the party has seen its power wane, it has remained dominant in the Senate. McCain and his acolytes have taken a number of steps seen as a rebuke of Trump’s worldview. The Senate voted unanimously for a resolution by Graham reaffirming the U.S. commitment to NATO. It voted 98-2 to strengthen sanctions on Russia.

And over the past few months, McCain and other defense hawks put pressure on the administration to maintain or boost the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, even as Trump was considering a full withdrawal. The president came around to their position, announcing an increase in the U.S. footprint there earlier this week.

“There’s a lot of senators in my class who believe” in a strong foreign policy role for the United States, Sullivan said. “Having [McCain] reinforce that certainly makes a difference.”

McCain has always had an outsized role in influencing his fellow senators, even before he got to the Senate — because of his status as a nationally known war hero and the son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals.

Before launching his political career, McCain did a stint as a Navy liaison officer to the Senate, a job that required him to organize and travel on congressional delegation trips. On one such trip to China in 1978, McCain struck up a conversation with a just-elected Republican senator from Maine, William Cohen, who told McCain he planned to join the Government Affairs and Judiciary committees.

“John said, ‘No, no,’” Cohen recalled in an interview. “‘You have got to go on the Armed Services Committee.’ I said, ‘But I’m already committed to the others.’ He said, ‘You owe it to your country.’ … His joy of life was infectious, and his commitment to the country was so persistent, so palpable, that I said, ‘OK.’ I finally yielded.”

Cohen would go on to be a key member of the Armed Services panel and serve as secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton.

“The mentoring is by example,” Cohen said. “John is genetically predisposed to kinetic behavior. He's never not in motion. He's always moving.”