1—GUESTS AT THE HANOI HILTON

On Memorial Day in 1993, two United States senators were escorted through a prison in downtown Hanoi. It was a massive building, enclosed in a compound and occupying most of a block in the middle of the crowded city. The windows had bars, and some had louvred shutters. The Vietnamese name for the prison was Hoa Lo. The name given it by Americans was the Hanoi Hilton. During the war, the prison held captured fliers, whom the Vietnamese called “air pirates,” and on this day one of them had returned, for the first time since his release: John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona. As a Navy bomber pilot, he had been held prisoner for nearly six years, from October of 1967, when he was shot down, until March of 1973. Most of that time he had spent at Hoa Lo, more than two years of it in solitary confinement. This past summer, a large television audience heard McCain refer to the experience when he placed Bob Dole’s name in nomination at the Republican National Convention. “A long time ago, in another walk of life, I was deprived of my liberty,” he said, with the understatement of a man who knows that his imprisonment is what distinguishes him.

When McCain returned to Hoa Lo in 1993, he was accompanied by John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts. Kerry, another Navy war veteran, was the chairman of the by then disbanded Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, while McCain was its leading Republican; committee business had brought them back to Vietnam. Recently, Kerry told me about the visit to the prison, describing the walk down a corridor toward McCain’s old cell—“at the back end of the right-hand side as we walked in, around the corner. It was just this very small, dark, dank cell, with a little bed area, hardly fit for anybody.”

In a recent interview with McCain, I asked him to describe the cell. “Nine or ten feet by seven feet,” he said, “a little teeny window up at the top that was barred; a metal door that had what we used to call a peep door in it, where the guard can open it and look in at you.”

McCain had communicated with the man in the next cell by tapping on the wall and listening to taps that came back. News passed along by this tap code included reports of antiwar activity at home. Peace activists like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda showed up at the Hanoi Hilton during McCain’s imprisonment. He always refused to meet with them; the prisoners hated the peaceniks. But then, more than three years into McCain’s incarceration, in April of 1971, news came of an even more disturbing antiwar demonstration. Around a thousand American soldiers recently returned from Vietnam had gathered on the Mall in Washington to denounce the war. Led by a former Navy officer, they threw the medals and ribbons they had earned over a barricade at the Capitol.

The former Navy officer who led that veterans’ protest and who “turned back” ribbons he’d won with one Silver Star, one Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts was John Kerry. Kerry told me what it was like to stand on the threshold of the prison cell with McCain: “I remember a kind of silence, and I remember distinctly that we were alone. . . . We had other people around us, but they melted into the background at that moment, and we were just standing in this place. I remember being in awe, feeling a sense of awe for what I could feel this guy must have gone through in that place.” Kerry himself was part of what McCain had gone through.

Standing with McCain at Hoa Lo brought Kerry face to face with the contradiction that had given shape to his life as surely as the prison had given shape to McCain’s. Unlike the admirably direct McCain, Kerry is a man of many complications; the difference is reflected in their very different war histories. But now McCain’s history was to the point. “It was a time for me to listen,” Kerry told me. “I asked a few questions . . . and he talked a little about it. And he talked about the friend next door that he’d communicated with, and how they’d tap. . . . He told me that they knew that some veteran had stood up and said the war was wrong. They knew what was going on.” They knew, that is, that a former Navy officer had betrayed them.

In 1984, thirteen years after that protest at the Capitol, John McCain, by then a United States representative from Arizona, went to Massachusetts to campaign against Kerry, a first-time Senate candidate. At a rally in the North End of Boston, McCain spoke in support of the Republican candidate, a businessman named Ray Shamie. “I hadn’t met John Kerry,” McCain told me. In Boston, conservative opponents had tagged Kerry as Ho Chi Minh’s candidate. McCain, in his appearance for Shamie, talked about the events of April, 1971. “I said he shouldn’t have thrown his medals on the steps, and that I heard about it while I was in prison.”

John McCain has never changed his mind about Kerry’s participation in that antiwar demonstration, but he has changed his mind about the man. Much sets the two apart. Kerry is tall and lean, with carefully coiffed dark hair, a sharp nose and chin, and a mouth that seems small for his face, which perhaps explains why his expression falls into a smile only with reluctance. He could be cast in any movie as the patrician senator. McCain looks more like a senator’s friendly appliance repairman. He is stocky, with washed-out white hair and the slightly pasty skin of a man who has been through something. But a smile comes into McCain’s face like a boat into its slip. McCain is the son and grandson of admirals, while Kerry’s mother was a Boston Brahmin and his father a Foreign Service officer. Kerry, a liberal Democrat, is at ease in the role of Senator Edward Kennedy’s junior partner; McCain is proud to hold Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat. Kerry came out of Vietnam as a leading critic of the war, McCain as one of its few true heroes.

Nevertheless, their names have become linked, both through their surprising friendship and through their work together on the Select Committee. “Kerry-McCain” is said as if it were one word. It describes legislation they have co-sponsored, and defines an unusual place in the political landscape. This past June, for example, a Kerry-McCain measure provided millions of dollars in compensation for the “lost commandos”—covert agents from South Vietnam whom the C.I.A. had long ago cut loose. “Our relationship is now so easy,” McCain told me, “this latest, on the commandos . . . was a two-minute conversation. We didn’t have to explore each other’s views or anything like that. We both thought alike, and we just did it.” Last month, when a CNBC talk show wanted comments on the United States missile attacks against Iraq, Kerry and McCain appeared as a duo. Across the boundaries of ideology, the men have formed a potent bipartisan partnership, grounded in a common, if rarely articulated, experience of the loss, grief, and bitterness that marked the generation of Americans who fought the war in Vietnam and fought against it.