What I learned about John McCain during 20 years covering him It was on that bus rolling through New Hampshire, as McCain was poised for arguably his finest moment politically, that I truly came to know him.

Dan Nowicki | The Republic | azcentral.com

Show Caption Hide Caption John McCain dies at 81: Biography video John Sidney McCain III: A POW in Vietnam for five years, he served as Arizona’s senator from 1987 until his death and twice ran for president.

The famous news media faces were gone. The swarm of reporters who followed U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had scattered, and only a few of us remained.

By July 2007, McCain's once-impressive presidential campaign was nearly bankrupt. Senior advisers and staff were let go. And the media had written him off.

The torrent of campaign coverage turned to a trickle.

That left plenty of elbow-room on the Straight Talk Express as it rolled through scenic New Hampshire, home to the nation’s first-of-the-season presidential primary.

There still was usually an Associated Press reporter on board with the McCain campaign. Typically, a reporter from the Concord Monitor or some other New Hampshire media organization was there too. And there was me.

I was a national political reporter for The Arizona Republic, McCain's hometown newspaper. And I was on the bus because Republic editors decided to keep covering McCain, even as his campaign appeared to be in freefall.

I already knew McCain, or thought I did. I had covered him as a reporter, blogger and columnist for The Republic. Before that, I wrote about him for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa. In all, I would follow him for two decades.

But it was traveling through New Hampshire on that bus, poised for arguably his finest moment politically, that I truly came to know McCain.

By the end, I was covering a man with terminal brain cancer and telling the world he did not fear his death, which came Saturday at age 81. As a reporter who covered McCain for Arizona’s paper of record, I had become one of the journalists most closely associated with him.

I didn't plan it. Things just played out that way.

McCain as calming force

As a Tribune political reporter, I had written occasional stories about or involving McCain, including a Dec. 30, 1998, front-page story announcing that McCain was set to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.

McCain would lose that race to George W. Bush, who would go on to win the White House. And I would soon be deployed to the Washington, D.C., bureau of Freedom Communications.

Freedom owned the Tribune, the Orange County (California) Register, and the Gazette of Colorado Springs.

Thanks to his 2000 presidential run, McCain was growing in clout and stature on Capitol Hill and I closely covered him.

This included his work with Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., to reform America's campaign-finance system. Their bipartisan bill would become law in 2002, among McCain's biggest legislative achievements.

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On the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, McCain spoke to 17 reporters, according to Elizabeth Drew's 2002 book "Citizen McCain." I was one of them.

McCain was a calming force that day.

"He phoned his wife a couple of times to assure her that he was all right," Drew wrote. "He became upset when he learned that the schools in Phoenix had been closed. 'My God, they're panicking,' he said, and so in most of his calls he told people not to panic, that the president would return to Washington, that the government was functioning, and that people were secure."

It was a nervous time in the nation's capital. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, near the smoldering Pentagon. I still remember the smell of burning jet fuel and black smoke that hit me as I left my apartment building the next morning.

Then came the anthrax contamination that temporarily shuttered the Hart Senate Office Building, where McCain's Arizona colleague, U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, had his office.

A bittersweet moment came when the Arizona Diamondbacks met the New York Yankees in the 2001 World Series while America was still staggering from the 9/11 attacks.

McCain, a passionate Diamondbacks fan, attended series games with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had become something of a national hero after 9/11.

Following the Diamondbacks' victory — spoiling the prevailing national narrative that New York needed the post-9/11 series victory to heal — I tagged along as McCain led a tour of the U.S. Capitol for the world champion D-Backs.

McCain let the players know how proud they had made Arizona by bringing home the World Series trophy.

"I hadn't had so much fun since my last interrogation in Hanoi," McCain, a celebrated former prisoner of war, cracked at a Hill reception for the team ahead of the tour, in which then-Manager Bob Brenly and 2001 standouts such as Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling and Craig Counsell soaked up the history and art of the Capitol Rotunda before heading to the White House for an East Room ceremony with Bush.

On Capitol Hill during this period, a grim Congress was focused on war — first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq.

And later came the Beltway snipers, whose murder spree gripped the greater Washington, D.C., area with fear during October 2002.

McCain as underdog

By the time McCain started to gear up for his second run for president, I had returned to Arizona and moved to The Republic. I was tapped to cover his campaign.

Along the way, I became the cable-TV news channels' go-to local reporter for all things McCain. I made appearances on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN, among others.

I was under no illusion that my rising national exposure was the product of my personality and charisma. Years later, I joked to McCain that my once-promising national television career died along with his White House ambitions in 2008.

Those ambitions would die hard. But not before McCain pulled off one of the most remarkable escape acts from a campaign that was spiraling earthward and almost certain to crash.

Many in media have tried to figure out McCain over the years. They have alternately praised the "maverick" who did things his own way, and condemned him when they saw him behave as an expedient politician.

Which was the real McCain, some wondered.

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I would argue he was a combination of the two. But I wouldn't presume to say I know, despite having written about the Senate lion and master politician in one capacity or another for practically my entire 25-year career in professional journalism.

I do, however, believe I got a glimpse of the real deal when I observed McCain up close on the presidential campaign trail that summer and fall of 2007.

This was the McCain who was out of money and with nothing to lose. The McCain who through grit and determination — a combination of fighting spirit, formidable political skill, a willingness to take chances and dark humor — achieved a comeback that took him from the depths of disaster to a better-than-expected showing in the Iowa caucuses and victories in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries on his way to clinching the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

McCain was under pressure to give up. Instead, he defiantly proclaimed nothing short of "contracting a fatal disease" would get him to drop out of the race before the New Hampshire primary. "It's always darkest right before it's totally black," he joked.

Even at age 71, he was a tireless campaigner.

"We're going to do the town-hall meetings, we're going to be on the bus, we're going to have the direct contact with the people," McCain told reporters after a July 2007 lunch event in Concord, New Hampshire.

McCain kept his word.

Keeping up with him on the campaign trail was a grind. He sometimes would appear at as many as six or seven events a day. Thanks to McCain, I must have visited every Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion hall in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

He conducted more than 100 town halls in New Hampshire alone. The town-hall format worked well for McCain. He enjoyed mixing it up with the crowd, particularly critics of the Iraq War that he supported.

McCain already had a connection to the Granite State. It was there that he had upset the front-running Bush in 2000.

McCain's now-shoestring operation seemed to make everything more intimate. He was more approachable and often in a good mood. A reporter on the bus observed he seemed like he was enjoying himself more. McCain said he was more relaxed because he didn't have to worry about raising money all of the time.

"Being an underdog with low expectations can be liberating and fun," McCain would write in his final memoir, 2018's "The Restless Wave."

'No Surrender'

McCain may have been at his best during his September 2007 "No Surrender Tour" of the three early presidential states that helped him get back in the race.

The tour's name had a double meaning, reflecting both McCain's passionate advocacy for U.S. victory in the unpopular Iraq War and his never-say-die attitude toward his own faltering campaign.

It also was an opportunity for McCain to remind voters of his Vietnam War record, which included getting shot down over North Vietnam and spending more than five-and-a-half years as a POW.

The first chapter of "The Restless Wave" is titled "No Surrender." In the book, he credits campaign adviser Steve Schmidt with the name.

McCain, the former Navy aviator, was joined on the bus in Iowa by two of his fellow POWs, retired Air Force Col. George "Bud" Day and Orson Swindle, a retired Marine aviator. The friends had a great time, laughing and sharing funny stories about their time in captivity in Hanoi.

I asked McCain if he felt like he had missed out on a lot in the United States while he was locked up as a POW.

"No, except that the miniskirt phase had come and gone," McCain quipped. "I regretted that."

Before or since, I never personally heard McCain open up that way about the details of his POW experience. I feel lucky to have witnessed it.

This was McCain immersed in his element. A scrappy political pugilist enjoying the fight and taking chances, drawing strength from old comrades from the Hanoi Hilton and energy from town-hall audiences.

The effort paid off with another big win in the New Hampshire primary. And then in South Carolina, Florida and on Super Tuesday.

Those instincts may have betrayed him during the general-election campaign against Democrat Barack Obama, such as his decision to make a risky bet on the then-unknown Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate.

For better and worse, those qualities were the essence of McCain.

They are what powered his long political career and, in turn, are why he will be remembered as one of Washington's most consequential figures.

Short temper not seen firsthand

Years later, it was a column I wrote related to McCain's POW experience that caused a rare rift in our professional relationship.

McCain and The Republic over the years often had a rocky, even hostile, relationship. But I believe he realized the newspaper had a duty to perform for its readers and his constituents.

I personally found McCain straightforward, helpful and probably more accessible to me than he needed to be.

When I started covering his presidential campaign in 2007, everybody involved was ready to leave behind the bitterness of the past and move forward, but the relationship remained icy. I remember telling McCain's nascent campaign operation that The Republic just wanted to be treated like any other news organization. They agreed, and the thaw began.

Over the years, I had countless conversations with McCain about almost every political topic under the sun. He would usually address me as "Danny." Sometimes, he would call me a "jerk," but with him, it was a term of affection.

For all the talk about McCain's alleged short fuse — he had acknowledged having a temper in one of his books, and it had been a political liability — I never saw him explode in a way that was consistent with the legends. I would get the silent treatment from McCain from time to time after writing something he didn't like, but such reactions are common among politicians.

I did once get a face-to-face dressing down for something that my Republic colleague, E.J. Montini, had written. I think McCain just wanted to vent at someone about it and I happened to have an interview with him scheduled that day.

Painful POW memories

A half-dozen years later, my decision to write a column about tapes of his POW confession became a more serious point of contention.

Not long before Arizona's Aug. 30, 2016, Senate primary, McCain critics had unearthed long-lost recordings of Radio Hanoi propaganda broadcasts featuring McCain's coerced confession of "crimes against the Vietnamese country and people." On the recording, McCain compliments the doctors who treated his injuries after he was shot down on Oct. 26, 1967. At the time, McCain's father, John S. "Jack" McCain Jr., was an admiral who commanded U.S. forces in the Pacific, and Radio Hanoi's broadcast of McCain's confession tape was no doubt hurtful to him.

McCain had long acknowledged, with regret, that he had recorded a confession after sustained beatings and torture from his North Vietnamese captors. But the recording itself had not been heard and it carried historical significance, particularly to someone like me, who had studied his Vietnam experience.

McCain made it clear through his Senate spokeswoman that he didn't agree it was newsworthy and signaled extreme displeasure with me writing about it.

I was taken aback by the force of the pushback.

Although fringe right-wing McCain foes were trying to make political hay out of the tapes, I didn't think they would have any impact on McCain's 2016 fortunes. If anything, readers would remember the tremendous ordeal that McCain underwent from 1967 to 1973.

But from that pushback, I came to a realization: I was seeing the recordings as an important historical document. But for McCain, revisiting the false confession appeared to trigger painful memories and emotions that were still raw nearly 50 years later.

The column was published over McCain's objections. The recordings did have news value, particularly since McCain's Vietnam War record had always been so central to his rise in politics.

Eventually, three of McCain's fellow POWs — Everett Alvarez, Jerry Coffee and Swindle from the 2007 "No Surrender Tour" — issued a joint statement calling the recorded confession "old news" and emphasizing that McCain "fought our captors as hard as any of us" and "did all that could be expected of him."

As I had predicted, the recordings of the McCain confession had no impact on his re-election, but that column kept me in McCain's penalty box until primary day. After that, it was forgotten. We both moved on.

Dan Nowicki covered U.S. Sen. John McCain as The Arizona Republic's national political reporter from 2007 to 2018. Nowicki is The Republic's national politics and issues editor. Follow him on Twitter, @dannowicki.