Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

John McCain, the six-term senator from Arizona who succumbed to cancer over the weekend at the age of eighty-one, was less an enigma than a paradox. For every version of McCain that existed, there seemed to be some other, shadow iteration of the man that contradicted, yet somehow coexisted, alongside it. One John McCain was Trump’s greatest “nemesis”; the other was one of his most reliable congressional allies. One McCain left a legacy eulogized by a prominent socialist as “an unparalleled example of human decency”; the other was known for his vicious temper tantrums and for engineering the wholesale slaughter of millions of civilians. One McCain was a straight-talking “maverick” and principled statesman who was not made for this post-Trump world of craven opportunism; the other was a reliable right-wing Republican who changed his spots as often as he ran a campaign. How could this be? The story of McCain’s life and career is as much a tale of the obsessions of a media and political culture as it is the story of a man. Fixated on symbolism, rhetoric, war stories, and the concept of bipartisanship for its own sake, the political establishment found a tailor-made idol in McCain, who could deftly feed these compulsions on one hand while dutifully advancing the agenda of the postwar conservative movement of Buckley and Goldwater with the other. In this sense, McCain was one of the most successful politicians of the last forty years, even if his ultimate prize of winning the presidency forever eluded him.

Planting Seeds War was in many ways McCain’s birthright, born as he was the grandson and son of admirals, his father serving as the commander of the United States’ Pacific forces during Vietnam. Before that, the senior McCain had led the US invasion of the Dominican Republic to prevent a return to power by supporters of Juan Bosch, the country’s democratically elected reformist leader who had been removed by a coup from taking back power, saying: “People may not love you for being strong when you have to be, but they respect you for it and learn to behave themselves when you are.” McCain followed his father and grandfather into the military, a decision that would eventually yield four decades’ worth of political capital for the senator-to-be. McCain’s military service would become a staple of his subsequent political mythology. According to a 2008 profile, however, it was largely undistinguished, with McCain frequently crashing the planes he was piloting and, by all accounts (including his own), more interested in partying than taking his training seriously. He graduated at the bottom of a class of 899 people. While serving as a bomber in Vietnam, McCain was frustrated at the restrictions then imposed by the Johnson administration, calling the civilian commanders “complete idiots.” He was eventually shot down and captured, undergoing years of harrowing torture that left him physically disabled for the rest of his life. McCain’s experience supposedly instilled in him a revulsion to torture, which he would speak out against for the rest of his career, even if his actual record on the issue was less than clear. It also instilled in him a hatred for the Vietnamese, whom he would insist on unapologetically referring to as “gooks” decades later. McCain would later claim that, while imprisoned, members of the US peace movement visited him, urged him to confess, and, when he refused, told his captors he had to be “straightened out in his thinking.” He would also accuse two of his fellow POWs of being “collaborators” who were “actively aiding the enemy,” because of antiwar statements one of them had made while a POW, a charge that dogged the men for the rest of their lives. Upon returning from the war, McCain began his involvement in politics, thanks partly to his wife Carol, whom he had relentlessly cheated on while in the Naval Academy, and who was particularly close to the Reagans. When Ronald Reagan launched his primary challenge against Gerald Ford in 1976, McCain lent the celebrity he had achieved as a returned POW to Reagan’s campaign by appearing with him at events. McCain, who continued cheating on Carol after returning home to find her disfigured from a 1969 car accident, eventually met Cindy Lou Hensley, a much younger heiress to a beer-distributor fortune. He divorced Carol and married Cindy, forever straining his relationship with the Reagans, but giving himself access to the kind of wealth necessary for starting a political career.

An Unreliable Rebel McCain moved to Arizona in 1981 and eighteen months later ran for Congress, parrying accusations of carpetbagging by declaring the longest he had lived in one place had been Hanoi. His campaign was partly financed by his father-in-law’s company, and McCain would end up spending $600,000 on the successful race. As early as 1982, the Washington Post would suggest that the newly elected McCain was not a Reagan backer but a pragmatic, nonideological Republican. He entered Congress as a conventional Reagan conservative, however, backing the president’s supply-side economic policies and a balanced budget amendment, and opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, busing, and the use of federal funds for abortions for poor women. In 1983, McCain opposed the creation of Martin Luther King Jr Day, a vote he would publicly disavow sixteen years later when he ran for president the first time. It began what could charitably be described as a complicated relationship with black people in the United States. While McCain ultimately worked to create a state version of the holiday (though not before supporting the Arizona governor’s repeal of the state’s recognition of King) and reportedly forged connections with a handful of high-profile local black leaders in Arizona, the state’s black community by most accounts rarely saw or heard from him. In 1990, he was a crucial vote allowing George H. W. Bush to become the first sitting president to veto a civil rights measure, the Civil Rights Act of 1990. Until his dying day, he would receive consistently dire ratings from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a fact belied by its president’s praise for McCain upon his death. Even so, McCain would go on to forge a career as a Republican rebel, a career trajectory nearly derailed by the Keating Five scandal. McCain, who had intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a developer with whom he had years of personal and financial connection to, was ultimately decided to have acted with “poor judgment” in the matter, and never charged.