John McCain

John Sidney McCain III came from one of the most distinguished military families in American history — both his father and grandfather were four-star Navy admirals. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958, near the bottom of his class, and became a carrier-based Navy pilot. On October 26, 1967, his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi during a bombing run. He was badly injured on ejection, captured, and taken to the Hoa Lo Prison — known to American POWs as the “Hanoi Hilton.” When North Vietnamese captors learned that his father, Admiral John S. McCain Jr., commanded all US forces in the Pacific, they offered McCain early release as a propaganda opportunity. He refused, citing the military Code of Conduct requiring prisoners to be released in the order of their capture. For that refusal, he was subjected to repeated, severe torture. He was held for five and a half years before his release in March 1973. The injuries left him permanently unable to raise his arms above his head. He served as an Arizona congressman from 1983 to 1987 and was elected to the Senate in 1986, where he would serve until his death. He became known as a bipartisan figure, co-authoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law (2002), championing anti-torture legislation, and working to restore full diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

McCain ran for president in 2000, winning the New Hampshire primary and building substantial momentum before losing to George W. Bush, partly due to a South Carolina campaign widely attributed to Bush operatives that used push polls implying McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child. (His daughter Bridget had been adopted from Bangladesh.) McCain never forgave the tactics, and his resentment of Karl Rove was lasting. He won the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate — a decision he later expressed ambivalence about, and one that is both credited with energizing his campaign and blamed for accelerating the populist insurgency that eventually became Trumpism. He lost to Barack Obama 173–365 in the Electoral College. One of the defining moments of the campaign came at a Minnesota town hall when a supporter called Obama “an Arab,” and McCain took the microphone to say: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

After 2008, McCain maintained his reputation as a Republican maverick. He was among the Senate’s most vocal opponents of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation, speaking from direct personal experience. He co-authored the “Gang of Eight” comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013, which passed the Senate but died in the House. He was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme — an aggressive brain cancer — in July 2017. Three weeks later, he returned to Washington for one of the most dramatic Senate votes of the modern era: the so-called “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act. His thumbs-down vote at approximately 1:30 a.m. on July 28, 2017, preserved the ACA. He died on August 25, 2018, at age 81. His feud with Donald Trump — who had mocked him as “not a war hero” and attacked him repeatedly throughout his cancer battle — defined the fault line between the Republican Party’s Trumpian present and its pre-Trump past. At his funeral, Obama and Bush both spoke; Trump was not invited. In death, McCain became the symbol of the Republican tradition that Trump displaced.

McCain’s thumbs-down vote on the ACA “skinny repeal” at 1:30 a.m. on July 28, 2017 — three weeks after a terminal cancer diagnosis, delivered with a dramatic gesture to a stunned Senate chamber — is one of the most iconic moments in modern Senate history. It preserved health coverage for millions of Americans and was the clearest single expression of his political identity: institutional, principle-driven, and resistant to partisan discipline.

His feud with Trump — which began in July 2015 when Trump said he preferred “people who weren’t captured” — encapsulated the GOP’s transformation. Trump mocked a decorated POW who had been tortured for five and a half years, and a significant portion of the Republican base did not hold it against him. That dynamic, more than any policy argument, explains the nature of the political revolution McCain died watching. At his memorial service, attended by two former presidents and notable for Trump’s explicit exclusion, he was eulogized as the standard-bearer of a Republican Party that had ceased to exist. His daughter Meghan McCain’s eulogy, delivered with barely contained fury, was addressed at least as much to the present as to the past.