And that’s when I revealed to myself and the average Americans who’d given me all that money that I was more of a Republican than an American. That was the moment, my dear friends, after they’d screwed me, that I screwed you.
That’s when I went back to the empty chambers of the Senate and left you—those of you who had voted for the first time, those of you who had believed in me, those of you who had given me the dollars you couldn’t afford to give—in the same old hopeless, futile lurch you’ve been in all these years and with all those other candidates.
I was a politician after all, you now saw. For a moment there, I’d made you forget that. For a moment there, I’d forgotten it myself.
The reason I ran for president was to give America back to you, to take it away from the toothless call girls who sit next to me in the Senate and are paid to take care of the special interests and the lobbyists. The reason I ran was to turn the world right side up again from the America where Bill Clinton is introduced before a speech as a “tough, battle-tested, principled” president and praised for his “undaunted courage and bravery.” The reason I ran was because in the 1996 election, voter turnout among eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds was the lowest in history.
The reason I ran was to give the American people access, total access, to the man who led them. No more Robopols, rope lines, and lying, full-a-shit spin doctors who wanted to “control the story of the day” and “stay on message.” No more politicians who spoke like programmed Furbies. I also wanted to take the MOTEL SIX sign off the Lincoln bedroom and be a president, not a bellhop.
I’m a romantic and an adventurer. When I was a kid, my heroes were Hemingway characters like Robert Jordan, who died for a cause he believed in.
I felt there had to be a reason why I wasn’t dead. God had to have something in mind that I had to do. I don’t mean just the five and a half years in Hanoi, the broken arms, ribs, shoulder, teeth, and knee, the dysentery, the puking, the torture.
There was a plane crash in Corpus Christi, too, when I was in training, when my engine conked out and I fell into the bay. And another plane crash in Philadelphia, when my engine blew and I fell onto a beach. And the power lines that almost brought me down in Spain. And the carrier Forrestal, when I was about to take off and got hit by one of my own guys’ rockets, creating a firestorm that killed a lot of men. And then, above Hanoi in my Skyhawk, getting hit by that SAM missile that blew my wing off and sent me ejecting into a lake.
But I survived. Miracles. All of them. Why does God spare a man on all those occasions? So he can drink and be merry, for tomorrow he may die? I didn’t think so.
But like I said, I grew up reading Hemingway, before he killed himself.
I thought about running for president as Bill Clinton was going through impeachment, and when I wrote it down on a piece of paper, it made no sense:
Much of my own party hated me.
My party was already blowing the trumpets, heralding the coronation of the Crown Prince.
I had had as many zipper problems as Bill Clinton.
I had dumped my crippled wife of fifteen years and traded her in for a sexy young babe loaded with big bucks.
My own mouth was my biggest enemy. I had said and I knew I would continue to say some dumb-ass, tasteless things.
I thought about my list for weeks and figured I didn’t have a prayer of becoming the president of the United States.
So I said, I’m running.
I decided that I am the way I am, that I can’t help it. I’m a flawed human being. I’m going to let the American people see my flaws and let them decide.
My grandfather Slew smoked and drank and crashed five planes. He finished 79th out of 116 in his class at Annapolis. He became a full admiral. My father, “Good Goddamn” McCain (as in “I don’t give a good goddamn”) drank more than my grandfather, which was a helluva lot. He finished 423rd of 441 in his class at Annapolis. He became a full admiral.
I didn’t drink as much as they did at Annapolis, but I was always a member of the Century Club, an exclusive society of those students who had earned a hundred demerits. I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman who felt it necessary to prove his mettle by challenging authority. In short, I acted like a jerk. I outdid Slew and Good Goddamn. I finished fifth from the bottom of my class.
I had myself photographed in James Dean poses. I went over the wall to visit greasy-floor strip clubs. When some older women wouldn’t let me pick them up, I yelled, “Shove it up your ass!” at them and got arrested. When a commander asked if I knew who he was, I said, “Frankly, Commander, I don’t give a rat’s ass!”
I am like my grandfather Slew, who was always ready to fight. When the Japanese surrendered, my grandfather told a friend, “This surrender has come as a kind of shock to me. I feel lost. I don’t know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don’t know how to relax. I am in an awful letdown period. I feel bad.” A week later, he had a heart attack and died.
And I am like my father, Good Goddamn, who always liked beautiful women. My mother is a beautiful woman and she has an unmarried identical-twin sister. Both my mother and her sister were always around Good Goddamn McCain. “How do you tell ’em apart?” somebody asked him. “That’s their problem,” my dad said.
My friend Gary Hart says I’ve got a little boy inside me trying to get out. He’s probably right. On the other hand, gee, Gary Hart? Talk about having a little boy inside you!
I hired Mike Murphy as my strategic consultant and chief media adviser, probably because he likes convicted felon Chuck Berry as much as I do. A couple of years ago, Cosmopolitan picked Mike as one of America’s most eligible bachelors. I was very impressed with that, too.
He’s thirty-seven years old, has long blond hair, a stubble, wears thick glasses, black leather jackets, Hawaiian shirts and sneakers. He calls himself a “rock and roll Republican” and is known as the “Mr. Groovy of politics.”
He’s the guy who did the ad that stuck Pat Buchanan’s Mercedes up his ass. He’s also the guy who put the lumberjack shirt on Lamar Alexander. (Great shirt, wrong guy.) He’s also the guy who ran this high-road ad against Senator Chuck Robb in Virginia: “Why can’t Chuck Robb tell the truth? About the cocaine parties where Robb said he never saw drugs? Or about the beauty queen in the hotel room in New York? Robb says it was only a massage.”
Mike Murphy had been doing this for twenty years when I hired him. He had run campaigns out of his dorm room at Georgetown. He had won eighteen races for the statehouse or the Senate. Mike said to me, “Make the charge and let the other guy spend a million dollars to explain it . . . . We must be confrontational and define ourselves through our enemies.” He bragged that in one campaign, he focused on the rape of a nine-year-old girl to prove that his opponent was soft on crime.
I liked him immediately. I called him a lot of names during the campaign. “Murphistopheles” and “the Swami” and “008, Bond’s idiot brother.”
But all I said to the press after I hired him was, “Mike Murphy is the worst low-life scum I’ve ever been associated with in my entire life. In some ways, he’s worse than my Vietnamese interrogators.”
Mike was pleased with that. I think he liked me immediately, too.
Murphistopheles and I went over my personal soft spots. Talking to Murphy about soft spots is like confessing everything to a defrocked whiskey priest who went to the joint for rape and robbery. Why did the Republican establishment, especially so many senators, hate me? Besides the fact I tried to take their soft money bribes away?
Well, I told Murphy, sometimes I literally growled and shook my fist at them. I got into a scuffle with Sperm Thurmond once on the Senate floor after he physically tried to stop me from speaking on a bill. I cussed another Republican colleague out on the Senate elevator, and I said, “Only a chickenshit would create a chart like that!” to another colleague on the floor. I said to that suck-ass Mitch McConnell, during a debate, “You said it was okay for u
s to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies would run ads in our favor.” And I broke with Ronald Reagan over putting troops in Lebanon. Then I tried to stop some of the old girls’ favorite pork-barrel self-diddlings: An aircraft carrier the navy didn’t want, which was to be built in Trent Lott’s hometown; $1.1 million for a manure disposal project; $750,000 for a study of grasshoppers.
But that wasn’t even the real reason why they hated me, I told Murphy. They hated me because I don’t think leadership means compromises, coalitions, and deals. They hated me because I’m a loner and like being one. They hated me because once I take a position on something, I won’t change that position as a favor to the venerable round-heel sitting next to me. They hated me because I was uncooperative and a general pain in the ass—which was the same damn reason my North Vietnamese captors hated me.
Murphistopheles smiled.
What about dumping my first wife? Murphy asked.
I am a flawed human being, I told Murphy. Carol was faithful and true to me while I was in prison. She didn’t deserve my treatment of her.
Look, I said, she was a beautiful woman when I married her—tall, a model. I was in bliss. She had two kids. I adopted them. We had another child. Then I went to Nam. I talked about her in prison all the time. I called her “Long Tall Sally.”
I came back. I was crippled up. She had been in a car wreck. She was four inches shorter from surgeries than when I had last seen her. She was in a wheelchair. She’d put a lot of weight on.
We tried. It didn’t work anymore. We were a golden couple when we’d met. We weren’t that anymore. It hurt to remember how we’d been.
I started cheating on her, and then I met Cindy. Tall, model-like, beautiful. I fell in love with her. She was my new Long Tall Sally. A year after we met, I filed for divorce. Carol was in shock, but she understood. She said I was forty and wanted to be twenty-five again.
It looked bad, I know, not only because Cindy was so much younger and beautiful but also because she was the heir to a Budweiser distributorship. Some people said I was like Bob Dole—dumping the woman who’d helped him to walk again. I don’t know. All I can say is that I tried to do the honorable thing with Carol—alimony, child support, giving her both houses.
Over time, we healed it. Carol tells the press, “I’m crazy about John McCain. I love him to pieces.” Like Bob Dole’s ex-wife, she supports my campaigns. I was the best man at our eldest son’s wedding. Our youngest son works at the beer distributorship.
The breakup was a human tragedy. It was my fault. All of it. I didn’t marry Cindy to use her for my political gain, I married her because I love her. And I have to tell you, the fact she doesn’t look like Sabina Forbes helps.
Murphistopheles laughed.
A zipper problem, really? Murphy grinned. An old coot like you?
Not anymore, I said to him, but I wasn’t always an old coot. Even at Annapolis, we had a group of guys, the Bad Bunch. It was the James Dean thing I told you about. Being on liberty with me, one of the guys said, was like being in a train wreck.
Women liked me. I had a friend, Dittrick; he used to tag along, hoping for sloppy seconds. The guys used to say—no shit—I’d walk into a room and you could hear the panties drop.
I went to Rio on a destroyer and met this little blond honey who was a fashion model. Oh man! The guys put her picture in the Academy magazine—the caption was “So nice to come home to.” I remember being on a terrace with her and a bottle of champagne and a bucket of ice. Oh Christ, believe me, she wasn’t dressed for dinner.
Then there was a girl who was a stripper—Marie, “the Flame.” She used to clean her fingernails with a switchblade. And in Meridian, Mississippi, we had toga parties and bands from Memphis and guys were flying in to party all the way from the West Coast. All those Mississippi girls. Sweet Jesus!
I was tired a lot. I was exhausted a lot. I thought I’d die. I don’t understand why I didn’t die. I probably came closer to dying than on the plane crashes or on the Forrestal. I had to wade through fire to stay alive on the Forrestal’s deck, but that deck wasn’t as hot as those Mississippi girls I’d plowed through.
Murphistopheles said, “That’s enough. I can’t bear anymore.”
Tell me about Vietnam, Murphy said.
It’s Christmas Eve, pal, I said to him. The slant-eyed cocksuckers are playing Christmas carols. Dinah Shore. Dinah Shore all the time. Jesus Christ, do you have any idea how much I hate Dinah Shore?
One of the gooks tells us there’s going to be a Christmas service. I’d been in solitary for nine months. I was the scarecrow the crows were done with.
Okay, they hobble me into this room full of more flowers than a Mafia funeral home. We’re seated on benches—about fifty of us POWs. We’ve got to sit apart so we can’t talk. Some gook priest is up there at an altar. Then I see all these photographers. Flashbulbs. Movie cameras. The cocksuckers are setting us up, I think, for some propaganda film. They’re just using Dinah Shore to suck us into their plot.
I get up and grin and start waving at the other guys. “Hey, howya doin’, man? How’s it hangin’?” One of the cocksuckers says, “No talking! No talking!” and tries to get me back on my bench.
I say, “Fuck that!” and turn to the guy nearest me and say, “Hey, pal, my name’s John McCain. What’s yours?” He’s a scarecrow, too, but the crows aren’t done with him yet.
A gook we called “the Soft Soap Fairy” says, “McCain, no talking!”
I go, “Fuck you!” real loud. I go, “This is fucking bullshit! This is terrible! This isn’t Christmas! This is a propaganda show!”
I turn back to the guy I’ve just met. I go, “I refused to go home. I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm.”
The Soft Soap Fairy yells, “No talking! No talking!”
Another guard, the one we called “the Prick” runs over and screams, “No talk! No talk! No talk!”
I go, “F-u-u-u-u-ck you, you slant-eyed cocksucking motherfucking son of a bitch!”
I go hobbling around the room to the cameras, giving them the finger, going, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”—a scarecrow gone berserk.
Murphistopheles said, “You make it sound like fun.” He was smiling.
I smiled at him, too. I said, “It wasn’t all fun.”
What are some of the stupid things you’ve said? Murphy asked.
I told him my Chelsea Clinton joke. “Why is Chelsea so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father and Hillary is her mother.” I had called Leo DiCaprio an androgynous wimp and Ross Perot nuttier than a fruitcake. I had called an old-age home named Leisure World “Seizure World.” People with Alzheimer’s, I said, “couldn’t hide Easter eggs anymore.” I had referred to Congress as the “Fort Knox of hypocrisy” and the Senate as a place where “most of the members don’t have a life.”
Murphistopheles said, “Well, at least it’s all true.”
How do you think we should use the POW stuff? Murphy asked.
We should low-key it, I told him, like I’ve always done. When I was first running for Congress in Arizona and my opponent accused me of being a carpetbagger, I said, “As a matter of fact, the place I’ve lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” When I was criticized for leaving Carol, my pea-brained brother Joe McKmart told the press, “Here’s a guy who wouldn’t accept a Get Out of Jail pass from the North Vietnamese for five and a half years—so the guy is certainly not going to bail out of a marriage unless there just isn’t anything there.” When I was accused of using my influence to help businessman Charles Keating, I said, “Even the Vietnamese didn’t question my ethics.”
Low-key! Besides, I said to Murphy, by the time we go into New Hampshire, my book, which is mostly about what the gooks did to me, will be out and A&E will be airing the documentary called John McCain, Hero or God?
Murphistopheles cackled.
It ain’t easy to campaign against a crippled POW wrapped in Old Glory
, I said to Murphy. That, at least, is what one of my first congressional opponents said.
Murphy started noodling lines he thought the media would pick up. McCain survived prison camp; Bush survived summer camp. McCain survived getting his arms, ribs, shoulders, and knees broken; Bush survived trading Sammy Sosa. McCain got a silver star; Bush got daddy’s car. McCain got over dysentery; Bush got over the tooth fairy. McCain’s a hero; Bush is a zero. McCain’s a man; Bush ran.
“We need a low-key visual reminder,” Murphy said, “like Dole clutching his pen in his right hand all the time.”
Murphistopheles thought about it and smiled a sociopathic smile.
“We let the press see Cindy spraying your hair,” he said. “It reminds everybody you can’t lift your arms above your shoulders.”
That, I thought, was hellishly Murphistophelian.
With a pocketful of good luck charms, including an old penny and an American Indian medicine bag, I started campaigning in New Hampshire. I didn’t feel like Luke Skywalker, I felt like the Elephant Man. We didn’t have any crowds; we didn’t have any money; we hardly had any volunteers. In the beginning, it was mostly Long Tall Sally and Murphy and me.
“My friends,” I said at one town hall meeting after another, “I will say things you agree with and some things you don’t agree with. But I promise you this. I will always tell you the truth, no matter what. You have my solemn promise. You may disagree with me often, but I will never embarrass you. We need to reform government. We need to reform politics. We need to reform the military, the education system. We need to reform the tax code, which would lead to greater freedom for all Americans. Anyone who is satisfied with the status quo should vote for somebody else. But anyone who believes that America is greater than the sum of its special interests should stand with me.”
The folks gawking at me like a circus freak didn’t like the truth sometimes, but I told it anyway.
“Who won the war in Vietnam?” somebody asked at a town hall meeting.
American Rhapsody Page 46