Faith of My Fathers

by John McCain

  Halsey looked at me for a long moment before remarking, “Well, your grandfather drank bourbon and water.” Then he told a waiter, “Bring the boy a bourbon and water.”

  I had a bourbon and water, and with his old commander watching, silently toasted the memory of my grandfather.

  CHAPTER 4

  An Exclusive Tradition

  In 1936, while commanding the naval air station in Panama, my grandfather was introduced to me, his first grandson and namesake. My father was stationed in Panama at the same time, serving aboard a submarine as executive officer. He had brought his young, pregnant wife with him. I was born in the Canal Zone at the Coco Solo air base hospital shortly after my grandfather arrived there. My father was transferred to New London, Connecticut, less than three months later, so I have no memory of our time in Panama.

  My mother has fond memories of the place despite the rough living conditions that junior officers and their families suffered in prewar Panama. Among those memories is an occasion when my parents left me in my grandfather’s care while they attended a dinner party. My mother, mindful of my father’s concerns about coddling infants, instructed my grandfather to put me to bed in my crib, and not to mind any protest I might make. When they returned they found me sleeping comfortably with my grandfather in his bed. Admonished by my mother for pampering me, he gamely insisted that the privilege was only fitting. “Dammit, Roberta, that boy has the stamp of nobility on his brow.” Had he lived longer, he might have puzzled over my adolescent misbehavior, lamenting the decline of his once noble grandson.

  My parents were married in 1933 at Caesar’s Bar in Tijuana, Mexico. They had eloped. My mother’s parents, Archibald and Myrtle Wright, objected to the match. For months prior to their elopement, my grandmother had forbidden my father to call on my mother, believing him to be associated with a class of men—sailors—whose lifestyles were often an affront to decent people and whose wandering ways denied their wives the comforts of home and family.

  My mother, Roberta Wright McCain, and her identical twin, Rowena, were the daughters of a successful oil wildcatter who had moved the family from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. Wealthy and a loving father, Archie Wright retired at the age of forty to devote his life to the raising of his children. The Wrights were very attentive parents. They provided their children a happy and comfortable childhood, but they took care not to spoil them. And in their care, my mother grew to be an extroverted and irrepressible woman.

  My parents met when my father, a young ensign, served on the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was homeported at the time in Long Beach, California. Ensign Stewart McAvee, the brother of one of my Aunt Rowena’s boyfriends and an Academy classmate of my father’s, also served on the Oklahoma. At his brother’s urging, he had called on Rowena, and soon became a frequent visitor at the Wright home.

  Eventually, Ensign McAvee developed a crush on my mother. He took her out on several occasions and often invited her to visit the Oklahoma. On one of those visits she met my father, who was dressed in his bathrobe when McAvee introduced them. My mother only remembers thinking how young my father looked, and small, with cheeks, she said, like two small apples. My father, however, was infatuated at once.

  Until my parents’ courtship, my mother had, in her words, “never teamed up with any man.” She was, she confesses, immature and unsophisticated, possessing no serious aspirations, but cheerfully open to life’s varied experiences. Her mother frequently complained to her, “If a Japanese gardener crossed the street and asked you to go to Chinatown, you would go.” To which my mother always responded, “Why, sure I would.” When she met my father, she was a beautiful nineteen-year-old student at the University of Southern California. But unlike her twin sister, she had never fallen in love nor shown more than a casual interest in dating.

  As my mother describes it, she would typically go out in large groups where the boys always outnumbered the girls. When a young man asked her for a date, she would reply by inquiring what he had in mind. If he proposed to escort her to the Friday-night dance at the Biltmore Hotel, or the Saturday-afternoon tea dance at the Ambassador Hotel, or the Saturday-evening dance at the Roosevelt Hotel, she consented, believing any other assignation to be a poor use of her time. But even obliging dates were rewarded with nothing more than my mother’s charming company and had to content themselves with membership in her wide circle of frustrated suitors.

  A short time after being introduced to my mother, my father appeared on her doorstep and asked her to accompany him the following Saturday to the Roosevelt Hotel. She agreed, assuming he was acting on behalf of Ensign McAvee. But McAvee would not be among the young naval officers consorting with my mother’s crowd that evening. Instead, my mother found herself having “more fun than I had ever had in my life” with the diminutive, youthful Jack McCain.

  Their romance progressed for over a year, despite my grandmother’s growing anxiety and the aggrieved McAvee’s angry reproaches. When my grandmother finally ordered an end to the relationship and banished my father from the Wright home, my mother prevailed on former suitors to call on her and take her surreptitiously to meet my father.

  Until confronted with maternal opposition, my mother “had never planned on marrying anyone.” By her own admission, she was a willful, rebellious girl. Her attraction to my father was only strengthened by her mother’s disapproval, and when my father proposed marriage she consented. They eloped on a weekend when my grandmother was in San Francisco. Just before they departed for Tijuana, my mother informed her softhearted father of her intention. Despite his misgivings, he did not stand in her way.

  My father had asked one of his shipmates to explain to the executive officer on the Oklahoma that he had gone off to get married, but the friend had thought my father was joking. That Saturday, during the ship’s inspection, the captain asked, “Where’s McCain?” My father’s friend responded, “He said he was going to get married or something.” When my father returned to the Oklahoma that Sunday, having dropped his new bride at home, he was confined to the ship for ten days with a stern censure from the captain for failing to ask leave to get married.

  The bond between my mother and her parents was a strong one, and my grandparents’ alarm at losing their daughter to the itinerant life of a professional sailor was understandable. It took several years for them to grow accustomed to the idea. But, in due course, they accepted the marriage and shared with my father the deep affection that distinguished their family.

  Captain John S. McCain, Sr., thought the match to be an excellent one from the start. He was as charmed and amused by his new daughter-in-law as she was by him. Six months after my parents married, my father was suspected by the ship’s physician of having contracted tuberculosis, and was admitted to a Navy hospital because he had suddenly lost a great deal of weight. When the doctors there asked if my father could explain his dramatic weight loss, he attributed it to his recent marriage.

  Sometime later, my grandfather was in Washington, where he went to Navy Records and asked to see his son’s latest fitness report. There he read of my father’s condition and his response to the doctor’s inquiries: “My wife doesn’t know how to cook, and my meals are very irregular.” Much amused, my grandfather kept a copy of the report, and delighted in showing his friends how his “son couldn’t wait to get married, and within six months the girl had nearly killed him.”

  Stationed in San Diego at the time of my parents’ elopement, my grandfather had traveled to Tijuana with them to attend the ceremony and stand at his son’s side. Theirs was also an exceptionally close relationship.

  The relationship of a sailor and his children is, in large part, a metaphysical one. We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war. Our mothers run our households, pay the bills, and manage most of our upbringing. For long stretches of time they are required to be both mother and father. They move us from base to base. They see to our religious, educational,
and emotional needs. They arbitrate our quarrels, discipline us, and keep us safe. It is no surprise then that the personalities of children who have grown up in the Navy often resemble those of their mothers more than those of their fathers.

  But our fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long absences, can be a huge presence in our lives. You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other relatives, and the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance. When your father is away, the tradition remains, and embellishes a paternal image that is powerfully attractive to a small boy, even long after the boy becomes a man.

  This is the life to which my older sister, Sandy, my younger brother, Joe, and I were born. It was the life my father was born to as well. And it was the life that adopted my mother, substituting its care for that of a loving and protective family.

  CHAPTER 5

  Small Man with the Big Heart

  My father was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In several profiles and obituaries, he is described as a native of that Midwestern town, but he was no more a native of Council Bluffs than I am a native of Panama. My grandmother had gone into labor when visiting family in Council Bluffs while my grandfather was at sea.

  His boyhood withstood the strain of the frequent interruptions, upheavals, travel, and separation that the Navy imposed on the lives of its officers’ families. He would never know any other life. From early childhood, he understood he would share his father’s vocation.

  People who grow up without such expectations might think that anticipating so young the general course of your life would make a child self-assured. That may be the case for some. But I think for most of us our strong sense of predestination made us prematurely fatalistic. And while that condition gave us a kind of confidence, it was often a reckless confidence. We started with small rebellions against the conventions of our heritage. And as we grew older and coarser, our transgressions became more serious.

  We often exceeded the limits of our parents’ patience and earned the displeasure of educators. There were times in my youth when I harbored a secret resentment that my life’s course seemed so preordained. I often wondered if my father had ever felt the same way. Neither of us ever misbehaved by design, or purposely threw some insurmountable obstacle in the path of our expected naval careers. Our antics were much more spontaneous than that. But did he, like me, occasionally speculate that his troublemaking might disrupt his family’s plans for him, and was he as surprised as I was to discover that the thought did not fill him with dread? I don’t know. But I do know that when both of us reached the end of our naval careers, we could not imagine finding a greater measure of satisfaction than we had found in a life at sea in our country’s service. Neither of us ever sinned so grievously that we altered our fate. The Navy did not banish us. And years later, we realized we had mistaken our reaction to the Navy’s forbearance for disappointment. In memory, it appears as relief.

  My father was a slight boy, even smaller than his father. He never grew taller than five feet six, and near the end of his life he weighed no more than when he left the Naval Academy, 133 pounds. His irregular childhood, the constant disruptions occasioned by his father’s transfers, were a challenge to him, as, I suspect, was his small stature. It intensified an adolescent compulsion to prove his courage and daring to his peers in whatever new social circumstances he found himself in. The quickest way to do so was to exhibit a studied indifference to the established order, devise imaginative circumventions of the rules, take your punishment, show no remorse, and fight at the drop of a hat.

  He was only sixteen years old when his father delivered him to the United States Naval Academy for his plebe summer in June 1927; by his own admission, he was too young for the challenges of such a rigid institution and the highly competitive nature of the place. He had been included on President Coolidge’s list of appointees that year, passed his preliminary physical in March, and completed the entrance exams in April.

  His nervous father was at sea at the time, serving as executive officer aboard the USS New Mexico. When the ship made port in Panama on April 26, a fellow officer on the New Mexico sent a letter to a friend who was associated with the Naval Academy in some capacity and asked if he could find out if my father had passed the exams. “Our exec…is very anxious to know if the boy made it.” One month later, my grandfather’s helpful friend received a brief telegram from an officer on the Academy Academic Board: JOHN S MCCAIN JUNIOR PASSED APRIL EXAMINATION STANDING SEVENTH ON PRESIDENTIAL LIST.

  Shortly before my father entered the Academy, my grandfather, whose ship was being overhauled in the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, invited him to spend two weeks aboard ship. They were two weeks my father treasured all his life. He referred to them as a “final and farewell gesture before I went into the Naval Academy” and began his own life at sea.

  It is difficult to imagine my grandfather being too concerned with my father’s performance at the Academy, considering his own less than commendable record there. He was, however, a watchful father.

  In April 1928 he was detailed as an instructor to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and upon arrival he cabled a request to the Academy Superintendent that all reports on Midshipman McCain be sent to him there. Those reports, sent at the end of every term, were not encouraging. Had the old man been more of a spit-and-polish type, he might have reconsidered the career choice he had made for his son. As it was, while he might have been uneasy about the difficulty his son had staying out of trouble at the Academy, he would have become really alarmed only if it appeared that my father’s shortcomings might result in his dismissal.

  My father was constantly in trouble at the Academy. His grades were poor, his discipline worse. By the end of his first term his grades hovered barely above the lowest acceptable marks, where they would remain for four years. His class standing in his first term was 557 out of 601 midshipmen. That was his high-water mark for his first two troubled years at Annapolis. The next term, he stood 537 out of 549. The following year, he had dropped to 498 out of 504.

  Unimpressive as they were, his grades seldom slipped below the minimum satisfactory level. The ever shrinking aggregate number of his classmates indicates the number of midshipmen whose performance was considered so deficient that they were expelled.

  My father approached catastrophe on three occasions, in his first, third, and fourth years. On all three occasions he was warned that “the Superintendent notes with concern that you are unsatisfactory in your Academic work…and he wishes to take this opportunity to point out that unless you devote your entire effort to improve your scholastic work you are in grave danger of being found deficient at the end of the year.” “Copy to Parent” was written on the bottom left-hand corner of each notice.

  The only consistently good marks my father received were for Seamanship and Flight Tactics, and Ordnance and Gunnery. These courses were taught only in the last three terms, and my father earned the equivalent of a B in both courses every term. In the first term of a midshipman’s last year, his personal hygiene is graded. Here again my father, whom my mother once called “the cleanest man I’ve ever known,” received an above-average mark. These were the only bright spots in an otherwise dismal academic performance.

  My father was an intelligent man, and quite well read as a boy. His low grades as a student cannot be credited to a poor intellect. Rather, I assume they were attributable to his poor discipline, a failing that was almost certainly a result of his immaturity and the insecurity he must have felt as an undersized youth in a rough-and-tumble world that had humbled many older, bigger men.r />
  “I went in there at the age of sixteen,” he once told an interviewer, “and I weighed one hundred and five pounds. I could barely carry a Springfield rifle.”

  Even as an upperclassman, my father struggled to meet the robust physical standards imposed on midshipmen, who were expected to take athletics as seriously as their scholastic endeavors. In my father’s third year, the superintendent informed him that he was “deficient in physical training for the term thus far completed.” Consequently, my father’s Christmas leave was canceled that year, and he was “required to remain at the Naval Academy for extra instruction during that period.”

  My father’s roommates, two of whom were linemen on the varsity football team, treated him like a little brother and went to great lengths to protect him. They helped him through the relentless hazing of his plebe year, took the blame when they could for his infractions of Academy regulations, and made it clear that they would deal with any midshipman who thought to abuse him. However, when they were plebes, despite their formidable size, they could not prevent upperclassmen from physically disciplining my father. My father hated the hazing he was subjected to—some of it quite severe, even by the standards of his day—and forever after questioned the custom’s usefulness to the task of making officers.

  Even after my father graduated, he inspired almost paternal affection in many of his peers. A shipmate who occupied the bunk below my father on the Oklahoma, a huge man who had also played varsity football at Annapolis, would routinely wake up in the middle of the night to replace the blanket my father had kicked off in his sleep.

  As hard as they tried, my father’s friends could not spare him the consequences of his own natural rebelliousness. His report cards for every term, save one, list a staggering number of demerits for bad conduct—114 in his first term, an astonishing 219 his second. Except for the first term of his last year, my father never accumulated fewer than a hundred demerits a term, and usually he was closer to two hundred.