by John McCain
I, too, was a notoriously undisciplined midshipman, and the demerits I received were almost enough to warrant my expulsion. But I never racked them up as prodigiously as my father had. And when I read the accounts of his “unmilitary conduct” today, and the scores of demerits it earned him, I am little short of astonished by the old man’s reckless disregard for rules. His offenses were various: talking in ranks; using obscenity; absent without leave; fighting; disrespect shown to an upperclassman. They ran the entire gamut of what the Academy considered serious offenses, and the punishments he received were onerous.
Typically, he found some value in his troublemaking and in the punishment he earned for it. “You get to know people that you don’t ordinarily know if you’re one of the good boys. And sometimes the world’s not always made up of all the good boys, either, not by a long shot,” he said.
“I was known as a ‘ratey’ plebe, and that’s the plebe who does not conform always to the specific rules and regulations of the upperclassmen,” my father explained in his interview for the Naval Institute. “Some of these upperclassmen would come up and make some of these statements to you, and required you to do such things which only incited rebellion and mutiny in me. And although I did them, the attitude was there, and they didn’t like that. But it was a fine institution.”
In his last year, my father was removed from the watchful care of his concerned roommates. He was expelled from the dormitory, where his rebelliousness might have infected good order and discipline in the ranks, and exiled to quarters and a hammock for a bed aboard the Reina Mercedes, a ship seized from the Spanish during the Spanish-American War and kept moored at the Academy.
First classmen in my father’s time were not allowed to exceed 150 demerits. During his final term, my father came perilously close to exceeding the number, and was informed by his battalion commander that his graduation from the Academy was anything but certain. “If we get one more demerit on you, McCain,” he warned, “we’re either going to turn you back into the next class, or you’ll be dropped from the muster roll. I can’t tell you which will happen. But you can rest assured one of the two will.”
From that moment on, my father remembered, “I shined my shoes and everything else and did everything right. When it came time for me to graduate, I took my diploma, and I went. I think that was the closest call I had.”
My father was reported to have suffered his punishments without complaint. He would have disgraced himself had he done otherwise. He was a principled young man. Strict obedience to institutional rules was not among his principles, but manfully accepting the consequences of his actions was.
Neither would my father have considered for a moment committing a violation of the Academy’s honor code. Honor codes were something he had been raised from birth to respect, and I truly believe he would have preferred any misfortune to having his honor called into question for an offense he committed. He was a small man with a big heart, and the affection in which he was held by his peers was attributable in part to his unquestioning allegiance to the principles of honorable conduct. His profile in the Class of 1931 yearbook commended his character with the following inscription: “Sooner could Gibraltar be loosed from its base than could Mac be loosed from the principles which he has adopted to govern his actions.”
The memory of his frequent clashes with its regulations and authorities never diminished my father’s abiding reverence for the Academy’s traditions and purpose, although he also never lost his realistic appreciation of a typical midshipman’s many shortcomings. He once served for two years as an instructor at the Academy, and he boasted that “the lads learned soon enough never to try to hoodwink an old hoodwinker.” And he looked back on his Academy days, as he looked back at most of his life, with a satisfaction that was remarkably free of nostalgia.
He remained until the end of his life one of the Academy’s most steadfast defenders. In 1964, when my father had attained the rank of vice admiral, he got in a public dispute with one of the Navy’s most prominent leaders, Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine. In testimony before Congress reported in the Annapolis newspaper, Rickover had “blasted the Academy for everything from the quality of its teaching to the hazing of plebes and the relative competence of ROTC and Academy officers.”
Rickover, an Academy graduate himself, had long complained to the Navy hierarchy that the Naval Academy was not turning out qualified officers for his nuclear submarines. This he attributed to the Academy’s antiquated curriculum and traditions, which he derided as nothing more than quaint and anachronistic customs of an institution focused on the past. He believed it neither grasped nor concerned itself with the imperatives of leadership in the modern, nuclear Navy that he had, with peerless tenacity, set about creating.
My father understood that technological advances and the nature of Cold War rivalry necessitated innovations and profound changes in his beloved submarine service. Although he and Rickover were not friends and Rickover’s cold, imperious personality made him difficult to like, my father admired Rickover’s ability, intelligence, and vision, and he supported Rickover’s efforts to revolutionize seapower.
Nevertheless, he strongly objected to Rickover’s assault on the Naval Academy and to his call for systemic change in the way the Navy trained its future leaders. He felt that Rickover’s remedies abandoned proven leadership principles. The primary mission of the Academy was to strengthen the character of its officers. Without good character, my father believed, all the advanced instruction in the world wouldn’t make an officer fit for service.
As long as human nature remained what it was, the Academy’s traditions were, by my father’s lights, more effective at imparting the cardinal virtues of leaders than the methods devised by any other human institution. Rickover, he argued, was more interested in turning out technicians than officers whose worth would ultimately be measured by how well they inspired their subordinates to risk everything for their country.
My father called a press conference aboard his flagship the day after Rickover’s testimony to rebuke his fellow admiral and reject the argument that naval officers were better trained in private institutions. “The Naval Academy is designed to make sure an officer is well founded in the sciences and liberal arts. But there’s something else,” he said. “In leadership there’s no such thing as a master’s degree. We’ve got to develop that type of officer who has the tools to develop his own leadership capabilities. I won’t talk about Rickover except to say he may have overlooked this aspect.”
This was not my father’s first dispute with the irascible and solitary genius. Rickover had made admiral before my father, but not before being passed over for promotion on several occasions. Rickover was Jewish, and some felt that he was the victim of the anti-Semitism harbored by many among the Navy’s leadership. Others believed that Rickover, who professed no concern for the affection of his brother officers, was repaid for his indifference with the active dislike of a good many admirals. Whatever the reason, the Navy Selection Board had for several years unfairly left him off its list of flag rank recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy, which, for all practical purposes, determined who would and would not wear an admiral’s star.
Rickover did have a number of supporters in the Navy, my father among them, who may have been as put off by Rickover’s personality as was the Selection Board, but who recognized his genius and devotion to the Navy. He also had considerable political support in both the legislative and executive branches of government.
After several flag lists failed to reward Rickover’s indisputable accomplishments, the Secretary of the Navy passed word to the Selection Board that he would refuse to accept any flag list that didn’t include Rickover’s name. Thus admonished, the Selection Board finally recommended that Rickover be made a rear admiral.
Shortly after Rickover’s promotion, my father, still a captain, called to congratulate his new superior. An embittered Rickover responded to my father’s
courtesy by declaring curtly that he had made admiral without “the help of any damn officer in uniform.”
“That’s a damn lie, Admiral,” my offended father replied before hanging up on the surprised Rickover. My father could never tolerate officers whose resentment over personal disappointments made them contemptuous of the service. Rickover, he felt, had earned his promotion, had deserved his stars earlier than he received him. But that didn’t mean he had accomplished the feat entirely on his own. My father believed that the Navy, for all its faults, took care of its own, sometimes acting later than it should have, but eventually according all their due.
Their relationship didn’t improve much after that angry exchange, and their dispute over the Academy only exacerbated the tension between them. Yet, near the end of their lives, they had a reconciliation of sorts, although neither of them would have characterized it as such because neither was the type who would have accorded incidental professional rancor the status of a personal animosity.
After my father had retired, and very late in Rickover’s unusually long career, both men became quite ill and were admitted to the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. They were given rooms on the same floor. Both were expected to remain hospitalized for some time, and as there were no other Navy legends in residence at the time, they began spending a good part of every day together.
Perhaps they saw in each other qualities they had overlooked earlier. Perhaps they talked about the only thing they had in common, the Navy, the only thing either of them ever talked about. They may have simply enjoyed reminiscing, as old sailors are apt to reminisce, about their experiences and the vicissitudes of long Navy careers. Or perhaps, as old men, they recognized that they had each devoted every particle of their being to their shared cause, and were, for their devotion, more alike than not.
They left the hospital as friends, and remained so for the little time that remained to them.
My father suffered a serious disappointment his last year at Annapolis. In the same year that my grandfather was earning his naval aviator wings, my father was judged “not physically qualified” for aviation school. I suspect this was a hard blow to my father. His lifelong ambition was to emulate the man he most admired, and being deprived of this opportunity to follow in the old man’s footsteps must have shaken his resolve considerably.
After graduating, barely, standing eighteenth from the bottom, my father was assigned to the Oklahoma. Before he left, he requested permission to attend the naval optical school in Washington, D.C. Dejected after being denied pilot training, he temporarily wavered in his desire to immediately commence building a successful naval career, preferring to spend a pleasant year enjoying the attractions of the nation’s capital (where he had attended high school).
The request was routed through the Academy Superintendent, who offered his opinion that “young officers just graduated from the Naval Academy should join the ships of the Fleet as soon as possible.” Two weeks later my father received his answer from the Bureau of Navigation. He was ordered to consider himself released from his current occupation or any other duty that he may have received earlier orders for and report without further delay to the commanding officer of the USS Oklahoma.
As he would throughout his career, he made the most of his opportunity. His father’s career guidance to him had been limited to impressing on his son the importance of command. “It doesn’t make any difference where you go,” his father often said, “you’ve got to command.” With that in mind, my father entered the submarine service after his tour on the Oklahoma. His father approved of the decision and told him “to make a good job of it,” which my father did in his relentless pursuit of a command.
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Seapower
I hesitate to write that my father was insecure, but he was thrust into difficult circumstances at such a young age that it would have been very hard to resist some self-doubt. He was an aspiring man whose ambition to meet the standard of his famous father might have collided with his appreciation for the implausibility of the accomplishment. Nevertheless, he would succeed, and become the Navy’s first son of a four-star admiral to reach the same rank as his father.
The Navy consumed nearly his every thought. He had few aspirations for success outside its narrow confines. Whatever other interests engaged his mind were in some way associated with the Navy, including his preferences in literature, history, philosophy, and the study of military tactics and strategy. He attended every Army-Navy football game he could, not because he loved football, but because it involved the Navy. It could have been the Army-Navy tiddlywinks championship and he still would have wanted to attend it.
He did not fish or hunt or share his father’s fondness for gambling or my enthusiasm for sports. He played tennis often, and kept to a daily regimen of rope-jumping and sit-ups, not because he particularly enjoyed exercise, but because he intended to keep himself fit for combat command. During one of his tours in Washington, D.C., a local paper observed that he was “a familiar sight to Washington commuters who frequently see him stride across the 14th Street Bridge, walking the four miles between his Capitol Hill home and the Pentagon.”
He worked ceaselessly. Lacking the gregariousness and easy charm of his father, he was less comfortable in social situations, a failing that can be an obstacle to an officer’s advancement. He wasn’t withdrawn or unapproachable, and he didn’t shrink from social obligations. He just didn’t seem entirely at ease when his career required something more than strict, tireless dedication to the task at hand.
My mother was indispensable to my father. She had adapted to Navy life with few regrets, and acquired an abiding affection for the whole of the culture she had entered upon marriage, once remarking that she was “tailor-made” for the Navy. Her vivacious charm, beauty, and refinement assured her success in the social aspect of Navy life and more than compensated for my father’s weaker possession of those graces. Her complete devotion to my father and his career contributed more to his success than anything else save his own determination.
The Navy in the years before the Second World War, the Navy my mother married into, was a small, insular world where everyone knew everyone else. “We were all in the same boat,” my mother says of those days. “There wasn’t any point for anyone to put up a false front.” She means, of course, that few Navy families lived beyond their means. But they did live graciously, as graciously as circumstances allowed, assisting each other in a common effort to preserve the exacting social standards that were appropriate for an officer and his family in the small, prewar Navy.
Most families of naval officers lived on modest resources, a condition attributable to the meager salaries paid to officers in those days. Although my mother came from a wealthy family, our family lived, in accordance with my father’s wish, on his income alone. Yet we never wanted for anything, and we believed we lived within a privileged society where refined manners made the relative poverty that most families shared inconspicuous.
In 1934, my father, a young ensign, was ordered to Hawaii to serve as a junior officer on a submarine. He brought his new bride with him, to what my mother called “paradise.” Home to America’s Pacific Fleet, Hawaii in the 1930s was the heart of Navy culture, where singular standards of social etiquette and personal and professional ethics were rarely breached.
Newly arrived officers, dressed in white uniforms, took their wives, who were attired in white gloves and hats, to call on the families of fellow officers every Wednesday and Saturday between four and six o’clock. The husband laid two calling cards on the receiving tray, one for the officer in residence and the other for the lady of the house. His wife offered a single card for her hostess, as it was inappropriate for an officer’s wife to call on another officer. The visits never exceeded fifteen minutes. Within ten days, the officer and his wife who had been paid this homage returned the compliment by calling on the newly arrived couple at their home. The commanding officer was always called on f
irst, followed by the executive officer. Their rank excused them from paying a return call.
When an officer had finished his tour he would complete another round of calls to bid good-bye, leaving his card with its upper left-hand corner turned down as a signal of his imminent departure.
Every Saturday night, my father and mother, dressed in formal attire, attended a party at the Pearl Harbor Submarine Club, after spending their afternoon at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel’s four o’clock tea dance. The Beach Club at Waikiki, with its five-dollar monthly dues, was another venue for stylish socializing among the officers and their families. Though the exacting formality of this society seems pompous and excessive today, few who lived within its rules then thought it anything other than normal and appropriate. Even when they dined alone at home, my father dressed in black tie and my mother in a long evening gown.
One aspect of my parents’ social life was unique to my father’s branch of the service. The submarine service was a small component of the Navy and even more insular than the Navy at large. Small ships manned by small crews, submarines hosted a more intimate fraternity, less socially segregated by rank than those found aboard battleships and carriers. My parents were on familiar terms with the families of enlisted men on his submarine; officers and men attended parties at one another’s homes and celebrated weddings and christenings together.
Submarine officers, like all naval officers, faithfully observed the professional distinctions governing their relationship to enlisted men, upon which the good order and discipline of the service depended. But living aboard ship in such small quarters bred an off-duty informality among officers and their enlisted shipmates. They were friends, and my father, like his father, valued those friendships highly.