by John McCain
More than the manners of polite society distinguished the life of a naval officer. His character was expected to be above reproach, his life a full testament to the enduring virtues of an officer and a gentleman. Those virtues were not necessarily as many as those required of clergy. An officer’s honor could admit some vices, and many officers, my father and grandfather included, indulged more than a few. But honor would not permit even rare or small transgressions of the code of conduct that was expected to be as natural a part of an officer’s life as was his physical description.
An officer must not lie, steal, or cheat—ever. He keeps his word, whatever the cost. He must not shirk his duties no matter how difficult or dangerous they are. His life is ransomed to his duty. An officer must trust his fellow officers, and expect their trust in return. He must not expect others to bear what he will not.
An officer accepts the consequences of his actions. He must not hide his mistakes, nor transfer blame to others that is rightfully his. He admits his mistakes openly, and accepts whatever sanction is imposed upon him without complaint.
For the obedience he is owed by his subordinates, an officer accepts certain solemn obligations to them in return, and an officer’s obligations to enlisted men are the most solemn of all. An officer must not confer his responsibilities on the men under his command. They are his alone. He does not put his men in jeopardy for any purpose that their country has not required they serve. He does not risk their lives and welfare for his sake, but only to answer the shared duty they are called to answer. He will not harm their reputations by his conduct or cause them to suffer shame or any penalty that only he deserves. My father once said, “Some officers get it backwards. They don’t understand that we are responsible for our men, not the other way around. That’s what forges trust and loyalty.”
An officer accepts these and his many other responsibilities with gratitude. They are his honor. Any officer who stains his honor by violating these standards forfeits the respect of his fellow officers and no longer deserves to be included in their ranks. His presence among them is offensive and threatens the integrity of the service.
Even in the small Navy world that disappeared with the Second World War, some officers fell short of the demands of honor. If they did so grievously, or repeatedly, or without remorse and requital, they were, if not thrown out of the service, so completely ostracized, so bereft of respect, that they would usually leave of their own accord. If the Navy tolerated their conduct, it would shame everyone in the service.
My parents arrived in Hawaii in the aftermath of the infamous Massie scandal, which had deeply shaken prewar Hawaiian society and the entire Navy community there. A young lieutenant, Thomas Massie, who some time earlier had served on my father’s submarine, had committed an unpardonable breach of the code. He was, reportedly, an intemperate and unlikable man, and his petulant and difficult wife, Thalia Massie, one of three daughters of a Kentucky bluegrass family of aristocratic pretensions, was even less likable.
One evening, Massie and his wife drove with a few other officers and their wives to a nightclub in a rough part of Honolulu. There the officer and his wife became very drunk. What happened next and why has never been determined with certainty. What is known is that at some point the wife had left the nightclub without her husband. Her husband located her at home later that evening, bruised and frightened and claiming to have been abducted and raped by as many as six native Hawaiian boys. She identified five boys who had been arrested that same evening for a traffic altercation as her assailants, and they were subsequently put on trial for the crime.
The evidence against the boys was far from conclusive. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was pronounced. The accused were released on bail pending retrial. One month later, Lieutenant Massie persuaded two enlisted men from the submarine base to help him and his blue-blooded mother-in-law apprehend and murder one of the defendants. A short time later, Massie, his mother-in-law, and one of the enlisted men were stopped by police while racing through town in their car, curtains covering the windows, with the body of one of the boys wrapped in a tarp on the floor of the backseat.
The conduct of this officer shocked and outraged the rest of Hawaii’s naval community, but not because the man had exacted mortal vengeance for his wife’s rape. That showed poor judgment, perhaps, but given the nature of the alleged crime, the act was forgivable. What was unforgivable was that the officer had involved enlisted men in his crime, placing them in great jeopardy to help him avenge an offense that concerned only him and his wife. That was a grave breach of an officer’s duty to his men.
There was a trial, and Massie, his mother-in-law, and the two enlisted men were convicted of manslaughter even though the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow had defended them. They escaped justice, however. The Navy had intervened in the case to help in their defense, and, after their conviction, to help persuade the governor of Hawaii to commute their sentence from ten years to one hour. After the convicted vigilantes had served their hour in the governor’s office, the Navy quickly sent them and Thalia Massie back to the States.
Many of his fellow officers felt shamed by Massie’s conduct, and by the Navy’s intervention in the matter. Initially, most officers believed the allegation of rape and their fellow officer’s subsequent explanation of the killing as self-defense. They found it hard to believe an officer would lie. But most soon came to believe that he had indeed lied about the killing, and that he and his wife had probably lied about the rape as well. The discovery made the Navy’s intervention on his behalf as unpardonable as the officer’s use of enlisted men.
When my parents arrived, the scandal still dominated all conversation in every officer’s home. The entire community seemed distressed over this singular violation of the standards they had always accepted as an unquestioned, ennobling way of life. And it was a long time before they recovered from the shock of it all.
My mother said that on the ship that returned him to the States, the disgraced Massie was observed to be frequently drunk and “making a natural fool of himself.” She claims that some years later, he was incorrectly reported to have killed himself—an act that most of his fellow officers and their wives who had known of his crime and the damage it had done to the Navy’s honor thought appropriate.
This was the Navy in which my father and grandfather felt so at home. They had entered its ranks already imbued with the notions of honor that distinguished a good officer. They were the standards passed down from one generation to another in their family. As boys, no less than as men, they did not lie, steal, or cheat, and they never shirked their duty. My brother once said that our father’s word “had the constancy of Newtonian laws of physical motion.” He added, “I have never met a more honest man than my father. I literally cannot think of a single time he did not tell the truth about something, as best he knew it.”
My mother recalls playing gin rummy with my father once when she jokingly accused him of cheating. He reacted so strongly to the accusation, with such evident distress over the charge, admonishing her to “never say such a thing again,” that she never did. Not even in jest.
The Navy revered my father’s and grandfather’s shared ideals and offered them adventure. It promised them the perfect life, and they were grateful to their last breath for the privilege.
Happy in his profession, my father worked every day, without exception. On Christmas morning, after we had opened our presents in front of the Christmas tree, he would excuse himself, change into his uniform, and leave for his office. I cannot recall a single instance when he came home from work earlier than eight o’clock in the evening.
As any other child would, I resented my father’s absences, interpreting them as a sign that he loved his work more than his children. This was unfair of me, and I regret having felt that way. The most important relationship in my father’s life had been his bond with my grandfather. That cherished bond influenced every major decision my father
made throughout his life. Yet my grandfather had been absent from his family at least as often as my father was away from us, probably more often. He had done his duty as his country had asked him to, and his family understood, and admired him for it.
My father felt no shame in attending just as diligently to the responsibilities of his office, nor should he have. I am certain that he wanted to share with me the warm affection that he and his father had shared. But he wanted me to know also that a man’s life should be big enough to encompass both duty to family and duty to country. That can be a hard lesson for a boy to learn. It was a hard lesson for me.
He worked hard to please his superiors and accepted every assignment as an opportunity to prove himself. Even when he viewed a new assignment as sidetracking him from his pursuit of important commands, he never betrayed the slightest hint of bitterness. “No matter what job you get,” he told my mother, “you can make a good one out of it.”
He once helped a friend get a prestigious position on an admiral’s staff. My father thought him to be a born leader and expected great things from him in the Navy. But the man didn’t like the long hours associated with the job. Nor did his wife, who openly resented the demands placed on young officers and their families.
Late one Sunday night, the admiral on whose staff my father’s friend served called him to get the combination for a safe that contained classified documents he wanted to review. The young officer started to give him the combination over the phone, and the admiral cut him off abruptly. “Don’t you dare give me that combination over the phone,” he admonished his aide. Both my parents were shocked at their friend’s careless regard for his professional responsibilities. My mother remarked, “Had it been Jack, he would have said, ‘Sir, I’m on my way.’” It would never have occurred to my father to respond in any other way.
My father was devout, although the demands of his profession sometimes made regular churchgoing difficult. His mother, Katherine, was the daughter of an Episcopal minister, and she had ably seen to her son’s religious instruction, no small feat in a home where the head of the household happily indulged a variety of vices.
My father didn’t talk about God or the importance of religious devotion. He didn’t proselytize. But he always kept with him a tattered, dog-eared prayerbook, from which he would pray aloud for an hour, on his knees, twice every day.
He drank too much, which did not become him. And I often felt that my father’s religious devotion was intended in part to help him control his drinking. In the Navy in which my father came of age, men relaxed by drinking. The greater the burdens a man bore, the more he drank to relieve himself of them.
During the Second World War, when exhausted submarine crews finished a combat patrol in the Pacific, which typically lasted from six weeks to two months, they would come into port at Midway Island or Freemantle, Australia, for a month’s “rest camp.” These remote locations offered few natural or cultural distractions from the terrors of war. Midway’s sole distinction was its claim to be home to a third of the world’s population of gooney birds, large, awkward, and odd-looking fowl. Visiting sailors named the island Gooneyville. There is little else memorable about the place. To compensate for barren landscapes and somber circumstances, the Navy would see to it that the men had someplace to drink when the pleasure of playing baseball and horseshoes wore thin. In Freemantle, the Navy rented houses for the men and stocked them with cases of beer and liquor. The men, most of them kids in their teens and twenties, lacking anything better to do, would drink themselves senseless until their next patrol.
During one typically intoxicated evening while on leave at Midway, the officers of a recently arrived submarine tore up the officers’ club when the bartender refused to serve them. For a time, they kept their destruction within reasonable limits. Then they discovered a plaque dedicated to the club that had been commissioned by the officers of another submarine in the days before submariners were banished from the place. Seeing this, and deeply aggrieved that the submariners’ courtesy had been repaid with such a gross discourtesy, they took the plaque and tore the cabinet that contained it from the wall.
A short time later, a young ensign from the shore patrol arrived to restore order. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to ascertain which officer was in charge of the marauders, the ensign left to call for help. As he was placing the call a group of the officers walked over to him. One of them announced, “I’m in charge. Jack McCain, skipper of the Gunnel.”
In a report the young ensign filed with the base commander the following day, he described how my father and his officers continued to ransack the officers’ club until they were eventually persuaded to leave by the duty officer, who had arrived on the scene carrying his side arm. They took the offending plaque and the cabinet that had housed it along with several other pieces of furniture and drove off in a jeep and a weapons carrier they had stolen earlier in the evening. My father drove the jeep back to the old, dilapidated “Gooneyville Hotel,” where he and his officers were quartered. He was accompanied by his executive officer, Joe Vasey, who recalled that when they arrived at their destination, my father “abruptly decided to drive through the main entrance into the lobby, overestimating by only an inch or so the width of the entrance.”
My father then retired to his room. When the rest of the Gunnel’s officers arrived in the stolen weapons carrier, Vasey instructed them to return the confiscated furniture to the officers’ club, which they did, heaving the large cabinet into a hallway and leaving it there in pieces.
The next morning, the Navy commodore in command at Midway called my father to his office and chewed him out for some time. Afterward, my father ordered his men to return the confiscated plaque to the officers’ club.
During another leave, this time in Freemantle, my father and some of the men under his command barely escaped death after one of them had drunk himself so thoroughly witless that he threw a box of bullets into the fireplace of the house where they were drinking. The rounds cooked off and fired into walls and furniture as my father and his friends dove for cover.
When spirits were in short supply, submariners often drank the alcohol that was used to fuel torpedoes. My father once served as engineering officer on a submarine. His first day on the job, he discovered that his predecessor had drunk nearly all the torpedo alcohol aboard. His submarine was scheduled to stand for inspection that day, and he had to borrow a quantity of the alcohol from other submarine commanders to cover up the embarrassing deficit.
There was one rule about drinking that most submariners, my father included, considered inviolate. A submariner never drank aboard ship. Submarine warfare is as treacherous and mentally exacting as any form of warfare can be. It requires the combatants to be in full possession of their faculties at all times while under way. Accordingly, no matter how excessive their binge drinking was when ashore, my father and his crew stayed sober at sea.
My father returned from war with a great appetite for drink, which he overindulged until the very last years of his life. He didn’t drink at work, and was never completely incapacitated by his weakness. But he would often ease his way into social settings by drinking too much. And, as with most people, drinking changed his personality in unattractive ways. When he was drunk, I did not recognize him.
On occasions, friends cautioned him that his drinking was harming his career, but he never let it get so out of hand that it ruined his fitness for command. His aspirations were dear to him, and his determination to achieve them more formidable than the allure of any vice.
Like his father, my father swore a lot, and subordinates often referred to him as “Good Goddam McCain.” Also like his father, he was a chain-smoker, although he preferred enormous cigars to my grandfather’s roll-your-own cigarettes.
As an ensign, he had served on a submarine commanded by Captain Herman Saul, whom my father regarded as an exemplary officer, and whose leadership style he tried to emulate. Saul taught my father the difficult te
chnique of keeping a submerged submarine perfectly level, a skill my father mastered. Saul also introduced his protégé to the pleasure of smoking stogies, and my father, like his mentor, was seldom without one. The cigars performed an additional function later in his life, often serving as pointer and exclamation point for his well-regarded lectures on the history and importance of seapower.
As a submarine skipper, my father often let junior officers bring the ship into port so they could gain the experience necessary to operate a submarine competently. On one occasion, while my mother, sister, brother, and I watched from the pier, a young officer struggled to navigate my father’s submarine through the strong river current coming into port at Groton, Connecticut. My father was standing in the conning tower, a cigar in his mouth, talking to his executive officer. He was not paying sufficient attention to his ship’s progress.
It was clear to all of us watching onshore that the young ensign piloting the sub was going to drive her directly into the pier. When, at the last moment, my father finally recognized the approaching catastrophe, he turned excitedly to give the order “All engines stop.” Unfortunately, as he drew a breath to bark out the order he inhaled his cigar and choked. A moment later, the submarine crashed into the pier, knocking down a lamppost, which landed on our car. My father calmly ordered the ensign to back the ship out and bring it in again, which he did without incident.
With his ship safely in port, my father went home with us and began a long and difficult argument with his insurance company over the credibility of his insurance claim for a car destroyed by a submarine.
My father developed his seapower lecture in midcareer, when he served as the Navy’s first Chief of Information, and later as the Navy’s senior liaison officer to the United States Congress. Both posts helped to broaden his circle of acquaintances outside the Navy. He became a frequent witness before congressional committees, experiences that he used to improve his lecture and polish his delivery. He acquired some of the skills of an accomplished military historian who moonlighted as a stage actor. Appreciative audiences gave him the nickname “Mr. Seapower.”