Faith of My Fathers

by John McCain

  Over a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen now answered to my father’s orders. As CINCPAC, my father had command over the war in Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams, then commanding U.S. forces in Vietnam, was his subordinate; as was I, a lieutenant commander, held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

  II

  I heard the old, old men say,

  ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away

  Like the waters.’

  —William Butler Yeats,

  “The Old Men Admiring

  Themselves in Water”

  CHAPTER 9

  Worst Rat

  I was not quite two years old when my parents felt it necessary to instill in me a little self-restraint and my instruction in some of the colder realities of life began in earnest. During an otherwise tranquil early childhood, I had quite unexpectedly developed an outsized temper that I expressed in an unusual way. At the smallest provocation, I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious. Alarmed at this odd behavior and worried that I was suffering from a strange and possibly serious illness, my parents consulted a Navy physician for an explanation. The doctor assured them that the malady was not serious. It was self-induced. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.

  The doctor prescribed a treatment that seems a little severe by modern standards of child care. He instructed my parents to fill a bathtub with cold water whenever I commenced a tantrum, and when I appeared to be holding my breath to drop me, fully clothed, into it.

  I do not recall at all these traumatic early encounters with the harsh consequences of my misbehavior, buried, as they must be, deep in my subconscious. But my mother assures me that they occurred, and went on for some time until I was finally “cured.” Whenever I worked myself into a tiny rage, my mother shouted to my father, “Get the water!” Moments later I would find myself thrashing, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, in a tub of icy-cold water. Eventually, I achieved a satisfactory (if only temporary) control over my emotions. And as a side benefit, the treatment apparently instilled in me an early reverence for the principle of equal justice under the law. After my first few experiences with the dreaded immersion therapy, I would shout, “Get the water! Get the water!” whenever my older sister, Sandy, momentarily lost control of her temper.

  My mother often despaired over the quality of our education. When asked today how her children were educated she is apt to respond that we were “raised to be completely ignorant.”

  The frequent relocations imposed on Navy families were the chief obstacle to a decent education. As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order. I was often required in a new school to study things I had already learned. Other times, the curriculum assumed knowledge I had not yet acquired.

  Many of the base schools I attended were substandard institutions. Sometimes the school building was nothing more than a converted aircraft hangar. The classes mixed children of varying ages. We might have one teacher on Monday and a different one on Tuesday. On other days, we lacked the services of any teacher at all. My first purpose during my brief stay in these schools was to impress upon my classmates that I was not a person to suffer slights lightly. My second purpose was to prove myself as an athlete. When I was disciplined by my teachers, which happened regularly, it was often for fighting.

  My parents worried a great deal about our irregular schooling. Once, when we were transferred to Long Beach, California, my father resolved to improve upon the educational circumstances to which we had grown accustomed. He drove to the rectory of a Catholic parish and pleaded with the monsignor to allow us to attend the parish school. He even offered to convert to Catholicism if that was necessary. The good monsignor admitted us without obliging my parents to abandon their church.

  My mother’s complaint not withstanding, I enjoyed my early education. I enjoyed it for the very quality that caused my parents to despair—its informality. Until I was sent at fifteen to a boarding school, I relied on the members of my family to be my principal instructors. My mother assumed most of this responsibility, and she proved to be an imaginative and amusing educator.

  Like wealthy parents who “finish” their children’s education with a tour of the European continent, my mother saw our frequent cross-country trips to join my father as an opportunity to supplement our irregular schooling. She was forever routing our journeys through locations that offered a site of historical significance or a notable institute of the arts or sciences.

  When we passed through cities we searched for whatever the locals considered their most prominent attraction—art galleries, museums, churches, buildings designed by celebrated architects, natural phenomena, and the homes of historical figures. I recall being greatly impressed with Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the high bluffs and Civil War history of Natchez, Mississippi, and the venerated shrines of American heroes, especially Washington’s Mount Vernon and Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. They were all memorable events in my childhood, and I recall them today with gratitude.

  We once spent a night in El Paso, Texas, so that my mother could take us across the border to Juárez, Mexico, the next day. She wanted us to see a cathedral that her father had taken her to see when she was a young girl; he had regaled her with stories of its difficult construction, how its enormous wooden beams had to be floated down the Colorado River. We arrived in Juárez to find the city much changed from my mother’s recollection of it. She could not locate the cathedral, which she said had dominated the town when she saw it last. We became lost, and when we found ourselves in a rough neighborhood where the men were all dressed in zoot suits, she sensibly called off the search and beat a hasty retreat for the border.

  My mother went about these tours with her usual direct, enthusiastic approach to life and her extraordinary self-confidence. The difficulties we encountered en route seldom proved superior to her problem-solving skills. And when her children posed a problem to her progress, we too proved inferior to her resolve.

  I earned my reputation as a “hell-raiser”—my mother’s term—in high school and at the Naval Academy. But, appropriately, it was in my mother’s mobile classroom that I gave the first indication that I was headed in a troubling direction. On an exhausting trip from Washington to Coronado, my mother had become exasperated with Sandy and me. We had been quarreling for hours on end. Reaching back from the front seat to throw a banana at me for making a smart-aleck reply to her most recent rebuke, she accidentally hit Sandy. When I laughed at her for missing her target, my mother grabbed the first object in reach, an empty aluminum thermos, and flung it at me, hitting me on the brow, knocking me temporarily mute, and denting the thermos.

  Having now reached the end of her maternal patience, she resolved to hasten our arrival in Coronado. We diverted from our course so that we could stop in College Station, Texas. Upon arriving there, my mother located the dean of students at Texas A&M and appealed to him to help her find a student who was in need of transportation to California and would agree to travel with us and share the driving. We checked into a hotel that evening, and my mother wrote to my father to inform him that for the first time in my life I had been “a real pain in the neck.” Apparently she had forgotten by this time my brief period of defiance as a two-year-old, which had ended in complete surrender to parental authority. After the cold-water treatment had subdued my incipient rebelliousness, I possessed for the next ten years a rather meek disposition.

  The next morning two students arrived to take my mother up on her offer. As the trip progressed, my mother charmed our new companions. One of them remarked how fortunate we were to have such an attractive and clever mother. The compliment was too much for me, as I was still angry over the previous day’s swift and unexpected punishment. Holding up the damaged thermos and pointing to my head, I replied, “Oh yeah, you think she’
s so great. Look what she did to me.” My denunciation prompted gales of laughter from my mother. She laughed about it intermittently for most of the remainder of the trip, as did our new traveling companions. And she still laughs when reminded of the incident today.

  I became my mother’s son. What I lacked of her charm and grace I made up for by emulating and exaggerating other of her characteristics. She was loquacious, and I was boisterous. Her exuberance became rowdiness in me. She taught me to find so much pleasure in life that misfortune could not rob me of the joy of living. She has an irrepressible spirit that yields to no adversity, and that part of her spirit she shared with us was as fine a gift as any mother ever gave her children. My father, as she will admit if asked, always came first with her. She loved him deeply, and made his life whole, mending as best she could the breaches in his life, the times when doubt and insecurity would cloud his sense of his destiny. Even today, many years after his death, my mother still keeps a card on which, after his passing, she wrote down a list of the things my father had found pleasure in, from his favorite meal to his favorite music, as well as a list of the things he had disliked. But although there was never any doubt about the primacy my father enjoyed in my mother’s affections, her heart has always been large enough to encompass her children with as much love and care as any mother’s child has ever enjoyed.

  When I was young, similarities between my mother and me were more apparent than were those between my father and me. My father and I probably seemed in many respects, at least superficial ones, very different people. My keen-eyed brother in his observations on our family’s domestic life often remarked on our father’s and my contrasting dispositions in those long-ago days. We were, he thought, mirror opposites. My father was taciturn, while I was noisy. My father was shy, while I “loved working a crowd.” My father “was often quiet at the dinner table, while the rest of us raised hell, argued, until Dad would intervene—always on my mother’s behalf. John was either fiercely immersed in the squabble or the root cause of it.”

  My father was a more learned man than his grades at the Naval Academy indicated. He taught physics at the Academy for two years and was regarded as an able instructor. He had many intellectual interests, but he especially loved history and English literature. An “outstanding command of the English language,” he often remarked, “will stand you in good stead as time moves on.” He was an avid reader of Toynbee and Spengler. He could recite great lengths of poetry from memory. He loved Edgar Allan Poe, Kipling, Dante, Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll. But his favorite poem was Oscar Wilde’s ode to the British Empire, “Ave Imperatrix,” which he quoted from at length in his lectures on seapower:

  The fleet-foot Marri scout, who comes

  To tell how he hath heard afar

  The measured roll of English drums

  Beat at the gates of Kandahar.

  He was a great admirer of the British Empire, crediting it with keeping “a relative measure of peace” in the world for “someplace in the neighborhood of two centuries.”

  He read and reread the biographies of historical figures whose lives, he felt, would always be an inspiration to others. “I heard some man make a statement one time not so long ago,” he once recalled of a popular futurist, “that reading the lives of great men was somewhat a waste of time because this was past history. Well, this is stupid on the face of it, because one of the real factors of life is what you learn from reading about the lives of great men, because there are certain fundamentals of human relationships that never change.”

  Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great naval historian, author of the seminal work on the importance of naval expansion, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was my father’s inspiration and his passion. He quoted from Mahan’s book often and at length, not only in his seapower lectures but to almost anyone he thought could profit from Mahan’s wisdom. He talked about Mahan to me quite often, during his occasional attempts to help steer me toward a successful naval career.

  My paternal grandmother was a well-educated woman of gifted intellect and refined manner. She had been an instructor of Latin and Greek at the University of Mississippi, where she taught my grandfather. Bookish and eight years his senior, she won the devotion of the much coarser but widely read naval officer. Throughout their union, they indulged together their shared love of literature, reading aloud to each other whenever time allowed. That my father was well versed in the classics is undoubtedly a tribute to both his parents: his mother, the scholarly taskmaster; his father, the rough adventurer who in glamour resembled the fictional heroes who had enlivened the provincial world of his Mississippi childhood. Together they instilled in my father their love of literature and learning, encouraged his imagination, gave him responsibilities early in life, and fortified him with their values. As a schoolboy, he got in trouble once for telling his classmates a tall tale about having seen a bear on the way to school. His mother excused the lapse, remarking, “All little boys must have an imagination. Don’t worry, he’ll know about honesty and the truth.”

  It was while I was in my grandmother’s care that I began to develop my own interest in literature. I spent the summer of 1946 with my widowed grandmother and her daughter, my Aunt Katherine, at their house in Coronado. My grandmother was a composed, straight-laced woman who kept a formal house. I still recall quite vividly their maid summoning me to tea and supper every day, at precisely four and seven, by ringing a bell. If I lingered too long at whatever activity I was preoccupied with and arrived a minute or two past the appointed hour, my grandmother would dismiss me very politely from her presence. She would observe that she had looked forward to dining with me, but as I had failed to arrive promptly, she would have to forgo the pleasure of my company until the next meal. She never yielded to any of the elaborate excuses I devised to coax her into allowing an exception to her daily routine.

  The room I occupied in my grandmother’s house was furnished with my father’s boyhood belongings. It contained a substantial collection of the authors he had favored as a boy. I spent most of the summer reading one volume after another. Among the authors who most impressed me in that summer of unsupervised study were Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Booth Tarkington. I was also taken with the tales of King Arthur’s court. These works instilled in me a lifelong love of reading. And, with their straightforward moral lessons, they reinforced my sense of right and wrong and impressed upon me the virtue of treating people fairly.

  Among the Stevenson volumes was a collection of his poetry. It included the poem he wrote for his own epitaph, “Requiem.”

  Under the wide and starry sky

  Dig the grave and let me lie:

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  In his brief life, Stevenson had been quite an adventurer, wandering the continent of Europe, and later the Americas and the South Pacific. He had lived in the capitals of Europe, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, and in Monterey, California. He spent the last years of his life in a house he had built in Western Samoa, a location as remote from the cold austerity of his native Scotland as could be imagined. He is buried there on a low hill overlooking the Pacific.

  Stevenson is recalled in biographies as a restless, striving man. Crediting a tropical grave as the place “he longed to be” struck me as a brave declaration of self-determination. I thought the poem the perfect motto for all who lived a life according to their own lights, and a moving tribute to the lives of strong-willed, valorous men like my grandfather and father. I read it as an exhortation to “be your own man.” It influenced my childhood aspiration to find adventures, pursue each one avidly, and, when it had run its course, find another.

  Like my father and grandfather,
I lacked as a boy the physical size to appear imposing on first acquaintance. Together with the challenges of my transient childhood, my small stature motivated me to prove quickly to new schoolmates that I could stand up for myself. The quickest way to do so was to fight the first kid who provoked me.

  Whether I won or lost those fights wasn’t as important as establishing myself as someone who could adapt to the challenges of a new environment without betraying apprehension. I foolishly believed that fighting, as well as challenging school authorities and ignoring school regulations, was indispensable to my self-esteem and helped me to form new friendships.

  The repeated farewells to friends rank among the saddest regrets of a childhood constantly disrupted by the demands of my father’s career. I would arrive at a new school, go to considerable lengths to make new friends, and, shortly thereafter, be transplanted to a new town to begin the process all over again. Seldom if ever did I see again the friends I left behind. If you have never known any other life, these experiences seem a natural part of existence. You come to expect friendships to last but a short time. I believe this breeds in a child a desire to make the most of friendships while they last. The relationships make up with intensity what they lack in length. That’s one of the benefits of an itinerant childhood.

  On the other hand, you never lose the expectation that friendships come and go and should not be expected to do otherwise. That fatalistic expectation is reinforced later in life when war imposes a sad finality on relationships grown extremely close under difficult conditions. Even when you are an adult, when passing time and changing circumstances separate you from old friends, their absence seems unremarkable and in accord with the normal course of things.